Dock Seven

Tirane is a grey moon of Ithera where nobody fires. No treaty forbids it. Custom forbids it, and in forty-six years nobody has dared break it. Commander Ysolde Kray set her XASTER down beside dock seven of Puerto Aurora with a twenty-four-year-old pilot, a crate stolen from her own Chancellor and the certainty that the Chancellor was on his way.

She had signed twelve orders without numbers in her life. This was the first time she had disobeyed one.

---

Kray had never been to Tirane. No Zenith of her generation had had reason to go, apart from the pilgrims, and Kray wasn’t the pilgrim type.

She went down the ramp in her vacuum suit, because Tirane has air, but so little that it’s no use for anything except making mist. The sky was black. On the horizon floated a white haze, very low, rising from cracks in the ground and slowly coming apart. And above everything hung Ithera: nearly three degrees of sky, twice the size of Melvara seen from La Cicatriz, blue and green, with clouds. The biggest thing up there.

On Ithera’s disc, if you knew where to look, you could see a dark line.

“La Cicatriz,” said Ada, beside her, over the suit radio.

Kray didn’t answer. She was looking at the docks.

They were eight lattice towers planted on a grey plain, in a row, each with empty mooring arms and a green beacon at the top that came on and went off slowly. Thirty-one people had built them in four months, finishing the day before the war. The reactor that powered them had never been switched off. For forty-six years the beacons had been telling an ark that no longer existed that everything was ready.

And between the towers, across the plain, people were walking.

There weren’t many, scattered, in vacuum suits of different colours, some with El Pináculo insignia, others with El Fondeadero’s, most with nothing. They carried little lanterns. They were heading for dock seven slowly, stopping by lamps planted in the ground every hundred metres, then moving on.

“Pilgrims,” said Kray. “They come from both houses. To look at La Cicatriz from here.”

“And what do they do when they get there?”

“Nothing. They look. And they leave.”

---

At the foot of tower seven sat a cargo ship that had been on the ground since Year 1, ramp down and lights on inside, because the docks’ reactor powered it too. Inside it had real air. Kray and Ada went in with Mamparo’s crate, took off their helmets and stood still for a moment, breathing.

The hold was long and nearly empty. On one side was a small module with its door open and nothing inside: some clamps, a round hollow the size of a head, loose cables. On the other side, taking up half the hold, was a big Flota cargo container, closed, its original seal intact and some hand-painted letters on its side: WELCOME · DOCK 7.

And on the back wall, engraved on a hull plate, was a list of thirty-one signatures and, above them, a few lines.

Ada went over and read them aloud.

“‘Eight docks operational. Beacons green. Cranes load-tested. Seven stays reserved for the Aurora, as planned. Thirty-one people, four months. The tandas start tomorrow. We’ve left a welcome container at seven. Let them open it.’”

Below, in another hand, more crooked, there was one more line. Ada read it more quietly.

“‘We watched it fall. We don’t know whose fire it was.’”

They were silent. Behind them, in the crate, Mamparo’s lens came on.

“Dock seven,” he said. “We’ve arrived.”

“We’ve arrived,” said Ada.

“Late.”

“Forty-six years late.”

“Logged.”

---

“And that one?” asked Kray, pointing at the empty module.

“That’s where CUADRANTE was,” said Ada. “The Pathfinders’ compi. They left him here to guide us in. He told me. He saw us switch on the lights and fall.”

Kray looked at the container.

“Let them open it,” she repeated. “Who’s ‘them’?”

“Us. The Aurora’s people. The ones who were going down in the tandas.”

“Then it’s you.”

Ada said nothing. She went up to the container and put her hand on the seal, which had the Flota’s stamp and a date in Year 1.

“Are you going to open it?” asked Kray.

“I don’t know what’s in it.”

“That’s the thing about containers.”

“What do you think’s in it?”

Kray gave it serious thought, because it was a question half the system had asked itself for forty-six years and she had never had time to.

“Plans,” she said. “Something useful. A navigation chart of the whole area, the first maps of Ithera. What the Cátedra would send if it had to welcome somebody.”

“Food,” said Ada. “It was a welcome. Thirty-one people had been here on their own for four months. They’d have saved the best. Real bread. Something with fruit in.”

“Estimated weight,” said Mamparo from the crate: “nine hundred kilos.”

“Nine hundred kilos of bread,” said Kray.

“With butter,” said Ada.

And they both laughed, in the lit hold of a ship that had been waiting forty-six years for people who weren’t coming, because sometimes it’s the only thing you can do.

Ada took her hand off the seal.

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“Not yet.” She looked at the ship’s open door, the grey plain, the pilgrims with their lanterns. “Not everyone’s here.”

---

Nearly everyone arrived over the next three hours. Kray watched them land one by one through the hold window, like someone watching guests arrive at a wedding nobody organised.

First, the Tozuda. She came down fifty metres away with her usual affectionate clumsiness, starting at the second try and landing at the first. Vedma, Chemo and Tais got out. Vedma came into the hold with her helmet under her arm and stopped in front of Ada.

“We’re not your friends,” she said.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I owed you a crate.” Vedma didn’t look away. “I asked the Colonel where you were. She said: ‘Tirane. You’re late. Like everyone.’”

Ada looked at her for a long moment. Then she nodded, once. Behind them, Chemo let out a breath he seemed to have been holding for three days.

Next came the Vanguard’s red Tortuga, Casco Carmesí finish, flown by Corporal Osk at exactly the time he had said. Colonel Reyna Ostrach came out of it, walked into the hold without taking her helmet off and stood by the door.

“I asked her to come,” Kray told Ada quietly. “If something’s going to happen here, I want the Colonel in front of it.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s the only person in the system my Chancellor can’t give orders to.”

Then the Tejedora Sable Vunn’s Challenger, white with orange stripes. Vunn came in brushing off dust she didn’t have and looked round the hold like someone valuing a flat.

“The truth is only worth anything once, darling,” she told Ada. “The first time it’s heard. I wanted to be here.”

And behind the Challenger, like a big dog following a small one, the grey Revenant with Conforme painted on its nose. El Notario got out with his notebook and his two three-red-stripe lads, went up to Vunn and stood beside her.

“You owe me a crate, Tejedora.”

“I know.”

“Two, in fact.”

“I know.”

“I’ve come to collect.”

“Nothing gets collected here,” said Vunn. “This is sanctuary.”

“I know,” said El Notario, and you could tell it hurt him. “Even corsairs have one rule.”

---

The last to arrive was the Chancellor.

Kray saw the ship before she heard it, because on Tirane there is hardly any air for sound. It was a small XASTER, single-seat, the purest of the line, white, with no insignia and no gold. It came across the plain in a long, clean arc, dropped over the pilgrims without brushing them and settled beside tower seven with a gentleness that Kray, after twenty-two years in the Guardia, had only ever seen in recordings.

“He learnt,” said Ada, by the window.

“What?”

“To land. I taught him, on the Aurora’s simulator, when he was twelve. He always crashed to the left.”

The XASTER’s canopy opened. A man got out alone, in a grey vacuum suit with no weapon at his belt, and crossed the fifty metres to the cargo ship without hurrying. The pilgrims moved aside. Some of them recognised him. None of them said anything.

Before getting out of the cockpit, Kray saw him rap twice with his knuckles on the edge of the panel.

---

Chancellor Vantis came into the hold, took off his helmet and looked at everyone there, one by one, his eyes lighting blue each time they focused on a face. Vunn. El Notario. Vedma and her crew. Osk. Ostrach, whom he looked at a second longer than the others. Kray. His sister.

And the crate.

“Commander,” he said. “The crate.”

Kray had thought a great deal about that moment during the flight, about what she would say. She had prepared sentences. She forgot every one.

“No, Chancellor.”

The Chancellor didn’t move. Nobody moved.

“That’s the first time you’ve said that to me in twenty-two years.”

“It’s the first time I’ve said it in twenty-two years.”

“That crate is cargo recovered by The Vanguard,” said Ostrach from the door, without taking off her helmet. “I have the report.”

“That crate has been in my notebook since day 221,” said El Notario. “I have the receipt.”

“I sold that crate twice and now I haven’t got either,” said Vunn. “I’d settle for someone paying me for the third time.”

“The girl’s in my crew until she’s paid off her thaw,” said Vedma. “And the crate goes where the girl goes.”

“Mamparo doesn’t belong to anybody,” said Ada.

Kray noticed that everyone’s hand was close to something. Vedma’s, to the pistol on her thigh. El Notario’s lads’, to their rifles. Osk’s, to his service weapon. Tais had her rifle slung on her shoulder and her fingers drumming on the stock. Kray herself had her hand on her holster and didn’t remember putting it there. Nobody had drawn anything. On Tirane, nobody draws. But the hands were where they were.

That was when Mamparo spoke.

---

“Nobody shoots here,” said the crate.

He said it in his flat voice, toneless, in the middle of the hold. Everyone turned towards him.

“Is it true?” asked Mamparo.

Nobody answered. They looked at one another.

“Nobody fires on Tirane,” said Colonel Ostrach slowly. “It’s custom. For forty-six years.”

“Weapons by the door,” said Mamparo. “All of them.”

There was a long silence.

Then Colonel Reyna Ostrach of The Vanguard, the only person in the system with the right to carry arms in La Cicatriz, took the pistol from her belt, laid it on the floor by the door and stepped back.

“The Vanguard never fires first,” she said. “Today, not second either.”

Osk put his beside it without a word. Kray took her weapon out of its holster, looked at it for a moment and laid it on top of the other two. Vedma unbuckled the pistol from her thigh and tossed it onto the pile. Chemo wasn’t carrying anything and said so out loud so it would be on record. Tais unslung her rifle, held it for a moment in her hands, like someone holding something heavier than it looks, and leant it against the wall.

“I aim fine,” she said, to nobody in particular. “Shooting’s another matter.”

El Notario’s lads looked at their boss. El Notario looked at the pile of weapons. Then he closed his notebook, tucked it under his arm and nodded to his lads. They put down both rifles. El Notario took a small pistol out of his breast pocket, which nobody knew he had, and laid it on top of everything.

“Even corsairs have one rule,” he said again.

Vunn opened her hands to show she had nothing.

“I never shoot, darling,” she told the crate. “I sell.”

That left one.

Chancellor Vantis was still standing in the middle of the hold, gloved hands clasped behind his back.

“I don’t carry weapons,” he said. “I carry people who carry them.”

“Well, today you haven’t brought anyone,” said Ada.

---

Mamparo’s lens lit fully, for the first time since Kray had known him. Not faint: whole, amber, like a small lighthouse in the middle of the hold. Everyone’s faces turned the same colour.

“Confirmed,” he said. “The captain’s order. Year 1, day 236. Hold until someone comes who doesn’t shoot.”

He paused.

“Someone has come.”

“No,” said the Chancellor.

“I’m opening the seven.”

“No.”

“Lelo,” said Ada. “Sit down.”

Kray saw it. They all saw it. The Chancellor of the Cátedra de Ascensión, the man who never raised his voice because he never needed to, looked at a twenty-four-year-old in a transit suit too big for her, and something in him, something very old, obeyed before the rest of him could stop it.

He sat down on a cargo crate.

Vunn raised an eyebrow. El Notario opened his notebook and closed it again without writing anything. Colonel Ostrach, by the door, finally took off her helmet, and Kray saw that her eyes were closed.

“Year 1,” said Mamparo. “Day 236. Ten twenty-nine. Bridge. Captain’s voice.”