Page 35 of Taken By the Alien Killer
“Quiet, girl. No lights. Nose down. We are not here.”
The board spits warnings anyway. I kill the transponder, melt the IFF into a smear, and ride the dark with no more than a passive ear. My nav goes from clean lines to guesswork: star fixes, the old school kind, where you check positions with a taught string of math in your head and a gut that remembers how to be a compass. The hull hisses when a net brushes us; the sound is small and mean, a zipper across scales. I hold my breath and count to twelve because twelve is how many beats it took a man I knew to die once, and it always buys me another second after.
There’s chatter in the nets—Reaper garbage layered under civilian noise. I sift it for hours. Some of it is brag, some of it is hunger with language stapled to it, some of it is singing so off-key it wants to be violence and fails. I slide the gain until the static makes a shape and let their slur of dialects sit in my head long enough to become sentences.
“—Khong’s pet is getting cleaned?—”
“—red one’s a firebrand?—”
“—captain says keep the yellow-skin in the light; they bite in the dark?—”
The scout’s receiver coughs once, thin as a cough can be, and there it is: a ghost ping with a ceremonial signature that has no business in this stretch of nowhere. It’s not the cruiser’s beacon; whoever took it knows the basics of theft. This is dumber—some forgotten subsystem waking for a blink under load, flashing a factory line of code and falling asleep again. A climate control on a VIP loop, prim enough to incriminate itself. The telemetry is a smear, but the frequency is an old friend. Akura’s ceremonial birds all hum at the same useless pitch.
“I have you,” I tell the empty cockpit. “Stay loud, little sin.”
I chase the flutter across the interference like a hunter following a hoofprint when the wind wants to erase it. Twice I lose it. Twice it comes back, quick and apologetic. The thirdtime, I catch more than the climate loop. The echo lands with a mass on my spectrograph, a belly signature the size of a small town and the temperament of a blade. Bloodseeker. She doesn’t say her name, but the way her engines shiver the black is a calling card I learned to hate before Star was a woman.
I can’t outrun her. I can’t outgun her. I can make her greedy.
The wreck is a gift—twisted plates drifting in a gravel cloud where someone’s convoy lost an argument with a micro-meteor belt and a bad pilot. The scout and I slide into the debris and let the drift grab us. I cut everything but passive power and life support, then cut those in half and swallow the cold. The suit seals around my torso with a sound like a door closing on the last good idea. I strap the emergency beacon to a cracked slab of hull and program it to shout help in three languages I don’t speak anymore.
“Talk for me,” I tell the dead metal. “I’ll play corpse.”
I snag two cables from a broken pallet and run them across my nose cone like I’m wearing a net, then jam an old cargo pod against the scout’s flank so our silhouette reads salvage, not threat. I exhale slow until my breath doesn’t fog the visor, then go still enough to count ion trails at the edge of perception.
They come in like a bad story told by a drunk: too loud, too late, and still dangerous. The Bloodseeker’s skiffs broom the field, magnet grapples spitting out like tongues. I hear them on the hull as a dull, smug thump. The scout twitches. I put a hand on her dash and squeeze.
“Easy.”
“Salvage three to hookmaster,” a voice bleeds over the band, bored. “Got a live one.”
“Present for the captain?” another voice says. “Put a bow on it.”
“Bow’s your department,” the bored voice answers. “I just drag.”
They reel me in with all the gentleness of a butcher. The wreck field spins, then becomes a smear, then a wall. The Bloodseeker’s hangar yawns open, a square of bristling black with rails like teeth. Her field catches my hull and my stomach at the same time; the artificial gravity yanks and the cables sing. I let my head swing once, like a good piece of trash, and shut down even my suit’s helpful prompts. I am cold. I am dead. I am listening.
The first minutes inside a hostile hangar smell the same on every ship if you have the nose for it: hot weld, burned lubricant, recycled air that has learned fear, and meat. The Bloodseeker adds bone dust and a sweet, wrong edge I only ever learned to name during triage. The grapples ratchet me to the deck and the skiff crews clank aboard, boots loud because they haven’t been taught to respect their own ghosts.
“Pop the shell,” one says, tapping the scout’s canopy with a gauntlet. “Maybe it’s a toy.”
“Toy this,” the other answers, and laughs when the canopy stays dark.
I wait. They forget me. Everybody forgets trash when there’s something more interesting to break. New boots, heavier, sure of themselves, cross the deck—the officer cadence, plus spurs. I smell Reaper and the old battlefield in the same breath. I count steps away. I memorize the pattern their gravity deck uses to flex under that much pride.
When the hangar’s routine breath finds itself again, I move.
The scout’s lower panel pops with the flex of a tool I don’t officially have. I slide down into the belly, then behind it, where the ribs of the ship become crawlspace and lie. The Bloodseeker has ducts big enough for a man and thoughts small enough to think he won’t use them. I unscrew a grill and feed myself into the ship like a promise keeping itself.
The noise inside the walls is a kind of weather. Fan hum, coolant whisper, the soft clatter of unsecured gear arguing with a vibration it can’t convince to stop. Voices bleed in from below when I pass over open bays and overflow storage—the Reaper drawl is a throatier thing than human bass, like rock fall given grammar.
“—captain says keep the red pretty, he wants her whole?—”
“—the yellow one bit me?—”
“—you shouldn’t taste what you can’t keep?—”
“—what’s the point of a feast if you can’t?—”
