Asheborne Downs

The crew mess nearest A Hangar was a broad, low-ceilinged space with real wood paneling on the walls and lighting that approximated natural daylight, luxuries that most of the Enforcer's quarter-million inhabitants would never see. At 1900 hours, it was mostly empty. The dinner rush had cleared out, and the evening watch had pulled most of the on-duty personnel to their stations. A few officers lingered at corner tables, nursing drinks and conversation.

Connor's ribs didn't hurt anymore. The beast-folk healer had seen to that. The bruise had faded to a faint yellow shadow that would be gone by morning. Physically, he was fine. His fighter was in the repair bay, the earth mage coaxing post-material lattices back into alignment atom by painstaking atom, and Dietrich had sent word that they were on schedule for a two-day turnaround. Everything was proceeding exactly as it should.

Lisa Geiger had filed her report. Navigation malfunction. Captain Kastor had accepted it, issued his token notation, and that was that. Connor had a commendation in his file and a shuttle in the salvage bay and a technician with a fractured wrist who he'd never spoken to, and the whole thing was wrapped up and filed away in less than a day.

He took a sip of coffee. It had gone cold.

The mess hall door slid open, and a knot of people came through, six of them, carrying bags and cases, talking over each other in the easy shorthand of people who spent their working hours together. Technicians, Connor noted from their uniforms. A mix of departments, judging by the sleeve patches, A Hangar maintenance, a couple from C, one from F, and one from J. All human. They commandeered a large table near the center of the room, pushed two smaller ones together to extend it, and began unpacking their bags.

Connor watched idly as they set up. Folding screens. Stacks of paper. Pencils. A collection of polyhedral dice in various colors, four-sided, six-sided, eight-sided, twelve, twenty. One of them, a heavyset man with a C Hangar patch, unfolded a large sheet of paper that appeared to be a hand-drawn map.

Something stirred at the back of Connor's mind. A faint prickle, like a word on the tip of his tongue.

"Alright," the man with the map said, settling into the head of the table. "When we left off, you were in the catacombs beneath the temple. Kaelen, you'd just triggered the pressure plate. Grim, you were holding the door. Vex, you were arguing with the ghost."

"I was negotiating with the ghost," a younger woman from F Hangar corrected.

"You had a sword to its throat."

"Assertive negotiation."

The table laughed. Connor felt the prickle sharpen into something more specific, a texture of familiarity that he couldn't quite place. He knew these rhythms. The back-and-forth. The mixture of strategy and improvisation. The dice.

He knew this, and he had absolutely no reason to know it.

"Roll initiative," the man at the head said, and the table erupted in the clatter of dice on wood.

Connor's hand tightened around his coffee cup. Roll initiative. The phrase resonated with something buried deep, something he'd spent fifteen years convincing himself was a dream. Fragments surfaced unbidden, a kitchen table covered in character sheets, the smell of pizza, laughter, a voice saying you enter the tavern and the barkeep looks up,

He shut it down. He'd gotten very good at shutting it down.

But he didn't leave. He sat and listened, half against his will, as the technicians played their game. They were investigating some kind of underground complex, fighting creatures, solving puzzles, managing resources. It was,

It was a tabletop RPG. The words surfaced from that locked room in his memory with absolute clarity. A tabletop role-playing game. Dice and character sheets and a game master describing a world that existed only in the shared imagination of the players.

He had never played one. Not in this life. He was certain of that. And yet he knew, with the bone-deep certainty of muscle memory, exactly how the twenty-sided die would feel between his fingers.

The game ran for about an hour. Connor sat through all of it, his cold coffee untouched, listening to the players navigate a dungeon and negotiate with a faction of underground rebels. When the man at the head of the table finally called for a break, Connor stood up before he could talk himself out of it and walked over.

The table looked up. Six technicians, suddenly aware that a lieutenant commander from A Hangar was standing over their game. Spines straightened. Conversations died.

"Sir," the heavyset man said, half-rising.

"At ease. I'm off duty." Connor pulled out an empty chair and sat on its edge, keeping his posture open, unthreatening. "I was listening to your game. I'm, curious about it. What is it?"

The technicians exchanged glances. The woman from F Hangar, the one who'd been negotiating with the ghost, spoke first.

"It's called Monsters and Magic, sir. It's a, uh, role-playing game. You make a character and play through adventures." She was watching him carefully, trying to gauge whether he was amused, offended, or about to report them for wasting time.

"Where did you learn it?"

"Gareth here picked it up from Q Hangar," she said, nodding toward the heavyset man. "It's big down there. Really big, actually."

Gareth, the man running the game, nodded. "Yeah, it started in Q about, what, three or four years ago? A tech down there created it. Made up the rules, the whole system. He runs games for anyone who wants to play, and some of us learned it from players who came up to the mixed-deck recreational areas." He paused. "It's spread through most of the lower hangars now, sir. A few of us in the upper decks play too, though we usually use the rec rooms on J Deck. They're closed for maintenance this week, so we came up here. Hope that's not a problem."

"It's not." Connor kept his voice casual, though his pulse was doing something strange. "This tech who created it. In Q Hangar. Does he have a name?"

"Ravi, sir. Ravi Longwhisker. Mouse beast-folk. He's kind of a legend down there, at least when it comes to the game. Runs sessions most evenings for whoever shows up."

Ravi Longwhisker. The name meant nothing to Connor. And yet the shape of it, the idea of a small, clever person building a game system from memory and teaching it to others, fit into a space in his mind like a key into a lock he hadn't known was there.

"Q Hangar," Connor repeated. "Is there a session tonight?"

Another exchange of glances. Gareth answered slowly. "Most nights, sir. He usually wraps up around 2100. But, Commander, Q Hangar is a long way down. And it's, uh..."

"It's what?"

"It's Q Hangar, sir."

Connor understood what he meant. A Hangar officers didn't visit Q Hangar. A Hangar officers didn't visit anything below D, as a general rule, and most had never been past F. The lower hangars were a different world, smaller, shabbier, increasingly populated by beast-folk as you descended through the alphabet.

"Thank you," Connor said, and stood up. "Enjoy your game."

He left the mess before any of them could ask him why an A Hangar squadron commander wanted to visit Q Deck to watch a beast-folk mouse run a tabletop game.

He wasn't entirely sure of the answer himself.

---

The main lift system of the Enforcer of Mercy ran through the ship's core, connecting all twenty hangar levels and the dozens of auxiliary decks between them. Officers had access to a dedicated express lift that bypassed the lower levels entirely, A Hangar to the bridge, A to the senior officers' quarters, A to the fleet command center. Connor had used it nearly every day of his life.

He took the standard lift instead.

The car was large, built to move cargo and personnel in bulk. Connor stood near the back as it descended, watching the level indicators tick past. B Hangar. C, his father's deck. E, where he'd flown shuttles as a fourteen-year-old ensign. F, the lowest he'd ever been.

Below F, the indicators kept falling, and the Enforcer changed around him.

It wasn't dramatic. It was gradual, the way a city changes as you move from the center to the outskirts. The corridors visible through the lift's transparent doors grew narrower. The lighting shifted from the warm daylight simulation of the upper decks to a flatter, bluer tone that hummed faintly at a frequency just below conscious perception. The walls lost their paneling, then their paint, then their pretense, bare metal conduit and exposed cable runs where A Hangar would have had decorative composites.

At J Hangar, a group of maintenance workers boarded the lift. Two humans, three beast-folk, a tall canine type and two smaller ones that Connor thought might be some kind of mustelid. They wore the same uniforms, though the beast-folk had additional patches on their sleeves indicating species and magic classification. The humans nodded to Connor, registering his rank insignia with the casual deference of enlisted personnel encountering an officer. The beast-folk kept their eyes down and moved to the far side of the car without being told.

They exited at L. Connor kept descending.

By N, the corridors had shrunk to about two-thirds the width of A Hangar's main passageways. At P, the lift stopped and a beast-folk woman boarded alone, a rabbit type, small and slight, with pale fur and long ears pressed flat against her head. She wore a technician's uniform with a Q Hangar patch. She glanced at Connor, did a visible double-take at his rank insignia and hangar designation, and pressed herself into the corner of the lift with her head bowed.

Connor wanted to tell her he wasn't there to inspect anything. He wanted to say she didn't need to make herself small. But he didn't know how to say it without sounding patronizing, and the silence stretched until the doors opened at Q and she slipped out ahead of him.

He followed her into Q Hangar.

The first thing he noticed was the noise. A Hangar's corridors were insulated, its machinery muffled, its conversations held at the moderate volume of people who had plenty of space. Q Hangar buzzed. Voices overlapped in the narrow corridors, some human but mostly beast-folk, conversations in accented Imperial Standard mixed with fragments of languages Connor didn't recognize. Somewhere, metal rang against metal in the rhythmic cadence of manual labor. The air was warmer than he was used to, and carried a complex layering of scents, machine oil, ozone, cooking spices, fur.

The corridors were tight. Connor found himself turning sideways to let people pass. The beast-folk he encountered moved out of his way before he had to ask, pressing against the walls with lowered heads, and the handful of humans, NCOs and junior officers, mostly, gave him curious or startled looks. An A Hangar insignia down here was, apparently, unusual enough to attract attention.

He stopped a human petty officer who was hurrying past with a clipboard. "I'm looking for Tech Specialist Ravi Longwhisker. Can you point me in the right direction?"

The petty officer blinked. "Longwhisker? He'd be in the common area this time of night, sir. Two sections aft, take the left at the junction. You'll hear it before you see it."

Connor thanked him and followed the directions. The corridors narrowed further, branching into residential sections where the quarters were stacked three high and barely wide enough for a bunk and a shelf. Beast-folk glanced at him from doorways and quickly looked away.

The petty officer was right. He heard it before he saw it.

A voice, high and clear and animated, carrying over the murmur of a crowd, "-the barrier shatters and the Bone Lord rises from the throne, shadows pouring off him like smoke. His eyes burn with cold fire. He raises his hand and the dead around you begin to stir. What do you do?"

A chorus of voices responded, overlapping and eager, and someone rolled dice on a hard surface.

Connor rounded the corner and found the common area.

It was a repurposed cargo bay, maybe fifteen meters across, with makeshift seating arranged in clusters, crates, salvaged chairs, cushions on the floor. Two dozen beast-folk sat in a rough circle near the center, focused on a small figure perched on a storage container that served as a raised platform. A few humans were scattered among them, lower-hangar technicians, from their uniforms, and no one seemed particularly concerned about the mixing.

The figure on the platform was a mouse beast-folk. Small, very small, even for his type, with gray-brown fur and round ears and bright dark eyes that moved constantly, taking in his players with the restless attention of a conductor watching an orchestra. He couldn't have been more than four feet tall, and his feet dangled off the edge of the container without reaching the floor. He wore a technician's uniform with the sleeves rolled up, and his hands moved as he talked, painting pictures in the air.

"The cleric channels divine light," one of the players said, a fox beast-folk woman clutching a handful of dice. "I'm targeting the Bone Lord directly."

"Roll it," the mouse said.

The dice clattered. "Seventeen plus four. Twenty-one."

"Twenty-one hits. The holy energy slams into the Bone Lord and he staggers. The shadows around him shriek and recoil. He's wounded, badly, but still standing. He turns toward you and speaks a word of power. Everyone within ten feet, give me a willpower save."

More dice. Groans and cheers in equal measure. Connor stood at the edge of the room, unnoticed or at least unacknowledged, and watched.

It was the game. The same game he'd overheard in the mess, but here it was alive in a way the technicians' session hadn't been. The mouse, Ravi, ran it with a fluency and energy that transformed the bare cargo bay into something else. His voice shifted between characters effortlessly, his descriptions were vivid without being overwrought, and he balanced the chaos of a dozen eager players with a casual authority that reminded Connor of-

Something. Someone. A kitchen table. Pizza. A voice that said the dragon's scales shimmer like oil on water as it turns toward you and made you believe it.

He was losing the fight with his own memory, and he wasn't sure he wanted to win it anymore.

The session built toward its climax. The players fought the Bone Lord through a collapsing crypt, making tactical decisions and dramatic declarations. Ravi narrated the destruction around them with evident delight, raising and lowering his voice, pausing for effect, rewarding clever tactics with visible approval.

The fox cleric landed the killing blow, a critical hit that she screamed about loud enough to echo off the bulkheads.

Ravi grinned. He spread his hands wide, tail flicking behind him, and said, with the particular relish of a phrase worn smooth by years of use, "Describe the death blow."

Connor's vision went white, and for a moment he wasn't standing in a cargo bay on Q Deck, he was sitting in a folding chair in a basement, and Jason was across the table with his DM screen, and Tyler was next to him arguing about attack of opportunity rules, and the pizza was getting cold, and Jim was describing how his barbarian split the orc chieftain from crown to navel, and Jessica was telling Jim that was disgusting, and-

And then a dragon. Its eyes glowing. A white light. And then nothing, and then he was five years old and dreaming of a life that wasn't his.

"-sir? Sir, are you alright?"

Connor blinked. He was gripping the edge of a storage crate hard enough that his knuckles had gone white. A beast-folk, one of the players, a young canine type, was hovering nearby, concern and deference warring on his face.

"Fine," Connor said. His voice sounded strange to him. "I'm fine."

The session was breaking up. Players were gathering their dice and papers, talking animatedly about the night's events, arguing over who had contributed most to the Bone Lord's defeat. Several of them had noticed Connor now, an A Hangar officer standing at the edge of their game, and the conversations nearest him had dropped to whispers.

Ravi hopped down from his platform, and Connor got a look at him up close for the first time. Smaller than expected. His fur was a warm gray-brown, his ears large and expressive, his whiskers twitching slightly as he packed dice into a small cloth bag. He looked like a mouse. He looked like nobody Connor had ever met.

And he looked, in the way he tilted his head and the way his hands organized things into neat piles without his eyes needing to direct them, and the way his attention was everywhere at once, exactly like Tyler Reed.

Ravi looked up. His gaze passed over Connor's face with the automatic deference of a beast-folk registering a human officer, a quick glance, then down, then away. Then his eyes snapped back. His hands stopped moving. The dice bag hung forgotten between his fingers.

For a long moment, neither of them spoke.

"Could I speak with you?" Connor said. "Privately."

Ravi's whiskers twitched. He looked at Connor for another three seconds, three seconds during which fifteen years of suppressed memories passed between them in silence, and then nodded.

"Of course, sir. This way."

He led Connor through a narrow corridor to a storage alcove barely large enough for two people, one of whom was four feet tall. Ravi closed the door, turned around, and looked up at Connor with an expression that had shed its deference entirely.

"Mark?" he said.

Connor exhaled hard and leaned against the wall.

"Tyler."

Ravi, Tyler, stared at him. Then his face split into a grin so wide it showed every tooth in his head, which was considerably more teeth than Tyler Reed had ever had.

"It's you. It's actually you. I-" He caught himself, ran both hands over his ears in a gesture that Connor recognized from a lifetime ago as Tyler processing something overwhelming. "How long have you remembered?"

"I haven't. Not, not the way you mean." Connor slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, which put him roughly at Ravi's eye level. "I've been dreaming about it since I was five. I thought it was- I don't know what I thought it was. Something wrong with me. I buried it."

"You buried it?"

"What was I supposed to do with it? I'm an officer's son on a carrier ship nine thousand years in the future. I couldn't exactly tell my parents I had memories of being a college student named Mark Mitchell who played video games and worked at a restaurant."

Ravi sat down across from him, cross-legged, his tail curling around his feet. "I mean, that's fair. But I've been living with it too, and I went the other direction."

"The game."

"The game." Ravi's grin came back. "Took me years to piece it together from memory. The combat system was the hardest, I could remember the feel of it, but the actual math took a lot of trial and error. The d20 system, the modifiers, the saves, I had to reconstruct all of it."

Connor thought of Tyler in their previous life, hunched over a laptop with spreadsheets of homebrew rules, arguing with Jason about whether a paladin should be able to multiclass into warlock.

"You didn't just recreate the game," Connor said slowly. "You changed the rules."

Ravi's ears perked. "How did you-"

"You always wanted to change the rules. Tyler always wanted to fix the action economy. And you used to argue with Jason about-" He stopped. The name hung between them, suddenly heavy.

"Jason," Ravi said quietly.

"Yeah."

"You remember the last session."

Connor closed his eyes. He could see it now, clearer than it had been in years, the dam he'd built against it crumbling under the weight of this conversation. Jason's basement. The campaign they'd been running for months. A final confrontation with a dragon. Jim had landed the killing blow, and Jason had said describe the death blow, and Jim had started talking about his character's axe cleaving through scales, and then the dragon's eyes had glowed, and then-

"The dragon," Connor said. "Its eyes. And then I was five and dreaming."

"Same," Ravi said. "Same for me. I came to as a kit in Q Hangar, and I had Tyler's memories rattling around in my head. Scared the life out of me for a year or two. But then I just... started using it. The engineering knowledge. The problem-solving. It's why I advanced as fast as I did, I didn't just have earth-magic, I had Tyler's entire mechanical engineering education backing it up."

"That's-" Connor stopped. "Wait. Have you run into anyone else?"

"No. I've looked. Carefully, without being obvious about it. There were nine of us at that table. Jason, Jim, Jessica, Emily, David, Sarah, Kevin, you, me." Ravi ticked them off on his fingers. "Nine people. If we both ended up here, the others could be anywhere. Different ships, different planets, different species."

"Different species," Connor repeated, looking at Ravi.

Ravi held up his small, furred hands and wiggled his fingers. "Believe me, I noticed."

Connor almost laughed. It came out as something between a cough and a sigh. "How are you so calm about this?"

"I've had fifteen years to get calm about it. You've had about ten minutes." Ravi leaned back against the wall. "But there's something else. Something I've been sitting on because I had nobody to tell."

Connor waited.

"Have you ever heard of Asheborne Downs?"

Asheborne Downs. The town. Jason's campaign, not the last one, the big one before it. The town that was supposed to be a one-night stopover, a place to buy supplies and sleep at the inn, but Jim had started asking questions about the local politics and Jessica had gotten invested in a subplot about a corrupt magistrate, and before anyone knew what was happening they were three months deep in a storyline about a slave uprising that became the best arc Jason ever ran.

"The town from Jason's campaign," Connor said. "The slave revolt arc."

"That's the one." Ravi's ears were flat now, his voice low. "Connor, there's an asteroid mine out in the Oort Cloud. The conditions were bad, really bad. The kind of violations the Empire fines people for when they bother to look. The regulated servants there revolted, took control of the mine from the overseers. They're running it themselves now." He paused. "They call it Asheborne Downs. The Empire knows about it, but since the whole operation was illegal to begin with, they can't exactly send in a fleet without admitting they let it happen. Last I heard, they've been trying to negotiate, get the miners to accept a new governor and come back into the fold. The miners aren't interested."

Connor stared at him.

"Yeah," Ravi said. "That was my reaction too."

"That can't be a coincidence."

"No. It can't. That name doesn't exist anywhere in this world's history. I checked. It's from Jason's game and nowhere else."

"So one of the others, "

"That's what I think. Someone who remembers that campaign, who found themselves in a position to do something about, " He gestured vaguely at everything around them. "All of this. The regulated service. The system. And they named their rebellion after the place where Jason's fictional slaves won their freedom."

Connor's mind was racing. "Do you know who?"

"No. I'm a mouse technician in Q Hangar. I hear rumors that most officers never would, but actual intelligence? I've got nothing. Could be Jim, he'd have the tactical mind for it. Could be Jessica, she had the justice streak. Could be any of them." Ravi met Connor's eyes. "But someone from our game table is on Dapple, leading a community of free beast-folk, and they want people who know the story to find them."

Connor sat with that for a long moment. "I need time to think about this," he said finally.

"Take all the time you need. I've been thinking about it for two years, and I still don't know what to do with it."

Connor stood up, and the shift in height between them reasserted itself, he was looking down at Ravi again, the physical reality of their positions in this world snapping back into focus. Officer and technician. Human and beast-folk. A Hangar and Q.

"Listen," he said. "I can help you. I've got pull in A Hangar, not a lot, but enough. If I recommend you for a transfer, Kastor would listen. You'd skip two generations of social climbing overnight. Your kids would be-"

"No."

The word was sharp and immediate, and louder than anything Ravi had said so far. Out in the corridor, a passing beast-folk technician glanced toward the alcove with wide eyes.

"No," Ravi said again, quieter but no less firm. "Connor, do you know what happens to a beast-folk mage in A Hangar? I stand behind a human technician and use my magic when and where they tell me. I don't talk to the pilots. I don't talk to the crew. I'm a tool with fur. You were in your repair bay yesterday, did you speak to the mages working on your fighter?"

Connor opened his mouth. Closed it.

"I know you didn't, because that's how it works up there. Down here, I work with my crew. I solve problems. I innovate. I teach. When something breaks in Q Hangar, my pilots and I figure it out together, because we don't have the luxury of pretending the person doing the actual work is invisible." He was standing straight now, looking up at Connor with an expression that was pure Tyler, stubborn, certain, and completely unwilling to back down from an argument he believed in. "You want to help me? Don't rescue me. Come down here."

Connor blinked. "You can't be serious."

"Transfer to Q. Bring your skills where they'll actually change something."

"Transfer to-" Connor almost laughed. "Ravi, Q Hangar hasn't won an exhibition match above L Deck. You've never beaten anyone higher than L. I've flown against Q squads. It's not-" He caught himself, but not quickly enough.

"Not what?" Ravi's whiskers twitched. "Not competitive? Not worth your time?"

"That's not what I meant."

"It's a little what you meant."

It was, Connor admitted silently, a little what he meant.

They'd drifted out of the alcove during the exchange, and the corridor around them was no longer empty. A dozen or so beast-folk had gathered at a respectful distance, players from the game session, technicians on their way to or from shifts, people who had heard an A Hangar officer arguing with Ravi Longwhisker in a storage closet and come to see what was happening. A few humans were among them, NCOs from the lower hangars, watching with the guarded interest of people witnessing something that didn't fit any category they knew.

Ravi looked at the gathered crowd, then back at Connor, and something shifted in his expression. The private Tyler-and-Mark warmth was still there underneath, but over it settled something more calculated, a performer's instinct, a game master's sense of timing.

"Tell you what," Ravi said, and his voice carried just enough to reach the onlookers without sounding like he intended it to. "Your squad's got an exhibition against Q-05 in three weeks."

Connor narrowed his eyes. "How do you know my schedule?"

"Exhibition matchups are posted for everyone, Connor. We do play in them, even if A Hangar doesn't bother to notice."

That landed. Connor set his jaw.

"Here's the bet," Ravi said. "If your squad wins, and I'm sure you think that's a given, then I'll accept your transfer recommendation. I'll let you rescue me. A Hangar, supervised magic, the whole deal. I'll be your grateful little success story."

"And if Q-05 wins?"

Ravi smiled. It was Tyler's smile, the one that meant he'd already calculated the odds and liked what he saw.

"If Q-05 wins, you transfer down to Q."

The corridor went quiet. Connor could feel the weight of two dozen stares. A Hangar's youngest squadron commander, standing in Q Hangar's cramped corridor, being challenged by a four-foot mouse to bet his career on an exhibition match that everyone present assumed was a foregone conclusion.

He should have said no. He should have laughed it off, thanked Ravi for the game, and taken the lift back to A Deck. He should have done what any sensible officer in his position would do, which was exactly nothing.

"Your squad against mine?" Connor said.

"My squad against yours."

Connor looked at the faces around them. Beast-folk technicians, watching him with expressions that ranged from nervous to hopeful to carefully blank. This was a story. Whatever he said next would be retold in Q Hangar's corridors and common areas before he made it back to the lift.

He thought about Lisa Geiger's navigation malfunction. He thought about the mage on the scaffolding, hands pressed against his crumpled stabilizer, coaxing post-materials back into alignment while the human technicians watched from a terminal below. He thought about the rabbit woman in the lift, pressing herself into the corner because an A Hangar insignia had entered her space.

He thought about Tyler Reed, who had been his best friend since elementary school, standing in front of him with gray fur and round ears and a grin full of teeth, daring him to put his money where his rank was.

"You're on," Connor said.

The corridor exhaled. Someone in the back made a sound that might have been a cheer, quickly stifled.

Ravi extended a small, furred hand. Connor took it. The handshake was brief and firm, and Ravi's grip was stronger than his size suggested.

"Three weeks," Ravi said.

"Three weeks."

---

Ravi walked him back to the lift. The corridors of Q Hangar felt different on the way out, not smaller, exactly, but more present. Connor noticed things he'd missed on the way in. Hand-painted murals on a bulkhead, bright colors depicting forests and mountains that no one on Q Deck had ever seen. A small shrine tucked into an alcove, decorated with dried flowers and what looked like carved tokens. A pair of beast-folk children, children, on a military vessel, which meant their parents were either crew or regulated servants, playing a game with bottle caps in a corridor junction, supervised by an elderly fox-type who watched Connor pass with sharp, appraising eyes.

At the lift, Ravi stopped. The Tyler warmth had receded behind the careful neutrality that beast-folk on the Enforcer always wore.

"Connor," he said. "Be careful with what I told you. About Asheborne Downs."

"I know."

"Do you? Because if someone in fleet intelligence decides to investigate a rumor like that, and they find out it came from a Q Hangar tech who talks too freely to A Hangar officers-"

"I'm not going to tell anyone, Ravi."

Ravi studied him for a moment, then nodded. "Good game tonight, by the way. You should play sometime. I think you'd like it."

The lift doors opened. Connor stepped inside and turned around. Ravi stood in the corridor, small and gray and utterly unintimidated, and raised a hand in a half-wave that Connor recognized from a thousand departures in a life that may or may not have been a dream.

The doors closed. The lift began to climb.

Connor leaned against the back wall and watched the level indicators rise. Q. P. N. The corridors widening through the transparent doors, the lighting warming, the air thinning out as the ventilation systems had less and less work to do. By J, the walls had paint again. By F, they had paneling. By D, they had art.

He stepped out at A and stood for a moment in the broad, clean, well-lit corridor with its squadron insignias and its real-wood accents and its perfect, calibrated air. It was home. It had always been home.

It looked different now.