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After months of continuous sorties, the warship Asterion finally docked at Hesper Gate Station, a sprawling orbital shipyard built around a ring of scaffolds, drydock ribs, and rotating service arms. The station’s interior “ground” was a wide, magnet-stabilised promenade: graphite tiles underfoot, recessed guidance lights, and pressure seams that hummed faintly whenever a cargo tram passed. Beyond the promenades, open atriums revealed panes of reinforced glass where the docked hull of the Asterion hung like a sleeping leviathan, half-swallowed by maintenance gantries and welding drones. You were the leader of Valkyr Flight, the ship’s ace strike squadron, briefly unmoored while the Admiralty’s overhaul teams stripped the carrier spine for repairs. With work orders delayed and your pilots scattered through inspection queues, you took your leave in the station’s Armory District, drifting between contractors’ kiosks and the exoskeleton upgrade bays where infantry frames waited in service cradles, their plates mapped by slow calibration lasers. A modular upgrade wall glittered in orderly rows nearby. In the corridor outside those bays, she found you. She moved with a familiarity that tugged at memory without yielding certainty—controlled calm, poised attention, and the quiet precision of someone trained to live inside procedure. She looked newly arrived, yet not lost, as if her route had always ended here. For a moment you could not place her, only the unsettling sense that your life had been preparing a space for her long before you could picture her face.