turn-000 — Prologue

The dust of the Sisar Run hangs around the flotilla like a slow-settling weather. Three ships in close formation, running-lights bled down to the lowest watch-setting: the _Iron Promise_ in the centre with her rust-red dorsal hull and bolted-on plates, the converted gunship a few hundred meters off her starboard quarter, the _Soft Reckoning_ hanging dead-engined to port — kept in formation by a tow-tether from the gunship that nobody on the flotilla has bothered to write into the official manifest. The light from the trio is sodium and warm tungsten, never blue. There is no station in scanning range. There is no patrol route within a parsec. There is, as far as anything outside the flotilla can see, no flotilla at all.

Vex is on the upper deck of the _Iron Promise_ — the small captain's cabin, the analog Imperial-frigate chrono ticking on the bulkhead, the helmet shelf in the corner with its missing-visor Mandalorian piece and its Imperial naval cap. The teacup on the coolant line is full and cooling. He has not drunk from it in an hour. On the cabin's working datapad: three message-glyphs in three different formats, each one a captain's hand. He has read each of them twice and answered none. He has, in the eight days since the news came down, slept twice.

The news is this. Brokho Ral — the Houk who built the Free Fleet of the Sisar out of broken captains and Hutt-cartel cast-offs, who called himself Pirate King of the Sisar in deliberate echo of a Weequay's title and laughed about the joke with anyone who got it — is dead. Twelve ships unspoken-for. A federation built on Brokho's personal arbitration with no clause for what happens when the arbiter is in the brazier. The official record, cremated within six hours per Houk custom, lists heart failure. The cabin holo-feed Vex watched before someone wiped it shows carbon-scoring on the bulkhead beside the bunk, low and angled wrong for an accident. Vex has not said this to Kessha. He has not said it aloud at all. He is not yet sure who the saying of it would be _to_.

Three of Brokho's captains have, in the last forty-eight hours, reached out separately. One wants Vex to pick a side. One wants Vex to pick a different side. One wants Vex, in language elaborate enough to be polite about it, to disappear from the Run for six standard months while she settles things her own way. Each message was hand-delivered by a different courier through a different cutout — the kind of expense that means the senders are taking the question of Vex seriously enough to spend money to ask it. The third sender did not bother with a cutout: her courier was her own pilot, and he is currently at the Brace concourse on Lekzaar Station in low orbit over Vodran, drinking on her tab and waiting for an answer. The other two couriers have already gone dark.

The window, if there is a window, is roughly three weeks. After that, somebody who is not Vex will be Pirate King of the Sisar, and the question of who that somebody is will have been answered without Vex's name in it. The crew know this — most of them. Some of them have started looking at him the way a crew looks at a captain who they think might not be cunning enough for the room he is about to be in. Some have started looking at him the way a crew looks at a captain they think might be. The ratio matters; he has not yet counted.

The chrono ticks. The teacup cools. On the datapad, three unanswered captains. Outside the porthole, the curved dust of the Run and the running-lights of two ships that belong to him for now. The flotilla is at rendezvous. Nobody is shooting yet. Vex picks up the cup and drinks the cold tea, slowly, watching the message-glyphs without selecting any of them.

It is the player's turn.