Page 13 of Fought and Found

4

Vanity Project

Xor

Thecourier’sshipisnot designed for a Xarthian. This is a structural assessment, not a complaint. The cockpit ceiling clears my horns by an inch and a half, the corridors require a lateral adjustment at the shoulders, and the cargo bunk she has assigned me is approximately 80% of my required sleeping dimensions. The decorative lighting creates a navigational hazard at every junction. My tail has knocked over three objects in the past forty minutes.

A tin labeled Darjeeling — The Good Stuff — DO NOT TOUCH. MORRISON, THIS MEANS YOU. A small ceramic figure of a creature I cannot identify, wearing a hat. A stack of data pads balanced on the edge of the nav console with the architectural integrity of a wish.

The courier rights the ceramic creature. Adjusts its hat. Pats its head.

“He’s fine,” she says, to the creature, or to me, or to the ship at large. “Barely a scratch, Gerald.”

Gerald. She has named a ceramic figurine. I am sharing a vessel with a woman who names ceramic figurines, and my tail is doing something complicated near her elbow that I shut down before it makes contact. I anchor it to the co-pilot’s chair with enough force that the joint aches. The tail has been staging a slow-motion insubordination since I boarded, and I am addressing it with appropriate severity.

“Tea?” she says, already filling the kettle.

“I don’t want tea.”

“Wasn’t asking if you wanted it. Was telling you it’s happening.”

She pulls two mugs from the rack — the chipped one and a second, larger one with a faded image of a planet and the words JUNCTION ONE: IT’S NOT MUCH BUT IT’S OURS. She fills the larger mug and holds it out. My claws retract. Both hands. Simultaneously. An autonomic response to the proximity of a ceramic vessel requiring careful handling — the kind you cannot do with inch-long combat claws extended. My body has made this decision without filing a requisition, and the speed of the retraction is a degree of betrayal I intend to address at the earliest operational opportunity.

I take the mug. The ceramic is warm against blunt fingertips.

She watches. Not my face. My hands. The smooth pads where the claws should be, wrapped around the planet mug. Her gaze stays two seconds longer than the exchange warrants, and whatever she sees makes her mouth do something small and involuntary before she looks away. She does not comment on the retraction. She takes a sip of her own tea.

I drink mine. It is not terrible. This is operationally irrelevant.

“Your notebook.” I set the mug down because I need to reclaim ground, and intelligence gathering is a framework I understand. “You were writing in it during the approach. Show me.”

“Earn it.”

“I am a Tier 1 SRS operative with nine years of field experience. I don’t earn access. I’m granted it.”

“Not on this ship, lovey.” She tucks one foot under herself in the pilot’s chair — an absurdly informal posture for a woman in negotiations with a species that has an apex-tier threat classification across fourteen jurisdictions. “On this ship, you share first.”

I should refuse. Director Trell would refuse. The operational protocol is clear: intelligence is currency, and you don’t spend currency on couriers. I open the merc data on her display instead. Formation analysis, weapon signatures, intercept probabilities. If she wants intelligence sharing, I’ll demonstrate what actual intelligence looks like — conducted by a professional who does not decorate his tactical displays with fairy lights.

She leans forward. Studies the analysis. Thirty seconds of silence, which is the longest I have heard her be quiet.

“Their kit was Solari-manufactured,” she says. “High-end but generic. Deniable procurement chain.”

She had already cataloged their equipment. The folder I have mentally labeled the courier’s tactical competence is becoming inconveniently thick.

She sets the notebook on the console between us. Open. Like an offering she expects to be mishandled.

Names. Dates. Routes. A meticulous record of cargo lost and never recovered, of people who filed reports that went nowhere and itemsthat vanished into the gap between what the system promised and what it delivered. The handwriting is small and precise. Each entry has a date, a name, a brief description, and a follow-up note: Filed with OOPS, no response. Contacted Junction One dispatch, transferred to holding queue. Morrison says it’s not our sector. Going anyway.

Going anyway.

“What is this?”

“Cases. Things that got lost and nobody looked for.”

“Documentation without institutional authority is a diary.”

The temperature in the cockpit drops. Not literally — the environmental controls hold. But the warmth that lives in her voice, the chatty cadence, the pet names — all of it has been set down with the deliberate care of someone placing a weapon on a table.