Under the microscope, at four hundred times magnification, the speck in the ice core resolves into something Elara has never seen in seventeen years of xenobiology: a structure, crystalline and impossibly regular, frozen mid-division three kilometers down in the ice of Europa. She is still recording the words 'possibly biogenic' when the breach klaxon goes off.

Something is coming through the walls of Europa Station. They look like wolves, if wolves stood seven feet at the shoulder, carved through station-grade alloy with their claws and watched her with eyes that burn ice-blue. The one that reaches her first changes shape as it walks, into a man with tousled sandy hair, a wolf tattooed around his bicep and a grin like he's enjoying a joke she hasn't heard. 'Doc,' he says, 'you picked the wrong moon.'

She wakes gagged and bound in the hold of a ship that smells of musk and pine. The sandy-haired one, Rafe, greets her like an old friend. The other, Kael, is six and a half feet of braided black hair, old scars and a silver torque, and he doesn't smile at all. He hardly moves. Elara tells herself to think like a scientist and catalog what she knows, which isn't much. What she can't stop cataloging is the weight of Kael's attention, pressing against her skin.

The Wolfpack Protocol

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