9. The Cache
The Cache
Tael
I just told her the truth.
I said mate to her face and meant it and refused to apologize.
My purr has not fully died because she is three feet from me in the co-pilot’s seat, and the cocky version of me would like to lean across the cockpit and finish what the corridor and the patch started.
The other version, the one that has been managing since she walked into my case, knows that what I do in the next ten minutes decides whether she ever lets me close again.
I do not move my hand. The discipline costs.
JINX, low: “Approach in eight. I am professionally noting that you have not blinked in six minutes.”
“Mute, JINX.”
Muted.
SENTRY, miraculously, says nothing. The cockpit is the quietest it has been since she walked through my airlock in a cardigan a size too big, and I lost the rest of my professional life on the spot.
She does not look at me but she does not stop looking at my hands.
The cache is a spartan rock at the Velarkis periphery, berths carved into the face, an airlock retrofitted into what used to be a mining supervisor’s office.
I bring us in on sublight because the port thrusters will not survive a drive burn through the approach, and my overlay sweeps the docking ring and registers a heat signature inside.
I go still.
One occupant. Living. Adult male. Korrhai signature.
“Thane.”
Almost certainly.
Thane is in my cache, which means Thane is using the biometric override I gave him years ago, drunk, because I was alive specifically because of a thing he had done and the override seemed proportional.
Thane is in my cache sixteen minutes from a kill zone I just walked out of, which is not a coincidence, which means something in his case brought him here ahead of me.
And Thane is in my cache while I am bringing Natalie into it for the first time, which is the fact my body is having the most trouble with.
She reads my face.
“Vosk.”
“We have company. In the safe house. An old colleague.”
“Friendly?”
“Define friendly. He’ll clock everything and say nothing.” A beat. “He saved my life twice. He saved a child’s life once. He doesn’t ask questions he doesn’t want the answers to. He’s safe, Torres.”
She files that. Her mouth does that thing.
“Okay.”
“You’ll tell me if it stops being okay.”
“I’ll tell you, Vosk.”
I bring us in.
The airlock cycles on my biometrics, and I see the cache through her eyes before she sees it through her own.
One small main room. Undressed rock at the ceiling, a strip of amber light along the floor seam because I never installed an overhead light.
Supply crates against the far wall labeled RATIONS / MEDICAL / AMMUNITION / KASA in block capitals.
A galley along the back wall, a kasa thermos, two cups on a shelf.
Through her eyes, it is a male’s bunker.
The place a male sleeps for ten days after the worst week of his life and tells no one about it.
The two cups are a question I have been refusing to answer for three years, and she is going to read all of it and file it and not say a word, and I am standing in my own airlock with my chest open to a Head of Station Security who is about to know more about how I live than any being in the registry.
The second cup is in Thane’s hand.
He is sitting on a crate in front of the galley wall, rifle propped beside him, drinking my kasa, and he looks at me like he has been waiting six hours to be looked at.
He does not stand. Six-foot-eight of royal-blue Korrhai, the silver-blue dermal plates across his shoulders and upper arms catching the amber along their edges, two short ivory tusks, one broken, that graze rather than protrude, gold eyes with the pupils flat because he has not yet been moved by anything in the room.
He raises the cup.
“Vosk. You’re bleeding.”
“I’m aware.”
“You should sit.”
“I’ll sit when I’m ready to sit.”
His eyes move past me to Natalie. Cardigan rolled up over the dressing on her forearm. Dried blood on her shoulder. Field kit. His pupils widen one notch. He looks back at me, and he does not say you brought a person home, and he does not need to.
“Thane,” he says to her. “Korrhai. I am at your partner’s safehouse uninvited. He is not pleased.”
“He’s not my partner. Officer Torres.”
“Officer.”
He sets the empty cup on the crate beside the rifle and looks at me, and the silence holds until I acknowledge that he is going to make me ask.
“What are you doing here, Thane?”
“I have a case. It ended at a dock approach that turned out to be your cache.” He gestures at the crate across from him. “Sit. Then we share.”
He has, in his stillness, put the room on his terms. I am bleeding.
Natalie is wary. Thane is calm. I sit. Natalie does not; she stands at my shoulder with her arms folded loosely and her weight on her left foot, keeping a strange male inside her sight lines, and Thane reads it and his face does not change.
“Six months,” he says. “A broker called Severin BioSystems. A front; I have not been able to map for what. They offered me a security contract, logistics oversight, garbage margins for the muscle they wanted. I declined. I have been tracking the work they commissioned with the muscle they hired in my place.”
“Kesh Vorrin.”
His eyes flick to mine.
“Corridor of Relay Node V-6, tonight. He held the concourse while a three-male team came at us in the spur. He didn’t engage.”
“Confirm.”
“The pivot off the lead foot. The knee he ruined on Valorian. The way he scans a room. It was him. Crex, Grolic, Threshari. All down.”
Thane breathes once. Then he draws a datapad from the field jacket beside him and turns it once in his hand without activating it.
“A Korrhai diplomatic family disappeared from a station six months ago. Three adults, bonded. They surfaced dead in a wiped relay node not unlike V-6, four months later, arranged to suggest a pirate raid. The chemistry on the bodies was specialist. The hardware in the chamber they had been kept in carried the same Severin BioSystems stamps.”
Natalie sits down.
She sits on the crate beside mine, not looking at either of us, and draws the evidence bag from her kit and places the filament on the crate between us without a word.
“Xarthian,” Thane says.
“Bonded. Bond-signature in the oil. Pulled tonight from a Severin-stamped restraint anchor in a refitted chamber at V-6. He was in that chamber hours before we got there.” Her voice is level. “His name is Torek. His mate is a client of SNAG.”
Thane’s pupils widen another notch. “I have not had a name on the Xarthian thread before this evening.”
“You have one now.”
“And the team that came for you was the cleanup that came for him.”
“Yes.”
He picks up the filament bag. Turns it in his hand the way he turned the datapad. Sets it down.
“Whatever the front is for, it is moving bonded mates. My family was three. Your Xarthian is one. There are going to be many more.” Flat. “This is collection.”
“That is the word she used in the chamber,” I say. “SENTRY archived it.”
“She has good instincts, your Officer Torres.”
“She has the best instincts I have ever worked with.”
Natalie’s eyes flick to mine for half a second and back to the filament. The half-second lands and stays.
“I have not briefed SNAG. Or anyone. This is the first time these threads have been in one room.” He sets the datapad beside the evidence bag.
“I am in your cache, Vosk, drinking your kasa, with a piece of evidence on the crate that says my six-month case and your two-day case are the same case. Think about what that means. Think about it before dawn.”
He does not need to say he is offering help. He stands. He washes the cup. He sets it on the shelf beside mine.
“I am taking the supervisor’s office,” he says, with his back to us. “I have been awake thirty-one hours. The crew berth is yours. Whatever you two need to do in it, you do not need an audience.”
The hatch closes. Within ninety seconds the snoring starts, a granite-bass Korrhai snore that fills the cache wall to wall, and which Thane is, I suspect, deploying on purpose.
The crew berth is smaller than the bunk on Helia’s Reach. A single narrow bunk built into the rock, a thermal blanket, a cleansing spigot, and a folded towel.
I sit on the edge. She kneels with the kit open; her face eight inches from my sternum, and my brain, without permission, in the half-second before her hands are on the field patch, produces an image.
Her on this bunk. Under me. The tank gone, the pants gone, her hands above her head where the bunk meets the rock and her knees either side of my hips and her dark eyes on mine as I lower onto her, saying my name in the register a female uses when she has decided.
The image lasts half a second. The purr deepens hard. I look at the bulkhead and force the picture down.
She unwraps the rib patch. Professional. Not looking at my face. Her breath at my collarbone where she bent to the wound, her hair fallen against the side of my throat, the smell of her, soap and cold air and her, in my face at a range it has not been since the cockpit.
The brain produces the second image. Both her hands flat on my chest, pushing me back onto the bunk. Her mouth at my throat, at the place my species keeps for the mark, and a Draelith registers teeth at the throat with the specific cardiovascular event my entire system is having.
Bulkhead. I count breaths. I think about the cold of space. The counting is only partially successful.
Her hands do not change. Her face does not change. But the pulse at the hollow of her throat, which my overlay has been mapping since the airlock this morning, climbs four beats.