Page 9 of Delivered and Devoured
Her pulse is doing something at the side of her throat that I can see from this angle, fast and visible, and her hair has the smell of recycledstation air and something that might be tea and underneath both of them the warm-sweet thing my tongue has been tasting since she walked aboard, and I am — I have been — pressed against her for approximately four seconds longer than the situation strictly required.
I step back. Slow.
She turns. Slower.
Her cheeks are crimson. Her eyes are doing something I am not equipped to name. The chin comes up.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Don’t,” she says.
Then — both at once — “Sorry.”
She laughs. It bursts out of her, helpless, and it lands somewhere in my chest that I am going to have to deal with later, in private, after she is off my ship.
“HORATIO,” I say. “Status.”
“The cradle is restabilizing, Captain. The harmonic has settled. We are, for the moment, in nominal range.” A diplomatic pause. “I might gently suggest that the agent has done her part of the handoff and is free to take possession of the pod, if she so wishes, before we have any further excitement.”
“I’d love to,” Lorri says.
“Hover-carts on the bay concourse,” I say. “HORATIO can dispatch a station bot to —”
“I brought one.” She squares her shoulders. “It’s at the foot of the ramp. I just need to attach the cradle harness and —”
The pod hums again.
Different hum this time. Wrong in a new way. The diagnostic strip flickers. Lorri pivots toward the cradle’s secondary diagnostic panel — the same instinct that brought her up the ramp at Vresh, the instinctthat hasn’t dropped the datapad yet, the instinct Flossie clocked in eleven minutes.
“That readout’s spiking —”
She presses her palm flat against the panel to steady herself as she leans in.
Three things happen at once.
The panel — designed for a Skiveth biosignature and not, specifically, a human one — registers an unauthorized contact. The cradle interprets this as a containment breach at handoff. And the pod, which has been waiting for an excuse for six days, sends a cascade alert direct to Junction One Station Authority on the priority channel reserved for unidentified biological cargo with possible quarantine implications.
The hold light shifts. The bay doors begin to close.
“Oh,” Lorri says. “Oh, no!”
The klaxon fires.
JUNCTION ONE STATION AUTHORITY. BAY-RESTRICTED QUARANTINE INITIATED. BAYS THIRTEEN AND FOURTEEN, DOCKING LEVEL, SECTOR SEVEN.
POSSIBLE BIOSIGNATURE CONTAMINATION EVENT. ESTIMATED CLEAR: TWENTY-FOUR HOURS.
ALL PERSONNEL CURRENTLY WITHIN THE QUARANTINED BAYS WILL REMAIN IN PLACE. APOLOGIES FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.
The magnetic seals engage. The bay doors close with the heavy finality of a station that does not negotiate. The hold goes very quiet, and then HORATIO speaks, with the unhurried satisfaction of a being who has been waiting his entire operational life for this exact moment.
“Captain. We are sealed.”
“How long?”
“Twenty-four standard hours, Captain. The protocol is, I should note for the record, wildly disproportionate to the actual risk profile of the cargo, and I would describe the Junction Authority’s response as enthusiastic. But the protocol is the protocol.”
Bay quarantine runs on the Junction Authority’s independent security grid — station infrastructure, not ship systems. HORATIO can monitor it, file reports against it, lodge formal complaints about its sensitivity thresholds in language I suspect he finds deeply satisfying, but he cannot override it. The cascade alert went from cradle to station authority on a priority channel that bypasses every ship AI in the docking ring. By design. The station does not trust its couriers to make quarantine decisions, given the average courier, probably fair.
