Page 4 of Enslak

I spent three days in that cell, watching the people around me break down, listening to languages I didn't understand, trying to figure out if there was any way to escape or if I should just find a way to end it before they sold me into something worse.

Then the Bardaga showed up.

The rescue was chaos, alarms blaring, the ship shuddering from weapons fire, Trogvyk screeching as Alliance soldiers stormed through the corridors. When they opened our cell, I didn't believe it at first. Didn't believe the tall, elegant beings in armor were real.

"You're safe now," one of them said, tall and muscular with silver skin and eyes like liquid mercury. "We're taking you home."

Except they couldn't.

At least not me.

The Garoot Healer the Trogvyk put me through wasn't just medicine. It was regenerative technology that restored your body to optimal health, and for humans, that meant reversing aging and adding centuries to your lifespan.

When I woke up after the treatment, I noticed it immediately. That old knee injury from academy training, the one that had nagged at me for fifteen years and ached every time it rained, was completely gone. Not just scarred over but actually restored, like it had never happened. My hands looked different too, smoother, younger.

Everything hurt less.

But that miracle came with a cost. I could never go back to Earth. Would never see my mother's face again.

I didn't cry. Not then. I just nodded and asked what happened to people like me, people who couldn't go home.

The answer was an agricultural planet called Tau Ceti.

Or working at a restaurant chain started by an abducted human chef called Space Pearls.

Or any of a dozen other places in Alliance space where rescued humans ended up doing menial labor because we didn't have the education, the training, or the biological compatibility to do much else. Farm work. Service industry. Manual labor. The Alliance was kind enough to give us a place to live and work to do, but it was charity.

Pity.

I'd spent fifteen years as a detective, fifteen years solving cases, tracking down criminals, making a difference. And now I was supposed to spend the rest of my life, however long that was, serving drinks to aliens or picking vegetables on some colony world?

The despair crushed me, worse than the gunshot wound, worse than the Trogvyk cell. At least then I'd had hope that it would end, one way or another.

This was forever.

This was my life now.

That's when I cried.

I spent two weeks on an Alliance ship in a fog of grief and rage, barely eating, barely speaking to anyone. My grandmother's voice kept echoing in my head, telling me about gaman, endurance, perseverance, the quiet dignity of bearing hardship without complaint.

But I didn't feel dignified.

I felt hollowed out.

Then Chloe found me.

Tall, with dark hair and sharp eyes that cut right through my carefully maintained walls, she sat down across from me in the mess hall without asking permission.

"You're Nicole Nguyen." Not a question.

"Niki," I corrected automatically.

"Niki. NYPD detective, fifteen years on the force, decorated twice for bravery, excellent marksmanship scores, fluent in English, Cantonese, and conversational Spanish." She tilted her head. "You're exactly who I'm looking for."

I stared at her. "Looking for what?"

"An opportunity." She leaned forward, her voice dropping. "How would you feel about doing something that actually uses your skill set?"