Page 82 of Fought and Found

“Professional focus.”

“Sprout, if either of us makes a move, lock the cockpit controls and play something unsexy.”

“I have a playlist prepared. It is forty-seven minutes of OOPS compliance training recordings. Morrison narrates the section on freight insurance.”

“That would work.”

“It would not work on him,” Sprout says. “His arousal response has no correlation with audio environment. I have data from the mineral corridor.”

“SPROUT.”

“I am providing tactical intelligence. You asked for this service.”

He checks the long-scope. Third time this hour. The lanes are charted and empty, and he checks anyway, and I catalog the checking the way he catalogs everything about me. Saar’s warning rides with us — the chip buys time, not safety — and Drask lost the sale, not the interest. Nobody in this cockpit has forgotten.

The scope stays clean. The checking continues. This is what peace looks like now: not the absence of teeth. Just teeth that haven’t found the range yet.

I pull the notebook out an hour into the flight.

Not because I planned to. Because the boredom is unfamiliar and my hands need something and the notebook is the thing my hands always reach for. Brown cover, worn soft. Twelve years of entries in my round, quick handwriting. Lost things. Missing shipments. People-shaped gaps in systems that don’t track people.

I open it on the console between us.

“What is this?” He looks at the page. He has seen the notebook before — called it documentation without authority, called it a diary, quoted from it without admitting he had read it. But he hasn’t seen it like this. Open. Offered. The twelve years of compulsive writing presented not as evidence of institutional failure but as a business plan.

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

“You showed me this in the cockpit. The first night. I called it —“ He stops.

“You called it documentation without authority. A diary.”

“I was incorrect.”

That lands. The male who was never wrong admitting he was wrong about the thing that matters most. I don’t make a production of it. I flip to a page near the middle.

“Relay Station Brax. Three shipments diverted over six months. Different cargo types, different routes, but the timing pattern isidentical — all three were rerouted during a twenty-minute window when the station’s tracking system runs a diagnostic cycle.”

His eyes sharpen. The tactical brain engaging. “Internal corruption. Someone at the routing level with access to the diagnostic schedule.”

The speed of that assessment. Three sentences of data and he has the operational picture. The tactical brain is doing things to me that have nothing to do with the notebook and everything to do with watching competence in real time. I had a frankly historic night and I am getting turned on by a male reading my case notes. This is my life now.

“I flagged it two years ago. Sent it to OOPS compliance. They filed it. Nobody followed up because it wasn’t a priority and nobody was hurt and the shipments were insured.”

“Because nobody had your data combined with operational capability. You had the pattern. You lacked the resources to act on it.”

“I lacked a partner.”

The word sits between us in the cockpit. Partner. Not just the romantic kind — though it is. Professional. Two people whose skills interlock. My instinct and network, his training and tactical mind. Twelve years of notebook entries are proof of concept for a company that didn’t exist until this week.

We go through the pages together. I read, he assesses. The rhythm is immediate and natural — I see the human cost (the people, the unanswered calls, the gaps), he sees the operational structure (the routes, the timing, the institutional failures that allowed the gaps). We’re good together in a way that has nothing to do with the sex and everything to do with the way his brain complements mine.

“This one — sector 7, missing survey vessel. The insurance company wrote it off but the spouse filed six reports.”

“Six reports, no investigation. The vessel was operating in uncharted space. OOPS doesn’t do uncharted. SRS would charge triple and ask no questions. The spouse has been calling Junction One every month for two years.” I tap the entry. “Someone should find that ship.”

“Someone will.”

He turns a page. Stops. “This entry. The bonded pair — Xarthian male, human wife. ‘Disappeared from registered address. No foul play indicated. Wife hospitalized, cause undetermined.’ You wrote this nine months ago.”