Kaelen woke to the recycled air that lacked any of the familiar signs of filters three years due replacement. It felt too clean against her skin, too warm, the temperature lacking the typical chill of a space station meant to accommodate for the wide berth of sentient races. It felt like the kind of warmth that came from a sterilized oven a room away within a medical facility custom built for humans. Then came the sound, a hum that touched her ears and left in their wake a quiet vibration of machines that were working four floors below, seeping through the mattress and into her bones.

Consciousness did not come slowly, her eyes snapped open, the movement was instant, a soldier’s reflex honed by a decade of active duty, mind cataloguing threats and attack vectors. The ceiling was a seamless expanse of a matte grey material that seemed to drink the pale, sourceless light. There were no visible vents, fixtures, nor seams. She rolled onto her side, every muscle coiled. The room was a perfect cube, maybe ten meters to a side. The walls were the same seamless grey as the ceiling. The floor was a slightly darker shade, slightly warm to the touch, smooth against her bare feet as she rose. One of the walls was metallic, polished to a mirror sheen, reflecting the room back at her and providing an illusion of size that was not there. On the wall opposite to the mirror, there was a fine rectangular line that was almost invisible, hinting at a door. There were no panels, no visible controls. The only breaks from the perfect monotony was a drain at the center of the room, and a metal lavatory in the corner. A cell.

Assess yourself.

Training kicked in, she looked herself over, inspecting for any injury or weapon or tool. Her uniform was a wreck. The tough, nano-weave fabric of her Alliance Marine BDU was scorched along the left side, the material blackened and brittle, tiny holes pockmarked that flank, and she remembered the explosion on the observation deck of Starbase Epsilon. It'd been a blinding white light, the shriek of tortured metal, and Eva’s name a half-formed word on her lips as she'd lunged to protect her wife. And then, nothing. “Eva,” she whispered in realization, her voice a dry rasp.

A soft groan answered from the spot next to where she'd been unconscious. Eva was lying on a pallet identical to her own, her doctor’s fatigues in a similar state of disrepair albeit less damaged. Her dark, curly hair disheveled and burnt on a few spots, her eyes fluttered open, they were clear and sharp. Kaelen had foregone the soft wakeup, instead carefully pressing into different parts of Eva's body to confirm there was nothing broken, nothing out of place.

“Kae?” Eva’s voice was thick with sleep. She pushed herself up on one elbow, needing several long seconds to properly take in their surroundings. A calm analytical calm followed, her shoulders squaring up in that tell-tale sign of military authority that had been ingrained into them for years. “Status report.”

“Contained,” Kaelen said, her voice low. “Single room, no visible egress controls, unknown hostiles.” She offered a hand, and Eva took it, her grip firm. Kaelen pulled her to her feet. “You don't look injured, how do you feel?”

Eva did a quick self-assessment, a repetition of Kaele's own, her hands running over her ribs, her neck, she looked both relieved and confused. “A few phantom aches, but… nothing. You?”

Kaelen did the same. Considering the state her clothes were in, the explosion should've turned half her body into crispy burger meat. She remembered the feeling of superheated shrapnel tearing through her armor, the searing pain. Now, there was nothing. Not even a scar. She lifted the scorched fabric of her sleeve. Beneath it, her skin was pale and unblemished. “I’m fine,” she said, the words tasting like a lie. “They healed us.”

The implication hung in the air between them, heavy and cold. This wasn't the work of some ragtag terrorists or pirates or some one-off militia. Cellular regeneration that left no easy trace was a level of medical technology only available to people with very deep pockets.

“They took my sidearm,” Kaelen said, her hand instinctively going to her empty thigh holster. “My kit, my comms...” Her finger brushed against her wrist, then the left side of her jaw, the places where two critical emergency-broadcast subdermal devices should've been in. "...my implants..."

“Same,” Eva murmured, patting herself down a second time. “My datapad, my personal comm… wait.” Her hands stopped on the small, hardened case still clipped to her belt. She unfastened it with a sense of disbelief, her fingers tracing the familiar lines of her standard-issue Alliance Medical Field Scanner. “They left this.”

Kaelen frowned, her eyes narrowing, the situation felt too controlled and closely monitored to having missed this. “Why? Why take a pulse rifle and leave a medical device?”

“Maybe they don’t know what it is,” Eva suggested, but her tone lacked conviction. She opened the case. The scanner was a sleek, silver device, about the size of her hand. She pressed her thumb to the activation plate. It whirred to life, a soft blue light emanating from its emitter as a holographic display shimmered into existence above it. “It’s still powered,” she said, a note of wonder in her voice. “And connected to its micro-reactor. They didn’t even drain it.”

“It can't be a mistake,” Kaelen said, her voice hard. “It’s a trap, somehow. Assume everything is a trap.” She began a meticulous circuit of the room for a closer level of scrutiny, her naked feet silent on the strange, stone-like floor. She pressed against the walls, searching for any give, any hollow sound. Her fingers traced the hairline seam of the door, looking for a manual release, a pry point, anything. There was nothing. The construction was flawless.

“Let’s see what we’re dealing with,” Eva said, her focus shifting, activating the scanner with some trepidation before scanning herself. She checked the readings, carefully looking into the hologram of her own insides. "There are some trace signs of bio-tissue-repair drugs, but nothing else. Unless they can somehow fake a real-time read... which isn't unlikely, but feels odd to do so, I'd say I'm clean." The device was pointed at Kaelen. “Kae, hold still.”

She stopped, her back to the wall, her gaze sweeping the empty room as if expecting an attack. Eva held the scanner up, it quietly flickered a light that mapped her body before beeping. The hologram shifted, displaying Kaelen’s biological data in crisp, flowing lines of Alliance standard script along a projection.

“Vitals are stable,” Eva reported, her eyes flicking across the data. “Heart rate is elevated, but that’s to be expected. Adrenaline levels are high. No internal bleeding, no fractures… Wait.” She paused, her brow furrowed. “There is an anomaly. A foreign object. Non-biological.”

Kaelen’s blood went cold. “Where?”

“Base of the throat. Carotid artery, vagus nerve cluster.” Eva stepped closer, adjusting the scanner’s focus. The hologram zoomed in, rotating a three-dimensional image of Kaelen’s neck. There, nestled amongst the delicate latticework of veins and nerves, was a device. It was a perfect, dark collar of some crystalline metal, no thicker than her thumb, but it wasn't on her skin. The image showed it embedded in her flesh, a seamless, a fusion of metal and biology. It pulsed a faint blue with her heartbeat, a stark contrast to the warm, organic glow of her own body.

Kaelen reached up, her fingers tentatively touching her throat. If she hadn't known what to look for, she would've missed it, but now that she focused, she could feel the ridge underneath her skin, a spot infinitesimally colder than the rest of her. It wasn’t a collar they had slapped on her. They had grown it into her. “What is it?” Her voice was a low growl.

“I have no idea,” Eva breathed, her face inches from the hologram, her expression a mixture of medical fascination and pure horror. “The scanner can’t identify the material. It’s got the density of a tungsten alloy but the energy signature of a chemical battery. It’s not just there, it's… integrated. It has filaments, Kae, microscopic threads wrapping around your carotid and the vagus, and a few others reaching towards your spine. It’s not just latched on; it’s plugged in.”

The sense of violation was profound, her hands clenched into fists. "A bomb? A tracker?" Some sort of device meant to guarantee she couldn't escape? Why only her? Why not both of them?

“It could be anything,” Eva admitted, her voice trembling slightly. She backed away, lowering the scanner. “The technology is… it’s not K’tharr, nor Cygnian, this is too elegant. To the scanner, the anomaly didn't even register as non-biological until I adjusted the parameters, it's almost as if whoever made it intended it to become a part of you.”

The slight tone of awe within the horror was not lost on Kaelen, but she pushed the implications of what this might mean to her in favor of something more productive, racing through the geopolitical map of the sector they'd occupied before the attack. Starbase Epsilon orbited a contested world in the Attican Traverse. Three major powers had a stake there. “If it's not the K’tharr Dominion nor Cygnian Technocracy... that only leaves the OmniGen Corporation.” Either that, or some other faction that had gone insane and opted to cross ten sectors to have guaranteed plausible deniability.

“It has to be OmniGen,” Eva said, pacing now. “This feels like them. Bleeding-edge bio-weaponry. They’re the only ones who would fuse tech and biology with this level of sophistication. And they’re the only ones with the audacity to attack the Alliance and try to make it look like a pirate raid.”

"So it's not a bomb," Kaelen's fingers rubbed against her throat. “They could've taken any human for this, it would've been easier, quieter, far less risky. Why us?"

"You are a decorated soldier."

Kaelen considered that, then shook her head, pointing at the scanner. "OmniCore and humanity haven't gotten along very well, I doubt they have many, if any, of our scientists on their payroll. Meanwhile, you're a renowned xenobiologist and have years of experience in human medicine. They left you the scanner on purpose. They want you to see the thing they put in me. This is an experiment, and you're meant to be the early alarm if something goes wrong." It was elegant in a cruel kind of way, an answer that fit too perfectly for the kind of cold greed OmniGen was known to run on. But the other side of this was just as easy to see: psychological torture. A way to impress upon them the totality of their control. They hadn't just put them into a box, they'd planted something into Kaelen neither of them had the tools to remove without killing her in the process.

The hours that followed were a long, tense exercise in futility. Eva spent her time tweaking and adjusting the scanner to try and get it to work on things that were less biological, to check the room for any possible flaws. Her initial attempts to interface with the wireless systems had proven futile, but the determination with which she was furiously navigating the menus and submenus gave Kaelen hope. The soldier, meanwhile, had taken to a more concussive approach of testing for vulnerabilities. The room appeared seamless, but there were tiny seams through which air ran freely. She tried kicking and ramming into viable candidates with little results.

Defeated for the moment, they retreated to the metal pallets that were bolted to the floor, pulling together the bedding and sheets and huddling together for comfort. Eva’s head rested on Kaelen’s shoulder, her hand tracing idle patterns on Kaelen’s arm. Kaelen remained watchful, a silent sentinel, but her arm was wrapped securely around her wife.

“What was the last thing you remember?” Eva asked, her voice a soft murmur against the low hum of the room.

“The flash,” Kaelen said. “The sound of the viewport shattering. I was trying to get to you.”

“I remember you pushing me,” Eva said. “You threw me behind a console.” There was a hint of a sad smile in her voice. “My brave, stupid soldier.”

“It’s my job to protect you,” Kaelen said simply.

“It’s our job to protect each other,” Eva corrected gently. She shifted, looking up at her face. “We’ve been in worse spots.”

“Have we?” Kaelen’s voice was grim. “The K’tharr labor camps were bad, but we had tools, there were openings, this is too sterile, and I bet they've got a dozen hidden cameras looking.” Her hand went to her throat, her thumb rubbing over the cool, hard ridge of the device, then shifted to show her middle finger at the empty air around them. "If it's an experiment, they can't afford to stop watching."

Eva’s hand covered hers. Her fingers were warm and soft. “It’s just metal, Kae. It’s a thing. It doesn’t change who you are.”

“Doesn’t it?” Kaelen’s gaze was distant. “They put a leash on me, Eva. A leash, and I don’t even know who’s holding it yet.”

They fell into a tense silence, the only sound the ever-present hum. They were a study in contrasts, a perfect partnership of mind and might. Kaelen, with her sharp, angular features, her pale hair cropped short in a military cut, and eyes the color of a winter sky, was all coiled, disciplined strength. Eva, with her warm, dark skin, her cascade of black curls, and her soft, intelligent brown eyes, was the calm, analytical center that gave that strength purpose. They had survived a dozen worlds, a handful of wars, and the endless, grinding bureaucracy of the Alliance military.

Every time, they had always found a way.

A sound, sharp and clean as shearing metal startled them out of their tense quiet. It was the sound of a lock disengaging. Kaelen was on her feet before the thought had fully formed, counting how long it took for the locks to disengage and the door to open, pulling Eva up with her. They moved as one, falling into a practiced two-body fighting stance, Kaelen taking the lead, her form a coiled spring, Eva a half-step behind and to her left, ready to pivot and flank. They faced the hairline seam in the wall, their eyes fixed on the point where the sound had originated.

Five seconds later, the vertical line widened, the door sliding silently and with impossible speed into the wall, revealing a figure that seemed to drink the pale light and fill the entire frame.

Kaelen’s blood ran cold. She recognized the species. Xylian. Mercenaries, slavers, apex predators from a world of savage gravity and endless jungle. They were legends in the Alliance, a species without borders beyond the lone planet at the edge of the galaxy, whispered about in after-action reports and terrified mess hall stories. She’d never seen one in the flesh. Holo-vids did them no justice.

He was immense, standing an easy full two heads taller than her, at least eight feet tall with a breadth of shoulder that seemed to defy the dimensions of the doorway. His body was a terrifying tapestry of corded muscle, covered in a short, dense coat of fur the color of burnt orange, slashed with stripes of midnight black. A long, thick tail, tufted at the end, swayed slowly behind him, a lazy metronome counting down their final seconds. His digitigrade legs were bent in a slight crouch, ending in massive, clawed feet that rested silently on the floor. But it was his face that held her gaze. It was a perfect, brutal fusion of feline and humanoid, with a broad, flat nose, high cheekbones, and a jaw that could crack plasteel. His eyes were the color of molten gold, sharp like a tiger's, and they fixed on Kaelen with an unnerving, intelligent stillness. He was a creature built for the sole purpose of violence.

He wore no armor, only a simple harness of black leather that crossed his massive chest and a dark, kilt-like garment that left his powerful legs bare. He was armed with nothing but the weapons nature had given him, and it was more than enough.

He took a single, silent step into the room, and the plan, their only plan, ignited.

“Now!” Kaelen snapped.

The sequence was one they had drilled a hundred times. Eva broke left, a feint designed to draw the eye, her movements quick and distracting from beyond the xylian's reach. Kaelen exploded forward and to the right, driving low, her target the outside of his knee. It was a classic takedown maneuver: buckle the joint, destroy the base, and bring the giant down. Against a K’tharr brute or a human heavy, it was a fight-ender.

Against the Xylian, it was a joke.

He didn’t even seem to register Eva’s feint. His golden eyes remained locked on Kaelen. He didn’t sidestep or block. He simply moved through her attack with a grace a creature of his size should not have been capable of. As she lunged, he flowed forward, lowering himself almost all the way to her level, his tail shooting outwards to keep his balance even as he lunged at her, a river of orange and black muscle. Both of his hands shot towards her as his whole body followed through in her direction like a furry rocket. Kaelen didn't have the time to move out of the way, she tried to block, but one of his paws slapped her arms up like they were nothing but wet noodles, the other darted straight for her throat.

They tumbled, she felt his grip on her neck, and then a faint click before she could pry him off of her.

A shock ran through her body, her muscles seizing for a fraction of a second and leaving her completely paralyzed for a blink. It was more than enough time for him to twist their fall into a roll, his massive body straddling her with ease as the hand on her throat pinned her to the floor. The impact drove the air from her lungs in a choked gasp. Stars exploded behind her eyes. Before she could even process the pain, his weight was on her, a crushing, suffocating reality. His strength was absolute, a biological vice that perfectly choked her breath yet left a fractional amount of space for a wheezing struggle to make it through. Kaelen tried to fight, but her body wasn't responding as it should have, her limbs felt leaden and heavy, her body lethargic and slow to respond.

“Get off her!” Eva’s voice was a shriek of pure rage.

From the corner of her eye, Kaelen saw a blur of motion. Eva launched herself at the Warden’s back, a feral, desperate whirlwind of fists and feet. She was a doctor, not a soldier, but she fought with the ferocity of a cornered animal, her strikes aimed at his kidneys, his spine, the side of his head, his eyes. But the xylian barely registered the attempt, eyes locked on his target as his right arm snapped back with a casual, almost lazy backhand. It wasn’t a punch; it was a swat, the kind one would use on a bothersome insect. Yet it carried enough power to send Eva flying off, hitting the far wall with a sickening thud and crumpled to the floor, dazed.

“Eva!” Kaelen roared between choked breaths. It was like trying to fight a mountain.

He shifted his weight, his knees forcing her legs open as his claws tore into her suit with the care of a surgeon, tearing fabric yet leaving skin untouched. For a heartbeat, she thought she had an opening. She tried to twist, to bring her legs up, but there was not enough strength, her muscles refusing to answer the way they should have. That was when she noticed the bulge under the loincloth. This wasn't a prelude to a fight. This was a claiming. 

Terror, cold and sharp, cut through her rage. "No," she snarled. She fought harder, even against the lethargy, digging nails into furred wrists, trying to reach for his face and gouge out his eyes. But he kept his head out of her reach, his arms too long, his fur too thick, her gestures, though desperate, lacking the true ferocity she felt burning inside. "No, you bastard, don't you dare-"

The xylian's eyes were a mix of coldness and disgust as he moved to drive into her but paused at some sort of realization that he was too large for her. His lips curled into a snarl as his ear flickered as if hearing an annoying voice, arms coiling with frustration that tightened around her throat that remaining inch, taking away her precious air, stars beginning to swim in her eyes as he rubbed his length against her exposed sex. The sensation was lost in the edges of the world going black, fingers desperately trying to pull away his grip to give herself some air.

Eva was on her feet again, staggering but driven by a love so fierce it bordered on insanity. She charged him once more, attacking from directly behind him, where his arms would have a hard time reaching. She tried to scramble to get a choke-hold on him, to grab his skull from behind and drive her fingers into his eyes. For the first time, the Warden seemed to register her presence. With Kaelen still pinned beneath him, he reached back with shocking flexibility, grabbing a fistful of Eva’s fatigues. Then, using the same infuriatingly casual strength, threw her to the ground next to Kaelen. She landed in a heap, the impact knocking the air from her lungs in a series of ragged, desperate coughs.

The soldier stared up at the monster looming over her, her vision blurred with furious tears, mouth opening in a breathless roar. His face was impassive, his golden eyes watching her with a cold, analytical curiosity. The grip on her throat lightened enough for her to be reduced to a coughing fit, her mind buzzing with the after-effects of the asphyxiation. He leaned down, his massive, feline head blotting out the pale light of the ceiling. The scent of him filled her senses, a strange, clean smell of ozone, warm fur, and something feral. His hot breath ghosted across her ear. A low, resonant wordless sound rumbled in his chest, a vibration that seemed to ignore her ears and land on the device in her throat, racing up her brain and blossoming into a singular idea.

"YIELD."

The world went black.