Page 4 of Return of the Nine

The men looked down at data pads and then back up at her. “We are looking for Signy Alora.”

Leara blinked. “That is my daughter’s name, but what do you want with her?”

The men snapped into a sharp salute. “We have orders to bring her in to attend the celebration on the Nine mother ship.”

“Why? She has never been involved with the Nine. Have you, Ziggy?”

Ziggy winced. Her mother hated her nickname. For her to be using it she had to be stressed.

“Not that I am aware of, Mom. Can you let Dad know that nothing is wrong, but he will need to be here for the delivery van tomorrow morning?”

Leara bit her lip. “If you are sure that you want to go with them.”

She sighed. “Mom, I don’t think that I have any choice.”

“Ma’am, we have orders to bring her in. We also have confirming video that she is the woman we are looking for.”

Ziggy smiled and patted her mother’s hand. “It’s fine. Everything will be fine.”

Leara squeezed her hand. “If you are sure. Keep us posted on what is going on.”

Ziggy laughed. “As soon as I figure it out, you will know.”

The two men saluted again and escorted her out of her mother’s flower shop and into a wide bodied skimmer. The flying unit was technology of the Nine. They had been very generous to the settlers on their old world.

She settled on the passenger seat and in seconds they had lifted off the street and were a hundred feet over the city. Crowds were watching them fly away, and Ziggy waved to a few familiar faces.

“Where are we going?”

“The launch area. You will travel to the mother ship via shuttle in the custody of the Nine.”

She nodded. There was nothing else to do. She had chosen her options and while she had never expected to be found out, she had prepared herself for the eventuality.

She left custody of the Gaian military and walked across the tarmac to the shuttle where three officers of the Nine were waiting.

The officers she was facing were of the Giant, Dwarf, and Fairy persuasion. Three of the nine branches of the Nine.

They saluted and helped her up the stairs, settling her in her seat before lifting off. She knotted her fingers together. The light touch of the Giant’s hand had given her basic information on how to fly the shuttle as well as where all of the emergency supplies were.

Since her time on the ship, she picked information out of people much more easily. It almost flowed out of them at her lightest touch.

She sat back and watched the men who had been asked to pick her up. It had come as a shock that the ship found back on Earth two hundred years ago had been a ship of the Nine. When the colonists piled aboard, it took them back to its home.

Ziggy was a third-generation Gaian. From the Nine archives, the very soil of Gaia or Underhill created a genetic potential that would soon begin to occur in the humans now living there.

She was one of those new humans. Born with the ability to gain knowledge from those around her, she found the knowing was the hardest thing to deal with when you got information you didn’t want.

She waited. While the males sent her friendly glances, they didn’t offer to engage her in conversation. She idly wondered what kind of trouble she was in and how bad it actually was.

The feeling of leaving the planet’s surface wasn’t nearly the jarring sensation of her previous capture. The giant piloting the ship moved them smoothly through the layers of atmosphere and to the mother ship beyond.

Ziggy watched the huge silvery bulk get closer and closer before she had the thought that she had been fighting since shesaw the men in her mother’s flower shop.

How did they find me?

Chapter Three

The Fairy held his hand out to her and assisted her from her seat. Ziggy was a little wobbly but her talent surged up and did a rapid reading of the man holding her hand. He was a medic and he was studying human physiology.

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