Chapter 3
Niki
The descent to Merisalle felt nothing like the flights I'd taken on Earth.
No turbulence warnings. No seatbelt signs. No flight attendants offering peanuts and ginger ale. Just the steady hum of alien engines and the viewport showing me a planet I had no business visiting.
I pressed my face closer to the transparent material, not glass but something stronger that didn't even have a name in English, and watched as we dropped through the atmosphere.
The planet's surface resolved itself in stages, first just a reddish-brown blur, then mountain ranges like jagged teeth, then the sprawl of a city that seemed to grow like fungus across the landscape.
No grid pattern. No organized streets.
Just chaos built on top of chaos, the kind of place where laws were suggestions and violence was currency.
It reminded me of the worst parts of New York back when the neighborhoods still had teeth, before the gentrification, before the yoga studios and artisanal coffee shops moved in and sanded down all the rough edges. This was that energy multiplied by a thousand and spread across an entire planet.
My stomach twisted.
Not from the descent, the ship's inertial dampeners handled that, but from the reality of what I was walking into.
I was a cop. Past tense. But the instincts were still there, the training, the way my mind automatically catalogued threats and exits and tactical advantages.
Though none of it had prepared me for this.
"Two minutes to landing," the pilot said in clicks and grunts that came through my translator implant as slightly accented English. "Cloaking will hold through touchdown, but we need you off fast. Thirty seconds, no more."
"Understood," I said, steadier than I felt.
The ship banked hard, dropping toward the foothills several miles from the main city.
Through the viewport, I watched scrubland roll past, twisted vegetation more purple than green, rocky outcroppings, the kind of terrain that offered cover but not comfort.
The city squatted in the distance, a sprawling mass of structures thrown together without any thought for aesthetics or building codes.
The landing was so smooth I barely felt it. One moment we were airborne, the next we'd touched down with barely a whisper of displaced air.
"Go," the pilot said. "Now."
I grabbed my pack, light with just emergency supplies, a small blaster, and the equipment I'd need, and hit the release on the hatch. It hissed open, equalizing pressure. I was already moving, boots hitting alien soil before the ramp fully extended.
The air hit me like a fist.
Hot. Dry. It tasted of minerals and something acrid that made my nose wrinkle. Definitely not Earth. The gravity felt slightly off too, just different enough that my first few steps came out awkward, like I was walking on a surface that wasn't quite level.
Behind me, the hatch sealed and the ship's engines cycled up. I didn't look back. Couldn't afford to. I pushed toward the scrub brush, toward the cover of the twisted vegetation, as the ship lifted off and vanished into the burnt-orange sky.
Then I was alone.
Alone on an alien planet, on a criminal hub where humans were trafficked like livestock, where speaking English or even Spanish or Cantonese would get me killed or worse, where everything from the air to the gravity to the color of the sky screamed wrong.
I crouched behind a cluster of purple vegetation, noting the long and wickedly sharp thorns, and tried to steady my breathing.
My hands trembled as I gripped the edge of my pack.
My mouth had gone dry as dust. The world tilted at the edges, vertigo threatening to pull me under the way it used to before a raid or a high-risk arrest.
But this wasn't a raid.
This was an infiltration, a suicide mission dressed up as rescue.
I pulled the cuddwisg device from my pack.
It looked harmless enough, just a small disc about the size of a silver dollar, made of some material that shifted colors in the light.
I pressed the activation stud and felt the device warm against my palm before attaching it to the neckline of my dark gray cloak.
It clicked into place.
A strange tingling sensation spread across my skin.
The transformation was instantaneous and deeply unsettling.
I looked down at my hands and saw gray-green skin, thicker and rougher than my own. My fingers were longer, the joints slightly off.
And there were six instead of five.
I pulled out the small mirror from my pack and nearly dropped it.
The face staring back wasn't mine. It was Ulkommenian, with broad features, skin the color of old bruises, eyes too large and set too far apart, a nose that was basically just two holes in the middle of my face, and thin black lips.
The hologram was perfect, seamless, showing me exactly what anyone else would see.
But I could still feel my real face underneath, my human skin, my human features.
The disconnect between what I saw and what I felt made my stomach lurch.
I forced myself to breathe through the disorientation, to accept the alien reflection staring back at me.
This was me now.
This was who I had to be.
Next came the voice modulator, smaller than the cuddwisg, just a thin strip no larger than a band-aid that adhered to my throat. The moment I pressed it into place, I felt it activate, a subtle vibration against my skin as it calibrated to my vocal cords.
"Testing," I said in English.
The words came out in guttural Ulkommenian. The translator inserted behind my left ear converted it back so I could understand myself, but the sound was all wrong, alien, nothing like my voice.
I tried again. "My name is Niki Nguyen."
The modulator transformed it into harsh syllables that bore no resemblance to English.
Perfect. Terrifying, but perfect.
I settled into my hiding spot behind the thorny vegetation, making myself as small as possible. The pack went beside me, within easy reach. My hand found the small weapon they'd given me, a blaster that fired energy pulses instead of bullets, and I checked it for the third time.
Charged. Ready. Hopefully unnecessary.
Then I waited.
Waiting was something I'd done plenty of as a cop, stakeouts, surveillance, the long hours of watching and listening and staying alert while nothing happened.
But this was different.
This wasn't some suspect's apartment in Queens or a drug corner in the Bronx.
This was an alien planet, a criminal hub, a place where I didn't belong and couldn't afford to be discovered.
The suns, two of them with one larger and redder than the other, beat down on my hiding spot. Sweat trickled down my back despite the climate control of my tactical suit. My legs cramped from crouching. My eyes watered from staring at the landscape, watching for any sign of movement.
An hour passed. Maybe more.
Time felt strange here, stretched and compressed all at once.
I thought about Danny, about how he'd died in an alley not so different from the streets I'd patrolled for fifteen years, about how I'd become a cop because of him, because I wanted to make the city safer, to stop other families from losing their brothers and sons and daughters.
And now here I was, light-years from that alley, crouched in alien scrubland, waiting to rescue someone I'd never met from captors who'd been torturing him for a century.
The absurdity of it should have been funny.
Should have made me laugh or cry or something.
Instead, I just felt determined.
The Prime's face flashed through my mind, the way she'd looked at me in her chambers, the weight of her hope and grief and desperate love for her son pressing down on every word, the way she'd thanked me as if I'd already succeeded, as if her faith in me were absolute.
I couldn't fail her.
Wouldn't.
A sound cut through my thoughts, a high-pitched whine that grew steadily louder. I tensed, hand tightening on my weapon, eyes scanning the landscape.
There.
Coming from the direction of the city. A vehicle of some kind, moving fast across the scrubland.
The speeder took shape as it closed the distance.
It looked like someone had taken a motorcycle and stripped off the wheels, leaving just a sleek body hovering about two feet off the ground.
The seat was wide enough for two, and the whole thing moved with a fluid grace that seemed impossible for something mechanical.
It slowed as it approached, then stopped about twenty yards away.
The driver dismounted, and I got my first look at Binwee Jazarazant.
She was tiny, maybe three feet tall if that, with brilliant blue skin, not the pale blue of a clear sky but deep and vibrant like tropical water.
Her hair was pure white, cut short and practical.
She wore dark robes that seemed designed for movement, and even from this distance I could see the way she carried herself.
Confident. Competent. Dangerous despite her size.
A Framaddi. One of Asad Intelligence's best operatives.
She looked like a Smurf.
Her gaze darted around with quick, efficient movements. Then she made a subtle hand signal, the one we'd agreed on during the briefing.
Yes, I'd taught her to flip the bird, and I couldn't help the amused huff as her small blue fingers performed it perfectly.
I stood up, my legs protesting after the long crouch, and moved out of my hiding spot.
Binwee's eyes, large, dark blue, and impossibly expressive, tracked my movement. She nodded once, a gesture that seemed universal across species.
"Detective Nguyen." Her voice was surprisingly deep for someone so small, rendered perfectly by the translator in my ear. "You're on time. Good."
"Call me Niki," I said, hearing the words come out in modulated Ulkommenian.
It still felt wrong, hearing that alien voice instead of my own.