Page 115 of Stripped By the Alien

Around me the command chamber is loud with a giddy happiness I don't share. My underlings are already rehearsing how they'll tell the story, already arguing over which details the Queen will want to hear first.

Four planets. The greatest Harvest in the history of the Brood. My name attached to all of it, forever.

I should feel like a conqueror. But I feel like I've been stripped of everything that has any value, empty and bare.

Brax'tok has said little since our conversation about guards at every door. He stands near the rear of the chamber now, watching me rather than the viewport. I've stopped pretending I don't notice.

The Nest grows larger in the 'eye', close enough now that I can make out the individual scars and growths along its ancient surface. Somewhere in that darkness is a chamber where I will kneel, and a young Queen who will need me at her side for many longcycles, and a version of my life that ends the moment the Beast passes through that opening.

I find I need to know something before we cross it. I'm not sure what. Only that I can't stand at the edge of the chamber and watch it happen to me, like weather.

I cross to the controls myself, without being asked, and take them out of the pilot's hands before I've fully decided to.

The pilot startles and steps back, uncertain, glancing toward the chief nearest him as if for permission that isn't his to give.

A ripple of surprise moves through the chamber. Nobody says anything. Nobody quite dares to. I rarely control the Beast directly, except in battle.

The Beast responds to my touch the way she always has, warm and immediate and utterly trusting, and for one long moment I simply hold her here, suspended, neither approaching nor retreating. My hands rest on controls that have never once felt heavier.

Sris climbs to my shoulder, delighted, filling the silence before anyone else can.

"How fitting," she says, patting my arm. "The victorious Chief Harrower, home from the greatest Harvest ever found, guiding his own ship through the gates himself. They will tell that detail for a hundred longcycles, Chief Harrower. I couldn't have suggested anything better myself."

I don't answer her.

Ahead, the Nest fills the entire 'eye' now, close enough to blot out every star behind it.

I know what waits on the other side of that threshold. Guards at every door, for my protection and for hers. A title that will outlive me, songs that will outlive the title, and somewhere very far beneath all of it, a version of myself who used to love the silence of open space more than anything else in the universe.

A name that will be known forever. A legend.

Absolutely everything anyone could ever want or dream of.

Once I dock, there will be no undoing it.

I find myself imagining it. The ceremony. The title. The new Queen, young and vital, needing a mate at her side for longcycles.

I would stand where Morr'ak stands now, polished and measured and permanently stationed, and the Nest would close around me slowly, completely, without ever asking whether I wanted it.

There would be no flying or fighting. I would never again stand on the Beast's hide in open vacuum and feel the silence of the stars settle into my bones.

I would rule, and be honored, and never leave.

And beside me, where Nora should be, there would be nothing at all.

Just duty, forever, in a chamber that smells of decay.

The Beast glides forward, unhurried, toward the yellow opening in the Nest.

36

- Nora -

I lose track of the days because there's nothing to measure them against. There's no window, and no clock, only the slow cycling of a dim overhead light from grey to greyer and back again, which might mean a day has passed or might mean nothing at all.

They separated us within minutes of the capture. I fought that too, uselessly, until the same restraint field that took my legs from under me in the corridor took my voice as well, and I watched them carry Sophia away down a corridor in the opposite direction, her head turned back toward me the whole time, until a wall closed between us and there was nothing left to see.

My cell is small. It has a metal floor, metal walls, and a single transparent door that fogs at the edges but never quite enough to give me privacy from whatever's on the other side of it. There's no bed, only a shelf of the same cold material, and a drain in the floor I try very hard not to think about.