His shoulder has drifted closer to mine. Or mine to his. The gap is less than an inch now, a sliver of warm air between my jacket sleeve and his bare skin. He glances down at his own hands, at the ridges I was not staring at, and then glances at me, and I am not quick enough to pretend I was looking at something else.
He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to. The corner of his mouth does the thing.
He knows. He knows I was watching, and he has not moved his arm. I am going to survive this lockdown the same way I survive everything, which is badly and with my dignity running three full paces behind me and losing ground.
Stop smelling him. Stop smelling the shirtless alien courier. I have been on this station for one hour. An AI is monitoring my AIRBORNE CHEMISTRY. An AI who can read heart rate and skin temperature and my entire hormonal autobiography but who could not warn me abouta PANEL because the station’s quarantine system doesn’t answer to him and my hand was faster than his processors. The one thing I needed him to catch, and he was busy running diagnostics. And there is a corrupted stasis pod twenty feet away containing a six-year experiment. Stop.
I don’t stop.
The pod’s diagnostic strip flickers.
Not fail. Flickers. A single amber pulse in the line of green that has been stable since I walked into this hold, and it is there and gone so fast I am not sure I saw it. But Jazil saw it. His head turns. The amusement drops out of his face like someone pulled a plug, and what’s left is flat, focused, the expression of a male who has been running live cargo for fourteen years and knows what a flicker means.
“HORATIO.”
“I note it, Captain. A brief fluctuation in the stasis field. Within tolerance. The lockdown rotated the bay to back up power twelve minutes ago. The pod’s stasis is cycling to its internal backup.”
“How long will the internal backup hold?”
“Estimated ninety minutes at current draw. The pod’s specs are not in any station database. I am estimating from the power signature. Captain, the power signature is the nonstandard one.”
The nonstandard one. The hand-built one. The one HORATIO could not identify and that does not match any cataloged manufacturer. The six-year one.
Jazil stands. The crate rocks. My thigh goes cold where his knee was, and the absence registers before the alarm does, which tells me something about my priorities that I will deal with another time.
“Is the occupant showing any signs of responsive cycling?”
“Not at this time. Biosignatures are stable. Dormant. The backup is holding.”
“For now.”
“For now, Captain.”
He crosses to the cradle. Not fast. Not slow. One hand on the pod’s housing, looking at the diagnostic strip, and the strip is green again, all green, the amber flicker gone like it never happened.
I am still on the crate. My hands are still in my lap. The SNAG questions are still in my head — who built this pod, who modified the power, who sealed a living predator in an unmarked container on a ghost ship — and underneath them, a new one, smaller and worse: what happens if the backup doesn’t hold?
“Jazil.” My voice comes out quieter than I meant it to. “If the backup fails. What’s in there. How bad is it?”
He looks at me across the hold. His eyes are steady, and his expression is the expression of a male deciding how much truth to put in an answer.
“Vrennaks are apex predators,” he says. “Five to six feet at the shoulder. Plated. Bioluminescent. Fast. This one’s been in stasis for six years, which means it’ll wake up hungry and disoriented and in a space it doesn’t recognize, and it will react to that the way any predator reacts to a threat. It mates for life, so if this one is bonded and can’t find its mate? I think it’s going to be very upset.”
“How do they react to a threat?”
“With their teeth.”
Right. Right. So if the backup fails, the thing in the pod wakes up and it is large and fast and plated and uses its teeth and it might look for a mate it will never find in a sealed cargo bay, and I am locked in here with something that is grieving and furious and built like a batteringram with bioluminescence, and my only weapon is a utility jacket and a can-do attitude. Great. Wonderful. Flossie said, “If you do this cleanly,” like clean was an option, like clean was something that happened to people who got sealed into cargo bays with lovesick apex predators on their first morning.
“The backup will hold,” Jazil says. “Ninety minutes. Lockdown will cycle back to main power in four hours. The pod re-engages. It stays asleep.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
He holds my eyes for a beat longer than the question needs.
“Then I handle it,” he says. “That’s what I do.”
The thing is, it isn’t. Not anymore. OOPS delivered the pod. OOPS contained it, flagged it, brought it in clean. Morrison took one look and said it wasn’t theirs. That’s why I’m here. That’s why Flossie sent me. OOPS brings the problem to the door. SNAG opens the box.
