Writer’s Note: This is the first story in a six-part series that kicks off the new “Trackways” story arc and launches new important characters, new starships, and a new writing location.
Tae’latas — Part II
— 2399 —
Rhya’thor Reach Asteroid Belt
Tae’latas age: 22
The asteroid field did not look like a place where dreams went to grow.
It looked like a place where useful things came to be forgotten.
Stone drifted in slow, indifferent herds across the forward viewer, tumbling through weak light and old dust. Some were no larger than shuttle pods. Others were mountains with no ground beneath them, turning patiently through the dark as if they had nowhere else to be and all eternity to arrive there.
Between them moved smaller things.
Dead cargo markers.
Broken mining pylons.
Fragments of pressure hull.
A torn section of tritanium lattice half-buried in frost.
The long, blackened curve of something that might once have been a docking arm.
The I.K.S. Hovmey Daq slipped among them with more caution than grace.
She was alive now, but not yet refined. Her deck plates still carried three different patterns from three different salvage lots. One bulkhead near engineering had never stopped vibrating at high impulse, no matter how often Khevrak promised Awnya he would correct it. Half the aft access panels bore handwritten service marks in Klingon, Romulan shorthand, and one particularly rude Orion notation that had appeared after the port coolant manifold tried to murder them during a supply run.
The ship flew.
That was the important thing.
She flew because Khevrak Hurvek had refused to accept that a Lost Reality Bird-of-Prey was only a relic. She flew because Alan Skysen had let him use a landing field, tools, and just enough advice to make his own mistakes. She flew because a handful of people had decided that a young Klingon-Romulan with impossible eyes and too much faith in broken metal might be worth following.
Now Khevrak was asking her to find him a workshop.
Awnya sat in the command chair with one leg folded beneath her and the other boot resting against the side of the console as if the chair had been designed specifically to offend regulations. The Orion woman had a padd in one hand, a coil of cable draped over the armrest, and the expression of someone calculating how many different ways this expedition could become expensive.
“You know,” she said, without looking up, “most people find a place to put a cruiser-sized wreck before they register legal claim on it.”
Khevrak stood near the forward viewer, hands clasped behind his back, eyes following the slow motion of the field.
“Most people lack imagination.”
“Most people lack a K’Vort hull bleeding storage fees in a salvage reserve.”
“That also shows a lack of imagination.”
Awnya’s eyes lifted.
“It shows a lack of liquidity.”
From the engineering station, Vrokh gave a low Klingon grunt that might have been agreement. The older engineer had joined them six months earlier after deciding that honest work aboard a ship held together by audacity was preferable to dishonest work aboard one held together by accountants. He had not yet admitted affection for the Hovmey Daq, but he had threatened to break the fingers of a dockworker who called her scrap.
That was close enough.
At the aft sensor alcove, T’Rava s’Ehlar adjusted a bank of Romulan-pattern filters that had never been intended to speak politely with Klingon sensor hardware. The screen in front of her shimmered with interference from mineral scatter and ancient metallic ghosts.
“No stable return yet,” she said. “The field is saturated with old industrial debris. If the installation exists, its signature may be masked by the larger ferrous bodies.”
“If it exists,” Awnya repeated.
Khevrak did not turn.
“It exists.”
“You have no proof.”
“I have six partial survey logs, two contradictory mining charts, a drunk Nausicaan’s story, and a seventy-year-old maintenance invoice for replacement drydock clamps delivered to a facility that no longer appears on any active registry.”
Awnya stared at him.
“That is your proof?”
“That is a trail.”
“A trail made of missing paperwork and alcohol.”
“Many useful trails begin that way.”
Vrokh snorted.
Awnya leaned back in the chair and tossed the padd onto the console.
“I should have stayed with smugglers. At least they admit when they’re lying.”
“You were bored.”
“I was solvent.”
“You were bored and solvent.”
“That is better than inspired and broke.”
Khevrak finally glanced back at her, and the corner of his mouth curved.
“Not always.”
Awnya held his look for a moment longer than the joke required.
That was the trouble with Khevrak Hurvek. He said ridiculous things with the calm of a man describing gravity. Worse, he sometimes made them sound true.
She had seen the K’Vort hull.
Not in person. Not yet. But through his scans, his registry claim, his diagrams, his endless annotated damage maps, and once through a private transmission he had replayed in silence long after he thought the rest of the crew had gone to sleep.
It had been sitting in the back rows of an old salvage reserve, half-shadowed behind dead freighters and stripped patrol craft, its great wings damaged, its neck plating burned open, its command head dark and scarred. A massive Lost Reality hull, displaced from a dead future, too wounded for military reclamation and too strange for most yards to certify without stripping out anything interesting.
The reserve broker had called it a liability.
Khevrak had called it unfinished.
Three days later, he had filed the claim.
Khevrak Hurvek.
chuD Hurvek.
Commanding operator, I.K.S. Hovmey Daq.
Salvage claimant of record.
Awnya had asked him then whether he understood what he had just done.
He had said yes.
She had told him that was the worst possible answer.
Now they were here.
Searching through the old stones of Rhya’thor Reach for a repair installation that might have been stripped, crushed, claimed, cursed, or invented entirely by drunk miners who mistook a broken fuel depot for a shipyard after their fourth bottle.
The Hovmey Daq trembled lightly beneath them as a cluster of smaller stones passed along the starboard shields.
Khevrak felt the vibration through his boots.
“Reduce lateral drift by two degrees,” he said.
Awnya looked toward the helm.
“You heard the dreamer.”
At the forward console, young Merak adjusted course. The Hovmey Daq answered with a low growl through her frame and slid between two rotating asteroids with less room than Awnya preferred to owe to luck.
The viewscreen filled with stone.
Then darkness.
Then the field opened again.
Khevrak’s eyes narrowed.
“There.”
T’Rava checked her instruments.
“I am not reading a structure.”
“You will.”
Awnya stood from the command chair and came down beside him.
“What did you see?”
“Pattern.”
“Pattern in what?”
“The absence.”
She looked at the field.
There were stones, shadows, dust, and debris. Nothing else.
Khevrak raised one hand and pointed, not at any single object, but across the spread of the field.
“Those bodies have been disturbed.”
“They’re asteroids. That is their nature.”
“No. Watch the rotation. Three larger bodies are moving against the local drift. Not much. Enough. Something once anchored between them.”
T’Rava’s hands moved over her console.
“Running gravitational history projection.”
The viewer shifted. Lines appeared across the field, thin and pale, tracing probable motion paths. At first they looked meaningless.
Then one gap became visible.
Not a hole.
A shape.
Awnya’s expression changed.
“Well,” she said softly. “That is irritating.”
Khevrak looked at her.
“Irritating?”
“I hate when you’re right this early. It encourages you.”
The Hovmey Daq moved deeper.
The asteroid field thickened around them until the stars became broken things glimpsed between passing rock. Mineral interference crawled across the sensors. The ship’s cloak remained offline to preserve power for shields and maneuvering thrusters, but Khevrak felt exposed anyway.
Not afraid.
Aware.
There was a difference, and he had learned it young.
Fear wanted to close the hand. Awareness taught it where to place the blade.
“Old transponder echo,” T’Rava said. “Bearing zero-three-six mark twelve. Weak. Intermittent.”
Awnya returned to the command chair.
“Can you identify?”
“Not yet. It is buried beneath static.”
“Source?”
“Moving.”
Khevrak turned sharply.
“Moving?”
T’Rava frowned.
“The signal appears to be changing position relative to the larger field bodies.”
Vrokh leaned forward at engineering.
“Could be reflection.”
“Could be a beacon attached to debris,” Awnya said.
“Could be bait,” Khevrak said.
The bridge quieted.
Awnya looked at him.
“You think someone else is here?”
“I think old salvage fields teach caution to those who survive them.”
The transponder echo flickered again.
This time, even the forward viewer caught it: a brief blue-white shimmer reflecting from something metal between two tumbling rocks.
Merak glanced back.
“Orders?”
Khevrak watched the shimmer disappear behind a slow wall of stone.
“Follow. But do not chase.”
Awnya smiled slightly.
“There’s the Romulan in you.”
“If it were the Klingon, we would already be closer.”
“If it were the Orion, we’d be charging them for making us curious.”
“Prepare an invoice.”
The Hovmey Daq drifted after the ghost signal.
As they moved, Khevrak’s mind slipped unwillingly back to the K’Vort.
He had first seen it under dead work lights.
Not whole.
Never whole.
The primary hull had survived, but survival was not the same as health. Sections of the port wing were missing entirely. The starboard structural root had been cut open by a weapon that had left glassy edges along the armor. Internal compartments had been stripped down to ribs. Some of the remaining systems had no corresponding architecture in any current Klingon technical library Skysen could access without swearing at three databases in four languages.
Future tech, Skysen had called it.
Not magic.
Not miracle.
Not safe.
Future technology was still technology, and technology could be understood, but only if one respected the context that birthed it. This K’Vort had come from a war and a reality that had ended badly enough to scatter pieces of itself into another universe.
Khevrak had stood before its dark command head and felt the weight of that.
Others saw danger in the unfamiliar systems.
Khevrak did too.
But he also saw memory.
And memory deserved better than torch-cutting.
The Hovmey Daq lurched.
A warning tone barked across the bridge.
“Proximity shear!” Merak called.
The asteroid ahead of them split.
Not cleanly. It rotated apart along a fracture line, shedding stone and ice into their path as if some old internal stress had finally remembered it was supposed to kill someone.
“Hard port,” Awnya snapped.
“Not port,” Khevrak said. “Down through the break.”
Merak hesitated for less than a heartbeat, then obeyed.
The Bird-of-Prey dropped.
Stone filled the viewer above and below. Shields flared as debris struck across the dorsal arc. The vibration in the aft bulkhead became a full-throated rattle.
Vrokh cursed and braced one hand against his console.
“Port impulse flow is spiking.”
“I see it,” Khevrak said.
“You are not at engineering.”
“I hear it.”
Awnya’s head turned.
“You hear an impulse spike?”
“The deck pitch changed.”
“That is not a diagnostic method.”
“It is aboard this ship.”
The Hovmey Daq slid through the fracture gap sideways, starboard wing clearing a jagged wall of nickel-iron by less than three meters. The shields flashed again. The lights dimmed, recovered, then dimmed once more.
“Vrokh,” Khevrak said.
“Already rerouting. If your beloved little bird tears her own wing off, I will haunt you.”
“She will not.”
“You sound certain.”
“I repaired that root myself.”
“That is why I am concerned.”
The ship burst out of the tumbling debris cloud into a pocket of clearer space.
For a moment, no one spoke.
Then T’Rava said, very calmly, “I have the signal.”
The forward viewer shifted.
There, half-hidden in the shadow of a broad, black asteroid, something angular protruded from the stone.
Not a ship.
Not exactly a station.
A structure.
Metal ribs curved out from the asteroid’s surface like the bones of some dead leviathan. Docking arms lay folded against the rock, most of them dark, one of them broken near the joint. A wide service aperture had been cut into the asteroid face, sealed by ancient pressure doors large enough to swallow a small freighter. Along the outer hull, faded hazard markings clung stubbornly to plating burned by micrometeor strikes and time.
A repair cradle.
Collapsed, damaged, forgotten.
But real.
Awnya rose slowly from the command chair.
“Well,” she said. “Look at that.”
Khevrak did not answer.
He stepped closer to the viewer.
The installation drifted in darkness, half-rock and half-machine, ugly as debt and twice as old. Most of its external systems were dead. Its gantries were wrong for the K’Vort as they were, too narrow, too weak, too neglected. The docking ports would need rebuilding. The power grid was probably ruined. The interior could be decompressed, contaminated, unstable, occupied, or all four.
It was not enough.
Not yet.
But it was room.
Room to anchor a hull.
Room to store parts.
Room to carve new bays.
Room to build outward.
Room for the Hovmey Daq to perch beside something greater.
Room for the K’Vort to come home.
Awnya watched his face and sighed.
“Oh no.”
Khevrak looked at her.
“What?”
“I know that look.”
“I have no look.”
“You have three looks. ‘This can be fixed.’ ‘This can be improved.’ And ‘this will ruin us for at least five years.’”
Vrokh came up behind them, wiping grease from his hands onto a rag that had long ago surrendered its dignity.
“That place will ruin us for ten.”
Khevrak studied the dead repair base.
“No,” he said softly.
Awnya folded her arms.
“No?”
He finally smiled.
“This place will make ten years useful.”
That, Awnya thought, was why people followed him.
Not because he made impossible things sound easy.
He did not.
He made them sound worth surviving.
The Hovmey Daq circled the asteroid installation once, then twice. T’Rava mapped the outer hull. Vrokh muttered increasingly violent opinions about the structural state of the service arms. Merak kept them clear of a debris cluster orbiting near the lower docking spine.
The deeper scans were discouraging.
Emergency power: intermittent.
Primary reactor: cold.
Secondary batteries: degraded.
Atmosphere: partial pockets, quality unknown.
Structural integrity: uneven.
Automated systems: mostly dead, but not fully.
Ownership registry: inactive.
Last official designation: corrupted.
Last known operational status: decommissioned, pending dismantlement.
Awnya looked over the report and tapped the last line.
“Pending dismantlement. That is not the same as abandoned.”
“It was never dismantled.”
“Because maybe it killed the dismantling crew.”
“Then we will be polite.”
“That is your plan for boarding a dead repair base?”
“It is my plan for most first meetings.”
Awnya looked at him.
“Your Klingon ancestors weep.”
“My Romulan ones take notes.”
She laughed despite herself.
They docked at the least damaged access pylon.
Docking was generous. The Hovmey Daq pressed herself against the old pylon with the careful patience of one wounded thing touching another. The seal failed twice before Vrokh slammed an override into place and declared, loudly, that if the base wanted to remain dead it should have filed the proper paperwork.
The boarding party crossed in suits.
Khevrak went first.
Awnya followed behind him with a disruptor in one hand and a portable claim beacon in the other. Vrokh came third, carrying a tool kit heavy enough to qualify as a blunt weapon. T’Rava remained aboard the Hovmey Daq, tied into the base’s outer systems through a reluctant data tether.
The interior airlock opened onto darkness.
Khevrak’s helmet lights cut across a corridor lined with old frost, dust, and dangling cable bundles. The gravity was weak enough that each step carried too far if not checked. Their boots clicked against the deck, the sound swallowed quickly by dead bulkheads.
The base smelled like nothing through the suit filters.
That bothered him.
Old ships should smell of metal, oil, air, bodies, work.
This place had been denied even that.
Awnya swept her light across the wall markings.
“Old industrial standard. Not Imperial.”
“Frontier civilian,” Khevrak said. “Modified later.”
“By whom?”
“People who needed it to keep working.”
“That narrows it to everyone.”
They moved deeper.
The first repair chamber opened beyond a pair of reluctant pressure doors. The space inside was enormous compared with the access corridor, a hollowed cavern within the asteroid reinforced by old structural ribs and half-functional work gantries. Overhead tracks still held three dead repair drones. Tool lockers lined one wall, most stripped, some sealed. Cargo rails ran through the chamber floor toward a larger bay beyond.
Khevrak stopped at the threshold.
He saw the chamber as it was: dark, cold, damaged.
Then he saw what it could become.
Lights along the ribs.
Pressure seals rebuilt.
Gantry rails extended.
Fabrication pods installed.
Aft storage converted to parts vaults.
External cradles expanded.
Docking tunnels cut through the rock.
Small craft bays hollowed deeper into the asteroid.
A K’Vort hull resting outside under repair arms that did not yet exist.
Awnya’s voice came over the suit channel.
“Khevrak.”
He blinked.
She was watching him.
“Do not fall in love with the first room.”
“I am inspecting.”
“You are glowing.”
“Orion eyesight is unreliable in low light.”
“Orion eyesight is excellent when men are about to make terrible financial decisions.”
Vrokh moved past them and slapped one gloved hand against a support pillar.
“Main spine is better than it looks.”
Awnya groaned.
“Do not encourage him.”
The old base resisted them for nearly two hours.
The operations core was locked behind a pressure bulkhead that no longer recognized legal override codes, emergency maintenance codes, or Vrokh’s threats against its parentage. T’Rava eventually found a buried maintenance pathway through the tether and walked Khevrak through a manual release sequence that required him to crawl through a half-collapsed service tunnel while Awnya reminded him every three minutes that dying inside the first thing he tried to claim would be bad branding.
When the bulkhead finally opened, it did so with a shriek that carried through the deck.
The operations core was small, circular, and colder than the corridors. A dead command table sat in the center. Around it, dark stations faced outward toward blank displays. One viewport, narrow and shield-scored, looked out toward the asteroid field.
Beyond the glass, the Hovmey Daq waited beside the base, small and scarred and alive.
Khevrak stood very still.
Awnya came to his side, quieter now.
“This is it?”
He nodded.
“This is where we file.”
Vrokh moved to a side console and coaxed power into it from a portable cell. The first display flickered, died, then returned in a wash of pale amber. T’Rava’s voice came over the channel.
“I have partial registry response. The installation’s claim status is inactive. Decommission order was issued but never completed. No active claimant on record.”
Awnya held out the beacon.
“Before you do this,” she said, “I want it said aloud.”
Khevrak looked at her.
“This place is dead,” she continued. “The power grid is rotten. The bays are too small. The arms are wrecked. The legal fees alone will bite. Moving it will be worse. Making it useful will be worse than that. And if we somehow survive all of that, the K’Vort will still be waiting to eat every credit, favor, spare part, and sane hour we possess.”
Vrokh grunted.
“She is not wrong.”
Khevrak looked from Awnya to the dark stations, then to the viewport where the Hovmey Daq hung against the stones.
“I know.”
Awnya’s eyes narrowed.
“You always say that.”
“Because I usually know.”
“No. You know the work. I am asking if you know the cost.”
That landed differently.
Khevrak did not answer immediately.
His thoughts went back to the K’Vort in the salvage reserve, to its broken command head and future-touched systems, to the way everyone else had walked past it because saving it would be unreasonable. He thought of the Hovmey Daq sitting dead in Skysen’s field, rain dripping through open hull seams while he lay beneath her with cold mud at his back and a conduit refusing to seat.
Small dreams were not lesser dreams.
They were how larger ones learned to survive.
He took the claim beacon from Awnya.
“I know enough,” he said, “to begin.”
Awnya watched him for a long moment.
Then she stepped aside.
“Then begin properly.”
Khevrak set the beacon onto the command table.
It unfolded with a soft mechanical click, linking to the half-awake console through a hardline lead Vrokh had patched together from two incompatible connectors and spite. The display flickered again.
Text crawled across the screen.
SALVAGE CLAIM INITIATION
FACILITY STATUS: DECOMMISSIONED / INACTIVE
CLAIMANT IDENTIFICATION REQUIRED
Khevrak removed one glove and pressed his hand to the reader.
The system hesitated.
Then accepted.
KHEVRAK HURVEK
chuD HURVEK
COMMANDING OPERATOR — I.K.S. HOVMEY DAQ
CLAIMANT OF RECORD
The words appeared without music, ceremony, or witness beyond the few people standing in a dead room inside a forgotten asteroid.
Khevrak did not need more.
The base’s old systems pulsed once through the deck.
Faint.
Unsteady.
Not life yet.
But acknowledgment.
Awnya looked around the dark operations core.
“So,” she said, voice softer than before, “what did we just win?”
Khevrak looked through the viewport at the Hovmey Daq, then beyond her to the field, and beyond that to the stars waiting where the black opened between stones.
“A place to continue.”
Vrokh grunted.
“That is a terrible name for a repair base.”
Khevrak smiled.
“It is not her name.”
Awnya caught the word.
Her.
Of course.
She shook her head, but there was no mockery in it now.
Outside, the asteroid installation drifted silent among the old stones of Rhya’thor Reach. Its docking arms were broken. Its chambers were cold. Its future was expensive, dangerous, and unreasonable.
Khevrak Hurvek looked at it and saw gantries filled with light.
He saw hulls under repair arms.
He saw voices in the work bays, sparks in the dark, ships that other yards had given up on becoming themselves again. He saw the Hovmey Daq perched in one berth and, farther out, a great wounded K’Vort finally brought home.
Awnya saw darkness and impossible cost.
Then she looked at him.
And, gods help her, she began to see it too.