The third drink was smoother than the second, and Raevis nursed it with a slow, practiced hand as her gaze drifted to the far end of the bar. The soft clatter of tools from a nearby booth and the occasional hiss of an overheated coolant valve reminded Ethan that this wasn't a proper lounge, it was a working man's bar. Half of the patrons were either coated in synth-oil or wore jumpsuits with broken zippers and scorch marks on the sleeves.
"You ever wonder," Raevis said suddenly, tapping the edge of her glass, "if we've built ships faster than we've built the sense to use them?"
Ethan gave a noncommittal shrug. "I try not to wonder too much when I'm flying. Keeps me alive."
She snorted. "That's fair."
But her tone shifted, softening slightly, yet tinged with something heavier. She wasn't just making casual conversation anymore.
"You should be careful, Walker," she said, glancing at him sidelong. "Things in the Federation are getting jumpy. Not just out in the border zones, either."
He leaned forward. "You mean politics?"
She nodded slowly. "Politics. Corporations. Command staff with private agendas. Rumors of joint ops between corporate fleets and certain extremist-aligned regiments, supposedly independent, but everyone knows better."
"And let me guess," Ethan said, swirling the remnants of his drink, "mercenaries are getting caught in the middle?"
"Some willingly. Some without knowing it." She paused. "Contracts are changing. Less about credits, more about control. If you're not careful, you'll find yourself working for someone you thought you were fighting last cycle."
He frowned, absorbing the weight of her words.
"It's not just happening here?" he asked.
"Especially not here," Raevis said, shaking her head. "Ashen Sector's still tame. Somewhat regulated. Watched. Despite the events on Kynara. But there are sectors where skirmishes between corporate 'security' forces and fringe resistance groups are happening every week."
She ticked off points on her fingers.
"Three Federation-linked systems went dark last cycle. One shipping route through the Kirell Drift had to be rerouted after a scout vessel disappeared,. No wreckage, no signal, no explanation. Black boxes blank. Wiped clean."
"Pirates?"
Raevis shook her head. "Not the way it happened. Too clean. Too fast. One of my engineer friends said it looked like a ghost attack. No warning, no chatter. Just gone."
Ethan was silent.
"I'm telling you this," she added, "because whatever you plan to do… you should know the map's not as solid as it looks. The galaxy's bigger, meaner, and way more tangled than what you saw on Kynara."
"I figured," he murmured.
There was another pause. The low hum of the ceiling fans filled the space between them.
Then Raevis leaned back, her gaze settling squarely on him. "About your ship."
Ethan met her eyes. He didn't shift, didn't stiffen but the quiet stillness that came over him was unmistakable.
"When we were studying the structure before we even started work on the Wraith," she said, her voice a touch lower now, "I mentioned it to you back then. There were… oddities."
"Oddities," Ethan echoed, calmly.
Raevis gave a small nod. "Components we couldn't trace. Material configurations I've never seen used by any corp, Federation or private. Some of it didn't match anything in the known manufacturing registries, not even the backlogged experimental catalogs."
She drummed her fingers once against her glass.
"My team's worked across five sectors. We've patched up everything from luxury liners to battle-scarred patrol cruisers. But your ship? Parts of it felt like they came from somewhere else entirely. Not just rare. Unfamiliar. Beyond our frame of reference."
She leaned in slightly.
"We got it flying, and it runs smooth. But I'd be lying if I said we understood everything we were working with."
Ethan remained quiet, letting her talk.
"We figured you got some of it off the Memory Markets," she said finally. "You ever hear of them?"
He shook his head, feigning mild curiosity and ignorance. "Can't say I have."
"They're in the Arctov Sector," Raevis said, lowering her voice slightly. "Way out there. Gray zones between Federation and the old Empire's fringe. The kind of place where no one checks serial numbers. Sometimes you find tech… stuff that shouldn't exist anymore. Not always dangerous. But never explainable."
Her fingers drummed idly against her glass.
"My guess? Some of your ship's components came from there. Or through a vendor that works with them. If you didn't put them in yourself, then someone else did. Someone who didn't want the Federation, or anyone else, knowing where it came from."
Ethan let out a small breath, nodding slowly. "That so?"
"You've got a good bird, Walker. Better than most C-tier independents I've seen. Maybe don't let just anyone near it."
He smiled faintly. "I don't."
The topic drifted, naturally, into other stories. Tales of half-built rigs hauled from asteroid fields, engineers who jury-rigged corvette hulls to warp like cruisers, mercs who swore they'd seen ships with no crew and no registry wandering deep void lanes.
Eventually, Raevis downed the last of her drink and pushed the empty glass forward.
"Anyway. You're smart enough to keep moving. Just don't get too comfortable anywhere. Ashen's nice, but it's a bubble. And bubbles burst."
Ethan stood and nodded. "Appreciate the warning."
She gave him a look, one survivor to another. "It's not a warning. It's a reminder. Out here, knowledge is armor. And paranoia's just another name for being careful."
Their eyes met again, and for a moment, neither of them needed to speak. In that shared glance was the kind of understanding forged not through long friendship, but through the mutual language of quiet professionals who'd survived more than a few long nights, tight repairs, and tight deadlines.
Ethan extended a hand.
Raevis clasped it with a firm, callused grip. The kind that belonged to someone who'd spent her life elbow-deep in bulkheads and reactor coils.
"Thanks for the drinks," she said, her voice softening.
"Thanks for the repairs," he replied. "Wouldn't have made it off Kynara in one piece without you."
"You'd have limped," Raevis smirked. "Barely. Maybe half a jump before your core blew."
He gave a quiet chuckle, and so did she. Gruff, genuine, short-lived.
It was the kind of farewell that didn't need ceremony. No promises were made. No new rendezvous planned. They both knew how this life worked. Between drifting schedules, long hauls, and dangerous systems, goodbyes were rarely permanent but they were always uncertain.
What lingered between them wasn't words.
It was trust.
And for people like them, that was rarer than fuel in a black market depot.
As Ethan stepped away from the booth, the industrial bar around him resumed its low, mechanical hum. Conversations layered over the clatter of tools and the faint whir of atmospheric scrubbers. Beyond the noise, the ring pulsed with work and purpose, engineers, salvagers, techs, and broken machines all moving through a cycle as old as the first orbital dockyards.
He passed a few groups without drawing attention. A crew hunched over a half-disassembled drone. A pair of mechanics arguing over plasma coupling schematics on a grease-smeared display. A tired-looking woman eating rehydrated slob from a sealed pouch with a wrench tucked into her tool belt. Life went on here, honest and sharp-edged.
Outside the bar, the corridor lights flickered into night-mode dimness, cool blues and shadowed greys. The hum of the station's deeper workings vibrated faintly through his boots.
But Ethan wasn't thinking about air ducts or neon signage anymore.
He was thinking about Raevis' warnings.
About missing ships. Black-market chatter. Growing instability along the galactic seams of the Federation. The way she looked at him when she mentioned the unknown components in the Wraith, components she couldn't source, couldn't trace.
He didn't show it. But he felt it. A shift.
A sensation that something bigger was starting to stir beneath the surface of his journey.
His steps echoed as he moved through the corridor, each one carrying him closer to tomorrow and to whatever path the universe was going to throw in his way next.
Not just jobs, or contracts, or politics. But truths. Questions. Secrets that stretched back long before he arrived in this universe.