Chapter 7: Docking at the Ironveil Bazaar

Ironveil announced itself three hours before it was visible.

The first sign was the density shift in traffic — freighters and mid-range haulers filtering out of the transit corridor like tributaries finding a river, their approach vectors converging on something the *Indifferent Maren's* long-range array resolved gradually, reluctantly, the way instruments always struggled with Ironveil. The station had been built in phases across six separate Confederation administrations and two periods of political collapse, and it read on sensors the way old cities read on maps: contradictory, stratified, impossible to reduce to a single coherent shape. By the time the station came visible on the forward display it had already been audible for twenty minutes — a sustained frequency of docking traffic, commercial broadcast, and proximity warnings that Merrick had described, without affection, as a place that sounded like an argument someone else was having.

Farro had been to Ironveil four times. He had never stayed longer than a refueling cycle and had left each time with the sense that the station had not noticed his departure any more than a market notices a single customer walking out. This, he understood now, was useful. Ironveil's comprehensive indifference to individual arrivals was precisely the quality they needed.