9. The Order #3
I run the tactical calculus and the numbers are sound.
Civilian population. STI oversight — the Stellar Togetherness Initiative, an absurd name for a bureaucracy that pretends to administer the galaxy.
The pretense generates inspectors, filings, witnesses.
SRS eliminates quietly or not at all. A defensive grid Morrison has had twenty-three years to make paranoid.
SRS has a file on Junction One. What the file does not describe is whatever Morrison has built underneath, because Morrison is the kind of woman who registers the front door and fortifies everything behind it.
An SRS kill team cannot operate at Junction One without Morrison knowing. Morrison knowing means witnesses. A quiet elimination becomes an interstellar incident. The order requires discretion. Junction One is the opposite of discretion.
“That is —“ She is watching me with one eyebrow slightly raised, the expression that means she already knows the answer and is enjoying making me say it. “— a tactically sound option.”
“Don’t sound so surprised. I do occasionally have those.” The corner of her mouth moves.
I look at the display. I have been looking at the display instead of at her for long enough that it has become a habit, and habits are things I do not form, and I note this, and I do not address it.
“Sprout,” she calls. “Pull up the Junction One files.”
“I have been waiting,” the AI announces from the ceiling, its orb cycling amber, “for one of you to arrive at the obvious conclusion. Junction One has been the optimal destination since hour six.” A pause calibrated for maximum impact.
“I did not mention it because I assumed the route planning was a collaborative bonding exercise. The cardiovascular data certainly suggests recreational motivation.”
The heat-dispersal markings flush from jaw to collar. She presses her lips together — the effort of not laughing visible in her cheeks — and turns back to the display.
“Sprout,” I say, in a tone that contains a warning the AI consistently declines to action.
“I will refrain from publishing the biometric comparison. For now. The data will be available for posterity should either party require evidence of their mutual cardiovascular investment.”
“Thank you, Sprout. Junction One files. Please.”
The files populate the display. I study the schematics, the docking protocols, the defensive grid with Morrison’s signature throughout.
Efficient, paranoid, thorough. Secondary systems that do not appear on any regulatory filing.
A woman who trained a courier to survive contested space and built the fortress to match.
Her foot nudges mine under the console. Absent. Unconscious. The contact of a body that has stopped treating proximity as something to account for.
I do not move my foot. I let the contact sit there, and I think about all of it — the blank option tree, the deleted message, the destination, the eleven hours of dark that start when we enter the corridor, the conversation I will have with her at the end of them — and I hold the weight of it and I do not put it down.
“We leave in four hours,” she says. “That gives us the window.”
“Four hours.”
She nods. Stands.
She stretches — arms above her head, spine arching, the unhurried extension of her body that has been living in mine since the bunk — and I do not look away.
I have been looking away since I came through the airlock.
Running the cost, accounting for what it meant, keeping it at operational distance.
The message in my deleted files has changed the calculation.
I have already chosen, in the place that makes choices before the brain is consulted, and the cost of looking has shifted.
She drops her arms. Turns. Finds my eyes on her.
A beat. Something moves across her face that she doesn’t finish.
“I think,” she says carefully, “you should get some rest.”
“I have not slept.”
“I know, lovey.” The gentleness that undoes me faster than any other register she has. “Rest. I’ll wake you when it’s time.”
She leaves. The cockpit holds her scent — peppermint, wool, warmth. The console holds the route to Junction One, the plan we built together, the architecture of getting her somewhere safe.
Getting her somewhere safe. Telling her. Surviving what comes after.
I don’t know what comes after.
But I know this: I have already chosen her over Trell. Over the only life I have known. Over the weapon I was built to be.
The kill order is still in my deleted files.
But so is she.
And I have already chosen.
I sit in the pilot’s chair. Her chair. The fairy lights reflect in the darkened display. The blanket folded over the back smells like her.
I press my fists against my thighs. The crescent marks are bleeding again — small dark half-moons in crimson skin, the cost of holding it, written in the same hands that held her. I do not bandage them. The pain is a record.
The purr stirs in my chest. Low. Involuntary. The dead frequency that came back in her arms and will not go dormant again. I let it run. I do not fight it.
The purr and the kill order and the blank option tree — they coexist in me now, and the coexistence is the closest thing to honest my body has ever been.
In the cargo hold, she is running pre-flight checks. I can hear her voice — talking to Sprout, talking to the ship, the chatty warmth that fills every room she enters.
She is humming. The aimless melody.
I memorize the sound she makes when she does not know she is being listened to.