Chapter 153 · Twenty credits

“We have twenty credits.”

Stent looked at the money in Eli’s hand, then at the empty berth. “That is insufficient.”

“Thank you. I was worried I might accidentally feel optimistic.”

Eli gathered the coins into one hand and shoved them back into his pocket.

Twenty credits.

Not twenty credits until they could reach an account. Not twenty credits until they could retrieve another chip from their luggage. Twenty credits between everything they were carrying and absolutely everything they owned that remained accessible.

The distinction was beginning to settle in.

Stent turned away from the empty pad. “We should inspect the berth before we leave.”

Eli nodded. That, at least, was something they could do.

The service connection drew Stent’s attention first. When they had returned with the groceries, the Faded Glory had still been connected to ground power. Eli remembered stepping over the thick service line while Stent guided the cart past the side of the ramp.

Now the coupling lay several meters from its proper housing. Not coiled. Not returned to the recessed compartment. Simply disconnected and shoved aside, one section of the heavy line resting crookedly across the painted edge of the berth.

Stent crouched beside it. Eli joined him. “That wasn’t Tee.”

Stent glanced at him. “Why?”

“He’d put it away.”

“Yes.”

The agreement came immediately. Tee had opinions about cables. Tee had opinions about most things aboard the Faded Glory, but unsecured equipment occupied a particularly offensive category. Eli had once watched him stop halfway through a diagnostic cycle to retract a loose maintenance lead someone had left across the cargo-bay floor. If Tee had prepared the ship for an ordinary departure, the service connection would have been secured.

This looked as though somebody had needed it out of the way. Fast.

Stent examined the coupling without touching the contacts. “No obvious damage.”

“So it was disconnected properly.”

“Mechanically, yes. Not procedurally.”

Eli looked toward the empty space where the ship had been. That distinction bothered him.

They moved back toward the blood. Under the berth lights it was easier to see than before. There was not much. Several separate drops on the duracrete, darkening as they dried, followed by a smaller scatter extending perhaps half a meter toward where the ramp had been. One drop had struck at an angle and left a tiny secondary fleck beside it.

Stent crouched again. Eli stayed standing this time. “Well?”

“The pattern is consistent with blood falling under gravity.”

“Meaning?”

“Someone was bleeding while upright.”

Not dragged. Not lying there. Not enough blood for anyone to have bled out on the berth.

Eli found that reassuring until he remembered that they had no idea whose blood it was. “Human?”

Stent gave him a brief look. “I cannot determine that visually. And I’m not sampling it.”

“Worth asking.” Eli shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and looked around the pad again.

No scorch marks. No obvious impact damage. No signs that anyone had fired a blaster. The access panel beside the berth gate looked intact from where he stood, although neither of them had the tools to examine it properly.

And the blood could not belong to Tee. That thought arrived stupidly, because of course it could not. Tee did not bleed. Ch’eth did. Eli’s stomach tightened again. He looked at the size of the drops.

Stent understood without needing the question.

“No. If the blood came from Ch’eth, I would expect a different pattern given his size.”

Eli exhaled. That did not mean Ch’eth was safe. It only removed one particular image from his head. He was grateful for that much.

They walked the neighboring berths next. There was little to see.

The nearest bay held a squat cargo shuttle with its ramp raised and all exterior lights reduced to night-cycle markers. The next contained an old medium freighter whose cockpit had gone completely dark. Two more were empty. Farther along, another vessel sat behind a locked service gate with a single blue maintenance lamp glowing beneath its hull.

No people. No one having a late caff beneath a wing. No mechanic finishing a late repair. No convenient witness leaning on a crate ready to explain that, yes, they had seen exactly who had taken the Faded Glory and in which direction.

Eli looked at the nearest closed ship. “We could knock.”

Stent looked at the dark cockpit. “At local night.”

“Yeah.”

Neither moved. There was no reason to wake strangers simply because they happened to be parked nearby. Anyone who had been awake during the relevant window might have already left. Anyone asleep now had almost certainly been asleep then as well.

They continued to the end of the spur and found nothing useful.

By the time they turned back, Eli was acutely aware of how awake he felt. The port had settled into its night rhythm around them. Fewer voices. Less foot traffic. Most commercial shutters down. The deep intermittent rumble of ships arriving or departing somewhere beyond the terminal complex.

His body disagreed with all of it. According to the clock they had been living by aboard the Faded Glory, it was early afternoon. He should have been halfway through a normal work period. Stent looked equally alert.

“We’re not sleeping anytime soon,” Eli said.

“No.”

“And the security office doesn’t properly open until morning.”

“The kiosk employee indicated skeleton staffing until 0600 local.”

Eli checked the port clock. Hours. Far too many. He looked back at the empty berth once more. Standing there would not make the ship return. “Traders’ Lounge?”

Stent nodded.

At least they knew where the chairs were.

The lounge had changed while they were gone. Not closed. Just contracted.

The navigation tables had dimmed. The commercial terminals were still powered but unattended, their displays rotating through overnight freight notices and fuel prices. Most of the seating area had emptied, leaving abandoned glasses and a few isolated traders who looked as though they had no intention of seeing a hotel before morning.

Only the bar remained fully alive.

The man behind it looked up when Eli and Stent came in.

He was human, perhaps somewhere in his fifties, broad through the shoulders despite the beginnings of a stoop, with iron-gray hair cropped short and the particular expression of someone who had spent decades listening to pilots explain why their problems were exceptional. One of the locals had called him Marten.

He recognized them. “You’re back.”

Eli stopped at the counter. “Apparently.”

The bartender looked past him. “Something wrong?”

Eli stared.

The man lifted one shoulder. “You left in a better mood.”

Fair.

Eli set both hands on the bar. “Our ship is gone.”

That got his full attention. Not dramatic attention. Experienced attention.

The kind that sharpened rather than widened. “Gone how?”

“We came back to the berth and it wasn’t there.”

The bartender put down the glass he had been storing. “You move it somewhere else?”

“No.”

“Port authority?”

“No record.”

“Partner, crew?”

Eli glanced toward Stent. “Our crew is a droid.”

The bartender’s eyes moved between them. “And the droid?”

“Aboard.” Eli sighed. “Well, I hope so.”

He gave a low breath through his nose. “Which field?”

Eli gave him the berth spur and bay number.

Something in the man’s face changed again. Not surprise this time. Recognition. “That outer run.”

“Yes.”

“The cheap berths.”

“We noticed.”

The bartender rested both forearms on the counter. “How long were you away?”

“A little over two hours. We’d already come back once after shopping. Left the ship, went for dinner, came here, went back. Gone.”

The man’s expression tightened. “Anything at the berth?”

Eli glanced at Stent before answering. “The service line had been disconnected and shoved aside. Not damaged, just not put away properly. And there was some blood on the ground.” That drew a sharper look from the bartender. “Not much,” Eli added. “Someone had been bleeding, but there was no sign of a firefight or anything like that. Nothing obviously broken.”

The man muttered something under his breath.

Stent had remained quiet through most of the exchange, watching him. “You have heard of this happening before.” It was not phrased as a question.

The bartender looked at him. “Not personally. Heard enough.” He reached beneath the counter, poured himself water and drank half of it before continuing. “Couple ships went missing here in the last few months. More from the smaller fields south of the city. One off Raskin Port, two from a field inland. That’s just this planet. Heard similar stories from the next world over and one of the moons.”

Eli felt the hypothesis assemble itself before the man finished. “A theft ring.”

“That’s what people say.”

“People?”

“Traders. Mechanics. People whose insurance premiums went up. The ones who had it…” The bartender gave a humorless smile. “Authorities call it isolated property crime.”

Stent leaned one hand against the bar. “Have any vessels been recovered?”

“Some.”

That was worse than a simple no.

The man continued. “One showed up stripped in a quarry. Another got found with a new transponder three systems over. Two others were broken for parts. Drives, nav computers, shield generators, anything worth moving. Hulls left wherever nobody would complain about them.”

Eli thought immediately of the Faded Glory’s hyperdrive. Laro. Lysatra. Weeks of reconstruction and one of the best pieces of machinery aboard their ship. A class-two drive inside a hull that had never been built to deserve it.

His jaw tightened.

The bartender saw something in his expression. “Good hardware?”

“Yes.”

“Then start watching the parts boards.”

Stent glanced at Eli. They would. They absolutely would.

“What about the por authority?” Eli asked.

The bartender laughed once. Not because anything was funny. “The Imperials are busy.”

“With?”

“Take your pick.” He gestured vaguely upward, encompassing the port, the system and perhaps the entire galaxy at war. “Rebel cells. Military traffic. Customs. Local governors deciding they outrank people who technically outrank them. Half the patrol budget got redirected two months ago. You lose a merchant ship and they’ll take a report. Eventually. Maybe put the registry on a list.” His mouth tightened. “Doesn’t mean anyone goes looking.”

Eli and Stent exchanged a glance. That should have been reassuring. It was not.

A report was one thing. An Imperial search was another. The image arrived immediately: a patrol cutter finding the Faded Glory, ordering her to stop, receiving no sensible response from whoever was riding it, boarding her—

—and opening the wrong cargo case: the one the rebel Colonel had given them.

Eli looked away.

Marten noticed that too, because apparently everyone in the Traders’ Lounge was professionally incapable of missing things. “You report it?”

“Port movement incident,” Eli said. “Not a full theft declaration.”

The bartender’s brow rose slightly. “Why?”

Eli had already prepared the answer by the time the question finished. “Insurance.”

“Ah.” The man accepted that immediately. Too immediately, perhaps because every independent trader in the galaxy had at some point done something strange because of insurance.

“Full theft flag can make ownership recovery ugly if somebody moves the ship before paperwork catches up,” Eli added.

That was sufficiently true to survive casual examination.

The bartender nodded. “Fair.”

Stent said nothing. Eli was grateful.

The bartender picked up the abandoned glass again. “Name’s Marten, by the way.”

“Horatio.”

“Ren.” Stent said, eyes scanning the area as if expecting someone unexpected to walk in. There were only three people around: two at a table and another one dozing over a beer.

Marten nodded toward the mostly empty room. “You can sit here until the offices open if you want. Night bar stays running. Just don’t sleep across three chairs or Kess on morning cleaning will throw you out herself.”

“We’re not tired,” Eli said.

Marten looked at the port clock. Then at him. “Long flight?”

“Different ship cycle.”

“Right.”

Marten understood immediately. Another small mercy of spending time around spacers: nobody needed an explanation of biological midnight occurring at local noon.

Eli reached into his pocket.

Marten saw the motion. “How much have you got?”

Eli stopped. “That obvious?”

“You just lost your ship and you’re checking your pocket before ordering water.”

Stent’s gaze shifted toward Eli. He ignored it.

“Twenty credits.”

Marten stared at him for a moment. “Total?”

“Currently.”

The bartender pointed toward a dispenser at the end of the counter. “Water’s free. Caff on the overnight pot is technically free too, although I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’ve done something terrible and feel you deserve punishment.”

Eli almost smiled. “Appreciated.”

“Food costs.”

“Expected.”

Marten looked toward Stent. “You eaten?”

“We had dinner.”

“Then save your money.”

That was the first piece of financial advice Eli had received all evening that did not make him want to argue.

They took a table near the back. The same part of the lounge where, a few hours earlier, they had been discussing unreliable beacon chains with people whose problems had seemed significant.

Now those problems felt almost luxurious.

Eli sat with his short-range communicator on the table. He tried the ship code again.

No response.

He left the unit there anyway.

Stent sat opposite him, arms folded loosely. Neither spoke for a while. There was too much to sort.

The Faded Glory might already be hours away. Someone might be stripping her. The Rebel case might be sitting inside a criminal workshop. Tee might be damaged. Ch’eth might—

Eli stopped that thought deliberately.

There was food aboard. Water. A secure enclosure. If Tee was functioning, environmental systems would remain functioning. That was as far as he could reason without inventing disasters.

He rubbed his palms together. “We can’t contact them.”

Stent knew exactly who he meant: the rebels. “No.”

“All the long comm channels are aboard.”

“Yes.”

“And the Stygeon delivery window—”

“Has not yet passed.”

“It will.”

Stent leaned forward slightly. “We cannot solve that tonight.”

Eli disliked the statement because it was true. He disliked most of Stent’s useful statements for exactly that reason. “What happens if whoever has the ship opens the case?”

“The contents themselves do not identify the receivers.”

“They might identify somebody.”

“They identify equipment intended for secure communications. That is suspicious, but not conclusive without additional context.”

“That’s a lot of comfort packed into ‘not conclusive.’”

“I did not say it was safe.”

Eli leaned back.

At the bar, Marten was arguing quietly with a Sullustan over whether another drink constituted continuation of an existing tab or the beginning of tomorrow’s. The normality of it was almost offensive.

Eli looked at his communicator again. Still nothing. “We could file the full report in the morning.”

Stent was silent for a moment. “We could.”

“If an Imperial patrol finds her—”

“They may board.”

“And then we’re done.”

“Potentially.”

Eli stared at the tabletop. That was the trap. If they did nothing, thieves could strip the ship or move it beyond any chance of recovery. If they asked the Empire to find it, the Empire might succeed. That outcome was not necessarily better. He let out a slow breath. “For once, I’d appreciate a problem with a good option.”

Stent’s expression shifted faintly. “Those are rarely problems.”

Eli looked at him. “That was annoyingly philosophical.”

“It was not intended to be.”

“Even worse.”

They sat.

Every fifteen or twenty minutes, Eli tried the communicator again. Every time, nothing.

Marten brought them water without asking.

Much later—though Eli still felt as if the afternoon had simply become very long—Marten appeared beside their table with two cups.

“Tea,” he said, setting them down. “Sweet. End of the night pot. I was going to throw it out.”

Eli looked at the cup. “Free?”

Marten gave him a flat look. “I just said I was going to throw it out.”

“Right. Thank you.”

He moved away before Eli could say anything else. Stent took a cautious sip. Then another.

Eli tried the communicator again. The ship still did not answer.

The first administrative lights came on shortly before 0600 local.

Eli had been watching the lounge empty and refill in strange increments as night-shift workers became early-shift workers. His body had finally started protesting.

Not violently. Just enough. The sharp alertness of the evening had softened into something heavy behind his eyes. According to the clock they had kept aboard the Faded Glory, it was approaching the middle of their night.

He should probably eat something soon. The thought brought another with it, immediate and unwelcome: the glucose reader was aboard the ship. Eli resisted the urge to check a pocket he already knew was empty. The implant did not need the reader to function. That had been the whole point of getting it. It was still doing its job whether he could see the numbers or not. Probably. He decided not to dwell on that last part.

Naturally, that was when the port became useful.

Marten noticed them standing. “Morning desk opens in about ten minutes.”

“Security?”

“Skeleton shift until six. You’ll have better luck once the day staff are in.”

Eli picked up his communicator. Still nothing.

Marten nodded toward the adjoining commercial office. “Tiri should be opening up shortly.”

Eli glanced through the glass partition. The office beyond was still dim, terminals dark except for a single standby light near the entrance. “Good.”

Marten had already turned back to the bar.

Stent rose, and Eli followed him toward the office. At least now there was finally someone they could ask for help.

The office door unlocked a few minutes later.

A Nautolan woman stepped inside carrying a large cup in one hand and a satchel in the other. She set both behind the counter, switched on the first terminal, waited for it to finish cycling, then moved to the second.

Eli and Stent waited outside until the status light beside the door changed from red to green.

The woman was still settling into her chair when they approached. “Morning.”

“Morning,” Eli said. “We need some help with a vessel.”

She looked at him, then at the terminal. “Berth number?” Eli gave it. “Vessel?”

“Faded Glory. Light freighter.”

“Registered operator?”

“Horatio Figg.”

Her fingers moved across the controls. “Commercial registry number?”

Eli gave her that too.

A pause while the record came up. Tiri frowned faintly at the screen. “That vessel isn’t in the port.”

“That’s why we’re here.”

She looked up.

“We left her in the berth last night,” Eli continued. “Went into the port for a couple of hours. When we came back, she was gone. We didn’t authorize anyone to move her.”

Tiri set her cup down. “Did you report it overnight?”

“We contacted the service desk. They checked what they could and told us to come here once the office opened.”

“Identification.”

Eli produced the small commercial credential he had taken to the lounge. Stent handed over his own crew authorization when she asked for it.

Tiri checked both against the registry, then opened another screen. “Any outstanding repossession order or ownership dispute?”

“No.”

“Anyone else authorized to operate the vessel?”

“No.”

She selected a field. “I can open an unauthorized vessel movement incident.”

“That’s what we need.”

Tiri glanced at him. “That isn’t the same as reporting the vessel stolen. If you want it flagged through Imperial traffic control, that’s a separate procedure.”

Eli hesitated only briefly. “Not yet.”

“Fine.”

No curiosity. No question as to why someone whose ship had vanished might choose not to report it stolen. Tiri simply continued with the form. She asked when they had last seen the Faded Glory, when they had returned to the berth, whether anyone had remained aboard and whether the manifest contained hazardous materials.

“No hazardous cargo.”

Technically true. The sealed case was dangerous for entirely different reasons.

“Passengers?”

“No sapient passengers.”

“Animals?”

“One small animal.”

“Declared?”

“Yes.”

She found the incidental-fauna notation from the Imperial inspection and moved on.

“Droid aboard?”

“Yes. Astromech. R2 unit.”

“Registered to the vessel?”

“Yes.”

She added it. “Anyone else?”

“No.”

The terminal chimed. Tiri turned the display slightly toward Eli. “Incident number. Security handles surveillance requests and anything involving the berth itself. Concourse Three, lower administrative level.”

Eli read the number, then realized he had nowhere useful to save it.

“Can you send that to my communicator?”

“If it accepts local text packets.”

He put the device on the counter. It did.

One small problem solved.

“There’s a camera covering the approach to the berth,” Stent said. “The night desk told us archived footage has to be requested in person.”

Tiri nodded toward the corridor beyond the office. “Security.”

“And traffic records?”

“Same place.”

Eli rubbed at one eye. “So that’s where we go next.”

Tiri had already turned back to her terminal. “That’s where I’d go.”

They stepped away from the counter.

Eli glanced at the incident number on his communicator, then toward the corridor leading deeper into the administrative section.

At least they had something official now. Not much. But something.

Security occupied a lower level of Concourse Three, behind a pair of doors that looked considerably more substantial than anything in the Traders’ Office.

The incident number got them through the first one.

The second required another check of Eli’s commercial identification and Stent’s crew authorization before they were directed to a desk near the back of the room.

The officer who took the report was human, middle-aged and awake enough to be competent without displaying any particular enthusiasm for the privilege. He read through Tiri’s incident entry, asked Eli to confirm the berth and vessel registration, then looked at the screen for several seconds. “You said there was physical evidence at the berth?”

Stent answered. “A small amount of blood. Several drops on the duracrete near where the ramp had been. The service connection had also been disconnected and pushed aside rather than properly returned to its housing.”

The officer’s fingers moved over the terminal. “You touch any of it?”

“No.”

“Good.”

He added the information to the incident and opened another window.

Eli leaned forward slightly. “Can you see the camera footage?”

“I can request it.”

“That’s different from seeing it.”

“Yes.”

The officer did not appear troubled by the distinction. “Archive access for commercial berth surveillance needs authorization. I can put the request through now, but somebody has to release the recording.”

“How long?”

The man gave him a look that suggested he had been asked that question many times and had never once improved the answer. “Depends on the queue.”

Stent glanced toward the terminal. “What about traffic records?”

“Those I can check.”

That got Eli’s attention. The officer entered the Faded Glory’s registration and waited.

A track appeared.

He frowned faintly, adjusted the time range, then brought up a second display. “Well.”

Eli straightened. “What?”

“Your ship did leave.”

For a moment Eli simply stared at him. “You have it?”

“Part of it.”

The officer rotated the display enough for them to see. A simple traffic plot showed the Faded Glory lifting from the outer commercial field and climbing away from the port. The track continued upward in a clean line, then ended abruptly.

Eli looked at the final marker. “How far?”

“About twenty klicks altitude.”

“And then?”

“Then the system stops receiving the transponder.”

Stent studied the plot. “Signal failure?”

“Could be.”

The officer expanded the record.

“No degradation beforehand. No intermittent loss. It’s transmitting normally, then it isn’t.”

Eli knew what that meant. “So somebody switched it off.”

“That would be my first guess.”

The words settled unpleasantly. A stolen ship with an active transponder was inconvenient. A stolen ship with its transponder deliberately disabled was something else.

“Do you have the departure vector?” Stent asked.

“For as long as the transponder was transmitting.”

The officer brought up the track again. It told them direction, climb and very little beyond that. Once the signal disappeared, the Faded Glory became another unregistered object somewhere above a busy planet.

“Anything else leave around the same time?” Eli asked. “Another ship following it?”

The officer checked. “Nothing outbound in that window.”

“Nothing?”

“One shuttle was on final approach and a bulk freighter entered the landing pattern a few minutes later. Couple of local atmospheric movements farther east. No other registered departures from this field close enough to matter.”

Eli stared at the plot.

If someone had taken the Faded Glory, they had apparently done it cleanly. No escort. No second vessel leaving behind it. No obvious support craft.

Stent’s attention remained on the traffic display. “What happens when a transponder disappears at that altitude?”

“If the ship isn’t creating a traffic hazard, usually not much.”

Eli looked at him.

The officer continued before he could object. “Control may issue a query. If there’s no response and the vessel continues away from controlled traffic, it gets logged. We don’t launch interceptors every time a civilian transponder fails.”

“Did control query ours?”

Another search. “Yes.”

“And?”

“No response.”

Eli felt something tighten behind his ribs. Tee would have responded. Unless Tee couldn’t.

He stopped there. There were too many possibilities and none of them improved with repetition.

Stent asked, “Can you tell whether the vessel remained in atmosphere?”

“Not from the transponder record.”

“Other sensors?”

“Possibly. That’s a separate data request.”

Naturally.

The officer attached it to the existing incident. “I’ll add raw traffic sensor review to the surveillance request. If there’s anything useful, Security will contact you.”

Eli almost laughed. “With what?”

The man looked at him. “Our long-range comms are aboard the ship.”

That produced the first hint of practical inconvenience on the officer’s face.

Eli placed his short-range communicator on the desk. “This is all we have.”

The officer checked the device identification. “Local port messaging?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll attach it.”

Another small mercy.

Stent looked back at the traffic plot. “The berth camera?”

“Requested.”

“The blood?”

“I’ll send someone to collect a sample if it’s still there.”

“And until then?”

The officer returned the screen to his side. “Until then, you wait for the archive and sensor review.”

Eli rubbed his face. “That’s it?”

“For the port investigation? For now.”

The officer glanced at the incident classification. “If you believe the vessel was stolen, you can escalate this to a formal theft report and have the registration circulated through Imperial traffic control.”

Eli and Stent exchanged a glance.

“Not yet,” Eli said.

The officer gave a small shrug. “Your ship. Your decision.”

That was precisely the problem.

Outside the security office, the port had fully become morning. People moved with purpose through the concourse, shops were opening, freight crews were changing shifts, and somewhere nearby somebody had decided that this was an appropriate hour to run a floor polisher that produced a thin mechanical whine directly behind his eyes.

His body wanted a bed. His brain wanted the Faded Glory. The port, with impressive neutrality, offered neither.

They had started the paperwork. Security had the incident number, the request for the camera archive, the traffic record and whatever sensor review someone eventually decided to perform. There was nothing else they could force into motion by standing in front of another desk.

Stent looked no better than Eli felt.

Not exhausted. Not yet. But quieter. The kind of quiet that came when too many useful options had been removed in succession.

“We should look at the berth again,” Eli said.

Stent nodded. It was something to do.

They took the long route back through the commercial concourse and down toward the outer bays. By the time the access spur came into view, Eli knew something had changed. There was engine noise where there had been none before.

Then he saw the ship. For several seconds he simply stopped walking. A broad-bellied cargo hauler occupied their berth. Not near it. Not adjacent to it.

Their berth.

Its forward landing gear had settled across the painted edge of the pad, one heavy support foot planted almost exactly where the blood had been.

Eli stared at it. “You have got to be kidding me.”

Stent said nothing. There was no point.

The berth had been marked vacant, because they had paid it until the morning. The port had assigned it again. The world did not reserve empty commercial pads because one previous occupant was having a bad week.

Three Rodians were unloading crates from the cargo ramp. One stood on the pad operating a repulsor pallet while the other two shifted sealed containers from the hold. None of them paid Eli or Stent any attention.

Eli walked closer. The service line had been connected properly this time. The coupling sat locked into place. The hose ran in a neat curve from the housing to the ship. Everything looked exactly as it should.

Except for the part where their ship was gone.

Stent moved toward the landing leg. Eli followed. The blood was effectively gone.

A few dark traces remained outside the edge of the support foot, but most of the pattern had disappeared beneath several tons of landing gear. Whatever had been visible before had now been smeared, obscured or ground into the duracrete.

Eli crouched. There was nothing useful left to interpret. “Security said they’d send someone to collect a sample.”

Stent looked at the landing strut. “They should have come sooner.”

Eli laughed once. There was no humor in it. “One more thing for the report.”

One of the Rodians glanced toward them. Not suspiciously. Just enough to register two strangers standing beside his ship.

Eli straightened.

He was suddenly aware of how this looked from the other direction. Two tired men loitering around somebody else’s cargo hauler. Stent had apparently reached the same conclusion. They moved back several steps.

The Rodian returned to unloading.

Eli watched the pallet drift toward the service corridor. “They probably have no idea.”

“No reason they should.”

“The system marked the berth empty.”

“And they rented it.”

Eli rubbed at his eyes. He had no anger to spend on them.

The Rodians had paid for an available berth and landed where the port told them to land. They had not stolen the Faded Glory, contaminated the evidence deliberately or done anything except arrive at an inconvenient time.

Arguing with them would accomplish nothing beyond making everyone’s morning worse.

Stent looked once more toward the landing leg. “The remaining traces may still be recoverable.”

“Maybe.”

“If security considers it relevant.”

That qualifier had begun appearing too often.

Eli stood for another moment, staring at the place where their ramp should have been. Nothing had improved overnight.

They had gained a traffic track that ended twenty klicks above the port, an incident number, a camera request waiting in somebody else’s queue and confirmation that whoever had taken the ship knew enough to disable the transponder.

They had also lost most of the blood evidence beneath a Rodian freighter.

Progress, apparently.

His stomach reminded him again that he had not eaten since the noodles. The thought arrived with the now-familiar absence behind it. No reader. No numbers. Just the implant doing whatever it was doing inside him and the assumption that it knew better than he did.

He trusted it.

Mostly.

“We need food,” he said.

Stent looked at him more sharply than the subject deserved. “I know.”

That was all. No lecture. No question about glucose. Just recognition.

Eli appreciated that.

Then Stent glanced toward the port clock. “And sleep.”

Eli followed his gaze. Local morning. Biological night.

They had spent most of the hours when their bodies expected activity waiting for offices to open, and now that those offices were finally useful there was nothing more they could do until someone else answered a request.

It felt like a particularly inefficient form of punishment. “The lounge?” Eli suggested.

“For food?”

“And somewhere to sit until we work out what comes next.”

Stent considered the busy berth one last time. Then they left the Rodians to their cargo.

They found breakfast in a narrow counter-service place two concourses over.

Nothing looked particularly good. That helped.

Eli stood beneath the menu board with the remaining coins in his palm, counting them twice before choosing the cheapest thing that still looked like food.

Stent ordered only caff.

Eli turned to look at him. “You don’t even like caff.”

“I do not dislike it.”

“That is not the same thing.”

Stent took the cup from the server and stepped aside.

Eli looked at him. “You’re not eating?”

“Not now.”

“We have enough for both of us.”

“We have enough for you to eat.” There was no point arguing with the distinction. Stent could go longer without food than Eli could, and both of them knew it.

War economy. Apparently that was where they were now.

Eli paid, gathered his breakfast and the few coins that remained, and followed Stent toward an empty table.

His meal was small. Stent’s caff was probably terrible.

Neither complained.