Page 8 of Claimed by the Alien Assassin

DAYN

T ouchdown is anticlimactic.

We cut engines a klick beyond the colony perimeter, setting down in a copse of mottled thornbrush where no one patrols and nothing wants to live. The ship wheezes as it settles, a final breath from something that’s survived longer than it should have.

My boots hit the dirt, and for one crystalline moment, I remember what solid ground feels like.

Drexar Seven smells the same as it did in the files—like damp metal and ozone and rot barely hidden by synthetic scrubbers. A world still carving out its place in the galactic food chain.

The image inducer hums at the base of my neck, bending light and shadow into something more palatable: tall, broad-shouldered human male, just sharp enough to command attention, but not distinct enough to provoke Vortaxian paranoia.

The device pulses faintly with each breath I take, reminding me with every heartbeat that this face is not mine.

I am wearing a lie.

Josie doesn't look back as she peels off into the fringe of prefab buildings, her gait tight, confident, and burning with purpose. She’s fire in a world grown too used to cold. I let her go, because that’s the plan. She needs to be seen. I need to remain invisible.

The colony looks almost the same.

That disturbs me more than I expect.

Too quiet.

People shuffle like ghosts, eyes lowered, shoulders hunched like they’re bracing for blows that never come. No guards on the corners. No patrol drones in the alleys. Just the looming presence of the Vortaxian capital ship in the sky, casting a shadow like a dying god across the earth.

Psychological occupation.

Clever.

I take the long route around the outer ring, sticking to shadows, sensors tuned for Vortaxian resonance. A few spikes here and there—enough to track—but no heavy enforcement. Not yet.

They don’t need brute force. Fear does the work for them.

I pause near a half-rusted filtration tower, watching two men argue in whispers over a stack of hydrospanners.

Their hands twitch like they expect to be punished for even raising their voices.

When a child laughs somewhere out of sight, the sound is so foreign it draws a flinch from both men—and from me.

It’s not right.

Josie’s been gone less than an hour, but I can already feel the emptiness settling in my bones. I don’t like waiting. I don’t like watching. I’m a weapon, not a wick. And this whole damn place feels like kindling doused in dread.

Still, I know better than to force ignition. Not my role.

She’s the spark.

A woman passes me, hunched under the weight of a crate. Her eyes flick to my face—my constructed face—and away again. She doesn’t see me. Good. The disguise holds.

I melt into a shadowed alcove behind a row of hydroponic tanks, tapping a looped scanner on my wrist. Josie’s beacon pulses faintly. She’s in the inner core now—near admin, if I had to guess.

She’s faster than I thought. Or more reckless.

Probably both.

I think about her voice, the way it cracks when she talks about this place. Not out of weakness. Out of fury. That kind of anger doesn’t come from ego. It comes from love.

No one fights this hard for something they don’t love.

The sun climbs slowly, filtered through Drexar’s thick atmosphere into something the color of old bruises. Light that never quite warms. I watch it paint the prefab rooftops in violet and gold, and I wonder how long this colony can last under a yoke they pretend not to see.

Josie might be their only shot. But even she can’t do it alone.

I check the scanner again. Still no distress signal. Still moving. Probably talking. Probably lighting fires with nothing but her voice.

I close my eyes, trying not to picture it. Failing.

She’s going to change everything.

And I’m going to be there when she does.

It starts small.

A busted turret near the colony’s northwest perimeter—a rust-gnawed relic meant to discourage native fauna more than Vortaxian infantry.

Still, it’s there, slumped like a sleeping guard too long forgotten.

I find it during a perimeter walk, and instead of ignoring it like I should, I take a knee and crack the casing.

Wires inside snarl like angry worms, charred at the nodes. The kind of rot that speaks of neglect, not sabotage.

I patch it.

Quietly. Efficiently.

No one sees me do it. But someone notices . A day later, I catch murmurs at the market stand near the supply depot. “Turret’s humming again,” an old miner says. “Like it remembers how to bark.”

They don’t know it was me.

They don’t need to.

Josie’s the face of this thing.

I’m just the shadow with teeth.

She’s everywhere now—slipping between prefab units with the ease of someone born to dirt and duct tape.

People gravitate toward her like moths to a reactor coil.

Her voice carries low and warm when she speaks to them, always casual, always safe.

She doesn’t scream. Doesn’t demand. She offers. Hope , wrapped in sarcasm and pastry.

Literally, in some cases.

Where she got access to the colony’s old yeast stock, I have no idea. But damned if she doesn’t bribe half the engineering deck with sweet rolls that smell like cinnamon and rebellion.

I watch from a distance as she sits cross-legged on a cargo crate, chatting up a group of mining techs.

One’s missing two fingers. Another has a scar across his throat like he lost a bar fight with a plasma cutter.

They look like people who've been stepped on too long.

But around Josie, they sit straighter. Laugh more.

It’s unnerving.

She doesn’t make people fearless. That would be a lie.

She makes them remember they can be.

And I…

I follow her.

Not because she needs protection. She can hold her own, even if she throws punches like someone who’s learned from holonovels instead of combat drills. No. I trail her because being near her makes the weight in my chest easier to carry.

And when she leans in close to whisper a new meeting location, her breath brushes my neck and I forget how to breathe.

“You’re tall,” she murmurs, tone half-amused.

“Disguise,” I answer, voice tighter than I’d like.

“Still counts.” She nudges me with her shoulder. “You make a great wall to stand behind.”

“I’m not a shield.”

“No,” she agrees. “You’re a storm. But even storms have sides.”

That one sinks deeper than it should.

Later, I catch her by herself, hands stained with grease as she adjusts the capacitor feed on a wind turbine. The sun catches in her hair, turning it into a black flame. She curses under her breath when a wire zaps her thumb.

“You talk to everyone,” I say from the shadows.

She doesn’t jump. Just glances over her shoulder. “Someone has to.”

“They trust you.”

“They need someone to believe in.”

I step closer. “And you picked me.”

“No.” She straightens, dusting off her palms. “I picked us.”

I don’t know what to say to that.

So I say nothing.

The wind howls through the colony’s skeleton buildings like a voice caught between wanting to wail and whisper. Josie’s eyes search mine, as if she can see through the image inducer to the truth of me—jagged, wrong, dangerous.

And still.

She doesn’t look away.

She swore it would work.

Gods help me, I believed her.

She rigged that food-delivery drone like a bomb in a care package. A rebel’s Trojan horse wrapped in plastic and hope. We loaded it inside one of the prefab supply shafts—cold, metal-walled corridors that smell like burnt toast and old sweat—and I told her it was reckless.

She winked and said, “This is how we get them to pay attention.”

She wasn’t wrong.

The drone’s propellers whirred like a toy on steroids. I watched from the shadows as she tapped the controls. That familiar spark in her eyes—brilliant, dangerous—lit up her face.

It took less than three seconds for it to start.

There was a spark, a hiss, then a pop so loud it rattled my teeth.

I launched forward just in time to see the drone erupt—artificial mashed potatoes exploded like a geyser, thick and starchy, flooding the corridor.

Circuit boards charred and fell like black snow, sparks raining against plexichrome walls, wires kissing flame and smoke.

Alarm klaxons slammed on.

And for the first time… we ran.

We dove, me pulling her under a tarp—one of those weatherproof surgical covers from the field med-kit stash. We shriek-laughed as the potato slurry dripped over us, hot and sticky. Steam rose from our heads, hot ghosts of absurdity in the cold corridor light.

We lay tangled beneath the tarp, hearts hammering. She is gasping—her laughter is wild and real—and it’s contagious.

I laugh, too. Deep, full-bellied, moonlight-on-metal catharsis. It’s been years since I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe. Years since I forgot the ache that follows every kill.

Her elbow bangs into mine. “See? They noticed .”

I peek out through the tarp netting. Two stunned Vortaxians stare down the corridor, slipping on potato sludge. Their armor gleams cold and wrong among the mess. Behind them, colony guards scramble to avoid the splatter, shouting orders in clipped tones as they attempt crowd control.

“Yeah,” I whisper, voice a scratch of amusement. “They noticed.”

She brushes potato mush from her sore cheeks. “We’re officially terrorists now.”

“You’re the general.”

“You keep the shadow.”

We share a look through the tarp netting, faces inches apart in the stale, hot air beneath the makeshift hideout.

That look…

It’s no longer just camaraderie.

It’s something else.

Something like orbit.

Gravity, pulling.

I feel it deep in my chest—the weight of her next breath, the faint tremor in her voice when she laughs. The warmth of her, of us , like a fire lit too close to cold metal.

She clears her throat, breath ragged, eyes bright with mischief and something deeper. “We gonna get out of here?”

I grin, the knife-edge tension eased by laughter. “Yeah.”

I tug the tarp edge, making sure we’re hidden as the guards shuffle past, boots thumping, voices fading.

Once they're gone, I help her wipe off the worst of the starch. Our hands brush, and something flares behind my ribs.

She doesn’t pull away.

I don’t let her.

For a lingering moment, it’s just us—rebel generals hiding under a tarp, plotting revolution with mashed potatoes and stolen laughter.

And I know I can’t un-see that pull. I wouldn’t if I tried.