Elias

The harvest bells were still ringing when Aldith Fenmar opened the manor door. On the step: a wool basket, an infant who had not learned to focus his eyes — Elias, less than a week old — and beside him a courier nothing on Proxima Libre filed with the yard drones: humanoid chassis with a registry line Robot: Korrathi model that fringe Net boards treat as proof of a cover-up Concord denies. Yellow-orange plating worn at the joints, luminous optics fixed on her without blinking. The note from Lieutenant Mara Fenmar fit on one card: war zone, cannot keep the boy safe. Aldith pocketed it and told the machine it could leave the child but not leave him alone. The staff named the robot Jarvis before the week was out.

Domaine Fenmar raised Elias in noise — cousins underfoot, dogs that knew every terrace, syndicate clerks on the morning tram. His mother was still a lieutenant when Jarvis delivered him; she made admiral around his fourteenth year, and after that the estate read fleet dispatches differently. He pruned in the Haut Vallee cold until a vine knife stopped feeling like metal and started feeling like part of the hand holding it. Magic came before breakfast; by ten he was doing graduate arcane work in Aldith's private syllabus and calling that ordinary. Lightning pleased him most: a fracture of white air, rain-smell and burned varnish, Aldith shouting from the hall while the training wall still smoked. Every morning she hid her enchanted silver spoon in a vine hollow or behind a cask or once inside a grammar text he was supposed to read. He had to find it by spell and return it without touching it. Jarvis was forbidden to help. « Et Jarvis n'a pas le droit de le toucher non plus… Pas de triche, petit singe espiègle ! » He laughed: « Tu m'as toujours appris que si je ne triche pas, je n'essaie pas vraiment. »

The Navy took him because Mara wore stars and because an estate feels small when you can throw lightning and still get sent to work the terraces. At the Academy he taught more arcane classes than he took and corrected officers whenever their ward math failed — legacy kept the uniform on when attitude should have ended it. They posted him to a lone destroyer on the outer rim, where gate chatter thins and rescue is someone else's rumor. There he met Ivan, who could fly and did not care whose mother outranked the captain. Pirates had tracked them for months. When they jumped, the fight was short and the bill was forty percent of the crew. Officers dead, pilots dead, drives cold — Ivan, lower rank and the only stick left qualified to use, held command for three weeks while Elias patched hull and prayer into something that would move. Promotions. Medals. Forcibly retired early with honors.

He brought Ivan home to Proxima Libre. Together they signed Aldith's loan — interest, signatures, no gifts — and bought an older hull at the Alpha Centauri junkyard: patched plate, honest rust, a botany dome bolted to the spine like a promise two spacers could not keep. Aldith sent Jarvis with them. Two years to register Verdigris and make her legal to jump; two more in the Orion Corridor feeding brown plants into a void that hates green until Talyra came aboard and the dome finally learned to live.

The three of them have been crew for about a year when Khesret closes around them — thin credits, fat port fees, repairs that talk back after every burn. Dermidine Industries offered one month playtesting a new theme park in exchange for clearing the dock, fixing the hull, and filling the tanks. Elias signed. So did the others. The alternative was staying berthed until the registry took the ship back.