Chapter 4
The Right Voice
Lorri
Not hums. Not shifts. Screams. The pod screams in a register that bypasses every rational part of my brain and hits the part that grew up on a mining colony, the part that knows what an alarm sounds like when it comes from something that was supposed to stay asleep.
Jazil is already moving. Not toward me. Toward the port locker.
One hand on the containment rod before I’ve finished flinching, the other rifling the lower shelf the way you rifle a drawer you already know the contents of.
He moves differently now. Looser. Faster.
The danger has opened something in him that civilian life keeps bolted shut, and the thing behind the bolt is — not the point. NOT THE POINT RIGHT NOW, LORRI.
The diagnostic strip turns solid red. The pod’s casing splits along a seam that was not there two seconds ago.
Steam. Or vapor. Something hot and wet and biological pouring out of the breach, and through it, the first shape: a skull, long and angular, plated in something between bone and chitin.
Eyes. Four of them. Milky and bioluminescent, pulsing cold blue-white.
A jaw that hinges wider than anatomy should allow.
Teeth that are not for chewing.
SNAG should not have hired me. Flossie should not have hired me. I am going to die in a cargo hold because I told a kind woman in a butter-colored cardigan I cried reading her job posting and she gave me a TASK.
“Lorri.” His voice has gone flat. Operator-flat, stripped of everything but function, and the command voice does something to my nervous system that my nervous system does not have time to fill out the paperwork for. “Stay behind me. Don’t run.”
I don’t run.
The Vrennak rises. And rises. The full body of it clears the pod, and the scale hits all at once: five feet at the shoulder, six at the crest of the plated spine, and wide.
Wide in a way that height doesn’t capture.
Plated muscle and bioluminescent panels and a tail that sweeps the deck plate with a sound like metal on metal.
Six years in a modified stasis pod on a ghost ship and it is awake and it is filling the hold and it is very, very unhappy about it.
The tail catches the secondary cargo console on the backswing. The console doesn’t break so much as cease. Sparks. Display fragments. A dent in the bulkhead that is going to need more than a sticker and some round handwriting.
“Captain.” HORATIO has lost the theater.
Not all of it — HORATIO cannot lose all of it — but enough that the voice coming out of the ceiling sounds like a man whose household is on fire and who is making a note of it for the insurance claim.
“Secondary console is offline. Ventilation housing in Quadrant Three has sustained impact damage. I am rerouting the airflow. I would also like to note, for the insurance claim I am already drafting, that this vessel is rated for courier freight, not apex predator containment.”
“HORATIO. Containment options.”
“Secondary containment field available. Requires manual activation — two-stage seal release on the port wall: red housing, then green. The field will need to charge, and the Vrennak will need to be within the cradle perimeter for re-engagement.”
“How long to charge?”
“Approximately ninety seconds from activation.”
Jazil looks at me. Not at the Vrennak who is roaring but not moving yet. At me. Blue eyes steady, slit pupils contracted to vertical lines, and he is about to ask me something he needs me to say yes to. I can see it in every line of him.
“The seal releases are on the port wall behind you. I need to keep this thing’s attention. I can’t be in two places. Can you do it?”
Not stay there. Not let me handle it. Can you do it?
“Yes.”
“Red housing first. Pull the lever down, hold for three seconds, and release. Then green housing, same motion. Go when I draw it.”
The Vrennak’s four eyes swivel between us. It is deciding. Every cell of me understands what kind of decision it is making.
Jazil moves. Toward the Vrennak. The rod comes up, and he cracks it against the plated flank and the sound rings through the hold like a bell struck wrong and the Vrennak screams and swings toward him and the pivot he makes — fluid, low, every joint unlocking into something faster than his walk — does a thing to the base of my spine that I am absolutely not acknowledging while running for my life.
I run.
The port wall is twelve feet behind me. My boots ring on the deck plate. Red housing. Red lever. Cold under my hands. I pull it down and hold and count — one, two, three — and the mechanism grinds and something in the cradle’s base engages with a hydraulic clunk.
Behind me: the crack of the rod on a plated skull. A grunt from Jazil that is low and clipped and not a word. The scrape of claws on the deck plating. Something heavy hitting a bulkhead hard enough that the port wall shudders under my palms.
I release. Green housing. Two feet left. Down, hold, count —
The Vrennak’s tail catches the cradle housing on a blind swing. The field emitter’s mounting bracket shears clean off the base. Sparks. Dark.
“Captain. The primary emitter is offline.” HORATIO’s voice has gone flat. No flourish. No commentary. Just information, delivered fast. “Switching to back up emitter. Recalibrating. New charge time: approximately four minutes.”
Four minutes.
Four minutes in a sealed cargo hold with an apex predator that is currently using a courier ship the way my brothers used to use the colony gym — as a surface to destroy when the mood took them.
Four minutes in which Jazil has to keep a five-hundred-pound plated carnivore interested in him instead of me, with a rod and one arm and the sheer stupid confidence of a man who has been running live cargo for fourteen years and has apparently decided that death is a scheduling problem.
Because he is bleeding. The Vrennak’s claws caught his right forearm on the pivot — I saw it happen, saw the slash open from elbow to wrist, clean and deep and wrong — and the blood is coming dark, almost black in the lockdown light, sheeting down his hand and over the rod.
He hasn’t made a sound about it. He hasn’t stopped moving.
He is herding the Vrennak toward the center of the hold with the patience of someone who has reclassified pain as a to-do item and moved it to the bottom of the list.
Jazil is bleeding, and he is still between me and it. He is bleeding, and the muscles in his back are doing things under the green-bronze skin that the lockdown light is choosing to illuminate with what I can only describe as personal malice, and I am WATCHING instead of HELPING.
Not now. Help now. Be attracted to the bleeding alien later. Later is a thing that exists. Hopefully.
The Vrennak charges the starboard cargo rack.
Three crates go over. The rack bows, shrieks, and one of the upper cross-braces snaps free and clatters across the hold like a thrown javelin.
Jazil sidesteps it without looking. Without looking.
His body just knows the trajectory, the way mine knows how to trip over things and apologize to furniture.
“Captain, I am now cataloging the damage. Thus far: one secondary console, one ventilation housing, three cargo crates of unspecified non-hazardous freight, one cross-brace, and what I believe was a personal effects locker. I would like the record to reflect that I am not speculating on the insurance implications, but I am thinking about them very loudly.”
Jazil doesn’t answer. He is driving the Vrennak back, step by step, the rod working in short controlled arcs that keep the plated skull turning, keep the four eyes tracking him instead of me.
The ridges on both his forearms have gone dark — nearly black — and he is working the Vrennak the way you work a problem you can’t solve but refuse to put down, and I am standing at the port wall with my hands on a lever and my heart hammering and the stupid, useless, magnificently unhelpful thought that nobody has ever looked like that while bleeding.
Nobody. Not once. Not in the history of bleeding.
STOP IT.
The green housing clicks. The backup emitter begins to cycle. A low whine builds beneath my boots.
“HORATIO. Field status.”
“Charging, Captain. Twelve percent. The Vrennak will need to be within the expanded cradle perimeter. The perimeter has shifted because of the emitter swap. I am recalculating.”
The Vrennak is not cooperating with HORATIO’s recalculations.
It has planted itself in the center of the hold, forelimbs braced, tail sweeping in long arcs that clear anything within reach.
The bioluminescence has shifted from cold blue-white to something hotter, pulsing fast and irregularly.
It is not charging. It is not retreating.
It is doing math. Predator math. The math that ends with teeth.
“It won’t herd,” Jazil says. Flat. Thinking out loud when the audience is himself and the answers are getting worse. “Six years in stasis. It’s disoriented. It doesn’t recognize the cradle as safe.”
“So how do we get it back?”
He looks at me across the hold. Blood on his arm, rod in his hand, jaw set.
“We need to calm it down. If it stops perceiving us as a threat, HORATIO can widen the field perimeter and pull it in. But it has to stop fighting first.”
“How do you calm down a Vrennak?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never dealt with one on a ship before.”
The Vrennak turns.
It turns toward me.
All four eyes. The plated skull angles down to my height, and the jaw opens a fraction, tasting the air or reading my heat or doing whatever a Vrennak does when it’s deciding about you. Ten feet between us. Less.
I don’t freeze.
The panic is happening. It is happening at a pitch that should have put me on the floor, should have locked my legs and blanked my vision the way Vresh’s roar sent me down the ramp at Bay 13.
The panic is happening, and my voice is still in my throat, and my hands are still at my sides, and my brain, underneath all of it, is doing something I did not know it could do.
It remembers my mother.
Not the mining colony. Not the evacuation drills.
Not the three brothers who could all handle this better than me on their worst day.
One specific thing: the voice my mother used when the colony’s nervous cat got stuck behind the heating unit.
The cat was old and half-deaf and terrified and my mother got down on her knees on the dirty floor in her work coveralls and talked to it.
Soft. Steady. The same three words over and over until its claws retracted, and it crawled out into her hands.
This is it. This is what I have. A comfort voice and a mother who could talk a cat out of a wall.
I can talk to a predator. I have talked to my brothers, who are functionally the same.
“Vrennak.”
My voice comes out low. Lower than I expected. The half-octave drop that happens when I’m scared.
“Hey. Hey, it’s okay.”
The jaw closes a fraction. The four eyes stay fixed.
Behind the Vrennak, Jazil is moving. Not watching.
Not waiting. He is circling toward the cradle with the rod low, pressing gauze from the kit to his forearm one-handed, and his eyes flick to me once before he drops to the cradle base and starts working the manual housing.
Using the time. Using my time. Whatever I’m doing, he is spending it.
“We’re going to put you back to sleep. You’re okay. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
The bioluminescence dims. The pulsing slows.
The plated skull tilts the way a dog tilts its head when it hears something it’s trying to place, and my heart is slamming but my voice is steady.
My voice is my mother’s voice. My voice is the only thing in this hold that is not made of metal or muscle or teeth.
“I know. I know you’re scared. You were asleep, and now you’re not, and this place smells wrong, and nothing here is yours. I know.”
The body posture eases. The forelimbs lower. The tail stops sweeping.
It’s working. It’s actually working. My hands are shaking, and my voice is not, and the Vrennak is settling, lowering, and something in its chest is making a sound that is almost, almost —
The sound changes.
Low. Keening. A frequency that sits behind the breastbone and aches.
The bioluminescence flickers, dims, flickers again in a pattern that looks like searching.
The Vrennak’s head swings away from me. Not toward Jazil.
Not toward the pod. Toward the sealed bay doors.
Toward the wall. Toward something that is not here.
It mates for life. If this one is bonded and can’t find its mate —
The keening builds. The forelimbs that had been lowering locked straight again.
The four eyes come back to me, and they are different now.
Not milky. Not calculating. Bright and wrong and full of something I recognize because I have seen it in the mirror, in the faces of people who have realized they are alone somewhere they don’t understand and the thing they need is not coming.
My voice is not enough. My voice quelled the fear, but it can’t fill the space where the mate should be.
“Lorri. MOVE.”
The Vrennak lunges. Not the calculated stalk from before. A grief-blind charge, forelimbs wide, and the sound it makes is not a roar. It is the sound an animal makes when something has been taken from it and the taking has no name and there is nothing left to do but break.
I throw myself sideways. Not fast enough. The claws catch my temple — white flash, heat — and the tail comes around on the follow-through and catches my hip and I hit the deck plate shoulder-first and the air punches out of me and the hold goes sideways and bright and wrong.
I am on the floor.
The Vrennak is turning. Coming around. The four eyes — bright, grieving, looking for something I am not — find me on the deck plate, and the plated skull lowers, and the jaw opens, and I cannot get up.
My arms won’t hold. My vision is swimming.
There is blood in my left eye from the temple, and the Vrennak is three feet away and closing, and it is so much bigger from down here.
So much bigger than anything should be, and it smells like ozone and old metal and grief, and its breath is hot on my face, and my mother’s voice is gone, and I have nothing left.
I have nothing left, and it is right there, and I am going to die on this floor in a jacket from the Finder’s Market on my first day at a job I am not going to have anymore because I am going to be dead —
The Vrennak opens its jaws.
From somewhere behind it, very far away, a sound.
Not human. Not a command. Something low and raw and ancient that fills the hold like a pressure wave, and the last thing I see before the world whites out is the Vrennak’s head snapping away from me toward the source of that sound.