Page 34 of Taken By the Alien Killer
“Commander, the unregistered craft are… we’re not… the manifest?—”
“Will show exactly what it needs to,” I say. “And later, when someone with a crest asks why, it will show nothing at all.”
He licks his lips. “Do you have authorization, sir?”
I set both hands on his console and lean until he can see his face reflected in my eyes. “I am authorization.”
He looks at his hands. He looks at the pane that separates us from a row of ugly little ships with stubborn faces. He looks at the clock. He makes a choice that will not ruin his life. “Bay four,” he says. “She’s ugly but mean. You didn’t hear that from me.”
“What’s her malfunction,” I ask, already walking.
“She drinks too much and bites on reentry,” he answers, scrambling after me with a data key. “Like my ex. She’ll still get you there.”
“She’d better,” I say, and he laughs because the alternative is fear.
Bay four houses a scout with a nose like a punch and a paint job that says it has never met a salon. I like it immediately. The cockpit smells like oil and old coffee and someone else’s temper. The seat fits me like it remembers my sins. I run the quickest pre-flight of my life and the most careful.
“You didn’t see me,” I tell the quartermaster through the external mic.
He salutes with the data key and pretends to be deaf. “Who are you,” he says to the empty air. “No idea. Never met him. Hope he wins.”
“Hope he does too,” I say, and the hangar doors begin their slow apology.
The intercom crackles. Sneed’s voice slides into the cockpit like a knife under a letter seal. “Commander.”
“Seneschal,” I say, and take us up before he can ask me not to. The scout rattles exactly where the quartermaster said it would, then remembers who it wants to be and steadies.
“Where are you going,” Sneed asks, his tone smooth and tight, as if he’s pinching a bridge of his nose he doesn’t trust to hold.
“Out,” I say. “I’ll bring something back.”
“You will return to your post,” he says. “You will return now.”
“No,” I say, because the word is true on every axis that matters.
“The Baron will?—”
“Forgive me,” I say, and mean it. “Or he won’t. I will still be gone.”
“You are abandoning your duty,” he says, and his breath catches almost imperceptibly on the first syllable ofabandoning,like it hurts his mouth to aim that word at me.
“I am executing it,” I say. “Just not on your floor plan.”
He goes quiet for a heartbeat. When he speaks again, the honest spine shows through the etiquette. “Bring her home,” he says.
“That is the plan,” I answer, and cut the channel because I have no room left in me for a voice that can talk me out of this. The scout clears the last of the city lights, noses into the black, and the air changes from shared to mine.
Planetary traffic control chirps for a flight plan; I send one written in fairy tales and falsified numbers. The scout makes a hungry sound and I feed it. Warnings blink; I stroke them like nervous animals until they settle. The world falls away without argument. The sky opens like a wound and like a gift.
I set the vector Tally gave me, the one she didn’t give me, the one I have always carried for when a thing I love goes missing. The console lights throw thin blue bands across my hands. The Bishop in my pocket makes itself known with a nudge against my thigh every time the ship breathes. It feels like a promise and a threat.
“Hang on,” I say to no one, and to her, and to the part of me I refuse to put back in a cage. “I’m coming.”
I open the throttle. The scout lunges into the black, and the chain I chose snaps somewhere behind me, quiet as a thread and loud as a war.
Space fights back.
Not with guns at first, but with drag you can’t measure and noise that isn’t noise—static that crawls under the skin and teaches your teeth a new kind of ache. The Stormhammer interference nets bloom across the vector like ghost spider silk, each filament a frequency you don’t see until you’re inside it. I throttle down to whisper and talk to the scout under my breath like it understands bargains.
