Page 6 of Fated to the Dragon Alien
Cerani was a different sort of prisoner. Not for the first time, he wondered what she’d done to land herself in the Axis penal system. Some of those “settled territories” had been around for mig-cycles. For all he knew, she’d been born into one. Her records were missing. That, in itself, wasn’t odd. Plenty of Axis prisoners had incomplete files.
He sighed and stared at the flickering requisition board across from the console. Rations were late in arriving. Power routing in tunnel D still dropped below standard levels. Another tremor and those supports would have to be shored up with materials they didn’t have.
Stavian cracked his neck. Something needed to give.
But nother. She couldn’t break. He simply wouldn’t allow it.
He turned to the console behind him and entered a quick command, making the terminal doors slide shut and locking everyone else out. No one needed to know Cerani was now classified under his personal watch.
He pulled his wrist comm out from under his sleeve and keyed a direct channel to Mech Control.
“Prioritize recalibration sweeps to the suits from E-level. Full toxicology check,” he said.
“Orders came from Med Command yesterday,” the comm replied. “We’re not flagged for override.”
“You are now,” Stavian said. “Route the sweep through my clearance. I’ll handle the report fallout.”
“Understood.”
He ended the feed. As he walked the hallway toward the lift, a figure stepped out from the wall. Lieutenant Darven was his second-in-command. The Etoki male was tall, pale-skinned, with eyes dark as coal. He was one hundred percent loyal to the Axis. He and Stavian tolerated each other, barely.
“You’re overscheduling 630-I,” Darven said.
“Am I?”
“You extended her shift without reporting it to Central. Is she being punished? Has she committed an infraction?”
Eh, the last thing Stavian wanted was Darven thinking Cerani was a disciplinary problem. “No. She’s an efficient miner. Keeps the quotas clean,” Stavian said.
“You care about quotas now?”
Stavian paused, biting back an unnecessary insult. “I care about keeping miners alive in a place designed to kill them. 630-I can take the extra work. The others can’t.”
Darven said nothing.
Stavian stepped onto the lift and hit the button for the lower-level command bay. As the platform dropped, he closed his eyes for just a second and let everything narrow down—the whine of the lift, the metal walls around him, the flickering panel overhead. It was quiet here. Nowhere else in this facility gave him that.
Darven hadn’t said so, but Stavian knew the male would report it. Probably not now, probably not directly, but someone would hear about Cerani being flagged for extra shifts underhis authorization. That wasn’t the kind of thing that got ignored forever. Nothing here ever stayed quiet for long.
The lift slowed, then locked into place with a mechanical thud. The doors split open, revealing Lower Command—bare steel walls, three monitoring stations, and one mech stationed for coordination scans. Everything down here pulsed at a different rhythm, heavy with power cycles and bleed-off heat from the surface converters.
He stepped off, scanned his wrist panel at the terminal, and kicked on an encrypted interface.
The sector map pulled up again. He zoomed into tunnel set E. Five suit sweeps were already running. All five units populated: weak radiation leaks at the clavicle seals, pressure faults on two knee joints, and one was marked with a ruptured respirator membrane that hadn’t been caught on entry.
Half a unit from the last shift had been exposed.
He didn’t swear. Didn’t blink. He added those logs directly to the Axis queue with a red flag under General Systems Notice. If he could prove that the medic team failed protocol, it would give him just enough leverage to pause future rotations without Central pulling him from his post. It was a narrow window. Risky. But better than digging another mass grave next to air lock 3.
He exited the suit scan, tapped into Cerani’s imaging feed again, but paused before it opened. He tapped out.
No. Stars, he needed to get a hold of himself. He’d already spent too long staring at her metrics, trying to make them make sense.
Instead, he opened his secure ledger, created a new file, labeled it “Anomaly 630-I,” and keyed in a manual entry: No Axis flags, No visible code. Just the word “Pending.” He rubbed his temples and stared at the screen. If the stimulant injections that kept most supervisors and prisoners upright on FK-22Rhelped with pressure headaches, he’d consider taking them. But Cerani—she had none of those standard support boosts. There wasn’t a single dose logged for her. No immuno-boosts. No cell-repair stimulants. Nothing to explain how she was thriving here.
He rubbed his thumb against his jaw, thinking. Could it be environmental mutation? Some genetic quirk that let her reprocess psiak the way his body did? No. There were protocols for that kind of screening—nothing in her intake file showed up flagged. Not even in the fine print.
Unless someone buried the data or missed it completely.
