12. The Fight
The Fight
Flossie
Sixty seconds ago his hand was on my face and his purr was in my bones and his mouth was one inch from mine.
Now he is something else.
The transition is not gradual. It doesn’t pass through stages—soft to tense to combat-ready.
It is a switch. One second: the male in the co-pilot’s chair with retracted claws and a purr that shook the console and gold eyes that were looking at my mouth like it was the only navigational coordinate that mattered. Next second: weapon.
He is on his feet and his claws are out—all ten, fully extended, black and curved and catching the emergency light—and his tail has unwound from my hand and is rigid behind him in a posture I recognize from the merc fight.
Combat stance. The tail as counterbalance, as third limb, as the thing that put the last armed merc into a wall in the corridor of my ship before I’d reacquired my aim.
He fills the cockpit. Not just physically—although physically is significant, seven feet of Xarthian between me and the airlock, the shoulders blocking the emergency strips so the light comes around him in a corona.
He fills it with intent. The air changes temperature.
His thermal output spikes—I can feel it from the chair, the 103 degrees climbing, the markings along his neck and shoulders flushing dark as combat chemistry floods his system.
“Stay behind me.”
“Absolutely not.” I draw Betsy. Two-handed grip, feet planted. “I stay beside you or I stay in front of you. Pick one.”
He turns his head. Not his body—his body stays oriented toward the airlock, every line braced. But his head turns and those gold eyes find me and the look is—complicated. The weapon and the male , both present, fighting for the same face. The weapon wants me behind cover. The male knows better.
“Beside.” A concession that costs him something.
I can see it in the flex of his jaw. “The corridor outside the airlock is four meters wide. Mineral walls on both sides. The Tier 1 will breach at speed—they are trained for close-quarters and the pursuit craft will have docking capability. I will engage at the entry point. You cover the secondary approach from the cargo junction.”
“Sprout, what are we looking at?”
“Single agent. Yulx biosignature—elevated thermal, combat-rated. Docking sequence initiated on the starboard airlock. Forty seconds.” The orb is blazing white.
Battle Sprout. No sass, no commentary, the AI stripped to its tactical core.
“The pursuit craft is running automated systems. Disabling the vessel will require access to the starboard engineering panel after the agent is neutralized.”
“After,” I say. “Optimistic.”
“I have learned optimism from extended exposure to you. It is a character flaw I am working to correct.”
Even in battle mode, Sprout is Sprout.
Xor moves to the airlock. I follow. The corridor is tight—his shoulders brush both walls—and I am behind him and beside him and the view from here is his back.
Broad. The tactical suit stretched across muscle that is tensed for combat, the geometric markings visible at his nape where the suit collar ends, the dark fuzz I had my fingers in sixty seconds ago standing on end.
His tail finds me. Not a wrap—a brush. The tip sweeping across my hip as he passes, a single point of contact that says I know you’re there and is gone. My skin lights up under the cardigan where the heat of him lingered.
Focus, Flossie. Morrison’s voice in my head: Feel later. Shoot now.
The airlock hisses.
The Tier 1 agent comes through fast.
Not like the mercs. The mercs came through sloppy—adrenaline and noise, boots on hull metal, the clumsy confidence of hired guns who expected a cargo ship and a civilian.
This agent comes through like smoke through a vent.
Silent. Fluid. A blur of dark blue and black tactical gear, shorter than Xor by nearly a foot but built lean and angular, a body designed for speed in corridors exactly this size.
Not Xarthian. The skin is blue—deep, saturated blue, the color of a lake at dusk, and it catches the emergency light with an almost luminous sheen.
No fuzz, no horns, no tail. The bone structure is sharp beneath the skin—high cheekbones, a jaw that could cut glass, the kind of face that would be beautiful if it weren’t currently trying to kill us.
Silver eyes, bright and cold, catching the light like coins.
Yulx. I’ve seen them on stations—rare, usually in diplomatic or intelligence work. Built for infiltration, not brute force. The fact that SRS has one at Tier 1 tells me everything I need to know about what this male does for a living.
Xor meets him at the threshold.
The sound is—I don’t have a word for it.
Not a crash. Something more violent than it should be.
Xarthian mass against Yulx speed, and the corridor wall buckles at the impact point, mineral dust raining from the ceiling.
Claws on tactical armor. The shriek of black points on polymer.
Xor’s tail whips—not at the agent’s legs, at his weapon arm, three and a half feet of prehensile muscle wrapping and wrenching, and the agent’s sidearm clatters to the deck.
He is terrifying.
He is magnificent.
The two facts exist simultaneously and they are the same fact.
He moves with a speed I haven’t seen from him—not in the merc fight, not in the corridor when the first boarding happened.
The merc fight was controlled. Efficient.
A male handling a problem below his skill grade.
This is different. This is a Tier 1 engaging a Tier 1 and the speed is inhuman—feints and strikes that my eyes can barely track, his claws raking across the agent’s shoulder guard and finding the gap at the collar, and the agent is good, he is very good, he slips the throat strike with a fluidity that is almost boneless and counters with an elbow that catches Xor’s jaw and his head snaps back.
My heart stops.
It is a full second of cardiac suspension, long enough for the word no to form in my chest before my brain has processed the visual data.
His head snaps back and I am already moving—Betsy up, sightline clear—but he rolls with the impact, uses the momentum to spin, and his tail catches the agent’s knee from the blind side and the crack of the joint is audible.
The agent drops to one knee. Good leg bracing. Not out.
“Flossie—the secondary!”
I’m already turning. The cargo junction—the agent came alone but the pursuit craft is automated and Sprout said the docking systems are independent. If the craft has boarding drones—
Two. Small, fast, weapons-grade. The kind SRS equips for corridor suppression—I’ve seen them in Morrison’s threat briefings.
They come around the cargo junction in formation and I put the first one down with a shot that Morrison would have graded a seven out of ten.
Center mass on a moving target at eight meters.
The second drone adjusts—they’re adaptive, they learn from the first casualty—and the angle changes and I drop to one knee to fire under the first drone’s debris cloud while the second is recalculating.
The agent moves.
One arm breaks free from Xor’s grapple—a half-inch of space, a fraction of a second, enough. His hand goes to his vest. The tactical weight he throws is small and solid and aimed, and my dodge is half a beat too slow. It catches me across the temple. I hit the wall.
For one bad second the corridor goes white at the edges and copper floods my mouth and Morrison’s voice cuts through the static: going down is dying, Flossie.
I don’t go down. I brace against the bulkhead with one hand, blood already running warm and fast down my cheek the way head wounds do, and the second drone is still incoming and I put Betsy up on instinct and fire clean.
It sparks and spins and dies against the opposite wall.
“Good girl, Bets.” My hands are steady. My face is not.
I turn.
He has the agent pinned.
His tail is locked around both of the agent’s wrists.
His knee is on the damaged leg. The agent is face-down on the deck plating, immobilized, and Xor’s hand is at his throat—but not with the controlled precision I saw in the first seconds.
The claws are in. Not dimpling. In. Four points sunk through the gap at the collar seam, dark against the luminous blue, and the agent has gone absolutely still with the stillness of a male who knows when the margin is gone.
The sound Xor is making lives below the warning frequency. It has no language. It has no SRS operational category. It is something older than either of them, the thing the Proving Dens tried to excise and couldn’t reach all the way down to.
He is going to kill him.
“Xor.”
His name. Not the blade. The tether—the register I found in the bunk with my body against his and the purr in my ribs. I say it across the corridor at a normal volume, with the blood running warm and fast between my fingers pressed to my temple, and I say it like: I’m here. Stay here.
He stops.
The claws don’t retract—not yet, the combat chemistry too hot—but the downward force holds.
His head turns a fraction, and the gold eyes find me against the mineral wall with my hand pressed to the cut, blood mapping the side of my face, and something happens to him that I’ve never seen.
The weapon and the male, both present, and something underneath both of them—the architecture cracking under the weight of what he almost did and the sight of my blood and the fact that I am still standing.
My body responds to this with a heat that has no business being present in a corridor where someone is bleeding. It’s present anyway. Because I am watching the restraint engage in real time, and the restraint is choosing me.
“Don’t kill him.” My voice. Steadier than it has any right to be.