The disturbance wasn't serious-just loud. Three crew members from a bulk hauler, drunk enough to forget which station's jurisdiction they were antagonizing, arguing with a vendor about the philosophical implications of overpriced protein bars.

  Mara watched from a distance, assessing. The drunk crew were big but uncoordinated. The vendor was shouting for station security. The crowd was starting to form that particular density that meant either everyone would back off or someone would throw a punch.

  She sighed and walked over.

  "Hey," she said, not loudly but with the kind of tone that suggested shouting was optional but compliance wasn't. "You need to move along."

  The largest drunk crew member turned. "Who're you, their mom?"

  "No. Their mom would probably hug you." Mara stepped between the vendor and the crew. "I'm the person suggesting you leave before station security shows up with stun batons and poor impulse control."

  "We're just-"

  "You're just drunk and making noise. Which is fine, but do it somewhere that isn't blocking commerce." She glanced at the vendor. "How much for the protein bars?"

  "They crushed two boxes!"

  Mara pulled out credits. "For the damages. Now you-" she looked at the drunk crew "-have a choice. Walk away and enjoy your shore leave. Or wait for station security and enjoy their hospitality. Their brig smells like feet and regret."

  The crew members looked at each other with the slow calculation of people whose blood alcohol level was affecting their decision tree. Finally, the largest one shrugged. "Fine. Whatever."

  They wandered off, already arguing about something else. The vendor accepted the credits grudgingly. "Station security should've been here minutes ago."

  "Station security has bigger problems." Mara had seen the patrol schedules-understaffed, overworked, responding to anything less than murder was considered optional. "Just be glad it didn't escalate."

  A voice behind her: "Nice work."

  Mara turned. A station security officer, looking tired and grateful. Her uniform was worn, her boots were salvage-grade, and her expression was that of someone who'd given up on perfection sometime in the last decade.

  "You with the Discordia?" the officer asked.

  "Yeah." Mara tensed slightly. Being recognized by security was rarely a good thing.

  "Your pilot filed docking reports this morning. Very thorough. Very carefully vague about certain technical details." The officer smiled slightly. "Port Vorin's liaison has been asking questions."

  "What kind of questions?"

  "The kind that suggest you should be very careful about your next few jumps." The officer glanced around, lowered her voice. "Look, I don't care what your ship can or can't do. But Port Vorin does, and they're sending inspectors to the Cant. Said next week, but they've been known to show up early when they're building a case. If I were you, I'd be somewhere else by then."

  Mara processed this. "Why are you telling me?"

  "Because you just saved me paperwork. And because-" the officer hesitated "-the Cant sees a lot of ships. Most are honest. Some aren't. You seem like the first kind, and it'd be a shame if the second kind decided you were competition."

  "Competition for what?"

  "Use your imagination." The officer nodded and walked away, already responding to something on her comm.

  Mara stood there for a moment, thinking. Then she pulled out her handheld and sent a message to the group channel: We need to leave the Cant soon. Like, maybe tomorrow soon.

  The bar was technically a cargo container that someone had welded chairs into. The lighting was dim, the music was aggressively mediocre, and the clientele was exactly the kind of people who had information and poor judgment about sharing it.

  Quinn sat in the corner, nursing a drink that tasted like remorse, listening.

  "-heard the Authority's cracking down on micro-jumps. Not just fines anymore, full inspections-"

  "-derelict in sector four broadcasting something weird. Not just automated. Like someone talking-"

  "-Port Vorin's hiring privateers. Not officially, but when's the last time officially mattered-"

  Quinn sipped the drink and made mental notes. The bar's acoustics were terrible, which meant conversations carried. People forgot to whisper when the music was this loud.

  A cargo runner sat down at the next table. "You hear about the Discordia?"

  Quinn's attention sharpened.

  "That Borf ship?" his companion asked. "What about it?"

  "They pulled a micro-jump yesterday. Port Vorin's sensors caught it. They're denying it, but the liaison office is building a file."

  "Ex-collective crews always push limits. That's what happens when you're recovering from a hivemind-you forget fear."

  "Or you remember it differently." The runner lowered his voice. "I heard they're carrying modified drives. Salvage-grade micro-jump coils. The kind that'll tear a ship apart if you're not careful."

  This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

  "And?"

  "And Port Vorin wants that tech. Or wants to make sure nobody else has it. Either way, that crew's going to have problems."

  Quinn finished the drink and left quietly. Outside, the commercial ring was winding down for station night-lights dimming, crowds thinning. They pulled out their handheld and typed a message to Pilot: We're flagged. Port Vorin's building a case. Recommend we move up departure.

  Then they added a second message to Mara: Heard privateers mentioned. Might be nothing. Might be worth extra watch rotations.

  Intelligence gathering was about collecting fragments and letting other people assemble them. Quinn was very good at fragments.

  "Excuse me," Kellan said, very politely. "You need to move."

  The crowd didn't move. They were too busy watching two vendors argue about whose jurisdiction this particular square meter of Cant decking belonged to. The argument had escalated to the point where cargo crates were being used as property markers.

  Kellan tried again. "Station regulations require clear emergency corridors. You're blocking-"

  "We're establishing territorial sovereignty," one vendor announced.

  "You're blocking foot traffic." Kellan gestured to the backup forming behind the crates. "Please move your merchandise-"

  "Make us."

  This was the problem with shore leave. People forgot that space stations had rules specifically because vacuum was unforgiving. Kellan sighed and activated his comm. "Mara? Need some help with crowd management."

  Mara's voice came back: "Busy. Handle it."

  "Define handle."

  "Non-lethally."

  Kellan looked at the marines behind him-three bored crew members who'd drawn security rotation. "Okay. Let's do this professionally."

  They moved the crates. The vendors protested. The crowd found it entertaining. Station security showed up, assessed the situation, and decided everything was technically legal since nobody was bleeding.

  "This is protocol enforcement," Kellan explained to a junior marine who looked confused. "We're maintaining order through implied consequences and organized furniture relocation."

  "We're moving boxes."

  "We're moving boxes professionally." Kellan straightened his jacket. "There's a difference."

  By the time they finished, the corridor was clear, the vendors had reached a compromise that satisfied nobody, and Kellan had a renewed appreciation for why most marines preferred simple problems like boarding actions and defensive formations.

  His handheld buzzed: group message about meeting at Mina's food recommendation.

  Finally, something that didn't require a protocol manual.

  The food place was called Nutrition and Adjacent Concepts. The interior was clean-ish, the menu was optimistic, and Mina was already seated at a large table looking pleased with herself.

  "I ordered the sampler," she announced as the crew filtered in. "It's allegedly food from eight different cultural traditions. Probably all synthesized from the same protein base, but the effort counts."

  Pilot arrived first, looking tired. Tavi came in clutching her datacubes like treasure. Sira and Rafe showed up together, arguing quietly about load-bearing specifications. Dr. Lira was making notes on her handheld. Mara walked in with Quinn, both looking professionally paranoid. Kellan arrived last, with a marine who was documenting the entire shore leave for reasons nobody questioned.

  They sat. They ordered drinks that might have been tea. They compared notes.

  "Port Vorin's watching us," Pilot said.

  "Everyone's watching us," Quinn added. "We're developing a reputation."

  "For what?" Tavi asked. "We just haul cargo."

  "We haul cargo interestingly." Rafe gestured with his drink. "Also, possibly illegally, depending on who's asking."

  Sira pulled out the coupling module she'd bought. "Found this. Military-grade, shouldn't be on the civilian market."

  "That's either very good luck or a trap," Mara observed.

  "Why not both?" Dr. Lira looked up from her notes. "I met a researcher tracking signal anomalies. Same patterns we've been seeing. She's organizing an expedition."

  "How much?" Pilot asked.

  "Five thousand plus expenses."

  The table considered this. Five thousand credits was enough to matter but not enough to be life-changing.

  "What did you hear about signals?" Pilot asked Tavi.

  Tavi leaned forward. "The vendor said ships are reporting navigation inconsistencies. Derelicts in wrong positions, charts not matching reality. Some crews think space is moving."

  "Space doesn't move," Sira said.

  "Space-time can be affected by gravitational fields, frame-dragging, relativistic effects-" Dr. Lira started.

  "Okay, space moves. But not randomly." Sira paused. "At least, it shouldn't. The physics we know doesn't account for cargo haulers ending up forty thousand kilometers off their logged positions."

  "Unless," Dr. Lira said carefully, "there's something affecting local geometry. A phenomenon we haven't documented yet. The researcher I spoke with-she studies spatial anomalies. She mentioned patterns in the derelict signals. Fibonacci ratios, specifically. 5:8, 8:13, 13:21. Appearing in signal timing, spacing, amplitude. Statistically impossible to be coincidence."

  "Someone really into their number theory?" Pilot asked.

  "Or something that makes space arrange itself mathematically." Dr. Lira looked at her notes. "She called them drift pockets. Regions where navigation becomes... unreliable. Where the distance between two points isn't what the charts say it should be."

  The table went quiet. Outside, the Cant hummed with its usual chaos. Inside, the crew of the Borf Discordia faced a decision they'd probably already made without realizing it.

  "We're going to investigate," Pilot said. It wasn't a question.

  "We're going to investigate carefully," Mara corrected. "With extra watches and the understanding that Port Vorin wants us gone."

  "So business as usual," Rafe said, already calculating fuel costs on his datapad. "Though if we find anything commercially viable, I'm claiming naming rights. 'Rafe's Mysterious Space Fold' has a nice ring to it."

  "Absolutely not," Mara said.

  "Standard speculation pool?" Rafe asked the table. "Twenty credits, closest guess to what we actually find."

  "Broken navigation beacon," Quinn said without hesitation.

  "Alien artifact," Tavi said, equally fast.

  "Both," Dr. Lira offered.

  Mina's sampler arrived-eight small plates of things that might have been food. The crew ate, planned, and tried not to think too hard about what "space moving" actually meant.

  Tavi pulled up the researcher's coordinates on her handheld. Dr. Lira cross-referenced them with her own data. Sira mentally catalogued the Ship's current capabilities. Mara calculated risk factors. Quinn listened to the conversations around them, collecting fragments.

  By the time they left, the plan was set: resupply quickly, file departure clearance for tomorrow morning, and head toward the signal source before Port Vorin's inspectors arrived.

  Investigating the signal probably wasn't the smart choice. But it was definitely the interesting one.

  "Oh," Pilot added, standing. "We picked up a passenger. Civilian researcher named Ven, traveling to the next port. Already paid for passage and signed the waiver. They're settling into guest quarters."

  "Another academic?" Dr. Lira asked, brightening slightly.

  "Anthropologist or something. Asked a lot of questions about ship culture during boarding. TresLingua tried to sell them a Borfian language course within thirty seconds, so they're getting the full experience." Pilot shrugged. "Seemed harmless. We could use the fare."

  "As long as they stay out of Engineering," Sira said. "I have enough personalities to manage with the Ship and System arguing over optimal routes."

  "The Ship doesn't argue," Pilot said.

  "No, it just hums passive-aggressively until you do what it wants."

  The System's voice drifted in from the overhead speaker: "For the record, the Ship hums. I adjust route parameters until the correct answer becomes self-evident. There is a documented difference."

  The hull hummed.

  "See?" Sira said.

  "I'll add them to the manifest," Rafe said, making a note. "Under 'passengers (non-metaphorical).'"