The transfer to the Gilded Heron’s lower service bay took longer than he expected — nearly two hours by his best guess, most of it spent in a cramped orbital holding pattern while, from what little he could make out through the casing’s thin ventilation channels, merchant crew argued about docking clearance and cargo priority in a clipped, efficient dialect he only partly understood.
His legs had gone numb an hour ago. His spine had filed a formal complaint some time after that.
But none of it mattered next to the sound that finally came — the heavy clunk of docking clamps engaging, followed by a shift in gravity so subtle he might have imagined it if his stomach hadn’t lurched to confirm it.
[Objective: Survive transfer to orbital vessel. — Complete]
[Quest Updated: Stowaway Beneath the Gilded Heron]
[New Objective: Locate a stable hiding position aboard the Gilded Heron. Avoid detection until departure from the Cael Athis system.]
[Conditions: Do not implicate Veyrhold. Do not harm Veyrhold civilians.]
[Warning: Extended concealment required. Estimated departure window: 6–14 hours.]
Rohan read the objective twice, and both times it told him the same unwelcome thing.
Fourteen hours. I might be in this casing for fourteen hours.
He didn’t get the chance to find out.
Voices approached — two sets of boots on metal decking, unhurried, discussing something about inventory discrepancies from the last Tradefall cycle. Then the voices stopped directly beside the casing, and one of them said, with the particular flatness of someone reading directly off a manifest slate:
"This one’s flagged unstable. Component transfer, not resale. Should be routed straight to engineering disposal, not sitting in general receiving."
"Then route it," the second voice said. "Not our problem."
A grinding shriek of metal on metal — a cargo hauler’s claw arm engaging with the casing’s exterior lift points — and then motion again, rougher this time, less careful than the merchant handlers on the ground had been. Rohan’s shoulder cracked hard against a support strut and he bit down on the sound that wanted to come out of him.
They’re moving it to disposal. That’s not general cargo. That’s somewhere people go to work on things, not somewhere things sit forgotten.
His plan — such as it had been, mostly consisting of hide until the ship leaves and figure out the rest later — had just acquired a hard deadline measured in minutes rather than hours.
He needed a way out of the casing that didn’t involve someone in engineering disposal opening it up to find a person where a broken stabiliser core should be.
The hauler set the casing down with another spine-jarring clang, and the voices moved off, their conversation trailing away down what sounded like a long corridor.
Rohan gave it thirty seconds of silence. Then he pushed the panel.
It didn’t budge — some new latch mechanism from the loading process had engaged where Tavin’s careful scratch-mark had once been.
He tried Molten Assimilation instead, reaching not for ash this time but for the metal itself, testing whether the same principle — remember what you used to be, remember you could move — applied to alloy the way it applied to compacted grit.
The metal resisted him at first, cold and stubborn and entirely unlike anything he’d worked with before. But heat was heat, and decay was decay in its own patient way, and after several long seconds of concentrated effort he felt the latch mechanism’s internal spring begin to soften, its structure loosening at a molecular level his mind understood as warmth spreading through frost.
[Skill Activated: Molten Assimilation]
[Note: Target material outside typical operational parameters. Origin Energy cost significantly increased.]
[Warning: Continued use at this cost may induce fatigue.]
’Noted, but ignored.’
The latch gave with a soft click. Rohan pushed the panel open onto a room that smelled of scorched metal and industrial solvent, lit by cold white strip lighting that made his eyes water after so many hours in total darkness.
Engineering disposal was smaller than he’d feared — a narrow bay lined with racks of components in various states of decay, no crew currently present, one door at the far end marked with a symbol he didn’t recognise but assumed meant something like authorised personnel.
He climbed out of the casing on legs that barely remembered how to hold him upright, resealed the panel behind him out of some instinct toward tidiness that felt faintly absurd given everything else about his current situation, and moved toward the shadows between two component racks.
[Objective Updated: Locate a stable hiding position aboard the Gilded Heron.]
[Suggested Area: Lower maintenance decks — reduced crew traffic during standard rotation.]
Thank you, Great System. Very helpful. Do you also have a map?
Though, realistically, it should be Hestia he’d be asking these questions to, considering she was the creator of the Great system and all.
He didn’t, as it turned out. But four months of learning to read unfamiliar terrain by instinct and necessity had left him with something almost as useful — a feel for where people would and wouldn’t walk, built from watching how Veyrhold’s own corridors filled and emptied around patrol schedules and shift changes.
Rohan slipped through the far door into a service corridor beyond, dim and narrow, its walls lined with cable conduit and the low hum of systems he couldn’t identify running somewhere behind the panelling.
He had made it aboard.
He was, for the moment, alive, unnoticed, and moving — however unsteadily — toward a version of his future that didn’t involve two more years trapped on an ash-choked planet.
It would have felt like victory, if he’d let himself believe the hardest part was over.
It wasn’t. Not by a long way.
He found a gap between a coolant housing unit and the outer hull plating on the third lower deck he explored, barely wide enough to fold himself into sideways, dark enough that even a careful visual sweep might miss him, close enough to a ventilation duct that he could hear scraps of crew conversation drifting through from adjacent corridors.
It would have to do.