Page 72 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

“Good thing I enjoy being volunteered for miracles.”

I pull two compact charges from my field pack and toss them to him. “Nonfragmenting. Directional. No hull breach equiIkkev nt.”

Brakk catches them, then huffs. “I know how bombs work, big man.”

“I know. That is why you are setting them.”

He grins despite the terror in his eyes and lumbers toward the narrow section behind us. “Finally, somebody recognizes my spiritual gifts.”

I kneel beside Anita and Sira, keeping my body angled toward the upper corridor while they work over the inscription. The archive case rests on the floor between them, its cracked core throwing thin silver light across their hands. Anita’s fingers move quickly over the scanner controls, but the trembling has worsened. She braces her wrist against her knee to steady it.

“You need water,” I say.

“I need thirty seconds.”

“You also need water.”

She flashes me an irritated look. “Are you always this medically bossy during pursuit scenarios?”

“Yes.”

Sira touches two fingers to the projected script. “The passage identifies the lower system as a memory reservoir.”

Anita’s annoyance vanishes instantly. “Archive storage?”

“Larger,” Sira says. “The phrase suggests a deep retention lattice beneath the planet’s crust. A repository for suppressed causal histories.”

Brakk pauses near the choke point. “Suppressed casual what now?”

“Causal,” Anita calls back. “Histories tied to origin events.”

Brakk stares at her. “Those words all got worse in that order.”

Sira keeps reading, her voice calm but strained. “The next phrase is damaged. It references record severance, custodial fear, and inherited shame.”

Anita leans closer. “Custodial fear sounds like the Precursors again.”

The words strike me harder than I want them to.

Custodial fear.

Inherited shame.

The phrasing crawls beneath old doctrine and finds soft places. My people built strength around the belief that the Precursors shaped a road through chaos. If these records are true, the ones we revered may have discovered older roads, feared where they led, and hidden the signs from every species that came after. I understand military censorship. I understand quarantine. I understand secrets kept to prevent panic. I also understand how often the powerful describe embarrassment as protection.

A metallic scrape echoes from the passage above.

Brakk swears and slaps the first charge into place. “Company’s early.”

I rise. “Move.”

Anita snatches up the case, but her gaze remains fixed on the half-translated text. “Ghar, the next line references intentional erasure.”

“Carry that thought while running.”

“It says the record of prior civilizations was severed by inheritor command.”

I step closer, fighting the urge to haul her up by the back of her coat. “Anita.”