Page 5 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

The last impact had torn the mesh bin opposite our cell from its rack. Its contents had spilled across the corridor: scraps of fabric, strange cuffs, and, holy miracle, my muddy tool belt. I grabbed it and buckled it on with shaking hands because flashlight, multitool, anything from Earth mattered right now. Also because I was not philosophically opposed to having a knife.

I didn't know where I was. I didn't know the layout of what I was on. I didn't know where to go. I didn't know to run from the sounds of fighting or to run towards it in case it was help. So I stood there like an idiot, looking from right to left, right to left, trying to figure out what to do as my roommates and cellmates crawled out from that same hole.

Except the giant grasshopper got stuck. High-pitched chittering noises. I turned around and saw that she was too big to get through the opening. God, that sucked. There was no way in hell I was gonna let somebody stay stuck in that cell when none of us knew what was gonna happen next. Everybody else had immediately left and ran.

So I kicked at the wall with my heel over and over and over, widening the cracks, lengthening the cracks, until finally more of the corner broke away and the giant grasshopper skidded out and also immediately ran away.

"Thanks! No problem! Glad to help!"

I let out a breath and looked from left to right again. I didn't know what to do, and I wasn't really someone who blindly followed people either. But I assumed they knew more about what was going on than I did.

God, was I an idiot? I probably should have followed them. I turned, taking a few steps to the right, when a tall armored figure came around the curved wall. They were dressed completely in black, a shiny helmet enclosing their head, and they held what had to be some sort of weapon aimed at me. Oh great, I was going to die because a nightmare in discount armor found me first.

3

KEL

The mission was compromised.

I moved through the lower corridor of the Saurok vessel at speed, weapon drawn, cataloging damage as I went. Hull breach on deck four. Structural failure along the port side. The rival faction that had hit the ship — Korvathi raiders, judging by the energy signature of their weapons — had done significant damage before I'd even reached the holding cells.

None of which would matter if I didn't reach the target.

Seyla Voss-Andari, daughter of Valorian Diplomat Andari, taken by the Saurok captain Draxis eleven standard rotations ago. My mission parameters were precise: locate, extract, return. I had tracked Draxis's ship through all eleven of those rotations. I had boarded during the Korvathi attack, using the chaos as cover — a one-way hull breach, my own vessel holding station far outside the engagement, extraction planned by stolen shuttle or escape pod. Everything had been calculated, planned, executed with the precision that had made me the Authority's top retrieval specialist for the last eight years.

And then the ship tilted thirty degrees and I watched the holding cell block collapse on itself through a viewport, and my mission parameters became irrelevant.

I checked twice. There was no path to Cell Block Three. The corridor was crushed, the emergency bulkheads had sealed, and the atmospheric readings on the other side were dropping. If the target was still in that block, extraction from this approach was impossible. I would need to find an alternate route. The ship lurched again. I braced against the wall, recalculating. The Korvathi were still firing. The Saurok were returning fire but losing. This ship had perhaps fifteen minutes before a critical system failed.

I turned back toward the escape pod bay. Regroup. Reassess. Find the target from outside the ship or confirm her location with the Authority. Acceptable tactical adjustment. Not failure. Adjustment.

I was moving fast down the curved corridor that ran along the outer cells when I saw the open wall. The force field barrier on Cell Block One had shattered, and the broken corner beneath it had been kicked wider from the corridor side. Captives were already scattering down the far end of the corridor. I cataloged them in half a second. A Talori female, running. A blanket-form Xylari, flowing along the floor. A Chithari with a broken limb, hauling itself out of sight. A small pink Zeloxi, tentacles flailing, already disappearing around a corner.

And standing in the corridor, looking from left to right and back again with wide eyes, a creature I had never seen before.

Small. Bipedal. Brown hair plastered to its skull with sweat. Clothing that appeared to be shredded plant-based fabric covered in dried mud, and a scuffed tool belt buckled over it, cinched tight, as if it mattered. It was just standing there, turning back and forth, clearly having no idea where to go. The other captives had scattered immediately. This one was frozen.

Not my target. Not my mission. I should keep moving.

I kept moving. Toward it. Because there was something about this creature, something pulling at me like a gravitational anomaly. I told myself it was simply efficiency — the escape pod bay was past this cell block and this alien was in my path, and leaving a captive to die on a disintegrating ship was not consistent with Valorian military conduct.

I reached for its arm. My left gauntlet was already gone, lost to the explosion on deck four. I had not registered it until now.

The moment my bare hand closed around its arm, every marking on my body ignited.

I have been wounded in combat. I have endured the Valorian rite of fortitude, where initiates are exposed to controlled neural overload as a test of composure. I have experienced pain, exhaustion, fear, and rage in measured quantities across a career built on control.

Nothing—nothing prepared me for this.

The resonance hit like a shockwave through my entire nervous system. Every bioluminescent line on my body flared from dormant gray to blinding blue-white. My awareness expanded and suddenly I could feel her — not information, not data, but emotional state, flooding in raw and unfiltered. Terror. Confusion. The bond does not tell you facts about your mate. It tells you how they feel. And she felt like a storm — fear so intense it had a texture, a metallic sharpness that my own nervous system had no analog for.

She was mine.

The thought defied reason and tactics. Biological imperative delivered it with the force of a detonation, shattering eight years of training in a single heartbeat.

She screamed.

Understandable. A fully armored Valorian had just grabbed her in a collapsing ship. But the sound she made... I have heard Korvathi battle shrieks and Saurok territorial roars and neither compared to the pitch this small creature achieved. My auditory filters struggled to compensate.