Chapter 4
Cullen
The world exploded.
The impact came like a physical fist, slamming me backward into the crash webbing with a force that drove the air from my lungs in a violent gasp. G-forces crushed down on my chest, pressing me flat, making it impossible to breathe, impossible to think. My vision blurred white at the edges.
Metal screamed—a sound like nothing on Earth, a high-pitched shriek of structural failure that vibrated through my bones.
The ship convulsed around us, bucking and twisting as it tore through the jungle canopy.
Trees splintered like matchsticks. Branches thick as my torso punched through the viewport in a shower of crystalline fragments.
Leaves and debris exploded inward, filling the cockpit with a choking cloud of green and gold.
The smell hit me next—burning electronics, ozone, the sharp green reek of torn vegetation mixing with the acrid stench of superheated metal. My eyes watered. My throat constricted.
Another impact. Harder. The ship pitched violently to starboard, and I felt the webbing cut deeper into my shoulders as the g-forces shifted, trying to tear me from my seat.
Serna's hand was ripped from mine. I heard her cry out—a sound of shock and pain—before she was thrown against the far wall of the cockpit.
"No!" I lunged forward, but the forces pinning me down were too great. I was helpless, suspended in the webbing while the world came apart around us.
The ship's nose dug into something solid—earth, rock, something that didn't give.
The deceleration was catastrophic. Every system screamed in protest. Sparks erupted from the overhead panels.
The emergency lighting flickered and died, plunging us into darkness for a heartbeat before the red emergency backup kicked in, bathing everything in a hellish crimson glow.
We hit the ground hard enough to knock the air from my lungs a second time, a bone-jarring impact that felt like being dropped from a cliff. The crash webbing held, but barely. I felt something in my ribs shift—not break, but close. Pain exploded across my left side.
Then silence. The kind of silence that comes after violence, heavy and ringing, broken only by the hiss of venting atmosphere and the occasional groan of stressed metal settling.
I hung in the crash webbing for a moment, taking inventory. Ribs—bruised but not broken. Left shoulder—wrenched but functional. Head—pounding but clear. Blood in my mouth from where I'd bitten my tongue. But I was alive. I was conscious.
Training kicked in before thought did.
I hit the harness release and dropped to the deck, landing in a crouch. The ship was canted at a forty-degree angle, nose-down in what looked like a crater of torn earth and shattered vegetation. Smoke poured from somewhere aft. Emergency lighting flickered red.
"Serna!" My voice came out hoarse.
No response.
I scrambled across the tilted deck toward her seat. She hung limp in the crash webbing, her head lolled to one side, blood matting her dark hair. My heart stopped.
"Serna." I reached for her throat, fingers finding the pulse point. Strong. Steady. Thank God. "Serna, can you hear me?"
Nothing.
The Navy training I'd carried for thirty years took over completely. Assess. Prioritize. Act. I checked her pupils—responsive, if sluggish. Breathing—regular. But that head wound was bad. A gash above her left temple, still bleeding, the kind of injury that could mean concussion or worse.
I needed to get her down. Needed to treat that wound. Needed to—
A groan of metal made me look up. Through the shattered viewport, I could see the ship's nose was buried in soft earth, but the tail section was propped up by a massive tree trunk. The whole structure was unstable. If that tree gave way, the ship would collapse.
"Okay," I said, more to myself than to her. "Okay. We're getting out of here."
I hit her harness release and caught her as she fell forward, her weight solid and warm against my chest. She was heavier than she looked—all that Vaktaire muscle—but I'd carried wounded men through worse terrain.
I laid her on the deck as gently as I could, then moved through the wreckage, searching. The medi-kit. Where the hell was the medi-kit? Standard Alliance ships kept them in—there. A compartment near the galley, door hanging open, contents scattered but intact.
I grabbed the kit and a survival pack, then returned to Serna.
My hands were steady as I opened the kit—years of field medicine training making the movements automatic.
Antiseptic. Gauze. Dermal regenerator. Alliance tech was more advanced than anything we'd had in the Navy, but the principles were the same.
I cleaned the wound first, wiping away blood and debris with antiseptic-soaked gauze.
The gash was deep but clean—no skull fracture that I could see, no depression.
Good. I activated the dermal regenerator and ran it along the wound, watching as the edges began to knit together.
Not perfect, but enough to stop the bleeding and prevent infection.
"You're going to be okay," I told her, even though she couldn't hear me. "You're going to be fine."
My hands were shaking now. Just a little. Just enough to notice.
I sat back on my heels and let myself breathe. Let myself feel the fear I'd been pushing down since the moment I'd seen her hanging unconscious in that harness. She could have died. Could still die if that wound was worse than it looked, if there was internal bleeding, if—
Stop. Focus.
I forced myself to stand, to look around, to assess our situation. The ship was a loss—even if we could repair the hyperdrive, the hull was compromised, life support was gone. We were stranded. But we were alive.
I moved to the shattered viewport and looked out at our surroundings.
Jungle. Dense, suffocating jungle stretched in every direction, a living wall of green so thick it seemed to press against the broken viewport like something with weight and intention.
But it wasn't the green of Earth forests—it was wrong, alien.
Sickly chartreuse mixed with deep forest shadows, patches of vegetation that seemed to pulse with an inner luminescence, bioluminescent plants casting an eerie glow even in the fading daylight.
The colors shifted and bled into one another—acidic yellows, bruised purples, a pale lime that hurt to look at directly.
Massive trees with trunks like pillars rose into a canopy so thick I could barely see the sky.
The canopy was layered—multiple levels of vegetation stacked on top of each other, each layer darker than the last, until the depths were nothing but shadow and mystery.
Vines hung in thick curtains, some as thin as rope, others as wide as my torso, and they moved.
Not in the wind—there was barely any wind down here—but with a slow, deliberate undulation that made my skin crawl.
Some of the vines had thorns. Others had what looked like mouths.
The air that poured through the broken viewport was thick and hot, so humid it felt like breathing through wet cloth.
It carried the smell of rot and decay, yes, but also something else—something sweet and cloying, like flowers blooming on corpses.
Underneath that was the sharp, chemical stench of something alien, something that didn't exist on Earth.
Spores, maybe. Or the exhalations of things that had no names.
The sounds were worse than the sight. Distant animal calls echoed through the canopy—some high-pitched and chittering, others deep and resonant, nothing I could identify.
Insects. Thousands of them, maybe millions, creating a constant background drone that seemed to vibrate in my teeth.
Water dripped somewhere, a steady plink-plink-plink that echoed through the dense vegetation.
And underneath it all, something larger was moving through the jungle.
I could hear it—the crack of branches, the rustle of undergrowth, something massive enough to make the smaller sounds fall silent as it passed.
The jungle was alive. Not just with life, but with a kind of consciousness, a density and weight that made it feel like the vegetation itself was aware of us, watching us, waiting.
It reminded me of Colombia.
The memory hit me like a fist to the gut.
Another jungle. Another mission. Twenty years ago, when I'd been young and stupid and thought I was invincible.
We'd gone in after an American aid worker taken by a local cartel—three days in that green hell, moving through terrain that wanted to kill us, hunting men who knew every inch of it.
We'd found her. Found what was left of her.
I could still see her face. Still hear the sound Corporal Martinez had made when he'd found the body. Still feel the weight of failure pressing down on my chest as we'd carried the pieces we could find in a body bag.
I'd sworn then that I'd never let it happen again. Never let someone die on my watch because I wasn't fast enough, wasn't smart enough, wasn't good enough.
I looked back at Serna, still unconscious on the deck, and something fierce and protective surged through me.
Not her. Not this woman who carried the weight of an entire Alliance on her shoulders. Not this woman who'd let me see past the Prime to the person beneath. Not this woman who'd made me feel something I hadn't felt since Catherine died—something I had no right to feel.
I wouldn't let her die. Not here. Not in this jungle. Not ever.
Even if it cost me everything.
I moved back to her side and checked her pulse again. Still strong. Still steady. I brushed a strand of dark hair from her face, my fingers lingering longer than they should have.
"I've got you," I said quietly. "I promise. I've got you."
The truth settled in my chest like a stone. I cared about her. More than I should. More than was wise or professional or remotely appropriate. She was the Alliance Prime. I was a soldier.
But right now, in this moment, none of that mattered. Right now, she needed me. And I would be damned if I let her down.
I heard a sound from the cockpit—a wet, dripping sound. Kalipuk.
I moved forward carefully, already knowing what I'd find. The pilot was still strapped in his seat, but his chest wasn't moving right. Blood pooled beneath him. When I checked for a pulse, there was nothing.
He'd gotten us down. Gotten us down alive. And it had killed him.
I closed his large eyes and stepped back. I'd have to deal with his body later. Right now, Serna was my priority.
I returned to her side and settled in to wait. To watch. To make sure she kept breathing.
And to prepare for whatever came next.
Because if someone had orchestrated this crash, if someone had driven us here deliberately, then we weren't just stranded.
We were being hunted.