Chapter 14 #2
A single, deep tone filled the room. The vibrations moved through my chest before my ears.
The lattice vibrated against the housing.
The housing vibrated back. The resonance climbed until it was at the upper edge of hearing and then above it — felt rather than heard, a sustained pressure in my sternum that matched the pulse of the marks at my collar, the pulse of the root network, the deep bass-note hum of a planet running its consciousness through everything it had claimed.
Through me.
Then the reactor ignited.
The ship’s systems activated on their own. Not in the linear startup cascade I expected. Not sequential — reactor, power routing, systems-check, navigation last.
Everything simultaneously. A single enormous surge through every system at once.
Every display lit together. Three secondary circuits overloaded and blew with sharp reports like distant gunfire.
Emergency lighting cut out completely. Primary systems compensated and flooded the bay in blinding white.
I grabbed my scanner with both hands.
It glitched. Refused to take a reading. Random numbers flashed across the screen faster than I could read them.
The sound was wrong. Not the clean ignition hum of a Meridian-class shuttle.
Something that resonated in harmonics I felt in my molars and my sternum and the marks at my collar.
A deep vibration that moved through the deck plates and up through my boots and my legs and into the base of my spine.
Found every point where the Skybond had made me sensitive.
Pressed into each one like a key into a lock.
I turned to Sorik. His storm nodes blazed. Full-bright. Blue-white light flooded the reactor bay. The ship's power now ran on the Soltharra crystal. That crystal still carried the planet's electromagnetic signature.
A familiar energy moved through the ship’s wires. Through the walls. My nervous system reacted instantly, registered the hum. The pulse. So recognizable.
The planet was here. Inside my ship.
The planet's hum moved through the Imperium-standard construction materials that had never been designed to carry it. They were carrying it anyway.
Like me, it appeared the ship had no choice.
The storm had chosen.
I stood with both hands on the diagnostic platform and felt Soltharra move through my ship. Awaken it. Take it over. Remake the dead space into something else.
Something conscious. Aware. Unique. The ship was part of Soltharra now, but also itself the same way a stormglass tree or a rock retained its identity.
I stood in the blinding white of the reactor bay with the planet moving through my ship and didn’t try to analyze what was happening. There was no data that could explain this.
The beacon.
The thought arrived quietly. The beacon that would signal my people.
Bring the salvage crews. Strip this living, conscious, singing world down to dead rock for Imperium mineral extraction.
Leave Sorik's valley silent. Leave Sorik alone.
Leave me in the dead air of an Imperium posting with the marks fading and the planet's hum gone and the memory of what being truly alive, truly loved, had felt like.
The planet's signal moved through the ship's conduits in slow, deep pulses.
My marks blazed and I knew the ship was talking to me.
You know, don't you, I thought. You know what the beacon means.
The signal pulsed. Asked a question. Can you reach it?
If I turned it off, I’d be condemning my crew to life here. No choice. No discussion. I did not feel right making that decision for them.
The signal pulsed again with something that did not ask permission. Something that simply acted.
I stood in the reactor bay and felt Soltharra choose for all of us. Sighed with the relief of a decision shared with something vast and ancient. Something I could not reason with or overrule.
"Sloane." Sorik’s hand landed on my shoulder.
I turned to face him.
He looked at me the way he always looked at me. Like I was extraordinary.
"I think…" My voice was something I almost didn't recognize — open, undefended, a voice filled with wonder. "I think the storm just took over the ship."
He laughed. "Yes. I can feel that." He looked all around the interior, his gaze tracking the new marks spreading over the walls as we watched. “Where is the beacon?”
He knew. Of course he did. He’d been talking to this planet his whole life. I was the novice here.
The planet's signal pulsed through the deck plating. Up through my boots. Into the marks at my collar in a slow, warm wave.
“Come on. We need to go to bridge.”
He followed me through the ship without question, back to the place I had truly believed I would die. The pilots’ seats were exactly as I had left them. But this time, every console and system was fully active. Online.
I opened the beacon system. Tracked the crew.
Six of ten beacons were moving. Not toward the crash site. Toward Sol'Virex — the settlement marker glowing eleven kilometers northeast on the planet-interface map.
My crew moved toward safety. There was only one way they would be heading toward the village. They were being escorted. Sorik’s guards had found them.
Six found. Four not moving.
Sorik leaned over my shoulder, studied the map. “I will send warriors to retrieve them as soon as we reach the village. We still have time. They will be safe. I give you my word.”
“Thank you.” One less thing to worry about. While I had been in crystal caves and on cliff ledges and running through charged jungle, Sorik's people had found mine.
I opened the emergency beacon’s control system. My hand hovered over the deactivation panel.
“Will my crew be safe in your village? Even if they don’t have mates?”
He looked offended. "Of course. They will be sheltered through the storm. They will be safe."
"And after that? After the storm?"
"Your crew will be alive and well. What happens after that will be up to them."
He gave me that. The acknowledgment that my crew had their own voices, their own choices.
My hand hovered above the console. The planet’s demand pulsed through my feet.
I could not deny the storm. If my crew decided they wanted to leave later, we’d figure it out. What we absolutely did not need was a Recon team or salvage crew showing up here to attack Sorik’s people. Destroy the ecosystem.
I activated the ship's communication system and recorded a message.
"This is Chief Engineer Sloane Carter of the Astraea. I am the only survivor. The planet’s surface is hostile with powerful electromagnetic storms, unpredictable weather, dangerous ground environment.
Geological scans show no significant mineral or gemstone deposits.
Consider the Astraea and her crew lost. Official recommendation: do not send further crews.
Please release death payments to our beneficiaries and mark all crew lost." I finished with my security code, so they would know the message was authentic and sent it. Deactivated the distress beacon.
Done.
I was such a liar.
The Skybond biology alone represented a discovery of first-contact significance.
The biological integration mechanism. The frequency matching.
The progressive nervous system adaptation.
I looked at my hands where they rested against my thighs.
At the luminescence tracking my veins. At the marks blazing on my shoulders.
Lying had been my last act as an employee and contracted agent of the Astraea. From this moment on, I was just Sloane. Mate to Sorik. Daughter of Soltharra.
"What have you done?" Sorik's lips moved over my temple. Soft. Careful.
"Protected you. Protected this place." I kept my eyes on my hands.
"If they knew a human nervous system could interface with an alien planet's electromagnetic grid? If they found out about the Skybond resonance, how you can share thoughts and emotions? If they knew humans could communicate in any language because the storm translates and interprets instantly? That there’s some sort of psychic connection to the planet and everything on it?
No. They can never know. Never." I knew exactly what the military fanatics at NFI would do. They’d send a thousand ships.
This valley would be torn apart. Everything destroyed in their endless quest to create better soldiers.
Superhumans. Always chasing more psychic abilities. Physical powers. War. Expansion.
Conquest. They were conquerors, not explorers.
"Sloane."
I turned in his arms. Wrapped my arms around his waist. “Is it okay with you if I stay?”
His silver eyes blazed. The marks at his collar pulsed in time with mine. The Skybond ran its warm current between us.
"Thank you for protecting my people."
“I didn’t do it for them. I did it for you.” Might be pathetic to admit that I wasn’t some world-saving, honorable, selfless, noble person. But the truth was, Sorik was all that mattered to me now. Him. My mate.
His hands came up and cupped my face. Both palms, the nerve clusters discharging in slow warm arcs against my cheeks, the Skybond carrying everything he felt directly into my nervous system. Relief. Desire. Love. Acceptance.
His emotions moved through me. All of them. The love so strong my knees nearly buckled.
"The storm is coming." His thumbs traced my cheekbones and small arcs of blue-white electricity followed the movement. My marks blazed at the contact. "My people will shelter yours through it. And when it passes—"
"When it passes," I said, "I'll explain the situation to the crew." My scientist's voice and my heart’s voice in the same sentence, no conflict between them. For the first time in my life. "They'll have questions."
"They will," he agreed.
"Some of them may want to leave."
"We will find a way." No doubt in his touch or his voice. "We have ships. Ancient, but if your people want to leave, we will find a way that does not place my people in danger."
Behind me, the last vestiges of NFI's corporate architecture was being overwritten by the consciousness inside the crystals — inside the planet. In me. The ship belonged to Soltharra now. No difference between ship and ground and rock and stormglass tree. NFI would never be able to track it again.
The display updated to low-power maintenance mode. Neither of us looked at it.
I put my hands over his where they cradled my face. "Tell me about Sol'Virex."
He smiled. "Come and see it."