Page 2 of Alien Devil's Prey
And it all started with one woman on one ugly freighter.
My variable.
My prey.
TAMSIN
TheStardust Drifterand I had an understanding. I kept her flying, she kept me alive. Neither of us were free.
The cramped cockpit reeked of recycled air and stale synth-coffee, a bitter cocktail that had become as familiar as breathing. The warning light on the secondary console flickered its usual amber complaint—a faulty coupling in the atmospheric recycler that I could fix in twenty minutes. Instead, I let it blink its mechanical distress. Small rebellion, but mine.
The only heartbeat in the ship was mine, thudding faintly through the metal like it was part of her systems.
My hands flew through the pre-flight sequence, checking fuel reserves and verifying navigation protocols. Each motion sharp and irritated. Three years flying this route, the latest in a long line of indentured posts. Fifteen years of scrubbing decks and hauling cargo before I was finally trusted with a navigator's console. The weary resignation in my eyes didn't match the speed of my hands, but that was survival—competent enough to be valuable, broken enough to stay compliant.
Or so they thought.
I recalibrated the nav sensors manually, ignoring the automated prompts. The computer's calculations wereadequate. Mine were better. The idiots who owned this ship didn't know the difference between fuel efficiency and lazy coding, but I did. My father had built this OS from the ground up, every line of code a work of art.
The Conclave bastards who’d assigned me here probably thought it was a cruel joke, sticking me on a freighter class whose navigation systems he had designed. Or maybe they’d just forgotten. Either way, they didn’t know I’d spent those years finding traces of his work in the deeper systems, little gifts waiting for someone who knew how to look.
I was tooyoung when they killed him to have learned from him directly, but he'd left pieces of himself behind. Hidden in the OS were his notes—comments and annotations meant only for another programmer, not a user. It was in those ghost-like tutorials that I truly learned his craft, a daughter taught by her father's digital shadow.
My father's ghost still lived in this ship, and I’d spent the last three years layering his hidden failsafes back into it, one hidden sub-routine at a time. It was my last resort, a final ‘fuck you’ to the system that owned me.
I should have transmitted my departure notice to the dockmaster five minutes ago. Instead, I changed the status code to show us in a different sector, then delayed the transmission another three minutes. Petty? Yes. Satisfying? Absolutely.
The proximity sensors chirped their all-clear as I cleared the station's traffic control zone. Standard cargo run to the Traplav mining colonies—medical supplies and protein rations for the indentured workers scraping rare earth elements from dead rocks. Slaves delivering supplies to slaves, all of us feeding the machine that ground us to dust.
If there was anything worth stealing on this ship, they'd never told me about it.
I settled back in the pilot's chair, watching the stars wheel past the viewport. The navigation computer chimed, indicating optimal jump coordinates.
Then the sensors picked up something. A slight fluctuation I almost chalked up to debris.
I frowned, checking the readings. Probably nothing. Space was full of junk—derelict satellites, discarded hull plating, the occasional bit of organic matter that used to be someone's bad day.
Another reading. Closer this time.
My hands stilled on the nav-console. That wasn't debris. Something was out there, moving toward us on an intercept course. I killed the running lights and used maneuvering thrusters to angle the ship's profile, making it a smaller, colder target against the starfield. Most corporate pilots wouldn't even think of it—they'd just hit the emergency beacon and hope for rescue. Whatever was tracking us would have a harder time getting a lock.
The proximity alarm shrieked through the cockpit, and this time I couldn't dismiss it.
The hull breach detector screamed a split second before the cockpit wall split in a perfect circle, metal peeling away like it had been carved by a god's hand.
TALON
Smoke and debris filled the cockpit as I stepped through the jagged hole I'd cut in theStardust Drifter'shull. The signal dampener activated as I cut through, masking our electromagnetic signature from any patrol ships in the area. The breach was clean, surgical—a perfect circle that left the rest of the ship's integrity intact.
Emergency containment fields shimmered around the edges, sealing us in together. The docking collar I'd used to attach theNightfallmaintained our connection, its umbilicals not just holding us fast but siphoning power and data through the breach interface. A standard tactic to control a target vessel's systems.
Her scent cut through the smoke—clean metal, burned coffee, and something warm that didn't belong in a machine.
She didn't scream.
Through the haze, I saw her grab the nearest heavy object—a fire suppressant canister—and lunge toward me. Her movements were quick, desperate, but untrained. She held the canister like a club, her stance all wrong for combat.
I sidestepped her clumsy attack and disarmed her, my hand closing around her wrist. The canister clattered to the deck as I twisted her arm behind her back.
