Page 75 of Fought and Found

“Drask.” She reaches for the comm array. “He’s hailing. Timed it to your docking. I’ve been holding the channel for twenty minutes because I wanted you in this chair when we took it.” She looks at me. The blue eyes sharp and proud and furious all at once — the Morrisoncontradiction, the woman who is already angry at what I’m about to tell her and already preparing to help me anyway. “Together?”

“Together.”

Drask’s voice fills Morrison’s office like smoke.

Calm. Professional. The particular brand of pleasant that means someone is calculating whether you’re worth more alive or dead and hasn’t finished the maths.

“Ms Knight. I was beginning to think the mineral corridor had solved my problem for me.”

I use the warm voice.

Not the charm voice — the real one. The one I use when I mean business so thoroughly that the warmth becomes the threat. Morrison recognizes it. I see her mouth tighten with something that is definitely not approval and is definitely not not approval.

“Mr Drask. Alive and well, thank you for your concern. The route was educational.” I pull the notebook from my cardigan pocket. Open it on my knee. The brown cover, worn soft. My handwriting, round and quick, and on the most recent page: his transaction code. His buyer’s reference number. The pattern that Sprout cracked in four seconds and I wrote down because I write everything down and people keep underestimating how dangerous that is.

“About your deadline, Mr Drask: I’ve decided we won’t be needing it. I’ve been thinking about better uses for the time.” I’m enjoying this. I shouldn’t be — the male tried to kill me, tried to use Xor as a weapon against me, hacked SRS comms and spoofed a kill order on a civiliancourier. But I am sitting in Morrison’s office with Morrison beside me and the notebook in my hand and for the first time since he boarded my ship I am not running. I am sitting. And the sitting feels like power.

“Your transaction code. Your buyer’s reference number. Ten times the container’s listed value — that’s not procurement, that’s auction pricing. You’re brokering stolen research samples to an unnamed buyer using Cygnus BioWorks as a front and SRS as an unwitting delivery service. None of whom know about each other.” I let each piece land. The rhythm Morrison taught me: fact, pause, fact, pause. Let the target do the maths. I learned this in the debrief chair. I am deploying it from the debrief chair. “Your encryption methodology is in SRS’s hands. Your comms architecture hack is documented. Your buyer code is flagged in three separate systems. Which means your buyer’s anonymity died with it. Nobody bids on evidence, Mr Drask. Your sale ended the moment I wrote it down.”

“The courier has been busy.” Still amused. Still testing.

The purr through the wall drops half an octave. He can hear every word of this. The frequency finds the bite mark, my sternum, lower — my body answering him mid-negotiation, which is outrageous and also steadying, which is the whole of us in one sentence. Morrison’s eye twitches at the wall again.

“The courier writes things down, Mr Drask. Compulsively. Ask anyone.”

“Impressive.” A recalibration in his voice — the broker adjusting, reassessing, recalculating the cost of a courier who was supposed to be a line item. “For a single operator with fairylights and no institutional —“

“About that,” I say.

Morrison leans forward and opens her mic.

She does not introduce herself gently. Morrison has never done anything gently in her life. Her voice arrives on the channel the way a dreadnought arrives in a system — the kind of presence that makes the physics of a room rearrange themselves around it. I have watched Morrison use this voice on dock managers, customs officers, pirate captains, a Corsairian warlord who was holding one of our couriers hostage, and one memorable corporate representative from ApexCorp who left the conversation visibly sweating. Morrison collects powerful men who underestimated her the way I collect tea.

“Mr Drask. I am Director Morrison. I run OOPS operations for the Junction One sector, which means I coordinate logistics, security, and intelligence across sixty-nine active trade routes. I have managed courier crises involving warlords, psychic bonds, alien biochemistry, gladiator arenas, and one incident with weaponized Christmas presents that I am still filing the paperwork on. The courier you have been threatening is mine. She has been mine for twelve years. And the institutional backing you just questioned is standing right here.”

Morrison doesn’t threaten. Morrison presents options. I have watched her do this to men twice her size and three times her resources. Every option she presents is a corridor, and every corridor ends with the same wall.

“The data Ms Knight described is verified and backed up across three separate OOPS secure servers. The container has been processed for delivery to the Tessaro Foundation through channels you will never access. Your buyer code has been flagged. Your operational methodology is in SRS’s hands. You have no leverage, no product, and no anonymity.” Morrison’s beat — the one that makes admirals sweat. “Middlemen survive by being invisible, Mr Drask. How visiblewould you like to be?”

Silence on the channel. Five seconds. Seven. I count them against my own heartbeat, steady, Morrison-trained, the pulse of a woman who has just watched her mentor dismantle a broker’s confidence with the efficiency of a surgical strike.

“The transaction is unrecoverable.” Drask. The amusement is gone. What remains is flat and cold and personal — a male who has been outmaneuvered by two women and does not intend to forget it. “You have cost me the sale, Ms Knight. Not the interest. This isn’t over. The courier and I will speak again.”

“I look forward to it, Mr Drask. I really do.”

The channel closes.

Morrison and I look at each other across the desk. For half a second her face does something I have seen exactly four times in twelve years — the corners of her mouth lift, not a smile, Morrison does not smile, but an acknowledgement that something has been done well by someone who was trained well by the best.

“Adequate,” she says.

“Coming from you, that’s a standing ovation.”

“Don’t push it.” She closes the comm array. Picks up the coffee mug. Takes a sip. Puts it back down.

Picks it up: control regained. Puts it down: control about to be lost. The mug is on the desk.

“Now,” she says. “The Xarthian-shaped situation.”