Someone Who Should Be Dead

Someone Who Should Be Dead

1105-043. Berth clearance is taking longer than it should. Standard at Glisten — the station runs on its own timeline and doesn't care about yours. I was in the bar off docking ring four, the one with the scratched viewports and the bartender who's learned not to ask questions. Nursing a drink I didn't want. Watching the clearance board.

The Dead Reckoning is two berths down. Transponder clean, drive cold, nothing on the manifest worth a second look. I've been thorough. That's not the problem.

The problem is time. Every hour I'm docked at Glisten is an hour someone might pull the scrapyard manifest and notice a decommissioned Ship's Boat sitting in a live berth. The Navy is bureaucratic, not stupid. The paperwork catches up eventually.

I was calculating how long I had when I saw Esken.

Chief Warrant Officer Marek Esken. Former, probably, same as me. Drive engineer, same as me. We served three years together on the Riven Cross before he transferred to Glisten station support. The kind of man who notices things and keeps them filed somewhere behind his eyes, retrievable when useful.

He was at a corner table with a civilian. Merchant type, expensive clothes, doing all the talking. Esken was listening the way trained engineers listen to machinery — not for what it's saying, for what's wrong with it.

Then his eyes moved and found mine. Half a second. No reaction. Just — registered. Filed. He kept listening to his merchant.

I turned back to the clearance board.

He's still at Glisten. Still here, or came back. Men like Esken don't return to places without a reason. And he saw me. He's smart enough to know what ship I'd have walked off — there's only one in that berth, and the manifest says it's scrap.

Berth clearance came through. I walked to the dock without looking back. I could feel him watching.

The Dead Reckoning has no jump drive. She's an in-system boat. Courier runs, orbital work, cargo between stations — that's the living. Most people muster out with a handshake and a travel allowance. I got a working ship worth more than five years' pay.

The Navy bought my silence with something real. I try not to think too hard about what that says about what I saw — or what they thought I might do with it.

The Mechanics

The dice rolled 2 and 5, totalling 7 — Routine. A sub-roll on the encounters table produced Significant Figure: someone of consequence enters the story without triggering an immediate crisis. No stats changed. Esken is now a known NPC with unknown alignment. The Dead Reckoning has no jump drive — Urien works the Glisten system, which gives him a solid living and a reason to stay close to the people and politics he knows best.

What's Next

Esken is still at Glisten. Whether that half-second look was recognition, a warning, or something else — Urien doesn't know. He might find out whether he wants to or not.