The Bitter End handled better than her scorched hull suggested, and Kael found that out the hard way three minutes after wheels-up, correcting for a yaw the old pilot had apparently lived with for years without bothering to fix.
“You’re sure you can fly this,” Mara said from the co-pilot’s seat, shoulder still bound tight against the jump seat’s harness.
“I flew a loader rig for four years before any of this started.
The principles carry over.” “That’s not the same as flying a modified freighter off a world you just left two dead men on.” “No.
But it’s the closest thing I’ve got to practice, so it’s what we’re using.” The navicomputer had been the real prize, more valuable than the hull or the weapons rack or the encrypted comm-logs still cycling through old check-in schedules from a dead man’s employer.
Tharos’s coordinates mapped a whole vein of the galaxy’s underside: waypoints threading out of the Outer Rim into the Mid-Rim’s shadow economy, ports where questions cost more than answers and a man’s name mattered less than what he was carrying.
Kael had spent the first hour of the flight simply reading it, the same patience he used to read a shaft’s structural surveys before deciding where to cut.
“You took his ID too,” Mara said, watching him thumb through a stack of chits at the console.
“His credentials.” “Mercenary ID.
Bounty license.
A string of credit accounts that closed the second he died, but the ledgers on them are still readable, still useful if I know how to repurpose the paper trail instead of the funds.” Kael turned one of the chits over, studying the hologram seal.
“A dead hunter’s ship is worth more than the durasteel it’s built from.
It’s a key.
I intend to use it as one.” “You’ve stopped sounding like a miner.” “I stopped being one a while ago.
I just hadn’t said it out loud yet.” She let that sit, watching the stars smear past the viewport as the Bitter End dropped into its next jump calculation.
“What happens to Varn’s Reach, once people start asking about the two bodies and the missing hunter’s ship?” “Nothing that involves us.
We’re a story people tell for a week, and then a story people stop telling because there’s nothing new to add to it.
By the time anyone thinks to connect a scavenger’s name to a ship this far out, we’ll be someone else’s problem.” “You say that like it’s already decided.” “It is.
I decided it three systems back.” Mara studied him a moment, the low console light carving his face into planes she was still getting used to.
“You used to ask my opinion before you decided things.” “I still want it.
I’d rather have it before the decision than instead of one.” “That’s not the same as asking.” “No.
It isn’t.” He didn’t look away from the readout.
“I’m working on it.” They came out of the last jump into a system crowded with debris and old mining scars, and at its center hung Drevin Station, a spaceport carved whole into a hollowed asteroid, lit from within like something that had swallowed its own sun.
Kael had heard of places like it in secondhand stories on Varn’s Reach: worlds where the Hutt Cartel’s reach ran up against the Republic’s total indifference, and the space between the two filled in with smugglers, stolen identities, and men desperate enough to take any work going.
Drevin was exactly that, magnified.
He felt it before he saw the detail, a low churn of desperation and opportunity that the cold stir picked up on the same register it once used to read fear in a collapsed shaft.
He docked at berth seventeen and walked down the Bitter End’s ramp with Mara at his side, favoring the shoulder but upright, the holocron cold against his ribs under his coat, same as always now, a permanent second heartbeat he’d stopped consciously noticing days ago.
The dock-boss was waiting before either foot hit the deck.
She was a Devaronian named Yuzta, horned and unhurried, her authority borrowed entirely from the Hutt she answered to rather than any strength of her own, and worn with the total confidence of someone who had never once needed to test it.
A datapad hung from one hand, already scrolling.
Behind her, two armed handlers loitered at the edge of the berth, close enough to matter, far enough to look incidental.
“Berth fee,” she said, without preamble.
“Landing fee.
Breathing fee.
You want to breathe on Drevin, you pay for the privilege.” “That’s four names for the same tax.” “Four names, four line items, one Hutt who collects them all the same.” Her eyes moved past him to the scorch marks scored across the Bitter End’s hull, old blaster damage that hadn’t been there when the ship left its last owner’s hands, and something in her expression recalculated.
Newcomer, unprotected, easy mark: that read had held for exactly as long as it took her to clock the damage and start wondering what kind of newcomer arrived flying a dead man’s scars.
“Interesting ship for someone who looks like he just fell off a supply hauler.” “It has an interesting history.” “I bet it does.” She held out the datapad, fee total glowing at the bottom.
“You paying, or you telling me a story instead?” Kael paid.
It cost a full quarter of what the salvage runs on Varn’s Reach had left him, and he handed it over without negotiating, without so much as a flinch at the number, because the payment itself was the message he wanted delivered.
He wasn’t here to fight Drevin’s system.
He was here to learn its shape well enough to use it, and no lesson worth learning ever started with a fight he could avoid by simply paying the toll.
He watched her run the transfer through her datapad twice, a habit he recognized: verify once for the funds, once for whether the newcomer flinched at the total.
He hadn’t.
That, more than the credits themselves, seemed to be the actual test.
Mara stayed a half-step back through the whole exchange, silent, reading Yuzta with the same flat assessment she once turned on a foreman deciding whether a new hire was worth the training.
Kael caught the look and understood it without needing to ask: she was building her own file on Drevin already, independent of his.
“You’re not going to argue the total,” Yuzta said, faint surprise creeping past her professional flatness.
“Would arguing change it?” “No.” “Then it’s a waste of both our time.” He watched her file that answer somewhere behind her eyes, recalculating him a second time.
“I’d rather spend the time learning how Drevin actually works than losing a fight over four line items I can’t win.” “That’s either very smart or very naive.
Drevin usually only produces one of those in a newcomer, never both at once.” “Ask me again in a month.” Yuzta almost smiled, the expression of someone filing a name away for later use rather than forgetting it the second the credits cleared.
“Berth seventeen’s yours till the fee runs out.
After that, it’s someone else’s, and Drevin doesn’t refund partial breaths.” She turned to go, then paused.
“Money buys you time here.
Time buys you standing, if you’re careful how you spend it.
Standing buys everything else, eventually, if you live that long.” “I intend to.” “Everyone does.” She left them on the promenade without another word, datapad already dark, already moving toward whichever newcomer needed taxing next, her two handlers falling into step behind her like they’d been waiting the whole conversation for exactly that cue.
Kael watched her go, cataloguing the same way he’d catalogued Tharos: gait, authority, the handlers’ spacing, the practiced boredom she wore like armor.
Yuzta wasn’t the top of anything on Drevin either.
She was another rung, closer to the ground than Vesh had been, but a rung all the same, and Kael no longer walked past one without noting exactly how much weight it could bear.
Mara watched her go, arms crossed loosely to favor the bad shoulder.
“Friendly place.” “It’s honest, at least.
Varn’s Reach pretended to have rules.
This one just tells you the actual price up front.” “And the price is everything.” “The price is always everything, everywhere.
Drevin’s only sin is saying so out loud.” Kael looked out past the berth toward the promenade’s crowded lights, smugglers and freight crews and a dozen species haggling over cargo that wasn’t strictly legal on any of the worlds it had passed through.
Somewhere in that crowd was an operation worth building, if he was patient enough to learn the board before he tried to move a single piece on it.
“Come on.
Let’s go learn how this place actually works.” He stepped off the berth and into the crowd, and the promenade swallowed them both whole, one more pair of strangers among ten thousand, exactly as invisible as he needed them to be for now.