What First Call Buys

Four years on, the Cairn is a boom town — crowded, expensive, thrilling and unfair. It admitted everyone it promised to admit, could not house them, and bought the steel the only way it could: forty-year build-leases sold to nine private houses, with first call on berth priority and environmental allocation. Ester Kade signed it. It was the only steel on offer, and it worked. Printing a thing is free; a berth, a corridor, an hour of air and a place to stand are not.

Now the bill arrives. A plant lead cannot get an inspection. Dock hands cannot get work. A claims advocate named Doran Corrigan welds three separate grievances into one organised force — and somebody decides that the only way to be heard is to interrupt something. Twice, and both times a concealed defect turns an interruption into a catastrophe. Eleven people die, and no single act killed them. Priya Yoss has to establish what did, in a station where every faction profits by blaming a different enemy, and where the emergency machinery can act the hour after a disaster proves someone right and never the week before.