“Perfect time,” Dove says, not moving from my chest.
“Mm. Your biorhythm data suggests you’ve had an eventful evening, but I’ll take the diplomatic answer.” A pause. “Got a situation. Courier named Harlan—solid kid, two years on the routes, runs the Andara Sector loop. Ship took debris damage near the Kytherian border. He limped to the nearest station, but he’s stuck there until replacement parts arrive, and the station commander is a Draelith female who’s apparently decidedHarlan is—and I quote—’a terrified little mammal who needs to stop flinching when I stand near him.’”
Dove lifts her head. “Draelith. Scales, heat vision, territorial nesting instincts?”
“The full package. She’s already rearranged her station’s living quarters to put him closer to her command centre. He says it’s for ‘security purposes.’ She says it’s because he ‘smells correct.’”
“Smells correct,” I repeat.
“Draelith pair-bonding involves olfactory imprinting. Once a Draelith selects a mate, the partner’s scent becomes a neurological fixation.” Mother’s tone shifts—still dry, but gentler underneath. “Sound like anyone we know?”
Dove’s hand flattens on my chest. Over my heart. Over the markings that pulse in sync with hers.
“Send him our way,” she says. “We’ve got room. And I’ve got—let’s call it relevant experience in the ‘stranded with an alien who won’t stop sniffing you’ department.”
“I did not sniff you,” I say.
“You absolutely sniffed me. Day two. In the kitchen. You leaned over my shoulder to ‘check the seasoning’ and inhaled for about thirty seconds.”
“I was assessing airborne particulates.”
“You were smelling my hair.”
“Mother,” I say, “is there anything else?”
“Just this.” Morrison’s voice drops the professional veneer, and what’s underneath is something I recognise—pride, the specific kind that comes from watching someone you’ve protected finally find solid ground. “Dove. Your quarterly review came through. Perfect score. First one from a frontier Specialist in eleven years.”
Silence. Dove’s fingers tighten on my chest.
“Also,” Mother adds, quieter. “Your OOPS account’s fully funded. Part-time runs confirmed through the next fiscalquarter. The sector routes have been reorganised to loop through Kepler—means you’ll never be more than eighteen hours from home.”
The word lands. Home. From a woman who’s been sending Dove into the black for nine years, who watched her run from every port and never once told her to stop.
“Thanks, Mother,” Dove manages. Her voice is rough.
“Don’t thank me. Thank the bureaucrats who approved the route restructuring. And maybe thank the sarcastic AI who filed the logistics proposal that made it happen.”
“I require no thanks,” Pickles says, because of course he’s listening. “I require updated processing cores. But I am... not displeased by the outcome.”
The line clicks off.
Dove presses her face against my chest. She’s not crying—she’s past that, settled into a state of quiet, fierce certainty that I feel through the bond like bedrock.
“A network,” she says. “We’re building an actual network. Couriers and stations and families and—”
“And a very aggressive AI with a filing habit.”
“And an eight-year-old who’s going to stow away on my ship the moment we stop watching her.”
“I give it six months.”
“I give it three weeks.”
She lifts her head. Kisses me—slow and thorough, the kind that tastes like future and permanence and all the variables I stopped trying to control the day she crashed into my docking bay.
“Round three?” she murmurs against my mouth.
“You are insatiable.”
