12. The Airlock
The Airlock
Natalie
Parr’s Anchor smells like forty years of re-breathed air and somebody’s burned coffee.
The docking corridor is rust. Not the color; the actual metal, oxidizing at the edges where the atmospheric seals have not been replaced since the first refit.
I walk behind Tael at two meters, close enough to see the rosettes on the back of his neck shift under the field jacket, far enough to give him the approach space a tracker needs.
The silk under my tactical kit moves against my skin with every step, and my body has been keeping a running commentary I am refusing to acknowledge.
The lace at my hips is worse. He did not ask.
At the yoke, with his tail betraying him and his eyes pinned to my face like a discipline exercise, he did not ask whether I had put it on.
I am letting him wonder. It is the best leverage I have held all case, and I am going to spend it slowly.
I am going to do the interrogation, extract the intel, and get back to the ship.
Then I am going to revisit the commentary.
Possibly with the male in front of me. Probably with the male in front of me.
Definitely with the male in front of me, if he keeps walking at the pace of a tracker who is trying not to look back to check I am still there.
The concourse is the graveyard shift. Three Xarthians arguing with a Juneth server who has clocked the hour and is not pretending to care.
A Krellan couple playing cards the way two people bonded many years play cards, half-attention, full of comfort.
Freight-crew humans too tired to register us.
We are invisible in the way two contractors in clean kit are invisible on a rust-periphery station.
Nobody here knows my title; nobody is supposed to.
Tael, low, over his shoulder: “Deck three. Galley on the forward side. Corner booth, back to the wall.”
“Confidence.”
“Ninety.”
“Split at the lift. I’ll take the corridor approach.”
“Copy.”
Deck three. Forward galley.
I come in through the corridor door after Tael takes the direct approach. The man in the corner booth is human, forties, medium build, the tired eyes and the wrong shirt of a man running out the last hours of a layover. Back to the wall. Eye on the door. He has not touched his mug.
Tael walks in, and I watch Rethlor’s face do the thing I have seen on suspects picked up in customs mid-shift: not fear. Calibration. He does not reach for his sidearm. He does not stand. He pushes his mug six inches away from himself, hands visible, a small, clear gesture.
Tael sits across from him. I take the galley’s other exit, back to the wall, sidearm holstered, my hand where Rethlor will know where my hand is.
“Vosk.”
“Rethlor.”
“What are you doing at Parr’s Anchor.”
“I am sitting across from you.”
“I am on a rotation.”
“You are on an interrogation.”
Silence. Rethlor’s jaw works. His eyes flick to me, back to Tael, down to his own hands.
He is weighing, and Tael lets him weigh.
That is the part of the technique I have not seen before: he does not push.
The single claw on his left hand stays extended on the table.
He does not speak. He lets Rethlor’s own arithmetic become the room.
“Vosk. I cannot afford this conversation. I have a contract that depends on me not having it. And you have brought a partner I have never seen, which means this is not going through SRS channels, which means I have no procedural shield if it comes back.”
“I know, Rethlor.”
“…And you are still asking me.”
“Yes.”
A longer pause. His eyes go to the mug, past the mug, to the wall behind Tael’s shoulder.
“You used to be the best of us.” Tael’s expression does not change.
“I am going to tell you what you want to know, because I remember what you were, and I remember what SRS did to you, and I have been carrying it for four years. I am going to do it once. And when I am done, you will walk out of this galley and we will not speak again.”
“Copy, Rethlor.”
“Don’t copy me, Vosk. Ask me your questions.”
“V-6. Two nights ago. The chamber was due a wipe. Who took the run?”
“Not me. I was on the V-6 run and I got pulled, rerouted here on layover. Someone else took it. I assumed it went to a senior, because dispatch does not pull me unless the job has climbed past my rating.”
“Who gave you the reroute?”
He reaches, slow, hands visible, for his datapad, sets it in the middle of the table, and taps it. A dispatch stamp comes up.
“Velenti Transit. Cargo logistics shell. They put the original request through SRS dispatch weeks out; the reroute came from the same shell. Velenti contracts for us, Vosk. They have been the dispatch front for every recovery clean I have run on the Velarkis corridor for eighteen months.”
Tael’s eyes narrow a quarter-millimeter. “Velenti. I know who it fronts for. Keep going.”
“Next run is tomorrow. Station called Iris-Nine, lower Ixara sector. Decommissioned research outpost, struck from the public registry eight years ago. The registry says it was scrapped. It wasn’t. It is there and it is active. Dispatch says wipe-and-go, six-hour window, no questions.”
“Who is at Iris-Nine?”
“I don’t get told. Tier 3 dispatch is paper-thin.” A pause. “I have one note in the margin.”
“Give it to me.”
“Dispatch margin says do not engage; operator is not operational.”
My stomach moves, but I do not. Tael’s jaw is tight; he knows what the note means, and he is holding it in his face without moving his face.
“Coordinates?”
“In the packet. Take the packet.”
He slides the datapad across. The packet copies to Tael’s overlay in a small green flash. Rethlor leans back, and the weight that comes off him is the visible weight of a man who has been carrying something and has put it down.
“I am going to file sick at 1000 local. Food poisoning. I lose six hours and drop a reliability mark. I will take the hit. Whatever happens at Iris-Nine tomorrow happens without me.”
“Copy.”
“If anyone from dispatch comes asking?”
“You never saw us.”
“I never saw you.”
Tael stands and puts his hand on Rethlor’s shoulder, the way a male puts a hand on the shoulder of another male he has lived through some quantity of shared work with. Not threat. Not comfort. Acknowledgment.
“Take care of yourself, Rethlor.”
“You too, Vosk.”
In the lift, Tael waits until the doors close.
“Velenti Transit. I have seen the encryption signature on that dispatch before. It’s theatrical.
There is one broker who uses theatrical encryption the way other males use cologne.
Drask. Voice-only on every comm; nobody who has done business with him has seen his face.
Drask Acquisitions, independent brokerage, the space between legal and criminal.
He is not ideology, Torres. He would launder recovery cleanups through SRS for whoever is paying, because the paperwork is profitable and the questions are above his pay grade. ”
“So he’s the client?”
“More likely the hinge the client pays to move paperwork through channels he has built. The difference matters, but not in the next twenty-four hours. What matters is that the Velenti dispatch carries a Drask signature, which means whoever is at Iris-Nine is paying for the kind of professional-grade silence Drask sells.”
“Copy.” I let three seconds pass. “Vosk. The dispatch note. Operator is not operational. You read Kesh in it before Rethlor finished the sentence. Why.”
A longer pause. His eyes are on the lift panel. The single claw on his left hand has retracted.
“At V-6, in the doorway. His body was wrong, Torres. Rosettes going gray at the edges. Walk off. His shoulders holding an angle a Draelith male’s shoulders do not hold unless his thermoregulation is failing.
He was running on compensation. I clocked it in the four seconds before he disappeared and I did not have a reason for it. The dispatch note is the reason.”
“Regulatory tells of a male whose systems are failing.”
“Yes.”
“What does that mean, Vosk.”
A pause.
“Later. On the ship. Not in a Parr’s Anchor lift. I promise you.”
I let it go, but I am not dropping it
The lift doors open.
The docking corridor is empty when we step out. Rust-plated decking, amber cycle lights, the echo of boots on station metal.
We make it eight meters. Three males step out of the service alcove.
Station muscle. I clock them in the first half-second: human, bulky, civilian clothes with the wrong silhouette, under-armor shoulders, knives at the hip, the rolling gait of men paid for twenty years to intimidate arrivals off their valuables.
They have assessed two well-kitted off-worlders, and the woman in front looks, by their arithmetic, like the easier target.
They are going to find out shortly that this is the wrong math.
The lead male smiles, gap-toothed. “Evening, friends.”
Tael’s tail flicks once. Preparing to uncoil.
I put my hand on his chest. “Wait.”
“Torres—“
“Wait, Vosk. This one is mine. Let me work.”
Half a second of him reading my face. He steps back a half pace. “Copy.”
I walk toward the three men. Not aggressive posture. Customs-counter posture, the one I learned in my first year at Junction One when a hauler pretended not to have a hold I could see from the dock. Relaxed. Slightly tired. Hand in the pocket of my field jacket.
The lead male does not know what to do with this. His training runs to two configurations: fight and freeze. A woman walking toward him at the pace of someone about to ask him the time is neither. He hesitates. I take the hesitation.
Slow walk, fast commit. The compact baton comes out of the pocket and goes to his left wrist, the wrist locks, his own momentum puts him on his knees. Foot to the back of his calf; he goes prone. Knee to the small of his back. His sidearm is in my hand before his face touches the deck.
Four moves. Three seconds.