“How long to charge?”
“Approximately ninety seconds from activation.”
Jazil looks at me. Not at the Vrennak who is roaring but not moving yet. At me. Blue eyes steady, slit pupils contracted to vertical lines, and he is about to ask me something he needs me to say yes to. I can see it in every line of him.
“The seal releases are on the port wall behind you. I need to keep this thing’s attention. I can’t be in two places. Can you do it?”
Notstay there.Notlet me handle it.Can you do it?
“Yes.”
“Red housing first. Pull the lever down, hold for three seconds, and release. Then green housing, same motion. Go when I draw it.”
The Vrennak’s four eyes swivel between us. It is deciding. Every cell of me understands what kind of decision it is making.
Jazil moves. Toward the Vrennak. The rod comes up, and he cracks it against the plated flank and the sound rings through the hold likea bell struck wrong and the Vrennak screams and swings toward him and the pivot he makes — fluid, low, every joint unlocking into something faster than his walk — does a thing to the base of my spine that I am absolutely not acknowledging while running for my life.
I run.
The port wall is twelve feet behind me. My boots ring on the deck plate. Red housing. Red lever. Cold under my hands. I pull it down and hold and count — one, two, three — and the mechanism grinds and something in the cradle’s base engages with a hydraulic clunk.
Behind me: the crack of the rod on a plated skull. A grunt from Jazil that is low and clipped and not a word. The scrape of claws on the deck plating. Something heavy hitting a bulkhead hard enough that the port wall shudders under my palms.
I release. Green housing. Two feet left. Down, hold, count —
The Vrennak’s tail catches the cradle housing on a blind swing. The field emitter’s mounting bracket shears clean off the base. Sparks. Dark.
“Captain. The primary emitter is offline.” HORATIO’s voice has gone flat. No flourish. No commentary. Just information, delivered fast. “Switching to back up emitter. Recalibrating. New charge time: approximately four minutes.”
Four minutes.
Four minutes in a sealed cargo hold with an apex predator that is currently using a courier ship the way my brothers used to use the colony gym — as a surface to destroy when the mood took them. Four minutes in which Jazil has to keep a five-hundred-pound plated carnivore interested in him instead of me, with a rod and one arm and the sheer stupid confidence of a man who has been running livecargo for fourteen years and has apparently decided that death is a scheduling problem.
Because he is bleeding. The Vrennak’s claws caught his right forearm on the pivot — I saw it happen, saw the slash open from elbow to wrist, clean and deep and wrong — and the blood is coming dark, almost black in the lockdown light, sheeting down his hand and over the rod. He hasn’t made a sound about it. He hasn’t stopped moving. He is herding the Vrennak toward the center of the hold with the patience of someone who has reclassified pain as a to-do item and moved it to the bottom of the list.
Jazil is bleeding, and he is still between me and it. He is bleeding, and the muscles in his back are doing things under the green-bronze skin that the lockdown light is choosing to illuminate with what I can only describe as personal malice, and I am WATCHING instead of HELPING.
Not now. Help now. Be attracted to the bleeding alien later. Later is a thing that exists. Hopefully.
The Vrennak charges the starboard cargo rack. Three crates go over. The rack bows, shrieks, and one of the upper cross-braces snaps free and clatters across the hold like a thrown javelin. Jazil sidesteps it without looking. Without looking. His body just knows the trajectory, the way mine knows how to trip over things and apologize to furniture.
“Captain, I am now cataloging the damage. Thus far: one secondary console, one ventilation housing, three cargo crates of unspecified non-hazardous freight, one cross-brace, and what I believe was a personal effects locker. I would like the record to reflect that I am not speculating on the insurance implications, but I am thinking about them very loudly.”
Jazil doesn’t answer. He is driving the Vrennak back, step by step, the rod working in short controlled arcs that keep the plated skullturning, keep the four eyes tracking him instead of me. The ridges on both his forearms have gone dark — nearly black — and he is working the Vrennak the way you work a problem you can’t solve but refuse to put down, and I am standing at the port wall with my hands on a lever and my heart hammering and the stupid, useless, magnificently unhelpful thought that nobody has ever looked like that while bleeding. Nobody. Not once. Not in the history of bleeding.
STOP IT.
The green housing clicks. The backup emitter begins to cycle. A low whine builds beneath my boots.
“HORATIO. Field status.”
“Charging, Captain. Twelve percent. The Vrennak will need to be within the expanded cradle perimeter. The perimeter has shifted because of the emitter swap. I am recalculating.”
The Vrennak is not cooperating with HORATIO’s recalculations. It has planted itself in the center of the hold, forelimbs braced, tail sweeping in long arcs that clear anything within reach. The bioluminescence has shifted from cold blue-white to something hotter, pulsing fast and irregularly. It is not charging. It is not retreating. It is doing math. Predator math. The math that ends with teeth.
“It won’t herd,” Jazil says. Flat. Thinking out loud when the audience is himself and the answers are getting worse. “Six years in stasis. It’s disoriented. It doesn’t recognize the cradle as safe.”
“So how do we get it back?”
