“Passengers electing the Economy (Interior) fare are, for the duration of transit, classified as Freight Escort (Temporary). Escorts are not entitled to seating, catering, viewports, artificial gravity, or a grievance procedure. Welcome aboard.”— Tago Express Delivery, Fare Conditions, clause 11(c)
He came down the stairs at the far end while I was still watching the woman leave her hand on the bar.
Hector was broad, easy in his shoulders, wearing a dark polo with a tiny unlit The Central Gym logo over his heart and forearms that had clearly moved a lot of weight in their time. He crossed the floor with a hand already out and a grin that reached his eyes before it reached his mouth.
“Dash. Hector.” His handshake was warm, and his eyes went to the sword across my knees, and something in them brightened, though he said nothing about it yet.
I stood and got ahead of my own nerves. “Should I leave this somewhere first? At the last place I had to check everything at the door.”
“Eh, no.” He waved it off. “Bring it. We train with what we carry. Andiamo, come up, we sit like signori and we talk before we sweat.”
I couldn’t stop wincing at the Italian words. I was fighting to understand what Natty was saying, and now Italian added to the mix?
Ugh.
So the sword stayed at my side, and instead of the floor he took me up a wide flight to the machine level, past rigs I half-recognized and rigs I didn’t, and instead of putting me straight onto one of them he steered me to two low armchairs by the glass wall with a small table between them, and dropped into one, and gestured me into the other.
“Allora.” He set a slim holo-tablet on the table. “Tell me everything. Start from nothing, assume I know nothing, because about you I know nothing.”
“I’m a total beginner,” I said, and it came out easier than I thought. “I got my System not that long ago and a few days ago I got measured at a place called Kraftwerkhaus, they ran me through an assay because I’d just upgraded my attributes, and a friend told me the numbers mean nothing if my body can’t cash them. She said I need to shore up my base.” I got to the last part. “She also sent me a sword regimen. So—”
Hector lit up as if a switch had been thrown.
“You do the sword?” The grin came all the way out, and his hands came up with it. “Ah, bene, benissimo! I love the sword, amico, everybody here wants to press the big machines and grow big for the mirror, and nobody wants to pick up a blade and actually learn a thing.” He caught himself, patted the air, professional again in half a second. “Okay. Okay. First, the boring part.” He tapped the tablet. “Can you share it all with me? The Kraftwerkhaus data, and what your friend wrote to you. I put it together and build you a plan. Nothing generic.”
I thought about the one-page NDA sitting somewhere in this building with a ten-million floor under it, and for once I was at least a bit confident I wasn’t doing something stupid. “Yeah. Sending it now.”
I pushed the assay shard’s readout and Ceci’s regimen across, and his tablet chimed as they landed.
“Perfetto. While it opens.” He set it face-down for a moment and looked at me. “Your experience. Before the System. What have you done with your body?”
“Nothing, really.” I scrubbed the back of my neck. “Didn’t have a system, so I went to mining school and ran around the school mines until something tried to eat me, then I ran faster. That’s it. So my base probably isn’t as low as a total couch case, but I never once did any of it on purpose.”
“Ha. The mines.” He turned the tablet back over as it chimed again. “That is more than the couch, sì. Running for your life is still running. Give me a minute.”
He read for a few minutes, eyes going back and forth, occasionally making a small sound to himself. I sat there and watched people not sweat.
“Okay.” He set it down. “So. The physical is fine. For a normal, untrained youth, it is honestly good; your legs, your wind, all that running paid you back. But fine is below ICC standard, capisci.” He turned the tablet and showed me a figure lit up along the back. “Here. Your back is weak. Everything behind you; the pulling muscles, the chain up your spine, the core when it turns. You push, you shoot, you run forward, and you never once pull or brace or rotate under load, so the whole rear of you has been coasting.”
That tracked with a Reaver putting me through a wall and a Guardian folding my planted leg out from under me. “Yeah. Things hitting my guard is sort of a theme.”
“We fix the theme.” He nodded at the regimen on the screen. “And what your friend sent, this is a good start, truly. I tweak it, only a little, nothing wrong with the bones of it.” Then he scrolled and slowed, and his eyebrow went up. “But the sword…” He glanced at me. “Your friend. She is good with the sword?”
“She’s incredible,” I said before I’d decided how much to admit.
Hector smiled to himself and set the tablet flat. “It shows. This is the Midorikawa Sword Style she has put together for you, properly compiled, someone who knows the form well. But there are basics missing here, small ones, foundation things, and I think it is because she is talented. The talented ones learn the hard part young and forget they skipped the easy part, so they cannot teach it, because for them it was never there.” He tilted his head. “It is a common thing. Nothing against her.”
“That’s… incredibly her, actually.”
“Sì.” He stood. “So. We do it like this. The sword, we train together, you and me, whenever we have the time. When I don’t have the time, you drill it on the dummies; I give you exactly what to run and how. And around the sword, exercises for the muscles it neglects, because a sword form uses some things and starves others, and we feed what it starves.” He spread his hands. “You put in the work, you get into good form in a few months.”
“A few months,” I said as I glanced at his spread hands. “I can do a few months.”
“Dai, then first I have to see you move.” He was already walking, and he grabbed a pair of blunt practice blades off a wall-rack without slowing, one in each hand, spinning one around his wrist out of what looked like pure habit. He led me to an elevator set into the back wall, and he pressed the call button with the tip of a training sword rather than lower his hand.
“Did you just—”
“Faster,” Hector said, entirely serious, and we rode down.
The doors opened onto a dojo.
There was a matted floor edge to edge, a rack of practice weapons down one wall and a row of striking dummies down the other, ours alone.
He handed me a practice blade and kept one, rolled his neck, and my great-grandfather’s sword stayed leaning against the wall, because a blade that cut through everything had no business anywhere near a man I liked.
“We spar,” Hector said, moving out onto the mat and settling his weight. “Light. I am not going to hurt you, and you are not going to hurt me, don’t worry about that. I only want to read your style. Show me what she taught you. Vieni.”
So I showed him.
I read his opening like I’d read a soldier drone, watched his lead hand, took the first cut on the flat of the practice blade and let it skate off the curve instead of catching it square, off the line, taking the cost out of his side, and planted my weight to turn the shove I was braced for.
There was no shove. He was my size.
The force I’d set my whole body against simply wasn’t there, and I pitched a half-step forward into a wall that had never been coming, and the flat of his blade tapped me gently on the ribs.
“Ecco. There.” He stepped back, delighted rather than smug. “You brace as if the sky is falling on you. Why? I am not heavy. You put your base against a truck, and I am a bicycle, so you fall over your own feet.”
“The things I fight are heavier than me.”
“Aaah.” He pointed the practice blade at me as if I’d confessed something interesting. “Now it makes sense. She taught you to fight things bigger than yourself. Heavy things. Monsters, sì?”
“Bug monsters, mostly.”
“Bugs,” he laughed. “It shows, amico, it shows all over you. Good foundation, but a man is not a bug. Against me you fight a mirror, not a wall. Half the weight you are using, keep it. The other half you were saving to survive a hit that does not come… spend it, or leave it home.” He reset. “Again. Piano.”
We went again, and this time I didn’t set for the truck.
He came in; I skated the cut, and because I wasn’t over-planted, I actually came off the parry and onto his flank in one motion, and for half a breath I had it. Then my eyes flicked off him, past his shoulder, hunting the second bug.
I’m so stupid.
There was no second one. And in the quarter-second my attention was somewhere else entirely, Hector’s blade laid itself flat along my collarbone.
“And where,” he asked pleasantly, “did you just go?”
I winced and couldn’t look at him straight. “Looking for your friend.”
“I have no friends down here. It is you and me.” He tapped his own temple with the pommel. “She taught you to watch the room because the room is full of teeth. Adapt. Here the danger is the one man in front of you, and you keep leaving him to check for ghosts. One opponent, you give him everything. Read him. He will tell you what he does before he does it, if you are looking at him and not at the exit.”
“Ceci said watch the hands with nothing in them. Sorry. I—”
“Your Ceci is right, for many enemies.” He lifted the blade. “For one enemy, watch this one. His hands are the only hands there are. Ancora.” We went a third time, and I stayed on him, and it was better. I stopped bracing for weight and stopped hunting for company, and I put the edge where the fight opened.
We sparred for a while, and by the end of it, I felt my energy bottom out fast.
“Bene. Now I know you.” He wiped his brow with the back of his wrist. “You have good instincts. We round it out.”
I got my breath back, and I had an idea I knew Ceci would want. “Hey, can I get a picture? Of me doing something sword-looking. My friend sent me here basically at gunpoint; I want to send proof I actually showed up.”
Hector’s face opened. “Ha! Yes. This! This is how you stay motivated; you send the proof, the friend is happy, you come back, or she complains. I approve completely.” He was already fishing out the tablet. “Go, go, on the dummy. Make it look dangerous.”
I set up on the nearest striking dummy, drew great-grandfather’s actual sword because it photographed a great deal better than a padded stick, and then carefully didn’t swing it, because the dummy would have come apart in two clean pieces.
I froze it instead, blade cocked back mid-strike, edge a hand’s width off the dummy’s throat, weight loaded, held perfectly still.
“Sì! Hold—bello—hold—” Hector crouched for the angle, thoroughly enjoying himself. He turned on the holo. In the frame I looked like someone who knew what he was doing.
“Send that to her,” he said, satisfied, sending the holo to me. Then he took me back up and walked me down the row of machines fast, naming them off, this one is your back, this one your legs, this one the rotation you do not have yet—don’t touch the far ones until I write you the plan or you hurt something and blame me—and I nodded along and kept maybe half of it, which he seemed to expect, because he finished with, “It is all in the program. I’ll compile it tonight and I’ll leave it at the desk.” He clapped my shoulder. “You did well today, Dash. The starting is the hard part. You started.”
I paid for the lesson at the reception desk on the way out, where the woman had gone back to popping her bubbles and set them down again to take it.
[Paid: ¢50]
Comma was asleep or pretending to be by the time I got in. I lay on top of my blanket next to a bag half-packed for the Moon and pulled up the group chat and dropped the photo in.
Me: Went to a gym. got a trainer.Me: Now I’m tired and I ache in muscles I didn’t know existed
The dots came up fast.
AliceOnFire_real: WAITAliceOnFire_real: dash that’s so nova i’m putting it on the counter
CeciTheSamurai: Your elbow is dropping in that stance.CeciTheSamurai: But you went. Good.
AliceOnFire_real: ceci he goes to a gym ONE TIME and you find the elbow
CeciTheSamurai: The elbow can get him killed.
Me: Yeah, I’ll get better. Hopefully now I won’t be so useless.
AliceOnFire_real: she’s been staring at the holo for like a full minute btw
CeciTheSamurai: I have not.
AliceOnFire_real: she saved it
I set the band on my chest and let them argue it, but then I remembered the six a.m. alarm, groaned at the ceiling, and went to finish packing.
The alarm went off at six, and the house was quieter than I had ever heard it.
No Mom humming over a closed contract. No Comma dropping out of bed with a thump that carried through two floors. Just the water regulator ticking somewhere in the walls and, past my window, the district still running on its night settings.
I had showered the beach out of my hair the night before, after the gym, standing under the water long enough that the smart-home flagged it. Now I dressed in the dark, the muted blue button-down from the Lutivex trip because it was the one shirt I owned that didn’t imply incompetence, and I packed the last of the bag by the light of my band.
The gear went in first. Coilgun, broken down into the duffel with its four translucent magazines and the loose slugs; the revolver in its holster; the hoodie folded on top; and the sword, which I clipped to my side because the sword always came with me. I stood there for a second, looking at all of it, laid out and then loaded, going up.
I still couldn’t quite believe the fare had said I could carry weapons out loud.
Mom was already at work, and I stopped outside her door for a moment with my hand not quite touching the frame, and then I remembered the last thing she’d texted me this morning—Call me when you land—and decided that was the goodbye.
I let myself out. The door recognised me leaving and locked behind me without a sound.
The Tago Central Spaceport at half past seven on a Saturday was a different animal from the one I’d walked into with my family.
Last time we’d gone in through the corporate terminal, the vaulted mall-concourse with its holograms selling orbital cruises and its Lunar real-estate scam and its ceiling built to make you feel the vastness of space and delivering, instead, the vastness of retail. Mom had booked through her company. There’d been a fast scan line and cheap bolted chairs and a business-class hull with tray tables and a safety card printed in soothing colours.
This was the freight wing.
You got to it by following the signage down, past the corporate terminal and past the public one, to a stretch of the port that had given up on the ceiling entirely. Bare structural beams. Work lighting. A floor scuffed grey by a decade of loader wheels, taped into lanes nobody was walking in this early.
The holograms down here cycled hazard placards and customs declarations and a looping ad for a logistics insurance product aimed at people shipping things that could sue.
TAGO EXPRESS DELIVERY had a counter at the end. The logo was a stylised chevron doing its best to look faster than the company was, and under it, smaller, a line of text that I read twice on the walk over:
CARGO • SUPERCARGO • SAME-ORBIT FREIGHT
I found the desk. There was one man behind it, mid-shift and fully out of enthusiasm, working a stylus around a manifest board, counting down to a break.
“Morning,” I said. “I’ve got the nine o’clock to Luna. Economy interior.”
He didn’t look up. “Band.”
I put my band to the reader.
And here it came, the thing I’d braced for the whole walk down. I watched the reader think about it and ran through the reasons it might refuse me.
The reader beeped. The man glanced at whatever came up, and instead of a triple-pass and a supervisor and a very long afternoon, he just reached under the counter, pulled out a badge on a lanyard, and slid it across.
“Escort,” he said.
I looked at the badge. It was a flimsy printed thing in a clip-sleeve, TED chevron in the corner, and across the middle in blocky temp-print:
FREIGHT ESCORT (TEMP) — DASH K.MANIFEST 4471-L / HULL: DILIGENT
“Escort,” I said back.
“Economy interior.” He said it the way you’d explain something to a slow child, still not looking up. “We don’t run a passenger class. Passengers are a liability on a cargo manifest. So on paper you’re not a passenger, you’re supercargo. Freight escort, temporary crew, riding along to keep an eye on the load.” He finally looked at me, and almost smiled. “Means we don’t owe you a seat, or a meal, or a window. It’s in the fare conditions. Clause eleven.”
I let out a sigh, feeling stupid again. “I didn’t read clause eleven.”
“Nobody reads clause eleven.” He tapped the board. “Clip the badge on. You’re crew now, congratulations.”