Page 27 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

Silence follows.

Then Ghar’s voice comes through the door, low and unmistakable even muffled through reinforced metal.

“Anita.”

My stomach drops so fast it feels like orbital failure.

Of course he found me.

CHAPTER 4

GHAR

The restricted imaging lab smells of cold metal, overheated processors, and Anita Prentiss caught in the act.

That last scent is not literal, though with her it nearly becomes one. She stands in the middle of the chamber beneath a suspended projection sphere, her face illuminated by layered scans of the planet’s buried anatomy. Pale blue light cuts along her cheekbones and catches the loose curls escaping their pins. Dust still darkens the knees of her field pants from the lower chamber collapse, and the sleeve of her coat bears a fresh streak of black ruin powder. Her eyes are too bright for this hour, too awake, too fiercely alive inside a room she absolutely should not have entered.

Behind her, Nareth-Kul unfolds in translucent layers.

The visible excavation is only a wound in the surface. Beneath it, impossible structures descend through the rogue planet’s crust in clean geometric tiers, chamber after chamber, corridor after corridor, all arranged with such deliberate precision that my soldier’s mind rejects any comforting explanation before she can offer one. This is not random. This is not natural. This is not a ruin half-buried by time.

This is a secret someone tried to keep buried.

Anita raises one hand as if she can physically push my anger back across the threshold. “Before you say anything, I want to establish that I had several excellent reasons.”

I step into the lab and let the door seal behind me. “You broke into another restricted area.”

“Yes, but with intellectual consistency.”

“You bypassed a League-grade security system.”

“That lock was not League-grade. That lock was optimism with a keypad.”

“You disappeared from medical review, stole access to hidden scan equipment, and activated deep-structure imaging without authorization.”

She points at the projection sphere. “And look how much more informed we are now.”

The worst thing is that she is right.

That does not save her.

The lab’s low temperature creeps through my shirt and into the sealed wound along my neck. The medical patch pulls when I turn my head toward the projection. Layers of subterranean architecture rotate slowly in the air, precise and monstrous. The deeper sections pulse with faint energy signatures that the system marks as uncertain, then unknown, then impossible.

A quiet alarm pings from one console.

Anita glances at it. “That is probably nothing.”

“Probably?”

“It only appeared after the fourth deep sweep.”

“How reassuring.”

She folds her arms. “You know, most people say thank you when someone uncovers evidence of a buried megastructure beneath their unstable archaeological site.”

“Most people do not commit four security violations in one night.”

“Five, if we are being honest.”