Page 8 of Fought and Found

Mercenaries.

Three vessels. Unmarked. Configuration: Outer Rim freelance, the kind of crew that takes contracts from people who do not want paperwork. Not SRS. Not law enforcement. Not here for negotiation.

Here for the container. And they do not care who is holding it.

My body moves before my brain authorizes the action.

Tail first — it uncoils from my leg and wraps the courier’s waist. All three and a half feet of prehensile muscle closing around her midsection and pulling her behind the pilot’s chair, behind me, between mybody and the bulkhead. The contact is immediate and total, and I am not going to think about what it feels like because what it feels like is irrelevant to the tactical situation, and also I would like to remain functional.

She is warm. That is the only data my nervous system is processing. Warm through the cardigan and the tactical vest and the shirt beneath, and every receptor in three and a half feet of prehensile muscle has fired simultaneously, and the output is a single word I do not have an operational category for, and I am not going to examine it, because the mercenaries are fourteen minutes out, and I need to function.

Both hands go to full extension. Ten black points. I am between her and the airlock, thermal output spiking, the markings along my shoulders running hot enough to feel through the tactical suit.

She does not scream. Does not freeze.

She takes up Betsy. Two-handed grip, feet planted, weight centered. The stance is Morrison-trained and flawless, and I will be revising every assumption I have made about OOPS couriers and their operational capabilities, starting with this one, who is holding a named weapon with the steady hands of someone who has killed before and will kill again and is not troubled by the interval.

Four minutes. I have known this courier for four minutes. My tail is around her waist. My claws are out. My body has positioned itself between her and the threat with the efficiency of nine years of combat training applied to an objective I did not select and did not authorize. This is not a framework failure. This is the framework collapsing entirely, and there are three armed vessels inbound, and I do not have time to examine what that means.

“I suppose we have a problem,” I say.

“We have several, lovey.” She does not look at my tail. Does not look at my claws. She watches the tactical display, where three red signatures are closing fast, and her grip on the flower-stickered blaster does not waver. “The mercs are only one of them.”

My tail does not let go. This is not a tactical decision. This is not a decision at all. My tail has made an assessment I was not consulted on, arrived at a conclusion I cannot countermand, and is currently holding a courier against my body with the certainty of something that has been waiting nine years to do exactly this. I am going to have to think about that. I am not going to think about it now.

It is not dismissed.

3

Good Shot

Flossie

Fourteenminutesisalong time when someone’s coming to kill you.

Sprout counts it down in intervals. “Contact bearing zero-four-seven mark twelve. Twelve minutes.” “Three vessels confirmed. Weapons signatures hot. Ten minutes.” “They have altered formation. Eight minutes.” Each update delivered in the flat white-glow voice that means Sprout has packed away every ounce of personality and become the thing it was built to be — a tactical system with opinions it is temporarily declining to share.

The Xarthian’s tail is still around my waist.

He hasn’t let go. Three and a half feet of prehensile muscle cinched around my midsection, pulling me behind him andthe pilot’s chair, and the heat of it is denser than human warmth — radiating through my cardigan and the tactical vest underneath like a palm pressed flat against bare skin. I can feel the grip tighten every time Sprout calls a new number. His body is counting too.

“They are splitting formation,” Sprout reports. “Two vessels converging on the SRS craft. One on approach to us.”

Through the viewport, I watch it happen. The two merc ships bracket his vessel — fast, coordinated, the kind of formation that comes from practice rather than training — and open fire. The first salvo punches through his portside hull like paper. The second takes out the engine array. I can see the breaches opening in real time — amber wounds glowing against the dark, atmosphere venting in white plumes that catch the starlight and scatter it. His power grid flickers. Lists. The ship is dying in clean, efficient stages, the way something dies when the people killing it have done this before.

He watches his ship come apart through my viewport and his face doesn’t change.

Not a flinch. Not a tightening. Nothing. The gold eyes track the damage with the clinical precision of a man running a post-action assessment on someone else’s operation, and the only tell is his tail — the grip around my waist shifts, tightens, and the last six inches press flat against my hip in a way that has nothing to do with tactical positioning and everything to do with the fact that the only functional vessel in this corridor is the one he’s standing in, and the only warm thing in his immediate vicinity is me.

I don’t mention it. There are bigger problems than a tail.

“Four minutes,” Sprout says. “The third vessel is matching our airlock approach vector. They intend to board.”

“Right.” I put my hand on his tail. Not a stroke. Not a comfort. A tap — two fingers against the warm muscle, the way you’d tap someone’s shoulder to say move. “I need my waist back, lovey. Can’t shoot with you wrapped around me.”

His tail unwinds. The loss of heat is immediate — a cold stripe across my midsection where 103 degrees becomes ambient air, and I feel it more than I should. My body catalogs the absence before my brain catches up, and then I’m drawing Betsy and the cataloging stops because Morrison trained the sentiment out of combat and what’s left is geometry.

He takes the starboard approach. I take portside. We don’t discuss it. The positioning is instinctive — he fills the corridor toward the secondary airlock, I cover the primary, and the width of him in my peripheral vision is a wall someone forgot to install a door in. The heat radiating off him reaches me from three feet away. Combat warmth, I tell myself. Exertion. Nothing specific to him at all.