An Alien Noble for November (Alien Abduction of the Month #12)

Chapter 1

ONE

The slave ship captain dropped to the floor before he had even registered the blaster shot.

Rhaezon stepped over him without breaking stride, clearing the corridor junction without issue, having mapped the ship's layout in his head before boarding.

Behind him, Davn moved in silence. No footfalls, no breath loud enough to track, just the soft click of a sidearm's safety disengaging and re-engaging as each doorway proved empty.

Their Free Worlds Alliance team had taken the slave ship's bridge in under ninety seconds.

The crew complement matched the intelligence briefing: twelve armed, four unarmed support staff, all but one who had surrendered the moment the Alliance breach team cut through the hull plating.

The captain alone had not surrendered. The captain was no longer a consideration.

"Lifeforms in the lower hold," Davn said.

Rhaezon moved down the access ladder, dropping the last eight feet to the deck rather than climbing.

The impact sent a vibration through the floor plating that he noted instinctively — solid construction, commercial-grade, a vessel that hauled livestock or ore in its legitimate life and had been retrofitted with cell partitions that smelled of welding flux and something worse underneath.

The smell hit him at the bottom of the ladder. Old sweat, old fear, the chemical bite of sedation agents vented through recycled air. His jaw tightened and scales surfaced along the back of his neck before he pressed them down. Ten years of this work, and the smell still got to him every time.

The first block held six cells of captives.

Davn had already moved ahead to secure the far corridor, so Rhaezon worked the locks alone.

The crude magnetic bolts were designed to be cheap and reliable rather than sophisticated.

He'd cracked worse. He had the first cell open in four seconds and stepped back, keeping his hands visible, making himself as unthreatening as a man his size could manage.

The occupant, a Thyraxi juvenile, their sex indeterminate beneath the bruising, pressed into the far wall and would not look at him.

"I'm with the Free Worlds Alliance," Rhaezon said, his words delivered in a low, even tone. "You're being extracted. No one here will touch you."

The Thyraxi's gaze flickered up, caught on the left side of Rhaezon's face, and dropped.

The flinch was small but readable. He'd noticed his scars.

The burned tissue damage that pulled Rhaezon's skin taut from jaw to shoulder, the way the light caught the uneven surface and made it look worse than it was.

Or exactly as bad as it was, depending on perspective.

Rhaezon stepped aside to give the Thyraxi room. They slid past him with their spine against the opposite wall, maintaining maximum distance. It was a standard response. Rhaezon gave no reaction and moved to the next cell.

The second held a pair — bonded, from the way they gripped each other.

Pruvian, both of them, purple-skinned with spiraled gray striping.

Their eyes went wide at the sight of him: his height filling the cell door, wings folded tight against his back, the scars.

The larger of the two pulled the smaller one behind them.

"Free Worlds Alliance extraction," he repeated. "The ship is secured. Please move to the corridor and wait."

They moved. They did not look at him as they passed.

Third cell. Fourth. A Draelith merchant with a broken arm who whimpered when Rhaezon knelt to check the injury, then went rigid and silent, remembering that showing pain invited more of it.

Rhaezon steadied the arm with both hands, his grip calibrated to the gram, and fashioned a rough splint from a section of conduit casing he yanked from the wall.

"There's a medic on the transport," he said. "You'll be feeling better in less than twenty minutes."

The merchant nodded without meeting his eyes.

Fifth cell. A species he didn't recognize — tall, thin, with bioluminescent patches along the temples flickering in distress patterns.

They recoiled when the door opened and did not stop recoiling.

Rhaezon held position in the doorway, hands open, and waited.

Thirty seconds. Forty. The flickering slowed.

He spoke the extraction brief again, careful to keep his voice soft and low, and they moved past him on shaking legs.

Davn's voice came through the comm piece. "The rear block's clear. The center block has four cells. Two from here need carrying."

"Copy."

Rhaezon moved deeper into the hold.

The last cell block was smaller — four units, retrofitted from what had been a cargo partition.

The lighting was worse here, a single overhead strip buzzing at a frequency that scraped against his hearing.

Three of the four cells were occupied. He worked the first two locks and repeated the process: door open, step back, hands visible, brief delivered.

A young Korvathi female who wouldn't stop thanking him in a dialect he only half understood.

An older male of a species he couldn't place, who simply stood, walked out, and said nothing at all.

The third cell.

He cracked the magnetic bolt and pulled the door open, already stepping to the side, already arranging his posture into the practiced geometry of non-threat.

The woman inside did not press herself to the far wall. She did not flinch. She did not look away from the ruined left side of his face.

A human.

He had heard of them. A fringe species, relatively new to the transit lanes, bipedal and unremarkable in most physiological respects.

The intelligence briefs described them as adaptive and numerous, and largely unimportant to the power structures that governed this sector.

He had never encountered one in the flesh.

She was sitting on the cell floor with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up — not in a defensive curl but in the posture of someone who had been waiting and had gotten comfortable doing it.

Her hair was dark and matted. Her clothing was torn at the shoulder.

There was a bruise along her jaw that had progressed to the green-yellow stage of healing, which meant it was old.

Days old. Which meant she had been here long enough for injuries to cycle.

She looked up at him, and her eyes tracked across his face with an attention that was neither frightened nor pitying. It was inventory. She was staring at him the way he inspected a room: systematically, without sentiment, filing each detail into a framework he could not see.

Then she smiled.

It was small and crooked and completely unexpected, and it landed somewhere behind his sternum like a stone dropped into still water.

"Free Worlds Alliance," he said. His voice sounded strange to his own ears. "You're being extracted."

She nodded. Her gaze had not left his face.

He should deliver the rest of the brief. He should tell her the ship was secured, that there was a transport waiting, that medical personnel were standing by. He should tell her any of the things he had told every other occupant of every other cell on this ship.

"Can you walk?"

She stood. No wobble, no hesitation. Her balance was solid, her weight centered. She'd been keeping herself functional in here — stretching, probably, maintaining what range of motion the cell allowed. Smart.

"Good."

Four words. He had given her only four words. He turned away and moved to the last cell, which was empty, and stood in front of it for a beat longer than necessary.

Davn appeared at the end of the corridor carrying a Korvathi child on one hip and supporting an adult who could not bear weight on their left leg.

His pale face betrayed nothing. His eyes found Rhaezon's, and Rhaezon saw the question form and die in the space of a single blink.

Davn did not ask it. This was why they had been friends for ten years.

"Transport's cycling," Davn said. "Five minutes."

Rhaezon moved back through the hold to help with the injured.

The Draelith merchant had made it to the corridor but was sitting against the wall with a grey pallor that meant shock.

Rhaezon crouched beside him and checked the splinted arm, adjusting the binding where it had slipped.

The merchant stared at Rhaezon's hands — the size of them, the dark knuckles, the faint shadow of scales along the tendons — and went very still.

"You're alright," Rhaezon said. Quiet. The words were nothing. The tone was the instrument, and he pitched it low and steady, the way he'd pitch it for a wounded animal. "We'll have a medic with you shortly."

He moved to the bioluminescent being next, who had folded into a seated position and was rocking in small, tight oscillations.

Rhaezon draped a thermal blanket around their shoulders without touching their skin, leaving space, leaving distance.

The flickering along their temples slowed by a fraction.

He was checking the young Korvathi female's wrists — raw from restraints, the skin abraded in a pattern he recognized since he had worn the same once — when he became aware of the human.

Not because she made noise. Because she was helping.

She had found the emergency supply cache near the access ladder and had cracked it open without being told where to look or what it contained.

She was distributing water rations. Her movements were unhurried, and she touched each person she helped with a specificity that meant she was examining them for who could tolerate contact, who could not, who needed the weight of a hand on their shoulder and who needed six feet of empty air.

The crying Thyraxi juvenile had attached to her side like a moon finding orbit, and she had adjusted her center of gravity to accommodate the extra weight without comment.