Page 114 of Stripped By the Alien

Sophia comes to the glass and puts one palm on it. “There's…” she begins, then has to start again. “There's only you?”

"Only me and Lucius." I press my hand against hers through the fogged surface. "Are you hurt?"

She shakes her head, but the movement is too controlled, too measured. It's the kind of careful gesture people make when they're holding themselves together by will alone. "I knew someone would come," she whispers. "I didn't know it would be you."

"Who else?" I manage, and something that might be a laugh escapes her, raw and cracked and barely a sound at all.

"There are two guards," Lucius murmurs beside me. "Positioned at the block entrance, forty feet from us. I can likely disable the cell locks remotely, but the moment I do, station security will register it. I estimate we'll have perhaps thirty seconds before…"

The wall behind us lights up.

It's nothing as crude as an alarm. Just a soft, out-of-tune alien chime, and then a section of the corridor ceiling irises open and something with too many legs and a chassis like polished bone drops down in front of us, already unfolding what is unmistakably a weapon.

"Maintenance drone," Lucius says, and there's real alarm in his voice for the first time since we boarded. "Or a guard drone. It's found us. Captain, it's transmitting."

I don't wait to hear the rest. I close the distance and hit it before it can finish unfolding, driving the heel of my hand into the base of what might be its sensor cluster the way Krix'vorr showed me — any vulnerable structure — and it staggers back into the wall with a shriek of tortured metal. It's not enough. It rights itself almost immediately, mechanical and tireless in a way no locust or human ever could be, and lunges again.

"Lucius, the locks!" I shout, no point in whispering now.

"Working."

The attacking drone's weapon arm swings and I duck under it, grab the arm itself, and use its own momentum the way I used Krix'vorr's in the training room a lifetime ago. Pivot, pull, let its weight do the work. It crashes into the transparent wall of the cell block hard enough to crack it, and behind the spiderwebbed material I hear Sophia cry out.

Down the corridor, the two guards are moving now, alerted, weapons rising.

"Locks disengaged!" Lucius calls. "Captain, the cell is open, but⁠—"

I don't hear the rest of it, because the drone comes at me a third time, faster, having apparently learned something from the first two attempts, and this time it doesn't lunge for my shoulder the way a locust would. It goes for Lucius.

One skeletal limb closes around the drone's small body mid-air, and I hear the crunch of something giving way inside him, a sound that goes through me like ice water.

"Lucius!"

"I'm functional," he says, but his voice comes out garbled, wrong, one register too low. "Barely. Captain, the guards…"

I don't think. I throw myself at the maintenance drone, both hands locked around the limb holding Lucius, and wrench with everything I have. It's not a fair fight, but it loosens its grip just enough, and Lucius drops, sparking, into my free hand.

That half-second of hesitation, of choosing him over the guards closing in behind me, is all the guards need.

Something strikes me across the back. It's a blow meant to subdue, some kind of restraint field that locks every muscle in my body. I go down hard, Lucius still clutched against my chest, my legs no longer answering to me at all.

"Sophia…" I manage, and even that costs me everything I have left.

Through the spiderwebbed crack in the wall, I see her hand pressed flat against the transparent surface, her face white, her mouth shaping my name without any sound reaching me at all. The cell door stands open behind her. Lucius did that much. And for one wild, useless second I think run, just run, get out while you can —

But she doesn't run. Of course she doesn't. She comes toward the crack instead, toward me, and that's the last thing I see clearly before rough hands haul me upright, and the corridor tilts, and the lights of the station blur into long white streaks above me.

"Another intact specimen," a voice says, the translation flat and clicking through Lucius's broken voice. "Undamaged. Good. The auction master will be pleased to have a matched pair to sell."

I try to speak. Nothing comes out but a thin, furious sound that isn't even a word.

The last thing I register, before the dark takes the rest of it, is Lucius, still cradled uselessly against my chest, his single working light flickering once, twice, and then going out.

35

- Krix'vorr -

The Nest fills the forward 'eye' long before we're close enough to slow down, a vast dark shape against the star-river of the Galactic Center, and the whole Beast seems to lean toward it, eager for her stall.