Page 1 of The Alien Minotaur's Bride

CHAPTER 1

WALK TOWARDS THE SCARY SMELL

The number four air recycler had been making a noise like a cat in a tumble dryer for the last three hours, and I'd been ignoring it for two and a half of those, because sometimes that worked.

It didn't work.

I shoved back from the maintenance console and pulled up the diagnostics log for the seventh time since my shift started. Same readout. Same unhelpful string of amber alerts. I scrolled past them, looking for the one that would tell me what was actually broken so I could hit it with the correct end of a wrench and go back to pretending I had a fulfilling career.

The station was called Relay 11-Bravo. Eleven automated relay stations strung through this corridor of deep space like cheap fairy lights, and Bravo was the one nobody wanted. Too far from the supply route, too old, and prone to deciding at three in the morning that the carbon dioxide scrubbers needed recalibrating, right now, immediately, wake the only human on board.

That human was me. Lucky, lucky me.

I grabbed my toolkit from the charging rack, tucked my torch under my arm, and headed for the lower decks. The overhead lights buzzed as I passed beneath them, that thin fluorescent whine I'd stopped hearing months ago. My boots rang on the metal grating, too loud, the way they always were on night cycle, when the station dialled everything down to standby. The day shift, which I hadn't worked in four years and had frankly stopped missing, came with ambient noise: machinery, comms chatter, the dull thrum of the ore processors in the next hub along. At night there was just me, my footsteps, the recyclers and whatever small mechanical tantrum the station had decided to throw.

I liked it, mostly.

Mostly.

The lower decks smelled the way they always did, of coolant and engine fuel and the faintly sweet chemical note of the water purifiers. I'd read somewhere that human noses stopped noticing familiar smells after a while, some kind of sensory adaptation. I believed it, because the station smelled of nothing to me until I consciously tried. Then it smelled of everything. Every panel had its own particular staleness, every junction box its own warm plastic breath. Nine years on relay stations and I could probably identify which deck I was on blindfolded, just by sticking my nose in the air.

"You're a delight at parties," I told myself, rounding the corner into the service corridor. "Really. A conversational marvel."

The lights flickered.

I stopped.

They flickered again, a hard clean blink, both overheads going dark at the same time and coming back a half-second later. My console buzzed against my hip. Atmospheric irregularity detected. Sector 7-C.

Sector 7-C was the exterior cargo bay access corridor. I stared at the notification, waiting for the follow-up that would tell me it was a faulty sensor, a pressure fluctuation, one of the dozen boring explanations I'd learned to rattle off in my sleep.

The follow-up didn't come.

"Fantastic," I muttered. "Fine."

I turned left. The corridor narrowed as it dropped towards the bay level, the ceiling lowering by degrees; the station's architects had apparently decided that the sections nobody visited didn't need headroom. The air got colder down here. The grating under my boots gave way to solid plating, and my footsteps went from ringing to flat, dull thuds that swallowed themselves.

The hatch to 7-C was closed but not sealed. That was odd. I kept the exterior access corridors sealed on principle, less atmosphere to heat, less space for things to go wrong in. I'd sealed this one myself three weeks ago, after the last cargo delivery.

I pressed my palm to the release panel. The light blinked green, and the hatch hissed and juddered open about two-thirds of the way before grinding to a stop. Standard. Nothing on this station opened all the way on the first try.

I squeezed through.

The air on the other side was wrong.

I stopped mid-stride with one hand still braced against the hatch frame. The corridor smelled different. Warmer, somehow, though the temperature readout on my console said fourteen degrees, the same as always. And underneath the usual recycled staleness there was–

I breathed in.

Sun-heated earth. Musk, low and warm and animal. Green growing things, the kind of rich damp-soil smell you got from a planet with actual weather and actual dirt, not from a station corridor that hadn't seen organic matter since the last engineer dropped a sandwich behind a junction box.

My body went very still.

Not by choice. No, as if someone was taking over. I was standing there one moment, breathing that impossible smell, and my shoulders dropped, my jaw unclenched and my grip on the torch loosened, all at once, as if my entire nervous system had decided we were safe here and hadn't bothered to check with me first.

Which was suspicious. I realised it was suspicious even as it was happening, which was somehow worse. Like watching your own hand reach for a hot plate and being unable to stop it.

That's not right, I thought. That is very much not right.