Chapter 2
Chain of Custody
Jazil
The pod is humming wrong.
Not loud. Not yet. But the harmonic on the diagnostic strip has gone half a tone flat in the last twenty minutes and I can hear it from across the hold — a bad belt on an engine before the engine knows.
The cradle says green, green, green. The cradle is a liar.
The cradle has been a liar since Hyross Station, and I’ve been telling Mother as much for six days, and the only person Mother is interested in telling about it is whoever shows up from SNAG in, I check the chrono, eleven minutes.
“HORATIO.”
“Captain.”
“What’s the cradle telling me?”
“The cradle reports nominal containment, Captain.”
“And what are you telling me?”
A pause. The kind HORATIO produces when he’s about to commit to an opinion he can technically be held accountable for. “I am telling you the cradle is a liar, Captain. I have been telling you this for six days. I am gratified to hear you have finally begun listening.”
“Spike anything. I want a baseline before the SNAG agent gets here.”
“Already running. The baseline, I should note, is drifting.”
“How fast?”
“Politely.”
I crack my neck. The hold smells of warm metal and the faint ozone the cradle’s been off-gassing since the relay station, with the sweeter undernote of lubricant I racked through the housing this morning.
Temperature’s climbed a couple of degrees while I’ve been working, and I shucked the top half of the overalls about an hour into the diagnostic and never put them back on, which is fine, because nobody’s coming aboard except, I check the chrono again, a SNAG agent in nine minutes, who will be one of Mother’s old contacts, most likely some grizzled retired courier who’s seen worse cargo than this and will not give a damn whether I’m wearing my uniform like a regulation poster boy.
The panel driver goes along the cradle housing one more time. Tighten the secondary clamp. The hum drops a quarter tone. Better. Not solved.
“Captain.”
“What.”
“Your ridges.”
Down my forearms, the iridescence has gone a shade darker, catching the work-light differently than the rest of my skin. They do this when the cargo’s wrong and the body knows it before the mind catches up. I roll the kink out of my shoulder.
“They’re fine.”
“They are informative, Captain. I am simply —”
“HORATIO.”
“Captain.”
My hands flex. The ridges settle. Mostly. This is fine. Containment job. Chain-of-custody handoff. Sign a flimsy and pass the haunted shipment to whoever Mother has sent and undock by mid-shift. I can do this with my eyes closed. I have done this exact handoff a hundred times.
That’s when the boots stop at the top of the ramp.
Not at the ramp. Past it. They made it all the way up and into the hold before going still, and that means nerve, or momentum, or the particular forward motion of someone who has had an unpleasant morning and decided through is the only direction available.
My tongue flicks out before my brain has a vote.
Adrenaline. Recent-sprint, not fear-fresh. And underneath it, warm and unannounced, something sweet and layered that my biology straightens up and pays attention to. Compatible. A register that hasn’t fired in forty-one years of living and isn’t supposed to fire at all.
Female.
I set the driver down very carefully.
I turn around.
She’s small. Curvy. Flushed all the way down to where the jacket — wrong jacket, too broad in the shoulder, broken into a male’s frame — gapes at the throat.
Her hair’s escaping whatever she did to it this morning, brown strands curling damp at her temple.
Her eyes are huge, hazel shifting green in the work-light.
She’s holding a datapad two-handed, like it might bolt.
Everything in me says yes.
It says it without consulting anyone else. It says it the way a Skiveth male’s biology is supposed to say it once in a lifetime and has not, for me, said it in forty-one years, and I have approximately one second to decide what I am going to do with my face.
I lean a hip against the cradle. Cross my arms.
“You supposed to be here?”
She straightens. Both feet planted. “Lorri Vance. SNAG. Chain-of-custody on the flagged pod. I have the datapad, I have the authorization, I’m absolutely meant to be here.” A breath. “I went up the wrong ramp first.”
“How wrong?”
“Bay Thirteen wrong.”
“Ah.”
“Something in there roared at me.”
“I’d imagine it did.”
“It was deafening.”
“Vresh has feelings about visitors. He bites.” I tip my chin at her hands. “You held onto the datapad.”
“I held onto the datapad.”
“Good.”
That word does something to her. The flush deepens from cheek into throat, and her grip on the datapad shifts.
Her pulse is going at her collar. I could count it from here.
I could count it with my eyes closed. My tongue catches the edge of her scent again and I stop counting because if I keep tracking her pulse while tasting sweet-warm-compatible on the air, my ridges are going to go full dark in front of her, and I am not ready to explain that.
“Jazil Ereux.” I push off the cradle. Walk toward her. Slow. “OOPS. The pod’s mine until you sign for it.”
“Right.” She fumbles the datapad around. “Right. Yes. I have the form preloaded.”
She has. It’s flawless when I take it — every field, the case number, the containment specs, the signature line waiting clean and bright. She does this part well. Whoever briefed her drilled it.
“Who briefed you?”
“Flossie. Florence Knight. SNAG.”
I look up. “Flossie’s running her own outfit?”
“You know her?”
“Used to fly long-haul at OOPS. She left a couple of months ago. On good terms — Mother’s the kind who’ll always help out family, and Flossie’s family.” I sign the form. Slide the stylus back into its clip. “How long has SNAG been open?”
“Three weeks and four days. The bunting hasn’t gone up yet.”
“And you’re —”
“Day one. This morning.”
I stop with the datapad halfway back to her.
“Day one.”
“Day one. Eleven minutes into my interview, she abandoned the questions and gave me a working trial instead. This is the trial.”
I look at her. Properly. Three weeks and four days.
First hire. Working trial. Flossie does not miss — Flossie has the cleanest read on people I’ve ever known, and Flossie picked this woman out of a chair on her first morning and put her on a cargo handoff for a pod Mother flagged personally, which means Flossie saw something in eleven minutes that I am —
My ridges pulse darker. I lose the thread.
“Sign here for SNAG,” I say. I tap the line.
She reaches for the stylus. We’re standing close enough now that I can hear her breathing, the small catch and release of someone working hard to keep it even.
The hold’s warmth has loaded the air between us and the warm-sweet thing my tongue keeps tasting is thicker now, layered with something tea-adjacent and something that might be soap and underneath both of them the part that is just her, and the part that is just her is going to be the death of me.
Her fingers brush mine on the handover and her breath hitches — small, almost nothing, the sort of catch you’d miss if you weren’t paying attention — and I am, regrettably, paying attention.
Yes.
She signs. Quick, neat handwriting. Lorri Vance. I take the datapad back. Our hands brush again.
The pod chooses this exact moment to make its move.
The hum shifts. Not a quarter tone; a full step, audible to her, audible to anyone, and the diagnostic strip flares amber for half a second before steadying back to green like nothing happened. Lorri’s head whips around.
“Was that —”
“HORATIO.”
“On it, Captain. The cradle reports stable. The cradle is, I should reiterate, lying.”
Lorri takes a half-step toward the cradle. “Should we be —”
“No,” I say, at the exact moment she says, “Should I —” and reaches for the diagnostic console.
I move.
I don’t think about moving. My hand closes over hers on the console rim before her fingers have made contact with anything that will object to being touched, and I’m behind her, close enough that my chest is at her shoulder blade and I can feel the heat radiating off the back of her neck.
Her hand under mine is small and warm. The entire length of my forearm is pressed along hers because that’s how the geometry worked out, and the ridges along my arm are about three shades darker than they were two minutes ago, and the warm-sweet scent at the nape of her neck is so close to my mouth I could taste it without trying, and there is nothing to do about any of it.
“Don’t touch the panel,” I say, into her ear. Quieter than I meant to. Closer than I meant to.
She has gone perfectly still.
“Why,” she says. Also quiet.
“Because the cradle is sensitive, and I don’t yet know what it’s sensitive to, and I would prefer not to find out by way of your hand.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
Neither of us moves.
Her pulse is doing something at the side of her throat that I can see from this angle, fast and visible, and her hair has the smell of recycled station air and something that might be tea and underneath both of them the warm-sweet thing my tongue has been tasting since she walked aboard, and I am — I have been — pressed against her for approximately four seconds longer than the situation strictly required.
I step back. Slow.
She turns. Slower.
Her cheeks are crimson. Her eyes are doing something I am not equipped to name. The chin comes up.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Don’t,” she says.
Then — both at once — “Sorry.”
She laughs. It bursts out of her, helpless, and it lands somewhere in my chest that I am going to have to deal with later, in private, after she is off my ship.
“HORATIO,” I say. “Status.”
“The cradle is restabilizing, Captain. The harmonic has settled. We are, for the moment, in nominal range.” A diplomatic pause.
“I might gently suggest that the agent has done her part of the handoff and is free to take possession of the pod, if she so wishes, before we have any further excitement.”
“I’d love to,” Lorri says.