Page 18 of Alien Healer’s Mate

She held out a hand, palm up, letting it decide. “Come on, little one. I won’t hurt you. I promise.”

It hesitated, the round lenses blinking at her. Then, in a scramble of tiny metal legs, it shot forward. Fast. Bolting past her ankle, it tucked itself behind her calves. Like it thought she could shield it from the monsters above them.

“Oh.” Her throat tightened as she looked down at the quivering bot clinging to her, and her eyes burned. It had chosen her. She’d spent years being the one nobody picked. But this little hunk of metal looked at her and decided she was the safest thing in the room.

“Oh, honey.”

Reaching back slowly, she scooped it up. It was lighter than it looked, all hollow frame and trembling joints. The chirping kicked up, panicked at first, then settling as she cradled it against her chest. One small front arm reached up, tentative, and hooked into the weave of her sweater.

“It’s okay,” she murmured, low and soothing. “I’ve got you. We’re going back to my very swanky prison cell, and you can hide under the bed. Or the sink. I’ll look after you. Everything’s gonna be fine.”

It chirped again, softer, as she started walking. By the time she crept past the second junction, its legs had stopped shaking. By the third, it peered around her arm with curious, blinking lenses, chirping softly at the red corridor lights.

She smiled and kept walking.

His neck had locked up three hours ago.

Kellat ignored it, the way he ignored the dull throb behind his eyes and the steady ache in his lower back from hunching over a console built for a warrior twice his breadth.

The dataflex in his hand hissed softly as he scrolled, the material flexing and reforming as it displayed the next dense block of text. He frowned.

The Vorrtan documents were a joke.

Not the content… no, the content was revolutionary, if what he could make out could be believed. It was cellular regeneration beyond anything the Imperial healers had achieved. Neural pathway reconstruction that rebuilt damaged tissue instead of routing around it, something he’d never even considered possible.

But the files were incomplete. His lips pressed into a thin line. And it was deliberate, anyone who had eyes in his head could see that. Every third paragraph dissolved into redacted blocks, every schematic cut off at a crucial juncture, leaving him staring at half a molecule and a whole lot of draanth-all.

His fingers tightened on the flex, the material crinkling in protest.

Charlotte Mason’s file glowed on the secondary display beside him. He’d pulled it up an hour ago to cross-reference her injuries against each promising advance. The Scorperio implants had carved channels through her central nervous system like a knife through wet clay.

He tucked a stray braid behind his ear. Standard Latharian regeneration protocols couldn’t touch the kind of pervasive trauma Charlotte had suffered, but Vorrtan cellular reconstruction? If it worked? Forget stabilizing her. It could reverse most of the damage.

If it worked, and if it did, it would be down to the Vorrtan.

He growled under his breath, a low vibration in his chest, and tossed the dataflex onto the console. It landed with a soft thwack against the dark metal.

Other healers, most healers, talked about the Vorrtan the way they spoke of feral drakeen from the cascade incident: dangerous relics, weapons that had outlived both their war and their welcome. Their fighting forms alone were enough to terrify anyone on the battlefield… massive secondary forms that could take on a level-five drakeen and win.

But that wasn’t the whole story. It had never been the whole story.

The First Emperor had been the sharpest scientific mind of an age that had built the basis for all the technology the Lathar still used today. He’d engineered the Vorrtan from the ground up, weaving together the best genetic templates his labs could produce. You didn’t create a species that sophisticated by being stupid, or by using stupid subjects. The genetic donors were all the best minds of the age. Kayan Vorr’s theory was that to win a war against a highly intelligent enemy, you couldn’t field cannon fodder. So he hadn’t, and intelligence like that didn’t just evaporate into the void because the Tanel war ended.

Kellat dragged a hand down his face. The Vorrtan had spent a hundred thousand years in silence, and now they had revealed themselves again, with medical advances that made Imperial medicine look like field triage.

Draanth. Laarn had been right to send him.

His comm unit chirped, a sharp note that cut through the silence in the room. His gaze dropped to the screen. There was a new document from the conference feed, flagged as low priority. He tapped it open.

A research proposal. His eyes narrowed as the clan sigil resolved on the header. Z’Saai. He rubbed at the stubble on his chin. If he wasn’t mistaken, the Z’Saai were a descendant-clan of the clan that had created the link-band technology… the neural bridges that synced warriors to drakeen and let construction swarms operate on thought alone.

He snorted softly to himself. The original research on that technology had long since been lost to history. The scientist was obviously trying to reclaim his clan’s past glory, waving around ancestral credentials in the hope that someone would mistake nostalgia for innovation. Pathetic.

Sitting back in his seat, he scrolled quickly. Yeah, there was nothing new here. These were all the theoretical frameworks he’d memorized in the early months of his healer’s training years ago. Nothing he didn’t know already. Nothing that hadn’t been superseded by Imperial biotech centuries ago. He sighed. This was a waste of bandwidth and his time.

He stopped suddenly.

One data cluster sat at the bottom of the document, tucked under supplemental findings. It looked like the Z’Saai had tried to recreate the initial trials their predecessors had run. There were reports of neural mapping from early interface-failure trials.