3. Kel
KEL
The mission was compromised.
I moved through the lower corridor of the Saurok vessel at speed, weapon drawn, cataloging damage as I went.
Hull breach on deck four. Structural failure along the port side.
The rival faction that had hit the ship — Korvathi raiders, judging by the energy signature of their weapons — had done significant damage before I'd even reached the holding cells.
None of which would matter if I didn't reach the target.
Seyla Voss-Andari, daughter of Valorian Diplomat Andari, taken by the Saurok captain Draxis eleven standard rotations ago.
My mission parameters were precise: locate, extract, return.
I had tracked Draxis's ship through all eleven of those rotations.
I had boarded during the Korvathi attack, using the chaos as cover — a one-way hull breach, my own vessel holding station far outside the engagement, extraction planned by stolen shuttle or escape pod.
Everything had been calculated, planned, executed with the precision that had made me the Authority's top retrieval specialist for the last eight years.
And then the ship tilted thirty degrees and I watched the holding cell block collapse on itself through a viewport, and my mission parameters became irrelevant.
I checked twice. There was no path to Cell Block Three.
The corridor was crushed, the emergency bulkheads had sealed, and the atmospheric readings on the other side were dropping.
If the target was still in that block, extraction from this approach was impossible.
I would need to find an alternate route.
The ship lurched again. I braced against the wall, recalculating.
The Korvathi were still firing. The Saurok were returning fire but losing.
This ship had perhaps fifteen minutes before a critical system failed.
I turned back toward the escape pod bay. Regroup. Reassess. Find the target from outside the ship or confirm her location with the Authority. Acceptable tactical adjustment. Not failure. Adjustment.
I was moving fast down the curved corridor that ran along the outer cells when I saw the open wall.
The force field barrier on Cell Block One had shattered, and the broken corner beneath it had been kicked wider from the corridor side.
Captives were already scattering down the far end of the corridor.
I cataloged them in half a second. A Talori female, running.
A blanket-form Xylari, flowing along the floor.
A Chithari with a broken limb, hauling itself out of sight.
A small pink Zeloxi, tentacles flailing, already disappearing around a corner.
And standing in the corridor, looking from left to right and back again with wide eyes, a creature I had never seen before.
Small. Bipedal. Brown hair plastered to its skull with sweat.
Clothing that appeared to be shredded plant-based fabric covered in dried mud, and a scuffed tool belt buckled over it, cinched tight, as if it mattered.
It was just standing there, turning back and forth, clearly having no idea where to go.
The other captives had scattered immediately. This one was frozen.
Not my target. Not my mission. I should keep moving.
I kept moving. Toward it. Because there was something about this creature, something pulling at me like a gravitational anomaly.
I told myself it was simply efficiency — the escape pod bay was past this cell block and this alien was in my path, and leaving a captive to die on a disintegrating ship was not consistent with Valorian military conduct.
I reached for its arm. My left gauntlet was already gone, lost to the explosion on deck four. I had not registered it until now.
The moment my bare hand closed around its arm, every marking on my body ignited.
I have been wounded in combat. I have endured the Valorian rite of fortitude, where initiates are exposed to controlled neural overload as a test of composure. I have experienced pain, exhaustion, fear, and rage in measured quantities across a career built on control.
Nothing—nothing prepared me for this.
The resonance hit like a shockwave through my entire nervous system.
Every bioluminescent line on my body flared from dormant gray to blinding blue-white.
My awareness expanded and suddenly I could feel her — not information, not data, but emotional state, flooding in raw and unfiltered.
Terror. Confusion. The bond does not tell you facts about your mate.
It tells you how they feel. And she felt like a storm — fear so intense it had a texture, a metallic sharpness that my own nervous system had no analog for.
She was mine.
The thought defied reason and tactics. Biological imperative delivered it with the force of a detonation, shattering eight years of training in a single heartbeat.
She screamed.
Understandable. A fully armored Valorian had just grabbed her in a collapsing ship. But the sound she made... I have heard Korvathi battle shrieks and Saurok territorial roars and neither compared to the pitch this small creature achieved. My auditory filters struggled to compensate.
I pulled her. She fought.
She fought me with everything her small body possessed.
Screaming, pulling back against my grip, striking my arm with her free hand — which she appeared to immediately regret based on the spike of pain I felt through the resonance when her fist connected with my armor plating.
She started kicking. Not effectively, but with admirable commitment.
I did not release her. I could not — not with the ship dying around us and the resonance making her terror feel like my own.
I kept moving toward the escape pod bay, dragging this shrieking alien alongside me while she hopped and kicked and hit.
Words burst out between the screams — sharp, rapid, untranslated demands that produced an astonishing volume of noise.
I should have been irritated. The noise was a tactical liability. Any remaining Saurok would hear us from three decks away.
I was not irritated. I was... I did not know what I was.
My markings were still blazing and I could feel her fear and fury like a second pulse alongside my own, and some part of my brain that had apparently lost all discipline was cataloging information about her: her grip strength was better than her size suggested.
She did not give up. Even in absolute terror, she fought. That was—
Not relevant. Moving.
We rounded a corridor and she went rigid, her scream cutting off. I turned. She was staring through the viewport. A Saurok body floated past in the vacuum, missing a limb. Her fear spiked so hard through the resonance that I staggered.
Then she screamed louder.
I covered her mouth with my hand. Her unusual eyes — a color I had no word for — showed my markings' light reflected in them.
They locked onto my visor. I could feel her breath breaking against the plating.
Fast. Impossibly fast for a being this size.
The translator, still calibrating on her language, offered a comparison from my training database: a small, high-metabolism prey-creature.
Beneath the language work the translator was doing its quieter job, turning her measures into mine and mine into hers.
I released her arm and made the horizontal cut gesture with my freed hand. Universal for silence. She stopped screaming. Her breathing still came in ragged gasps against my right, still-gloved hand, but the noise ceased.
I released her mouth, took her arm again, and pulled her forward.
She came. Still resistant, still dragging her feet, but the fight had shifted.
She fired another stream of incomprehensible words at me, pointed at the floating body, then at the corridor ahead.
She'd seen the danger. She understood, on some level, that staying on this ship meant death.
The escape pod bay. Three pods. Two had already launched — the Saurok crew evacuating.
One remained. Cell Block Three was as I had left it: sealed, crushed, unreachable from any interior route.
The target's recovery was now an exterior problem — regroup, reacquire, exactly as I had already assessed — and this pod was the only sound asset left for either purpose.
I hit the access panel, the hatch slid open, and she planted her feet.
No.
She was refusing. Pulling back. Screaming again. She looked at the small dark interior of the pod and every survival instinct she had apparently told her that getting into a small enclosed space with a stranger was worse than the alternative.
Under other circumstances, that instinct would be correct.
I respected it. But the passage along the outer cells — grabbing her, the dragging fight of every corridor since — had spent eleven of my fifteen minutes.
We had approximately four before this ship lost structural integrity and I was not going to let my resonance mate die in a Saurok corridor because she was afraid of a confined space.
My resonance mate. Saying it to myself did not make it smaller, and everything I had been taught narrowed to the one thing that mattered right now: the first tier was already active.
I could sense her broad state — fear, fury, pain — but not thoughts, words, or control.
Doctrine called it a background hum. With four minutes left on a dying ship, hers felt like drowning in someone else's nervous system.
I picked her up and shoved her through the hatch. She twisted and kicked and one of her mud-caked boots caught me in the chest plate. I followed her in, sealed the hatch, and hit the launch sequence.
The pod ejected with enough force to slam us both against the rear wall.
She cried out. I braced over her instinctively, absorbing the impact with my arms and legs, keeping my weight off her body.
She was fragile. I could feel it in my hand — the thinness of her bones against my palm, the give of her soft tissue. I could crush her without effort.
The thought sent a spike of protective rage through me that had nothing to do with mission parameters.
We cleared the ship. The pod's dampeners engaged and suddenly — silence. Zero gravity. She floated up from the floor, flailing, making a sound that was half scream and half something else. Her hair spread around her head in a wild tangle. She rotated slowly, arms windmilling, achieving nothing.
I engaged my restraints. Locked in. Then reached for her.
She flinched back but there was nowhere to go in a pod this size.
I pulled her to the adjacent seat and showed her the restraint mechanism, clicking it into place.
She watched my hands, then looked up at my visor.
Her confusion reached me through the resonance as a wordless pressure.
The bond gave me weather, not thoughts — whether she understood why I was helping her instead of hurting her, I could not tell.
The pod's guidance system locked onto the nearest viable planet. Zha'kari. Jungle world. Class-compatible atmosphere. Survivable, if you knew what to avoid. I knew what to avoid. Whether this creature did was another matter.
She was looking at me. Her breathing had slowed marginally. The resonance fed me a wash of emotions: fear dominant, but underneath it, curiosity. This small, battered, mud-covered alien was curious about me.
The pod rotated to align its entry vector, and the viewport swung to show the planet below. Green and blue and vast, filling the entire view. She turned to look.
And screamed.
I understood. From her perspective, the ground was rushing up to meet us at terminal velocity. From my perspective, the guidance system had locked a viable landing trajectory and our deceleration would begin in forty seconds.
I did not get the chance to communicate this because she screamed without pause for the next thirty-eight seconds while I sat beside her, resonance bond flooding me with her unfiltered terror, my markings blazing like a signal flare in the tiny pod, contemplating the singular disaster that my life had just become.