Eban's Command: Scifi Alien Abduction Romance (Science Fiction Alien Romance) (Survival Wars Book 2) (3 page)

And now? Now, she had given the whole world the formula for
her growth serum. The mixture accessed the same potential in plants that she
had noticed in the mutation, and sped up growth to four times the natural rate.
Food prices were noticeably lowering, and poor areas were suddenly not quite as
poor. She supposed that not having to spend as much money on things to eat
meant that there were more savings to put towards fixing windows, taking care
of yards, replacing what broke.

And that was simply how it should be, she thought with
contentment, lowering onto her knees and shuffling over to pluck a weed from
the sweet-scented soil at the edge of her vegetable garden. The world often
balanced itself out. Things ran in circles, highs and lows. And she was blessed
to have been involved in it.

But, while her mother would have simply ridden through the
good times and enjoyed the success for what it was, Saffron was a bit more
practical than that thanks to her business-minded father. She had invested
immediately at the very start of all this, and watched her bank account balloon
over and over.

That was how she had come to be here. This life was still
new, barely a month gone by. Her fields were still overgrown and unplowed for
most of the length of her property, as this ranch had sat alone and empty for
quite a bit before she took over it. She was hopeful however, humming softly
under her breath as she worked at the garden. Things would turn out exactly as
they were meant to.

Then, it came.

There was a sound like an airplane taking off, but in
reverse. A flash of light like a bolt of lightning ripped through the sky, and
then the ground heaved beneath her feet. Saffron cried out and fell over,
unable to keep her footing. Panic flooded through her body and she tucked her
head down against the ground, grass tickling against her cheek. Her breath
shook, and so did the world again.

Her mind raced.
An earthquake? A plane crash?

There was a flush of heat, and then nothing but whipping
wind and silence.

Hardly daring to breathe, she looked up and saw it. It was
out in her field, something straight from a cheap science fiction movie. A disk
of curved metal, with stubby winglets out to the side, was halfway buried in
the top of her overgrown field. Whatever it was had slammed into the apex of a
hill, smoking faintly far above her.

This is a dream, right?
she thought, so baffled deep
in the core of herself that she didn’t even know what to make of all that
confusion. There were only so many explanations for this. Was it some sort of
secret military vehicle? Apparently there were quite a lot of those.

If so, it was dangerous and she had best just stay here
until someone came to take care of it.

But, there might be someone inside. It looked like such a
hard crash, could the occupant even still be alive in there? And if they were
alive and suffering, she couldn’t just sit around and do nothing. She wasn’t
that kind of hippy.

Sitting up, Saffron grabbed her headband from where it had
fallen onto the grass and pulled it back on. The strange metal contraption sat
utterly silent, windowless. It was covered in dull lights, and was also intact
as near as she could tell. That was perhaps the most astonishing thing to her.
That little ship had not only crashed hard enough to pierce the stony soil of
her unplowed fields, it had probably exploded, and yet it sat there looking
like a solid and unbothered piece of artwork.

Actually, as she hurried over, slipping and sliding on loose
stones in her designer boots, grabbing at stumps to catch herself, she realized
that she couldn’t see any openings at all. With the sunlight glaring so harshly
against the metal she couldn’t really tell, but it all seemed to have been cast
from a single mold. No way in or out.

What’s going on?

As she drew closer, she heard a faint whirring but it
quickly fell away under the wind. An engine of some sort, she recognized. Then
she was up the side of the hill, standing on the crest and looking at the
fallen object from only a few feet away.

It was larger than she thought. It was longer than her and
nearly as fall, looking flattened and yet oddly birdlike. And it was warm,
emanating pulses of heat from deep within. The smoke had stopped, though.

“Is anyone in there?” Saffron said loudly, closing the last
few steps and laying her hands on the metal hood. “Can anyone hear me?”

Suddenly, a sleek circle appeared on the top of the object.
She snapped her hands back, watching with an open mouth and wide eyes as the
circle appeared first as a slender line and then darkened before lowering in on
itself slightly to form a panel. The panel slid into the rest of the roof,
allowing her a brief moment to realize just how thick the metal was –at least
as thick as her hand on this part- and then someone stood up.

 It was a man, but not just any man.

He was dark-eyed and fair-haired, dressed in a strange suit
of shining fabric and metal that left his arms and shoulders bared. He was
slim, nearly as slender as a woman, but his exposed skin bulged with tight
muscle. And when he shook himself, it was like watching a bird spread out its
feathers.

“Are you hurt?” she asked, managing to find her voice. “Are
you okay? Who are you?”

The man lifted his eyes to hers. His black eyes pierced her
straight through, as bleak and knowing as the void. “So, it was true,” he said
roughly, with a terribly strange accent. “Karree had said you spoke a language
nearly identical to ours but I did not believe her.”

Her confusion deepened, along with a great deal of concern.
“It’s going to be okay,” Saffron soothed, making a slow motion with her hands. “I
think you must have hit your head. Can you just sit down?”

The man looked at her, almost seeming to be amused. She
scanned him over as she reached into her pocket for her phone. He didn’t
look
injured but that didn’t mean he hadn’t hit his head.

“What is that?” he asked, and reached out to take her phone.

She protested, “Hey!” but he ignored her and turned it over
and over in his hands before giving it back with a confused murmur about there
being such strange technology here.

Here? Where was
here
compared to where he normally
was?

Saffron tried again. “Sir?”

For some reason, that was what did it. He looked up, and she
saw that his face had changed into a fierce mask of concentration. “I apologize
for my strangeness. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Eban, commander of
the Icari. I am representative of my people. Will you represent yours?”

She stared at him. “I’m…sorry. I don’t understand.”

He frowned a little bit. “Perhaps your civilization is not
as technically advanced as I had thought. Your signal indicated otherwise,
however?”

What signal?
she wondered, and then had to take a step
back to adjust to what she’d just thought. This man was obviously an alien, or
at least seemed to think he was. He was the commander of some people, and he
had crashed down here in her field after picking up some signals from
somewhere. And her main concern was what kind of signal?
Have I gone mad?

But, she had to admit there was no other way to look at
things. This guy obviously wasn’t any government official that she’d ever heard
of or seen before. He hadn’t flashed a badge or immediately started pushing her
around. And so far as she could see, no one else had followed him here. Her
whole life she had been taught nothing but acceptance of various ways of life,
of the rhythms of how the earth moved, and now the biggest challenge she had
ever faced was standing right here in front of her. He might not fit into her
belief that the
earth
moved in circles, but so did the universe. So did
every universe. Everything was interconnected and she’d been playing her part
since the day she was born. Perhaps this just happened to be her next step.

Saffron ran her hand through her hair, adjusted her
headband, and then nodded a little to herself as the strange, potential alien
started to speak again. She would listen, and she would understand. “At first,
we merely followed one signal. However, as we grew closer to this planet, we
began to receive many signals!” He gestured, looking earnestly excited. “So
many signals that our computers cannot receive them all swiftly enough. We also
intercepted your communications broadcast. We knew by then that you were
intelligent, but I cannot describe to you our astonishment when we discovered
how similar our two civilizations were. And the sight of your planet only
convinced us further.”

Saffron tried to follow along as quickly as she could, her
adept mine pulling in information rapidly. They had intercepted some kind of
broadcast. That had to mean the Arecibo message, a one-time broadcast sent far
out into space that contained numbers, elements, DNA, and other assorted
human-related information. She remembered being fascinated by aliens for a long
time after learning of those various attempts to communicate with other
lifeforms in the universe, and so that was where her information came from.

Fascinating to think it had finally found some use, and that
the recipient was standing in her backyard!

“What was it about our planet, though?” she asked curiously.
“If it’s okay to tell me. And why do you speak English so well?”

He, the alien man who called himself Eban, just shook his head.
“I had the same question for you, as to how you have such mastery of Icarian
speech. But, perhaps that is best left for another discussion.”

She had to agree. As much as she wanted to learn
immediately, right at this moment, she was starting to feel like her head might
explode.

Eban gestured around at the barren fields, the overgrown
weeds and the two-foot-tall grasses, and then he pointed over at her garden.
“This is why we came,” he said softly. “Why I am here. We have learned much in
our few hours of studying. Your planet is so lush and full of life. You have
plots of land everywhere upon which food grows, and your animals do not even
have to be raised by hand to thrive! And then, there is you. We heard of you
almost before anything else, and how you have done wonderful things for the
life here.”

Embarrassment heated her cheeks. She looked away a little
bit, suddenly feeling shy. “I was just doing what I love,” she explained. “And
I ended up helping people. That’s not so uncommon or weird.”

“No,” the alien agreed. “You are correct in that, but the
fact of the matter is that this is more than anything we could ever have hoped
for. I need to bring you with me, back to my people.”

There it was. All this time she’d been waiting for this to
go sour, and there it was. She backed away, stumbling a little as her heel hit
a stone behind her. Eban moved as though to catch her, but she just backed up
again. “I don’t think I’m going anywhere with you,” she said coldly, trying to
hide her fear.

To her amazement, the alien held his hands up and out in the
same gesture she’d used on him when she thought he was hurt. “Make no mistake,
I would not force anyone to do anything against their will,” he reassured her.
“It was not a demand, but perhaps I did not phrase it correctly. Please, will
you tell me your name? I wish to speak with you as equals.”

Saffron stayed where she was, eyeing him warily. Her initial
impressions kept getting interrupted and fading away too rapidly for her to get
a good hold on him yet. Until she knew she could trust him, if that moment of
epiphany ever came about, it was best to just keep her distance. “Saffron,” she
replied.

“Saffron,” Eban repeated, tasting the word. “What does it
mean?”

She shrugged a little bit. “It’s just a spice. For cooking.”

He looked a little puzzled about that, but didn’t push it.
“Saffron, will you hear my plea?”

It was a plea, now. “I can’t promise anything.”

“Nor do I ask you to,” he replied. “All I ask is that you
listen to what I have to say. My people do not have a home. We are up there,
above your sky, waiting in a ship which carries the only of us left anywhere.
Our home was destroyed by attackers who caught us unaware.”

That part came out a bit stiffly, though she didn’t think it
was quite a lie. It sounded more like he was omitting something he felt was too
unsavory for the moment. That tempered a bit more of her enthusiasm but
something deep inside her was still tugging, urging her on to accept his offer
before she’d even heard everything.

“Ever since then, we have just been wandering. We have a
very specific low-gravity requirement but not much else, or I would have simply
brought us all down here to settle. Your planet is exactly what we are looking
for, but we would not be happy here. However, you are also what we have been
looking for.

“If we find somewhere that is more suited to our needs, it
will be lacking in another. We need someone who knows plants. We need a
scientist who has expertise in areas which we are lacking. That would be you.”

“But why me specifically?” she challenged, narrowing her
eyes and looking right back at him just as fiercely as he watched her. “There
are plenty of scientists around here for you to choose from.”