Page 5 of Bred

“What do you have to say for yourself?”

The words come out automatically, just like they were programmed into me. “Lyra Patrovich, Elite Global Officer #9969.”

He drops his head and looks at me under his brows. Being treated to that cool stare only increases my nervousness. “Hm?”

“Lyra Patrovich, Elite Global Officer #9969,” I repeat. My name, my role, my identification code. I am trained to provide them to hostile parties and to say nothing else. It is old Earth military tradition. Maybe this alien isn’t hostile, but I am afraid and reacting to him as if he was.

“And the reason you deviated from your course, Lyra Patrovich?”

His voice is deep and resonant. It has a curious quality to it. The accent is perfect, but it doesn’t sound human. There’s something raspier and rumblier, something deeper and more vicious. He is not being aggressive, but he is aggression incarnate.

He takes another step closer and comes into even sharper relief. He is handsome on a level I can’t explain. Those eyes are part of it, but his entire frame is impressive. There is what looks like hard plating down the back of his neck. I don’t know if that is armor or his biological form.

I want to see him naked.

The thought flashes through my mind, and I do not know if it is scientific or carnal, perhaps both.

“Are you an alien?” The question slips out of me. I don’t mean to ignore his, it’s just the next words to fight their way through my brain are those ones.

“Am I human? No.”

“Are you part of the space force? Some kind of ally?”

He shakes his head and fear shoots down my spine. If he is unaffiliated then he owes me nothing. We have no treaty. No safety. He could do as he pleases with me. In the old days there were many tales of abductions. People were taken. Sometimes returned. Usually not. In the very beginning nobody believed the taken ones, but over time the numbers increased and soon nobody could deny that we were being plucked like flowers in a vast field.

For a long time our species feared the aliens. Then the Galactic Accord was struck and the abductions stopped. We began to regain the confidence we had lost, to patrol our world and to use the technology shared by the allied aliens to improve the lives of the billions below.

The arrival of this creature threatens all of that. The aliens allied with Earth are protective and possessive. They will not be pleased to discover this interloper. Which means he must either be so strong he does not fear them, or so reckless he does not care. Neither one of those options settle my nerves.

“No, Lyra Patrovich,” he says. “We are not of your Earth. Or of your alliance.”

“Then you shouldn’t be here.”

His lips part, and a throaty laugh escapes him. “You are the one who should not be here,” he says, his lips curling in a smirk that registers to even my frightened mind as sexy. There is something about him that makes my body run hot with a desire that does not make sense.

I’m terrified, but I’m also soaked between the thighs. It’s as if he emits some pheromonal charge that reacts with my senses to addle my mind. I try to breathe deep, to collect my thoughts, but he is speaking again, scattering them.

“You altered your little shuttle to intercept our course. You charged through our slip shields and aimed directly at our hull. We had no choice but to take you aboard. The alternative was let you smear yourself across the side of our ship like a bug.”

He’s not just speaking English. He’s using turns of phrase. That suggests a deep knowledge of not just our planet, but also of our culture. I feel another one of those instinctive shivering chills running down my spine. Will ground control know what happened to me? My shuttle would have been feeding data back to HQ. If they look hard enough, they will see what I saw. They will become suspicious. Or, if they don’t, then they will assume my shuttle malfunctioned and they will write it off as a freak accident. They will not know to come for me because they—and everyone else—will think I am dead.

“You still haven’t answered my question,” he prompts me. “What brought you here?”

“I... my readings were strange. I wanted to investigate.”

He spreads his arms, great muscled appendages rippling. God, I hadn’t even taken that part of him into account.

I really want to see him naked.The thought intrudes again. I hide from it.

“You were curious.”

He smiles at me. His teeth are silver white, sharp at the very tips, with significant incisors top and bottom. That is a mouth made for tearing flesh. I recoil, the old instincts of my species firing with panic at the sight of what is clearly a predator looming over me.

“Don’t be afraid. I didn’t save your life to hurt you.”

“Why did you save me? What do you want?”

“I too, was curious,” he says in that alien rumble that makes parts of me vibrate with a deep resonance. “Our shields are exceptionally effective. You would have had to have been piloting by hand to within an impressive tolerance to penetrate them. Letting you die seemed to be a waste. That kind of talent should be preserved and propagated.”

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