Wick

BLACKFLAME's den is the Wick, a decommissioned relay station whose position appears in no sector's survey. People who claim to have been there describe the same three things and nothing else:

• a mast with a black flame burned into its housing;
• a room of racks that hum like a held note and run hot enough to heat the place;
• one codec deck on a desk, tuned to 142.59, with the volume low and the channel open.

Everything else comes from footage. Now and then an intercept drags a few frames from inside the Wick in behind it, and the frames always show the same room:

• The view. A scarred viewport looks out on a drifting field of wrecked orbital stations: ring stations, broken spokes, hulks gone dark. Old hands say they are stations the Switch-Off turned off and nobody towed away.
• The desk. A bank of mismatched CRTs sits among radio and test gear with analogue meters, beside a steel mug. One monitor shows a scope trace of live traffic, one shows the burn-in surfacing in static, and one shows the network's relays as a slowly turning constellation.
• The night vista. On the Wick's night side, a gas giant fills the window and its terminator line crawls across the glass by the hour. Beyond the wrecks hangs one relay station still lit, and operators say its spokes are the channels it carries. Survey crews have matched that gas giant against every chart in the Drift. They found forty candidates, which is the same as finding none.
• The relay beam. A beam burns up from the Wick's mast into the dark, and it burns only while every channel on the network is answering. When frames come through with the beam dark, operators take it as trouble on the network, and ready rooms stay quiet until it is lit again.
• The empty chair. Sometimes the frames catch the desk with no one at it. The chair stands empty and turned away, with headphones and shades left by the keyboard. Operators who see that image say the relays are on their own tonight, and they stand their own watches a little longer.

When BLACKFLAME is in the chair, the burn-in is over the face, as it is in every verified frame. Frames that show a face at that desk do circulate. The network files them as unverified footage and nobody has confirmed one.

The line to the arrivals pad. Intercepts that run long enough sometimes catch a second voice on the Wick's open channel: bright, prim and delighted, classifying things aloud. It is VECTOR, the SpacePort's caretaker. He has not left his post at the arrivals pad, and never would. The Wick's console keeps a line open to him over the relays, and he answers from his post, which he considers entirely within protocol. He reads the racks and the relays when asked, and touches nothing he hasn't been cleared for. He calls whoever is at the console "host". Protocol does not number the host, so he never gives one an arrival number, and he never says whose console it is.