21. Interrupted
Interrupted
Flossie
We take the service corridor toward the docking ring — Sprout's route, quieter, half-lit between pressure doors, the market noise fading to a hum in the deck plating.
He feels the shift. Of course he feels it. Chemoreceptors.
"Your scent has changed." Conversational. Smug. His tail tightens at my waist.
"My scent has been changed since this morning, and you know it."
"Since the chair," he agrees. "The chair required exceptional restraint. I would like it noted that I have been restrained for an unreasonable span."
"You'll be compensated."
"Tonight."
"Tonight."
The word does what the word does. He moves — the liquid, too-fast-for-his-size thing — and I am off the corridor line and into a maintenance alcove with my back against his chest, seven feet of Xarthian folding around me in the half-dark like a door closing.
"Xor —"
"A tease." His mouth finds the bite mark through the collar of the cardigan, breath hot, lips pressing the tender crescents until my knees do something embarrassing. "You permitted teasing. I checked the terms."
One arm crosses my body, palm spanning my belly, and pulls me back against him — against the hard ridged length of him through tactical fabric, the knot-swell pressed against my spine like a promise with a schedule — and his other hand slides beneath the hem of the cardigan, beneath the shirt, thumb hooking just inside my waistband.
Not lower. Nowhere near where every nerve I own is filing petitions.
Just the thumb on bare skin, drawing one slow line from hip bone to hip bone, mapping a border he intends to cross at length, later, with the clock owned.
"Tonight," he says into my neck, the purr inside the word, "I am going to lock us. And then I am going to be very, very thorough."
My head has fallen back against his sternum. I am a competent professional woman in a public thoroughfare. I am also wet and furious about the number of hours between now and tonight.
"You," I manage, "are a menace."
"I am good at everything. The menace is included."
I turn my head to say something I will not be held accountable for —
The corridor lights go red.
Not station-red. Not docking amber. Emergency red — and the pressure door ahead of us is falling, and the one behind us is falling, and Xor moves.
He is fast. The doors are faster, because they are not malfunctioning — they are timed.
He is through the alcove gap and lunging toward the sound his ears have already found, boots on deck plating somewhere past the junction, and I am two steps behind him when the door between us hits the deck with a boom I feel in my teeth.
Sealed. Fifty tonnes of emergency polymer. Xor on the far side.
Me on this one.
Morrison's voice, twelve years old, at the base of my skull: an ambush that separates you has already told you what it's afraid of.
"Sprout."
"Two hostiles, this segment." Battle-white.
No sass. The tactical stripping I have heard exactly twice before.
The orb peeled off his shoulder the moment the lights went red, and it is on my side of the door, which means the AI triaged us and chose me, which tells me everything about what this is.
"Lockdown was triggered from a maintenance node using dock-worker credentials.
Station security is alerted. Response time: four minutes. "
Four minutes. The maths does itself. This was designed to take less than four.
They come around the junction together — matte-grey gear, no insignia, moving the way Saar moved, professionals in a corridor built for their kind of work.
The first carries a capture loop. The second carries a military-grade stunner.
So that's the story: the courier, alive.
A lever sized to move a Xarthian and a container both.
Behind me, something hits the sealed door so hard the corridor rings like a struck bell.
I draw Betsy. Two-handed grip, feet planted, blood running combat chemistry and leftover arousal and twelve years of Morrison. "Boys," I say, in the warm voice, "you have terrible timing."
The stunner comes up. I am already moving — going down is dying — and my first bolt takes the loop-carrier in the shoulder seam and spins him into the bulkhead. The stunner tracks me, faster than I can slide —
Sprout takes the shot.
The orb drops into the bolt's line like a small amber planet committing suicide.
The discharge cracks blue-white against the chassis and Sprout hits the deck plating and rolls, casing scorched, light guttering — and the voice that comes out of the damaged orb is nothing I have heard in twelve years. Flat. Cold. Mechanical.
"Hostile action against Flossie Knight logged. Countermeasures unrestricted. Nobody touches my human."
Every light in the segment dies.
Not for me. Sprout knows my eyes, knows exactly where I stand — the emergency strips at my feet stay lit in a path useful only to a woman who is five-foot-four exactly.
For them: blind dark and an angry AI in the walls.
Doors cycling at random. Their squad channel shrieking static.
And me, moving low along my lit path while the second hostile fires at the place I no longer am.
I put a stun bolt in his knee, and a second in his chest when he drops.
Three minutes. That is what it takes. The longest three minutes since the boarding fight, my heart slamming Morrison-steady, the sealed door behind me ringing and ringing —
— and then the ringing stops, because four black claws have punched through fifty tonnes of emergency polymer and are peeling it open like a ration tin.
Xor comes through the gap sideways, shoulders first, tearing it wider on the way. His markings are black — jaw to collar, full combat saturation — and his eyes find me instantly in Sprout's dark, and the sound he is making is the below-language one, the one the Dens never reached.
The loop-carrier — shoulder-shot, still game — makes the final mistake of his professional evening. He moves. Toward me.
I don't see all of what happens next. Sprout's dark, Xarthian speed. I hear one impact. When the lights come up, a Drask acquisition specialist is folded against the corridor wall a metre above the deck, unconscious, held there briefly by nothing but the memory of velocity before he slides down it.
"Flossie." Wrecked. Rough. His hands are already moving over me — jaw, throat, arms, ribs, the field-medic inventory at combat speed. "You are —"
"Not touched. Not a scratch, lovey. Sprout took the only shot that mattered." My voice is steady. My hands are not. I let him see both, because we don't hide things. His forehead comes down to mine, horns bracketing careful, and the black drains from his markings one degree at a time.
Boots. Many boots — dock security arriving in a spill of light and shouting, Morrison's net closing over two professionals who are going to wake up in an OOPS holding cell with very reasonable rates.
I look down. Sprout's orb lists in the air like a boxer refusing the count. Scorch mark across the amber. A hairline crack through the casing.
"Sprout."
"Orb integrity sixty-one percent." The sass comes back online mid-sentence and I have never been so glad to hear anything. "I would like a new chassis. Something in gunmetal. And I want it minuted for the permanent record: nobody touches my human."
"Minuted." My eyes are stinging again. Twice in one day. "Archived. Backed up to three separate servers."
"Correct."
Xor has not let go of me. One hand at the back of my neck, tail around my waist, and against all good sense the adrenaline is converting — the combat chemistry and the alcove and his heat and the fact that we are both alive arriving in my body as one unreasonable demand.
He smells it. His pupils blow wide. Neither of us moves, in a corridor filling with security personnel, and the not-moving is its own entire event.
"He interrupted, Xor." I say it against his chest. Precise. Furious. "I was having a moment. Now I'm actually cross."
"Noted." The purr rebuilds under the word. "We will file the complaint together. Tonight."
The comm panel above us chimes. Morrison. Of course Morrison — forty seconds behind her own security, which across the width of a station is basically clairvoyance.
"Florence. Status."
"Two of Drask's people for your holding cells, Sprout needs a new chassis, and your service corridor needs a new door."
A pause. The specific Morrison pause of a woman recalculating a threat she thought she had priced.
"The delivery moves up. You leave for Velar Prime at first window.
" Her voice could strip hull paint. "And Florence — the allied services contract activated the moment they touched my station. Drask just became an OOPS problem."
The channel closes. Xor's tail tightens. Sprout lists against my shoulder, scorched and smug. Somewhere on or off this station, a broker is learning that his team failed, his sale is dead, and the incidental courier is still standing.
Drask keeps underestimating what I write down. He can add this to the list: I write down debts.
And tonight — after the fight, after the fear, after the male beside me tore a door off the universe to get to me — tonight we own the clock.