Chapter 236: Negotiating Safe Passage
"You think he’d take me?"
"I think he’d take your credit, provided you had enough of it, and I think he’d probably survive the trip, provided you’re as capable as Reya seems to believe you are." Halden’s expression turned more serious. "But I won’t pretend that’s a strong recommendation. Corven’s flown into worse odds than most sensible people would accept, and he’s not always come back from it clean. If you’re set on this, I’d want you going in with your eyes fully open, not just chasing whatever hope’s been driving you this far."
Rohan thought of Maerin’s voice again, steady and unromantic, reminding him that hope had teeth.
He thought of Odris’s warning about watching anyone too eager to help a man with no traceable past. He thought, most of all, of the pull sitting steady and undeniable in his chest, closer now than it had ever been in seven long months of carrying it.
"My eyes are open," he said. "I’d still like to meet him."
Halden studied him a moment longer, then nodded slowly, reaching for his comm unit. "I’ll send word. Whether he’s sober enough tonight to talk business is entirely his own concern, not mine."
Corven, as it turned out, was sober enough — barely — when Rohan found him a few hours later in the settlement’s single cantina, a cramped, dimly lit space that reminded him uncomfortably of the merchant Tradefall pavilions back on Cael Athis, minus the ash and the desperation clinging to every transaction.
The man occupied a corner table alone, nursing a drink that smelled sharp enough to sting Rohan’s eyes from several paces away, his weathered face bearing the particular map of scars and sun damage that spoke of decades spent on the wrong side of civilised space’s protective boundaries.
He looked up as Rohan approached, eyes narrowing with the wary assessment Rohan had come to expect from nearly everyone he’d met since arriving in this universe.
"You’re the one asking after the numbered system," Corven said, before Rohan could introduce himself. "Halden’s stray. Word travels fast around here."
"So I keep hearing," Rohan said, sliding into the seat opposite without waiting for an invitation. "I need passage. I understand you’ve flown closer to it than most people currently docked here."
"Closer," Corven agreed, taking a slow pull from his drink, "isn’t the same as to. I got within sensor range twice, back when the consortium was still paying decent rates to chart that stretch of the belt. Never actually set down. Wasn’t paid enough to justify the risk, and by the second run, the readings coming off that place had gotten strange enough that even consortium command started losing their nerve about pushing further."
"What kind of readings?"
Corven’s expression shifted, something uneasy flickering behind the weathered lines of his face.
"Energy signatures that don’t match anything in the standard catalogue. Gravitic distortions that shouldn’t exist around a system with no black hole, no exotic matter deposits, nothing in the survey data that would explain them. My sensor tech at the time called it interference. I called it a good reason to turn the ship around before we found out the hard way what was actually causing it."
Gravitic distortions. Energy readings that don’t match anything catalogued. That’s not natural.
That’s exactly what an overlap between two universes might actually look like from the outside, if nobody’s ever seen one before and doesn’t have a word for it.
"I still need to get there," Rohan said.
Corven studied him for a long moment, weighing something behind his tired, calculating eyes.
"Why? And don’t give me the same careful non-answer you apparently gave Halden. I’m not risking my ship and whatever’s left of my nerve on a mystery. If you want my help, you tell me something real."
Rohan hesitated, then decided, as he had with Renna, as he had with Odris in that engine room weeks ago, that some version of honesty would serve him better here than careful evasion.
"I’m not from this universe," he said. "There’s a boundary point somewhere in that system — an overlap, a tear, whatever you want to call it — connecting this universe to my own. I’ve spent seven months trying to find my way back home, and every piece of evidence I’ve gathered points toward that numbered system being the closest I’ve come to actually finding it."
Corven stared at him for a long, silent moment, and Rohan braced himself for the disbelief, or the mockery, or the wary suspicion he’d grown accustomed to receiving whenever he skirted too close to the truth of his origins.
Instead, the man let out a short, humourless laugh, and took another long pull from his drink.
"Well," he said finally. "That’s certainly a new one. Explains the readings better than anything the consortium’s own theorists ever came up with, I’ll give you that." He set his glass down, expression turning more serious, more considering. "You understand what you’re asking me to fly into, if you’re right? A tear between two universes isn’t something a standard hull rating accounts for. I don’t know what that does to a ship, or a person, up close. Neither does anyone else who’s tried finding out."
"I understand the risk," Rohan said, echoing the same words he’d offered Ashcombe days before.
"Everybody says that," Corven said, not unkindly. "Nobody actually understands it until they’re standing in the middle of it." He was quiet a moment longer, turning his glass slowly between weathered fingers. "But I’ve been flying this stretch of the Fringe long enough to recognise someone who’s not going to stop asking, regardless of how many times sensible people tell him no. Might as well be me who takes you, if it’s happening either way. At least I know the approach vectors that don’t immediately register as hostile to whatever’s still running the outpost’s old defence grid, assuming anything down there still bothers defending itself."
"What would it cost?"
Corven named a figure that made Rohan’s stomach drop — considerably more than the remaining balance of Renna’s working credit, more than he had any current means of earning honestly in whatever time he had left before his own patience ran out.
"I don’t have that," Rohan admitted. "Not yet."
"Didn’t expect you to." Corven’s mouth twitched into something almost like genuine amusement.
"Tell you what. There’s salvage work needs doing on that northern platform I mentioned — automated systems failing faster than the settlement can afford proper replacement parts for, work I’ve been putting off myself because I’ve got better things to do with my time than crawl through decades-old mining equipment. You help me clear that backlog, work off a fair chunk of the fee in honest labour, and I’ll cover the rest as an investment against whatever you actually find out there being worth something eventually. Consortium pays well for confirmed anomaly data, if it comes to that. I wouldn’t mind a cut of whatever this turns out to be worth."
Rohan considered the offer, weighing the delay against the alternative of simply waiting, hoping, for resources he had no clear path toward otherwise.
"How long would that take?"
"Two weeks, maybe three, if you’re half as capable as Reya’s apparently been telling half the settlement." Corven shrugged. "Could be longer, if the platform’s automated systems are in worse shape than the last report suggested. Either way, it’s the fastest honest path I can offer you toward that system, short of you finding someone reckless enough to fly you there for free, which I promise you, you won’t."
Rohan thought of the eleven days already spent preparing at the Anchorage, of the weeks of transit already behind him, of the pull sitting steady and insistent in his chest, closer now than it had ever been.
A few more weeks. After everything, a few more weeks is nothing. I’ve waited seven months already.
’I can wait a little longer for the last stretch, if it means actually getting there safely.’
"Deal," he said, extending a hand across the table.
Corven studied the gesture a moment, something faintly amused crossing his weathered features, before finally taking it in a firm, calloused grip.
"Deal," he agreed. "Northern platform, dawn tomorrow. Don’t be late, and don’t expect me to go easy on you just because you’ve got a sympathetic story. Work’s work, whatever universe you’re actually from."
Rohan left the cantina a short while later, the terms of the agreement settled clearly in his mind, and walked the short distance back toward his lodging beneath a sky scattered with unfamiliar stars, turning over the shape of the plan now finally, properly in motion — weeks of honest labour, a reckless pilot who somehow understood more than he let on, and, waiting at the end of all of it, an answer he’d chased across an entire universe to find.
Rohan found Ashcombe near the Ember Drift’s boarding ramp later that evening, watching the settlement’s modest lights flicker against Kestrel’s Hollow’s darkening sky, and relayed the terms of his agreement with Corven as plainly as he’d relayed everything else to her over the past several days.