Page 10 of Enslak

My hand fell away, and I let the darkness take me.

Chapter 3

Niki

The descent to Merisalle felt nothing like the flights I'd taken on Earth.

No turbulence warnings. No seatbelt signs. No flight attendants offering peanuts and ginger ale. Just the steady hum of alien engines and the viewport showing me a planet I had no business visiting.

I pressed my face closer to the transparent material, not glass but something stronger that didn't even have a name in English, and watched as we dropped through the atmosphere. The planet's surface resolved itself in stages, first just a reddish-brown blur, then mountain ranges like jagged teeth, then the sprawl of a city that seemed to grow like fungus across the landscape.

No grid pattern. No organized streets.

Just chaos built on top of chaos, the kind of place where laws were suggestions and violence was currency.

It reminded me of the worst parts of New York back when the neighborhoods still had teeth, before the gentrification, before the yoga studios and artisanal coffee shops moved in and sanded down all the rough edges. This was that energy multiplied by a thousand and spread across an entire planet.

My stomach twisted.

Not from the descent, the ship's inertial dampeners handled that, but from the reality of what I was walking into.

I was a cop. Past tense. But the instincts were still there, the training, the way my mind automatically catalogued threats and exits and tactical advantages.

Though none of it had prepared me for this.

"Two minutes to landing," the pilot said in clicks and grunts that came through my translator implant as slightly accented English. "Cloaking will hold through touchdown, but we need you off fast. Thirty seconds, no more."

"Understood," I said, steadier than I felt.

The ship banked hard, dropping toward the foothills several miles from the main city. Through the viewport, I watched scrubland roll past, twisted vegetation more purple than green, rocky outcroppings, the kind of terrain that offered cover but not comfort. The city squatted in the distance, a sprawling mass of structures thrown together without any thought for aesthetics or building codes.

The landing was so smooth I barely felt it. One moment we were airborne, the next we'd touched down with barely a whisper of displaced air.

"Go," the pilot said. "Now."

I grabbed my pack, light with just emergency supplies, a small blaster, and the equipment I'd need, and hit the release on the hatch. It hissed open, equalizing pressure. I was already moving, boots hitting alien soil before the ramp fully extended.

The air hit me like a fist.

Hot. Dry. It tasted of minerals and something acrid that made my nose wrinkle. Definitely not Earth. The gravity felt slightly off too, just different enough that my first few steps came out awkward, like I was walking on a surface that wasn't quite level.

Behind me, the hatch sealed and the ship's engines cycled up. I didn't look back. Couldn't afford to. I pushed toward the scrub brush, toward the cover of the twisted vegetation, as the ship lifted off and vanished into the burnt-orange sky.

Then I was alone.

Alone on an alien planet, on a criminal hub where humans were trafficked like livestock, where speaking English or even Spanish or Cantonese would get me killed or worse, where everything from the air to the gravity to the color of the sky screamed wrong.

I crouched behind a cluster of purple vegetation, noting the long and wickedly sharp thorns, and tried to steady my breathing. My hands trembled as I gripped the edge of my pack. My mouth had gone dry as dust. The world tilted at the edges, vertigo threatening to pull me under the way it used to before a raid or a high-risk arrest.

But this wasn't a raid.

This was an infiltration, a suicide mission dressed up as rescue.

I pulled the cuddwisg device from my pack. It looked harmless enough, just a small disc about the size of a silver dollar, made of some material that shifted colors in the light. I pressed the activation stud and felt the device warm against my palm before attaching it to the neckline of my dark gray cloak.

It clicked into place.

A strange tingling sensation spread across my skin.