As I tower over her,Virex Primespeaks directly into my mind; its voice is a harsh rasp of ancient code.
Commander,the ship rumbles, its presence heavy and demanding.Biometric scan complete. Interface potential: ninety-eight percent. The marker is compatible. She is significant. Do not allow the pulse to extinguish.
The report is impossible. She belongs to a different species, representing a primitive biological offshoot from a system usually ignored by higher civilizations. The ship’s bio-scanners remain steady. Her heart rate, her hormonal spikes, even the electrical conductivity of her skin—it all aligns with the Reaper network. She is more than a witness to my awakening. She is a chaotic variable, yet my systems inexplicably demand her presence.
"You're shaking." A dark growl rattles the very air around us.
"I'm cold! And I'm being held captive by a giant metal monster!" The demand carries a frantic, high-pitched energy that shatters like glass on the final word, revealing the hollow panic beneath the bravado.
She is lying. My sensors read the truth without specialized output. Her shivering is completely divorced from the temperature. She is burning. Adrenaline burns like a wildfire in her veins, competing with a spike of pure, unadulterated anger that keeps her chin upward even as her knees tremble. The fear is there, a cold undercurrent beneath the rest. The defiance is the thing that fascinates me. Most creatures in the fringe zonesknow better than to bark at a Reaper. This one seems to have forgotten the hierarchy of the stars.
"K-Seven! System override! Deploy—" she shrieks, her head whipping around to look for the small, battered drone hovering nearby.
The machine offers only a useless gesture, its sparking thrusters failing to bridge the gap. My ship,Virex Prime,already snares the drone in a localized stasis field. It hangs in the air like a dead insect.
"Your machine cannot help you," I assert, my hand moving to the seals of her helmet. "Nothing can."
"Don't touch that! Don't you dare—" She throws her hands up to grab at my wrists.
Her fingers are tiny against the alloy of my gauntlets. She claws at the joints of my armor, trying to find a purchase, her movements frantic and disorganized. I ignore the staccato drumming of her fists and trace the primary release triggers along the bottom of her throat.
With a pressurized hiss, the seal breaks. I lift the helmet away, and the recycled, stale air of her suit gives way to the ship’s rich, nitrogen-heavy atmosphere. I set the plexiglass dome aside on a nearby console and finally look at her.
She is lean and wiry, her frame tempered by years of manual labor. Her skin is a deep, rich brown, currently dusted with the silver-grey grime of engine grease and carbon scoring. Tightly coiled dark hair, once held in a practical braid that is now messy and coming undone, clings to her damp temples in sweat-soaked tangles. Sharp cheekbones define a face of hard angles and survival. Her eyes are wide, the pupils still blown out, staring at me as if trying to memorize the features of her executioner.
I lean in closer, my optical sensors recalibrating to capture the micro-tremors in her jaw. She looks vulnerable, her throat exposed and palpitating with the frantic beat of her heart. Herface stays unchanged. A scavenger fades from the definition. A survivor takes its place.
When I reach for her hands, she tries to tuck them against her chest, but I catch both wrists in a single, unyielding grip. Yanking away her bulky, grease-stained gloves, I toss them to the floor.
Her hands are small and calloused, her fingernails bitten down and rimmed with dark stains of oil and grit. Faint scars crisscross her arms and collarbone—marks of a life spent fighting for scraps in the guts of dying ships. I feel a strange, cold flick of irritation. A creature this filthy, this unrefined—and yet it is the one bridging the gap in my soul. I make a mental note that I must get her cleaned. The ship's reclamation systems will prepare a sterilization cycle. She needs to be scrubbed of the Fringe-world filth until only the woman remains.
"Is this what you do?" The inquiry emerges in shallow, rattling gasps, as though the oxygen in the room has grown too heavy for her to pull a steady breath through the panic. "You just jump out of pods to bully anyone who wanders into your graveyard? Is that the big plan?"
No answer comes. Her skin against mine holds me instead. Soft heat. Quivering. A direct affront to the cold sterility of my armor.
I have never truly felt a sensation like this. I have lived for centuries. I have led legions through the crushing dark of the Hegemony's expansion, watching the rise and fall of civilizations from the bridge of this very ship. My mind struggles against a thick veil of stasis-induced amnesia. The compulsion lacks tactical logic, defying every parameter I was grown to obey. An unexplainable urge to brand her overrides my Warlord training, driven by a violent biological hunger I cannot suppress.
If I ever considered it, I expected a warrior. A peer. One of my own kind who could stand beside me in the fire of battle, sharingthe burden of command with the same ice-cold discipline I carry.
Instead, I have been given this—a scrap of a girl with a heart pulsing like an alarm buried under steel.
Commander,Virex Primewhispers through our neural link, its voice a grinding of tectonic plates.The synchronization window I estimated when you first woke is closing. My calculations assumed contact would occur within minutes of emergence. We are past that threshold. The biological interface requires a direct conduit. Finalize the marker now, or the power surges will breach the secondary hull.
The ship is right. The lights in the corridor begin to strobe a violent, angry red. The gravity wells shift, making the floor feel like it is tilting beneath us. The bond instinct triggers with a sudden, violent force, an agonizing pressure behind my eyes, demanding an outlet. A raw and demanding hunger I've never known takes over.
"Be still, Nyra," I bellow, the sound of her name in my own tongue a snap of a whip.
"Get away from me!" she shrieks, her hands flying up to cover her chest as I move for the heavy zipper of her EVA suit.
I override her resistance, hooking my fingers into the pull and forcing it downward, separating the reinforced synthetic weave to expose the thin, sweat-stained tunic beneath. I need skin. I need the pulse.
I flatten my palm against her chest, right over her collarbone, where the brown skin is marred by a thin, jagged scar. She lets out a sharp, gasping sound, her entire body going rigid as my gauntlet makes contact. The violet brilliance in my armor intensifies, a predatory light bleeding out of the metal and into her flesh.
The marking is anything but gentle—a forceful grafting of my essence onto hers. I feel the surge of heat as the nanites begintheir work, a burning sensation radiating from my palm. She gasps, her back arching against the column as the mark sears into her. A sharp sting—a flash of heat that settles into a deep, echoing thrum.
A different kind of pain takes root, distinct from the physical scars of plasma fire or gravitational collapse. It is the ache of a void filling too quickly. I grit my teeth, pushing through the sensory overload to ensure the glyph takes hold perfectly.
Beneath my hand, a series of interlocking geometric lines begin to form on her skin—a Reaper glyph, an ancient mark of protection and possession shaking in time with my own twin hearts.