5. Just in Case
Just in Case
Natalie
Door closed. Monitor wall up. Detention report open. Half-written. My hands have been on the keyboard for three minutes and have produced, so far, two words.
Good work.
Not in the report. The report says DETENTION — HARKIN, T. — BAY 3 CORRIDOR, 1743 INITIATED. Good work is in my head, looping on thirty-second repeat while the cursor blinks and my hands sit on the keys like a pair of very expensive paperweights.
I delete the DETENTION line. I retype it. I delete it again.
Morrison has said good work to me more times than I can count, and I did, for a while, count.
Ardent says it maybe once a month on a good week.
The CO I punched said it the day before I punched him, the afternoon he signed off on the operational priorities memo that buried three people in a cargo hold.
Two words. Professional. The baseline currency of fifteen years of uniform.
Nobody has ever said those two words to me in the register Tael Vosk said them in a service corridor at 1806 this afternoon.
The problem is not the phrase. The phrase is a phrase. It goes on performance reviews. It is the single most boring commendation in the station’s administrative vocabulary.
And Tael Vosk stood in a corridor with our fingers on the same regulation field vest and said it like he had been holding a different word in his mouth for nine minutes and substituted this one in transit.
I know he substituted. I know because the circuit my body lit up on under that two-word delivery was not the one that lights up when Morrison signs a commendation; it was a different circuit entirely, and it had been waiting.
I stand up. Sit down. Stand up. Pace the two meters between my desk and the monitor wall. My reflection in the dark glass is a woman in a regulation braid with the expression of someone who has just discovered a wiring diagram of her own nervous system she has been pretending did not exist.
Option A: I am furious he did it.
Option B: I am furious I heard it.
Option C: I am furious that a phrase I have heard from the woman who trained me and from the deputy who calls my braid a cry for help has just been retrofitted, by a male with silver eyes and a tail problem whom I met the day before yesterday, into something my body will apparently now be routing through a new filing system for the rest of my natural life.
Option C. Escalating. Filed under Personal. Do Not Open.
Four years of the uniform doing the thinking for me. Bunk-alone, up-at-five, forms-in-triplicate. The career is clean, and the career is good, and the career does not explain why a male in a borrowed vest saying two words has just rerouted my pulse.
I sit down.
“SENTRY.”
“Yes.”
“The corridor audio from 1758 to 1806. How is it classified.”
“Professional: Acknowledged, per protocol.”
“Is that your personal classification.”
A pause. The particular pause of an AI calculating what its user has actually asked versus what its user is willing to admit it is asking.
“The file is archived, Torres. Per protocol.”
“Archived accessibly?”
“…The file is archived.”
I hate this AI. I love this AI. I have never been so grateful to be surveiled by a piece of software in my entire professional life.
“Delete the local cache.”
“Deleted.”
“Deleted, or noted and not deleted.”
“Deleted, Torres. Truly.” A beat. “The station archive retains the file by regulation. Anyone with your clearance can pull it. I mention this so that if a woman with your clearance were to request it at, say, 0200 on a morning when sleep proved uncooperative, the retrieval would not show up on my personal logs.”
“SENTRY.”
“I am being helpful.”
“Stop being helpful.”
“…Noted.”
I type the parts that fit on a form. The intercept.
The wrench. The chain of custody. I note, because I have to, that I walked ten meters down the corridor for detainee transfer protocol, leaving the Draelith contractor in visual range of the subject for twenty-eight seconds.
No verbal or physical contact. Subject resumed cooperative testimony voluntarily.
Every word of it true. Every word of it leaving out what actually happened.
I sign. I submit. Up the chain to Morrison, who will read it at 2100 between the lines and ask me, if ever, in her own time. Morrison never asks early.
It is 1906. SNAG is waiting.
The SNAG office at 1920 smells like chamomile and the particular quiet of a case that just got bigger.
Flossie has tea on her desk and the notebook open.
Xor stands behind her chair, tail around her waist in the evening configuration, the settled one, the one that has nothing to prove.
Petra is at her desk with bear in her lap, chewing the end of a stylus, doing the particular Petra thing where she is not looking at me and is absolutely watching me.
Tael is in the reinforced chair.
He does not meet my eyes when I walk in. He does not need to. He inclines his head a quarter-degree, the correct, professional, entirely deniable acknowledgment of a woman who has just re-entered the room, and the inclination should not feel like anything, and does.
I am Junction One Security. I am here to brief.
“Harkin’s in Level Two holding. Testimony recorded. Chain of custody clean. Morrison has the report.”
“Velarkis relay,” Flossie says. Pen already moving. “Coordinates?”
I read them off. Flossie writes them down the way Flossie writes everything: brisk, economical, the handwriting of a woman accumulating a pattern she is not yet going to name out loud.
“Tael got corpo out of him,” I say. “Anonymous relay. Advance paid for a second job. No timeline.”
“Corpo.” Xor’s voice is flat the way a blade is flat. “Not government. Not criminal. Corporate.”
“Yes.”
“Mm.” Xor does not say SRS. Flossie does not say SRS. Petra looks up sharply and does not say SRS. Tael is deliberately not looking at anyone.
Flossie sets the pen down. Wraps her hands around her tea mug, the chipped one, the warm one, and looks at me with the specific brown-eyed expression that used to end OOPS dispatch arguments from three stations over.
“Natalie, lovey. Thank you.”
“For what.”
“Harkin. The assist. The intercept. The whole thing.” Flossie’s warmth is a physical object in the room.
“We called you in to coordinate on jurisdiction and you handed us a named suspect, a signed confession, and chain of custody that a Corsairian liaison couldn’t poke a hole in if you gave her a week and a crowbar.
We’ve got the node from here. You’ve done more than we asked. ”
I do not know what to do with my face.
My face is a face that has been thanked, operationally, approximately once a quarter by Morrison, and this is not what Morrison sounds like.
Morrison sounds like a debt being tracked.
Flossie sounds like a door being opened with a pot of tea on the other side of it.
I do not have a professional response for doors.
“That’s—“ I say, and stop.
“Mm?”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, lovey.” Flossie’s eyes do the thing they do when she is about to let me off a hook I did not know was in my mouth.
“Xor and Tael are on the Velarkis run. SPROUT will relay findings. We’ll have you on a secure channel within an hour of any contact.
You can run Junction One from Junction One and sleep in your own bunk, which,” the warm voice, and now the operational one under it, “I am told you have not been doing recently.”
“SPROUT.”
“I did not file that, Torres. I mentioned it in conversation.”
“SPROUT.”
“…Apologies. I was being helpful.”
Flossie hides a smile in her tea.
The part of me that has been running on Option C for ninety minutes hears, under the thank-you and the tea and the open door, the very specific shape of the exit being offered. I can go home. I can sleep. The case is in excellent hands. My hands have done their part.
The other part of me, the part I have been managing with cold competence for four years, opens its mouth before the professional part has fully signed off.
“I’m coming to Velarkis.”
Flossie’s pen, which had started moving again, stops.
“Lovey.”
“Chain of custody. If Tael finds the compound source and I’m not in the room, anything we recover gets thrown out at the first evidentiary review.
I vetted Harkin. I know his supply chain.
I know what a Junction One diagnostic trail looks like and what it doesn’t.
This operation originated on my station and I am not handing the finish over the comms.”
“That’s one reason.”
I pause.
Flossie does not pause.
“I’m not counting them, lovey. I’m just noticing that the reason you gave me is a reason, and good reasons are like that. They tend to travel with company.”
I open my mouth. I close my mouth.
Across the room, Tael’s tail shifts against the reinforced chair. One inch. The coil loosens by a quarter-turn. I do not look at it. I do not need to. My peripheral vision has been recalibrated without my permission to track the movements of one specific male’s anatomy.
“And the Velarkis end is the end with a clock on it.” The operational voice.
The one that has survived every argument I have ever had with a superior.
“Harkin has been off the dock two hours. His handlers paid him an advance and they have a job pending, and the hour they work out he is in a cell instead of a bunk, they burn the relay and the handler goes to ground and this unbroken thread goes dark. The station end is watch-and-wait and it does not need my hands on it. The trail does. I want to be standing on it before anyone out there knows Harkin is compromised.”
“I want to be there.” Flat. The voice I used when a commanding officer asked me why I punched him. “I need to be there.”
“Okay, lovey.”
“Okay?”