Prologue

Min-Ji

"What do you mean, the readings are wrong?" my colleague and superior officer said from behind the Navigator's console. Officer First Class Jackson was always a stick in the mud, with an ego to boot; he didn't take kindly to his subordinates talking back. Well, too bad, because his readings were definitely wrong.

That moon was not anywhere close to where he said it was, and the planet we were supposed to skim by, according to his pathing, was going to leave us dipping straight through its atmosphere. Jackson was an ass, but he was not a bad navigator. We'd been assigned to several missions together before, I knew how he worked. This was wrong, something had to be messing with our sensors.

"I mean, this course is going to make us fly through that big purple planet, not around it. That's not what you intended, so there has to be something off with the readings." I tried to keep my voice level but bright; the bubbly-calm method, as I called it. That always made the big boys think I was no threat, and that I wasn't trying to step on any toes. Navigating a man's world of pilots, marines, and space cowboys meant I knew exactly when to be tactful and when to push.

Jackson seemed placated by what I'd said, and he dipped his head over his screen to get another look. He was muttering to himself, a deep frown furrowing his brow; not a good sign. If he didn't come up with a better answer soon, I'd have to take control, screw protocol, and find my own way around this huge purple orb.

My palms felt a little clammy around the yoke of the small shuttle, and I wished, not for the first time, that we were flying a bigger ship than this. The UAR Battleship the Preator had been our home for the past two years; I had been itching to get away from it for a solo mission. But that feeling had changed as soon as I'd entered this short-range shuttle.

I glanced over my shoulder at the curtain that had been hung in an improvised manner between the cockpit area and the rest of the small ship. From my seat, I could reach the head, the shower, and the bunk that I'd been assigned for the trip. That was it. Jackson had given me firm orders never to look behind the curtain, our cargo was beyond my clearance level. He'd made it abundantly clear that I had not been the first choice for this mission, but the change had been made at the last moment.

The curtain was a gray, ominous barrier, but it wasn't exactly hard to circumvent. All I'd needed was for Jackson to go to the head for a minute, and a peek took all of ten seconds. Now I understood why most of the marines like me aboard the Preator had not known the true nature of our mission. They might have balked at the truth, and too many marines struggling with the reality of their orders… Not a good idea on a mission that lasted years.

This was supposed to be a negotiating mission with important powers from the far-off Zeta Quadrant. This was supposed to be about securing supplies, allies, and manpower to strengthen the war effort in the other reaches of the Alpha Quadrant; all to protect Earth and its two alien partners. To protect the mighty UAR.

I didn't think the human population would agree with this method if it was ever discovered. It was also clear to me that my life would not be safe if Jackson realized I knew what we were transporting. "These readings are a mess…" Jackson muttered with a curse at that moment. "Switch to manual control, Pilot Yun."

That made me draw in a relieved breath as I hurried to obey the order. We should have made this switch several minutes ago, but it had taken far longer than I expected for him to start verifying his readings. I tightened my grip on the small shuttle's yoke and started to pilot the spacecraft around the planet. I tried to give us a larger distance from the first edges of the stratosphere than I normally might. I didn't trust this situation one bit.

With good reason. My yoke trembled when the gravitational pull of the planet got hold of us with surprising force. My instruments went haywire, and Jackson started cursing up a storm. "Get it under control, Yun!" he shouted like that was an order I wasn't already fighting to obey with every fiber of my being.

I could see the writing on the wall. This shuttle wasn't strong enough to break free of this strange, powerful grip the planet had. We were going to crash, badly. I didn't want to be the one who had to tell my superior that news, but there was no one else on the ship besides me. He caught my gaze, his brow lowered even more, and his jaw firmed. "Pilot Yun. We are not crashing. Tell me we are not crashing. That's an order!"

My eyes whipped from his face as I struggled to get my own emotions under control. The yoke was shaking, my grip was all sweaty and slippery from the anxious fear that had a hold of me now. We were absolutely crashing, and with the system going mad, we couldn't even be sure I could direct this ship into some kind of safe landing. I licked my dry lips before I forced out, "You better say your prayers, sir. I don't think we'll survive this."

Maybe our cargo had a chance, the stasis pods hidden behind the stupid curtain were sturdy. They were made to survive crashes, or at least, they were supposed to have a better chance at surviving one. The selfish thought spun through my brain that I should climb into one of those pods myself. That was a horrible idea, I couldn't boot some innocent person from their pod to better my own chances.

Of course, my superior officer had arrived at the same conclusion I had, and he had far fewer qualms about it. "Get this bird safely to the ground, Pilot Yun," he demanded. "The UAR won't miss one of their condemned humans. They've got the whole Preator stuffed to the brim with them, anyway." He unbuckled his flight harness and got up. "If you survive this, Yun. Wake me."

He turned and headed for the curtain, fully expecting me to obey. I think he assumed I already knew what we'd been transporting, and my lack of surprise must have clued him in that he was right. A rebellious thought rose in my brain when he turned his back. He thought I might die, and he didn't care. He was willing to kill a pod occupant to save his own ass.

My hand flicked to the laser pistol strapped in a holster on my thigh. I shouldn't do this, but nobody would know, would they? I wouldn't survive, he wouldn't survive, and that uninhabited planet would forget we existed. Maybe the people in those stasis pods would wake one day, maybe someone would track the signal on the pod beacons and rescue them. They'd be more deserving of that than Jackson was.

Jackson, who knew we were transporting humans to hand over as bartering currency with an unknown power in an unknown quadrant of the galaxy. All so we could fight a useless war at the edges of Earth's quadrant of space… My thumb flipped the clasp open and freed the pistol; it made a loud noise in the confines of the small shuttle.

My superior officer turned, alerted by the sound, and I stared him right in the eye as I lifted my weapon and fired. Shooting a person was not the same as shooting a target on a practice range. I had never done it before, and I didn't think I'd have it in me to do it again. It was awful. The weapon recoiled in my grip, the laser fire sizzled through the air, and the wound stank of burning flesh.

I hit him in the shoulder, a bad wound but not an instantly fatal one. He screamed in rage and I was certain he would have charged me, that I was a dead woman. I was a dead woman anyway, my brain supplied rather unhelpfully. It really didn't matter what way I died, did it? Dead was dead. The ship's systems blared with alarms, and I responded on instinct when we got thrown around in bad turbulence. We'd started entering the atmosphere.

My hand stuck the pistol back into its holster and secured it, my fingers slipped around the yoke, and my focus became the view out the front of the ship. I had to slow our descent, I had to pull up the nose of the shuttle. And while I was at it, I hoped desperately that we'd end up crashing on land, not a deep, endless ocean. That was something I would definitely not survive.

The shuffling behind me, unsteady in the rocking and jerking of the shuttle, had to be Jackson moving around. He wasn't saying anything, but he'd refrained from attacking me. Maybe he was at the back by the pods, trying to open one to get in. I hoped not, but I couldn't pull my attention from the ship now. That wouldn't achieve anything but certain death for all of us.

I gritted my teeth and fought with the ship, that was all I could do. When the hull started to tear apart with awful ripping noises, when the heat of the reentry bathed my skin, even when parts started falling off, I did not give up. A mountain filled my view, we were going to hit it, hard.

My last thought was that if I'd had the luck of striking a plain, I might have survived, but this mountain… We hadn't slowed enough. I assumed the safety position just before we hit the unforgiving planet. My head braced, my arms crossed. The planet looked pretty, all violet and purple, too bad I wouldn't get to see much of it.

I saw Jackson careen past me from the corner of my eye as we struck, hitting the navigator's seat and flipping over it. He might have already been dead, I couldn't tell. It was an odd thing to even care about during my last moments. Then everything went black.

***

I woke with a haze of pain over my mind, and a darkness that surrounded me that I couldn't pierce. Not at first. My brain throbbed awfully, reminding me I had a brain, though right now I wished I didn't. Anything was better than this pain. Why was I in pain? I didn't understand.

Then voices filtered through the rushing noise in my ears, and I focused on those. Anything was better than letting the pain consume me, and the voices were interesting. A female voice, tremulous and soft, speaking in English with an unmistakable UAR accent. The other voice was male, deep, rough, but with a dark edge that appealed to me. I could clearly hear what he said too, and it made me feel safe.

"Stay close, both of you. We'll exit the ancestral caves here. They shouldn't be able to find us," that dark voice said. I was picturing sinful eyes, bedroom talk, even secrets shared between lovers from hearing his voice. It made me forget about the pain pounding in my skull, or the way I couldn't move or see a damn thing.

The woman made a squeaking noise of consent, but a new, male voice replied in crisp tones that sounded familiar. He spoke English just like the woman, UAR tinted, and doused with a heavy dose of that military directness that had been stamped into my bones. "On your six. Zathar and Vera should prove a distraction. Can you loop back once we're in a secure spot to offer backup? I can guard the women."

Women, as in plural. Was he talking about this female stranger and me, or were there more? He was definitely a soldier; he spoke the lingo, and he seemed unafraid when talking of protecting and rescuing. So maybe even a soldier who'd seen action or worked on the front lines. Not like me, just a simple pilot for cargo ships and shuttles.

"Blazing suns, you know I can't understand either of you. Just stay close!" the dark voice said, the voice that was definitely not speaking English but that I understood anyway. My translator implants had to be doing the good work, but I couldn't shake this gut feeling that it wasn't that. Then it came to me, I'd crashed a ship, a shuttle with humans in stasis. I'd crashed the fucking ship onto a supposedly uninhabited planet. Had I survived? Had they survived? And was it inhabited, after all?

All those thoughts made my head spin, and I struggled to stay awake, to stay coherent. My eyes felt like they were open, but all I saw was darkness, and it felt like the world was seesawing around me. I tried to focus on my breathing, on feeling my body rather than running away from the pain. Not my head, but my limbs, my belly. I wasn't cold; I was cradled against something warm, and a scent filled my nose that was delicious. Spicy and musky, a little sweet. Like some of my favorite dishes from back home, before my mother died.

I thought I saw the faintest glow of something silver from the corner of my eye, and I focused on that. A vibrant slash of glowing silver peeking from beneath the edge of a leather band. I saw more details now, felt more things too. The scale-covered skin in a beautiful light blue shade, the arms that carried me.

A man was carrying me, an alien man with silvery-blue scales and strong arms. I tilted back my head and looked up at his face. A handsome alien of a kind I'd never seen before, and then he glanced down at me and I saw his quicksilver eyes, eyes that held the coldest, harshest look I'd ever received. I wanted to wilt under that gaze, and then I wanted to stick out my tongue and make him laugh. I didn't know where that urge came from, it was bizarre. It was too much for my poor head.