Chapter 137: Brann, The Thyrrian

The next morning, they flew the Wanderer-7 into the capital for the first time.

Leo sat in the throne with his hands sunk deep in the crystal cradles, and the familiar link poured into his head like warm water, every plate and thruster and humming coil of the ship becoming part of his own body again.

’There you are,’ he thought, and some knot in his chest he hadn’t even noticed finally loosened. ’Missed you...’

The bruises from yesterday’s training still ached under his shirt, but the ship didn’t care about bruises, and behind the throne, Chloe sat in her usual seat with a fading mark on her cheek from last night’s fight, looking perfectly content with it.

Off their starboard flank, the Mirage cruised alongside them in lazy loops, with Vexa chattering over the comms the whole way about Brann.

"He’s grumpy," she warned them for the fifth time. "Like, really grumpy... He’s going to say mean things about your ship. Don’t take it personally! He says mean things about everybody’s ship. He said the Mirage looked like a ’pink sneeze’ the first time I brought it to him."

"The Mirage is beautiful..." Harper said with a surprised expression.

"I know! He built it, and he still calls it a pink sneeze! He’s like that!"

Brann’s Yard sat on the industrial edge of the capital, where the gleaming towers gave way to huge warehouses, cranes and rail lines, and the sky was crisscrossed with the dark smoke trails of foundries.

...It was enormous.

The yard stretched over several square kilometers of scorched black concrete, crowded with half-built ship hulls sitting in towering scaffolds, stacks of armor plating as tall as buildings and long rows of engines lined up like sleeping animals, and showers of welding sparks were falling everywhere like orange rain.

CLANG! CLANG! KSSSSHHH! WHRRRRRR!

The noise was incredible, and even through the hull, they could hear the deep pounding of a hundred hammers and the scream of cutting lasers.

Harper was pressed so hard against the forward glass that her nose was flat.

"Cap," she whispered. "Look at this place... It’s heaven."

Leo set the Wanderer-7 down on a cleared pad near the center of the yard, beside a long workshop with its huge doors rolled open, and they climbed down the ramp into the heat and the noise and the smell of hot metal.

An old Thyrrian was waiting for them at the bottom of the ramp.

He was short and wiry, with skin a faded dusty pink and a long tail streaked heavily with grey, and he wore thick leather overalls covered in burn marks and a pair of huge round goggles pushed up on his forehead.

His hands were the most striking thing about him... big, gnarled and covered in old burn scars, the hands of someone who’d been building ships since long before any of them had been born.

"Brann!" Vexa called happily, and jumped off the Mirage’s ladder straight into his arms.

"Oof... Get off me, you overgrown kitten," the old man grumbled, but he hugged her back tightly for a long moment before setting her down and ruffling her hair hard enough to mess up her ponytail then he looked past her at the crew.

His sharp yellow eyes moved over them slowly, one by one, and then they landed on Leo and stayed there, and his expression didn’t change at all.

"So," Brann said flatly. "You’re the one."

"Leo Kaine," Leo said, holding out his hand. "Nice to meet you."

Brann looked at the hand and left it hanging in the empty air between them.

"Vexa told me some soft-skinned human beat her yesterday," he said, and crossed his scarred arms over his chest. "I told her she must’ve hit her head on the pad..."

"He did beat me!" Vexa protested. "Three point two meters! I sent you the telemetry!"

"Telemetry can be wrong... AI is not perfect, in my opinion, it’s quite dumb."

"It wasn’t wrong!"

Brann ignored her and looked past Leo at the Wanderer-7 sitting on the pad behind him, and his eyes narrowed behind his goggles.

He walked around the ship slowly, all the way around, tapping the slate plates with one scarred knuckle and peering at the welds and the turret mount and the harpoon housing, and the longer he looked, the deeper his frown got.

"Hm," he grunted. "It looks like a brick..."

Harper bristled instantly.

"Excuse me?!"

"A brick," Brann repeated. "Somebody took a brick, bolted a lot of plates onto it and called it a ship."

He knocked on one of the slate plates.

"Who welded these?"

"I did," Harper said through her teeth.

"Hm," Brann said again, and peered at the weld closer. "...Messy but it’ll hold."

Harper opened her mouth to argue, and Leo put a hand on her shoulder.

Brann turned back to Leo.

"I don’t sell Tier-3 parts to pilots who are going to crash them in a month," he said bluntly. "I’ve seen a hundred young idiots who think they’re the best flier in forty systems... and I’ve buried half of them. Vexa says you’re different but I don’t believe her."

’Stay calm,’ Leo thought, keeping his face still. ’He’s testing you... and he’s the one with the parts...’

He felt like punching this Brann guy in the face but Leo wasn’t confident in doing so... what if he pulled up that bullshit that Vexa did usually?

"That’s fair," he said evenly. "You don’t know me."

Brann looked at him for a long moment, maybe surprised that he hadn’t gotten angry.

"Brann," Vexa said, stepping between them with her hands on her hips. "He beat me, fair and square and the parts are his prize, so I’m the one paying for them... You’re not selling them to him, you’re selling them to me."

Brann’s tail twitched irritably.

"...Fine," he muttered. "Fine... Come and look at the list but I’m not promising anything."

He led them into the long workshop, where the air was cooler and the noise of the yard was muffled, and he slapped a scarred hand down on a glowing terminal.

A holographic list unfolded in the air in front of them, long rows of parts with spinning three-dimensional models beside each one.

[Tier-3 Reinforced Frame Spines (x6)]

[Tier-3 Fusion Reactor Core]

[Tier-3 Composite Armor Plating (Full Hull)]

[Tier-3 Long-Range Sensor Suite]

[Hangar Bay Framework (Small Craft)]

And at the very bottom, a number glowing in bright red.

[Total: 184,000 Zuni]

Camila made a small choking sound while Jin-Ah’s slate slipped out of her fingers and clattered onto the floor.

CLATTER!

"One hundred and eighty-four thousand," Jin-Ah whispered, picking it up with trembling hands. "That’s... that’s thirty times everything we own."

"Pfft, that’s fine," Vexa said, waving it off. "Put it on my account, Brann."

Brann started tapping at the terminal, looking satisfied, and then a cool clear voice spoke up from behind them.

"One moment, please."

Everyone turned.

Elena stepped forward with her hands clasped neatly behind her back and her chin lifted, and her icy blue eyes were moving slowly down the list of parts and prices, line by line, with the expression of a cat studying a mouse that had just made a very bad mistake.

"Master Brann," she said politely. "May I see the itemized breakdown?"

Brann’s eyes narrowed.

"Why?"

"Because I’m curious," Elena said, smiling very sweetly, "why the reactor core is listed at thirty-eight thousand Zuni, when the standard Thyrrian market price for a Tier-3 fusion core of that output is twenty-nine thousand five hundred..."

Brann’s tail went very still.

"...Mine are better," he grunted.

"I’m sure they are." Elena’s smile didn’t move at all. "That would explain perhaps two thousand of the difference and the frame spines... You’ve listed six at four thousand each, which would be reasonable, if you hadn’t also added a separate ’installation compatibility fee’ of six thousand further down the list, for parts we are installing ourselves."

Brann opened his mouth.

"And the armor plating," Elena went on, without pausing for breath, "is priced at your racing-grade rate per square meter, when the specification clearly lists standard military composite, which costs a third as much... There’s a ’rush handling charge’ for an order nobody has rushed and a ’premium client surcharge’ of eight percent, which I can only assume is because you believed Vexa wouldn’t read the list."

Vexa blinked.

"Wait... is that true, Brann?"

Brann made a low growling sound in his throat.

Leo stood a little way off with his arms folded, watching Elena work and he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

She was completely calm, completely precise, picking apart every padded fee one by one with her cool voice and her perfect posture, like a surgeon taking apart a machine piece by piece, and the old shipbuilder, who’d probably been frightening customers for fifty years, was slowly shrinking in front of her.

’She’s incredible when she does this,’ Leo thought, and he couldn’t look away.

He kept watching her, the way her eyes narrowed when she found another mistake, the small satisfied tilt of her chin every time Brann flinched, and the fall of honey-blonde hair over her shoulder as she leaned in to point at the list.

Elena glanced sideways and caught him staring and she stopped mid-sentence.

"Captain," she said sharply, and her ears went faintly pink. "Stop staring and pay attention. This concerns your ship."

"I am paying attention..."

"You’re staring at me."

"I’m paying attention to you," Leo said, before he could stop himself.

Elena’s ears went from pink to red.

She turned back to Brann very quickly, cleared her throat and continued in a slightly louder voice than before.

"As I was saying... the total, with the padding removed, comes to one hundred and thirty-one thousand Zuni... Not one hundred and eighty-four."

"Which is still twenty-one times everything we own," Jin-Ah murmured faintly beside Leo, "but it’s a much better twenty-one times."

Brann stared at her for a long, long moment then, slowly, his scarred face cracked into a grin, showing a mouthful of old yellow teeth.

"Hah!" he barked. "Where did you find this one, kitten? She’s vicious!"

"She’s ours," Harper said proudly, before Elena could answer.

"One hundred and thirty-one thousand," Brann agreed, still chuckling, and tapped the terminal. "Fine. Done. I like her... She’d make a terrible customer and a wonderful partner."

’That’s exactly what I’m saying!’

"I’ll take that as a compliment..." Elena said coolly.

"It was one."

As Brann turned back to his terminal, Harper sidled up beside Elena with her hands in her pockets.

"Nice work, Princess," she muttered out of the corner of her mouth. "You made the scary old man shrink..."

"I know," Elena said, without looking at her.

"You could at least pretend to be humble about it..."

"Why would I pretend?" Elena asked, honestly puzzled, and Harper snorted so hard she had to turn away.

While Brann and Elena finished arguing over delivery dates, Harper had wandered off to a long shelf at the back of the workshop, and now she was standing frozen in front of it with her mouth hanging open.

On the shelf, in a polished wooden case lined with dark velvet, sat a full set of Thyrrian calibration wrenches, gleaming silver and perfectly balanced, each one engraved with tiny precise markings.

She reached out to touch one, then pulled her hand back like it might burn her.

Leo walked up beside her.

"Those the ones?" he asked.

"Those are... those are the ones," Harper whispered reverently. "Cap, those are hand-forged... Look at the grip balance... Look at the..."

Leo turned around.

"Brann, how much for the wrench set?"

"Four hundred," Brann called back without looking up. "And that’s not padded. Tell your vicious one..."

Leo pulled out the crew’s credit chip, the one Jin-Ah had loaded with their own money that morning, and paid.

BEEP!

[Thyrrian calibration wrenches: -400 Zuni]

[Treasury: 6,200 ? 5,800 Zuni]

He picked up the velvet case and held it out to Harper.

"I promised," he said. "Back in the armory... remember?"

Harper stared at the case in his hands then she stared at him, and her mouth opened and closed twice without any sound coming out as her eyes went suspiciously shiny.

"...You remembered," she finally said, in a very small voice for Harper.

"Of course I remembered."

She took the case and hugged it against her chest with both arms, and then she punched him in the shoulder, hard.

"Idiot," she muttered, with her face red. "Don’t make me cry in front of the grumpy old man..."

Brann came over, wiping his hands on a rag, and stopped in front of Leo again.

His goggles were still pushed up, and his sharp yellow eyes studied Leo’s face for a long moment.

"Let me ask you something, boy," he said. "Why do you fly?"

Leo thought about it.

He thought about the canyon run on Thursday afternoons, and the tutorial void, and the throne, and the girls asleep in their cabins while he flew them through the dark.

"Because when I’m flying, I can keep them safe," he said simply. "And because it’s the only time everything makes sense."

Brann grunted, and something flickered behind his old yellow eyes that might have been approval, or might just have been the glare of the welding sparks drifting in through the workshop doors.

"Hm," he said. "Better answer than most..."

"Alright," he went on. "Your vicious one beat me on the price, and the kitten is paying, so the parts will go to the ship."

He jabbed one scarred finger into Leo’s chest.

"But I don’t hand my parts to a pilot I haven’t seen fly with my own eyes... Tomorrow morning, you take my test hull up. Crash it, and the deal’s off."