Tessa Cork was the best starship pilot that I ever had under my command. She was my number one officer for three years on my corvette NSS Mercury, which was my last Naval command before I completed my 15-year tour of duty. Tess retired from the Navy at the same time as I did, for family reasons.

Then I joined the Revenue Service for a further decade, commanding interstellar contraband cutter duties before requesting and landing my desk-bound job back on good old Earth.

Well, my marriage had broken up by then. Being away from home for long periods can strain the best marriage and mine clearly proved that it wasn’t strong enough. So I needed to settle down, get close to my three kids again, who were all under the age of ten. I got custody of the kids in the divorce settlement and they needed my stability around them as they missed their Mom.

I never lost track of most of my old shipmates, though, and I guess I always had a particularly soft spot for Tess Cork, my old number one.

I heard through the grapevine of other old crewmen that she was working as a commercial pilot, and enjoyed the glamour of flying luxury starships, mostly round the dangerous edges of the galaxy, where pay was rich but life cheap. Her last known trip was taking some high rollers to the casinos of Vague Stars Prime, at the very edge of the explored universe, where no Fed law existed, only security that the Casinos provided themselves.

When Tess never made it back to her home base, and nor did any of the high rollers that I could identify from my investigations, I decided to check it out on my own time. The kids love the rare space trip, but I left them with my sister-in-law, their Aunt Sallie and Uncle Doug who had a fruit farm on Amos Delta.

It took me a week and fifteen jumps to reach Vague Stars’ orbit. I took the shuttle down to the state capital.

Uncle Wat was expecting me at his office. Yeah, my late mother’s brother manages the Lucky Strike Casino in the Main Strip at Vague Stars City. I hadn’t seen him since I left to join the Navy.

Vague Stars City is in the southern hemisphere of that distant icy rock. In winter, that far from the centre of the galaxy, there’s no stars in the sky. So the city is lit up like a supernova, every colour under the rainbow, day or night.

“Hey, Jim,” Wat says to me, full of his usual brand of false bonhomie. Damn, he didn’t even get his goons to frisk me, “Ain’t seen you since you was a boy. Not here on Revenue business, ehh, I hope?”

I left this planet when I was 17, shortly after my pleasure-dust-addicted mother OD’d in his damn casino. I’d no idea who my father was; Ma had been a dancer in the show when I came along, but she was bussing drinks to the gaming tables at the end.

“Nah, nothing official, Unk. Just looking for an old friend from my Navy days, you know?”

“Sure,” Wat said smoothly, “Who you lookin’ for? I can access all the passport details.”

“Tessa Cork, pilot, PC Sally-May, out of Commodus Tertius. According to the hotel register, she checked in and shipped out 28 days ago, along with her crew and guests. However, Lloyd’s insurers’ records state that the boat departed nine days later, after a new crew was sent in to man her.”

Wat looked worried, “This Cork broad was an old shipmate, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“And you came all the way out here to find out what happened to her, like you feel you owe her?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

He breathed deeply. “Well, her high roller chums were cheating me out of my life savings, my only way off this blasted rock. So I made the problem go away. The crew, well, they were collateral damage. But hey, blood’s thicker than water, huh, kid?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said, as my smoking pacifier scorched a neat hole in his forehead before he could draw his own weapon. I burned his two goons before they recovered from the shock, too.

I hardly knew Tess recently, but Wat had left my kids without their mother.

You could say: Wat goes down in Vague Stars, stays in Vague Stars.