I signed the chain-of-custody. This pod is mine.
This pod with the apex predator in it that mates for life and uses its teeth is mine, and the male standing between me and it like he has any intention of letting me handle my cargo is not making this easier by being competent and calm and tall and — not the point. Not the point, Lorri.
He crosses back to the crate. He sits down beside me. The knee returns. The warmth of the contact returns. The part of my brain on knee-monitoring duties clocks in immediately.
The hold hums and the pod pulses green. The diagnostic strip is stable and entirely itself.
The diagnostic strip flickers again.
And again.
And stays amber.
“Captain.” HORATIO’s voice drops to a register I have not heard from him before. No theater. No commentary. Just the word. “The pod’s internal backup is drawing faster than projected. Current estimate: forty-three minutes. The occupant’s biosignatures are — Captain, the biosignatures are changing.”
“Changing how?”
“The occupant,” HORATIO says, carefully, “is waking up.”
Jazil stands. This time his hand goes to my shoulder — one touch, brief, firm — and the cool of his palm goes through my jacket into the skin underneath and my whole body registers it, all of it, the pressure and the temperature and the fact that he is touching me and the fact that what he is saying with the touch isstay there.
Across the hold, inside the matte gray casing, something moves.
Something large.
The pod screams.
4
The Right Voice
Lorri
Nothums.Notshifts.Screams. The pod screams in a register that bypasses every rational part of my brain and hits the part that grew up on a mining colony, the part that knows what an alarm sounds like when it comes from something that was supposed to stay asleep.
Jazil is already moving. Not toward me. Toward the port locker. One hand on the containment rod before I’ve finished flinching, the other rifling the lower shelf the way you rifle a drawer you already know the contents of. He moves differently now. Looser. Faster. The danger has opened something in him that civilian life keeps bolted shut, and the thing behind the bolt is — not the point.NOT THE POINT RIGHT NOW, LORRI.
The diagnostic strip turns solid red. The pod’s casing splits along a seam that was not there two seconds ago.
Steam. Or vapor. Something hot and wet and biological pouring out of the breach, and through it, the first shape: a skull, long and angular, plated in something between bone and chitin. Eyes. Four of them. Milky and bioluminescent, pulsing cold blue-white. A jaw that hinges wider than anatomy should allow.
Teeth that are not for chewing.
SNAG should not have hired me. Flossie should not have hired me. I am going to die in a cargo hold because I told a kind woman in a butter-colored cardigan I cried reading her job posting and she gave me a TASK.
“Lorri.” His voice has gone flat. Operator-flat, stripped of everything but function, and the command voice does something to my nervous system that my nervous system does not have time to fill out the paperwork for. “Stay behind me. Don’t run.”
I don’t run.
The Vrennak rises. And rises. The full body of it clears the pod, and the scale hits all at once: five feet at the shoulder, six at the crest of the plated spine, and wide. Wide in a way that height doesn’t capture. Plated muscle and bioluminescent panels and a tail that sweeps the deck plate with a sound like metal on metal. Six years in a modified stasis pod on a ghost ship and it is awake and it is filling the hold and it is very, very unhappy about it.
The tail catches the secondary cargo console on the backswing. The console doesn’t break so much as cease. Sparks. Display fragments. A dent in the bulkhead that is going to need more than a sticker and some round handwriting.
“Captain.” HORATIO has lost the theater. Not all of it — HORATIO cannot lose all of it — but enough that the voice coming out of the ceiling sounds like a man whose household is on fire and who is making a note of it for the insurance claim. “Secondary console is offline. Ventilation housing in Quadrant Three has sustained impact damage. I am rerouting the airflow. I would also like to note, for the insurance claim I am already drafting, that this vessel is rated for courier freight, not apex predator containment.”
“HORATIO. Containment options.”
“Secondary containment field available. Requires manual activation — two-stage seal release on the port wall: red housing, then green. The field will need to charge, and the Vrennak will need to be within the cradle perimeter for re-engagement.”
