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Pops had hired a few weeks back. A small screwdriver tucked behind her right ear held her pink and purple hair back from her face. She smiled as Kaidee approached, her face impish yet intelligent.
    “Need a seat?” Pops asked, motioning to the bearded dark-haired tech. “Garvey was just leaving.”
    “Don’t mean to put you out,” Kaidee said to Garvey, as she returned Aries’s smile.
    Garvey wiggled his thick eyebrows. “Meeting up with my little honey. It’s yours, Captain Griggs.”
    “And he’ll come back covered with love bruises and a happy twinkle in his eye,” Aries drawled teasingly.
    Chuckles sounded around the table. Garvey looked sheepish.
    Kaidee nodded her thanks. “You could have probably sold this seat and made some money.”
    Pops dropped his foot from the chair to the decking as Garvey disappeared into the crowd. “We’re all going to be needing a new business before long, if Tage don’t let up.”
    That was the truth. Kaidee liked Pops. She’d known of his repair facility for more than a decade but had dealt with him for only about a year now. Which meant she didn’t know him well enough to dump her troubles on him. She snagged a bottle of ale from a passing ’droid server, dropping a credit chip in the slot in its left arm, and tried to focus on something other than her personal problems. “You mean that with all these ships on dock, Pops’s Repairs doesn’t have a captive audience?”
    “With no one moving goods, no one’s getting paid.Which means captains don’t want to spend money they don’t have.”
    She understood that only too well. “They have to open the lanes soon.” Real soon. She didn’t want to see Frinks on her rampway again.
    “Tomorrow.” Pops looked around the table with a snort. “Isn’t that what we hear every few hours? Lanes’ll be open tomorrow.”
    Kaidee had heard the same line. Last time Tage pulled this, it had been almost a shipweek of tomorrows. And a shipweek would create serious trouble for her.
    “Or we’ll all starve to death, eventually,” Ilsa was saying, leaning against a sandy-haired man’s shoulder. Ilsa was about Kaidee’s own age, the man perhaps a little younger. His hair was pulled back in a long tail, which he had draped over the other shoulder. She’d seen him in Pops’s place before but didn’t know his name. And he didn’t wear tech coveralls but a spacer’s black leather jacket.
    She gathered from Ilsa’s posture that this was her current lover.
    “You’ll have riots here before that,” the man said. “Heard Trel’s had a big bar fight. Stripers had to fire-hose the place to stop it. Next time they’ll probably use gas.”
    Aries nodded. “No one in Aldan would cry big tears if we all got spaced or Dock Five imploded.”
    Aldan was the central hub of the Empire, with worlds like Sylvadae, Garno, and Aldan Prime, whose wealthy denizens would, no, not miss Dock Five at all. It had been a gathering place for pirates, mercenaries, and other ask-me-no-questions types for centuries, back when the Empire was just Aldan, Calth was firstbeing colonized, and Baris sector was some unpronounceable Stolorth name.
    Dock Five was also home to a lot of hardworking traders and spacers and ships that did the backbreaking runs the larger shipping companies had no interest in doing. So it was a place where a lot of careers started—and a place where many of them died.
    Kaidee wasn’t sure right now which end of the spectrum she was on. But if Frinks had his way, it would be the latter.
    “We’re not the only ones the Baris blockades have locked in,” she said, after taking a swig of ale from her bottle. It was icy cold and had a bittersweet tang that suited her current mood perfectly. “There’s Starport Six—”
    “Which houses a military base, so they’re getting supplies,” Ilsa’s lover said. “Lots of ’em, now that Corsau Station’s gone over to the Alliance.”
    Corsau?
She hadn’t heard. That had long been