Mate Abduction (Alien Abduction #9) - Eve Langlais Page 0,1
to be something more. Something better. Something more like home. But she wouldn’t find it here.
With that thought in mind, she marched out of the habitat assigned to her and her adopted sisters, her step firm as she mentally prepared a speech. She didn’t allow herself to be distracted as she weaved the hard-packed paths of dirt and crushed bone—because even in death, parts were recycled.
Out in space, resources were often scarce and the concept of preservation strong—mostly because the evolved races had learned their lessons a long time ago, unlike the humans supposedly. The stigma that came around dead bodies didn’t exist. Meat was meat. Bone was a great building material. And if she didn’t want her skull to turn into a bowl for soup, she needed to find a way off this world where she could have a normal life.
With chips.
She missed chips so badly.
Arriving at the heavily thatched home of her teacher slash roost mother, she knew better than to go inside. At this time of day, there was only one place Pantariste would be. The garden behind her habitat. Although the word garden was subjective. In some cultures, it meant a place of beautiful foliage, trimmed and bright. On Zonia, it was a graveyard where the sk’uul plants pushed up from the ground, seeded inside the buried entrails of both enemies slain in battle and friends alike.
Clarabelle caught sight of Pantariste’s bent form as she patted the ground, tamping down the dirt over her newest planting. Her roost mother—a term used for the one overseeing a nest of hatchlings, in this case human ones—never turned her head as Clarabelle approached, but she did snap, “What do want?”
Forget her hastily prepared speech. Clarabelle blurted out, “I want a spaceship.”
“Just a spaceship? Greedy child. Making such a lofty demand. Perhaps you’d like a moon to go with it?” was the sarcastic retort. “Mayhap a few stars?”
Clarabelle knew better than to cower and retract her words. “Now you’re just being silly. I just need a ship capable of faster than light speed.”
They had all kinds of fancy terms in space for how fast spaceships travelled. Warp, slide, jump, whatever. She just knew it got people from point A to B with sometimes an odd stop at an alternate universe C.
“Just a ship, caw?” Pantariste pretended to muse over the request, and Clarabelle held her breath. “Despite your annoying way of asking, it turns out I have a vessel docked in the cavern.”
The cavern being their version of a spaceport, hidden from eyes in the sky. There were a few of them scattered around, linked by tunnels and traps for the unwary who thought they could come and dominate the planet and its inhabitants.
Not that anyone dared, a fact often lamented by the Zonians. Their reputation preceded them.
“Can I have the ship?” Clarabelle asked.
“I wouldn’t have mentioned it if you couldn’t.”
She blinked. It seemed a bit too easy. “Aren’t you going to ask me why I need it?”
Pantariste uttered a noise and waved a taloned hand. “I’d say it’s obvious. You and the other human orphans aren’t content.”
True and yet Clarabelle hastened to say, “We are grateful for everything—”
Her roost mother cut her off. “You jabber about things I already know. Of course, you are grateful. But unhappy. Understandable given you’ve entered your fertile season. It’s natural for you to seek others of your kind, males more specifically, to dominate.”
“Um, find people yes, but I don’t care if they’re male or not.” A tiny white lie. She wouldn’t mind the rumble of a deep voice. She’d been sixteen when she was abducted, and not exactly innocent. Years of only girls for company had left her yearning for something more.
“You should care. How will you procreate and continue your line without proper males?”
With the Zonians, it was all about the family and ensuring their legacy lived on. For the human girls, though, that was an impossible dream, as Zonian males weren’t exactly anatomically compatible.
Not to mention the competition to claim one could be fierce. A human, even a well-trained one, would struggle against a pure blood Zonian in the mating heat.
“Not all of us want to make babies,” she grumbled.
The idea of a grubby mini person demanding her attention did not appeal. However, in the same stroke, she knew some of her friends were hoping to one day have a family.
“But the making of them is so enjoyable.” Pantariste’s beak spread in a lascivious smile. “If it is just coital pleasure