Excerpt from the Personal Journal of Dorian Almasi
(18/4/1973 - filed under Operation Sealpath / NIA Archive Redline-5)
I arrived in Baracoa just after dawn - one of those pale, salt-bitten sunrises that stains everything in a shade of damp regret. The kind of light that makes rust shine and men look older than they are.
The vessel that brought me in was barely seaworthy - a converted sugar freighter with a name no longer legible and a crew that operated on the time-honored tradition of never asking questions they didn’t want answered. We came in under low throttle, coasting past the outer reef where the harbor patrol occasionally remembered to circle. No greeting, no inspection - just a single half-interested signal light from the port watchtower that flickered like an afterthought.
By the time my boots hit the dock planks, the port was already breathing in full. Crates were being hauled, shouted about, re-labeled, and misplaced with the practiced rhythm of a well-oiled, untraceable machine. Somewhere in that mess, a man was already slipping bribe money into a clipboard while his partner argued loudly about a shipping delay no one intended to fix.
Customs control was a folding table nailed to a bollard. Two guards stood on either side, armed with clipboards, one of them swatting mosquitoes with a maritime ledger. The third,barely twenty, sunburned to leather, and far too tired to care, squinted at my work history and tapped a line with his fingernail.
“‘Honorably discharged - Dockside Logistics Division, Ninth Nereidonian Combat Transport Corps.’” He read it out like a schoolboy reciting poetry he didn’t believe in. “You really expect me to believe you came out of that mess with all your fingers and no limp?”
I smiled. Not too much - just enough to suggest weariness, maybe a bit of shame. “Lucky fingers, bad knees. You want to see the letter from my osteopath?”
“And you’re still using the old Kalinagoan seal.” he muttered. “No wonder this got flagged.” He waved the paper like it offended him personally.
I shrugged. “It’s the version I was told would get me processed quickest.”
He snorted. “Maybe twenty years ago.”
He let me through anyway. The seal had done its job - not of proving authenticity, but of drawing attention just sharp enough to scratch curiosity without slicing suspicion. That’s the balance. You want to look suspicious enough to be noticed, but not interesting enough to be remembered.
A dockhand was shouting at someone over a stack of mislabeled cargo: “If this had gone to Port Arbitration, we’d still be filling out forms by harvest season!”
A second voice, older, drier: “Depends who’s governing today - Baracoa’s under Ayiti regional policy, but the Republic inspector still thinks his badge counts here.”
I’d been briefed about that - Nereidonia’s little federal dysfunctions. A nation of overlapping jurisdictions and competing governance layers, like a tangle of nets no one’s untied in centuries. You weren’t governed so much as you were loosely draped in authority - by the time a law reached a place like Baracoa, it was usually out of date or out of favor.
The dock smelled of fish, sweat, and bribes - in that order. Someone had left a half-empty bottle of seawater and a shot of rum at the base of a corroded cargo crane. A makeshift shrine - Ptolemaic luck and Taino safe passage rites, cohabitating like two old gods forced into a shared apartment. The workers passed it without comment. They knew the ritual wasn’t about belief - it was about familiarity.
Behind the shrine, a mural half-concealed by scaffoldings caught my eye: a chipped mosaic of Horus and Atabey, side by side, watching the rust spread across old shipping containers like gangrene. A child had scrawled something beneath in chalk: “The sea watches even when the courts forget.”
I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t ask.
Someone handed me my dock pass - three weeks’ authorization, stamped in triplicate, one of the stamps clearly a fishbone someone had used by accident or design. The man who gave it to me didn’t bother explaining. Just said, “Welcome to the circus.”
No one asked where I came from. No one cared what I’d done before. They just wanted to know whether I could carry my own weight and keep quiet about where the weight came from.
That’s how these places work. The Republic still writes laws, but men like these enforce them - selectively, pragmatically, and always with a ledger in one hand and a wrench in the other.
I joined the loading crew by midmorning, my palms blistering by midday. No one spoke much. When they did, it was a dialect layered with idioms, hybrid phrases, half-sarcasms, and terms I hadn’t heard even in my NIA linguistic prep. Someone asked me if I’d “paid the crab tax” - I still don’t know what it meant, and I was too tired to ask.
Later, during a lunch break, a man with sea-rotted boots offered me a boiled plantain and advised I eat it upside-down “to keep the port fines low.” He said it deadpan. I still don’t know if it was a joke or policy.
There was a rhythm here. One I didn’t understand yet. But I’d begun to hear it - the clicks between transactions, the pause in a conversation when someone calculates how much honesty is safe, the way a bribe changes hands without ever stopping motion.
I had a name now. Dorian Almasi. Fixer. Ex-soldier. Quiet problem-solver with just enough damage to be believable. I was an apparition stitched from forged paper, institutional betrayal, and a few scars that weren’t entirely fake.
I wasn’t here to be trusted. I was here to be useful.
And in this place, that’s better than trust.
- D.A.