"OOPS?"
"One signature matches OOPS emergency shuttle transponder codes. The other—" Bebo's tone shifts. "The other matches ApexCorp asset-retrieval transport configurations."
The drones. They weren't just driving Stompy toward us. They were herding us into the open, confirming our position, transmitting coordinates to the retrieval team.
Krilly's hand finds mine. Her determination reaches me through the connection, solid as the basalt walls around us. No fear. Anger, yes. The specific, focused anger of a woman who has survived too much to let a corporation take what she's chosen.
"They're coming for you," she says.
"Yes."
"Over my dead body."
"That is precisely what I'm trying to prevent."
She squeezes my hand. The claiming color brightens where our skin connects, visible even in full daylight. "We face it together."
The ships break through the cloud cover. Two of them. The OOPS shuttle first, orange-and-white with Stellar Togetherness Initiative security markings along the hull. Behind it, close enough to be aggressive, a black-hulled transport with the ApexCorp logo stamped on the side.
Snowball and Pudding melt into the canyon's shadows. Creatures of the jungle, not of whatever institutional storm isabout to descend. They've given what they can. The rest is up to us.
Krilly's heartbeat in my chest. Steady. Certain. The heartbeat of a woman who is about to fight a corporation with nothing but a data implant, an AI's logs, and the absolute conviction that the male beside her is worth protecting.
The ships begin their descent.
Surviving the jungle, I'm beginning to realise, may have been the easy part.
12
The Cavalry
Krilly
TheOOPSshuttletouchesdown in a wash of dust and heated air, and beneath my own heartbeat, Horgox’s spikes.
Not fear, exactly. Something older. The deep-body recognition of a male who has been loaded onto transports before and never arrived anywhere good. His hand tightens on mine, and the claiming color brightens where our skin connects, opalescent light visible even in the morning glare.
“I’m right here,” I tell him. “Nobody’s taking you anywhere without me.”
His jaw is locked. Arena face. But underneath the tactical stillness, I can feel him holding onto my certainty the way a drowning person holds onto a line. Using my calm to anchor his. That’s what the bond gives us. Not just shared feeling. Sharedfunction. My steadiness becomes his steadiness. His alertness sharpens mine. Two nervous systems running in parallel, covering each other’s gaps.
The shuttle’s cargo bay lowers. Three figures step out: two couriers in dark field uniforms, one in the grey of the Stellar Togetherness Initiative, the galaxy’s governing body for sentient rights and interspecies relations. STI jurisdiction covers exactly the kind of case we’re about to make.
The taller courier moves first, and for a disorienting second my brain can’t categorise what I’m seeing. Humanoid, but wrong in the way that meansalien: fluid predatory grace, a tail that swings in a low controlled arc behind him, pupils that contract to vertical slits as they sweep the canyon. He positions himself at the shuttle’s flank without being told, reading the terrain the way Horgox reads terrain, and something about the economy of the movement saysfighter. Not past tense. Present.
The woman beside him is human, compact, dark-haired, with the particular energy of someone who has seen worse than this and isn’t impressed. She carries herself the way senior couriers carry themselves: like the universe has tried to kill her enoughtimes that she’s stopped finding it novel. Her eyes find me, find Horgox, find our joined hands and the opalescent shimmer in his markings, and something in her expression sharpens. Recognition. Not of us specifically. Of the situation.
And then it clicks.Nova Jaxson. Noomi now, officially, but every OOPS rookie knows the name. The courier who saved Christmas. The ex-pirate who went legitimate, fell back in with her alien ex, and somehow turned their catastrophic history into the highest-success-rate partnership on the Outer Rim. The male with the tail and the predatory stillness is Ober Kraine, her partner in every sense that matters. They run the routes nobody else will touch.
They fly together. As a couple. The thought lodges somewhere behind my ribs and stays there.
The STI officer approaches first. Lieutenant’s bars, hand near but not on his sidearm. His eyes do a rapid sweep: the canyon, the rubble from Stompy’s breach, the claw marks on every surface, and then us. He lingers on Horgox. On the blade at Horgox’s hip. On the size of him, the scars, the circuit traceries that mark him as modified.
On the opalescent shimmer threading through his jade markings, which the lieutenant clearly doesn’t know how to categorise.
“Courier Baxter?” His voice is trained for neutral authority. “Lieutenant Voss, STI. We’re here to extract you.”
“Acknowledged.” My voice comes out steady. Professional. The voice that passed OOPS training, that talks to ship AIs and names her tools and survived a murder jungle for nine days. “I have critical evidence of illegal operations by ApexCorp Facility Theta that requires immediate STI oversight. Data logs, drone surveillance records, specimen collar hardware, AI observational data, and a witness willing to testify.”
