Counted

The ship is running out of everything. Air, water, reaction mass — four lines on a graph, all bending the same way. The war Mala started isn't something she can finish on fumes.

The Hub is a trade station older than humanity's membership in the federation that built it. Fuel, materials, fabrication stock — everything she needs, administered by the species that rescued her kind and logged the favour as an investment. They know her name before she transmits it. They know what she did before she arrives. The welcome is warm, and the bill is already running.

She came for supplies. She found a bounty on the targets she'd already destroyed, a political architecture nobody told her about, and a question buried in the federation's own archives that nobody had thought to ask — or been allowed to.

One ship, rebuilt in crystal. One AI who can feel the weather now. A species she was told to hate, met face to face over tea. And a war that turns out to have been someone else's arithmetic all along.