Page 45 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

“Who was laughing?”

Her throat works. “Not at us. That’s worse somehow.”

I tighten my grip before I realize I have done it. The bond reacts to her fear with savage force, flooding my body with the need to lift her, hide her, kill whatever frightened her, and remake the universe into something that cannot touch her. I hate the instinct even while I obey the useful parts of it, because hatred does not change the fact that she is trembling in my arms and the corridor behind us is no longer passable.

Brakk staggers into view through the dust with one arm around Sira-Vel and his fusion cutter dragging sparks across the floor. Teren follows them, coughing violently, his face gray under excavation grime. He has a cut across his brow and one sleeve torn nearly to the shoulder, but he is moving on his own. That matters. Movement means options.

“Everybody have all their original limbs?” Brakk rasps.

Teren bends over with both hands on his knees. “I have emotionally lost several.”

“Quit whining unless something’s detached.”

Sira steadies herself against the wall, her eyes fixed on the collapsed tunnel behind us. “The archive released a signal.”

That pulls Anita partly back into herself. Her head lifts from my chest. “What?”

Sira turns toward her. “The activation did not merely unfold locally. I felt a directional resonance through the field. It moved upward, outward, and then beyond the atmosphere.”

My wrist comm begins screaming before I can respond.

The channel bursts open with static, overlapping voices, and one clear tone I recognize from military installations across the Alliance: perimeter breach alarm. The sound snaps every remaining fragment of shock out of me. I shift Anita to her feet but keep one hand around her upper arm until I am certain she can stand.

“Pell,” I bark into the comm. “Report.”

His answer comes through torn by interference. “Surface sensors just spiked. Something transmitted from the lower structure on a tight burst. I don’t know how it punched through the interference, but it went orbital and kept going.”

Anita’s face loses what little color the dust has not already stolen. “No.”

I speak over her because regret is useless until survival is secured. “Lock down all surface gates. Seal nonessential chambers. Move civilians to hardened shelters. No one approaches C-9 or any lower access without my order.”

“Already trying, but we have another problem,” Pell says, and the fear under his words sharpens the air around me. “External contacts just dropped out of low orbit. Three small craft. No transponder. They burned hard through the debris screen and are descending toward the western perimeter.”

The old battlefield instinct opens inside me like a blade.

“Raiders?” Teren asks.

I listen to the comm traffic. No boastful demands. No cargo chatter. No sloppy maneuvers. Three silent craft descending fast toward a vulnerable perimeter minutes after an unknown archive sends a signal beyond the planet. That is not piracy. That is response.

“No,” I say. “This is a strike team.”

Brakk spits dust onto the floor. “Well, that is just peachy.”

Anita’s hand closes around my wrist. “The archive called them.”

“Or told them we found it.”

Her grip tightens. “The fragments. I pulled partial scan captures before it destabilized.”

I look down at her scanner. Its casing is cracked, its display flickering through corrupted lines of silver code. Even damaged, it may contain the most dangerous data on Nareth-Kul.

“Secure it,” I say.

Her chin comes up. “I’m not handing it to Merrow.”

“I did not ask you to.”

That answer surprises her, but I do not have time to interpret the look that crosses her face.