Chapter 9
RYCHNE
The house next to Nessa’s is a glorified wooden crate masquerading as shelter—wooden siding peeling like old bark, windows that rattle in wind, and a basement with ceilings low enough to bruise my back every time I bend.
Not what Vakutans consider fortress-worthy, but practical enough in a world where the deadliest threat comes in three-dollar bills and outdated zoning laws.
I remind myself that camouflage matters more than armor here.
Inside, the bare floors creak under every step, complaining like injured rodents. The scent of unfinished wood, damp earth, and faint mildew rolls in through the open door, mixed with a hidden sweetness—someone’s trashcanned fruit left too long. I breathe it in and taste survival.
Most of the day is bureaucratic torture.
I transfer funds through shell accounts bearing painstakingly backdated addresses.
Each click of the compad keyboard is deliberate, precise—again and again I reinforce the facade of Richard J.
Wilmont, “independent consultant,” all sanctioned by my forged return filings.
A credit check pops green; the mortgage seizures clear.
Each signature, each digital fingerprint, is another brick in my fortress.
Heard the term “paper tiger”? This is more like paper fortress, made of lies—but fortress nonetheless.
The basement is next. I open the trapdoor to the unfinished space, the stairs groaning beneath my weight. I scan the room with a hand-held spectrometer—moisture levels, electromagnetic interference, structural alloy resonance. Suitable. Good enough.
Now comes the retrofit.
Between the concrete walls I plant stealth shielding—thin film layers that absorb and scatter radio waves.
I repurpose wiring from my wrecked Starfighter’s AI node to make a rudimentary network backbone in the walls.
Power reroutes into a small bank of salvaged capacitors to ensure redundancy.
Every decision is a calculated compromise—security vs. local signals, efficiency vs. stealth.
I drill the first hole, the sound echoing deep in the musty basement.
Concrete dust hangs in the air. My hands are slick with grime, and I taste the grit when I wipe at my lips.
There’s something deeply satisfying about the physicality of manual labor here, after weeks of code-driven survival.
I am making this world mine—moment by moment.
An hour later, I break for a drink of water—crisp, cold—and admire the first stealth panel installed. I run my fingers over its surface: smooth metallic weave beneath a plaster face. It merges with the wall perfectly, like a tattoo beneath healed skin.
I’m interrupted by a faint hum through the structure. Collinsville’s Holonet node—functional. I locate the central splice and plug in my comm transmitter. A small light flickers green.
Connection secured.
I step outside, closing the basement door carefully, and survey the house. It has flaws, but it’s close. Close enough to monitor Vanessa’s perimeter. Close enough to intercept leaks. Close enough to finally feel—almost—grounded.
A soft whisper cracks through—my inducer picking up a spike in ambient pheromones from next door. It’s Nessa, moving inside her house. Laundry. Dinner prep. Footsteps on stairs. A small sync pulse of unintentional contact, caught on sensors meant to remain impartial.
Lying beneath a perfect moonlit sky, I admit something I’d nearly forgotten: proximity matters. Presence matters. It’s not just wires and data streams; it’s shared atmospheric patterns, household rhythms. I’m not a ghost here. I am a neighbor now—by design.
I return downstairs and plug the last cable into the lab terminal. I retrieve a small toolkit, decades old, from under a tarp—microfiber cloth, sensor calibration rods, nano-filament matrix blades.
I pause.
I could leave.
I could erase every proxy link, flee back to rubble fields and empty skies.
But I don’t.
This place is flawed—wooden, messy, human.
The transformation begins the moment I wake. By sunrise, I’m already in motion—garage door up, toolkit laid out. The floorboards sometimes groan, but the air smells crisp—wood shavings, fresh paint, and kinetic potential. Progress tastes like grit and adrenaline.
First, the garage. The interior shelving comes down, revealing bare studs.
I map out a false wall—reinforced with melted composite from ship hull plating.
Behind it, weapons and tech can be concealed.
The vault is hidden in plain sight. I tuck my plasma slugs into a lined vault, magnetically sealed.
The tiles snap into place—fitted snugly so even a trained engineer would never guess it’s a hollow chamber.
The mailman arrives midway—I nearly freeze. He lopes down the driveway, carrying a bundle of letters. I greet him with a stiff nod and a five-second wave. He blinks twice, then offers a quiet, “Morning, neighbor.” And that’s it. I release a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. My inducer holds.
Next, the attic. Surrounded by dusty beams and sagging insulation labeled “vintage.” I reroute old ductwork to camouflage a stealth scanner array—a ring of dish sensors and repurposed lights that flicker once in a while.
Moments like this, I can almost hear Vakutan censors screaming: “Why are you wasting prime warp conduit on a human crawl-space?”
Because this world calls me need.
Downstairs, the basement hums with ambition.
I’m building something. Molecular replicator—rudimentary, crude, but functional.
Pieced together from broken ship modules and microwaves, wired into Earth’s archaic battery systems. Every joint, every splice, is an experiment.
Converting energy states. Reordering atoms. Making matter from static electricity.
The first test is… a rock. A gray pebble. It turns into a cube of smooth metal, warm to the touch. My breath shudders involuntarily. I hold the fragment up to the dim bulb—reflecting something in my hollowed chest.
I’m not home yet. But I’m close.
That evening, I step outside to test another module: a grill contraption perhaps an Earth innovation, but alien to me. I load charcoal. I light a match. Flames leap higher than I intended, licking the edges of the grill grate.
Smoke thickens.
Suddenly, footfall.
Sammy Malone.
She stands framed in the garage light, eyebrows lifted. “Risky enterprise?”
I cough out a lungful of smoke, waving her hands back. “No. I mean, yes. I am cooking meat for human consumption protocol.”
She snorts. “Looks more like cremation.”
I jerk the lid shut. Embers flare. “Unexpected... oxygen surge.”
She steps in. Detangler in hand—a small fire extinguisher. Douses the flames before I can register fear. The grill smolders, the vegetables nearby are slightly charred but not incinerated.
She beams. “That was epic. Want help?”
I nod—relief trickling in. We salvage the embers. We talk directions—she suggesting better airflow, I nodding like I’m absorbing sacred truths.
Over the next hour, she stays. We laugh when I refer to the firebowl as “incomplete combustion array.” She teaches me how to use tongs. She says I’m “totally the weirdest neighbor ever,” and I feel something like pride warming under my chest plate.
And it’s comforting.
Because in this messed-up house, with its jury-rigged labs and oil-stained tools, someone sees me. Not the alien. Not the warrior. Just... me.
Later, I wave at joggers again, this time with better timing—maybe even a believable human wave. The setting sun glints off my inducer. I scan the street, waiting, hoping for another neighbor nod.
It’s still odd. Strange. Illogical.
But for now?
It’s home.
Sunrise finds me awake, restless. I’ve spent more hours in this house than on any battlefield. And yet, today I feel both stronger and more vulnerable than ever before.
I step onto the front porch, breathing in the crisp morning air.
The sky is pale, the grass glistening with dew.
Across the way, the silo-shaped water tower glows in the gray light.
Ketchup-colored—or so I’ve heard—and entirely irrelevant to survival, but somehow emblematic of this strange, human world.
Vanessa is outside in her yard, kneeling by a row of tomato plants. Her hair is pinned up loosely; a few strands fall across her face. I watch her pinch off a yellowing leaf, carefully inspecting the stem. The tension on her forehead is unmistakable.
Even the early glow of the day can’t brighten that expression.
I sip from my coffee mug—coffee being as bitter and foul as any herbal suppressant I had in the medbay. But I drink it anyway, because it’s hers.
With each sip, I feel something shifting. In my chest. In my bones.
Not fear.
Something else.
I want to protect her.
It’s not a warrior instinct, not exactly. It’s something more... fundamental.
A draw.
A claim.
The Jalshagar bond—I know its edges. On my world, it’s ancient. Unbreakable. It binds soul threads across lifetimes. It’s not about attraction. It’s about destiny.
Destiny terrifies me.
On Vakut, I reveled in solitude. Self-reliant. Unattached. My only attachment was loyalty to the Emperor’s fight. But here? Every time I see her, my breath stalls. My limbs lock. My awareness heightens as though enemies surround us—but there are none.
I realize I’m paying attention to her breathing. To the way her shoulders shift when she leans forward. To the small sound when she pulls a vine taut.
This is not conducive to tactical advantage, as my mind reminds me.
But logic does not fully apply.
I set my mug down and step off the porch, crossing the street with slow, deliberate steps. The dew squishes beneath my boots. Earth smells like life—fresh grass, damp soil, herbicide. I inhale deeply. It steadies me in a way I can't explain.
She glances up.
“Morning,” she says, voice hoarse and soft.
“Good morning,” I reply, voice tuned lower—an echo of respect. “Your plants.”
She smiles—warm, but laden with something. “You’ve seen me do this a dozen times. Pretty sure I still do it wrong.”
“Plants are not strategic targets,” I say dryly.
She laughs, a short exhalation that somehow makes my heart rip wider.
“I wish they were. Might get more pride out of them.”
I crouch beside her, resisting the urge to take her hand. Instead, I inspect the tomato stem she’s holding. Tiny yellow flowers buds—promise of fruit. The stem is a little weak.
“Needs more nitrogen,” I say.
She sits back, surprised. “You know fertilizer?”
“Chemical catalyst. I studied common soil compositions on Earth via library network.”
She gives me a flat look. “You downloaded a gardening manual?”
“It was... information I deemed necessary.”
She rolls her eyes in the way moms do when they’re annoyed but know you mean well. “Fine. Here’s the simple version: feed them fish emulsion in the early morning, compost at night.”
I tuck this into my mind. Human rituals are strange but sometimes effective.
We stand for a moment in silence. The morning breeze rustles leaves overhead. Somewhere, a bird cries.
I want to ask her many things—the questions crowding in my mind like insurgents—but the gut insists I hold them back.
I nod toward her yard. “Your domino.”
She frowns at the plants, then at me.
“Everything okay?”
I hesitate. This is new territory—confession.
I tilt my head. “I feel... protective.”
She laughs again. “That’s called caring.”
I blink.
“People do that for each other,” she explains. “Neighbors help neighbors.”
I digest that. Sum it up slowly. “Neighbors?”
She stands and smooths her gardening gloves, placing them near my feet. “Yep. We watch each other’s houses when vacations happen. We trade tools and sugar. And sometimes, we stand guard—literally or metaphorically.”
I glance at her gloves. Her hair. The easy tone in her voice.
This girl is teaching me planet Earth’s gentle art of defense.
“Neighbors,” I say again.
“Yes. Neighbors.”
We stand silent, close enough that I can sense her warmth. Fear and desire swirl in my chest. What loyalty should I claim? To the Empire? To battle? To time itself?
Or to her?
Her hand brushes mine as she leans past me to pick up a fallen petal from the plant. Lightning strikes—tiny but fierce.
My breath stumbles.
She looks at me.
In that look is understanding. Recognition. Something anchored in places neither logic nor training can reach.
And I realize: I’ve anchored too.
I inhale, tasting the air that smells like home.
“Would you... like coffee?” I manage.
She smiles. A real smile. Sunlight on earth after centuries of cold moons. “I’d love some. Thanks.”
I help her stand. We walk back to our respective porches. I pour coffee. She hands me two mugs. The steam curls upward.
We sip, side by side, silent except for birdsong and distant hum of suburbs waking.
I know my mission hasn’t changed. I must repair, return, complete my duty.
But my heart has begun to divide its allegiance.
The Jalshagar bond doesn’t offer clarity. It only drags me deeper into human possibilities I’m not yet ready to name.
But she’s changing the calculus.
And that terrifies me.