Director-Commander Thane Halbrecht disliked waste. Even celestial waste. The stars orbited with predictable obedience. He preferred that. He stood at the observation bubble of his light cruiser, Enforced Correction, hands clasped behind his back, watching the corvette coast closer.

  The vessel’s hull was a patchwork of mismatched plates, its registration code a string of inelegant forgeries. Every time it updated, it stuttered, as if the ship itself was embarrassed by the ruse. He smiled thinly. They never learned.

  Lieutenant Murrow’s voice, clipped and precise, came through his implant. “Final intercept in six minutes, sir. No sign of hostile activity, but the pilot’s hands are off the board. They’re letting inertia do the work.”

  Halbrecht nodded, more for himself than the lieutenant. He appreciated it when adversaries showed a little cunning, if only so he could savour the moment he smothered it. “Acknowledge. Notify the boarding team to proceed as rehearsed. I want the captain alive and lucid. Ignore any contraband for now.”

  The ship—the Hearthlight, now, according to the transponder—was a scavenger’s bluff. Its engines ran too quiet, its comms squawked with the accent of an AI, and he’d seen that particular hull geometry in a different sector last month, sporting a different signal and a different lie. Did they think a new signal and borrowed name would fool anyone? Especially, a man who had spent two decades as the knife-hand of Afterlife Acquisition & Allocation? The vulgar nickname “SoulCorp” still irritated him. Branding should never pander. They even disgraced the insignia with the bastardization.

  He moved to the central holo-slab, where a projection of the Hearthlight spun in lazy rotation. The escape pods were highlighted in red, one blinking with the telltale signature of active life support. Murrow’s secondary scan resolved the interior: two life forms. Nothing else. Halbrecht double-checked the readings. The signatures were faint, but there. Human baseline and… unknown.

  A fluctuation in the harmonic field.

  He dismissed it. He tasted a flicker of curiosity, then spat it out. The unknowns were rarely interesting for long.

  The boarding shuttle docked with the ship. Halbrecht watched through body cams as his men, armored in corporate enforcement gear, moved with careful, methodical precision through the corridors.

  The captain was exactly where he expected: on the bridge, hands raised, an expression of submission on her face. The rest of the crew were ghosts—either absent or hidden in the myriad crawlspaces and smuggling cubbies that riddled ships like this one. He admired the discipline, even as he despised the messiness. A good crew should know when to die.

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  He flicked open the comms channel. “Patch me through to their bridge.”

  The captain’s face appeared, a gnome fuzzed with static and bruised with stress. She wore the persona of a minor trader, one who’d spent most of her life haggling over surplus fuel and cheap narcotics. Halbrecht could see the outline of the real woman underneath: sharp, calculating, desperate.

  “Director-Commander Halbrecht, I presume?” she said, her voice a rehearsed blend of obsequiousness and resignation.

  He let her have the illusion of dignity for a moment. “You presume correctly, Captain…?”

  “Cogsworth. Emilia Cogsworth.” A lie, but a practiced one. He filed the alias away with the others.

  He gave her the corporate smile: all teeth and no warmth. “Captain Cogsworth, your ship is in violation of the Stellar Nobility Compact transit protocols. You are to surrender all cargo, personnel, and data cores for inspection. Cooperation will be rewarded. Resistance will be regretted. Do you understand?”

  The captain nodded, eyes flicking to the side as if expecting some miracle to materialize in her peripheral vision. “Of course, Director-Commander. We’re simple traders. Nothing to hide. We simply stopped for repairs.”

  “Very good,” he said, and cut the line.

  He watched the feeds as the boarding team swept the ship, room by room, uncovering nothing but the detritus of a thousand petty crimes. No resistance, no panic. The only anomaly: that escape pod, still sealed, still faintly pulsing with a twin heartbeat. He signaled the team lead.

  “Scan for abnormal signatures.”

  The feed switched to a grainy first-person. The pod’s surface was scabbed with carbon scoring, its age evident.

  “Negative, sir, but with the pod's shielding, I'm surprised I'm getting anything back at all,” came the reply. “The hatch seems to be malfunctioning as well, sir.”

  Halbrecht switched channels. “Captain Cogsworth, care to shed some light on the malfunction?”

  The gnome hung her head. “Was like that since before I inherited the boat, sir. Any life signs are more than likely mana leeches or the like.”

  “I understand,” he said, leaving her channel open, he keyed the boarding team again. “Jettison the pod. Log the event and send the record to my office.”

  To the captain, “Send in an itemized invoice for the life pod to our corporate headquarters. Including labor costs. You can pad it a little, but don't be greedy.”

  He watched her expressions for any sign of emotion, but either her poker face was the stuff of legend, or she genuinely had no clue what was inside the escape pod.

  He returned to the observation bubble, watching the pod spiral away from the freighter, a seed cast into the void. Even as it vanished from view, he wondered if he should've impounded the entire ship, just for the satisfaction of opening it. However, that would mean spending far too much time away from his fleet's search.

  He made a note to track the trajectory of the pod, though. Debris had a way of returning.

  ***

  The second the light cruiser jumped away, Ironbelly—who had been nonspeaking muscle in the galley—triggered his commlink, “Who was in the pod?”

  Thimble just sat there in the captain's chair, dumbfounded.

  “Ben and Thorn,” she whispered.