The Price of Going Somewhere

The Morrow Finch traveled by tug power and old habit, which meant the ride was steadier than my skiff had ever managed and less comfortable than a coffin designed by someone who disliked the dead.

Iven and I had been assigned a maintenance compartment beside the tow controls. It contained two fold-down berths, one emergency heater, and a narrow porthole aimed at the stars. The heater worked only when the tug’s other systems did not require its circuit. The porthole had been scratched by micrometeorites until the galaxy looked as if someone had dragged a dirty thumb across it.

I liked it immediately.

“This room has no reasonable sleeping arrangement,” I said.

Iven inspected the berths. “The lower one supports a body of your mass. The upper one supports a body of mine.”

“That is not the same as reasonable.”

“I have found that reasonable is often a description applied after an arrangement has already become necessary.”

His voice had a faint delay in it. Less than a second, but enough for me to hear the effort beneath the words. The revival had restored his systems, not forgiven them. Every answer was being assembled on a power budget.

I put my tool case under the lower berth and sat beside him on the deck instead. The compartment vibrated around us. Somewhere beyond the wall, the Morrow Finch’s engines pushed against the dark, hauling my skiff and everything I had not yet lost toward Pelin Exchange.

Iven extended his left hand. The fingers still moved unevenly since the arm had been reconnected, but he had polished the joints himself before departure. The metal caught the compartment’s weak light.

“You repaired that,” I said.

“The joint was collecting particulate matter.”

“You repaired it because you wanted to hold my hand.”

His lens brightened by one degree. “That is not mutually exclusive.”

It was the closest he had come to admitting anything without a diagnostic report attached. I took his hand before he could retreat into precision.

For the first two hours, we listened to the tug.

At hour three, the navigation alarm sounded.

Iven stood too quickly. His knees locked, released, and nearly folded again. I caught him at the waist.

“Do not spend power falling over,” I said.

“I had not intended to fall.”

“Your intentions are developing a poor relationship with gravity.”

The alarm sounded a second time. A debris stream had shifted across the tug’s route, a cloud of frozen insulation and broken solar vanes released from an unregistered satellite. The Morrow Finch’s guidance system calculated three safe corridors and rejected all of them because the tow cradle made the vessel too wide.

Pell’s voice arrived over the compartment speaker, roughened by distance. “Astoria. The tug can slow, but we cannot stop inside the stream.”

“Iven can calculate a corridor.”

There was silence.

Then Pell said, “Can he?”

I looked at him. “Can you?”

He turned his lens toward the porthole. “I can attempt it.”

“Attempting is what people say when they want permission to fail.”

“Then I request permission to fail while succeeding if possible.”

Pell gave him access to the guidance feed.

The route unfolded across the compartment screen: velocities, rotations, probabilities, the slow tumbling of objects that had once belonged to machines built by people who believed their machines would outlive them. Iven’s fingers tightened around mine as his processing load rose. His chest light dimmed from blue to a thinner, colder color.

“Left corridor,” he said. “The third fragment is not on its projected path.”

The tug began its correction burn.

“Why?” Pell asked.

“Thermal expansion has altered its center of mass.”

“That much I can see.”

“No. You can see the result. I can see the object.”

I watched the screen. A piece of satellite skin no larger than a door rotated through the projected corridor, its trajectory changing by fractions as sunlight heated one edge.

“Hold thrust for two seconds,” I said. “Then hard starboard.”

Iven looked at me. “That will place us closer to the secondary stream.”

“Yes, but the secondary stream is moving away from us.”

His lens flickered. “Your confidence is not supported by the available data.”

“It rarely is.”

Pell made the correction.

The debris passed close enough to strike the Morrow Finch’s hull. The compartment shook. Something heavy clanged against the tow cradle, and my skiff’s status light went yellow, then green.

Iven remained standing after the danger had passed. His hand had gone slack in mine.

“Sit down,” I said.

“I should verify the skiff.”

“I will verify it.”

“I can do so more quickly.”

“Iven.”

He stopped. The pause was small, but it contained a decision. He sat on the deck beside me.

Pell’s voice came through the speaker. “You just spent forty-six minutes of projected function.”

Iven’s lens turned toward the speaker. “The tow remains intact.”

“That was not the question.”

“It was the relevant answer.”

I pressed my thumb against the back of his hand. “You don’t get to call every loss relevant and then pretend it isn’t a loss.”

His fingers curled around mine.

“No,” he said. “I do not.”

We arrived at Pelin Exchange seven hours and eleven minutes after departure. The tug’s clock displayed the time in red, as if ashamed of it. Iven had eighteen hours and forty-three minutes remaining, assuming no further thermal irregularities, navigation assistance, or acts of poor judgment.

Pelin was not a station so much as a collection of stations that had discovered the economic value of touching. Cargo rings surrounded a central spindle. Fuel depots clung to the outer hull. Passenger platforms had been welded wherever there was room, each one displaying advertisements for destinations I could not afford to reach.

A bright blue sign rotated above the docking bay.

TRADE WHAT YOU HAVE FOR WHERE YOU WANT TO GO.

I disliked it because it was honest.

The Morrow Finch released our tow cradle into a docking lane. I moved aboard the skiff before the clamps had fully locked. The interior smelled of cold metal, solder, and the dust I had failed to remove from the floor. Iven followed more slowly.

At the station office, a woman with copper-colored skin and a slate terminal waited beside the airlock. Her badge read SERA DOVAN, EXCHANGE INTAKE.

She scanned the skiff, then Iven.

“Obsolete unit,” she said.

“Obsolete technician,” I replied.

“Those are different categories.”

“Only to people charging by the category.”

Her mouth twitched. “Pelin can replace your port engine. Used assembly. Six hours of labor, plus a transit fee.”

“I don’t have the fee.”

“I noticed.”

She held out her slate. The display showed a list of available contracts. Salvage work. Hazard retrieval. Component testing. One line had been marked in yellow.

CORE RECLAMATION: HIGH-YIELD, IMMEDIATE CREDIT.

I read it twice.

Sera watched my face. “Your unit’s power system is worth more than the skiff.”

“No.”

“You haven’t heard the offer.”

“I heard enough.”

“I can have the core electrolyzed and converted into station-grade charge. It would cover the engine, passage to the inner ring, and six months of ration credit.”

The station seemed to lose its artificial gravity for one brief second. I felt the floor move under me.

Iven stepped between us. Not dramatically. He simply occupied the space where her attention had landed.

“Decline,” he said.

Sera looked at him. “You understand the offer?”

“I understand the conversion process.”

“Then you understand it is practical.”

“Yes.”

He turned his lens toward me. “It is also not acceptable.”

The words struck harder than they should have. Not because he had refused. Because he had said it before I could.

I wanted to tell him that I would never trade him. I wanted to make the promise so absolute that it could survive every station, every hour, every number counting down inside his chest.

Instead I looked at the contract list.

“What other work gets us the engine?” I asked.

Sera’s expression changed by a fraction. She had expected grief, perhaps anger. The Exchange understood both. Determination was less profitable.

“There is a dead courier in Ring Twelve,” she said. “Its navigation core contains a route map for the central planets. Retrieve it, and I can waive the transit fee. Six hours of labor remains.”

“Hazard rating?”

“Unrated.”

“That means bad.”

“It means nobody came back to file paperwork.”

Iven’s hand found mine.

Sera looked at our joined hands, then at the yellow line on her slate. “The core offer remains valid until your unit’s power drops below extraction minimum.”

“How generous.”

“It is not generosity. It is a market.”

I signed the retrieval contract with my thumb.

The skiff’s port engine was still dead. Pelin still wanted payment. Iven still had less than nineteen hours.

But the station had given us one thing it had not intended to: a route forward that did not require me to turn him into fuel.

For now, that was enough to make going somewhere feel like a choice again.