Chapter 65: The Names We Kept

The transfer entry was nineteen days old.

Dinraal stared at the date while Asha checked it against three separate records.

Nineteen days since the crew of the second survey vessel had been moved into the holding annex.

Long enough for anything to have happened.

Recent enough that he could not stop hoping.

“The annex still has power,” Alexander said.

Its image turned above the table.

Six storage modules surrounded a central service hub. Narrow structural braces held them together, while a small propulsion unit maintained their position beyond the depot’s main traffic lanes.

There were no windows.

No docking lights.

The outer hull bore the faded markings of refrigerated cargo storage.

Johanna leaned closer to the inventory record.

“What kind of holding?”

Asha opened another file.

Most of it consisted of numbers.

Then a diagram appeared.

Dinraal recognized the shape before it finished rendering.

A body suspended inside a narrow chamber.

Lines running from the chamber into a shared control structure.

He remembered rows of crystals and people waiting to become something else.

Beside him, Isolde’s hand closed around the edge of the table.

“Stasis.”

“Related technology,” Asha said. “The controls are different.”

“Can you tell whether they’re alive?” Dinraal asked.

“Not from an inventory file.”

He nodded.

Once.

Alexander watched him carefully.

“We send a drone.”

“Yes.”

“And you rest while it crosses.”

Dinraal looked down at his hands.

They had stopped shaking.

That did not mean he had recovered.

Isolde rose.

“Come on.”

This time, he let her lead him out.

He slept badly.

Every time he drifted close to deeper sleep, he saw the survey ship’s canopy.

The shapes behind it.

The pale thing unfolding from the engine.

Then Lysa holding her husband’s jacket.

He woke with his hand clenched so tightly that the silver had risen between his fingers.

Isolde sat on the edge of the bunk.

“How long?”

“Nearly two hours.”

“The drone?”

“Still working.”

He pushed himself upright.

She handed him water.

“Anything?”

“It found a service connection. Asha is reading the local indicators through a camera. No link to the annex system.”

Dinraal drank.

Isolde watched until he finished.

Then she took his hand.

“I keep doing it too,” she said.

“What?”

“Imagining who might be inside.”

He looked at her.

She lowered her gaze to their rings.

“And then trying to stop, as though that will make it hurt less if we’re wrong.”

He rested his forehead against hers.

For a little while, they stayed there.

The drone found eighty-one occupied chambers.

It could confirm electrical activity in seventy-three.

Eight returned no usable reading.

Asha delivered those figures without interpretation.

Johanna immediately asked for the environmental records.

Alexander requested the annex’s propulsion status.

Dinraal asked for the names.

“There aren’t any on the local panels,” Asha said. “Only compartment and chamber numbers.”

“Then we match the transfer records.”

“I’m doing that.”

Aramaeis stood beside the image of the annex.

“Any active defenders?”

“Nothing the drone has seen,” Alexander said. “The patrol has it covered.”

Gilgamesh studied the central hub.

“What happens if we take the whole thing?”

Asha looked up.

Nobody dismissed the question.

He pointed toward the braces.

“The chambers remain connected. We don’t wake anyone while standing in a place that wants to kill us.”

Alexander considered the distances.

“We could move it farther from the depot. Bring the medical ship alongside once we’ve isolated its systems.”

“The propulsion unit has a physical disconnect,” Asha said.

Aramaeis nodded.

“And the remote command receiver?”

“External.”

Dinraal studied the diagram.

For once, the simplest plan involved carrying an entire structure away.

“We isolate it,” he said. “Move it. Then open the chambers with Johanna ready.”

They approached from the side facing away from the depot.

Aramaeis reached the receiver first.

He did not tear it free.

Silver formed a narrow enclosure around the assembly while Asha guided him to the mechanical connections.

One cable.

Then another.

The receiver went dark.

On the far side, Gilgamesh disconnected the propulsion controls.

“Engines isolated.”

Dinraal and Isolde took positions beside the structural braces.

Their silver spread across the metal, forming broad supports that distributed the load through the annex’s frame.

Inside were eighty-one people.

He repeated the number to himself.

No sudden movement.

No force applied where a fragile connection might fail.

Isolde touched the shared field.

He felt her settle beside him.

“Ready.”

Alexander’s voice entered the channel.

“Begin movement.”

The annex shifted.

Slowly, the depot began falling away behind them.

Dinraal watched the gap widen.

Nothing fired.

No voice called.

For the first few minutes, that almost made it worse.

The first warning came from Asha.

“Central controller is issuing a command.”

Dinraal held his position.

“What command?”

A pause.

Too long.

“Chamber purge.”

The words struck harder than any weapon.

Isolde’s field tightened against his.

“Stop it.”

“I’m trying. Receiver is disconnected. This is local.”

Aramaeis moved toward the service hatch.

Gilgamesh was already there.

The hatch came free in his hands.

“Access open.”

Dinraal wanted to follow.

He could not release his side of the annex without transferring the strain through the occupied modules.

“Keep moving,” Isolde said.

He looked toward her.

“Dinraal. They have the controller.”

He held the brace.

Inside the service hub, Aramaeis crossed to the panel the drone had identified.

Asha’s instructions came rapidly.

“Upper feed. Leave the lower power lines intact. Those sustain the chambers.”

A sharp flash lit the hatch.

The command indicator vanished.

For one heartbeat, Dinraal thought it was over.

Then Asha said, “The sequence already reached two modules.”

Aramaeis turned.

“Which?”

She marked them.

Dinraal’s module was one.

Through the silver spread over its hull, he felt something begin to change.

A pressure adjustment.

Valves moving.

Machinery carrying out an instruction without understanding what it would do.

He pressed his palm flat against the metal.

“Show me,” he whispered.

The silver entered the seams.

The image arrived in fragments.

A conduit.

A reservoir.

A valve opening toward the chambers.

He could break the entire system.

He needed to stop one part of it.

“Isolde.”

“I’m here.”

She took more of the annex’s weight.

Dinraal shaped the silver around the valve and held it shut.

Metal strained.

Asha’s voice sharpened.

“Flow stopped in module two.”

From the other side of the annex, Gilgamesh spoke.

“Which part of this am I allowed to destroy?”

Aramaeis answered.

“None of it. Hold this.”

A second warning disappeared.

Then a third.

Asha exhaled hard enough for everyone to hear.

“Purge halted. Chamber power maintained.”

Dinraal remained pressed against the hull.

Inside, the people he could not yet see continued breathing.

They brought the annex into the stable region around the medical vessel.

Johanna waited inside its receiving bay with every available medic.

The first module connected through a temporary passage.

Fresh power came from the ship.

Fresh air.

Independent monitoring.

Only then did Asha permit the local controller to be dismantled.

Dinraal entered with Isolde beside him.

The chambers stood in two narrow rows.

Frost filmed the transparent covers.

Some held depot workers in ordinary clothing.

Others wore survey uniforms.

At the far end, a man lay with one arm bent awkwardly across his chest.

Dark thread crossed the elbow of his jacket.

Dinraal stopped so suddenly that Isolde touched his back.

“What?”

He could not answer at first.

Then he pointed.

The man was Davren.

Johanna confirmed his identity against the colony’s medical records before anyone said his name beyond the treatment team.

His heart was beating.

His breathing was supported by the chamber.

There were injuries beneath the stasis harness, and signs of prolonged chemical suppression that Johanna refused to interpret until she had proper tests.

But he was alive.

Dinraal stood beside the chamber while the medical staff prepared it.

The patched jacket looked absurdly ordinary inside that terrible room.

“He refused to bring the device aboard,” Dinraal said quietly.

Isolde looked at him.

“On the recorder. He knew it wasn’t safe.”

She reached for his hand.

“He was right.”

Dinraal swallowed.

He had heard something use this man’s voice.

He had believed that might be all that remained.

Johanna checked the chamber’s readings again.

“Both of you need to step back.”

They did.

The cover opened with a hiss.

Not all the chambers held people they could save.

Two of the eight unreadable units had suffered power failures before the annex was moved.

Their occupants were dead.

Johanna had the bodies transferred with the same care as the living.

The other six unreadable chambers contained patients whose monitoring equipment had failed.

They were alive.

Seventy-nine survivors.

Asha wrote the number down herself.

Then she began matching them to the depot’s recovered records.

Five belonged to the second survey vessel from Halden’s Reach.

Davren had been among them.

The other four missing survey workers had arrived aboard the first vessel.

Their names appeared in a separate transfer entry.

Transferred onward.

No destination in the local file.

Dinraal read it while standing outside the treatment room.

Five found.

Four still missing.

He let himself feel the first fact without using it to erase the second.

Davren woke several hours later.

He tried to pull away from Johanna.

Then from the monitor attached to his arm.

Dinraal remained beside the door, unsure whether his presence would help or frighten him.

Isolde stood farther back.

Johanna kept her voice low.

“You’re aboard an Imperial medical vessel. You’ve been removed from the annex.”

Davren shook his head.

His eyes moved wildly around the room.

“No.”

“You’re safe for the moment.”

“No. Don’t use the channel.”

“We aren’t.”

“They hear it.”

Johanna paused.

Then she lifted the communication unit from her collar, switched it off, and placed it on the bedside table.

Davren stared at it.

His breathing began to slow.

“Where’s my crew?”

“Five of you are here.”

He closed his eyes.

Tears slipped down both sides of his face.

Dinraal waited until Johanna glanced toward him.

Then he approached slowly.

“Davren.”

The man looked up.

“My name is Dinraal.”

Recognition came.

Not comfort.

Fear.

“It knows you.”

“I know.”

Davren’s fingers gripped the blanket.

“It asked what you would come back for.”

The room went still.

Dinraal thought of the voice outside Halden’s Reach.

You came back for the others.

He kept his own voice steady.

“Your wife is alive.”

Davren stopped breathing for a moment.

“Lysa?”

“Yes.”

“The colony?”

“We evacuated the people there. They’re living at Hearth.”

Davren looked toward Johanna as though asking her to expose a lie.

She nodded.

Dinraal leaned closer.

“She has your jacket. The other one.”

Davren gave a broken sound.

“The good one?”

“I think she might disagree with that description.”

A laugh escaped him.

Then he began to cry in earnest.

The annex’s surviving records changed their understanding of the depot.

Some captives had been held for labor.

Others for conversion.

Several had been interrogated repeatedly about routes, family members, work habits, and people they trusted.

Asha found recordings catalogued beside the answers.

Voices.

Expressions.

The ways people asked for help.

She closed that directory before playing anything.

“We preserve this,” she said. “We don’t use the recordings without the families’ consent unless there’s an immediate operational reason.”

Alexander nodded.

Aramaeis stood behind her.

“What about Voss?”

Asha brought up the annex’s command history.

The purge sequence had been installed days before their arrival.

It was triggered by movement away from the depot without an authorized departure instruction.

Voss had not needed to watch them.

Dinraal looked at the time the command had been written.

“He planned for someone trying to rescue them.”

“Yes,” Asha said.

Alexander’s expression hardened.

“Then we stop assuming his remaining compartments are merely locked.”

He issued new instructions to the patrol.

No uncontrolled boarding.

No docking based on an automated invitation.

The drones searching the main depot would continue, but any further extraction would begin with the local systems that might harm the people inside.

Outside the windows, the station’s traffic lights kept flashing.

The depot did not explode.

Dinraal found himself oddly relieved by that.

It remained under guard, its launch routes blocked and its exposed cargo locks watched.

There were still compartments to search.

Still records to recover.

Still the possibility of survivors beyond the sections they had reached.

Voss remained unaccounted for.

The Imperial commander accepted responsibility for the containment operation. Two additional patrol vessels were already approaching, carrying specialists and more medical personnel.

Alexander would remain until they arrived.

Dinraal, Isolde, Aramaeis, Johanna, and Asha left aboard the medical vessel with the annex survivors.

Gilgamesh stayed to help the next rescue teams.

He met Dinraal at the departure hatch.

“Try to have somewhere comfortable ready when I return.”

“A chair?”

“A large chair.”

“Movable?”

Gilgamesh frowned.

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

Isolde laughed for the first time that day.

Dinraal clasped his friend’s arm.

“Come back and inspect it.”

“I intend to.”

They sent the news ahead by courier.

No broad announcement.

A message for Aurelius, Mara, and the medical staff.

Five of the missing Halden’s Reach crew recovered alive.

Names confirmed.

Families to be told in person.

Dinraal read the message twice before approving it.

Then he added one line.

Please tell Lysa that Davren asked whether she still had his good jacket.

Lysa waited in Hearth’s hospital.

She stood when Johanna entered.

Then she saw the wheeled chair behind her.

For a moment, she did not move.

Davren looked smaller than he had in the recordings.

Thinner.

Wrapped in a blanket, with a monitor clipped to his collar and one hand resting weakly on the chair’s arm.

But his eyes found her immediately.

“Lysa.”

She crossed the room so quickly that Johanna stepped aside.

Then she stopped just short of him.

“Can I?”

Davren tried to rise.

Johanna put a hand on his shoulder.

Lysa knelt instead.

She held his face between her hands.

Looked at him.

Touched the scar near his eyebrow.

Then she folded herself against him.

Dinraal turned toward the door.

Isolde caught his hand before he left.

They stepped into the corridor together.

Behind them, Lysa said something neither could understand.

Davren answered.

His own voice.

No speaker.

No stolen signal.

Just a tired man speaking to his wife.

Dinraal leaned against the wall and covered his face.

Isolde held him while he cried.

They went home after dark.

Their old quarters waited with the same cups, the same blanket, and the plant Rhiannon had watered in their absence.

The First Weapon met them at the door with enough enthusiasm to make entering difficult.

Dinraal knelt.

A familiar weight pressed against his chest.

“I missed you too.”

Isolde set down their bags.

On the table lay a note from Beren.

The kitchen water was connected.

The bedroom floor was finished.

They could begin moving their things into the house when Johanna stopped telling people to leave them alone for an evening.

Dinraal read the last line aloud.

Isolde smiled.

“She’s been busy.”

“Yes.”

He put the note down.

For a while, neither spoke.

Then Isolde opened her journal.

“What are you writing?” he asked.

“Their names.”

He sat beside her.

Davren.

The other four survey workers.

The seventy-four additional people who had survived the annex.

And the two who had not.

They checked the list carefully.

When they finished, Dinraal rested his hand over hers.

“Five,” he said.

Isolde nodded.

“Five.”

Outside, someone walked past carrying fresh bedding toward the hospital.

Hearth had more people to make room for.

In the morning, they would help.