Page 118 of Stripped By the Alien

"You were nearly docked." She scuttles closer, agitated in a way I've never seen from her. "The Queen is expecting you. The new Queen, the Royal Mate, all of it! Chief Harrower, do you understand what you're–"

I accelerate as hard as the Beast can take, and I sense that she loves being given the chance to use her power. "I understand exactly what I'm doing, Sris."

She extends all her limbs, every leg and claw. "But why⁠—"

"Because it's Nora," I say, and something in the flatness of my own voice ends the conversation more thoroughly than any order could have.

Sris stares at me for a long moment, uncomprehending, and then retreats to her strut and says nothing further. I don't think she will ever understand it. I'm not sure I could explain it to her even if I tried. It's just something I know with every part of me. And this, turning around on the brink of absolute triumph, is such a relief that I nearly gasp for air.

Inquisitor Brax'tok says nothing at all. He stands near the rear of the chamber, very still, watching the readouts as the Nest grows smaller ahead of us, and there's something in his stillness that I don't have the time or the will to examine right now. Whatever calculation is happening behind that composed face, it isn't my concern. Not today.

But he's clearly not opposed to this move, this break. For it is a break, and we all know it. I'm placing Nora above my own Queen, my own Brood, my own purpose, everything I thought I was.

And it feels right.

Two days through the Soft Dark. I spend every hour of them in the command chamber, not eating, barely sleeping, leaving the controls only when the Beast forces me off by dimming the lights until I can't see. Even then I don't go to the cabin. I can't. The emptiness in there would stop me, and I can't afford to stop.

I can't risk anyone interfering with this. The Inquisitor may well try to wrest the Beast from me, or have Deeg do it.

Or Sris may try some well-meaning sabotage of my actions.

But I don't think about them much. I think only about Nora and what may be happening to her.

I often reach up and caress the Beast. “Faster, if you can.”

She always can.

Finally the station grows in the main forward lens, vast and cold and unmistakably built, not grown. Every line is hard-edged, purposeful, ugly in a way nothing living ever is. Somewhere on its far side, small and dark against the station's hull, I see it: the calf, buried beak-first into the metal like a thorn that never came free.

She found her way in. She's still here, days later. That can't be good.

The Beast slows as we approach, and I feel her decide, without any order from me, to press herself against the station's flank close beside the calf, patient and enormous and tense in her own slow way.

"Chief Harrower." Brax'tok speaks for the first time since we left the Nest. "I should come with you."

"No," I say flatly.

"Deeg could clear a path⁠—"

"No." I'm already moving toward the airlock, checking nothing, needing nothing but my own hands and whatever I find on the other side. "This isn't a mission, Inquisitor. This isn't Brood business, and it isn't yours. This is the opposite of the Queen's will. Whatever happens over there happens to me, and only me. I won't have it cost anyone else. Certainly not a possible future Royal Mate, which you plainly are. The danger is too great."

He studies me for a moment longer, and something changes behind his eyes that I don't have time to read. "As you say," he says finally, and steps back.

I don't wait for anything else.

The airlock membrane parts and I drop into the gap the calf has torn, into the station's cold, dead-smelling interior, and the moment my feet touch the alloy floor I feel it. It's faint, easy to mistake for imagination, but unmistakable once I stop and let myself feel it properly: A prickling low in my carapace, a charge gathering somewhere, pulling gently, insistently, toward one direction and no other. She's here.

I follow it. The corridors are narrow, built for smaller frames than mine, and I don't slow down for that. A drone unfolds from a maintenance alcove ahead of me, some low mechanical thing bristling with sensors. It doesn't get the chance to finish whatever it means to do. I take it apart with both hands and don't break stride.

The charge in my chest pulls left. I go left.

A pair of Gzet guards round a corner ahead of me, weapons already rising, some restraint field crackling to life around them that I feel close over my limbs like cold water. It slows me and drags at every motion.

But it isn't enough. Right now, nothing can stop me. I tear through it the way I'd tear through thin fabric and put both guards through the wall behind them before they can raise an alarm.

The charge pulls down, toward a lower level, and I find a stairwell and don't bother with the stairs at all. My wings deploy by themselves and I race down, falling more than flying.

What I see on the way down slows me more than any restraint field could.