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Five years later . . .

Ziggy stood in her mother’s flower shop and watched the news footage that they had been replaying for the last week.

“As you can see here, the first Tokkel ship destroyed by the Nine has been recovered. With the joint efforts of the Nine and Gaian ships, the first warship that was brought down has now been lifted from the depths of the Northern Ocean.

“The recovery efforts will bring the ship to the surface just in time for the five year anniversary of the triumph over the Tokkel. Survivors of the raids are being invited to the Nine mother ship for a gala event.”

Leara smiled and worked at an arrangement. “That’s nice. So many folks were affected by those raids.”

Ziggy remembered the terror of being hunted and getting caught in the grav beam with a dozen other men and women. Only five of them managed to survive the exams that the Tokkel engaged in.

When Ziggy had gotten the officers of the Nine away from the ship she had waited and then cut the lines to life support with cutters she found in the storage closet.

She knocked out two troopers from behind and stole their weapons, shooting everything that moved. She wounded one of the pilots and took his grasp of the workings of the ship.

Ziggy piloted the ship in a circle, spinning it in the centre of the flight of warships, firing wildly.

Her death spiral continued until the ship started breaking up in the upper atmosphere. There was a set of emergency pods near the bridge and she programmed one to drop her near her home town before she locked in.

The ship had an auto eject for occupied pods when it was in danger. It popped her out a mile over the ocean and the pod jetted to her landing site.

The moment that she landed, she stumbled free of the pod and hid for hours, slowly making her way back home.

It had taken her two days to get back into shape to pretend that nothing had happened, and while the men and women she had released from the experiment station remembered her, the woman that they created via a sketch artist was far more attractive than Ziggy made any claim to be.

The clatter of a set of pots against the table as her mother moved things around brought Ziggy out of her memory.

“They were. They deserve a holiday in their honour. In one way, they brought the Nine back to the area. Back home.”

“You are right, Signy. I know that you were upset during the invasion, but isn’t it great that we survived it with minimal losses?”

Ziggy sighed. “Any lives lost were too many. Do you have the display ready for the Markaqay wedding?”

Leara nodded. “Yes. The delivery van will be here at six.”

Ziggy smiled. “Excellent. Well, I am off for the night. I am just going to have coffee with some friends.”

Ziggy put on her jacket but turned to see the clients who rang the bell as they entered the shop.

Two men in military uniforms walked in.

“Good evening, sirs, we were just about to close but how can we help you?”

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 she saw the men in her mother’s flower shop.

How did they find me?