Rock Lavey
Session 1 — The Ragged Edge of Space
Rock Lavey woke first, which felt about right. Somebody has to be conscious to watch the others come up, and that job has fallen to him his whole life, in operating theatres and in worse rooms since. The docking ring smelled of recycled air and hard labor, and through the glass the bots crawled the hulls like they were dressing a wound that would never close. He had shipped himself here frozen to save the credits he did not have. A struck-off surgeon does not get to be proud about how he travels.
He is the sharp eye, and the eye did not stop working just because the license did. At the Silk Abbey he clocked the substances moving through the crowd before anyone said a word, the libido enhancers that were harmless enough and the amphetamine underneath them that was not, the kind of thing that turns a good night into a body on a slab at a high enough dose. Later, in the Nova Nexus holo-pit, he read the fight the way he reads everything, from the inside out. The veteran Clubber was being walked to an easy win before a bigger night. The setup was plain to anyone who knew where to look, and Rock always knows where to look.
What he carries and does not say is heavier than any of it. He scanned Six once and learned exactly what the big man is, property with a maker’s mark and a bounty on it, and he chose to say nothing. Two debtors on the same dead-end station, bound by a secret one of them does not even know is being kept. Rock has spent a career deciding who lives on a table. He decided this one quietly, the way he decides everything now, and moved on before anyone could thank him for it.