Chapter 3
It Wakes Up
Lorri
The klaxon finally stops.
Not the ringing in my ears. That one is going to be here for a while.
But the station alarm cuts off mid-cycle, and the silence it leaves behind has views about me, and all of its views are bad.
The bay doors are sealed. The magnetic clamps have engaged and the hold lights have dropped to a low amber that makes everything look like a sepia filter for bad decisions, and I am standing at Jazil Ereux’s comm console with my fingers over a message I have not yet sent to Flossie because I have forgotten, temporarily but completely, how words go in an order.
Hi Flossie. I locked down two bays. One contains a cargo hauler who has named me in a formal complaint. The other contains a stasis pod and a very tall shirtless alien, and me. I will be here for twenty-four hours. Shall I update my employment status now, or would you prefer to do it in person?
The cursor blinks. The cursor is patient. The cursor has nowhere to go. Neither do I, which is the problem.
“Lorri.”
His voice comes from behind me. Low, unhurried, the voice of someone who has dealt with worse mornings than this and will not raise it for mine. Footsteps on the deck plates, slow and even. Then the soft clunk of something being set down on the console ledge beside me.
Water. A sealed station ration pouch, the foil kind with the pull tab. He’s opened it for me.
“Drink that,” he says. “The message will still be there when you’re done.”
He is standing close enough that I can feel the temperature difference between us. He runs cooler than me. I noticed it at the console when his chest was at my shoulder blade and his mouth was at my ear, and I am noticing it again now, a draft I cannot locate but also cannot stop standing in.
“I’m fine.”
“You haven’t blinked in forty seconds.”
“That’s a normal amount of not blinking.”
“It is not.”
His hand is still on the pouch. My hand goes to the pouch.
Our fingers overlap on the foil and his are cool and dry and longer than mine by a full knuckle, and neither of us corrects this for one beat, two beats, a third beat that goes on long enough to qualify as its own small diplomatic incident, and then he lets go, and I pull the pouch to my chest like I’ve claimed it in combat.
I drink. Station filtration. Flat. The best thing I have ever tasted.
Don’t think about his hands. Don’t think about the hands. Hands are not the point. The point is the message. Send the message. Be a professional woman who is trapped in a cargo bay by her own hand. Her own literal hand. On a panel. That she touched. STOP THINKING ABOUT HANDS.
“Captain,” HORATIO says, from somewhere in the ceiling.
The voice has changed since the klaxon. Quieter.
Less like an AI narrating his own one-act play and more like an AI who has been told by someone bigger than him to use his indoor voice.
“The bay temperature is stabilizing. Life support is nominal. I have adjusted the ambient lighting for extended habitation. Shall I adjust further?”
“Leave it.”
“Of course, Captain. I will note that the current lighting is — and I mean this with no editorial intent whatsoever — quite flattering.”
“HORATIO.”
“I am simply maintaining accuracy, Captain.”
The message to Flossie writes itself while I am trying not to look at the ceiling or at the lighting or at the shirtless male; the lighting is reportedly flattering.
My fingers move on the input pad and I do not check what they’ve typed because if I check I will rewrite it and if I rewrite it, I will be here all day and I am already here all day. I press send.
“Done.”
“Good.” He tips his chin toward the cargo crates by the far wall. “Sit down.”
“I’m fine standing.”
“Your knees are shaking.”
My knees are, in fact, shaking. They have been shaking since the klaxon and the rest of me has been pretending not to notice, and now that he’s said it out loud the pretense collapses and my legs do something in the neighborhood of buckling. I cross the hold. I sit on the crate.
Jazil does not sit; instead, he is already moving back toward the comm console, pulling a headset off the wall hook, and his free hand changes the display from comm-out to something denser. Schematics. Station grid overlays. Security channel headers scrolling in orange text.
“HORATIO, patch me to docking authority. And get Morrison’s dispatch on the secondary.”
“Already waiting, Captain. The docking authority is on channel six. Morrison’s office is on nine. Shall I note your tone preference?”
“No.”
“Professional it is, then. Patching.”
He works through the lockdown as if it were a regular Tuesday incident.
I sit on the crate with my hands in my lap — both of them, flat, palms down, because I have been explicitly and catastrophically taught that my hands are not to be trusted near panels — and I watch him deal with it.
Docking authority first: calm, brief, an exchange between someone who knows the protocols and someone on the other end who is very clearly having a worse day than Jazil is.
He gives his OOPS ID, his bay number, the lockdown trigger code, and the containment status of the pod.
His voice does not change register once. He could be ordering lunch.
Morrison’s dispatch is different. Warmer.
Faster. He calls her Mother, not Morrison, and the voice that comes back through the comm is clipped and female and sounds like it has seventeen other things happening and has chosen to give him thirty seconds of its undivided attention, which is apparently more than most people get.
“Bay-restricted, not station-wide,” he says. “Twenty-four hours. Pod’s stable. HORATIO’s filed the report. I have the SNAG courier with me.”
A pause. Something comes back I can’t hear. He glances at me. The glance is quick and does something I am choosing not to examine.
“She’s fine,” he says. “I’ll make sure.”
He’ll make sure. He told Morrison he’ll make sure. About me. This is a professional statement made by a professional male on a professional channel to his professional superior, and my face is doing a thing about it I would like it to stop doing immediately.
He signs off and switches to the station’s security feed.
Bay 13, split-screen with Bay 14. In Bay 13, Vresh is pacing.
The image is low-resolution and blue-tinted, but the pacing has a quality to it that suggests the formal complaints are now being composed in real time, possibly in multiple languages.
Jazil watches it for two seconds, makes a sound that is not quite a laugh, and closes the feed.
The OOPS overalls are still pooled at his hips.
He has been bare from the waist up this entire time and appears to have no intention of correcting this, and in the amber lockdown light the green of his skin is doing something that no skin should be allowed to do without a permit.
The iridescence doesn’t just catch light.
It holds it. Bronze and copper and gold threading through the emerald, shifting when he breathes, shifting when he reaches for the console, shifting when the muscles in his back realign as he leans over the display.
I have seen hot aliens before. I dated a Seraphim for three months on Outpost Velar.
Gorgeous wings. Generous wingspan. Absolutely foul temper.
The relationship ended when he threw my comm unit at a wall because I laughed at the wrong moment during an argument about whose turn it was to clean the air filter, and I left, and the wingspan was not sufficient compensation for the temper, and I learned something about the difference between a male who is beautiful and a male who is good.
Jazil Ereux is making a security call in a lockdown with his shirt off and his forearms resting on the console so the ridges catch the amber light, and he is calm, and he is professional, and he brought me water and he opened it first. The Seraphim opened nothing for me.
The Seraphim never noticed when my hands were shaking.
That’s not the same thing. That’s not a comparison. I am not comparing a three-month relationship that ended with a wall-mounted comm unit to a male I have known for an hour. Stop it.
I stop it for approximately eight seconds, which is how long he takes to finish with the console and cross the hold and drop onto the crate beside mine. Not across from me. Beside. Close enough that when the crate settles under his weight, his knee bumps the outside of my knee and stays there.
The contact stays.
It stays the way a sentence stays when nobody can think of how to finish it, and I am not moving my knee, and he is not moving his knee and the part of my brain that should worry about my employment status has been reassigned to knee-monitoring duties without my approval.
“The pod,” I say, because I need to say something, and the pod is safer than the knee. “What’s in it?”
He tips his head back against the crate behind him. The movement exposes the line of his throat and the bead of sweat at his collarbone, and I am looking at neither of these things. I am looking at neither of these things with tremendous focus.
“Vrennak,” he says. “Salvaged. Mid-belt research outpost pulled it off a derelict that drifted into their sector. No manifest. No origin. Sealed under a power signature nobody recognized.”
“A derelict.”
“Ghost ship. Empty. Just the pod.”
“Who puts a Vrennak in a pod on a ghost ship?”
His eyes meet mine. Blue, steady, and for the first time since the klaxon, not amused. “That’s the question,” he says. “That’s why Morrison called SNAG.”
The distinction lands. Not hard — quiet.
OOPS found the pod. OOPS contained it. OOPS flagged it and moved it and is delivering it, because that’s what OOPS does — competent, professional, done.
But the question of who put it there and why — that’s SNAG.
That’s the job I am on probation for. The job that hires people to walk into bays and deal with the thing the courier brought in.