The Shape of her Wings

The chair across from Jacob’s desk was the kind that looked comfortable and wasn’t. Einar Scorn shifted his weight, crossed one leg over the other, then uncrossed it. The office looked mundane and smelled like old coffee, which was more or less how his CO had always operated.

Report to my office when the briefing wraps. No elaboration necessary.

He’d read that message twice between the hangar and the lift. No elaboration necessary. What the hell that was supposed to mean? Jacob wrote orders like a man who’d already considered every possible interpretation of a sentence, which meant the deliberate blankness of that phrasing wasn’t accidental and was chosen. Einar ran through the last two weeks. Briefings, flight rotations, three instrument-failure drills, one near-miss on the eastern training corridor that had already been logged and reviewed and signed off by two different supervisors. Nothing outstanding and nothing buried. He leaned back and let the chair creak under him.

There’d been a morning on Vesta Prime when Jacob had found him sitting outside the command tent at 0400, boots unlaced, staring at a dead comm unit. Einar hadn’t said anything. Jacob had sat down next to him, poured two cups of something that barely qualified as coffee, and they’d watched the smoke columns from the previous night’s engagement thin out against the sky. By 0700 they were both standing in front of a Federation review board delivering separate but identical accounts of a decision that had saved twenty-three lives and technically violated four standing directives. Jacob had carried that debrief like he was born in a courtroom.

There’d been Kerrith Station after that. It was different war and a completely different mess and it was there where the situation had been reversed. Jacob pale under the lights, hands steadier than they had any right to be, and Einar doing the talking because Jacob’s voice had gone somewhere unreachable. They’d come out of that one too. Barely.

Einar had learned to read the man over years of exactly that kind of pressure. Jacob didn’t summon people to deliver good news with vague language. But he also didn’t use that tone when someone was genuinely in trouble. Which left a third category, and Einar couldn’t place it. He straightened in the chair when he heard the prosthetic foot’s distinct rhythm in the corridor outside.

The door opened and Jacob barged in. He looked like a man who’d slept badly, argued with someone over breakfast, and lost. His uniform was pressed as it always was but something around his eyes had that familiar tightness that Einar associated with administrative problems that didn’t have clean solutions. He carried a datapad under one arm and set it on the desk without looking at it. Einar stood.

“Sir.”

“Sit down.”

Jacob moved around the desk but didn’t sit himself, just stood with one hand resting on the back of his chair, looking at Einar the way he looked at tactical maps he didn’t like.

“And drop it. No ranks. I mean it.”

Einar sat slowly. “Alright.”

“I need you to talk to me like a person, not like a captain reporting to a colonel.”

Jacob finally pulled the chair out and dropped into it, and the weight of the motion suggested he’d been on his feet longer than he should have been.

“Can you do that?”

“Sure.” A beat. “Probably.”

Jacob smiled at that. It didn’t land.

“This conversation is going to be complicated.” He pushed the datapad aside without opening it. “Ranks are going to get in the way of it. So is protocol. So is whatever face you put on when you think I’m evaluating you, which you are currently wearing.”

Einar felt the back of his neck tighten. He made a conscious effort to settle his shoulders, which didn’t help. Jacob had always been able to name exactly the thing a man was doing that the man believed was invisible. It was one of his most useful qualities in command and one of his most exhausting qualities in private conversation.

“Okay.” Einar spread his hands slightly, a gesture that meant he was listening and also that he had no idea where this was going. “Complicated how.”

Jacob looked at him for a moment. He was a man who always knew where to start. He didn’t hesitate in briefings, didn’t hesitate in the field, didn’t hesitate when delivering news, good or devastating. However he clearly hesitated now. Einar’s knee stopped moving while he wasn’t aware it had been moving.

“How long have we known each other?” Jacob said.

“Eighteen years, give or take.” Einar tilted his head. “Roughly.”

“Eighteen years.” Jacob repeated it like he was weighing the number. “I watched you land a dropship on a roof that was actively collapsing. I watched you try to cook a full holiday meal for twelve people on a field burner at minus twenty and then serve it anyway when half of it was still frozen in the middle.” He paused. “You made everyone eat it.”

“The protein content was technically intact.”

“Sergeant Delmarco chipped a tooth on the potatoes.”

“He chipped it on a ration bar the week before and chose not to report it.”

Jacob pointed at him. “That is exactly the kind of detail only you would know and only you would say.” Something in his expression settled, but not toward comfort. More like a man who’d confirmed something he’d been hoping was wrong. “You do weird things, Einar. You always have. You make strange calls and you cut corners that shouldn’t be cuttable and sometimes you operate on a logic I genuinely cannot follow until three days later when it turns out you were right.”

Einar said nothing.

“But I have always known when you were about to blow something up. I could see it. There’s a thing you do—” Jacob made a vague gesture toward his own face. “Doesn’t matter. Point is, eighteen years, I’ve had a working model of how and when Einar Scorn causes problems.”

He stopped. The office somehow squeezed its walls tighter than a minute ago.

“That model,” Jacob said quietly, “is not helping me right now.”

Einar’s jaw tightened. He held the silence for exactly as long as he could stand it, which was not long.

“Jacob.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “What happened. Straight.”

Jacob looked at the desk.

“Because I have been through the last ten months in my head and I cannot find it. I genuinely cannot find the thing.” Einar’s voice stayed even but something underneath it wasn’t. “The training cycles ran clean. The incident reports are squared away. I have not so much as filed a fuel requisition wrong in nearly a year.”

He paused.

“Eleven months ago I was on leave. On actual vacation. Whatever I did on a beach somewhere cannot possibly have followed me back here.”

Jacob opened the datapad. He turned it around and slid it across the desk without ceremony.

“One hour ago I received a formal request from Rhylarian military command.” His voice had gone completely flat, the way it did when he was reading from a document in his head. “For your complete service file. Psychological profile. Internal security assessment.” He tapped the screen once. “And a personal character analysis from Commander Vaethari.”

Einar looked at the datapad. The Rhylarian seal sat at the top of the document, silver and precise, the kind of letterhead that didn’t accompany informal inquiries.

“Requests of that particular composition,” Jacob continued, “typically follow something significant. A formal incident or a cross-species diplomatic violation, or a criminal investigation.” He paused. “Or a war crime, though we can presumably rule that one out.”

He folded his hands on the desk.

“They are asking for this on you specifically. Not on the program, not on the human contingent or on flight operations generally.” Jacob’s eyes stayed level. “You, Einar. By name, rank, and service number.”

Einar stared at the seal on the datapad. He counted it afterward, in his head, because it was the kind of thing his brain did when it had nothing useful to offer. Thirty seconds, maybe a few more. His mouth was open by the end of it and he closed it. He ran through the last year the same way he’d run through it a minute ago, but faster this time and with considerably less confidence in the results. Every interaction with Rhylarian personnel. Every joint briefing. Every training flight where an Empire pilot had been in the rotation. Commander Vaethari’s face during the last quarterly review.

Nothing surfaced. Nothing he could hold up and say there, that’s it, that explains the seal and the psychological profile and whatever the hell internal security has to do with any of this.

He picked up the datapad. Set it down again.

“I haven’t—” He stopped.

Tried again. Nothing came out. Jacob watched him with the patience of a man who had already spent three days sitting with the same silence and had simply gotten used to it.

“Okay.” Einar set the datapad down with more precision than the gesture required. “Okay, I genuinely have nothing. I’m not being cagey, I’m not running calculations on what I can and can’t say—I have nothing.”

He leaned back. Crossed his arms. Uncrossed them.

“My rotation is mixed. Has been since the program started—eight humans, six Rhylarians, and Instructor Vaethari’s group on alternating cycles. I run them all the same. Same drills, same rotation order, same standards on approach angles and atmospheric entry margins. If a Rhylarian trainee pulls a sloppy vector correction I write it up exactly the way I would for a human doing the same thing.”

Jacob said nothing while projecting they authority of a man collecting information.

“I don’t adjust the bar depending on who’s standing in front of me. Never have. You know that.” Einar rubbed the back of his neck. “And yes, I use language during exercises. Post-flight reviews, instrument failures, the canyon run—I get loud, I get colorful. That’s been true since Tannhäuser and before that at Kerrith and before that going back roughly a decade in documented flight instruction.” He gestured at nothing in particular. “Ten years, Jacob. Rhylarian trainees included for the last three of those. Not one complaint. Not one formal note in any review cycle, not one informal flag through any channel.”

He spread his hands.

“I called Trainee Sorveth a magnificent idiot after he nearly inverted into the ridge wall on the western corridor last month. He laughed. Wrote it in his personal log, apparently—Vaethari mentioned it in passing during the debrief and she was smiling when she did it.” He paused. “I think. It’s harder to tell with her.”

A breath.

“Point being—nothing is new. Nothing changed. I’ve been running the same program, the same way, with the same mouth on me that every pilot I’ve trained in the last decade has apparently survived without filing paperwork.” He looked at Jacob directly. “So whatever they’re asking for my psychological profile over, it is not in any training log I’ve submitted.”

Jacob hadn’t moved.

“Are you done?”

“Probably not.” Einar picked up the datapad again and looked at the seal. “But I’ve run out of the part where I know what I’m talking about.”

Jacob let the silence sit for exactly as long as it needed to. Then something shifted behind his eyes. A man changing angles.

“Do you remember the poster incident?”

Einar blinked.

“Flight maintenance crew quarters. About fourteen months ago.” Jacob tilted his head. “The posters.”

Einar pressed his lips together. His chest did something involuntary.

“The AI-generated—”

“Yes.”

“The nude Rhylarian—”

“Yes.”

Einar put both hands flat on his knees and stared at the wall behind Jacob’s head for a moment. The corners of his mouth were doing something he couldn’t entirely control.

“Jacob, we found out about that together. You were standing right next to me when Sergeant Kowalski pulled the first one off the bulkhead and turned it around.” He paused. “The one with the medieval plate armor. Just the gauntlets and the greaves. Nothing in between.”

“And the flight helmet.”

“And the flight helmet, yes. Which was somehow the most offensive part because it was a Mark IV atmo helmet on a body that was otherwise wearing thirteenth-century Earth steel and absolutely nothing else.” Einar rubbed his jaw. “And then there was the one with the—what was it—the pointed ears had been exaggerated to about twice natural proportion and she was standing in some kind of enchanted forest holding a—” He paused remembering.

“A railgun.”

“A railgun, in a forest, nude, with elf ears the size of dinner plates. Someone had typed ‘tactical woodland operations’ across the bottom in Federation standard font.”

He lost it. A sharp exhale through his nose and a full collapse of whatever composure he’d been maintaining. He pressed his knuckles against his mouth.

“We couldn’t—Jacob, we sat in your office for forty minutes trying to write the disciplinary recommendation and neither of us could get through a full sentence.”

Jacob’s mouth twitched. “I drafted it three times.”

“You kept reading the descriptions out loud for the formal record and then stopping.”

“The formal record required specificity.”

“You were crying.”

“I was not crying. My eyes were watering from the recycled air.”

“For forty minutes.”

Jacob held up one finger. “And then Lieutenant Commander Soravel walked in. The Rhylarian liaison. Full dress uniform, perfect posture, every centimeter of imperial decorum intact.” He paused. “And we showed him the file.”

Einar remembered. Soravel scrolling through the confiscated images on the datapad, his expression unreadable for roughly ten seconds. Then the widest smile either of them had ever seen on a Rhylarian face—not polite, not restrained, not diplomatically calibrated. Genuine, unguarded, almost boyish delight.

“I thought I was hallucinating,” Einar said quietly.

“He enjoyed it more than we did.”

The laughter drained out of the room the way warmth leaves a cockpit when the canopy seals crack. Jacob’s face reset as he leaned forward, forearms on the desk, and the datapad between them stopped being a shared joke and became what it had always been.

“After we sent everything they requested—the full package, service file, psych profile, security assessment, Vaethari’s character evaluation—we got a reply.” Jacob’s voice had dropped into the register Einar associated with field hospitals and casualty reports. “Twenty minutes ago.”

Einar’s spine straightened without permission.

“The Rhylarian Empire is dispatching an envoy. Here, to Tannhäuser.” Jacob held his gaze. “To escort you to Syhthemar Prime.”

The words found their way into Einar’s chest individually, each one finding a separate place and made sure he felt them. Syhthemar Prime. The Rhylarian homeworld. The capital of an empire that had been crossing stars when humanity was still arguing about combustion engines.

“I contacted Federation diplomatic corps immediately,” Jacob continued. “Pulled every channel I have and two I technically don’t.” He paused. “They confirmed that the request falls within established protocols between the Empire and the Federation. Specifically, it invokes a provision in the bilateral officer exchange agreement that allows either party to summon individual personnel for review under certain classified circumstances.”

“Classified.” Einar scowled.

“Classified.” Jacob’s jaw tightened. “Our diplomats reviewed it. They can’t block it. They can’t accompany you. They can advise, and they have advised, and their advice amounts to cooperation and good faith.”

“That’s not advice. That’s a damn fortune cookie.”

“I am aware.” Something raw moved through Jacob’s expression. “You’ll travel with the envoy. Whatever this is, you’re going to find out what it’s about when you get there and not a second before.”

Einar sat in his chair quietly looking at the silver seal on the datapad. Counted nothing this time. His hands were flat on his knees and they stayed there. He swallowed once. Then something behind his ribs locked into place—the same thing that locked in before a combat drop, before a hot extraction, before every moment in his life where the only direction available was forward.

“I haven’t done anything wrong.” His voice came out level and dry. “I know that the way I know my own hands. Whatever the Empire wants with me on their homeworld, I’ll go there and I’ll face it.”