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'Shit'. He cut left, angling away from the Guild ship and down the gangway. Had they seen him? He didn't risk a glance back, cutting his way through the crowd as quick as he could without drawing attention.

"Refurbed cables!" barked a merchant from a cart piled high with coils of wire. Which, Jal had learned, was just a fancy way of saying 'stolen'. Lifted from ships when nobody was looking, identifiers buffed off and cleaned up so nobody'd know them from the rest of the pile. "Half the price, just as nice!"

The woman he'd bumped into, the augmented in the coveralls, picked over the stacks of cables with a disinterested eye. Not really shopping, just killing time—waiting for somebody, maybe, and she didn't even look at Jal as he slipped past.

'Not you, either,' he thought, passing a shiny-hulled shipping vessel with its cargo door dropped. No Guild flag in sight, but she was loaded to the gills, and a pair of merchants squabbled on the dock over who saw her first, so they must've seen some serious scratch from whoever that ship belonged to. Only folks out there with capital like that were with the Trust, and he'd just as soon avoid them, too.

He passed a few more like that, ducking between carts and crews with his hands in his pockets and his duffel on his shoulder, trying not to squint at the sting of the lights. His specs, like the rest of him, had seen better days: scratched lenses, thinning tint, and a strap hanging on by about four threads and a prayer. Not a lot of opportunities to fix them up, where he'd been.

"You got need of an extra hand?" he repeated to himself. It'd turned into a mantra, of sorts. A meditation. 'Keep your eyes on the next foothold,' his mama used to tell him. 'The rest is just noise.'

There was just so much of it, though. The 'noise.' He used to love crowds— the snatches of conversations, the new faces. Windows into the lives of total strangers that made the universe feel big and small at the same time.

Now, though, the busyness of the hangar chafed at him. Made his head ache and his teeth grind, and as he passed the next shipping rig in the line, there was that fucking flag again. Half the crew stood outside it, staring straight at the walkway. 'No way they miss me'. But if he stopped, doubled back, he could draw their attention, and he'd just be headed straight back to the other Guild ship. 'Do something'. He was running out of time. Another dozen steps, and he'd be in front of them. 'Do something'.

And then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw it. 'There'. The noise faded, and for a blissful half second, all he heard was the soft pneumatic hiss of a dropping cargo bay door.

A smile kissed the corner of his chapped, chewed-raw lips. In a hangar full of sparkling 'new'ness, the old gyreskimmer perched in the next slip was like a glimpse back through time. They'd been decommissioned back when Jal was still picking up rocks on his home moon, but somehow, this one had dodged the scrap fields and made her way clear out to the pioneer rings. 'Bet you've got some stories to tell.' And best of all, he reckoned none of them involved the Guild.

'GS 31770 Ambit' was the only designation on the hull, painted and repainted above one wing. No flag, no shine, no slick-tongued merchants with the gleam of caps in their eyes. Not the prettiest thing to look at—the kind of 'classic' that was only three rusted bolts away from 'scrap,' with mismatched parts and a half-dozen layers of paint showing through nicks and scratches—but somebody'd taken care of her where it mattered. Sleek-cut lines like a phosphomoth midflight and engine thrumming so steady and smooth it could've been a lullaby. Old or not, that ship was likely as fit to glide through the black as any craft in that hangar.

Which did fuck-all to loosen his shoulders as he peeked through the open cargo door. No movement inside, at least none that he could make out, and eyes like his didn't miss much. 'We really doing this?' The duffel on his shoulder said 'yes', but the weight on his chest said 'on second thought, twenty- eight's awful old for leaps of faith'. He'd never been too keen on ship living, as a matter of principle 'and' proportion—they didn't tend to build deckheads with heights like his in mind—but he couldn't even look inside of one lately without his intestines twisting themselves up like bootlaces.

Just didn't seem like he had another choice.

'Least this coffin's got character,' he thought, and with a sigh in his throat and a shudder threatening the top of his spine, Jal started up the ramp.

Tall son of a bitch that he was, squeezing into the close quarters of a ship had never been easy, but this one felt tighter than most. Low-slung wires dragged across the top of his head as he ducked into a cargo bay so short he could nearly flatten his palms against the ceiling, and barely wide enough for a rover and a couple weeks' worth of supply crates. Not a long trip, then. Good. He hoped they were headed the right direction.

"'Scuse me," he called as he moved deeper into the bay, fingers skimming along the top of the rover, but he didn't get an answer. Didn't seem likely the whole crew would disembark without locking their ship up nice and tight, especially in the frontier, but there had to be some reason the door had dropped. He didn't hear anyone moving around inside, so he cleared his throat and tried again. "Excuse me?"

A sudden, familiar hiss sounded behind him, and he turned in time to watch the hatch rise. Moved too quick for him to beat it, but just slow enough for Jal to think, 'Well, that can't be good,' before the last sliver of light from the hangar shrank from view.