Page 134 of Saved By the Alien Hybrid

“The ship,” he growled so thickly that it took her translator a moment to find the words within the noise.

She looked over her shoulder at the viewport. Flames licked up over the glass, and realization crashed into her. “Fuck!”

She lurched toward the chair, scrambling over the armrest and grabbing hold of the ship’s controls. The ship groaned andshuddered around them as she struggled to pull the nose up, alarms flashing across the head-up display.

“Warning: strain to structural integrity. Please adjust trajectory or ship may inc-c-cur damage.”

The electronics flickered, and her blood turned to ice. For an instant, she was back on board the Leto. She’d had that dream a thousand times, where she was the one who’d gone down burning, and Felix was the one who’d lucked into the last functional pod.

What was it called when you thought about something over and over, and it finally came true?

Manifestation, she remembered with despair.

The gravity drive stuttered, and she drifted out of her seat for a moment before a six-fingered hand shoved her back down. She looked up to see Rentir looming over her, his boot wedged beneath the chair. His tail wound around her like a seatbelt.

“Rentir. I just found you.” Her voice cracked.

“You have not lost me,” he said, his eyes green once more and his voice less full of gravel. “You can do this.” He pinched her chin and pointed her back to the HUD full of doom and despair. Leaning down until his lips brushed her ear, he murmured, “Land the ship, Commander. I have plans for you, and I will not be deprived.”

She shivered. Steeling herself, she grabbed hold of the controls and leveled them off, ignoring the groan of metal around her.

This ship wasn’t made for entering the atmosphere; it was too long, too heavy.

“We need to lose weight,” she called to Rentir. “I can’t read half of these fucking buttons. Do any of them say they’ll drop the cargo or something?”

He leaned over her shoulder, reading as the ship rattled violently. A dark laugh filled her ears. “Here,” he said, pointing to a button beneath a glass case.

She wrenched it open and punched it, holding her breath as a sharp grinding sound filled the air—and then the ship finally stopped its death throes.

“Crèche detached. Self destruction in ten, nine, eight…”

“Did it just say…”

“Yes,” he said. “Don’t fear. It was empty.”

She blew out a harsh breath, reeling at the implications of the emergency dead weight being an entire generation of children. Part of her wanted to run theGidalaninto the ground on principle. Instead, she used the advantage of the ship’s shorter length and lesser weight to bring their course back under control.

Slowly, the blaring warnings subsided as they coasted down through the clouds. Leaning forward, she tapped the button she recognized as navigation from Lidan’s lessons.

“Can you point out the base?” she asked Rentir.

He leaned forward and tapped at it, locking it into the HUD. Cordelia course corrected, skimming off to the right, stirring the clouds in their wake. She recognized the mountain that housed the base and slowed as she approached, searching for the open field they’d scouted in the days before.

Rentir squeezed her shoulder as she ran through her mental checklist to set the behemoth down. Something crunched, and the ship lurched hard as they touched down, sparking a few angry warnings on the HUD, but…

There were no flames. No sirens. No smell of burnt electronics in the air.

Stunned, she let her hands fall away from the controls and into her lap, staring blankly at the green and purple trees outside the windshield. “We’re alive,” she said numbly.

Rentir circled her, kneeling at her side and taking her chin in his hand, beaming at her with sad eyes. “We’re alive.” His hand slipped into her hair, and he dragged her down for a kiss.

She leaned into him eagerly, tears pouring down her face as she hiccuped a sob, clutching at his shoulders. When he yelped in pain, she jumped and pulled back. An anguished sound escaped her.

“Your arm! God, how could I forget? We have to get you to the medbay!”

CHAPTER 55

They limpedoff the ship together, with Cordelia somehow managing to take the bulk of his considerably greater weight. She wept the whole time, though stoically. The tears tracked clean trails through the soot on her pale cheeks, courtesy of some smoking component of the ship. She coughed and wiped hard at her face, smearing the dark substance.