Page 81 of Fought and Found

Today, the same male is sitting in my co-pilot’s chair running a pre-flight check with hands that are too large for the interface and a tail that keeps bumping the throttle.

The Petal undocks from Junction One. My ship. My controls. The fairy lights blinking across the navigation console, the ceramic figurine Gerald perched on the throttle, the tea stain on the co-pilot’s armrest that has been there for three years because I could never be bothered to clean it and now his elbow is resting on it and the stain is his staintoo.

He’s learned the pre-flight sequence. Not because I asked him to — because he watched me do it twice and memorized it, because that is what a Tier 1 tactical brain does with information, it absorbs and optimizes and provides unsolicited improvements.

“You’re sitting in my co-pilot’s chair running my pre-flight check.”

“Your pre-flight check has three redundant steps. I have streamlined.”

“You have been on this ship for five minutes and you’re already reorganizing my procedures.”

“Your procedures needed reorganizing. The secondary shield calibration is duplicated in steps four and eleven. This is inefficient.”

“Sprout, tell him my procedures are fine.”

“Your procedures are adequate.” Sprout’s orb hovers between us — halfway, the diplomat’s position, the AI who is enjoying this. “His optimization is marginally superior. I have logged my assessment.”

“Marginally —“

“I’m not picking sides. I’m picking accuracy.”

“Since when are you two on the same side?”

“Since his tactical assessments became marginally more consistent than yours.”

“You said that already. On the station. You’re recycling material, Sprout.”

“The observation bears repeating. It has not become less true.”

The orb drifts back to its station above the console — scorched amber, the hairline crack catching the fairy light. “Also: I am running long-range sweeps at combat resolution. My chassis is at sixty-one per cent. My vigilance is at one hundred and ten. The two are unrelated.”

I look at Xor. He is not smiling — the fifth smile hasn’t arrived yet, I am counting, I will always be counting — but there is something around his eyes. A softness that his face is still learning how to hold. The arrogance is there, the certainty that he is correct about the pre-flight redundancy, but underneath it: the bewilderment of a male who has been adopted by an AI he did not audition for and does not know how to refuse.

The comedy triangle. Sprout and Xor against me. I am outnumbered in my own cockpit by an alien and an orb and I should be annoyed and I am not annoyed. I am the opposite of annoyed. I am the specific, dangerous, radiant feeling that happens when the empty spaces fill up and the ship that was too quiet for ten years is suddenly too loud and the too-loud is better.

Also: the cockpit is very small.

It has always been small — the Petal is a courier vessel, not a luxury liner — but it has never felt this small, because the co-pilot’s chair has never contained seven feet of crimson alien whose knee is three inches from mine and whose forearm fuzz catches the fairy light when he adjusts the nav display and whose scent is filling the cockpit with something warm and smoky that makes my thighs press together involuntarily. We had sex. We had a lot of sex. Very recently. And my body has apparently decided that the appropriate mourning period between sex sessions is zero seconds and the proximity is making a case.

His tail finds my ankle under the console. Wraps. Stays.

“That’s distracting.”

“My tail is providing stabilization during the departure maneuver.”

“We departed six minutes ago.”

“The departure maneuver is ongoing.”

Route to Velar Prime: charted space, standard lanes, a few hours of nothing. The first boring flight since he boarded. The boredom is a luxury neither of us is used to. The boredom is also, apparently,an aphrodisiac, because now there is nothing to dodge or shoot at or survive, there is only the cockpit and his knee and his forearm and his scent and the tail on my ankle and the memory of what his hands did twelve hours ago.

I shift in my seat. He notices. Of course he notices — Xarthian senses, every micro-movement cataloged, every shift in my body temperature registered. His nostrils flare. The jaw tightens.

“We have a delivery to make,” I say. To myself, mostly.

“We do.”

“Professional focus.”