Her Possessive Alien Daddy

1. Nyra

NYRA

The debt notice blinks red on my console for the ninth time this cycle, and I flick it off without looking.

There are enough credits owed against the hull of the Harrow itself that I've stopped doing the math in my head, because doing the math grounds it in a reality I must ignore.

I need to focus entirely on scrap. A score is my only priority.

The lien converts soon, and after that, the loan office takes her from me, and after that, it won't be debt collectors knocking.

It'll be something worse, and I've seen what worse looks like in the back alleys of Orun Station.

"Come on, come on." My fingers drum against the rim of the nav panel, chipped black polish catching the gleam of the dashboard. "Give me something. Anything."

The Harrow drifts through the Veln Expanse like a tired old dog, her engines purring low, her shields barely more than a suggestion.

She's patched in twelve places I can see and probably forty I can't. She's mine, or she's supposed to be, and the thought of watching a Coalition repo tug drag her out of the dock while I stand on the gangway with nothing but a duffel bag makes my breath turn to ash.

I didn't have much before her. The orphan crèche on Halvek Four spit me out at fifteen with a data chit, a pair of boots that didn't fit, and the address of a labor broker who took twenty percent of every wreck I worked for two years.

Another stretch of subcontracting meant sleeping in hammocks above reactor housings, eating protein bars over the dead, and pocketing the crumbs.

I was twenty-three before I put my name on a hull of my own, and only then because I took a loan that made a ruthless loan shark my best friend.

Four years later, this 'bad man' is still my best friend, if he can be called that when every cycle he takes another unpayable bite out of what's left of me.

A weak chirp pulls my attention sideways.

K-Seven drifts up from the maintenance well below my feet, three of its six segmented limbs tucked against its chassis and one dragging a half-frayed power cable it's been fussing with for two cycles.

Multi-lens optics cluster across the front of its little oblong body, a primary aperture ringed by two smaller ones that swivel independently, and all three dilate as it catches me looking.

The paint on its flank is scoured down to bare alloy.

A patch job over the rear thruster leaks a faint blue coolant shimmer when it moves too fast.

I rebuilt K-Seven from the corpses of three other drones after the last one took a ricochet meant for me on a job outside Brenn's Gate.

It lacks visual appeal, but it compensates with an unwavering loyalty rare for a bootleg personality chip.

It's functional, mostly, and it keeps me company, and the literal way it hears everything I say has gotten me to laugh on days I shouldn't have been laughing.

"Don't give me that look, K-Seven. I'm thinking."

"Unit thinking produces smoke," it warbles through a busted speaker grille. "Shall I retrieve the extinguisher?"

"Shut up," I mutter, turning back to the nav panel.

"Shutting up," it replies promptly, only to pause for a beat before adding, "Smoke detected."

"That is an old joke, K-Seven. You've been using it since I pulled you out of the scrap heap."

Its lenses perform a slow, methodical rotation as it hovers closer. "Joke archived two years ago. Redeployed for thematic consistency."

I snort despite myself. K-Seven misses the humor entirely, and that is exactly what makes it funny.

Its personality chip is half fried and half bootleg, humor leaking through the cracks in ways no clean program could ever replicate.

I have stopped trying to understand the mechanism. I just enjoy it when it happens.

The long-range scanner pings.

I lean forward so fast my forehead nearly cracks against the glass. The readout pulses in a lethargic, unchanging rhythm, green bleeding into gold at the edges. Massive mass signature. Dormant power signature—alive enough to deny it’s dead. Hull integrity is too high to be comfortable.

"K-Seven. Get up here. Tell me I'm reading this wrong."

It floats over my shoulder, the primary lens zooming and refocusing with a soft mechanical purr, the secondary lenses rotating in opposite directions like a pair of very small, very skeptical eyes.

"Reading is correct. Warship-class vessel.

Distance eight hundred kilometers. No transponder.

No registry match across seven databases. "

"In the Choke."

"In the Choke," it confirms, and if a drone could sound nervous, it does. "Unit recommends immediate course reversal."

"Unit is overruled," I tell it, waving off the warning as I lean closer to the display.

"Unit would like that objection formally logged," the drone insists, its tone dropping an octave to simulate gravity.

"Fine, log it," I sigh, my attention already elsewhere. With a brisk string of beeps, K-Seven confirms the entry, but my mind is already racing as I punch the coordinates into the secondary display.

I punch the coordinates into the secondary display. Deep in the Choke, where navigation dies, salvagers vanish, gravity wells fail the charts, and half the stars are dust and memory. No one goes there. Those who enter stop being people.

Running the scan a second and then a third time, I cross-check the results against the Guild registry and the Federation blacklist and the old Coalition logs that nobody bothers to purge anymore, and none of them flag a warship of this class in this sector.

Somebody lost her, or somebody buried her, and either way she's floating out there with her belly full of parts and no one alive to argue about who gets them.

"You are a stupid, stupid girl," I mutter to myself, already rerouting power to the forward thrusters. "You are going to die in the Choke, and K-Seven is going to short-circuit on the bridge, and the whole galaxy will laugh."

My hands are set on the controls anyway. Hunger teaches you how to keep your fingers from shaking.

The comm panel hisses before I can finish plotting the burn.

"Harrow, Harrow, this is Marrin, you reading me?"

My stomach drops straight into my boots. Of course. Of course, he's out here. The Choke draws desperate men the way a bad wound draws flies, and Jex Marrin has been desperate for as long as I've known him.

I thumb the channel. "I'm reading, Marrin."

"Vane." His voice is wire-tight, all teeth. "You better not be looking at the same signal I'm looking at, Vane. You better be on your way back to Orun for dinner."

"I'm not."

"Vane. Vane. This is mine. I picked up that ping two minutes ago, maybe three, and I'm already burning for it."

"I picked it up eight minutes ago," I inform him, keeping my voice cool and steady despite the adrenaline spiking in my chest.

"Liar," he spits back immediately.

"Pull my scan log if you want, Marrin. I've got timestamps to prove it." I can practically picture his scowl, knowing how much he hates being outpaced. Jex Marrin is twenty-nine and rope-thin, all nervous energy and sharp elbows, with sunken cheeks that make his eyes look too big for his face, wearing a patched pressure-suit that is honestly an insult to the word. We’ve crossed orbits four or five times on the edge of different wrecks, and every time it’s the same choreography.

He pushes in. I hold the line. A dozen petty escalations that end with both of us walking away poorer than we started.

"Back off, Marrin." His breath is coming hard. He's running in his suit. I can hear him banging through a hatch on his end. "Back off, Vane, I mean it."

"You back off," I snap in return.

"I picked up that ping before you did," he insists, the frantic energy returning to his voice.

"That is a lie that would embarrass a child, Marrin."

"Vane. I swear on every scrap of air in this suit, if you cut my burn, I am gonna ram you."

"With what, Marrin? That rust bucket you call a hopper? Your thrusters couldn't ram a drifting crate."

Static. A breath. Another. "You're bluffing. You haven't even scanned her yet."

"I've scanned her three times. Pull your own reading if you don't believe me."

"I'm gonna beat you to her, Vane," he laughs, a breathless, thin, and ugly sound. "I am gonna gut that hull before you clear the last burn. You're gonna watch, and you're going to remember the day Jex Marrin got the drop on you."

The channel ends with a harsh pop, leaving me staring at the dead comms panel.

"K-Seven," I bark without taking my eyes off the screen. "Track his hopper."

"Tracking. Battered Class-Three, subcontractor plating, single occupant. Intercept trajectory with target vessel. Estimated arrival four minutes."

"Ahead of us?" I curse under my breath, my fingers tightening on the controls.

"Approximately ninety seconds ahead," K-Seven reports with agonizing precision.

"Damn it. Damn him," I hiss, slamming my palm against the dashboard in a rare flash of frustration.

"Unit is unable to damn him on your behalf. Unit lacks the appropriate subroutine," the drone offers, bobbing slightly as if apologizing for its programming limits.

"You are not helping, K."

"Noted," it chirps back, instantly returning to its scan logic.

It takes a sluggish crawl to close the distance, and by the time the warship resolves on my forward scope, my mouth has gone dry.

She is huge.

Dwarfing even a dreadnought, her hull stretches out long and lean, mimicking an ancient blade left out in the dark to rust. Her hull gleams matte black against the starfield, broken only by a fractured wound along her port flank where something tore a ragged hole clean through three decks.

I whistle low under my breath. "What the hell happened to you?"

K-Seven drifts up beside me, all three lenses whirring. "Unit notes complete absence of standard kill-signatures. No plasma scarring. No kinetic impact craters. Hull damage originates from interior."