THE YIELD | VIK-TO'RIA

VIKTORIA

It is a galactic legacy, they had claimed. An invaluable strategic alliance for House van Bergen.

The journey here had been an absolute nightmare. Injections before every single jump, followed by violent vomiting fits afterward.

In hindsight, the stasis pod had been the most pleasant part of the entire ordeal. Waking up, puking my guts out, only to find out it had all been for nothing.

That was the real gut punch.

Nobody had bothered to mention that Warlord Voss possessed the emotional spectrum of a freshly poured block of concrete, was already spoken for, and that the other warlords looked at me like a particularly irritating pest that had been dragged across their polished obsidian floors by mistake.

“The nutritional value of that preparation approaches zero,” a deep, resonantly polished voice cut in from behind me. “You are expending organic resources merely to rearrange molecules into an aesthetic formation that offers no metabolic yield whatsoever. A quintessential human inefficiency.”

I squeezed my eyes shut for a brief second before turning around slowly. That dessert had been my last-ditch effort to win Voss over after all.

Him again.

I had already endured his condescending stares during my first lunch with Voss. The universe really wasn’t sparing me a single indignity.

Standing beside me was Commander Solon. The very man Lady Mei had described as coming from a house just as arrogant as her own.

A total waste of time, a warlord who refused to associate with humans. She would know. My family sourced all their intelligence from hers.

By now, I was past the point of caring. I was just putting on enough of a performance in case my family still saw an ounce of utility in me.

His pale-blue skin held a cold, sharp sheen, laced with the same intricate, silver geometric glyphs as Voss’s. He was massive, standing with his legs planted wide, wearing his arrogance like ceremonial armor.

His piercing, ice-blue eyes bore into me with sheer contempt. It wasn’t anything new. Everyone in my family looked at me the exact same way whenever I made a misstep.

You grow numb to it eventually.

“It is a dessert, Commander Solon. Its efficiency lies in savoring it, not calculating it,” I replied, forcing my voice into the polished, velvety cadence drilled into me since childhood.

I tucked a stray strand of blonde hair behind my ear and folded my hands neatly over the front of my red silk gown.

“It isn’t about nutritional yield. It’s about indulgence. A concept that, in your world, is probably classified as a system failure.”

“Indulgence is a biochemical illusion designed to reward primitive survival instincts,” he retorted with clinical indifference.

He stepped closer, and with every heavy, soundless stride he took, my stomach knotted a fraction tighter.

“Naturally,” I said, glancing past him toward Voss, who was standing beside Vespera.

Lucky girl.

This whole endeavor was completely pointless anyway.

“Subject designation: Vik-to’ria van Bergen. Current operational status: Attempting to solicit a warlord. Identified specialization: Nutritional science. A discipline dedicated to decorating sustenance, it appears.”

I felt the heat rising in my cheeks.

Breathe, Vik. Remember rule number one.

Never let anyone see that you’re unraveling and have no earthly idea what you’re actually doing here.

“It’s pronounced Viktoria,” I corrected smoothly. “A single, short word. My family -”

“Your family dispatched a subpar humanoid specimen to this station under the naive assumption that you could bait Warlord Voss with oral nutrient variations,” he cut in, cold as vacuum.

I would have phrased it differently, but the math checked out. They sent me because I wasn’t married yet, but was old enough to be traded off.

He stopped barely a food away. The sheer thermal heat radiating from his massive blue frame directly contradicted his frostbitten demeanor in a way that made my blood boil.

“Commander Voss commands an armada. He does not require a cook with a degree in decorative molecular biology.”

“I am not a cook!” I hissed, the pristine facade of the well-bred aristocratic daughter cracking straight down the middle. “I graduated from the elite academy in Geneva! I understand the biochemical composition of ...”

“You are inadequate,” he stated simply. It didn’t even carry the inflection of an insult. To him, it was merely an objective mathematical equation. A cold fact.

2 + 2 = Viktoria is worthless.

“A miscalculation on Earth’s part. And you are standing in my way.”

He looked right past me toward Voss. I had spent the last two hours positioning myself in Voss’s line of sight, timing every smile, and playing my words like a seasoned diplomatic chess player. And this armored blue bureaucrat had just dismantled the entire board in three sentences.

Because he was right. Before I boarded the shuttle, my father had looked me dead in the eye and delivered an ultimatum with zero ambiguity:

“Do not return without an alliance, Viktoria. You are merely one of fourteen children. Disappoint us, and Earth will have no place left for you.”

There was no return ticket. They had frozen all my accounts before my transport even cleared orbit. If Commander Voss didn’t claim me, I was stranded. On a frozen alien rock. With a degree in food science.

“Step aside,” Solon commanded softly, yet with a resonance of pure authority that made the ambient air hum. “I have tactical debriefs to conduct with the Commander. Your presence decreases the efficiency index of this room by fourteen percent.”

I didn’t budge. I glared up at him, my jaw clenched so tight my teeth cut into my inner lip.

“No,” I whispered.

Solon paused. His eyes narrowed, and the glyphs along his throat began to ignite. “What did you say?”

“I said no,” I repeated, the self-pity in my chest giving way to a sudden surge of pure, desperate fury. “Walk around me, Commander Solon. Or is your exquisitely efficient body incapable of taking two paces to the left?”

For a split second, absolute silence fell between us. Solon didn’t move. But the air around us turned suffocatingly hot in an instant.

Now I understood what Vespera had meant when she said a commander’s core could set your clothes on fire. The heat radiating off him was so blistering I almost wanted to tear the silk right off my skin.

The silver glyphs on his neck flared in an unstable, bone-white flash.

“Your verbal latency is remarkable for an organism with such a limited neural network,” he countered, his voice dripping with condescension. “However, your obstinance does not correlate with your actual utility. You are still obstructing my path. Step aside.”

“I am not obstructing anything,” I retorted, deliberately stepping closer until the insolent heat pouring from his pale-blue skin became nearly unbearable. “I am interacting. I am networking. The necessary preliminaries before signing treaties. But I suppose your spectrum is so overheated from running logic protocols that you can no longer distinguish between diplomacy and an obstacle.”

His ice-blue eyes narrowed into slits. He leaned down slightly, bringing his mouth inches from my face.

“You are not networking, Vik-to’ria,” he clarified with a surgical precision that made me want to scream in his face. “You are broadcasting desperate biochemical signals toward Commander Voss. It is a biological tragedy. Your species expends sixty percent of its energetic reserves on mating rituals, only to discover your genetic compatibility is near zero. Efficiency rating: Pathetic. You are inadequate.”

“Oh, believe me, I wouldn’t test the compatibility of your stomach with a cup of coffee,” I spat back.

My heart was hammering against my ribs. A volatile mix of raw fury and the creeping terror that he would see right through me, that he’d realize I was running on empty.

“An irrelevant analogy. Coffee is a toxic roast designed to artificially stimulate your nervous system, masking the perpetual exhaustion of your defective physiology. Much like this exchange.” He looked down his nose at me with clinical detachment. “Your stress markers are spiking. Your heart rate is at one hundred and ten beats per minute. You are on the verge of an emotional system failure.”

“I am perfectly calibrated, Commander Solon,” I lied. I could feel Lady Mei’s gaze burning into the back of my neck. I could feel the crushing weight of my father’s expectations closing around my throat. If I failed here, I was done for. But I refused to be humiliated by a walking, blue calculator.

I leveled a look at him that was as dripping with aristocratic disdain as anything my parents had ever taught me. Then I smiled a cold, sweet, lethal smile.

“You know what? You are completely right. This conversation is drastically lowering my personal efficiency.” I took a step back, smoothing the front of my silk dress with a theatrical sweep of my hand. “I sense a substantial accumulation of excess tension. Since my emotional system crash is imminent according to your calculations, I am going to take the only logical course of action.”

Commander Solon raised an eyebrow. “Which would be?”

I tilted my head, looking past his broad shoulder toward a cluster of alien officers, and let my voice drop into a soft, sultry purr.

“I am going to turn around, walk over to your foot soldiers, and blow off some steam. My physiology demands immediate, intensive relaxation. And they look perfectly capable of handling the task. The path is all yours. Choke on your efficiency! I’m going to be busy.”

I spun on my heel, prepared to deliver the most scathing exit of my entire life.

I made it exactly half a step.

The next thing I felt was a massive, scalding-hot hand locking around my upper arm. The grip didn’t crush me, but it was absolute iron.

Solon yanked me back around.

When my eyes snapped up to meet his, the icy blue was completely gone. His pupils were blazing with a blinding, searing white light, and the silver glyphs across his broad chest pulsed with such violent intensity that the sight made my head spin.

The air between us crackled, charged with a kinetic static that raised every single hair on my arms.

I wasn’t the only one who had just lost control.