Page 7 of Fought and Found

Her fingers flex against the mug handle. A small movement. Contained almost immediately. As if the observation had a physical component she caught before it reached her hand.

My claws retract.

Left hand only. The one nearest to her, resting on the console three inches from her elbow. Five black points sliding back into their sheaths like they have received an order I did not issue, leaving blunt fingertips, smooth pads, the hand of someone who is not a threat. The right hand stays armed. Combat-ready. Fully extended.

One hand for killing. One hand that has independently decided to be something else, and I am going to address this defection at the earliest opportunity, because selective claw retraction is not a tactical response, it is not in any operational manual, and if Director Trell saw this he would have me reconditioned so fast the paperwork would be a blur.

The right hand drives its claws into the console polymer — a sharp, ugly sound that makes the orb spike white for half a second. Crescent marks in the surface. Discipline reasserted. The left hand remains, horrifyingly, soft.

The courier notices. The retraction. The asymmetry. The claws buried in her console. She files all of it behind those brown eyes with a precision that has nothing to do with warmth and everything to dowith twelve years of reading people in places where reading people wrong gets you killed.

She says nothing about it.

She takes another sip of tea.

My nostrils flare on the inhale and I switch to oral respiration before I can stop the reflex. Too late. Her scent is on the back of my tongue. It will be there for hours. Xarthian olfactory memory does not discard signatures it has classified as significant. I did not authorize the classification. I cannot reverse it. I redirect.

“The container.” My voice is correct. My voice is always correct, even when the rest of me is staging a mutiny that would embarrass a first-year recruit. “You have sixty seconds to initiate voluntary transfer before I escalate to compulsory recovery. SRS protocol is clear. I do not wish to damage your vessel.”

“You don’t wish to damage my vessel.” She repeats it with a slow nod, as if I have said something I did not intend to say.

I have not said anything I did not intend to say. The vessel is the only relevant asset in this cockpit. That is a statement of operational fact and I will not be cross-examined on it by a woman with a flower sticker on her sidearm.

“Fifty-three seconds.”

She picks up the mug. Takes a slow sip. Sets it down. The ceramic meets the console with a small, precise sound, and she folds her hands in her lap and looks at me. Not defiantly. Not nervously. The way you would look at someone who has said something faintly ridiculous, and you are giving them a moment to hear it back.

“Thirty-six seconds.”

“Are you going to count the whole time? Because I should put the kettle on if so. Seems a waste of a minute otherwise.”

“Thirty-nine —“

The number stalls. She has reached up and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and the motion has shifted her cardigan, and the tactical vest beneath it is visible at the collar — scarred polymer, the kind that takes damage and keeps functioning, and there is a scorch mark near the left shoulder that I would classify as recent energy weapon contact.

She is wearing a tactical vest under the cardigan. She has been wearing it this entire time. She greeted me with tea and banter and a warm smile and an uncovered blaster, and she was armored underneath the embroidered animals. Every second of this has been a performance — not of weakness, of control. She let me see the knitwear, so I would miss the kevlar.

I did not miss the kevlar. I missed it for twelve seconds, which is eleven seconds longer than any target has ever deceived me, and I find this profoundly irritating.

I have lost the count.

Her eyes drop to my hands — both of them, the retracted and the armed — and her gaze stays there one second longer than assessment requires. Her fingers twitch against the ceramic, once, a reach she redirects to the mug handle before it becomes anything else.

“You know,” she says, “most people who want to rob me at least introduce themselves properly. You’ve given me your title and your employer.” She looks up. Steady. Warm. Entirely unintimidated by the claws and the tail and the fact that I am twice her size and standing in her ship uninvited. “You haven’t told me your name.”

“I have told you my designation.”

“Not the same thing, lovey.”

The word again. Lovey. My processing hitches — not a crash, a stutter, a half-second gap where the framework tries negotiation tactic, and it does not fit, tries psychological manipulation, and it does not fit, tries condescension and —

It does not fit because she means it. She calls me lovey the way she calls the ship a name it does not have and the weapons names they did not earn and the orb a word that is not its designation. She means all of it. There is no invoice attached. No leverage. No trade.

I have been called a great many things in nine years. Operative. Specialist. Weapon. Monster, twice, by people who were not wrong. Nobody has called me lovey. There is no framework for lovey. I would very much like one, because operating without a framework is the tactical equivalent of freefall, and I do not do freefall. I do structured descent with predetermined vectors. This is neither structured nor descending in any direction I recognize.

The proximity alert screams.

Three contacts. Incoming fast, weapons signatures hot, transponders dark. Not the courier’s soft chime from her earlier alert — I heard that through the hull as I approached, gauged her readiness, assessed her response time. This is different.