4. Vanity Project
Vanity Project
Xor
A tin labeled Darjeeling — The Good Stuff — DO NOT TOUCH. MORRISON, THIS MEANS YOU. A small ceramic figure of a creature I cannot identify, wearing a hat. A stack of data pads balanced on the edge of the nav console with the architectural integrity of a wish.
The courier rights the ceramic creature. Adjusts its hat. Pats its head.
“He’s fine,” she says, to the creature, or to me, or to the ship at large. “Barely a scratch, Gerald.”
Gerald. She has named a ceramic figurine.
I am sharing a vessel with a woman who names ceramic figurines, and my tail is doing something complicated near her elbow that I shut down before it makes contact.
I anchor it to the co-pilot’s chair with enough force that the joint aches.
The tail has been staging a slow-motion insubordination since I boarded, and I am addressing it with appropriate severity.
“Tea?” she says, already filling the kettle.
“I don’t want tea.”
“Wasn’t asking if you wanted it. Was telling you it’s happening.”
She pulls two mugs from the rack — the chipped one and a second, larger one with a faded image of a planet and the words JUNCTION ONE: IT’S NOT MUCH BUT IT’S OURS.
She fills the larger mug and holds it out.
My claws retract. Both hands. Simultaneously.
An autonomic response to the proximity of a ceramic vessel requiring careful handling — the kind you cannot do with inch-long combat claws extended.
My body has made this decision without filing a requisition, and the speed of the retraction is a degree of betrayal I intend to address at the earliest operational opportunity.
I take the mug. The ceramic is warm against blunt fingertips.
She watches. Not my face. My hands. The smooth pads where the claws should be, wrapped around the planet mug.
Her gaze stays two seconds longer than the exchange warrants, and whatever she sees makes her mouth do something small and involuntary before she looks away.
She does not comment on the retraction. She takes a sip of her own tea.
I drink mine. It is not terrible. This is operationally irrelevant.
“Your notebook.” I set the mug down because I need to reclaim ground, and intelligence gathering is a framework I understand. “You were writing in it during the approach. Show me.”
“Earn it.”
“I am a Tier 1 SRS operative with nine years of field experience. I don’t earn access. I’m granted it.”
“Not on this ship, lovey.” She tucks one foot under herself in the pilot’s chair — an absurdly informal posture for a woman in negotiations with a species that has an apex-tier threat classification across fourteen jurisdictions. “On this ship, you share first.”
I should refuse. Director Trell would refuse.
The operational protocol is clear: intelligence is currency, and you don’t spend currency on couriers.
I open the merc data on her display instead.
Formation analysis, weapon signatures, intercept probabilities.
If she wants intelligence sharing, I’ll demonstrate what actual intelligence looks like — conducted by a professional who does not decorate his tactical displays with fairy lights.
She leans forward. Studies the analysis. Thirty seconds of silence, which is the longest I have heard her be quiet.
“Their kit was Solari-manufactured,” she says. “High-end but generic. Deniable procurement chain.”
She had already cataloged their equipment. The folder I have mentally labeled the courier’s tactical competence is becoming inconveniently thick.
She sets the notebook on the console between us. Open. Like an offering she expects to be mishandled.
Names. Dates. Routes. A meticulous record of cargo lost and never recovered, of people who filed reports that went nowhere and items that vanished into the gap between what the system promised and what it delivered.
The handwriting is small and precise. Each entry has a date, a name, a brief description, and a follow-up note: Filed with OOPS, no response.
Contacted Junction One dispatch, transferred to holding queue.
Morrison says it’s not our sector. Going anyway.
Going anyway.
“What is this?”
“Cases. Things that got lost and nobody looked for.”
“Documentation without institutional authority is a diary.”
The temperature in the cockpit drops. Not literally — the environmental controls hold. But the warmth that lives in her voice, the chatty cadence, the pet names — all of it has been set down with the deliberate care of someone placing a weapon on a table.
“It’s evidence,” she says. Shorter. “Of a system that doesn’t work.”
“The system works for the people who pay for it.”
“That’s what I said.” She holds my gaze. Brown eyes, steady, and there is nothing soft about them. “It doesn’t work.”
She takes the notebook back. Closes it. Slides it into the cardigan pocket, and the gesture has finality — a door shut that I did not intend to close.
I have miscalculated. My assessment was accurate — documentation without institutional backing has no evidentiary weight — but accuracy is not wisdom, and the distinction is one Director Trell never covered in nine years of briefings.
My tail is reaching for her knee under the console.
I trap it against the chair leg and hold it there, muscles locked.
“The merc formation,” I say, because tactical analysis doesn’t require me to navigate the expression on her face. “Standard Kessler sweep. Two forward, two support, two reserve. If we route through the dust belt at the Voss-Meridian corridor, the mineral density disrupts standard tracking.”
“I know. I’ve run the dust belt nine times.
” She pulls up the route overlay, her fingers finding the controls without looking.
Her shoulder nearly touches mine as she leans across the console.
Nearly. The air between us has a thermal gradient I have no operational reason to be monitoring and cannot stop monitoring.
“The exit window is the problem. Fourteen minutes if Sprout’s calculations hold. ”
Her hand is flat on the console beside mine. Six inches between our fingers. She is adjusting the route overlay, pinching the timeline, and her hand drifts right — not toward me, toward the edge of the display, which happens to be where my hand is resting. Three inches.
She catches the drift. Redirects. Pulls her hand back to the timeline controls.
Her fingers are callused at the tips. Blaster hands. I shouldn’t know this from six inches away. I do, because my eyes are cataloging her with the devotion of a system that has lost track of its original mandate, and the catalog is becoming a document I don’t want to read.
I remove my hand from the console. Not fast or casual, just the deliberate withdrawal of someone who noticed what she noticed and is choosing to pretend he didn’t.
My comm unit chirps. Three short tones, descending.
Every line of me changes. I know it is happening and cannot stop it.
The shoulders square, the spine locks, and the face I have been wearing for the past hour — the one that was grudgingly impressed by her route calculations, the one whose jaw tightened when she called my vessel debris, the one that was three inches from touching a courier’s hand over a navigation display — goes flat. Smooth. Operational.
“Xax reporting. Scheduled check-in. Timestamp 1340, ship chronometer.”
“Agent Xax.” Director Trell’s voice. Calm.
Measured. The warmth of a man who has learned exactly how much warmth it takes to keep an asset compliant — and who deploys it with the precision of someone who has already read my suit telemetry and is waiting to hear whether I’ll tell him the truth. “Status on the recovery target.”
“Target is cooperating. Container secure.”
“And the courier?” Three words. No inflection. The question of a man who has been running this calculation longer than I have.
“Manageable.”
The word comes out clean. Professional. It is also the first lie I have told on a scheduled check-in in nine years of Tier 1 operations, and I know Trell heard it — not the word, the half-second before it.
The courier is sitting eight feet away with brown eyes that have gone very still, and Trell’s pause before maintain trajectory runs one beat longer than protocol requires.
“Maintain trajectory. Report at 0600.”
“Confirmed.”
The comm cuts.
“Manageable,” she says. Flat. No pet name. No warmth.
“It is an operational term.”
“It’s a leash.” She sets her mug on the console. Careful. Controlled. “And you don’t even notice when they pull it.”
Accurate. The observation is accurate. This is the problem — she doesn’t attack from positions I can defend.
She doesn’t challenge my competence or my tactical record.
She walks past all of it and puts her hand on the mechanism underneath, and she names it plainly, without permission, because someone should.
“OOPS couriers,” I say, because retreat to higher ground is the only maneuver available. “Bottom of the operational food chain. Glorified delivery personnel with sentimental attachments to their cargo.”
“You have a 98% compliance rate.” Her voice is level.
Not angry. Not hurt. The tone of a woman who has decided the facts are sufficient and doesn’t need volume to carry them.
“I have twelve years of watching what happens to the 2% who don’t comply.
You take things from people. I deliver things to people.
” She holds my gaze. “We are not the same, and I am not the one who should be embarrassed.”
Silence. My tail wraps my own leg. Tight. The muscle cords visibly from ankle to mid-thigh.
“I have updated the Xarthian’s threat classification,” Sprout announces from the ceiling, “from ‘Hostile’ to ‘Hostile and Sulking.’”
Neither of us laughs. The tension cracks — a single hairline fracture — and she turns back to the nav console. Merc signatures at long range. Route calculations to finalize. A fourteen-minute window between safety and a firefight.