Page 1 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

CHAPTER 1

ANITA

Nareth-Kul hangs beneath the shuttle like the corpse of a god nobody bothered to bury properly.

That is my first thought, which is unfortunate, because I am supposed to be a serious academic and serious academics are not supposed to compare rogue planets to divine remains before they have even cleared atmospheric entry. We are supposed to observe, catalogue, hypothesize, and avoid sounding like the kind of gullible relic-hunters who sell “authentic Precursor blessing stones” to tourists with more money than sense. Still, as the shuttle shudders through the black-purple haze wrapped around the dead world, the thought lodges behind my ribs and refuses to move.

The viewport glass vibrates under my gloved fingertips. Beyond it, Nareth-Kul’s surface turns in slow, broken swells of basalt, ash, and frozen mineral seas. There is no star to warm it, no day or night in the ordinary sense, only the harsh silver spill of excavation floodlights and the blue-white glare of orbital rigs burning above the dig zone. Static crawls over every comm channel. The air inside the shuttle smells like recycled oxygen, overheated wiring, and the sour tang of too many nervous bodies pretending they are not nervous.

The planet itself looks worse.

It looks old in a way planets are not supposed to look old. Not barren. Not dead. Those are ordinary words for ordinary rocks. Nareth-Kul looks abandoned by physics after physics got bored and wandered off to ruin somebody else’s day.

“Approach vector confirmed,” the pilot says over the cabin speakers. “Touchdown in three minutes. All passengers remain strapped until atmospheric buffeting stabilizes.”

A League official in a cream-colored pressure coat across from me tightens his harness until the fabric creaks. He has the polished, underfed look of a bureaucrat who believes unpleasant truths can be filed under the correct classification code and thereby made less unpleasant. His name is Council Liaison Merrow, and he has spent the last hour making it aggressively clear that my presence on this expedition is a favor, an indulgence, and possibly a symptom of institutional decline.

He catches me looking at the viewport and clears his throat. “Miss Prentiss, I must remind you that all initial field access remains subject to League safety review.”

“Doctoral candidate Prentiss,” I say without looking away from the planet.

“You do not yet hold a doctorate.”

“And you don’t hold a shovel, Liaison Merrow, but here you are telling archaeologists where they may dig.”

His mouth presses into a pale little line. The aide beside him, a young Kiphian woman whose scales have gone a stressed gray-green around the jaw, suddenly becomes fascinated by her compad.

Merrow inhales through his nose. “This site is politically sensitive.”

“Everything is politically sensitive if enough cowards stand around it with clipboards.”

“Miss Prentiss.”

“Doctoral candidate Prentiss.”

The shuttle drops hard enough to punch the air from my lungs. Harness straps bite into my shoulders, and several equipment crates groan in their locks behind us. Somewhere in the rear cabin, someone mutters a prayer to the Precursors. Someone else mutters something far less reverent. I keep my eyes on the viewport as the dig site rises through dust and fractured darkness, because I have spent seven years getting laughed out of seminars for claiming proto-civilizations left traces under the mythology, and I am not about to miss the first honest glimpse of proof because a League functionary wants to wrap it in warning labels.

The ruins appear slowly, then all at once.

At first they are only angles in the floodlight glare, black shapes against black stone. Then the shuttle banks, and the geometry resolves into enormous ribs of architecture jutting from the ground in impossible arcs. Slabs the size of habitation towers lean over excavation pits without visible support. Smooth columns pierce the rock in clusters of seven, except each seventh column seems slightly misaligned from the others in a way my eyes dislike. Trenches glow with faint amber mapping grids. Workers in insulated suits move along catwalks like insects trespassing across the bones of something too large to notice them.

My breath catches despite myself.

Merrow notices, of course. Men like him always notice awe because they treat it as a procedural weakness.

“The League’s position,” he says, “is that this discovery must be handled with restraint.”

“The League’s position is that it wants credit if we find something magnificent and deniability if we find something inconvenient.”

“That is a childish characterization.”

“It is a childish policy.”

The shuttle lands with a metallic shriek and a bounce that makes my teeth click. External clamps lock into place. The hatch seals hiss, equalizing against the thin processed envelope the dig team has wrapped around the landing zone. Cold seeps through the deck plating before the ramp even opens, the kind of cold that makes its own argument against optimism.

Merrow unfastens his harness and stands with the solemn dignity of a man about to lose an argument in public. “You will remain within approved zones until Director Halvek personally clears your access.”

“Of course,” I say, unfastening my own harness.