Draanth, he remembered exactly how those fingertips had felt against his jaw right before their mouths crashed together. Now his brain supplied a whole list of other places he wanted them, sliding over his chest, down his stomach, wrapping around his cock?—
He cut that thought off right there.
She highlighted a pattern in the data. “See this? Deliveries are accepted between oh-six-hundred and fourteen-hundred, station time. But there’s a gap here…” She pointed. “Between eleven-thirty and twelve-fifteen. No deliveries logged.”
“Lunch break?”
“Yeah, and a shift change.” She pulled up another screen. “Look here, the morning crew clocks out at eleven-forty-five and the afternoon crew doesn’t clock in until twelve-ten. That’s a twenty-five-minute window where the loading bay is minimally staffed.”
He blinked. She was reading shift changes from delivery schedules. He’d never have thought of that. In fact, it wouldn’t even have occurred to him to look.
Pulling up traffic logs next, she started cross-referencing them with the floor plans.
Draanth, look at her. Little human’s reading logs and cycles like they’re a damn warball playbook while you sit there chewing protein sludge and wondering why the hell you never thought to check the obvious trall. Genius move, champ. Real former-celebrity behavior.
“These doors here and here are rated for cargo containers up to class-three. That means they’re wide enough for loading equipment, which means they’re wide enough for us. This one…” She highlighted a smaller entrance. “Staff access only. Biometric locks.”
“Can Fred get through those?”
“I could,” Fred said, “but it would trigger a security flag. The Healers’ Hall takes patient privacy seriously. Their internal systems are considerably more robust than the supply chain’s.”
“We don’t need to,” she said suddenly, looking at another screen filled with yet more numbers he couldn’t read. “Look here. Main shipment comes in every seven days, smaller stuff daily.”
He shook his head, sliding to the edge of his seat to look at the same screens as she was. But the answer didn’t jump out at him. He slid a glance sideways at her. “How do you know it’s every seven days?”
She leaned forward to tap part of the screen. “Here, look. The supply vendor only invoices weekly, on a Tuesday. If we assume a day-one for day-three shipment schedule, then we’re looking at the main delivery on a Friday. See where all the other daily deliveries drop off here about eleven in the morning? Looks to me like they bring the main weekly delivery in then and…” she flicked to another screen. “The size of this load, there’s no way to get all this in one class-three. So that’s multiple ships. We can just slide on in the middle of them.”
Draanth.
He’d watched coaches draw up set plays with chalk markers and the gleam of desperation in their eyes, and he’d watched warrior-trained berserkers in tactical briefings on Parac’Norr. But none of them had worked like this.
She wasn’t strategizing. She was reading and pulling information out of data other people would throw away, stitching it together into a picture so clear he could practically walk through it. It was so simple it was crazy.
“But won’t they know we’re not part of the same delivery and raise the alarm?”
“Uh-huh,” she shook her head. “Look at these registrations on deliveries for the last month. They’re all different companies. Latharian and other species. I see at least four human company reg’s that I recognize.”
She looked at him in expectation.
“Okay, talk to me like I’m a youngling,” he admitted. “What does that mean?”
“Chaos,” Fred chipped in. “Absolute fucking chaos.”
“Fred!” Cait gasped, twisting to glare at his cartridge. “Language!”
“Well, it will be,” the AI said grumpily. “And if we move right and ping with the right code for the delivery, we can just slide into a berth with no one being any the wiser.”
Raaze rubbed the skin between his brows. “Okay, stupid question. But won’t anyone query why we’re not… You know, offloading cargo?”
Cait and Fred both chuckled, the soft sound of her laughter mixing with Fred’s mechanical amusement.
“Oh, you have never seen chaos like this,” she grinned. “Multiple ships, over two different shifts. Some ships will be held over for the afternoon shift to unload. So… if we get challenged in the morning, we tell them we have an afternoon unload slot. And if we get challenged in the afternoon… we tell them we were offloaded by the morning ship and we’re just waiting for POD before we leave.”
“That’s…”
“Brilliant?” Fred cut in. “Yeah, we might have been doing this a while.”
It was brilliant. So draanthing brilliant he didn’t have words for it.
