The Seven Tracks

I. Rift Haul

The house theme.

At shift change the board at Tau Ceti Orbital turns over, and two hundred pilots look up at once.

Grain for Vega. Steel for Procyon. Medical Supplies for Rasalhague, rush, pays double. Water for Castor, because Castor's Kettle is always low and nobody at Castor will admit it. Survey work for Halloran & Vey. Ice to Pollux, usual. Mixed goods for Marlowe, no questions anticipated.

Nobody makes those goods move but the people standing in this hall. There is no fleet behind them, no company line, no grand plan. There are two hundred pilots in two hundred battered cabs, each of them owing nobody, and between them they feed thirty systems.

On the far wall of the Union hall there are names. Thousands of them, small, close-set, gold leaf gone brown. They are the names of the haulers who stopped flying, all at once, for forty days, a very long time ago, and three systems nearly starved, and when the lanes opened again nobody ever quite forgot.

A new pilot stands under the wall and reads one at random. Ada Kell, Bellatrix. She has no idea who Ada Kell was. Nobody does. That is rather the point.

Her dispatcher, in her ear, says, "Grain for Vega's still up, if you want it."

She wants it. She goes.

II. Long Haul

The transit track. The run out.

'How long to the mouth?'

'Same as it was when you asked an hour ago,' said Dispatch, 'minus an hour.'

Procyon to Deneb is a long lane, and a long lane opens a long way out. Corin had been running for most of a day, and the mouth was still a smudge of light ahead of him, no bigger than when he'd last looked.

He had done his checks. He had eaten. He had listened to everything he owned twice. He had argued with Dispatch about whether a dipper could ever really marry a cutter, and lost.

'Talk to me,' he said.

'About what?'

'Anything. Prices.'

So Dispatch talked to him about prices. Grain at Cebalrai, steady. Steel at Rigel, cheap as it ever was. Something odd at Capella, a crash, nobody buying wine. Corin listened with his eyes half shut, and the cab hummed, and the mouth light grew so slowly he couldn't see it happen, only that it had.

This is most of the job, and nobody puts it on a poster. Not the Rift and not the pirates. The run out, the clock, a voice from an office you've never seen telling you the price of wine at Capella. The stars are a day apart, and somebody still has to drive.

'Mouth's coming up,' said Dispatch eventually.

'I know,' said Corin, who hadn't noticed.

III. Dead Reckoning

Alone, by faith.

The hopper's comms had died on the second day, and the last she had heard before the static was her dispatcher, on the delay, telling her to sit tight.

She did not sit tight. She was a rock hopper and had never sat tight in her life. She worked it out instead.

No band, no beacons, no Dispatch. Only the stars, which were the same stars they had always been, with their old names that nobody could translate except the Almanac. She had a copy, as every hopper did, battered and coffee-stained, and she opened it on her knee in the cold cab and found them one by one.

Sabik. The preceding one. Going before her, rimward, low. Alphard. The solitary one. Off to the left, on its own, as advertised. Naos. The ship. Dead ahead, if she had her sums right.

She took her bearings off a dead language from a world nobody went to any more, and laid her course by it, and lit her drive, and ran.

It took four days. On the fourth, the band crackled, and a voice came through, late and faint and furious with relief.

'Where have you been?'

'Following the ship,' she said, and did not explain.

IV. The Rift

Awe and dread.

You see it first from Deneb.

You've heard about it all your life. You've seen pictures. You know what it is, or what people say it is, which isn't the same, because nobody knows what it is. You think you're ready.

The run in to Deneb Freeport comes round the far side of the planet, and the sky opens, and there She is.

A line of light from one edge of the window to the other. Not bright, exactly. Pale and very long, like a crack in old glass with daylight behind it. It doesn't flicker. It doesn't move. It doesn't look at you. It is simply there, more there than anything you have ever seen, and the cab goes quiet, and you realise you've stopped breathing.

Somewhere out there, past the last lit harbour, every lane you have ever flown bends toward it. Every road in the stars leads there in the end, and nobody who has gone all the way has come back to say what's at the end of it.

You will fly toward it a hundred times in your life, and look at it every time, and stop looking at it somewhere around the hundredth, because you have to. Pilots who never stop looking don't last.

But not today. Today you look.

Dispatch, very quietly: "Everyone does that, first time. Take your time. The berth'll keep."

V. Far Shore

Arrival.

The cutters came in off Wezen with their bags full and the cold still in their bones.

Eleven days on a snowball in the slack. Eleven days of lances and anchor rigs and ice so hard it rang. Their ship was named Squall, because cutters named their ships after weather, and she was heavy and slow and leaked heat from every seam, and they loved her.

Moss, who ran the crew and had not said a full sentence since the snowball, said: 'Lights.'

They all crowded the forward screen to look. The mouth lights first. Then, past them, the dock, and the long string of berths, and the windows of the bar where somebody would have the heaters on.

At the dock a woman was waiting with a slate. She was the station's water warden, and her Kettle had been low for three days, and she had been watching the board for Squall since breakfast.

'How much?' she said, before the lock had finished cycling.

'All of it,' said Moss.

The warden closed her eyes. Then she opened them, and signed, and shook his hand, and held on to it for slightly longer than was strictly necessary.

That's arrival. Not the lights. The person waiting under them.

VI. Drydock

Tau Ceti Orbital.

The Bad Penny had come in with a cracked plate on her port quarter, and the yard at Tau Ceti Orbital had put two fitters on her, which was one more than she needed and one more than the yard had meant.

One was from Tyne Deep. One was from Wearside.

'That plate's Wearside,' said the Tyne Deep man, tapping it. 'That's why it cracked.'

'That plate,' said the Wearside woman, 'held through a pirate's broadside and a hard landing. It cracked because someone at Tyne Deep fitted it.'

'Nobody at Tyne Deep would fit Wearside plate.'

'Then who fitted it?'

They both looked at Nell Ashby, who had fitted it herself, at Naos, at two in the morning, with a manual and a lot of swearing.

'Don't look at me,' said Nell.

They looked at each other. The Tyne Deep man said something under his breath that ended in mackem. The Wearside woman said something that ended in Geordie and was not a compliment. Then they fitted the new plate together, in silence, in record time, and it was the best fit the yard foreman had seen all year, and neither of them would ever admit it.

Nobody knows how it started. It's older than the lanes. Everybody agrees on that much, and on nothing else at all.

VII. Station Lights

Deneb Freeport.

Every night at Deneb Freeport, when the shift turns, the dockmaster goes out along the rimward berths and turns the lights up.

They don't need turning up. The station's lights run themselves. But there's a switch, old and brass, at the end of the last berth, and every dockmaster for as long as anyone remembers has walked out there at shift change and pushed it, and the rimward lights go from bright to brighter, and burn that way until morning.

It's for the ones running the dark. Out past the last lane, a long way from anyone, on a long delay, counting their fuel. From out there, Deneb is the last lit harbour before the dark, and the dockmasters decided a very long time ago that it should look like one.

Tonight the dockmaster is a man called Fenn, who has done it nineteen years. He pushes the switch. The berths flare. Out past them, filling half the sky, the Seam is up, pale and enormous and quite indifferent to the station.

Fenn doesn't look at it. He looks the other way, out at the dark, where somewhere a pilot is watching the lights come up and doing the sum one more time.

'Come on, then,' he says, to nobody. 'Kettle's on.'