The Quiet Between Ports

Posted on Thu Jun 4th, 2026 @ 4:18am by Taryn Rook

1,897 words; about a 9 minute read

Mission: Between The Orders
Location: Foxglove - En Route Between URC Transfer Points
Timeline: Seventeen hours after leaving Red Thread Station

The problem with quiet was that it always sounded like waiting.

Taryn Saela Rook lay flat on her back beneath the forward comms console, one boot braced against the bulkhead and one knee bent at a stupid angle because Foxglove had been designed by someone who hated elbows, knees, dignity and probably joy as a general concept. A strip light buzzed above her in a tired little rhythm, flickering every few seconds. She had already counted the pattern twice, which meant she needed to fix it or stop pretending she was relaxed.

“Come on, Foxy,” she muttered, the corner of a circuit probe held between her teeth as she reached deeper into the open panel. “Don’t start being dramatic. That’s my thing.”

The console gave a thin, resentful chirp.

Taryn paused, eyes narrowing up into the dark tangle of relays. “Yeah, well, that was hurtful.”

The ship hummed around her in that particular way old ships did when they wanted credit for not falling apart. The deck vibrated softly beneath her spine, steady enough to trust for the next few hours, maybe longer if nobody asked too much of the starboard stabiliser. The air smelled faintly of warm insulation, recycled coffee and the sour-metal tang of a scrubber filter she had promised herself she would replace two ports ago. She had not replaced it, because two ports ago had also included a shouting match with a Bolian dockmaster, an unpaid fuel surcharge, and a cargo pallet that had mysteriously become her problem despite very much not being her problem.

In fairness, she had acquired three emergency capacitors and half a crate of protein packs out of it.

So, spiritually, who had really won?

The comms board chirped again, lower this time, like it was trying to sound wounded.

“Oh, don’t start. You love me.”

She twisted the loose junction by feel, thumb pressing hard against the casing until something clicked into place with a spark bright enough to make her blink. For a second nothing happened. Then the dead amber panel above her flickered, stuttered, and dragged itself reluctantly into blue.

Taryn let her head fall back against the deck with a dull thunk. “See? Teamwork.”

Foxglove did not applaud.

Typical.

She shoved the probe into the pocket of her jacket and wriggled out from under the console, hair catching briefly on the edge of the access hatch. “Ow. Betrayal from my own house.” She sat up, pulling loose strands of deep chestnut hair away from her face. In the cockpit’s low light it looked nearly black, except where the overhead strip caught the warmer brown threaded through it. Her jacket hung half off one shoulder, sleeves shoved up past her elbows, and when her gaze dropped to the pale old mark at her left forearm she tugged the cuff down before she had to decide whether she had meant to.

Outside the forward viewport, the stars kept their distance.

Good. Sensible of them.

Foxglove was running light between URC transfer points after dropping medical packs, water purifiers and two sealed courier cylinders at a depot that smelled like disinfectant, wet boots and tired people trying very hard not to look tired. It had been an easy job. Clean, even. Nobody had tried to shoot her, seize the cargo or explain regulations at her in the kind of voice that made her want to bite through a PADD. Payment had come through in fuel credit and one crate of ration bars that had only expired last month, which made them basically gourmet by fringe standards.

No alarms. No pursuit. No dockside shouting. No one bleeding in the cargo bay. No one telling her to sit still while adults made sensible choices over her head.

Quiet.

She hated it.

Taryn dropped into the pilot’s chair and swung one leg onto the console edge, careful not to clip the impulse trim because she had done that once and Foxy had pitched a fit for three hours. The traffic feed crawled across the rebuilt comms display in dull little lines: URC route corrections, a weather advisory from a mining colony, raider activity two sectors away, junk pings, beacon echoes, somebody’s automated trade advert for refurbished atmospheric scrubbers and, tucked between all of it like a knife wrapped in cloth, one encrypted message flagged through an old family relay protocol.

Her foot went still.

For a moment the cockpit felt smaller than it had any right to feel.

Taryn stared at the marker, then at the viewport, then back again. “Nope.”

The marker blinked.

“Brilliant argument. Still nope.”

She leaned forward despite herself and pulled up the metadata without opening the file. Old Vonn routing shell. Civilian encryption. Three bounces through humanitarian relays, one of them sloppy enough to be either honest or bait trying very hard to look honest. No direct sender. No clean voiceprint. No embedded tracker that she could see, which meant it was either harmless or built by someone who knew how to hide teeth properly.

She hated both options.

The message sat there, patient and smug, while the ship carried her through all that lovely empty space people kept insisting was peaceful. Taryn’s jaw worked once. Family. People said the word like it came with warm rooms and open hands. Like it meant someone heard you when you called. Like it wasn’t just another door that could lock from the outside.

She closed the message window.

The marker shrank obediently into the corner of the display and kept blinking.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she told it, which was ridiculous, because it was a light on a screen and therefore already emotionally healthier than most people she had met.

Somewhere aft, a coolant valve knocked once inside the wall.

Taryn turned her head sharply, listening.

Nothing followed.

She sat like that for a few seconds anyway, one hand resting near the console, the other loose against her thigh. There were old habits that faded, probably. She had not met any, personally, but people said things. Usually people with soft carpets and working locks.

When the ship stayed quiet, she pushed herself out of the chair and went to the galley alcove behind the cockpit. Calling it a galley was generous. It was a heater, a water spout, two cupboards, a cracked mug and a drawer that only opened if threatened with violence. She yanked it twice, kicked the lower panel with the side of her boot, and it slid open with the sulky grace of machinery that had been raised badly.

“Thank you.”

Inside were ration bars, a half-empty spice tin, two stolen stirrers from a depot canteen and a wrapped sweet she had absolutely not saved for any emotional reason. She took a ration bar at random, read the flavour, and immediately regretted having eyes.

“Vegetable breakfast loaf,” she said.

She turned the packet over as if the back might apologise.

It did not.

“There are laws. There have to be laws.”

She tore it open anyway and took a bite, because principles were nice but calories were useful. It tasted like someone had tried to make bread out of wallpaper paste and regret. Taryn chewed with the flat, offended expression of someone enduring a personal attack, then wandered back into the cockpit with the rest of it in hand.

The family relay marker blinked in the corner.

She ignored it loudly.

A low tone came from the sensor board.

Not an alarm. Not yet. Just a little sound, small enough to be nothing and wrong enough to make her body move before her thoughts caught up. She crossed the cockpit in two steps, ration bar shoved into her mouth so both hands were free. Passive sweep. Contact ghost. Distant, thin, there for half a second and gone again into the static between shipping lanes.

Taryn froze the readout and widened the scan. Nothing. Narrowed it. Still nothing.

Could be debris. Could be an old buoy spitting bad telemetry. Could be somebody lazy with a cloak. Could be nothing, and nothing had always been very good at getting people killed.

She took the ration bar out of her mouth and pointed it at the sensor board. “Fine. Be weird.”

Foxy’s engines purred beneath her, uneven but familiar, as Taryn adjusted course by three degrees. Not enough to look like she was running. Enough to stop being where the last scan expected her to be. One route kept her on the published URC corridor. One skimmed the edge of a dead sensor pocket near an uninhabited moon. One was stupid unless you knew the ship could handle a dirty impulse burn through ion dust without coughing up something expensive.

Probably.

She highlighted the third option and let it sit under her hand.

The comms panel refreshed. The unread family marker blinked again.

Taryn looked at it.

For half a heartbeat, because apparently her brain was a traitor, she imagined Elias Rook’s voice coming through the speaker. Not a recording. Not a rumour passed from one greasy port table to another. His actual voice, tired and warm and annoyed because she had rewired something important with the wrong gauge of conduit and then acted like that was a lifestyle choice.

She could almost hear him say her name.

Not kid. Not Rook. Not asset, package, problem or any of the other words people had tried to pin to her.

Taryn.

Her throat tightened.

The sensor board pinged again.

Same ghost. Closer.

She blinked once, and whatever had tried to crawl up inside her went back where it belonged. Her expression flattened into something much easier to use.

“There you are.”

She confirmed the course change. Foxglove leaned into the turn, hull giving a long, familiar groan like it wanted her to know it was doing this under protest.

“Oh, hush. You love a dramatic exit.”

Taryn dropped into the pilot’s chair and buckled the lap strap with one hand while pulling up defensive systems with the other. The light phaser emitter showed amber, because of course it did. The universe had a sense of humour, and it was rubbish.

She slapped the side of the console. “No. Do not give me amber. We talked about amber.”

The status light flickered.

“Foxy, I swear, if you embarrass me in front of whatever creepy little sensor ghost that is, I’m replacing your starboard coupling with the cheap one.”

The status shifted reluctantly into green.

Taryn smiled without warmth. “Knew you were listening.”

The unread message kept blinking from the corner of the display, small and patient and far more dangerous than the contact ghost. She did not open it. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Maybe in five minutes. Maybe after she stopped being stupid enough to hope.

Outside, the stars slid sideways as Foxglove slipped off the approved route and into the darker space between official places. Small, pale and stubborn, with a poisonous flower painted near her name and an engine note that sounded one bad decision away from poetry.

Taryn settled both hands on the controls, eyes on the sensor feed, jaw set.

“Right,” she murmured. “Let’s see who’s being nosy.”

 

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