The bones stretching over Morrow’s Spur were not bones.
Ryker decided that before Ebon Steed passed beneath the first massive white arch. Mineral deposits and centuries of wind had softened its edges, but structural seams showed beneath the chalky crust, far too straight for nature. Rusted fasteners ran along the inner curve. Whatever had crashed on this desert plain had been built, then worn down to the ribs of a dead god beneath a copper sky. Scrap-dealers and miners had drilled homes into it anyway. Warm windows glowed inside the hollow spans. Laundry snapped between ancient joints, and a child in a yellow pressure mask waved from a cargo hatch turned balcony. Ryker counted four failed landing beacons, judged the crosswind, and brought Ebon Steed toward their berth. Someone had spliced the surviving beacon into a water pump’s power line. Its light flickered each time the pump started.
Vera leaned toward the cockpit glass as the settlement rose to meet them. She’d taken the trousers and coat from his locker too, but it was his blue shirt he noticed, tucked into her waistband with the lowest buttons undone. The Haptic Cane rested across her lap beneath its thick oilskin. Since its performance in his cargo hold, Ryker had developed a healthy respect for that wrapping.
“If the archivist asks, you inherited it from a dead aunt,” she murmured, eyes tracking the landing pad.
Ryker lowered the landing struts into a swirling storm of red dust. “All my aunts are alive.”
“Then try to look bereaved, Starshadow. You’re already halfway there.”
He settled the cruiser onto the berth without answering. Vera smiled at the forward glass, pleased enough with her own wit for both of them, while the engines wound down to a low, throbbing purr beneath their boots.
Desert heat struck when the ramp opened. The thin air smelled of iron dust, frying oil, and the settlement’s overworked water plant. Beyond the landing field, faded awnings hung between pale arches while nests of leaking pipes shaded the streets, ticking as the metal expanded in the sun.
The Marrow House occupied the base of the largest arch, its entrance cut between supports that might once have anchored a city in the sky. Red dust filmed the windows but not the objects behind them: navigation sextants, obsolete court seals, a broken crown, and several chrome artifacts Ryker recognized as expensive plumbing. A brass plaque promised AUTHENTICATION, APPRAISAL, AND DISCRETION, with the last word twice as large as the others.
Inside, cool air carried the perfume of old paper, metal polish, and things recently removed from graves. A narrow man with a silver mustache looked up from a disassembled astrolabe as Vera entered. He set his tool in its tray, covered the exposed mechanism against dust, and glanced at the sword across Ryker’s back before offering them a stool each.
Vera laid the wrapped Cane on the counter with the exaggerated care of a priest setting down a holy relic. “We need an approximate age, an origin, and any ownership marks you can legally verify.”
The archivist looked at Ryker. “And you are?”
“The one paying.”
That satisfied him. He locked the shop’s front door and turned the window plaque to CLOSED before leading them through a heavy curtain of suspended star maps. The workroom beyond had been carved deep into the core of the ancient arch, where strips of cold blue neon illuminated storage cabinets labeled in six dead languages. A heavy scanning table occupied the center of the room beneath three articulated lamps and an armature bristling with magnifying lenses. The archivist spread a padded cloth over the metal before Vera unwrapped the Cane. “My aunt left it to me,” she said. Ryker examined the cabinet labels.
When the archivist adjusted the cracked sapphire handle, a haptic pulse rattled the Cane against the table. He withdrew his hand and lowered a magnifying lens over his right eye. “A haptic interface. Royal grade, unless someone has built an extremely expensive joke.” He moved the scanning arm over the fracture without touching the stone. “The active grip was calibrated to its original bearer’s nervous system. A damaged unit can still respond to another user, though I wouldn’t trust the settings.”
“For navigation?” Ryker asked, keeping his arms crossed.
The silver mustache twitched. “Among other, more intimate uses.”
Vera leaned over the table. “How intimate?”
The archivist raised his lens and looked at her, then at Ryker. “The catalog will list the appropriate classifications.”
“We’ve seen the demonstration. I’m interested in whether it was performing correctly.” She pointed to the silver inset switch along the shaft. “That one made the wrist restraint rotate. Was it supposed to?”
“Vera.” Ryker could remember precisely where the Cane had touched him, and she knew it.
“We’re paying for expert advice.” She turned back to the archivist. “There was also a considerable amount of jasmine. I’d like to know how much is left before we use it again.”
The man reached for a second lens and screwed it into place. “The reservoir would require a separate inspection.”
“We’re here for the ownership records,” Ryker said. “Leave the switches alone.”
Vera rested her palms on the edge of the table, keeping them well clear of the Cane. “You were very quick to find them this morning.”
“You were attached to it.”
“And very grateful for your assistance.” She looked at the archivist, whose enlarged eye remained fixed on the shaft. “He’s good with his hands.”
The archivist adjusted the lamp so its shade stood between his face and theirs. “I can give you a written estimate for the reservoir.” Vera nodded and pulled up a stool.
The archivist drew the scanning arm over the sapphire. Blue light combed the fracture, passed down the length of the black shaft, and found a hidden mark too shallow for ordinary sight. It projected onto the wall in glowing blue-white lines: a blazing sun pierced by a curling chain of stars.
Ryker moved closer. He knew a plainer form of that star line. His mother had carved it into his wooden practice blades whenever a lesson concerned the old escort routes, and his father still stamped that final curve into weapons forged for deep-space navigators.
“The bearer traveled under royal protection.” Ryker indicated the distinct turn at the end of the line without touching the image. “The sun identifies the specific court.”
Vera came to stand beside him. “Aurex the Great.”
“Possibly,” the archivist said. He brought up the court registries and set two versions of the seal beside the projected mark. “There were later copies. Some were made for his own descendants.”
The metal had aged properly. Ryker closed his fingers around the lower shaft, letting his thumb travel over a sequence of shallow grooves while the archivist searched the registries. His mother had taught him that silent language before he was tall enough to reach the family weapons rack. He had hated those lessons until a dust storm swallowed his family’s trade caravan and the marks on an escort blade led twelve suffocating people through the desert to safety.
The Cane spoke that same physical language. Its decorative lines concealed measurements for grip, balance, and hand placement. Beneath them, a shallow hook near the silver cap identified an artisan licensed to supply a royal household. “These are cut into the metal,” Ryker said, bringing the hook beneath the lens. “They’re meant to be read with the device switched off. The bearer’s calibration doesn’t change them.”
The archivist enlarged the mark on his screen. “My registry identifies that as a restorer’s stamp.”
“Turn it over.” Ryker kept his thumb beneath the cap while the man rotated the image. “The hook runs toward the grip. My father still uses that turn on navigator blades. A restorer’s mark faces the other way.”
Vera had stopped looking at the screens. Her eyes followed his thumb as he traced the mark again, and when he looked at her she took a moment to meet his gaze. “All those lessons you complained about.”
“Most modern museums display this backward.” He turned the Cane in his palm. Forging the mark would have required tools lost for centuries and knowledge of a smithing tradition his family still practiced. “It’s genuine.”
The archivist checked the reversed image against another entry. “Yes. The earlier license.” He corrected his notes and brought up the damaged ownership record. Vera watched Ryker set the Cane on its cloth.
“You might have mentioned you could do that,” she said.
“You might have mentioned you had it.” He saw the answer gathering in her mouth and expected another joke, but she looked down at his hand instead.
“I’m trying to admire you, Starshadow.”
“Then give it a moment.” He left his hand on the Cane as the record opened. Her fingers settled beside his on the table, close enough for him to feel the heat of them. He remembered that pause before she touched him. Nine years, and she could still make him wait for it.
ROYAL VESSEL GYPSEA. MOBILE RESIDENCE. TREASURY TRANSFER. PRIVATE COLLECTION. GUEST GRATIFICATION SYSTEMS.
Vera leaned closer as TREASURY TRANSFER appeared. The projected light caught in her sapphire eyes.
“There are three other entries,” he reminded her.
“None of them are a lost treasury, Starshadow.”
He examined the surviving figures blinking beside the transfer entry. Most had corrupted into strings of useless code, but the visible portion accounted for more gold than several frontier star systems held in reserve. Fairy tales were for people who couldn’t read a transfer log.
The archivist removed his lens and polished it against his sleeve. “Later history claims the vessel granted wishes. Anything a guest desired could be materialized.”
“A rich man employed hidden servants and high technology,” Ryker countered. “The servants died, the technology was lost, the story remained, and desperate people decided the ship must be magic.”
“Aurex encouraged the confusion. His royal estates promised places where reality yielded to desire.”
Vera had already found a damaged royal genealogy on an adjacent screen. Aurex stared out from a painted portrait in robes spun from liquid gold, beautiful in the polished, fragile way of men who had never carried their own luggage. The genealogy gave him a Celestial Fae father and a Djinn-descended mother. Apparently that qualified him to grant wishes. A man with that treasury could afford to punish anyone who asked how.
The archivist pointed out the machinery behind the miracles: atmospheric projectors and climate controls. Ryker called it very expensive weather. He had met wealthy men who mistook total obedience for affection and raw expense for power. Aurex appeared to have done both on a galactic scale.
“I would have liked him,” Vera murmured.
“He collected people like property.”
“I didn’t say I would have trusted the man. I said I would have robbed him blind.”
She enlarged the enormous sapphire pinned at the king’s throat. Ryker looked at the six kneeling attendants supporting Aurex in the portrait, then at the stone Vera had chosen. He believed her.
They worked for two hours. Vera found an agricultural manifest among resort tariffs because its customs seal had been forged with more care than the document. Ryker matched the Cane’s markings to the old sword routes. Both pointed toward a private cultivation reserve missing from modern charts.
Vera bent over the manifest, comparing the seal with a tariff the archivist had already authenticated. When she found the faulty stroke, she pushed both documents toward Ryker with one finger resting on the discrepancy. He knew that look. Someone had tried to be clever, and she was about to enjoy herself at the forger’s expense.
The Gravity Orchard supplied Aurex’s household with perfume resin, narcotic pollen, synthesized stimulants, and exotic fruit grown under engineered gravity. Its public coordinates terminated in a dead, empty region of space. The Cane held the final, secret approach.
Vera stood over the trade map, one hand braced flat on the table. “Where dead stars bear fruit...”
Ryker touched the scratched silver cap of the artifact. “The clue follows his old supply route.”
“Which means our next stop may be a royal vineyard.”
“Or a corporate slaughterhouse.”
She looked up at him through the dark fringe of her lashes. “You’ve always lacked faith, Starshadow.”
“I have faith in practical men. Aurex does not appear to have been one.”
The archivist offered to issue an authentication certificate. Vera wrapped the Cane instead, drawing the oilskin over it until the cracked sapphire disappeared. “Your window sign promises discretion.”
“At twice the ordinary fee.” He turned the monitor toward her. The unfiled report waited beside a blank receipt. “You can take the working copy. I retain the transaction amount for my accounts.”
Ryker paid him. Vera added a second chip and watched as he cleared the scans from his machine, then checked the empty directory herself. The archivist gave her the copy and opened the front door. “Keep pressure off that fracture. If you decide to repair it, bring it to someone who works on active interfaces. A jeweler will make it prettier and ruin it.”
Outside, the market packed the passages between the white arches. Bread snapped in shallow pans while mechanics shouted over portable welders and glass charms chimed beneath the pipes. Stalls offered machine parts, carved bone jewelry, animal-faced pressure masks, and “ancient relics” aged in ovens behind the butcher’s shop.
Vera moved ahead of him through the crowd, the Cane beneath her arm. A man carrying a rack of pressure masks stopped to look at her and nearly walked into a pipe. She ducked beneath his rack, leaving Ryker to catch it before it struck him in the chest.
Ryker caught up beside a stall selling mechanical songbirds. Vera picked up a brass bird no larger than her palm. It opened its beak and swore at her fluently in three languages. “It sounds like you before coffee.” She turned it over to examine the price, set it down with regret, and stopped at a bowl of silver berries sweating beneath a heavy shade cloth. After hearing the price, she gave the vendor a look usually reserved for armed robbery and continued walking. Ryker stepped up and bought them.
She glanced back when he offered the paper cone, her hand pausing before she took it. Then she selected a berry and bit through the shining skin. Dark juice welled against her lower lip, and his attention went straight to her mouth.
“You’re staring.” She stayed beside the stall, where the shade cloth kept the sun off their faces.
“You have juice on your mouth.” Ryker knew better than to provide her with an opening. He had done it anyway.
Vera licked the stain away, watching him. He remembered the galley table, her knees around his hips, and the taste of wine on her mouth before she stopped the kiss because she wanted more. She took another berry from the cone and held it just below his lips. “Shall I be careful with your settings too?”
He took the berry from her fingers and put it in her mouth. As her lips closed over it, he drew his thumb across the juice she’d missed at the corner. “You can ask me what you want to know.”
Her teeth stopped against the silver skin. He licked the juice from his thumb, letting her watch, and took the berries so she could adjust the Cane beneath her arm. The berry burst when she bit down, leaving a fresh drop on her lip.
“I was offering you breakfast,” she said after she swallowed.
“It’s past noon.” He selected a berry for himself. Vera looked at his mouth while he ate it, then reached into the cone without answering. He let her take her time. She’d watched his hands in the archive and brought up the Cane’s touch twice; if she intended to make the rest of the day difficult, he could oblige.
They walked on when she’d finished the fruit. Vera kept close, discussing fuel capacity and departure windows while she folded the empty cone into a small, precise square. When she began estimating the Cane’s probable radar range, Ryker looked at the bundle under her arm. He still wanted the answer to a question he’d asked nine years ago.
“You said you sent word the day you got a working relay,” he said, bringing his voice low.
The Cane shifted under her arm. “I did.”
“From where, Vera?”
Vera stopped beside a knife-seller’s stall. Harsh sunlight burned white along the calcified arch behind her. Her hand tightened on the oilskin until her knuckles went white, and the vendor moved to rearrange his blades at the opposite end of the table.
“Not here, Ryker.”
“There hasn’t been a good place for nine years.”
“I just learned Kallipos carried a map connected to the goddamn Gypsea.” She looked down at the bundle, pressing her palm over the wrapped handle. “Let me have one single day before we take it apart looking for every reason it might hurt me.”
Ryker had spent years arranging what he would say if he found her. He’d asked the same question in messages she’d never answered, and now she was standing close enough to answer it with her hand over Kallipos’s Cane. He wanted to insist. Tomorrow she could find another reason, and he knew how easily he could give her another day after that. The knife-seller slid a tray into a drawer, trying to do it quietly.
“One day,” Ryker said.
Vera looked up. “That sounded like a condition.”
“It was just arithmetic.” He looked past her at the fuel depot sign. He could get them off this moon, check the drive, follow the route.
She resumed walking, close enough that her coat brushed the back of his hand.
They spent the afternoon resupplying Ebon Steed. Ryker bought filters, engine sealant, and enough rations to avoid anything Vera called “technically edible.” She acquired two cases of wine he’d have to drink before he could judge, glittering hair clips, and an unregistered stabilizer coil by methods he chose not to inspect.
At the fuel depot, the settlement’s mayor arrived with a clerk carrying a berth ledger. He welcomed them, apologized for the blinking docking lights, and asked whether they planned to remain overnight. “The Marrow House keeps visitors longer than they expect. Did you get your appraisal?”
“We got the bill,” Vera said. The clerk found Ebon Steed’s entry and laid a finger beside the departure column.
“Then you’ll be wanting to leave?” The mayor held out a pen to Ryker, and Vera took it before he could. “We arrange the beacon load around departures. The pump shares a circuit.”
Vera gave him a smile and three conflicting departure times, all of which the clerk entered without complaint. The mayor thanked them, wished them good fortune with their inheritance, and moved on to a freighter captain arguing about water charges. Ryker watched him go. Vera had used the dead aunt in the closed workroom, and neither of them had mentioned an inheritance at the fuel depot.
They reached Ebon Steed near sunset. The calcified white arches had turned brilliant rose in the dying light, their inhabited windows kindling one by one while long shadows swallowed the marketplace. Ryker was sealing his maintenance kit when a sudden movement high above the Marrow House caught his cybernetic eye.
A courier drone rose from the narrow alley between the archive and the mayor’s office, climbing too steeply for a local delivery. His eye pulled it close. Military transmitter. No registry. It wasn’t delivering anyone’s lunch. A directional signal flashed as it synced with the orbital communication tower.
He could shoot it down, but the fireball would bloom over a crowded market and bring security before the wreckage struck. Whoever launched it could send another drone. He called up the port’s transmission schedule. The tower stored outbound traffic until its long-range window opened. Seven minutes remained. They had already lost the secrecy of their visit; if the packet included a live departure fix, he could still make that fix useless.
Ryker entered the cockpit. Vera had already spread the green star route across the main tactical display and sat forward in the pilot’s chair, the reflected constellations caught in her eyes. “How fast can you put us beyond relay range, Starshadow?”
“Six minutes. The tower’s next long-range window opens in seven.” He stopped beside the pilot’s seat as the boarding ramp sealed beneath them. “Five if you get out of my chair.”
She didn’t. He flew from the right seat. Ebon Steed surged from the berth, scattering red dust and canvas market awnings across the landing field. The first angry warning from port control arrived when they were already blasting above the white arches. Vera muted the comm console with one lacquered fingernail.
“Rude,” she noted.
“They were going to charge us for the destroyed awnings anyway.”
“Then I’ve saved us valuable credits.”
Ebon Steed climbed through the upper atmosphere while the tower counted down to its transmission window. Ryker held a false southern course until the relay’s tracking return fell off his display, then turned toward the dark beyond the system grid. Morrow’s Spur shrank to a set of white ribs beneath the dusk. The stars swung across the cockpit glass as the turn pressed Vera sideways in her harness, bringing her knee against his. She left it there after he leveled the ship.
The route to the Gravity Orchard unfolded on the glass in pale green lines. Vera rested a hand on the wrapped Cane and leaned forward to follow the first course marker. Ryker checked the drive temperatures and marked the distance to their turn. He could feel her knee against his, and he wanted to ask his question badly enough that he kept his eyes on the instruments.
Two hours out from Morrow’s Spur, the tactical radar pinged. At the dead edge of the system behind them, a massive second engine ignited in the dark, masked its registry, and swung wide onto a course that ran ahead of theirs.