The pilot was hanging out in the café outside the customs office, three hours before opening time, wearing a bomber jacket so old it's disintegrating and a cat-ears headband. She downs cup after horrifying sludgey cup of Caffeinated Rainbow Go!!™, its edible-glitter-laden layers of food-coloured goop slowly leached into each other and turning godawful brown.
Caz wouldn't be out this early, but she's avoiding her roommate, and there's only so much early-morning jogging she wants to do on the gym machines before her shift. The café isn't so bad; she can sit and read the day's headlines on her work tablet, do a crossword, nurse a cup of coffee until they start serving breakfast.
"Oh hey," the pilot says, when they drift to the counter together as the bored kid on the counter sets out the laminated cardboard Now Serving Breakfast!! sign. "Buy you a meat-patty-and-fried-egg bun, cutie?" and follows up with a wink, and Caz sputters a laugh.
"Sorry," she says. "Public official. You know how it is; the Mayor can embezzle fifty mil and gets a disapproving frown with his golden handshake, but I take one too many pencils from the cupboard and it's jail time. Accepting gifts is more than my job's worth. But if you know a six-letter word for spacebird, second letter maybe an A—"
"Aw geez, no, that's a real shame." The pilot nudges Caz with her hip, grinning. "Terrible at word puzzles, too; whatever are we gonna talk about?"
"How your caffeine intake is gonna kill you?"
"Thoughtful, caring, and paying attention to me!" the pilot crows, and orders a double-size Rainbow Go!! alongside the breakfast meal that Caz has heard the counter staff call through to the kitchen as a Heart Attack in a Bag.
Caz gets the oatmeal with freeze-dried fruit, and juice. There's coffee in the office, and she doesn't want to look like a hypocrite after chiding this perfect stranger like some kind of health nag.
"You are actually literally too good for this fallen world," the pilot says solemnly, looking over her tray, follows her to her table, and makes herself comfortable unasked.
She is terrible at word puzzles, though Caz doesn't know how much of it she's faking for laughs. And Caz does laugh, more than she remembers doing in months.
Naturally, when it's nearly office time and Caz goes to open up, the pilot saunters across with her and queues outside, then gasps and says, "Fancy meeting you here!" when Caz flips the Open sign and unlocks the door.
"Yeah, yeah," Caz says, but she's grinning back a bit. "You think I'm a stranger to freight-runners buttering me up, like it'll get them through port any quicker?"
"Oh, it's like that, is it? You a player? Got a pilot for every crossword?" She saunters after Caz, into the interview room, leans her hip on the desk, conspicuously crosses her legs. "Ooh. Is this where the sexy roleplay happens? On your knees under the desk, smuggler scum, if you want this paperwork stamped?"
And Caz, cursed with too many years of doing this job, looks at the slight nervous bounce of her foot, the way she bites the inside of her cheek, hears the not-quite-right tone of her voice, and stills instead of joking back.
"Oh," the pilot says, under her stare. "...Shit."
"Oh, god," Caz says helplessly. "Were you actually trying to bribe me with breakfast."
"No!" The pilot crosses her arms, quick, defensive.
"Oh god, I thought you were just — unserious clumsy-puppy flirting—" and the pilot's eyes go impossibly wide.
"I'm gonna go to jail with a class-five red mark on my license," she says in wobbly little way, "and the whole time I gotta hear you saying—" and she mouths unserious clumsy puppy.
"Class five?"
"What. What, I didn't say. Anything—"
"Class five is real specific," Caz says, and glances at the tablet on her desk for confirmation that she doesn't actually need about what ships are in the clearance queue, and where they're going. "Class five isn't hey how about I go down on you and you wave me through muling a crate of designer party pills. Five is biosecurity. You're the Pride of Io, right?"
"Oh, just call the fucking cops," the pilot says morosely, stuffing her hands in her pockets and shrinking into her jacket, and Caz stares at her for long, long seconds.
"The colony at Barghest has been trying to get a biosec permit for about a decade now," she says. "To export some kind of fruit trees, I think? From Janiston. And I don't know the ins and outs, but I heard that Barghest is a religious settlement, some kind of progressive branch of whatever religion that Janiston is, like, hardline orthodox of, and that's why they keep getting shot down. Pride of Io's registered out of Barghest, right?"
The pilot raises her chin and turns her head to stare determinedly at a ship displacement category poster on the office wall.
"If I call down for a ship inspection," Caz says, "tell me what I'd turn up."
For a long pause, it looks like the pilot might hold out. "Bay C's listed as empty," she mutters eventually. "It's full of, you know, hydroponic fucking sapling root balls."
Caz exhales heavily, and taps her fingers on the desk. "You know we get, like, fifty drug-runners through here a week that I can't ever pin a damn thing on," she says. "You are the worst smuggler."
The pilot mutters something not quite audible, but it sounds like it's got clumsy puppy in it.
"Next time you come through here, you're getting a 'random' inspection," Caz says. "And you had better be clean as a whistle." She taps the tablet a couple of times, stamps the paperwork, releases the ship. "Go on, get out of here."
The pilot starts at her phone getting the notification, looks at Caz, fishes her phone out to look at it, clutches it to her chest. Looks back at Caz. Her eyes flick, rapidly, to the space under the desk and back.
"It would be a horrific abuse of position and circumstance for me to say a word about making clumsy puppies bark for me," Caz says, picks up her tablet, and theatrically starts scrolling through the morning's workload. She gestures to the door with it. "Go on."
The pilot trails out, makes to close the door, and sticks her head back in.
"Maybe next time, if I'm a very good dog—" she says, light tone nearly recovered, and Caz has to cover her face, because she's worried she might smile.
"Out," she says.
