Page 117 of Stripped By the Alien

Lucius drops to the floor.

A new figure enters. He's taller than the guards and wearing a dark robe. He moves with the unhurried confidence of someone who has done this many times before. He carries a flat instrument, and behind it, mounted somewhere I can't see, a small mechanical voice begins to speak in a language I don't know at all.

A moment later Lucius's voice reaches me, thin and strained, translating in a broken whisper only I can hear.

"They're discussing... specifications," he says. "Buyer preferences. The auction was postponed, it seems. Because now they have two of you. 'A matched pair', they say. Something about… Captain, I'm sorry, something about proportions. Modifications to increase something. I don't have a clean translation, but it concerns your alien listed preferences, and your friend's."

"What kind of modifications?" I manage.

I can sense him not wanting to answer. "Physical. Permanent. I believe they intend to begin with your friend."

Across the room, the robed figure sets its instrument down on a tray beside Sophia with a small, precise click, and reaches for something else.

"No," I say, and I'm fighting the restraints now with everything I have left, uselessly, my wrists already raw. "No, don't fucking touch her⁠—"

"Nora, don't," Sophia says, and somehow, impossibly, her voice is steadier than mine. "Don't waste yourself on it. Save it."

"For what?" The word comes out of me half a sob.

Two squat robots enter and lift Sophia's table with her on it.

"I don't know," she admits. "But not this. Remember who you are, Captain Ellis. Semper Supra!"

The robots roll her out.

“Always above,” I repeat the Space Force motto. And it does give me a new mental strength.

We can do this. Whatever it is.

The door closes behind the helpless Sophia and the robots.

“Changed their minds,” Lucius hisses. “They'll start with you.”

A spear of ice shoots through me. “Shit.”

The horrific Gzet butcher lifts the instrument, and behind it the mechanical voice recites something clinical and unhurried, and Lucius's whisper translates a string of measurements into my ear that I can't make myself understand. The room seems to narrow down to nothing but the clinical click of instruments and the sound of my own breathing, too fast, too shallow, filling the silence where Sophia was.

Then the far wall of the room explodes inward.

It stuns me. The sound alone is enormous, a shriek of tearing alloy and a wave of pressure that rocks every table in the room. Through the settling dust and the sudden shrieking of alarms, something vast and dark and impossibly familiar comes through the gap where the wall used to be, moving faster than anything that size has any right to move, already scattering guards and drones like a storm scatters leaves.

I spot beating, translucent wings, a huge chest carapace where the colors change like a kaleidoscope. There's a roar of fury, straight from the depths of an ancient, primal rage.

Something melts in me. "Krix'vorr," I rasp, and I don't believe it even as I say it.

37

- Krix'vorr -

I turn the Beast sharply, and she surges away from the Nest so fast that half the crew is thrown off their feet.

I don't slow her, and I don't apologize for it.

Behind me, in the command chamber, nobody has said anything for a long time.

Sris clings to a strut near the ceiling, her small body trembling, and when she finally speaks her voice comes out high and uncertain, nothing at all like the confident, delighted creature who patted my arm an hour ago. "Chief Harrower! You turned away from the Nest!"

"Well observed, Sris." I look over my shoulder. Only the Inquisitor has the authority to stop this, and if he tries, I have to fight him.