Chapter 233: Departure
"Because things that go quiet out here usually went quiet for a reason, and the reasons are rarely good ones." Ashcombe’s gaze held his a moment longer than strictly comfortable. "Whatever you’re looking for, kid, I hope it’s worth wherever this search eventually takes you. I’ve seen plenty of people chase something out into the Fringe with that exact look in their eyes. Not all of them came back to tell anyone what they found."
***
The Ember Drift departed Threshold Anchorage six hours later, and Rohan spent the first leg of the journey the way he suspected any sensible newcomer to a working ship’s crew ought to — watching, listening, and making himself useful in whatever small ways presented themselves without waiting to be asked twice.
He fell in naturally with Dessa during the first watch rotation, helping her run inventory checks on the ship’s modest weapons locker, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that four months of Maerin’s training had given him more common ground with a fringe-running security specialist than he’d expected.
"You’ve had real instruction," Dessa observed, watching him handle one of the locker’s compact energy weapons with careful, unfamiliar precision. "Not much, maybe, but real. Somebody taught you the bones of this properly before you ever picked up whatever that spear of yours actually is."
"Someone did," Rohan agreed. "A long way from here."
"Must have been a good teacher."
’The best teacher I could have asked for, even if she’d never once admit to caring whether I lived or died.’ "She was," he said simply.
Dessa didn’t press further, which Rohan appreciated more than he let show. She talked instead, unprompted, about the Fringe itself — the scattered independent colonies clinging to survival at the edge of surveyed territory, the salvage crews who made their living picking through the wreckage of ships and stations that had failed to survive out here, the loose, ever-shifting patchwork of unofficial authority that governed each system according to whoever happened to hold the most firepower in any given month.
"No single power controls the Fringe," she explained, running a final check along a rifle’s charge cell. "Too thin, too poor, too far from anywhere that matters to the people who actually run this part of the universe. Which means it’s mostly left alone, and being left alone cuts both ways. Nobody out here to help you if something goes wrong. But also nobody out here telling you what you can and can’t do, provided you’re strong enough to make that choice stick."
That sounds almost exactly like the Ashen Marches. Just colder, and with worse weapons.
"Sounds dangerous."
"It is." Dessa didn’t dress up the truth for his benefit, which he found he respected. "But it’s honest danger, mostly. Nobody out here pretends to be your friend right up until the moment they aren’t. That’s more than I can say for plenty of places closer to civilised space."
Three days into the transit, Rohan found himself sharing a quiet evening meal shift with Pike, the ship’s young navigator, in the Ember Drift’s cramped mess — a narrow table bolted to the deck, meals that owed more to nutritional efficiency than genuine flavour, conversation that flowed more easily between two people close enough in age to recognise something familiar in each other despite the vast gulf of experience separating their actual lives.
"Ashcombe doesn’t usually take passengers," Pike said, picking at his own meal with the particular disinterest of someone who’d eaten the same rations too many times to still taste them properly.
"Not strangers, anyway. Renna Voss must have vouched for you pretty hard."
"I think she mostly just wanted to see whether I’d survive long enough to pay her back," Rohan said dryly.
Pike laughed, a short, genuine sound. "That tracks. Renna’s shrewd, but she’s not cruel about it. If she thought you were walking into something you couldn’t handle, she wouldn’t have pointed you toward us at all." He studied Rohan a moment, curiosity plain on his face. "Can I ask what you’re actually looking for out there? Ashcombe mentioned you named some pretty obscure corners of the circuit. Most people who end up out here are running from something, not toward it."
Rohan considered how much of the truth this particular conversation could bear, and found himself, not for the first time since arriving in this universe, genuinely uncertain how to answer without sounding like either a liar or a madman.
"I’m looking for a way home," he said finally, choosing the simplest version of the truth he could offer. "It’s a long story. Longer than I think either of us has patience for over a single meal shift."
You have no idea, and neither do I, and that’s probably for the best right now. "You have no idea," Rohan said, and let the conversation drift, gently, toward safer ground.
The trouble Ashcombe had promised would eventually find them found them on the sixth day, roughly eighteen hours before they were due to drop out of transit into Kestrel’s Hollow’s system.
Rohan was midway through a watch shift alongside Torvin in the engineering section, learning the basics of the Ember Drift’s own drive systems with the same careful attention he’d once devoted to Tavin’s sketches of the Gilded Heron, when the ship’s proximity alarm cut through the low ambient hum of the engines with a shrill, unmistakable urgency.
"Contact," Torvin said, already moving toward the nearest comm panel, all traces of the wiry engineer’s usual distracted focus vanishing into sharp, practised alertness. "Bridge, report."
Ashcombe’s voice crackled back immediately, flat and controlled in the particular way Rohan recognised from Maerin’s own voice during genuine emergencies. "Two vessels, matching profile for the Vasker crew that’s been working this transit corridor the past few months. Weapons hot, closing fast. All hands to stations, this isn’t a drill."
Rohan’s stomach dropped, adrenaline flooding through him with a speed that felt almost nostalgic — the same sharp, focusing clarity he’d learned to associate with skarn packs emerging from ash squalls, with the desperate scramble aboard the Gilded Heron, with every moment since his Awakening that had demanded everything he had simply to survive.
"Who are the Vasker crew?" he asked, already moving toward the weapons locker alongside Torvin.
"Raiders," Torvin said shortly, pulling a compact rifle from its housing with practised efficiency.
"Independent, opportunistic, prey on smaller transports running this stretch of the Fringe when they think the risk-reward calculation favours them. Ashcombe’s beaten them off twice before. Doesn’t mean the third time’s guaranteed to go the same way."
Dessa met them in the corridor a moment later, already armoured, expression grim and focused.
"Captain wants defensive positions at the cargo bay and the main airlock. If they’re serious about boarding, those are the two points they’ll try first." Her gaze flicked to Rohan, assessing. "You said you could fight. Prove it. Cargo bay, with me. Pike’s covering the airlock with Torvin."
Rohan gripped his spear tighter, feeling its familiar weight settle against his palm like a promise, and followed Dessa toward the cargo bay without hesitation.
The Ember Drift shuddered once, hard, as something struck her outer hull — not a direct hit, Rohan gathered from the muffled curse Dessa bit off under her breath, but close enough to rattle the deck plating beneath their feet.
"Grappling charge," Dessa said, checking her weapon’s charge readout with grim efficiency. "They’re not trying to destroy us. They want the cargo, and probably whatever they can strip off the crew before they’re done. That means boarding, which means close-quarters, which means your spear’s about to earn its keep."
The cargo bay’s outer hatch groaned under a fresh impact, metal straining audibly against whatever cutting equipment the raiders had brought to bear against it. Rohan positioned himself beside a stack of secured cargo crates, spear held ready, and tried to steady the wild, familiar hammering of his own pulse.
’Not skarn. Not merchant guards with energy weapons I barely understood. People, this time.’
Desperate people, probably, doing something ugly because the Fringe gave them no better options. That doesn’t make them any less dangerous. It just makes this harder to feel good about afterward.
The hatch gave way in a shower of sparks, and the first raider through it — a lean, hard-eyed man in salvaged armour, weapon already raised — barely had time to register Rohan’s presence before Dessa’s first shot dropped him where he stood.
Chaos followed in the way chaos always seemed to follow whenever violence actually arrived rather than simply being anticipated — shouts, weapon fire, the sharp, acrid smell of discharged energy cells filling the confined space of the cargo bay as two more raiders pushed through the breached hatch behind their fallen companion.
Rohan moved on instinct sharpened by four months of genuine desperation, closing the distance to the nearest raider before the man’s weapon could properly track him, spear sweeping low and then up in the same brutal, efficient arc Maerin had drilled into him across countless bruising practice sessions. The raider went down hard, weapon clattering uselessly across the deck.