Page 5 of Fought and Found

She looks at me. All of me. Crimson skin, black heat-dispersal markings visible where my tactical suit leaves my forearms bare, horns, claws extended, tail held rigid in standard aggression posture. I have seen this inventory conducted many times. It typically ends in compliance, occasionally violence, once in the aforementioned marriage proposal.

Her gaze starts at the horns, tracks down to the claws, pauses at my forearms where the dark velvet fuzz covers the skin between the geometric markings, and returns to my face. The entire circuit takes four seconds. It is not a threat assessment. It is closer to the way one might examine an interesting piece of equipment at a trade exposition.

I am not equipment at a trade exposition. I am a Tier 1 specialist conducting an authorized recovery. My professional designation has been earned through nine years of operational excellence. I do not require appraisal.

Her head tilts. She takes a sip of tea.

“Well. You’re not what I expected.”

This is not in my operational framework. Targets do not remark on expectations. Targets comply, resist, or attempt negotiation. This courier appears to be doing none of these things. She appears to be having a pleasant afternoon.

“You’ve got a dent in your shoulder plate.” She says it the way someone might point out a stain on a colleague’s shirt — helpful, conversational, unforgivable. “Left side, near the seal. Took a hit recently?”

I have taken seven hits recently. The shoulder plate damage is from a retrieval on Zessler Point, three days prior, and it is not relevant to this encounter, and she should not be examining my tactical gear with the unhurried attention of a quartermaster conducting an equipment review.

“That is not your concern.”

“No, I suppose not.” Another sip of tea. “Only it looks like it went deep, and you haven’t had it patched, which means either you haven’t had time or you haven’t got anyone to ask. Neither of those is great, lovey.”

Lovey.

The word arrives and my cataloging stops.

Two full seconds of dead air in my processing architecture. No file. No category. No protocol. I have been trained in eighteen forms of verbal negotiation — coercive, cooperative, deceptive, accelerated, seven sub-variants — and not one of them accounts for a target declining a recovery order while calling the operative lovey in a tone that suggests she calls everyone lovey, up to and including people who have just breached her airlock with visible weapons and hostile intent.

The observation about the shoulder plate is irrelevant. I do not patch armor between operations because armor damage is cosmetic and operational efficiency is not determined by aesthetics. The implication that I lack someone to ask is a civilian’s projection. I have an operational support infrastructure. The fact that the infrastructuredoes not extend to personal armor maintenance is a resource allocation decision, not a deficiency.

I do not know why I am still thinking about this.

Framework re-engages. The anomaly is attributed and dismissed.

“I don’t think so, lovey.”

“This is not a request.”

“No, I heard you the first time. Very official. Very impressive.” She gestures with the mug toward the pilot’s chair. “Tea? I’ve got sixty-two varieties. You look like a black-no-sugar type, but I’ve been wrong before. Once. Morrison still brings it up.”

“I do not want tea. I want the container.”

“And I want to deliver it to the Tessaro Foundation, which is what I was hired to do, which is what I intend to do, and which —“ she smiles, and the effect is profoundly, aggressively pleasant in a way that makes my jaw lock, “— is what I will do. So we appear to have reached an impasse. Sure about that tea?”

She moves past me to the pilot’s chair. Close. Unnecessarily close. Close enough that the air shifts temperature — her body heat registering against my dermal receptors as cool, the way everything human registers when you run five degrees above their baseline. Cool and particular.

My nostrils flare before I can clamp the reflex.

Her scent is stronger at this range. Peppermint, wool, the faint metallic trace of a blaster’s charge pack. And underneath, something biological and specific that my olfactory receptors have locked onto with the efficiency they are trained to apply to chemical signatures in debris fields, except there is no debris field and the only signature they are tracking is the skin of a courier in an embroidered cardigan, and I did not authorize this acquisition, and I am going to have a very seriousrecalibration of my autonomic nervous system when this operation concludes.

“The container is the legal property of Cygnus BioWorks, who have retained SRS to recover it. Your delivery contract is subordinate to their retrieval claim.”

“Mm.” She settles into the pilot’s chair — her chair, worn to the exact shape of her, and I note this against my will because my observation protocols do not have an off switch and this cockpit is saturated with evidence of her. “And who gave you that authority? Over this specific container, on this specific route, when the Tessaro Foundation’s researchers are waiting for samples that might — what was it — ‘advance treatment for degenerative neural conditions in three species’?” She glances up. “I read my cargo manifests, lovey. Do you read yours?”

The cargo manifest. I have read the cargo manifest. The contents are classified as research materials, biological, non-hazardous. The intended recipients and their purpose are not operationally relevant. They have never been operationally relevant in nine years of recoveries. That is not a deficiency. That is professionalism.

The courier would, I suspect, have a different word for it. The courier’s word would be wrong.

I do not answer the question.

A holographic orb drops into the space between my horns and her braid. Small. Green-gold. Fist-sized. Glowing with the unmistakable intensity of opinions.