Commander Stryker Foxx stood alone on the Endeavor‘s bridge during the quiet of gamma-shift, watching the slow drift of stars and replaying Orion VI in his head. The Concordance hive-mind had not been an enemy in any sense he was trained for; it had been a chorus, vast and grieving, and his crew had spent the day learning how to listen to it. Now, with the ship cruising at hyperlight toward the next assignment, the corridors had finally gone still. Stryker should have been resting. Instead he was here, eyes on the viewport, waiting for whatever part of himself the day had left exposed to settle back into place.
A soft chime interrupted him. Ashe’s voice came over his command chair speaker, calm and precise: “Captain. I have an irregularity in the biological sensor grid. Eight new heat signatures, none of them on the manifest. Distribution is non-uniform. Three are currently in Lieutenant Commander Tsukihara’s engine room.”
Stryker straightened. “Define ‘biological.’”
“Small. Mammalian, approximately. The pattern correlates with thermal bleed from an undocumented organism in Ensign Hero’s quarters.” Ashe paused, and her tone, ordinarily even, took on the faintest note of bemusement. “Captain, I believe Emilia has acquired a pet. Several of them, now. They appear to be self-replicating.”
A faint, tired smile touched the corner of Stryker’s mouth. “Of course they are. Show me.”
The HUD on his armrest flickered to life. A schematic of the ship rendered in soft blue, and across it, eight pulsing red dots scattered like spilled marbles—one in Emilia’s quarters, three already loose in engineering, two in the ventilation shafts above deck four, one in the mess hall, and one drifting slowly down the corridor toward Cristafiore’s medbay.
Stryker sighed. He had spent his early career charging fortified positions and walking out the only survivor. He had not, until this moment, considered that command of a research vessel would mean coordinating a furball containment operation at zero-three-hundred.
“Ashe, ship-wide. Discreet. Department heads only.”
“Channel open.”
He tapped the comm. “Tsukihara, Solaria, Hero—my office. Now. And Emilia.” He paused, choosing the word. “Bring it.”
Emilia arrived first, breathless, a mesh laundry sack clutched to her chest from which several indignant chirps issued. Her face was flushed and she had clearly run the entire way. “Captain, I can explain—”
“Not yet,” Stryker said, mild but absolute. “Sit.”
She sat.
Ayame swept in moments later, hydrospanner still in one hand, a smear of grease across her cheek and a fresh tuft of golden fluff stuck to her shoulder. The look she leveled at Emilia could have cut steel. “My engine room,” she said, voice low and precise as a scalpel, “is currently hosting an alien infestation. One of those things bit Ensign Choi. Another is wedged inside a coolant manifold. I have shut down two non-critical circuits to prevent a fire. So before I am asked to be reasonable, Captain, I would like that on the record.”
“Noted, Lieutenant Commander,” Stryker said. “On the record.”
Cristafiore arrived last, in a robe and slippers, hair somehow still glossy. Her amber eyes darted from Emilia to the chirping sack to Ayame’s spanner to the Captain’s level expression, and she clapped her hands together as though pleased to find a party already in progress.
“Oh, this is going to be very interesting,” she purred. “Where do you need me, Captain?”
Stryker leaned forward, hands flat on his desk. He looked at each of them in turn, taking just long enough that the chirping in the sack subsided.
“Ensign Hero. You smuggled an unscanned alien organism aboard a UFSC research vessel. That is a violation I am required to log. I will log it.” Emilia winced. He went on, voice unchanged. “You did so because you were hurting after Orion VI and you wanted something soft to hold onto. I am also required to log that, because it is the truth, and I will not pretend otherwise in my report. Are we clear?”
Emilia’s eyes had filled. She nodded, not trusting her voice.
“Tsukihara.” Stryker turned. “Your engine room is your country. I want a full sweep, every conduit, every vent. Ashe will give you life-sign tracking. Anything you find, you bring to medbay alive. Anything.” Ayame opened her mouth, and he met her gaze steadily. “Alive, Ayame. We do not space living beings off this ship for the crime of being inconvenient. We are not that kind of crew.”
She closed her mouth. After a long moment, she gave him the smallest of nods. “Understood, Captain.”
“Doctor Solaria.” His eyes shifted. “Quarantine bay. Full biological workup. I want to know what they are, what they eat, what their reproductive cycle is, and whether they are dangerous to anything on this ship besides Lieutenant Commander Tsukihara’s patience.”
“My pleasure,” Cristafiore said, her smile turning genuinely curious. “And the three of us are going to do this together, yes? It will be more efficient. And more therapeutic.”
Stryker glanced at her. He understood the second part of that sentence perfectly. “Together,” he agreed. “I will be on the deck. Move.”
It took the better part of two hours.
Ayame, to her credit, did not curse Emilia once, though her jaw worked steadily as she wedged herself headfirst into a coolant intake to retrieve a soggy, half-drowned furball that had then proceeded to gnaw on her sleeve. Stryker held the access panel open for her, his powered frame absorbing the stress of a hatch that ordinarily required two people. When Ayame emerged, dripping, with the creature cupped to her chest and a look of furious resignation on her face, Stryker said nothing. He only took the furball gently from her hands, wrapped it in a clean cloth he’d had Ashe deliver, and handed her a fresh towel.
“Thank you, Captain,” Ayame muttered, scrubbing her hair.
“Thank you, Ayame.”
In the mess hall, Emilia chased a runaway across three tables and into Stryker’s open palm. He plucked it out of the air mid-bounce, looked down at the trilling creature in his enormous hand, and said, perfectly straight-faced, “Stand down, soldier.” Emilia laughed so hard she nearly cried.
In the ventilation shaft above deck four, it was Cristafiore who lay flat on her back with a flashlight in her teeth and a pair of sterile tongs, coaxing two cuddled furballs out of an air filter with a soft Eastern-tinged murmur of endearments. Stryker passed her tools through the access hatch and watched, oddly moved, as she handled each animal with the same unhurried care she had shown his own scarred body in medbay on his first day aboard.
By the time the count was complete—nine furballs, all accounted for, all alive—Stryker had gathered his three officers in the observation lounge. The viewport showed hyperspace streaming past in long blue tendrils. On the low table between them sat a steaming pot of chamomile, a plate of ginger biscuits Cristafiore had bullied out of the replicator, and Emilia’s mesh sack, now opened, with several small purring shapes curled contentedly around the warm teapot.
Stryker poured.
“Sit,” he said again, more gently this time. “All of you.”
Ayame sat. So did Cristafiore. Emilia perched on the edge of her seat as though waiting for sentencing.
Stryker handed Emilia a cup first. “Orion VI,” he said quietly, “asked something of all of us we hadn’t been asked before. I am not surprised one of us came back wanting to hold something warm. I would be more surprised if none of us did.” He looked at Ayame. “And I am not surprised that one of us came back wanting to put their hands on a problem they could solve.”
Ayame’s eyes flickered. She accepted the cup he offered her without comment.
“Doctor.”
Cristafiore took her tea with a quiet “Captain” that, for once, contained no flirtation.
Stryker sat back. For a moment the only sound was the low purring of the furballs and the soft whisper of the ship’s air recyclers.
“Here is what we are going to do,” he said. “Ensign Hero will pay for the damage to the engine room out of her ship’s stipend. Lieutenant Commander Tsukihara will accept that payment and will not, for the duration of this voyage, refer to Ensign Hero as ‘cotton-brained.’” Ayame’s mouth twitched in what was almost a smile. “Doctor Solaria will keep the entire population in stasis aboard medbay until we reach a system with an appropriate biosphere, at which point we will release them somewhere they will be happy. And Emilia—”
He met her eyes.
“—you may keep one. With my permission. And under the doctor’s supervision. Because I understand exactly why you brought it home, and I am not going to be the captain who makes that wrong.”
Emilia’s tears spilled over. She nodded furiously, unable to speak.
Ayame let out a long, slow breath. “Captain, I—” She paused. “Thank you.”
“You are the one who hauled the wet one out of the coolant intake, Ayame. I’m thanking you.”
Cristafiore, watching all three of them over the rim of her cup, allowed herself a small, satisfied smile that she did not direct at anyone in particular.
Later, as the crew at last drifted toward their bunks, Stryker stood once more on the observation deck alone. One small golden creature, the original Fuzzle, dozed in the crook of his arm—Cristafiore had pressed it on him “for the walk back, Captain, just for a moment,” and somehow he had not yet given it back. The faint warm weight of it against his chest was strange and not unwelcome.
Ashe’s voice came softly through the comm, addressed to him alone. “Captain. The crew’s biometric stress markers have dropped by an average of thirty-one percent in the last two hours. I do not yet have a model that explains it.”
Stryker looked down at the sleeping furball. “Don’t bother building one, Ashe.”
“Understood, sir.” A pause. “Goodnight, Captain.”
“Goodnight, Ashe.”
The Endeavor pressed on through the dark, carrying its small, ridiculous cargo, and for the first time in days, Stryker Foxx felt the shape of the ship under his feet not as a command but as a home.
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