Page 50 of Alien Healer’s Mate

Warmth. Faint, small, tucked in behind her breastbone like a hand pressed to the other side of a wall. It didn’t hurt. It just sat there, steady, like something a long way away was reaching for her and couldn’t quite make it.

She went very still and waited for it to turn into a heart attack, or a panic attack… or whatever that tag on her wrist was really for.

Wishful thinking, she decided. It was just her brain throwing her a bone. She’d read about that somewhere, hostages inventing rescuers, lost hikers hearing voices. The mind was kind like that when there was no hope left.

Lying down on the bunk, pulled her knees up and watched the light strip dim to whatever counted as night out here.

The warmth stayed, but she didn’t let herself believe in it.

The darkness under the bunk was cool and steady. It pressed its chassis flat against the deck plating and let the cabin’s silence settle over its sensors.

There was a hollow place in its systems, a link that had torn loose when the pilot fell. It registered as a low-level, constant error it had stopped trying to resolve. But now there was a new link, a brighter, lighter connection that didn’t match any of the designations in its protocols. It ran through them again, teasing at the edge of the problem.

It was a warm signature… one that matched the female who talked to it and rolled the ball for it to chase. It ran alongside the absence of the first link. That one was gone, so it settled its attention on the warm link with a contented chirp.

But hours later, something changed. It came back online as the new link stretched thin. A hard spike came down it, heat and pressure and a jagged pulse. It knew that pulse, matching it to the feelings of its pilot, the one who was gone now.

That pulse was emotion. It was terror. Not its own. Hers. The female was far away, and the signal felt frayed and wrong. It skittered upright, its processes alert and on edge.

It surged out from under the bunk. Six legs clattered on the polished floor as it struck the bunk frame, recoiled, and circled. The need to move overrode three safety protocols in sequence. Find the source. It needed to find the female. Find the source.

It threw itself at the cabin door. The door was sealed metal with no handle its manipulators could grip and no gap it could pass through. It pressed its sensor array to the seam and pinged, rapid-fire, request after request, but the door didn’t respond. Then it tried slamming itself against the door again and again, but all it managed to do was rattle its plating.

The door was still closed.

Words were how the female opened things. It had watched her. She stood in front of doors and terminals and asked, and kept asking, circling a system’s logic until it gave way. But it had no words. It had only pings and protocols, and the terror in the link pulled at it like a directive it could not execute.

The panic cycled, high-frequency, and it whined as the overload nearly caused a system crash.

A heavy vibration came through the deck, warning it and not a moment too soon. It retreated into the dark under the bunk, pressing its belly to the deck.

It had watched the female move when she did not want to be found. She held her breath and timed her steps to the moments when the crew looked away. She made herself small and quiet. Patient.

So it copied her. Shutting down every non-essential system, it dimmed its optics and dropped its hum below the engine noise. Became nothing more than a piece of discarded hardware in the shadows. And it waited.

The door slid open. It moved backward further into the shadows as two beings entered. The first was tall and male, a being that it knew… the healer. The second was warmer and heavier. Its threat assessment protocols spiked. Vorrtan. It had files on them in its memory. Warnings flashed. It could not engage a vorrtan in its current format.

The male and the vorrtan spoke to each other in low voices. It didn’t pay attention to what they said, listening as boots crossed the floor and fabric shifted. They didn’t look under the bunk, didn’t see it.

They took something from the linked-female’s bag, and then they turned back toward the door.

It moved as soon as their backs were turned. Coming out of the shadows low and fast, it slipped through the narrowing gap of the door a fraction of a second before the seal engaged.

The corridor beyond was long and bright. It stood there for a second, sensors sweeping as it triangulated. Then it locked onto the flickering link.

The linked-female was out there.

So it ran.

13

The trail led them in the opposite direction to the one Kellat expected.

Amaelii moved ahead of him with Delilah’s jumper in one hand, her head up and her nostrils flaring. She turned left where the docking spur ran right and cut through a maintenance junction he hadn’t known existed. Three corridors later, she stopped at a sealed hatch with no clan markings.

“This one.”

He frowned as he looked up and down the docking corridor. Sector four. This was the sub-level command had flagged.