Page 2 of Zimon's Bride
In preparation for my return to my home planet, I applied to the Interstellar Matchmaking service to find mymeomee, my soulmate. I hoped to locate her on Earth so she could return with me, but it’s been a year now, and I still have not heard anything. I have some time left before returning to Narova; I just hope it will be enough.
When the call finally came, and they sent me a video greeting frommeomee,I was elated. Of course, she is beautiful as she is my soulmate. I could feel my heart beat a little faster, my chest tightening, and other body parts were alerted. I longed to go to her immediately, but that is not protocol for feline humanoids.
She will be physically compelled to mate with me once exposed to my pheromones. This means her body will desire me while her heart and mind may not. Then she would be bound to me for life when she might not want to be. As much as I want to meet her, that is the last thing I want to do to another being.
I replayed the video several times just to look at Abbie Poole. She is 28, with long brown hair and green eyes, and works as a paralegal in a small law firm. Her world was turned upside down when the Drayid attack on Earth took her fiancé Mark Lucas.
Even though I know there is a good reason I must wait for her to decide to contact me, it’s a little frustrating. Fortunately, I only had to wait a couple days, and it was a face-to-face video call.
Although I don’t remember word for word everything we said, I just know that talking to her was exhilarating. That she would be mymeomeefelt right from the very beginning. Even though I was aroused just by seeing her, I wanted to know everything about her. She seemed like the serious type of woman who thought things through to make decisions. And from her profile, she is also very intelligent.
We set a date to meet in two days at the Interstellar Matchmaking Center. I was already nervous and impatient to meet her for the first time, so I was disheartened when she was half an hour late for our meeting, thinking I had been stood up. After a few minutes of thinking about it, I realized something must have happened. Her enthusiasm during our first conversation made me believe she would not miss our meeting without calling to explain her delay and reschedule.
I learned from the supervisor that they had already tried to call her because of her lateness. Because there was no answer on her cell phone, they sent two agents to her home. What they learned was greatly disturbing.
They found her vehicle in her driveway with the car door standing open. Her purse and keys were on the ground beside the car, and she was missing. As soon as I heard that, my heart sank. We had been tracking alien slavers for months now, and we had not been able to locate their new base. I had been working closely with an Earth task force since humans collaborated with the Tenzari to abduct humans for the aliens’ interstellar slave trade.
As soon as we would root out one group of slavers, new ones came on the scene to take their place. This new group had some ultra-cloaking technology that prevented us from locating them. Had I met Abby before this, I could have tracked her by her scent.
I thanked the supervisor, got in my car, and returned to the base.
On the way there, I called my superior, Colonel Davix Nyco, to request a flyer and a team for another search to find the alien slavers' base. Before the Alliance announced their presence on earth, we used helicopters instead of our more advanced flyers traversing the mountains looking for alien slaver activity. Now there was no longer a need to hide our advanced technology. We searched part of the Blue Ridge and Appalachian for three days.
Late in the third day, we started to backtrack over territory we had already covered, knowing we must have missed something. From a distance, we saw a spaceship taking off from coordinates we had searched before and found nothing. The spacecraft was too high in the sky for us to do anything but watch it fly away. I called for the Defense Force Raptor Three to intercept, but it was too late.
So, I called Colonel Nyco to see if I could get a fast shuttle to rendezvous with Raptor Three. I want to be on that ship when they catch up with the alien slavers. In the meantime, he sent teams to the coordinates from where the spaceship took off to apprehend any of their cohorts.
We knew there had to be a human contingent helping them to abduct humans because the Tenzari involved were two starkly different from humans. They would not be able to move among them without being spotted instantly.
I didn't need to go home to pack because I could get standard-issue clothing and personal care items from the ship stores on Raptor Three. In any case, there wouldn’t be time for such minutiae.
It took us nearly two weeks to catch up with the Tenzari ship. Naturally, they did not respond to our hails or stop to allow boarding. Captain Pannot Rareton had little choice but to order the gunner to fire on the ship to disable it so we could latch on to it and board it.
Abby
I lost track of time between when I was taken from my driveway and the night, we were awakened by a loud boom that shook the whole ship. I learned afterward that it had been eleven days.
The accommodations were less than stellar. We slept on bunks stacked in a row of five sets of three with thin mattresses, light blankets, and no pillows. With all the moaning and crying, it was hard to get much sleep. Most of the time, I suffered a low-grade headache from lack of sleep and no caffeine.
During that time, I had little to do but think. I recognized the man directing the ones who kidnapped me. But I couldn’t quite remember from where I knew him. Then one night, as I lay thinking about it, I finally remembered he was a client at the law firm that employed me as a paralegal, Dalton Lane. Considering what I’d seen in his file during my job, he needed legal representation. But there was nothing about human trafficking.
Fortunately, I don’t think Lane even knew I worked there. I was just one of many in a large multispecialty law firm satellite office. I only learned about him doing some research for one of the associates. There was a copy of a mugshot in his file. He’d been arrested in Bentenville for disorderly conduct and menacing.
He had a long history of charges but no convictions. I shrugged the whole thing off at the time. Work on his file had just been another task in a busy day. I only remembered because he was a good-looking guy, too good-looking.
I saw his face when the thugs delivered me to the alien base, and he saw me. I knew I recognized him from somewhere, but I was so scared then; I couldn’t think where.
When I finally got it straight in my mind, I didn’t know what use it would be. No one I told on the ship would care. I wasn’t even a person anymore. We were all just merchandise.
We were lucky they fed us bland-tasting bars and water. For the fifteen of us, there was one lavatory with a sink and no shower.
I desperately hoped Zimon would realize I didn’t just blow him off and not show up. I can’t believe this happened when I was on the verge of putting my life back together. I had hoped that when the Alliance drove off the Drayids after their attack, there would be no more aliens abducting people from Earth. It must be so lucrative that it was worth risking the attention of the Alliance Defense Force to do it.
The shudder that went through our ship knocked some of the women off their bunks. Two were injured badly. One had a broken back, and another a broken collarbone and a concussion. Both were knocked unconscious, so at least they were not in pain before our rescuers arrived.
I was utterly relieved when the men and women who entered our cell identified themselves as members of the Alliance Defense Force. Medics attended the two badly injured, and the rest of us were shepherded onto the Alliance ship Raptor Three. Once aboard, we all went immediately to the medical bay.
I was fortunate not to fall from my bunk. I just bruised my forearm on one of the supports. I did not know that Zimon was aboard the ship until the medic came to see me.
