Ring Three

Her brother's face had not changed much in two years. It had only got tired.

"Dara," Caius Voss said, on the open channel, in front of the whole flag deck. "You look well. The admiral is feeding you."

"Where is the Lantern, Caius?"

"Docked. Ring three, inner berth. All ninety-two of her crew alive and eating better than they did on the picket." He said it as though it were the end of the matter. "Captain Dask will hand her back. She wants to talk to the admiral first. In person. On the station."

Admiral Brannock, standing out of the pickup's view, shook her head once.

"The admiral does not go aboard rogue stations," Dara said. "Neither does the captain of this ship. You know the regulations, Caius. You used to keep them."

"Then send someone who does not matter." Her brother's mouth twitched, the old half-smile. "Send yourself."

Brannock stepped into the pickup. "Lieutenant Voss will come across in a corvette with a marine escort, Lieutenant Voss. If she is not back aboard the Cinder Crown in six hours with the Lantern behind her, I will take your ring three apart with the Ninefold's guns and dig her out. Tell Captain Dask that is my opening position."

Caius looked at the admiral for a moment with something that was not quite fear. "She'll have heard it, Admiral. Six hours." The channel closed.

The Wren took Dara across again, with the same eight marines and Ensign Okonkwo at the tables. Halden Station had been a mining outpost before it was anything else, and from the inside it still was: long grey corridors, hand rails worn bright, the smell of cold metal and a thousand people's cooking. The people themselves lined the corridors to watch the Ninth Fleet walk past. Nobody shouted. A woman with a child on her hip held out a handful of station scrip, paper, grey, stamped with the Compact's wheel, and said "Fifty to a credit, Lieutenant, same as home," and laughed as though it were a joke, and did not laugh as though it were.

Oriel Dask received them in what had been the station master's office and was now, apparently, a government. She was older than Dara had expected, a lean woman with a captain's four bars still on her collar, worn out of habit or defiance. Caius stood behind her chair. He did not come forward to embrace his sister and Dara was grateful, because she did not know what she would have done.

"The Lantern came here with sealed orders," Dask said, without preamble. "The orders were to take the Candle's drive section in tow and jump it to the Aurum yards. Not to Vesper. Not to the fleet. To the yards, under Commodore Strand's seal. The frigate's captain showed me the orders when I asked why an Imperial hull was stealing my salvage." She slid a slate across the desk. "I kept a copy. You may keep that one."

Dara read it. The seal was Strand's. The destination was the Aurum yards. The Lantern had not been sent to look at Halden. She had been sent to take the half-built Mark V away before anyone from the fleet could see it.

"The Mark V coils on the Candle," she said. "You built those."

"My engineers built those, from plans a yard clerk sold us for two hundred thousand scrip. Four thousand credits, Lieutenant. That is what the Empire's best drive is worth on the open market, if you know the clerk." Dask did not smile. "I did not come to Halden to start a war. I came because the Admiralty would not give me a star and would not tell me why, and the people here needed somebody who knew how to run a ring. The Candle was drifting in my system. I salvaged her. When the fleet decided that was rebellion, I stopped answering the fleet."

"And the resin? The Grade Five?"

"Ask the Vashti," Dask said. "There is one aboard. It has been here since before I came."

Dara had wondered, as a child on Serrat, whether she would ever see a second Vashti. It stood in the station's hydroponics ring among the lamps, taller than the doorway, slate-skinned, and so still that she thought at first it was a statue the miners had made. Then it turned its head. The marines' rifles came up and Dara put her hand on the nearest barrel and pushed it down.

"The resin," she said to it, because she did not know what else to say. "The Grade Five. Is it yours?"

The Vashti's voice was very low and took a long time to arrive. "There are five grades," it said. "Your Empire buys three. It has never asked for the others. The one who runs this place asked."

That was all it said. Dara stood a while longer in the warm light and then went back to the station master's office and told Dask that the Lantern would leave the ring in one hour, under her own captain, and that the Candle's drive section would go with her, and that whether the Ninth Fleet took the station apart afterward was not a thing a lieutenant could promise either way.

"I know," Dask said. "Tell the Hammer I will be here."

Caius walked her to the airlock. They did not speak until the marines had gone through ahead.

"Sayer's sister is on ring two," he said. "Hydroponics. She's well. I'll tell her."

"Tell her he kept the coin," Dara said. "Tell her he was thinking of her."

"Was he?"

"He said she was here. I am choosing to count that." She looked at her brother. "Come home, Caius."

"This is home, Dara. It is only a smaller one." He touched her shoulder once, the way their father had, and went back down the corridor, and she went through the lock.

The Lantern cast off from ring three at the fifth hour. Dara watched her come out from the Wren's bridge, ninety-two crew and a frigate's worth of hull, the Candle's drive section on a tow line behind her, and the thing that had been sitting in her chest for thirteen days let go all at once. The frigate was found. Her crew were alive. Whatever else Halden was, it was no longer the place that had eaten a ship.

Admiral Brannock met her on the flag deck of the Cinder Crown with the whole deck watching and Captain Okafor at her side. Commander Petra Lindqvist stood at the fleet channel, as always; her husband Jonah had come up from the sensor deck to stand beside her, which he never did, and Dara understood from that alone what was about to happen before anyone said it.

"Lieutenant Dara Voss," the admiral said. "You went aboard a rogue station on my word, brought an Imperial frigate out of it with every soul alive, and brought me the one piece of paper in this system worth having. You have been a Lieutenant for three years. As of this moment you are not." She held out a hand, and Okafor put a pair of commander's bars into it, and she pinned them to Dara's collar herself. "Commander Voss. The flag deck is yours. Try not to lose any more crewmen."

"Aye, Admiral," said Commander Dara Voss, and could not say anything else.

The deck did not cheer, because it was Brannock's deck, but Ensign Okonkwo was openly grinning and Ensign Tomas Brannock had gone a dull red with the effort of not doing so. Petra Lindqvist said "Commander" on the fleet channel, formally, and her husband said "Commander" back, formally, from a metre away, and that was as close as the Ninth Fleet came to a party.

Afterward, when the deck had turned back to its work, Brannock stood beside her at the plot and said, quietly, "Strand's seal."

"Yes, Admiral."

"The Shield of Vesper sent an Imperial frigate to a rogue outpost to carry a stolen Mark V to the Aurum yards, and told me he had not read the orders." The admiral looked at the grey wheel of Halden Station on the screen. "Somebody sold Dask the plans. Somebody in the yards wanted them back before I saw them. Commander, I begin to think the Commodore and I are going to have a very long conversation when we get home."

"And the station, Admiral?"

"The station," Brannock said, "will keep. I gave my word on six hours. I did not give it on anything after."