Page 13 of Claimed By the Condemned Alien

CHAPTER THREE

The Drop

Falling from orbit was quieter than Kesta expected. For the first twelve seconds there was only the mechanical click of the restraints, the thin hiss of recycled air, and Mira Orr’s dark hair drifting beside her in the absence of gravity. Then Kharon-Veil’s atmosphere struck the pod and silence became violence.

Heat washed across the hull in white waves. Kesta’s harness crushed the breath from her lungs while warning symbols burst over the display: THERMAL SHIELD DEGRADATION. GUIDANCE ERROR. EXTERNAL COMMUNICATION LOST. Mira’s body jerked against the neighboring restraints with every roll, one bare foot striking the wall in a rhythm no living person would have chosen.

“I’m sorry,” Kesta said, because the dead woman could not hear her and because apologies were one of the few things the empire had not yet learned to inventory.

A storage compartment snapped open above Kesta’s knees. Two ration bricks, a folded thermal cloak, a palm-sized water recycler, a medical pouch, and an orange distress beacon spilled against the restraint web. The beacon’s casing carried one instruction in cheerful imperial lettering: ACTIVATE IMMEDIATELY UPON LANDING. Lysa’s warning returned with equal force. Do not activate the beacon unless you see walls or firelight.

The guidance display flickered. For an instant Kesta saw sixteen green descent tracks arranged around a central mountain range and one red track far beyond them: H-17, SIGNAL LOST. The image vanished when something struck the hull hard enough to spin the pod. Through the fire she glimpsed another capsule breaking apart, white armor peeling away in glowing sheets, before the descent thrusters fired too late.

Impact arrived like a wall. Kesta’s head snapped forward, the harness locked, metal folded beneath her feet, and the world went black.

She woke with dust on her tongue and blood running from a cut above one eyebrow. The pod leaned at a severe angle, one restraint released and the other pinning her shoulder. She tested fingers, toes, neck, spine. Pain answered everywhere, but sensation remained. Beside her, Mira hung motionless, still secured.

The status screen displayed SURFACE DELIVERY COMPLETE as if surviving impact fulfilled every obligation the system had toward her. Kesta opened the medical pouch and found half its compartments empty. She cleaned the cut in her palm, reopened it with the edge of a splint package, and dug out the memory crystal she had hidden beneath the skin before arrest. The shard came free red and slick but intact. She wrapped it in gauze and pushed it beneath the rigid lining of the medical case.

Only then did she free Mira. Kesta lowered her carefully, covered her with the thermal cloak, and retied the narrow strip of cloth around her wrist. Mira had been afraid of disappearing. Kesta could not give her a grave yet, but she could refuse to let the planet begin by taking her name.

The manual hatch release fought her twice before the seal finally broke. Hot wind carried grit through the opening, smelling of scorched stone, metal, and bitter vegetation. Kesta crawled out beneath two moons and found no walls, no guards, no lights. Only fractured black ground, smoking impact craters, and a sky the color of an old bruise.

Her pod had struck the side of a shallow ravine. Farther east another capsule lay on its side, its hatch warped but intact. Halfway toward it Kesta found a severed human hand beside a shard of white hull. The transport band around the wrist still pulsed green. Three apertures along its inner rim opened and closed in time with the signal, sampling what remained of the blood beneath it. The empire had not stopped observing after the drop. It had merely stopped pretending the observation was care.

The woman inside the second pod was alive. Kesta wiped soot from the viewport and met terrified eyes. The hatch would not open by hand, so she found a torn support strut and used it as a lever. A shriek rolled over the plain before she had forced more than a narrow gap.

The trapped woman pointed frantically toward Kesta’s belt. The orange beacon was flashing. Kesta must have struck the switch when she clipped it beside the medical pouch. She killed the signal just as a second shriek answered from the ridge, then a third from somewhere behind her. The beacon had not summoned rescue. It had announced prey.

Kesta drove the strut beneath the hatch again. Inside, one restraint still trapped the woman’s ankle. She reached through the gap until her shoulder scraped metal, found the manual catch beneath the seat, and pulled while six-limbed shapes began descending the ridge. The restraint released. The woman fell against her, and Kesta dragged her through the opening as the nearest predator crossed the plain with horrifying speed.

They ran badly. The rescued woman could not put weight on one leg, so Kesta hooked an arm around her waist and half carried her toward the ravine. “Name?” she gasped. “Lina.” “Kesta. Keep moving.”

A pulse of blue light crossed the plain. The closest predator veered so sharply it rolled. Another pulse struck the ground at the feet of the second animal, and the pack scattered toward the rocks. Tall armed figures stood on the northern ridge, too distant to identify and too deliberate to mistake for accidental help.

“Raiders,” Lina whispered. Her voice shook harder than her body. Kesta lowered her behind a slab of broken hull long enough to assess the leg. A deep laceration cut the thigh, two toes were probably broken, and swelling around the calf suggested a displaced fracture. Kesta irrigated the wound with half the recycler’s first output, used clot foam sparingly, and shaped the single-use splint while Lina bit down on her sleeve.

“You are medical,” Lina said when she could breathe again. “I was.” Kesta tightened the bandage. “What are you now?” Kesta looked at the dead band on the severed hand, then toward the figures coming down from the ridge. “Dead, apparently.”

The armed figures did not hurry. That frightened her more than a charge would have. By the time they reached the ravine, Kesta could distinguish layered bone armor, masks made from animal jaws, and weapons assembled from three different technologies. The leader looked from Kesta to Lina and then toward Kesta’s crashed pod.

One of the raiders entered it. When he emerged, Mira’s thermal-wrapped body lay over his shoulder. Lina made a broken sound. “Mira?” Kesta turned sharply. Lina’s face had gone gray beneath the dust. “My sister.”

The shared surname finally acquired meaning. Kesta moved closer to Lina before she looked back at the man carrying the body. “Put her down.” The leader’s translator rendered his laugh in a broken metallic rasp. “Dead has uses.”

Kesta reached for the bone splint in her pouch as though it were a weapon. The raiders laughed again. She knew exactly how useless the gesture was, but usefulness had stopped being the measure of what she would resist.

Then a horn sounded somewhere beyond the ridges. One deep note rolled through the ravine. Every predator on the plain went silent. So did the raiders.

CHAPTER FOUR

Second Moonrise

The horn sounded again, deeper this time, the note rolling through the ravine until Kesta could feel it vibrating through the soles of her boots. The masked raider carrying Mira’s body stopped so abruptly that the dead woman’s wrapped arm swung against his back. Around him, the others looked toward the western ridge, and Kesta watched the swagger drain out of men who had been laughing at her only moments before.

“Move,” their leader snapped.

The change in him was more frightening than the order. He had been in no hurry when he thought Kesta and Lina were his only problem. Now his men scattered with practiced urgency, two grabbing Lina while another reached for Kesta. She swung the medical pouch without thinking and caught him across the throat with its rigid edge. He staggered back, choking, and she seized Lina beneath the arm.