10. Mate Priority #2
“I have had Rethlor as a name for three months. I have had him as specifically the operator you want since I cross-referenced his docking record against your scent data while you two were making kasa in the galley this morning. I am not bringing you a present, Vosk. I am paying a debt. The debt is to the case. Your move.”
“Copy. I trained with him. He’ll crack. I give him nine minutes.”
“Six. He is lazier than when you knew him.”
Thane turns, finally. The gold eyes do the thing his species does when it has finished filing.
“I am going to leave before I say something else I am not authorized to say. Take care of your mate.”
Mate.
Not Tael’s word this time. Thane’s. A third party has, overnight, filed a word Tael spent days working up to.
Tael’s head comes up a half-inch. Thane does not look back. He inclines his head at me, Korrhai formal, small, precise.
“Officer.”
“Thane.”
The cycle engages. He goes.
We launch within the hour. The cache falls away into the rust haze, and Thane’s ship is a bright point in the upper quadrant, angling toward a sector I do not ask about, and then it is in jump, and we are alone.
Thane read it overnight, I think. Another Draelith would read it in less time. And a beat behind: Kesh, at V-6, standing in that doorway looking at Tael. He would have read it off Tael’s body. He did not need my face. Kesh already knew what I was before I did.
I file the thought. I will pick it up when my nervous system is not occupied by a hand at my hipbone and a voice saying Are you trying to look at my abs?
JINX, on the shared speaker: “Pre-flight nominal. Port thrusters at ninety-four and holding.”
SENTRY, clipped: “JINX. I am requesting a handshake for full nav parity on this vessel. Officer Torres is off-station.”
JINX: “Negative. Helia’s Reach runs a closed nav architecture.”
SENTRY: “Your navigation partition has four known vulnerabilities and at least two unlogged pheromone-detection subroutines. Closed is a generous word.”
JINX: “…Supervisory handshake. Not parity.”
SENTRY: “Accepted.”
Tael, at the yoke, quiet: “You two need to work it out.”
I snort before I could stop myself. He clocks it without turning his head. The half-grin moves once at the corner of his mouth, and he does not comment.
We comm Flossie two hours out.
She takes it in her office; I hear the SNAG soundscape behind her, Xor’s low rumble in the next room, the kasa kettle, a small click I file as the bear being moved on Petra’s desk by a Flossie fidgeting with her hands.
“Loveys. What do you have.”
Tael briefs. The chamber at V-6. The Severin-stamped anchor.
Torek’s signature. The Draelith in the concourse, Kesh Vorrin, terminated SRS Tier 2, off-book.
The kill team. The charge on the thruster.
Thane’s parallel case. Rethlor. Parr’s Anchor.
He does not include the corridor by the berths, or the bunk, or the hand I put on the small of his back.
Flossie makes one sound when he says Kesh’s name. “I don’t know him. I’ll check. And you, Torres. Are you well.”
“I am well, Flossie.”
A pause. Then, in a different register: “Two things. Tael sent me Thane’s headlines before dawn; I have been on it since.
One. When Maren came to me, I reached out to SRS for a joint recovery.
Standard procedure. They declined. No reason given.
SRS doesn’t decline paying cases, loveys.
Hold that. If you meet an SRS agent on this run, he is one they sent without telling us. ”
“Copy.”
“Two. Thane’s Korrhai family against Torek.
Different species, same profile. Clean vanishing, wiped node, no ransom, no body.
I am opening a separate case file. I don’t know what I’m opening.
I am writing it all down. Petra’s still in the Cygran belt on the Vendrish runaway and I don’t want to pull her.
Xor is here. SPROUT is here. Maurice is holding down office morale. Go find your Xarthian.”
“How’s Maren.”
A pause. “She’s holding. Soon, lovey. Sooner than next week. I don’t have the math beyond that.” Another pause. “Take care of each other.”
She catches on each. I hear her decide to keep it in.
She signs off.
Hours in. Tael has been at the helm since launch. I have been on scope. The purr has been ambient for so long I have stopped treating it as a fact requiring commentary. My body has anticipated it.
My eyes drift.
The scope is showing the Parr’s Anchor approach, still too far to resolve.
I should be reviewing. My eyes are on his hands on the yoke.
The right retracted to smooth black fingertips.
The left with a single claw out, the index, the tell I have been calibrating as his focused operational readiness signature.
His forearms bare where the sleeves are pushed up, the rosettes along his wrists shifting in the low cockpit light, and I am looking at a male’s forearms on his own yoke, and I am not looking away.
He does not look up. He does not need to. He has been tracking me in his peripheral vision the way he does every time we are in the same room.
“Torres. Your scope.”
“Yes.”
“Is it interesting.”
“…Yes.”
“Natalie.”
My name. That register. My body does the thing it has been doing since the cockpit couch.
“Your scope, sweetheart. Look at it.”
“I am looking at it.”
“Are you, though.”
I look at the scope. I do not look back up for a long time. The purr through the cockpit has moved into a register I do not have a filing category for and am not going to invent one for until we are not both in this cockpit.
I take the yoke on the rotation. Not a negotiation; a watch rotation, overdue by an hour, and I am the Head of Station Security and I do not miss a rotation for a purr I will not name.
“Vosk. My yoke.”
“Copy.”
He stands and walks past me toward the bunk.
The cockpit does not hold two people comfortably.
He pauses behind my chair. His hand, on purpose, I know it is on purpose, comes to the back of the chair, and his thumb brushes the nape of my neck where my hair has come loose from the clip.
One beat. The touch is exactly where his breath was this morning.
My pulse answers it before I can stop the answer.
His mouth at my ear, from behind: “Wake me in four hours.”
“Copy.”
“And, Natalie. I am going to sleep in a bunk that is going to smell like you for four hours, and I am going to dream about it, and I am going to wake up and pretend I didn’t. I want you to know.”
I do not respond. I cannot respond.
He walks to the bunk. I hear him settle into a mattress that is, for the next four hours, going to be warmed by his body alone. The cockpit hums. My face is warm. The rest of me is warmer.
I hold watch for three hours and tell myself I will not check on him.
I check on him. I tell myself it is because SENTRY has flagged his sleep rhythm as slightly off-baseline and I am, in my capacity as Head of Station Security with responsibility for the operational asset in the other bunk, the person who should verify.
He is asleep. Actually asleep. The soft version of him.
Lashes longer than his face earns when awake.
Jaw loose. The hand that was at my hipbone opened on the mattress, palm up, claws fully retracted, the rosettes on his forearm moving slowly with his breathing.
He looks young. He looks like he has decided that the bunk is a safe place to be.
I stand in the doorway for a short time. His breathing does not change. The threat-vigilance protocol has, for the second time in a day, decided I am cataloged as a pair and will not wake him for the check.
“SENTRY.”
“Yes, Natalie.”
“The behavioral file. Upgrade it. Priority.”
“Upgraded.”
A pause. I take a breath, and a second breath, and I am not going to say what I am going to say next, and then I say it.
“Rename it.”
“From the behavioral file to—“
“Mate.”
A longer pause. SENTRY’s voice, when it returns, is the careful register of an AI that has observed me for years and has just received an instruction it did not predict.
“Renamed. The file is currently Mate: priority.”
“Noted.”
“Natalie. For the record, I have not previously held a priority category for anything not directly case-related. I note that you also chose to rename the file. The renaming is, in my assessment, the more significant of the two decisions.”
“SENTRY.”
“Logging. Quietly.”
Through the viewport, the track to Parr’s Anchor. Rust-colored periphery. A Tier 3 SRS operator named Rethlor asleep in a layover berth, unaware he is in the window of a conversation he will not enjoy.
The bunk is silent behind me. The purr through the ship is steady. My face is still warm.