Page 18

Chapter18

THE SHIP groaned beneath them, as if it too sensed the weight of decisions that could no longer be delayed. Every component around them vibrated with pressure—from the failing systems, from the pounding fists outside, from the truth they could no longer ignore. There would be no second chances. No more corrections. Whatever came next, it would have to be enough.

Tor’Vek tweaked a final setting for the stabilizer in its core socket, fingers slick with blood from his own palms. Atremor rolled through the deck—deep, low, seismic—as the interface flared to life. He reached up, adjusted the thermal bypass limiter, then recalibrated the auxiliary circuits manually, rerouting excess pressure through the shield dampeners. The panel finally flashed green. It should have been a victory.

It wasn’t.

Outside, fists and claws pounded against the hull—feral, unrelenting. The shrieks of the hominids rose in a discordant chorus, shaking the air. Something heavier struck near the starboard intake, warping the metal with a sickening crunch.

Anya flinched. “Tell me that fixed everything. The countdown?”

Tor’Vek didn’t look up. His bracelet still tickedaway.

12:09:22 12:09:21 12:09:20

Not accelerating. Not stopping. Just bleedingtime.

“Stabilizer held,” he said, voice like stone. “Decay rate has slowed, but the countdown remains active. We have twelve solar units.”

She made a choked sound—half laugh, half sob—and blinked fast, fighting to pull herself together. She dragged her fingers down the sides of her thighs, then clenched them tightly, forcing the tremor from her hands. The panic didn’t vanish, but it hardened into something sharper. Something she could use. “Twelve hours tolive.”

A harsh screech tore through the ship’s comms.

Tor’Vek spun toward the source, body already bracing, as a fractured blue shimmer burst to life above the interface. The light jittered, warped—then resolved into the shape of Selyr.

He was grinning.

“Fascinating,” Selyr said, clasping his hands behind his back, ever so arrogant. “Even knowing your odds, you obeyed so predictably. Retrieve, install, hope. It is remarkable how desperate organisms will cling to even the thinnest promise.”

Tor’Vek stepped forward, muscles coiled. “Speak your final variables, Selyr,” he said, low and razor-sharp. “Iwant to hear the last data point from a failed experiment.”

“You thought survival would be simple?” Selyr retorted with a sneer. “Retrieve the part, plug it in, and live happily ever after?”

“Yes,” Tor’Vek said simply.

Selyr paced slowly in front of the camera feed, every movement deliberate, almost theatrical. He lifted a hand, stroking it across the top of a console just off-frame, as though fondly revisiting an old experiment. His expression was one of mock sorrow, his eyes lit with malicious amusement.

“How quaint. You’re still under the illusion that effort earns outcome—that if you fight hard enough, bleed deep enough, love fiercely enough, you win. But the universe does not care how much you want to live. It only watches to see how well you suffer. Oh no, precious creatures. Life—real life—is a predator, not a puzzle. It waits, teeth bared, for those foolish enough to think the game ends with a button press and a blinking light. You survive one trap only to step into thenext.”

Anya stepped forward, her eyes ice-cold. “Hear this, you sadistic bastard—watch us survive anyway. Watch us burn your world down on the way out. Ihope the last thing you see is myface.”

Selyr’s brows lifted, amused. He leaned closer to the feed as though studying her, tilting his head like she were some particularly interesting insect. “Ah, the fire. You always had it, even under sedation. Always fighting. Clawing. Useless, of course, but entertaining. You want to die with purpose? Fine. Die trying.”

Around them, the ship shuddered again. Apipe somewhere above them groaned under the strain, spraying a thin hiss of steam into the air. From outside came a new sound—something sharper, more frenzied. The pounding had escalated into a full assault, fists and claws hammering with rabid fury against the hull. Metal shrieked. Apanel near the aft corridor buckled inward with a deafening crunch.

Tor’Vek turned away from Selyr and dropped his voice to a whisper. “We need to take off. Now.”He swiveled back to face Selyr. “We will die with purpose. But your eyes will close long beforeours.”

Selyr’s laugh sliced through the static. “Priceless. Truly. You still think you’ve won, don’t you? All that effort, all that pain—and for what? Afew more minutes of breathing? Delightful. Ido so enjoy your suffering.”

Tor’Vek narrowed his eyes. He wasn’t listening to the words.

He was studying the shadows behind Selyr—the fractured blue lighting set into smooth concrete walls, the glint of silver piping, the curved architecture that mirrored the access corridor they’d just come through. The same recessed wall panels, the same flickering overhead strip-lights. Local. Underground. Nearby. The bastard hadn’t left the planet. He was close. Too close.

“You are not aboard your station,” he said coldly. He pressed a series of buttons for the onboard computer. “You are transmitting. And you are close.”

Selyr’s smile faltered.

Anya came up beside Tor’Vek. “Where are you hiding, you cowardly freak?”

“Clever,” Selyr said, smile returning with a twitch. He slowly stepped backward into the shadows, just enough to reveal more of the curving wall behind him—sleek, metallic, unmistakably from the same underground corridor Tor’Vek and Anya had just fled. The recessed lighting behind him pulsed dimly in the same flickering pattern they’d seen in the corridor beneath the access panel—the same pale-blue hue, the same humming power lines embedded along the seam of the floor. The wall material even bore the same scarring from water erosion. There was no doubt. He was inside the same or a similar underground complex. “But cleverness is irrelevant now. The clock ticks, and I have alreadywon.”

The feed snapped to static.

Tor’Vek stared at the empty space where Selyr’s image had been, his jaw tightening. That cut wasn’t timed for drama. It was panic. The bastard realized he’d exposed too much—lighting, architecture, proximity. He feared a trace. And well he should.

“Coward,” Tor’Vek muttered, echoing Anya’s opinion.

He accessed the ship’s scanners to sweep for residual signal bleed. Then hetapped his rij. His HUD flashed a coordinate spike, triangulated from the transmission’s bleed.

He swore. “The bastard is still on this planet. Subterranean base, eight kilometers southeast. Iwill fly us low.Fast.”

“We kill him,” Anyasaid.

He nodded once. “We killhim.”

The ship shuddered again, the outer hull screaming beneath the hominid assault. The pounding was no longer random—it was focused, concentrated, like a single, united force determined to breach. Aseam near the portside joint cracked with a metallic snap, and lights overhead flickered as something tore free outside. The noise swelled to a crescendo of claws and shrieks, and the ship’s frame groaned like it might finally giveway.

Tor’Vek dropped into the pilot seat, Anya in the chair adjacent.

There was no time left forfear.

Only the mission.

And theend.

The ship launched like a wounded animal, thrusters screaming as Tor’Vek yanked it up from the blood-soaked clearing. Fists and claws battered the undercarriage even as they lifted—furious hominids clinging, striking, trying to rip through before they escaped. The hull shrieked. Something scraped violently across the outer plating, carving a long, jagged line along the portside hull. One of the rear stabilizers stuttered before catching again, barely. Smoke curled up through a hairline fracture in the ceiling.

“Structural integrity down to sixty-eight percent,” Tor’Vek said. His hands gripped the controls with surgical precision, but even he could feel the trembling in the yoke. “We will hold. Fornow.”

Anya sat beside him, tense but focused, one hand gripping the edge of her seat, the other resting near the emergency manual override. Every tilt and lurch jolted through her bones, but her eyes never left the viewport. She was calculating, scanning, waiting for the moment everything might go wrong. The ship wasn’t flying—it was defying death with every shuddering breath. And the planet felt alive beneath them, furious they’d dared to escape.

The moment they cleared the ridge, the ship hit turbulence hard enough to rattle their teeth. Sharp, chaotic winds clawed at the hull, tilting them sideways in a sudden lurch. The inertial dampeners spat out a warning chime as the compensators lagged behind, struggling to keepup.

Anya gritted her teeth, her hand flying to brace herself. “Come on,” she hissed under her breath. “Hold together. Just a little longer.”

Tor’Vek caught the way her breath hitched, her posture clenching tighter as if something beneath her skin was clawing its way out. He did not need the bond to read it—though the bond screamed all the same. The surge was building in both of them, sharp and electric. It wasn’t fear. It was something hotter. The bond stirred like a live wire braided through his spine and hers, syncing their pulse, their fury, their hunger.

Anya’s hand flew to the dash as she was thrown sideways. Her bracelet flared, and she gasped. “Tor’Vek—”

“Ifeel it,” he bit out. The craving. Therage.

The emotions tore through both of them like a surge in the bond. Not lust. Not quite. It was need sharpened to a blade—desperate and unrelenting. Hunger, yes, but laced with rage. Not at each other, but at everything. At the trap they were caught in. At the dying ship. At the universe that kept them on the edge of survival. His hands didn’t falter on the controls, but every muscle in his body coiled as the bracelet slammed a molten surge through every nerve ending.

He saw Anya shift, the subtle arch of her back betraying the internal battle she refused to voice. She was fighting—fighting herself, fighting the craving, and losing ground. Her fingers twitched at her sides, flexing once, twice, then curling into her thighs as if she could attach herself there. He felt her heat, her pulse, the tremor that traveled from her bracelet into the air betweenthem.

She didn’t speak. Neither didhe.

But her silence rang like a scream in his skull. It clawed at the edges of his thoughts, louder than any alarm. She did not need to speak—her restraint, her trembling composure, echoed through the bond with such clarity it might as well have been a shout. He heard everything in what she didn’t say: the rage, the hunger, the unbearable ache of holdingback.

And yet, neither of them spoke.

The ship dipped violently as they cut over a canyon. Anya pitched forward and Tor’Vek’s hand snapped out, catching her. The moment they touched—

Heat, violent and immediate, surged betweenthem.

It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t soft. It was raw and explosive, acollision of craving and fury that punched through the bond like a burst of starlight through space. Her breath caught, eyes flying wide. His hand flexed involuntarily, holding on instead of lettinggo.

The bond roared tolife.

It slammed into them like a shockwave—hot, visceral, and absolute. Tor’Vek’s vision tunneled, the cockpit vanishing around him. All he could feel was her—the heat of her skin, the rhythm of her breath, the visible tension in her body that echoed hisown.

His control wavered at the edges, frayed by the pulse of the bond crashing through his system like a seismic wave. She was volatility in a closed system—heat, pressure, and ignition point all in one. Every movement, every micro-shift in her posture triggered his instincts like a proximity alarm. She was a tactical variable he could not neutralize, agravitational constant pulling him out of formation.

It was not lust. It was not affection. It was the need to possess and protect and destroy anything that stood in the way of that connection.

He gritted his teeth. He would not give in. Not here. Notnow.

But her presence filled his senses like gravity, and even his resolve bent towardher.

Tor’Vek held himself rigid, jaw clenched as the bond dragged him toward her like gravity. Every rational command screamed at him to let go. Every instinct screamed louder to pull her closer.

He didn’t move. Neither didshe.

But they were no longer separate. The bond blurred every boundary, folding time and fury into something breathless and hot. Every inch of space between them vanished without either of them leaning in. They were already there.

He held her too long. Her fingers gripped his forearm—tight, possessive, like she didn’t trust the world not to steal himaway.

Neither pulled away. Couldn’t.

Their eyes met. Her lips parted, and Tor’Vek watched the tremor there—the urge to speak, to surrender, to rage against what bound them and what kept them apart. He could feel it. Not just the hunger, but the ache beneath it. The chaos inside her echoed hisown.

He didn’t want the words. He wanted control. And the moment he saw her falter—just slightly—his breath caught.

What would she have said, if she had spoken?

He would not ask. Could not afford to know. Notyet.

Just breath. Just heat. And the bond—alive, hungry, waiting.

He dropped his hand like it burned, breath ragged, heart pounding too fast for control. For one second more, his gaze stayed locked on hers, the bond still singing between them like static in his blood.

Then he turned back to the controls. His voice came low, clipped, steadier than he felt. “Focus. We are nearing the target. We finish this first. Then we will face whatever this is. After.”

It wasn’t a promise. But it wasn’t a denial either. It was the only truth he could give her in that moment—gritted between teeth, carved from restraint. He could not offer hope, not when the sky was about to fall. But he would not take it from her, either.

She didn’t argue.

But her hands stayed clenched in her lap, white-knuckled, the only outward sign of the storm still raging inside her. Tor’Vek didn’t need to look to know she was barely holding herself together. The craving hadn’t passed—it had sunk deeper, latching itself to her breath, her posture, her silence. And beneath it, rage still simmered, waiting for a target.

He angled them low, banking southeast toward the signal bleed.

“Target coordinates in range,” he said. “We will make visual contact in under six minutes.”

The scanners beeped.

Anya leaned forward. “What’sthat?”

His HUD spiked. “Defensive grid. Surface-mounted artillery. Powered shielding. And—”

He paused.

“What?”

“There is a dome,” he said slowly, voice going flat. “Thermally shielded. Underground hangar, possibly automated.”

The scanner shrieked.

“Brace,” he snapped.

Then the sky litup.