I was still in Denebola when the distress signal came through.
VASCO fielded it before I'd fully processed what I was hearing. The LIST designation, he explained, stood for League of Independent Settlers — frontier families who'd claimed land out here beyond the reach of the UC and Freestar, trying to build something that belonged to them. He gave me this information in his usual manner, which is to say efficiently and without editorializing, and then waited to see what I was going to do about it.
I set a cruise heading for the signal's origin.
The man who came out to meet me had a rifle leveled before the Razorleaf had finished landing. He held it there for a moment — long enough to make the point — and then lowered it when it became apparent I wasn't a Spacer.
His name was Alban Lopez. He was genuinely surprised that I'd come, which I found strange. You send a distress signal into the dark and then express shock when something answers? I didn't say that. I made a mental note that he was the kind of man who complained loudly about the problems he'd caused himself, and filed it away.
His problem was this: the Spacers had taken over the Denebola system. Not just his land, but the whole system — four settler families cut off from each other, their communications satellites either taken offline or left to decay. He needed someone to get the satellites back up. He needed that someone to fight through whatever the Spacers had left guarding them. And then, if those satellites happened to re-establish contact with the other three families, maybe something could be organized.
I told him I'd handle it.
The satellites were spread across the system. Between each one, I had time to watch the stars drift past the viewport while the Razorleaf cruised on, unhurried, through the quiet between distances that would have taken lifetimes before grav technology made them unremarkable. There is something I keep noticing about space travel: that the scale is so far outside human intuition that the only honest response is to stop trying to feel it and just let it happen.
The Lopez satellite had three Spacer ships waiting. I cleared them and made the repair.
With comms re-established, Alban pointed me toward the remaining three.
The Banda satellite had three more. Same result.
Chanda Banda — a name that his parents either loved him very much or not at all to give him — seemed surprised to hear from anyone, let alone Lopez after I'd re-linked their comms. The conversation was brief, with Alban recommending a meet up.
The Lemaire satellite had three ships. I took them down and made the repair and waited on the comms.
Jackie Lemaire came through sharp and tired in the way of someone who had been holding things together through force of personality alone. She had words for Lopez even over comms, but agreed to meet in person.
The Wen satellite had no ships guarding it.
I noticed that on approach and understood what it probably meant before I'd finished the thought. I made the repair anyway. Ran the full sequence. Sent the connection request.
No response.
The system stayed quiet on that frequency. I sat with it for a moment — the particular silence of a signal that goes out and finds nothing on the other end — and then set a cruise heading for the rendezvous point.
The meeting was aboard a Lemaire family ship, which Jackie had insisted on and nobody had argued with. The three family heads were already in the same room when I arrived, which meant Lopez and Lemaire had been in the same room for several minutes, which meant the argument was already well underway.
Jackie's position was that Lopez was a scammer, that she wouldn't give him an ounce of Helium-3 if her life depended on it, and that she saw no reason to formalize an arrangement with people she didn't trust.
Chanda wanted everyone to work together and said so with the steady optimism of a man who had learned not to lead with how tired he was.
I let it run for a while. Then I talked to Jackie.
She had the most ships. She knew it. She'd framed that as having the least to gain from an alliance — if they were already the strongest family, why share? — and she wasn't wrong, exactly. I told her she had that backwards. The strongest family was the most visible target. The one the Spacers would come for first when they finished consolidating. She had the most to lose if this system didn't hold together, not the least.
She was quiet for a moment.
I may have also mentioned that driving Spacers out of an entire solar system was, objectively, a good story to tell.
She laughed. First real laugh I'd heard in that room. Then she said fine, she was in, but if Lopez pulled anything she'd leave him to the Spacers herself.
I told her that seemed fair.
Alban told me there were two clusters of Spacer ships that needed to be cleared before we could move on the station. He offered to send ships from all three families.
I told him to save them.
This was partly confidence. Partly I didn't want to be responsible for what happened to anyone else's family members if the fight went wrong. And partly — I'll be honest about this — I wanted to see what the Razorleaf could do in a real engagement, with something actually at stake.
Eight ships. Two groups of four, stationed at different points in the system. I cleared them in order, cruising between them, and by the time I reached the second group I'd found a rhythm that left me feeling unbeatable. A dangerous mindset, perhaps, but a boon in confidence for certain.
When I reported back at Lopez's farm on the moon's surface, he was excited to have won a bet with Chanda. At least he bet on my success, I suppose...
He then informed me that he hadn't been idle while I was risking my neck. he'd used the commotion to triangulate the location of their base of operations. That would be our next target, and this time we'd send everybody.
The base, a derelict star station in orbit over Denebola II, was the kind of structure that Spacers adopt the way rats adopt abandoned buildings — not because it's good, but because nobody else wants it. We came in together: the Razorleaf, and the ships from three families who two hours ago hadn't been sure they could share a room.
We cleared the ships around it. Then we boarded.
Muira was at my side through the interior. We'd done enough of these now that we had something like a system — I don't think either of us had named it, but it existed. She took one side, I took the other, and we met in the middle, and the Spacers in between had a very bad few minutes.
The station had been used as a staging point for a while. There was gear, supplies, weapons. There were Galbank safes ripped from somewhere and stacked against a wall, which raised questions nobody left alive was going to answer. I found the key eventually and discovered they were full of credits and good weapons, which I distributed between the Razorleaf's storage and crew.
When it was over I spoke with Alban on a bridge in the station. The system was clear. The families were talking. Something that looked like a future was taking shape out here in the dark, which is what they'd come out here for.
He offered the reward credits.
I told him to keep them.
He started to argue — out of form, I think, more than genuine protest — and I said what I actually meant, which was that their survival was less certain than mine. They were going to need those credits more than I was. The Spacers would be back eventually, or someone like the Spacers, and when that happened I wanted them to have every resource they'd earned.
He accepted that without making it sentimental, which I appreciated.
On the way back to the Razorleaf, Muira walked beside me and said nothing. Part of me wonders if she was disappointed with me for not taking the credits.
I thought about the Wen satellite on the cruise back out of the system. The signal that went out and found nothing. Four families who'd come out here together, and now there were three.
I don't know their names. There was nothing in the station records that helped. Somewhere between the dream and the attempt, the Wen family ran out of time, and I arrived too late to matter, and all I could do was make sure the same thing didn't happen to everyone else.
That's the job, I think. You can't save everyone. You do the math on what's still possible and you work the problem in front of you.
It doesn't make the silence any easier to sit with.