Collateral
The first crack of ionized air snapped over Liora Finch’s head before the sound hit her ears. Not thunder. The distinctive, whining shriek of a plasma discharge striking atmosphere. Her body froze at the diplomatic reception table, fingers curled around a glass of synthetic champagne, her mind already doing what years of translation fieldwork had trained it to do: detach from panic and analyze.
*Direction: north-northwest. Entry point: grand skylight. Weapon grade: military. Pattern: suppression fire, aimed high.*
Her hearing, always a degree too sharp, caught the sub-sonic thrum beneath the pandemonium. Kytherian power core. This wasn't random.
Chairs overturned. Delegates scrambled. Liora stayed seated, her translator’s pendant—a smooth, black stone on a silver chain—warm against her collarbone. Her gaze locked on the main doors as they slid open with a pneumatic hiss.
They didn’t burst in. They *entered*.
First came soldiers in matte-black armor that seemed to drink the light. Then, the figure.
Taller than the others, his armor a deep, blood-metal red etched with faint, circuit-like lines that pulsed with dull light. No helmet. His face was all hard, stark planes—jaw like granite, cheekbones that could cut, skin deep umber. His eyes were the worst part: pale, glacial grey, utterly empty of anything she could categorize as emotion. They swept the room like a targeting sensor.
A choked whisper from a colleague: “Varkon.”
The Butcher of the Veil Nebula. The warlord who’d ended the Century War by scorching rebellious factions into slag.
Liora forced her breath into a slow exhale. *You are a non-combatant. A linguistic asset. Useless dead, valuable alive.*
His eyes halted on her. On her, seated calmly in the center of chaos.
He crossed the room, armored boots silent on polished floor. The air around him seemed to drop ten degrees. He stopped before her table, looking down. He spoke in harsh, clipped Kytherian. “You are Liora Finch. The polyglot.”
His voice was low, gravelly, with a resonance that vibrated in her sternum. Not a question.
She met his gaze. “I am a translator. For the Terran Diplomatic Corps.” In flawless Kytherian. She saw it—a flicker, not surprise, but reassessment—in his eyes.
“You were documenting the Omega Archive fragment language signatures.”
Her secret project. She’d thought it hidden. She’d been catastrophically wrong.
“You will come with us.” Not an invitation.
A soldier moved toward her arm. Liora didn’t flinch. She looked directly at the warlord. “Alive and cognitively intact, I assume. Dead or traumatized, I can’t perform accurate semantic analysis. It’s in your interest to ensure my cooperation.” She held his stare. “I require my portable lexicon and a standard neural-linked translation suite. Your soldiers’ gear is calibrated for war-jargon, not precursors.”
Silence fell in their immediate vicinity. Soldiers looked to their general, shock bleeding through disciplined stillness. No one made demands of the Butcher.
Varkon studied her for a long, suspended moment. A muscle ticked in his jaw. Then, the faintest incline of his head. “Secure the asset. Provide the equipment.”
The soldier’s grip was firm as she was hauled to her feet and marched out. Through the ruined atrium, another soldier muttered into comms in rapid, slang-heavy battle-code. Liora’s mind latched onto the sound—a dialect she knew.
He reported the primary objective secured. But he used a verb form that meant *secured for transport*, not *elimination*. A small detail. She also noted the error in his tactical noun classification—a common mistake among non-native speakers. Proof they were rushing.
She filed it away.
The ship they were taken to was a dagger in the sky, all sharp angles. The interior was cold, functional metal and dim blue light. They didn’t take her to a cell. They took her to a sterile room that was part laboratory, part holding area. They left her with a new, sealed translation suite—battered, military issue—and a warning about ‘corrective measures’ for tampering.
Alone, Liora sank onto the hard bench. Her hands were shaking. She squeezed them into fists until her knuckles went white. The smooth stone of her pendant pulsed, a steady, warm rhythm against her skin. A comfort she’d always imagined was her own body’s heat. She thought of the last audio file her mother had sent from the deep-space research station, years ago, before the static swallowed the signal: a lullaby in three dead languages, a strange, looping melody. *Focus on the language. The language is the anchor.*
Her goal: survive. Her method: be indispensable. Her path: understand why a warlord wanted a linguist who knew dead words.
Hours later, the door hissed open. Him. Alone.
Varkon filled the small room with his presence. He’d removed his armored gauntlets, revealing strong-looking hands. He held a data-slate.
“The Terran delegation is being held,” he said, no preamble. “Their fate depends on your utility.”
He tossed the slate onto the bench. She picked it up. It displayed a complex star-map in archaic script. Her breath hitched. An Omega Archive fragment. At the bottom, a countdown timer in galactic units: **71:14:08**.
Below the timer, in Kytherian military notation, a list of assets. Her eyes scanned down. There, ranked as a ‘Phase-Two Strategic Asset’: **Liora Finch. Terra. Translator-Primate.**
And beside it, another label, glowing faintly: **Bond-Pair Candidate (Unverified).**
The cold in the room sharpened into something that cut. Bond-Pair. She’d heard the rumors. The ancient imperial tradition of binding key personnel through genetic and neurological locks. A soul-brand. An inescapable leash.
Her gaze snapped up to his. His pale eyes were watching her, reading the horror she couldn’t hide.
“Candidate?” she whispered.
Varkon’s expression was unmoved. “Potential. The Archive fragment requires a multi-dimensional interpreter. The bond ensures… reliability. We will know if it is viable soon.”
He turned to leave. At the door, he paused, not looking back. “Learn the war-codes, Finch. You’ll need them.”
The door sealed behind him.
Liora stared at the slate, at the countdown, at her name reduced to a line item beside a threat she couldn’t comprehend. Her fists unclenched. The shaking had stopped. A new feeling rose, cold and sharp.
They thought she was a key. A tool.
They hadn’t considered that a key could also be a weapon. And a tool, in the right hands—or forced into the wrong ones—could be used to dismantle the entire machine.
The countdown hit 71:13:45.
Her war had just begun.
