Page 5 of Stolen By Her Alien Mate

He can’t be, because without him, the shield wouldn’t have even opened. But I’ve never seen him do this.

“What the frack is wrong with Cass?” I ask.

“Is he glitching?” Draeden asks

Waleam glances over his shoulder and hushes us.

I raise my eyebrows.

Waleam—one of the newest recruits to the rebellion, a kid barely out of the school room—just hushed me?

Maedoc gives the boy a light slap on the back of his head. Waleam frowns, glances again at us, then straightens, turning and offering a brief salute.

“Pardon, sirs. I meant no disrespect. I mean—” He cleared his throat, scuffing his feet against the floor.

Draeden is still scowling, but with effort, I soften my glare. The kid is new to the rebellion. New to the life of a warrior. New to structure of any kind. Until a few months ago, he’d been a school boy, living in one of the many group homes for orphans from the war.

Watching the interaction, Maedoc steps away from the group to fill us in. “Cass isn’t offline. He’s processing an encrypted file that just came in.”

“Came in from where? New Calendeum?”

“No.” Maedoc pulls Draeden and I away from the group clustered around Cass. He taps on a blank swath of screen and pulls up a view of a deep space satellite array in orbit out by the Dark Moon.

The Dark Moon is the furthest moon from Perse. Rumor has it it was once the location of a prison, but contact with the prison was lost a few years after the coup.

Once upon a time, Perse had a deep space program and plans to contact sister planets, but the Soveriegnty’s isolationist platform ended all that.

The last time anyone from Perse even considered deep space travel was during the coup. When the Sovereignty seized control of the clans’ last stronghold, a castle in the far north where the very youngest of the clans were living in hiding, half of the children ended up here, on Nerida. The other half escaped Perse in one of a few deep space shuttles. The last we heard from them was a message that came through this very satellite array saying they were seeking sanctuary on one of the sister planets and would message us they arrived.

That was nearly twenty turns ago.

Now, Maedoc points to a spot on the screen. “See that?”

I shrug. “Yeah, it’s one of the satellites.”

“Nope.” He flicks to a picture nearly identical to the first. Nearly. “This was the array, this morning.” With a tap of his finger, he pulls up a succession of the images of the array. “Hell, yesterday. The day before that. Every day for decades.”

Draedan crosses his arms over his chest. “Okay.”

“Do you see it?” Maedoc asks.

“Go back to the first one,” I tell him.

When he does, a new … something … blips on to the screen. A single bright dot, smaller than one of the satellites and definitely not in any of the images from before this morning.

Draeden rocks back on his heels and then widens his stance. “What the frack is that and where did it come from?”

“We don’t know where it came from or how it got here. As for what it is, before Cass started working on the translation, he said it was an encoded message from Irick.”

Draeden and I exchange a look and then ask the same question. “Who the hell is Irick?”

Radford peels off from the group around Cass and comes over to answer our question. “He was one of the operatives on the ground in the early stages of the rebellion. He was a double agent for a while, ostensibly working with Sorvin, while smuggling information and supplies to us. He was caught, branded a traitor and sentenced to life on the Dark Moon, Græpus. He disappeared from there with everyone else when comms from the prison went silent a decade ago.”

Draeden and I exchange a look, as if we’re jockeying for who gets to ask the first question. Before either of us do, Cass drops his hand from the computer panel and turns around.

He blinks his eyes open and they flash as he switches from one mode to another.

His icy gray eyes seek Radford’s.