Read Dying Stars, Rising Hope free: the opening chapter

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 enjoys this."

"Nobody enjoys this, Ves."

"I enjoy some of it," said a voice from the top of the ramp.

Sol Quintero came down at a jog, small and wiry, a shock of copper-dyed hair sticking up in five directions where she had cut it herself without a mirror. She had a ginger candy tucked into her cheek and the braided cord bracelet of a Freehold miner around one freckled wrist, and she was grinning the gap-toothed grin that had gotten her into, by Rhea's count, eleven bar fights and out of ten of them.

"Hi, Harl," Sol said. "You look sad."

"I am always sad, Pilot Quintero."

"I know. It's your best feature." She crunched her candy. "So here's my question. If you clamp her, and I'm sitting in the pilot's chair at the time, running the pre-flight on the maneuvering jets, and I accidentally fire the port quarter cluster? Totally accidental. Fat fingers. That clamp goes about two hundred meters down the dock and takes your sled with it. Wouldn't that be awful."

One of the enforcers looked at the other.

"That would be a crime," Harl said.

"That would be an accident," Sol said. "Skein and stars, Harl, I'm a terrible pilot. Everyone knows."

Everyone on Port Tamsin knew Marisol Quintero was the best lane pilot working the rim, which was precisely why the enforcer on the left had begun, very slightly, to back the sled away from the Kestrel's port quarter.

Rhea sighed. "Sol."

"Captain."

"Don't threaten the man."

"I wasn't threatening him. I was describing a hypothetical."

"Describe it less." Rhea stepped forward. She was tall, taller than Harl, and lean, with close-cropped black hair and a single streak of silver at the left temple that had come in the year of her court-martial and never left. She kept her voice low and even. She had learned long ago that people leaned in to hear a quiet voice, and that a person who was leaning in was not, for the moment, doing anything else. "Harl. If you clamp my ship, I can't fly. If I can't fly, I can't work. If I can't work, you never see fourteen thousand marks, you see a hull you have to auction, and the auction gets you maybe nine, after the Authority's fees, because she's old and ugly and everyone on this station knows she's mine. You'd be trading fourteen for nine, and you'd have to fill in the forms."

Harl's long face grew, if possible, longer. "I hate the forms."

"I know you do."

"The Authority wants something today, Captain. A good-faith payment."

Rhea looked over her shoulder. The clinic nurse was watching, and so were three noodle-stall cooks across the walkway, and a pair of ice miners on shore leave, and a child sitting on a coil of hose with a stick of fried dough. On Port Tamsin, a ship being clamped was the best free entertainment going.

"What did the clinic pay us for the gel?" she asked Augustin.

"Twenty-one hundred," said Augustin. "Minus fuel."

"Give him two thousand."

"Skipper, that's the fuel."

"I know what it is."

Augustin's mouth worked for a moment. Then he said, "Well," which was what he said before every piece of bad news in the history of the Kestrel Vow, and went up the ramp to transfer it.

Harl watched the payment land on his slate. He looked at Rhea for a long moment. "Two thousand. And the rest?"

"Ten days."

"Seven."

"Ten," Rhea said, "or you can do the forms."

Harl closed his eyes like a man in pain. Then he looked at her again, and something in his face shifted, not softening exactly, but something adjacent to it. "You're the one, aren't you. The Navy one. Held fire at Corrin Gate."

The walkway did not go quiet, because Port Tamsin never went quiet. But the noodle cooks looked at each other, and the ice miners stopped talking.

"That was a long time ago," Rhea said.

"My cousin was on Lisle when those ships came in," Harl said. He didn't say anything else about it. He waved a hand at the enforcers. "Ten days, Captain. On my word, not the Authority's. Don't make a liar of me."

"I won't."

The sled went clattering away. The child with the fried dough looked disappointed.

Sol let out a long breath. "Wasn't going to fire the jets," she said.

"I know."

"Probably wasn't."

"I know that too." Rhea rubbed her eyes with the heel of her scarred hand. Ten days to find twelve thousand marks. On Tamsin. In spring, when the lanes were busy and every hauler on the rim was undercutting every other. "Ves, what do we have in the galley?"

Ves's colors moved slowly, blue fading toward a thoughtful slate. "Protein noodles. Seven tins of the yellow sauce, which Augustin says is not food. Two of Augustin's tomatoes, which he is saving for an occasion."

"What occasion?"

"He did not say. I think he will know it when he sees it."

"Then we're eating on the dock," Rhea said. "I'm buying."

"With what?" said Sol.

"With the hundred marks Augustin didn't give Harl."

From the top of the ramp, Augustin called down, "It's ninety-four."

---

The noodle stall was called Grandmother Wen's, and Grandmother Wen had died sometime before Rhea first docked on Tamsin, but her grandson kept the name and the sign and the broth, which was the best thing on the station. They took the end of the counter, where the stools were stained and wobbly and nobody minded a Tchell who stood instead of sitting.

Port Tamsin hung in orbit around the gas giant Halloway, and the big viewport over the counter showed it: a vast banded curve of ochre and rust filling half the sky, storms the size of worlds turning slowly in its southern belt. Rhea had seen it a hundred times. She still looked.

"You're doing the face," Sol said.

"What face."

"The money face. Where you stare at something and do math with your eyebrows."

Rhea picked up her chopsticks. "Twelve thousand marks in ten days."

"We could sell the Old Girl's spare skein coil," Sol said.

"Over my dead body," said Augustin, without looking up from his bowl. "And I mean that. You'd have to kill me first, and I'm hard to kill. I'm mostly gristle."

Ves made a soft sound through the voicebox, a sort of musical click, and a white flicker ran across their face. That was amusement. Rhea had learned the Tchell colors the way she had once learned Navy hand signals: badly at first, then all at once. Amber was happiness. Blue was worry. Violet was affection, and Ves turned violet more often than they seemed to realize, usually in Augustin's direction when he was grumbling. Gray was grief. She had only seen Ves go fully gray twice.

"We could take the Okonkwo charter," Ves offered. "The hydroponic substrate to Varrow."

"Okonkwo pays in substrate," Rhea said.

"Substrate is very good for tomatoes."

"The Authority doesn't accept tomatoes," said Augustin. "Their loss."

Rhea turned her ring. She had a list in her head, she always had a list: the cargo boards, the brokers who still took her calls, the brokers who didn't. Most of them didn't. A dismissed Navy officer with no pension and a reputation was a hard sell on the rim, where half the captains loved her for Corrin Gate and the other half thought anyone who disobeyed an order once would do it again, and both halves wanted a discount for the trouble.

She was halfway through the list when a woman fell into the stool beside her.

Fell was the right word. The woman did not so much sit as arrive, all at once, like a bag of laundry dropped from a height. She had a round, freckled face, pale as station light, and a great tangle of dark red hair pinned up with what Rhea realized, after a moment, were three styluses and a chopstick. Her fingers were stained with ink. She wore a cardigan that was far too big for her, the color of old porridge, and she was holding a battered document satchel against her chest like a shield.

"Hello," the woman said. "I'm sorry. Hello. Are you Captain Castellanos? You're Captain Castellanos. I'm sorry, the man at the dock office said you'd be here, and that you'd be, he said 'the tall one who looks like she's about to say no,' and you do, you do look like that, I'm sorry, that was rude."

"You've apologized four times," Rhea said.

"I know. I do that." The woman held out an ink-stained hand. "Dr. Anwen Thale. Xenoarchaeology. Formerly of the Concord Academy, Xenology faculty, Tessaly. Formerly. That's important. I'll get to it. I want to hire your ship."

Sol leaned around Rhea to look at her. "Doc, you have noodle on your sleeve."

Anwen looked. She did. She scrubbed at it with her other sleeve, which made it worse. "Right, so," she said. "Right. So. I need to go to the Sable Knot."

Augustin set down his chopsticks.

The Sable Knot was nine days down the Corvine Lane, past Kessick Waypoint, at the far edge of where the Freehold rim shaded into Concord space. There was nothing there anyone wanted. There was a Lantern, of course, because every knot had a Lantern, one of the Thirty-One: vast, dark, inert, older than human memory, as much a part of the landscape as the gas giants and the stars. And there was, Rhea remembered vaguely, some kind of station.

"The Sable Knot is Concord-restricted," she said. "Has been for years."

"Twelve years. Since 376." Anwen nodded rapidly. "There's a research station there. Brightwater. It was evacuated after an accident, nobody will say what kind, and the knot was closed, and nobody's been there since. Officially. But the station's still there. Its data cores are still there. And it was built right next to the Sable Lantern, it's only eleven kilometers off the shell, which is closer than anyone has ever been permitted to build to any Lantern, anywhere, and I need to know why."

"Why do you need to know why?" Sol asked, around a mouthful of noodles.

Anwen took a breath. Rhea watched her decide whether to say it. Then something changed in the round, anxious face. The fidgeting stopped. The voice dropped and steadied, and for the first time she sounded like a woman who had stood at the front of lecture halls.

"Because the lanes aren't natural," she said. "Everyone thinks they are. Everyone has always thought they are: filaments of shaped spacetime, a quirk of galactic structure, conveniently spaced, conveniently sized, conveniently connected at junctions where, conveniently, there's always a Lantern. I don't believe in that much convenience. I think someone built them. I think the Lanterns are part of the building. And there are glyphs." She opened the satchel and pulled out a sheaf of rubbings, thin film sheets covered in nested circles and branching lines, read, she said quickly, from the center out. "These are from the outer shell of the Morrow Lantern. Hesper script. Everyone calls it decoration. It's not decoration. It's writing. I published that. Four years ago. And the Academy expelled me for it."

There was a short silence at the end of the counter.

"Expelled," Augustin said. "For having an idea."

"For having an idea in print, with my name on it, that contradicted forty years of the Dean's own work." Anwen's mouth twisted. "They called it 'a breach of scholarly standards.' Which. Fine. Yes. Possibly I could have been more tactful in the abstract. I called his central thesis 'decorative.' That was a pun. It was a bad pun." She looked down at the rubbings. "I've spent four years and every mark I had getting the money for this charter. I need someone willing to go somewhere nobody goes."

Ves leaned down, very slowly, until their face was near the glyph sheets. Their colors went a strange, uncertain shade, somewhere between blue and something Rhea did not have a name for.

"These are pretty," Ves said. "They make my motes itch."

Anwen stared at them. "Do they?"

"A little. It is not unpleasant. Like the smell before rain."

Rhea pushed her bowl away. "No," she said.

Anwen's face fell so completely that Sol actually winced.

"It's restricted space," Rhea said. "Concord Navy patrols the knot. I'm a dismissed officer with a ship that's ten days from being clamped. If I take a civilian into a restricted knot without a lane permit, the Navy impounds the Kestrel and I go to a cell, and you go to a worse one, because you're the one with the publication record. I'm sorry, Doctor. No."

"I can pay," Anwen said. "I can pay sixteen thousand marks. Half up front."

Rhea did not move. She did not look at Augustin. She was very aware of Augustin not looking at her, and of Sol going completely still with a noodle halfway to her mouth.

Sixteen thousand. Twelve to Harl. Four for fuel and air and food, nine days out and nine days back.

Exactly enough.

She turned her ring once around.

"Maybe," she said.

Anwen lit up like a station coming online.

"On one condition," Rhea said. "We do it legally. You apply to the Concord Office of Lane Affairs for a research permit for the Sable Knot. If they approve it, we fly. If they don't, we don't, and you keep your money."

"But they never approve anything," Anwen said. "I mean. They don't. The last time I applied for a permit for anything, it took seven months and they lost the form twice."

"That's the condition."

Anwen looked at her for a long moment. Then she pulled out a slate, and her ink-stained fingers flew. "Right. So. Right. I'm filing it now, the packet buoy leaves the Tamsin mouth on the hour, but they'll never, I mean, it'll be weeks."

"Then it'll be weeks," Rhea said, "and we'll take the Okonkwo substrate in the meantime."

Augustin looked faintly pleased about the substrate.

---

She walked back to the ship alone, along the long curve of Dock Eleven, past the rust-red cradles and the cargo cranes folded like sleeping birds. It was the station's night cycle and the lights were dimmed to amber, and somewhere up the walkway somebody was playing a flute, badly, with great feeling.

She let herself think about it, just for a minute. The Sable Knot. A Lantern up close. She had seen Lanterns from a bridge, of course, a hundred times in her Navy years: black shapes at the edge of every knot, so big they were less like objects than like weather. Nobody looked at them twice. You did not look twice at a mountain you drove past every day.

But she remembered, from very long ago, sitting on the floor of her mother's ship with the paper star chart spread across the deck, and her mother's finger tracing the lanes from knot to knot. Look how they all connect, mija. Like somebody drew it.

Somebody drew it. Rhea had been nine. She had thought it was a joke.

The Kestrel Vow sat in her cradle, ugly and patient. Ninety-four meters of decommissioned Concord corvette, Ashby-class, built the year Rhea was a baby. Designed for twenty-two crew. Running on four. One mass driver, two point-defense turrets, a magazine rated for six lancer torpedoes that currently held three. A skein drive Augustin called the Old Girl, which was the only thing aboard worth more than the scrap.

Rhea put her scarred hand flat on the cold hull plate by the ramp. She did this sometimes, when nobody was watching. She did not know why.

"Ten days," she told the ship.

The ship, being a ship, said nothing.

She went up to the Nest, the cramped little bridge, and sat down in the captain's chair, and rubbed her thumb along the crack in its left armrest, which had been there when she bought the ship and which she had never had fixed. Through the forward port, Halloway's storms turned in the dark.

Her slate chimed.

It was the Office of Lane Affairs.

She read it once, and then again, and then a third time, because Rhea Castellanos had spent sixteen years in the Concord Navy and four more on the wrong end of its paperwork, and she knew exactly how fast Concord bureaucracy moved, which was not fast. It moved like a glacier moved, steadily, inexorably, and on a timescale best measured in seasons.

The time stamp on the approval was fifty-one minutes after Anwen's filing.

Research permit granted: Sable Knot (restricted), Brightwater Station, one visit, sixty days. Condition of permit: an accredited observer of the Office of Lane Affairs will travel aboard the vessel for the duration. Observer: Envoy Teodor Halloran. Envoy Halloran will present himself at Dock Eleven at oh-eight-hundred station time.

Footsteps on the ladder. Sol's copper head appeared through the hatch, then Augustin's white one, then a long arm of Ves's curling up the rail like a vine.

"Doc just called me," Sol said. "Screaming. Happy screaming. Is it true?"

Rhea held up the slate so they could see.

Augustin put on his reading spectacles and read it. He took them off again.

"Well," he said.

"Fifty-one minutes," Rhea said quietly. "And an observer already assigned. By name. Who's already close enough to be here by morning."

Sol frowned. "So? We got lucky."

"Nobody gets lucky with the Office of Lane Affairs." Rhea turned the steel ring all the way around, and then again, and looked out at the dark curve of the gas giant, and at the faint blue glow far beyond it where the Corvine Lane opened its mouth.

"Nobody," she said, "approves anything that fast."

The sample ends here.