The drones' engine pitch changes. They've found something.
His jaw tightens, markings pulsing darker. "I should tell you. The drones are here for me. The facility I escaped from, three months ago." His voice is flat, stripped of everything except the fact. "You were bringing cargo to that place. And now you're trapped in a cave with the most wanted being on this planet while the guard force closes in above us."
The drones' scanning beams sweep in tighter and tighter patterns. The predators start digging at the root cave entrance, claws scraping stone.
In the suffocating dark, pressed against a seven-foot alien who radiates heat like a reactor core, I run my options. No ship. No beacon. No AI. Forty-seven kilometers from where I'm supposed to be, with apex predators outside and corporate security overhead and mysterious cargo that was alive and trying to break free the last time I checked.
Mother is going to be so disappointed.
2
What Stays Buried
Horgox
Thedronespullnortheast.Toward the crash site. Seeking bodies, wreckage, cargo.
The courier is still pressed against my chest, her heartbeat fast beneath my palm where it rests over her mouth. The root cave presses tight around us, bark and soil and the sharp edges of stone against my back. Two threats receding, and a human female I should have left in the undergrowth.
I didn't. That decision will likely kill us both.
ApexCorp's retrieval teams are methodical. Three months of observing their search protocols have taught me the intervals, the weaknesses, the gaps in their coverage. They stopped attempting active extraction after the first month; the canyon system is too defensible, the jungle too hostile, and I am too expensive to replace if a retrieval team takes casualties. So they monitor instead. Drones on rotation, surveillance patterns I can predict to the minute. The planet is the cage; they are content to wait until I move somewhere accessible or until attrition finishes what their teams couldn't.
The courier trembles against me, and my tactical assessment adjusts. Not fear. Adrenaline crash. Her body is processing the sprint through hostile terrain, the collision, the sudden confinement. She's still tracking the shadows through the roots, still alert, still functional. Most beings in her situation would have locked up or started screaming by now.
She's doing neither. Inconvenient, because it would be simpler if she were useless.
I intended to stay hidden when the ship screamed through the atmosphere. Hunters arrive in gunships with targeting arrays and suppression grids, not in battered courier vessels trailing smoke and shedding hull panels. I watched from the upper canopy as the yellow ship fought for altitude and lost, watched the pilot wrestle with controls that were clearly failing, watched the crash tear a wound through the jungle half a kilometre long.
The pilot should have died.
Instead, twenty minutes later, a small human female came stumbling out of the wreckage and into the undergrowth with all the stealth of a cargo loader at full throttle. Talking to herself. Fumbling with a dead beacon. Completely oblivious to the pack circling her position.
I should have let the jungle sort her out. Three months of surviving alone by trusting nothing and no one, and the tactically sound choice was to remain invisible. She could be bait. ApexCorp would absolutely deploy a convincing decoy; they've spent enough credits hunting me.
But bait doesn't run like prey. Bait moves with purpose, with awareness of the trap it's setting. This courier ran blind, branches tearing at her face, roots catching her feet, the pack closing from three directions while she had no idea.
So I caught her. And now I'm pressed into a root cave with a stranger's heartbeat against my ribs and years under ApexCorp's control of survival instinct telling me I've made a catastrophic miscalculation.
The predators haven't left. They know what they cornered. But their attention splits between us and the receding engine whine above, and that divided focus is the first useful development in the last hour.
The courier's breathing has steadied. Her pulse still runs fast, but the ragged edge of panic has smoothed into something more controlled. When I ease my hand from her mouth, she doesn't scream. Doesn't bolt. She turns her head and looks up at me with an expression I cannot immediately categorize.
"So," she whispers. "Escaped gladiator."
Direct. No preamble, no hysterics, no negotiation. Statement of fact, delivered like she's confirming a cargo manifest.
"How did you know?"
"My boss warned me. ApexCorp facility in this sector reported a security breach three months ago. Varkaani gladiator, prison-grade containment failure." Her voice is barely above a breath, but steady. "She told me to dump my cargo and run if I encountered you."
"Wise counsel."
"Terrible timing, though." The corner of her mouth twitches. She's pressed against a fugitive in a hole in the ground with apex predators outside, and she's making jokes. "I'm guessing the drones aren't doing a routine wildlife survey."
"No."
"And those lovely blue lines on your skin aren't decorative."
