"My wife."

Jayden stared at the entity in front of him.

She was humanoid for the most part.

She was tall, lavender skinned, the color sitting somewhere between lilac and ash depending on how the emergency strip lighting caught her, and it caught her differently every time she moved even slightly. Large dark eyes currently fixed on the man rather than on Jayden, like Jayden was simply not the most important thing in the room. A tail extended from the base of her spine, thick at the root and tapering as it went, the same lavender as the rest of her, the tip moving in a slow unconscious arc. Her frame was lean but nothing about it suggested fragile. She had armor on, nothing Jayden recognized, one panel along her left side cracked in a fresh split that looked recent.

Whatever hit this ship hit her too.

Jayden opened his mouth.

Then Lila came back in.

She came through the gap in the wall she had been sent through, moving fast and low, blaster already raised, and she put the muzzle at the back of the woman’s head before anyone had fully processed she was there.

The tail stopped moving.

"Stand down," Jayden said.

Lila looked at him over the woman’s shoulder. "She threw me through a wall."

"Stand down."

"Jayden. She threw me. Through a wall."

"She hasn’t moved since I turned around," Jayden said. "Look at her."

Lila looked. At the complete stillness of the woman. At the way she still hadn’t looked at the blaster, hadn’t acknowledged it, was just standing there with those dark eyes on the man like she had decided the outcome of this moment already and was waiting for everyone else to catch up.

Three seconds.

Lila held the blaster exactly where it was for a long moment, her eyes going from Jayden to the back of the woman’s head to Calder and back to Jayden, running the calculation of how much she trusted Jayden’s read on a situation where she had personally been thrown into a wall thirty seconds ago.

Lila lowered the blaster. Not holstered it. Lowered it. Everyone in the room understood the difference.

The tail started moving again.

The man stepped away from the wall and put himself in the space between Lila and the woman, not aggressively, just present, the body language of someone who had done this before.

"She won’t attack unless you give her a reason," he said. "She doesn’t do things without reason."

"Good to know," Lila said, in the tone of someone who had been thrown through a wall by those same principles of reason and was keeping that information close.

Jayden looked at the man properly for the first time. The adrenaline was doing something temporary for the exhaustion but the signs of it were everywhere. The hollows under his eyes. The faint tremor in his hands when they weren’t gripping something. The gear on his frame that had been repaired so many times the original material was barely part of the story anymore.

"Who are you," Jayden said.

The man looked at him. Then at Lila. Then back at Jayden.

"Renn Calder," he said. "Sergeant. EDF third deployment division."

"Jayden Smoake," Jayden said. "S ranked awakened. Eclipse and task force joint operation. EDF adjacent, it’s complicated."

Calder looked at him. "Eclipse."

"Yeah."

Nothing. No flicker. No recognition at all.

"Eclipse," Jayden said again, slower.

Still nothing.

He looked at Lila.

Lila looked back with the flat expression of someone whose suspicion had just been confirmed out loud.

This man had no idea what Eclipse was. And you had to be genuinely, comprehensively unreachable to miss Eclipse at this point. The Sirius Prime footage had gone everywhere. The eastern Cardinal. Kelvin narrating a category four deletion on a Tuesday afternoon like it was sports commentary. Noah’s live broadcast to two billion people. Eclipse was not something you missed if you had been anywhere near a functioning communication network in the last two years.

"How long have you been out here," Jayden said.

"What’s the standard date," Calder said.

Jayden told him.

Calder’s jaw tightened. He was quiet for a moment. "Three years," he said. "Give or take."

Lila made a small sound.

"We weren’t drifting the whole time," Calder said quickly, the reflex of someone who didn’t want the wrong picture forming. "The ship situation is recent."

"Okay," Jayden said. "Start from the beginning. What are you doing out here."

Calder looked at the floor. Then at the woman briefly. Then back at Jayden like he had decided something.

"My squadron was on a delivery run," he said. "Resource and aide package for a newly contacted civilization in the outer sectors. Sector adjacent to the Valdris Expanse, close enough that the travel time made sense for the contract." He paused. "First contact with these people had been established maybe eight months before we got there. We were the second team in. Three days. Drop the supplies, do the assessment, file the report, leave."

"What happened," Jayden said.

"Harbinger scouts hit us while we were still on the surface," Calder said. "No warning. No build up. Just suddenly happening all at once. The whole squadron scrambled. I got separated in the engagement, made it to my ship, took a hit on the way out that knocked out most of my systems." He stopped. "I was in my suit in open space with enough power to keep the oxygen running and not much else. I don’t know what happened to the rest of my squadron." He said the last part carefully, the way people said things they had made a decision about, to say it plainly and not orbit around it. "There’s a chance none of them made it."

The room was quiet for a moment. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

"So who is she," Jayden said, nodding toward the woman.

"She’s from the planet we were sent to deliver aid to," Calder said. "Her people. That’s who EDF had established contact with. That’s whose ship this is."

Jayden looked around the compartment. At the state of everything in it. At the wiring hanging from the ceiling, the scoring on the walls, the general condition of a vessel that had been through something serious and had not recovered from it.

He looked at the woman.

He looked at Calder.

"So this ship," Jayden said, "belongs to the alien."

"I am standing here," a voice said.

Lila’s blaster came up immediately.

The woman was looking directly at Jayden. She had spoken without being addressed, without warning, and the words had come through perfectly clear, flat and even, stripped of whatever texture the original had underneath them.

Then Jayden saw it.

On her belt, half hidden behind the cracked armor panel at her side. A small rectangular device, green indicator light steady on its face. EDF manufacture. Standard issue for first contact deployment teams.

A translator.

"Lila," he said.

Lila clocked it a half second after he did. The blaster came down.

"From where I stand," the woman said, her eyes still on Jayden, completely unbothered by the blaster that had just been pointed at her skull, "you are the aliens."

Jayden looked at her for a moment.

"Yeah," he said. "Fair enough." He pulled a crate over and sat down. "Tell me about your people."

She looked at him. The tail moved at its slow rhythm. Then she sat, and Calder came and sat beside her, and Lila stayed near the entrance with the blaster at her side and said nothing.

"We are Vel’kai," the woman said. "My name is Le’anna."

Through his earpiece Kelvin made a sharp sound. "Say that again," Kelvin said.

"She said Vel’kai," Jayden said quietly into the comm.

The comm went briefly chaotic before Noah’s voice cut through everything else. "Keep talking to them," Noah said. "Don’t stop."

Jayden looked at Le’anna. "Go on," he said.

"We lived outside the conflict," she said. "For a long time. The harbingers, the dying, the wars moving between star systems, none of it reached us. We knew it existed. We were careful about our place." She paused. "Six years ago it found us regardless. Three harbinger ships. The first attack destroyed two of our outer settlements before we understood what was happening. We had weapons. We had people trained to use them."

She stopped.

"It didn’t matter," Calder said quietly.

"We reached out for help," Le’anna continued. "There is a council of species in our region. Old. Powerful. We went to them." The next part came out flat, word for word, like something memorized because it had needed to be exact. "They refused. They said we had chosen to collaborate with humans and that made us the same problem as humans in their eyes. That engaging harbingers in our sector on behalf of a species that had aligned itself with humanity was not something they were willing to do."

"So EDF support was the only option," Jayden said.

"EDF support was days away," Le’anna said. "We sent this ship to find more of it. To find whoever Renn’s people would send." She looked at the cracked panel at her side. "Harbinger scouts found us three months into the journey. We have been coasting since."

"Three months," Lila said.

"Approximately," Le’anna said.

The room was quiet for a moment.

Jayden looked between them both. At the state of Calder, three years written on his face and his hands and his gear. At Le’anna, the cracked armor, the steadiness of someone who had been holding something together through the kind of circumstances that didn’t care whether you were ready for them.

"Somewhere in all of that," Jayden said, "you two got married."

Calder looked at Le’anna.

"I was drifting in my suit," he said. "Alone. Long enough that I had stopped counting days. You spend that long in open space with nothing but the sound of your own breathing and the things that felt complicated before stop being complicated." He looked at her. "She found me. Her people brought me back." He shrugged with the ease of a man completely at peace with something other people might spend a long time arguing about. "Everything after that was pretty simple."

"It was not a traditional ceremony," Le’anna said.

"No," Calder said. "But it counted."

Then he leaned over and kissed her and it was not a small kiss. Both his hands went to her face, her tail wrapped around his ankle, and her tongue went into his mouth and the translator did not render whatever sound she made into anything, it just let it through as sound, warm and entirely unbothered by the two soldiers sitting three feet away who had not asked for any of this.

Jayden looked at the wall to his left. There was a partially dislodged panel there and he studied it with profound professional interest.

Lila looked at the ceiling. She found it very interesting.

The venting hiss from somewhere in the ship continued.

"Right," Jayden said.

"Mm," Lila said.

They waited.

---

The corridor outside was the same red lit wreckage it had been on the way in. Jayden and Lila stood far enough from the compartment door to talk without being heard.

"You buy it," Jayden said.

Lila looked back toward the door. "The damage on this ship is real," she said. "We walked through it. The scoring on the outer sections, the way the hull breached, the direction the structural failures went." She crossed her arms. "Harbinger scouts do exactly that. The profiles match."

"And them," Jayden said.

"He doesn’t know Eclipse," Lila said. "Three years off grid based on what he said and the state of him." She paused. "That’s either the most committed cover in history or it’s true."

"She came out here looking for more EDF support," Jayden said. "Their ship got hit on the way. They’ve been coasting for three months on top of whatever the three years before that did to both of them." He looked at the compartment door. "If there was hostile intent in any of this they’ve done a genuinely terrible job of it."

"Or an excellent job," Lila said.

"Yeah," Jayden said. "Or that."

He clicked the comm open. "Noah."

"Yeah," Noah said immediately.

"You heard all of it."

"All of it," Noah said. "Sit tight."

---

On the Eternal Pyre the war room had not quieted since Kelvin heard Vel’kai through the comm feed and it was not quieting now.

"Two systems," Kelvin said, all four hands occupied, auxiliary arms pulling data while his main hands worked the display. "Her planet based on the coordinates Jayden relayed sits two systems from the blue world. Two systems from where Kruel has been for two years." He looked at the room. "She has been living next door to whatever Kruel has been building out there."

"Or someone who knows we’re coming sent a convincing story into our path," Lucas said.

Sophie looked at him. "You think someone staged this."

"I think we’re a month from the Valdris Expanse and a vessel with two people carrying exactly the information we need drifted into our path," Lucas said. "I’m not saying ignore them. I’m saying don’t stop asking the question just because the answers sound right."

Diana had been going through the sensor data quietly while everyone else talked. "The hull damage is consistent with harbinger scout weaponry," she said, not looking up. "I’ve been comparing the energy residue against other crash site records. The breach patterns, the way the structural failure propagated through the frame." She looked up. "That ship got hit. That part is real."

Lucas shook his head slightly.

Kelvin caught it. "What."

"Real damage doesn’t tell us who put them in our path," Lucas said. "Those are two different questions."

"A ship with no functioning propulsion goes where physics takes it," Kelvin said. "We’re the ones moving toward the Valdris Expanse. The timing is ours."

"I know that," Lucas said.

"Then what are you actually saying," Kelvin said, direct, wanting the real concern on the table.

"I’m saying we don’t close the question," Lucas said. "That’s all."

"Nobody’s closing it," Noah said.

Seraleth had been quiet through most of it. "The council refused them," she said, "specifically because her people collaborated with humans. That made them enemies in the council’s eyes." She looked around the table. "If she had any connection to that council, any reason to be working with them, that is a very strange story to volunteer."

"Unless it’s exactly what you’d say if you wanted to seem disconnected from them," Lucas said.

Seraleth looked at him steadily. "At some point," she said, "suspicion becomes its own kind of blindness."

Lucas held her gaze. Then looked away.

"Kelvin," Noah said. "If we bring her across can you run a thorough enough scan."

"Biological, technological, anything transmittable," Kelvin said. "Thirty minutes with the right equipment and yes."

"Then that’s the call," Noah said. "Jayden, Lila, full sweep of the vessel first. Every section. Then bring them both across. Kelvin runs his checks before they go anywhere in the fleet." He looked at Lucas. "Anything comes back wrong we deal with it then."

Lucas nodded once.

Aurelius had been standing at the far end of the display through all of it, arms folded, watching the conversation the way he watched things that were still forming. He looked at the sector map. At the blue planet. At the coordinates Le’anna had described. At the distance between them.

"Bring them aboard," he said. "Run every check Kelvin needs to run." He looked at the room. "And then sit that woman down and ask her everything she knows about what has been happening in that part of space." He looked at the display one more time. "If her coordinates are right, her planet sits close enough to where Kruel has been that she may know things we cannot get any other way. Things that change how we go in."

Nobody argued with that.

---

On the damaged vessel, in a section of the ship that Jayden and Lila had walked straight past without stopping, something was glowing.

Green. Small. Pulsing slow and steady behind a panel in the wall, hidden behind everything else, barely visible unless you were looking directly at it.

Nobody had been looking directly at it.

It kept pulsing anyway.