I’d never had anyone that was mine, that loved me.
I realized I would rather die than give him up.I’d fallen in love with an alien.Totally.Completely.Fight to the death kind of love.
I snorted as I selected the best crystal, thought of the debrief I’d receive if I ever was forced to return to NFI base.I could just see the look on the psych-analyzer’s face if I said that out loud.He was dark teal, seven feet tall and had lightning under his skin.Oh, and I fell in love with him in a couple days, started to hear the trees talking to each other and the ground hum.
Funny.Although, I wouldn’t be cleared mission ready.They’d ground me.Probably put me in a straight-jacket and petition The Imperium for permission for a complete memory wipe.
Fuck that.I wasnotgoing back.Which meant I needed to fix the problem at hand, stabilize the core so the stupid ship didn’t explode and blow up the whole valley.
"The lattice geometry in these crystals is close enough."I talked over my shoulder.Steadier than I felt."The electromagnetic profile needs manual calibration, but the stored charge will bridge the gap during startup."I looked up at him."It's going to work."
Something moved through his expression.Not relief — something quieter.Pride?Satisfaction?Something that had nothing to do with the reactor and everything to do with the way he looked at me.
The way he always looked at me.Complete.Unhurried.Like I was the most interesting thing in any room he had ever been in.Like I was worth looking at.
"Good," he said.
"I need about twenty minutes."
"I'll be here."
I'll be here.
Simple.Absolute.The way he said everything true.The way he had taken care of me since the moment I stepped off this ship — steady and present and entirely without agenda.
I turned back to the crystal and got to work.
The most delicate field work I had ever executed, with more at stake than I dared think about.If I failed, Sorik’s village would be destroyed.My crew, wherever they were, would probably die in the blast.
Failure was not an option.
At last, the crystal seated with a sound that was not the standard click of component installation.Itresonated.
A single, deep tone filled the room.The vibrations moved through my chest before my ears.The lattice vibrated against the housing.The housing vibrated back.The resonance climbed until it was at the upper edge of hearing and then above it — felt rather than heard, a sustained pressure in my sternum that matched the pulse of the marks at my collar, the pulse of the root network, the deep bass-note hum of a planet running its consciousness through everything it had claimed.
Through me.
Then the reactor ignited.
The ship’s systems activated on their own.Not in the linear startup cascade I expected.Not sequential — reactor, power routing, systems-check, navigation last.
Everything simultaneously.A single enormous surge through every system at once.Every display lit together.Three secondary circuits overloaded and blew with sharp reports like distant gunfire.Emergency lighting cut out completely.Primary systems compensated and flooded the bay in blinding white.
I grabbed my scanner with both hands.
It glitched.Refused to take a reading.Random numbers flashed across the screen faster than I could read them.
The sound was wrong.Not the clean ignition hum of a Meridian-class shuttle.Something that resonated in harmonics I felt in my molars and my sternum and the marks at my collar.A deep vibration that moved through the deck plates and up through my boots and my legs and into the base of my spine.Found every point where the Skybond had made me sensitive.Pressed into each one like a key into a lock.
I turned to Sorik.His storm nodes blazed.Full-bright.Blue-white light flooded the reactor bay.The ship's power now ran on the Soltharra crystal.That crystal still carried the planet's electromagnetic signature.
A familiar energy moved through the ship’s wires.Through the walls.My nervous system reacted instantly, registered the hum.The pulse.So recognizable.
The planet was here.Inside my ship.
The planet's hum moved through the Imperium-standard construction materials that had never been designed to carry it.They were carrying it anyway.
Like me, it appeared the ship had no choice.