Out here, in the still hours between warp and station lights, memories come like slow tides.
Not whole things. Just edges.
The beacon in E02-IK is whispering under my hull, the kind of faint background tone that only stands out when the rest of the comms fall silent. It reminds me of that night — the one I’ve never been able to set in a clean line of cause and effect.
I was ten. Or maybe nine. The wind was pulling at the guy lines, singing through them in a way that made the tents shiver. I was curled under the landing gantry, knees against my chest, letting the warm spill from the vents wash over my face. There was a sound — not loud — the deep click of clamps catching a hull.
A pause. A breath that seemed to stretch. Then the ramp.
He walked down alone.
I don’t remember his eyes, only that his coat didn’t move like it used to, and the salt crust along the hem caught the light when he stopped. The old navigator’s chain was still around his neck, but the little bone disc was gone. I used to chew on it when I was small. It should have been there.
I think my mother said his name. Or maybe that was another night.
Get Marcel Krause’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
I shake my head. My Cheetah is sliding between planets now, the Wildlands hanging wide and cold around me. The navcomp’s projection is a neat arc of dots and lines. My father would have called it “the cage” — useful, but not to be trusted on its own.
He didn’t stay with the caravan that evening. He sat beneath the long-hauler’s hull instead, scratching lines into the dirt with a broken stylus. I watched from the shadow of a cargo crate. At the time they were only shapes, sharp and curling, drifting one into the next. Years later I’d know some of them were drift markers, others the Vherokior wayfinding script. One I have never found in any chart.
The first week after his return was full of whispers. Caravaneers who had known him before kept their distance, except for the rare nod that wasn’t quite a greeting. Some of the elders wouldn’t meet his eyes. Others studied him like they were weighing something and finding it too heavy.
The next week, the lessons began. Quiet ones, between other people’s voices. How to read stars when the sky was wrong. How to trace a path without a navcomp. How to find a beacon in static, and how to pass by questions without answering.
I skim past a customs relay now, its signal blipping faint in the overview. The hull drones hum against my skin through the pod gel — a vibration like the stylus tapping dirt. The map says I’ve got two more jumps before I reach the next safe point, but the map doesn’t know every road.
When I reached the age, he told me to take the Voluval. Then he shook his head, as if listening to something far away.
“Not yet,” he said. “You’ve still got roads to walk.”
I never knew if he meant the Wildlands or somewhere else.
By the time I finally stood in the rite’s chamber, years later, I’d already crossed more unmarked routes than I could count. The mark flared and settled into my skin, and in that breath I understood: he had seen it before. My father, the Pathfinder, had carried it back from somewhere beyond maps, and left the rest of the road for me to find.
And out here, when the comms go quiet and the beacons speak in the thin language of static, I sometimes feel I’m already on it.
