Chapter 1 #3
The sound goes through me before my ears process it.
My body makes every decision. Backwards, three steps, heel catching the ramp lip — down the ramp, jacket swinging open, datapad swinging with me, both arms doing the thing arms do when the brain has been bypassed by something older and louder than sense.
The concourse catches me at the bottom. Sorry-sorry-sorry to a pair of kneecaps that are already elsewhere. My heart is doing something load-bearing with my ribcage. One hand on the concourse wall and I stare at the floor because the floor is safe, and the floor is not currently roaring at me.
Nothing followed. The ramp is empty and still.
The number on the floor says 13, with the 1 nearly gone — worn to a suggestion, a ghost of paint at the left-hand edge of the stencil.
The 3 is bold. Clear. Entirely legible. I read the whole thing as 14 because I was tracking seventeen other things and my brain made an executive decision with insufficient data and that decision was incorrect, and I walked up a dark ramp and shouted into the face of what appeared to be a very old, very large alien cargo hauler who has feelings about strangers near his bay and expressed them at volume directly into my face.
The digital signage above the ramp reads BAY 13.
Two ramps down: BAY 14.
I stand with my hand on the concourse wall for three full seconds. A passing dockworker glances at me. I give him the nod of a person who definitely meant to do that and he moves on.
Right.
Thirty paces.
The jacket is straightened. The lucky top is askew underneath it, and I can’t fix that without opening the jacket fully on the concourse, so I leave it.
My hair is committed to something. I can’t tell what.
My cheeks are past the point where I can call them flushed with a straight face; they are warm, continuously, a system running too hot that hasn’t found its reset.
The pulse in my throat is visible. I can feel it tapping against my collar, and if I can feel it, then anyone standing close enough can see it, which means I need to not let anyone stand close enough.
The digital signage above the ramp reads BAY 14. Both numerals are bold. Both numerals accounted for.
Floor marking. 14. Yes.
Up the ramp.
Warmth. Ship-warm — the deep, bone-in warmth of a vessel that has been running for hours and is still shedding it, heat that settles in the upper third of a space and makes the air feel inhabited.
OOPS markings on the walls in orange-on-gray: route codes, contractor insignia, safety regs in three languages.
Cargo ramp down. And in the center of it all, on a containment cradle that sits level and deliberate, the pod.
Matte gray. Small. Diagnostic lights pulsing across the cradle strip: green, green, green. Stable. Contained.
Not roaring.
Two steps deeper and my eyes are still adjusting from the concourse light when I find him.
He’s at the far end of the hold near the inner hatch of his ship, most of his back to me, doing something to a wall panel with a tool I don’t have a name for.
The OOPS overalls are present but only just — pooled at his hips, waistband low, the top half shucked down and the straps hanging loose at his sides.
Above that is a considerable quantity of green skin, emerald-deep and vivid, catching the hold’s amber work-light in a way that makes the color seem as if it has its own source.
Short dark hair, loose, slightly wavy on top — hair on his head that has clearly started the day as something and has since become something else entirely, and the something else is very —
The ridges on his forearms are visible as he works.
The credentials photo had them too, but the photo did not have the light at this angle or the movement of actual living muscle underneath, and my brain, which has been valiantly processing inputs all morning, quietly closes several tabs and opens only this one.
There is a bead of sweat in the groove of his spine.
The specific, detached precision with which I notice this is the precision of a brain that has abandoned its remaining operating functions.
This is fine. The loop is still running, but it’s very far away, like something playing in another room. He is a professional contact. You are a professional. You are going to walk over there and present the datapad and say your name and be completely normal about —
He hasn’t heard me. My boots are quiet on the floor, and my heart is not quiet at all, and I’ve been standing here long enough that the moment has developed its own uncomfortable mass.
Say something. Say his name. Say hello. Say literally anything, Lorri, with your mouth, using words, in the next three —
“Oh,” says a voice from somewhere in the ceiling, in the tone of a person who has been watching and has found this very satisfying indeed. “Marvelous. We have a guest.”
A beat.
“She appears to have arrived at speed, Captain. Shall I note that in the manifest? Under miscellaneous.”