Page 17 of Alien Healer’s Mate

Pressing her back against the wall behind a support strut, she held her breath until the footsteps faded. When they had, she waited a few more seconds, then peeled herself off the wall.

She made it down another two corridors, ducking behind support struts and holding her breath every time a shadow moved at the edge of her vision, but didn’t run into any more overly muscled alien traffic.

“Real smooth, Sawyer. Real super spy shit.”

Peeling herself off a cold bulkhead, she wiped her damp palms on her thighs. Harper would lose her mind when she heard about this. Delilah bit her lip. If she heard, Kellat might just stuff her back in that room and throw away the key when he found out what she’d been up to.

That didn’t stop her though, and she carried on. The passage tightened for a section, the walls either side humming. Must be some kind of machinery behind them. Perhaps the engines? She didn’t know how human spaceships worked, let alone alien ones. Then she was past that section, and the corridor opened up again.

A wash of air hit her, and it was different. Dry enough to crack her lips and snapping with an electric charge that lifted the fine hairs on her arms. It snapped against her skin, leaving a metallic taste on her tongue. She frowned. What the hell… it was like licking a battery.

She blinked hard, utterly blind after the brighter light of the hallway behind her. Standing stock-still, she breathed shallowly as she waited for her retinas to get with the damn program.

Shapes resolved from the gloom. Huge and hunched, like they were about to attack.

She gasped, jumping backward and slamming into the bulkhead behind her. “What the fuck⁠—“

Her eyes widened. She was standing right beneath a row of the biggest alien war robots she had ever seen. Eight-legged monstrosities of dark metal and piston joints, they were hunkered down, but each was big enough to dwarf Kellat, and he was the biggest guy she’d ever seen.

Dull-red eyes clustered on one’s front plate. Guns were mounted across another’s back, easily big enough to punch through a station wall. She didn’t want to know what the saw blades were for. Or the hooks on the one at the end, curved and vicious, built to tear a hull open.

She bit back her whimper. The news feeds back home had shown Lathar combat bots, sleek bipedal machines that marched in neat formation. These were nothing like that. These looked like they’d been built by something with a serious grudge against anything soft and squishy, to take it apart painfully.

“Nope.” Shaking her head, she pressed flatter against the wall. Her lips moved, but it was like her vocal cords had seen the same thing she had and refused to form sounds out of self-preservation. “Hell nope from Nopistan.”

Her eyes wide, she pressed herself flat against the wall like she was trying to merge with it and slid sideways, an inch at a time. Her gaze darted from machine to machine, ready to make a break for it if any of them so much as twitched a metal leg.

None of them moved. There was no whirring or targeting lasers sweeping her face. They sat there, dark and silent.

Her heel scraped the deck, and she froze, her heart doing a frantic drum solo against her ribs. But nothing whirred, and no weapons systems activated to turn her into a smear of blood on the metal of the wall.

It could be a trap. She inched sideways along the wall. They were alien war robots, so they could be playing dead to lure her in. That’s what smart predators did, right? Act all dead and then—bam—alien blender.

Her pulse hammered in her ears as she moved, her knees all loose and wobbly.

It was okay. It was fine. She was tiny and quiet… basically a mouse. She took another shuffle backward, and her heel bumped a strut. She froze, biting her lip hard enough to sting. Mice didn’t get eaten when they didn’t move, right? She frowned. Wait. Owls ate mice. Shit. Bad analogy.

She looked up. The nearest robot stared down at her with a blank, eyeless face, all smooth dark metal and menacing angles. It didn’t twitch or power up with a threatening hum.

Please be broken. Please be broken.

She shifted another inch back the way she’d come. Be out of batteries. Please be scrap metal or something.

A flicker of movement caught in the corner of her eye. Low down, where the deck met the wall, tucked behind the legs of the biggest, meanest-looking robot.

Narrowing her eyes, she crouched down, her fingers pressed flat against the cold metal floor.

There. She gasped softly. There was a baby robot hiding back there.

It was tiny. Maybe the size of a big house cat, all huddled into itself with six spindly legs tucked tight and two smaller arms wrapped around what might have been its head. The thing was shaking, actually shaking, small round lenses blinking at her in rapid, terrified bursts.

“Hey there,” she breathed, softening her voice the way she used to talk to the strays behind their old building. The ones she could never bring upstairs because her aunt was allergic and they couldn’t afford vet bills or food that wasn’t for humans. She and Harper had fed them scraps through the fence instead, watching them eat through the chain links while the snow came down. “It’s okay. I see you.”

It made a noise… a reedy, broken chirp that sounded like a smoke alarm with a dying battery. It sounded scared, way more scared than she was.

“Hey, hey, hey.” She made her voice soft and reached out, wiggling her fingers. “It’s okay. These big meanies aren’t moving. And if they do, I’ll throw a shoe at them. I’m very scary, you know? Back home, people call me the terrifying disaster woman.”

Well, they did call her that…