Chapter 3 #3
Not fail. Flickers. A single amber pulse in the line of green that has been stable since I walked into this hold, and it is there and gone so fast I am not sure I saw it.
But Jazil saw it. His head turns. The amusement drops out of his face like someone pulled a plug, and what’s left is flat, focused, the expression of a male who has been running live cargo for fourteen years and knows what a flicker means.
“HORATIO.”
“I note it, Captain. A brief fluctuation in the stasis field. Within tolerance. The lockdown rotated the bay to back up power twelve minutes ago. The pod’s stasis is cycling to its internal backup.”
“How long will the internal backup hold?”
“Estimated ninety minutes at current draw. The pod’s specs are not in any station database. I am estimating from the power signature. Captain, the power signature is the nonstandard one.”
The nonstandard one. The hand-built one. The one HORATIO could not identify and that does not match any cataloged manufacturer. The six-year one.
Jazil stands. The crate rocks. My thigh goes cold where his knee was, and the absence registers before the alarm does, which tells me something about my priorities that I will deal with another time.
“Is the occupant showing any signs of responsive cycling?”
“Not at this time. Biosignatures are stable. Dormant. The backup is holding.”
“For now.”
“For now, Captain.”
He crosses to the cradle. Not fast. Not slow. One hand on the pod’s housing, looking at the diagnostic strip, and the strip is green again, all green, the amber flicker gone like it never happened.
I am still on the crate. My hands are still in my lap.
The SNAG questions are still in my head — who built this pod, who modified the power, who sealed a living predator in an unmarked container on a ghost ship — and underneath them, a new one, smaller and worse: what happens if the backup doesn’t hold?
“Jazil.” My voice comes out quieter than I meant it to. “If the backup fails. What’s in there. How bad is it?”
He looks at me across the hold. His eyes are steady, and his expression is the expression of a male deciding how much truth to put in an answer.
“Vrennaks are apex predators,” he says. “Five to six feet at the shoulder. Plated. Bioluminescent. Fast. This one’s been in stasis for six years, which means it’ll wake up hungry and disoriented and in a space it doesn’t recognize, and it will react to that the way any predator reacts to a threat.
It mates for life, so if this one is bonded and can’t find its mate? I think it’s going to be very upset.”
“How do they react to a threat?”
“With their teeth.”
Right. Right. So if the backup fails, the thing in the pod wakes up and it is large and fast and plated and uses its teeth and it might look for a mate it will never find in a sealed cargo bay, and I am locked in here with something that is grieving and furious and built like a battering ram with bioluminescence, and my only weapon is a utility jacket and a can-do attitude.
Great. Wonderful. Flossie said, “If you do this cleanly,” like clean was an option, like clean was something that happened to people who got sealed into cargo bays with lovesick apex predators on their first morning.
“The backup will hold,” Jazil says. “Ninety minutes. Lockdown will cycle back to main power in four hours. The pod re-engages. It stays asleep.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
He holds my eyes for a beat longer than the question needs.
“Then I handle it,” he says. “That’s what I do.”
The thing is, it isn’t. Not anymore. OOPS delivered the pod. OOPS contained it, flagged it, brought it in clean. Morrison took one look and said it wasn’t theirs. That’s why I’m here. That’s why Flossie sent me. OOPS brings the problem to the door. SNAG opens the box.
I signed the chain-of-custody. This pod is mine.
This pod with the apex predator in it that mates for life and uses its teeth is mine, and the male standing between me and it like he has any intention of letting me handle my cargo is not making this easier by being competent and calm and tall and — not the point. Not the point, Lorri.
He crosses back to the crate. He sits down beside me. The knee returns. The warmth of the contact returns. The part of my brain on knee-monitoring duties clocks in immediately.
The hold hums and the pod pulses green. The diagnostic strip is stable and entirely itself.
The diagnostic strip flickers again.
And again.
And stays amber.
“Captain.” HORATIO’s voice drops to a register I have not heard from him before. No theater. No commentary. Just the word. “The pod’s internal backup is drawing faster than projected. Current estimate: forty-three minutes. The occupant’s biosignatures are — Captain, the biosignatures are changing.”
“Changing how?”
“The occupant,” HORATIO says, carefully, “is waking up.”
Jazil stands. This time his hand goes to my shoulder — one touch, brief, firm — and the cool of his palm goes through my jacket into the skin underneath and my whole body registers it, all of it, the pressure and the temperature and the fact that he is touching me and the fact that what he is saying with the touch is stay there.
Across the hold, inside the matte gray casing, something moves.
Something large.
The pod screams.