Berth of Collision

Mara Voss has flown a hundred manual berthings like this one. The ore hauler Marrow Wind hangs above a resource moon with its cargo aperture irising open, and Mara is easing her tug, the Bitter Lullaby, in by the numbers, because a licensed human pilot earns the XP an automated tug never will, and the System does not accept excuses for a missed payment.

At a hundred and twenty meters the guide lights stutter out of sequence. A second transponder, foreign and unregistered, is calling from inside the hold. The aperture dilates far past its rated size, and something that is not gravity drags her in.

She wakes under a rust-orange sky on a plain of fused hull plating, among towers of ships welded together at impossible angles and canals of something that moves like mercury. She has heard of places like this only in port-bar ghost stories: a Dock-Continent. Her tug is gone, and a Quay-Warden cutter is running its searchlight along the quays. All she has is her scuffed titanium docking stick, which can now bend the local gravity just enough to shift a bollard, and a System pane she cannot blink away. Tugboat class, locked. Level 1. Then the bill: "47 XP billed to Pilot Voss, Mara. Payment due within one cycle." She has maybe twelve.

The System never bills for accidents, only for collisions. Mara is beginning to suspect that whoever was hiding in that cargo hold made sure she would have one.