Harbor-Call Wet-Hab Berth

Harbor-Call Wet-Hab Berth

You dock into teal-lit rings that smell of brine coolant and kelp broth and the ozone off a scoop tender that's been hauling ice because the world below won't give you a cup of honest water. The berth spins a hair over one gravity — slack decks make Zatheeri miserable, and they don't hide that fact — and every floor port looks down on Kavren II's rust-red desert like a sermon you didn't ask for.

The quota hall is Deck-Slow and precise: seal-break, salinity read, tide-mark logged against the water-oath ledger. Harbor-wardens speak with voice and color both; an aquamarine flash of gratitude reads as threat to an offworlder about once a shift until somebody's cousin explains tide-courtesy. Up from the docks are the tide-council galleries — low wet chambers where fleet lines settle oaths, dues, and the kind of marriage that isn't romantic so much as hydrological: two currents joined so the berth keeps flowing.

It is the strangest friendly dock in the spur. They'll feed a crew that flew their kin home through three hops and mean it — kelp-brine, a bunk with humidity you can taste, a straight welcome. And in the same breath a warden will meet your ramp with a soft voice and a ledger and want to know, precisely, who you're carrying and what tide-oath they broke, because on Harbor-Call a debt to the fleet is a debt until the council says the current is clear, and a word given on this wet ring is enforceable by people who've known the family since before the desert domes went up.