The memory unit did not give up its secrets quickly.
In Rohan’s first few days after returning from the eastern expedition, he found that truth more frustrating than almost anything else on Cael Athis.
It sat behind glass in the crash ledger hall, sealed inside a padded case as though it were a living thing that might wake if handled too carelessly. People came to look at it in silence. Some touched their line-plates before approaching. Others refused to enter the hall at all, claiming there was no good reason to disturb a voice from the ship that had already cursed their ancestors with survival.
Bryan, however, looked at it like a starving man looking at bread.
He spent the first evening after the expedition sitting in his wheeled chair before the sealed display, his good hand resting on the edge of the case without touching the memory unit itself. Rohan found him there long after the rest of the settlement had gone quiet, with only two ash-house lamps burning low and warm beside the crash ledger wall.
The old names watched over them.
Thousands of them.
Crew names. Passenger names. Sleep-cargo designations. Medical identifiers. Birth records from the first generation after impact. Death marks carved into small plates beside family lines. Rohan understood more of Veyrhold now than he had when he first stood in this hall, eating guest-bread under suspicion. The ledger was not only a record. It was proof. It told the people of Veyrhold that they had not simply emerged from ash and hunger. They had come from somewhere. They belonged to a chain of names that had refused to break.
And now, inside the case, lay something older than most of those written memories.
"You should be resting," Rohan said from the doorway.
Bryan did not turn. "People keep telling me that. It is making rest less appealing."
"You were nearly killed by skarn months ago and then spent the last few days managing expedition tallies as if your body did not still object to movement."
"My body objects to many things. I have learned not to give it too much authority."
"That sounds unhealthy."
"It is very productive."
Rohan walked closer, stopping beside the chair. The damaged memory unit looked smaller than its importance deserved. A palm-sized rectangle of pale metal and black glass, cracked along one corner, with faint gold lines running beneath the surface like veins in old stone. It did not glow. It did not hum. It did not announce itself as a key to anything.
That made Rohan distrust it more.
"Has Tavin made any progress?"
Bryan let out a breath through his nose. "She says she needs time, stable tools, and less of the elders standing over her shoulder asking whether it has spoken yet."
"That sounds reasonable."
"It does, which is why people dislike hearing it."
Rohan leaned against the display table and looked up at the ledger. "What do you think is on it?"
Bryan was silent long enough that Rohan wondered if he would answer at all.
Then he said, "The cruel answer is probably nothing. Corrupted maintenance logs. Cargo access codes for compartments that no longer exist. A list of tools sealed in a cache long since emptied by the crash."
"And the hopeful answer?"
Bryan’s good hand tightened slightly.
"The hopeful answer is a manifest. A location. A pre-crash record. Something that proves Horizon’s Mercy belonged to a route the merchants have never admitted existed. Something that shows we were not forgotten by accident."
Rohan looked at him.
Bryan’s face was angled toward the case, but his eyes were distant. The lamplight made the lines around them look deeper.
"You think the merchants know more about the crash than they say."
"I think merchants know every profitable silence in a room," Bryan said. "For generations, the Gilded Heron has told us Cael Athis is an unregistered marginal planet with no lawful claim except the current trade charter. They say Horizon’s Mercy was an old private vessel, lost outside protected lanes, with no surviving ownership network and no recovery rights worth pursuing. They say no one came because no one knew. They say no one knows because no one cared."
His voice tightened.
"I have spent most of my life listening to people in clean coats explain our history as if the ash buried our intelligence along with the hull."
Rohan looked back at the memory unit.
"And if this says otherwise?"
"Then it becomes dangerous."
"Useful dangerous?"
Bryan finally looked at him.
"All useful things are dangerous here."
That was a very Veyrhold answer.
But it no longer sounded cryptic to Rohan. It sounded like a lesson distilled from too many funerals.
Tavin’s attempts to read the memory unit began the next day.
The process took place in the old technical room beneath the trade store, a cramped chamber filled with salvaged equipment, copper wiring, storm-silver coils, ceramic insulation, ancient screens, and more hopeful improvisation than Rohan thought any machine should be forced to endure. Tavin treated the memory unit with reverence. Orrel treated the reader device with suspicion. Bryan treated the entire process as though his glare alone might restore centuries of corrupted data.
Rohan was allowed to observe only because the Great System had identified the item first, and because Maerin apparently believed that keeping him away would only make him more imaginative in unhelpful ways.
"You are here to watch," Maerin told him before the first attempt. "You are not here to touch, interpret, energise, heat, cool, awaken, repair, threaten, or make jokes at the equipment."
Rohan blinked.
"That was a very comprehensive warning."
"It needed to be."
"I object to threaten being included."
"You once told a jammed lens bracket that you would throw it into a skarn nest if it did not come loose."
"It came loose."
"That is not the point."
Tavin, who was carefully securing the memory unit into a padded cradle, spoke without looking up.
"If he threatens my reader, I will throw him into the skarn nest first."
Rohan raised both hands. "I will be silent and respectful."