Dying Stars, Rising Hope: The Lanternkeepers Saga, a Four-Book Space Opera

Book One, Chapter 1: A Charter Nobody Wanted

The clamp crew arrived while Rhea Castellanos was still signing for the regen gel.

She heard them before she saw them: the clatter of a magnetic boot-sled on the rust-red decking of Dock Eleven, and a voice she knew too well calling her name the way people called for a dog that had chewed something expensive.

"Castellanos! Captain Castellanos, a word, if you please."

The clinic's receiving nurse, a narrow Freehold woman with a hand-tattooed caduceus on her wrist, looked up from her slate. "Friends of yours?"

"Creditors," Rhea said. "Same thing, on Tamsin." She thumbed the last line of the delivery receipt. Forty crates of medical regen gel, Concord-surplus, three weeks past its printed date and good for another three years, delivered across eleven days of lane and two waypoints to a clinic that would have been paying five times as much through the official chain. It was honest work. It paid honestly, which was to say badly. "That's everything. Inventory matches."

"It does." The nurse looked past her at the approaching sled, and then at the battered gray hull of the Kestrel Vow hunched in its cradle behind them, all mismatched plates and scorched seams, the hand-painted kestrel on her prow flaking at one wingtip. "They're going to clamp her, aren't they."

"They're going to try."

Rhea turned around.

The docking-fee warden was a man named Harl, who had a long, sad face and a long, sad coat and an expression of permanent disappointment, as though the universe had been invoiced for something better and had sent him instead. Behind him came two enforcers in orange Port Authority vests, both big, both bored, and between them on the sled rode a docking clamp the size of a coffin, painted in hazard stripes.

"Captain," Harl said. "You know why I'm here."

"You missed me."

"Fourteen thousand marks, Captain. Fourteen thousand and some change. Berthing, air, water, waste, power draw, the lane-mouth toll you put on account in winter, and the late penalties on the lane-mouth toll." He held up his slate so she could see the red numbers, which she had seen. She had them memorized. She had them in her sleep. "The Authority has been very patient."

"The Authority has been very well paid, historically."

"Historically." Harl nodded sadly. "Historically is not a currency we accept."

Rhea turned the steel ring on her right index finger, once around. It was her mother's ring, plain and worn smooth, and it had been turning on her finger through most of the bad conversations of her adult life. The back of her left hand, where the old burn scar ran pale and ridged from knuckle to wrist, itched the way it always did when she was tired. She was very tired.

Behind her, the Kestrel's cargo ramp was still down. Augustin Pell filled most of it. He was sixty-one years old and built like a bulkhead, stooped from a lifetime of ducking through hatches made for smaller men, his white hair buzzed short and his reading spectacles hanging on a cord against his chest. The faded Navy tattoos on his forearms, an anchor and a wrench, flexed as he crossed his arms.

"Skipper," he said, in a low rumble. "Want me to go stand near them?"

"Not yet."

Beside him, something tall and soft and the color of moss and wet slate shifted its weight. Ves-of-Many-Rooms had been helping unload, which for a Tchell meant lengthening both arms to about three meters and passing crates down the ramp like a crane made of moss. Now those arms were drawing back in, shortening with a soft rustle, and a ripple of deep blue moved across their skin from shoulder to waist. The brass voicebox pendant at their chest clicked once.

"Captain," Ves said, in their pleasant, slightly over-precise voice, "the warden smells of worry and old noodles. I do not think he ...