22. The Delivery
The Delivery
Flossie
The first time I saw this male, he cut through my airlock to take a container.
Today, the same male is sitting in my co-pilot’s chair running a pre-flight check with hands that are too large for the interface and a tail that keeps bumping the throttle.
The Petal undocks from Junction One. My ship.
My controls. The fairy lights blinking across the navigation console, the ceramic figurine Gerald perched on the throttle, the tea stain on the co-pilot’s armrest that has been there for three years because I could never be bothered to clean it and now his elbow is resting on it and the stain is his stain too.
He’s learned the pre-flight sequence. Not because I asked him to — because he watched me do it twice and memorized it, because that is what a Tier 1 tactical brain does with information, it absorbs and optimizes and provides unsolicited improvements.
“You’re sitting in my co-pilot’s chair running my pre-flight check.”
“Your pre-flight check has three redundant steps. I have streamlined.”
“You have been on this ship for five minutes and you’re already reorganizing my procedures.”
“Your procedures needed reorganizing. The secondary shield calibration is duplicated in steps four and eleven. This is inefficient.”
“Sprout, tell him my procedures are fine.”
“Your procedures are adequate.” Sprout’s orb hovers between us — halfway, the diplomat’s position, the AI who is enjoying this. “His optimization is marginally superior. I have logged my assessment.”
“Marginally —“
“I’m not picking sides. I’m picking accuracy.”
“Since when are you two on the same side?”
“Since his tactical assessments became marginally more consistent than yours.”
“You said that already. On the station. You’re recycling material, Sprout.”
“The observation bears repeating. It has not become less true.”
The orb drifts back to its station above the console — scorched amber, the hairline crack catching the fairy light. “Also: I am running long-range sweeps at combat resolution. My chassis is at sixty-one per cent. My vigilance is at one hundred and ten. The two are unrelated.”
I look at Xor. He is not smiling — the fifth smile hasn’t arrived yet, I am counting, I will always be counting — but there is something around his eyes.
A softness that his face is still learning how to hold.
The arrogance is there, the certainty that he is correct about the pre-flight redundancy, but underneath it: the bewilderment of a male who has been adopted by an AI he did not audition for and does not know how to refuse.
The comedy triangle. Sprout and Xor against me.
I am outnumbered in my own cockpit by an alien and an orb and I should be annoyed and I am not annoyed.
I am the opposite of annoyed. I am the specific, dangerous, radiant feeling that happens when the empty spaces fill up and the ship that was too quiet for ten years is suddenly too loud and the too-loud is better.
Also: the cockpit is very small.
It has always been small — the Petal is a courier vessel, not a luxury liner — but it has never felt this small, because the co-pilot’s chair has never contained seven feet of crimson alien whose knee is three inches from mine and whose forearm fuzz catches the fairy light when he adjusts the nav display and whose scent is filling the cockpit with something warm and smoky that makes my thighs press together involuntarily.
We had sex. We had a lot of sex. Very recently.
And my body has apparently decided that the appropriate mourning period between sex sessions is zero seconds and the proximity is making a case.
His tail finds my ankle under the console. Wraps. Stays.
“That’s distracting.”
“My tail is providing stabilization during the departure maneuver.”
“We departed six minutes ago.”
“The departure maneuver is ongoing.”
Route to Velar Prime: charted space, standard lanes, a few hours of nothing.
The first boring flight since he boarded.
The boredom is a luxury neither of us is used to.
The boredom is also, apparently, an aphrodisiac, because now there is nothing to dodge or shoot at or survive, there is only the cockpit and his knee and his forearm and his scent and the tail on my ankle and the memory of what his hands did twelve hours ago.
I shift in my seat. He notices. Of course he notices — Xarthian senses, every micro-movement cataloged, every shift in my body temperature registered. His nostrils flare. The jaw tightens.
“We have a delivery to make,” I say. To myself, mostly.
“We do.”
“Professional focus.”
“Professional focus.”
“Sprout, if either of us makes a move, lock the cockpit controls and play something unsexy.”
“I have a playlist prepared. It is forty-seven minutes of OOPS compliance training recordings. Morrison narrates the section on freight insurance.”
“That would work.”
“It would not work on him,” Sprout says. “His arousal response has no correlation with audio environment. I have data from the mineral corridor.”
“SPROUT.”
“I am providing tactical intelligence. You asked for this service.”
He checks the long-scope. Third time this hour.
The lanes are charted and empty, and he checks anyway, and I catalog the checking the way he catalogs everything about me.
Saar’s warning rides with us — the chip buys time, not safety — and Drask lost the sale, not the interest. Nobody in this cockpit has forgotten.
The scope stays clean. The checking continues. This is what peace looks like now: not the absence of teeth. Just teeth that haven’t found the range yet.
I pull the notebook out an hour into the flight.
Not because I planned to. Because the boredom is unfamiliar and my hands need something and the notebook is the thing my hands always reach for.
Brown cover, worn soft. Twelve years of entries in my round, quick handwriting.
Lost things. Missing shipments. People-shaped gaps in systems that don’t track people.
I open it on the console between us.
“What is this?” He looks at the page. He has seen the notebook before — called it documentation without authority, called it a diary, quoted from it without admitting he had read it.
But he hasn’t seen it like this. Open. Offered.
The twelve years of compulsive writing presented not as evidence of institutional failure but as a business plan.
“Cases,” I say. “Things that got lost and nobody looked for.”
“You showed me this in the cockpit. The first night. I called it —“ He stops.
“You called it documentation without authority. A diary.”
“I was incorrect.”
That lands. The male who was never wrong admitting he was wrong about the thing that matters most. I don’t make a production of it. I flip to a page near the middle.
“Relay Station Brax. Three shipments diverted over six months. Different cargo types, different routes, but the timing pattern is identical — all three were rerouted during a twenty-minute window when the station’s tracking system runs a diagnostic cycle.”
His eyes sharpen. The tactical brain engaging. “Internal corruption. Someone at the routing level with access to the diagnostic schedule.”
The speed of that assessment. Three sentences of data and he has the operational picture.
The tactical brain is doing things to me that have nothing to do with the notebook and everything to do with watching competence in real time.
I had a frankly historic night and I am getting turned on by a male reading my case notes. This is my life now.
“I flagged it two years ago. Sent it to OOPS compliance. They filed it. Nobody followed up because it wasn’t a priority and nobody was hurt and the shipments were insured.”
“Because nobody had your data combined with operational capability. You had the pattern. You lacked the resources to act on it.”
“I lacked a partner.”
The word sits between us in the cockpit.
Partner. Not just the romantic kind — though it is.
Professional. Two people whose skills interlock.
My instinct and network, his training and tactical mind.
Twelve years of notebook entries are proof of concept for a company that didn’t exist until this week.
We go through the pages together. I read, he assesses.
The rhythm is immediate and natural — I see the human cost (the people, the unanswered calls, the gaps), he sees the operational structure (the routes, the timing, the institutional failures that allowed the gaps).
We’re good together in a way that has nothing to do with the sex and everything to do with the way his brain complements mine.
“This one — sector 7, missing survey vessel. The insurance company wrote it off but the spouse filed six reports.”
“Six reports, no investigation. The vessel was operating in uncharted space. OOPS doesn’t do uncharted. SRS would charge triple and ask no questions. The spouse has been calling Junction One every month for two years.” I tap the entry. “Someone should find that ship.”
“Someone will.”
He turns a page. Stops. “This entry. The bonded pair — Xarthian male, human wife. ‘Disappeared from registered address. No foul play indicated. Wife hospitalized, cause undetermined.’ You wrote this nine months ago.”
“The wife was dying. Slowly. The doctors couldn’t find a medical cause.
Her body was just — shutting down.” I remember writing the entry.
The handwriting is shakier than usual. “I didn’t know what bonded-pair separation did to the human half.
I didn’t know about any of that, then.” I touch the bite mark at my collar. The skin still tender. “I know now.”
His tail tightens around my ankle. Not arousal. Fear. The specific fear of a bonded male imagining the bond going silent.
“We will find him,” he says. Quiet. Absolute.
Not someone. We.