Eban's Command: Scifi Alien Abduction Romance (Science Fiction Alien Romance) (Survival Wars Book 2)

by Hana Starr

  “Okay,” she agreed, and he moved away with authority in his steps. She spared his butt a glance or two before paying attention to the shy Icari known as Garem, who immediately because submissive and timid despite the fact that she tried to be gentle when talking to him. If she knew how to control his panels and everything, she had no doubts that he would hand it right over to let her do whatever she wanted.

  Garem was simply going through the systematics of the little sample receptacle, checking it over with an extensive list. That wasn’t her area of expertise at all and she let her gaze wander to the big front window screen, which was showing the vastness of space and a miniscule amount of stars.

  Are they sure there’s a planet out there?

  Then, a few minutes later, she saw it. At first, it looked like nothing but a humdrum little asteroid. And a bit after that, it looked like a slightly larger asteroid. The surface was lumpy and misshapen, surrounded by bits and pieces of broken stones. Light was shining along one edge, pale from an elder star. Her excitement faded a little bit as she scanned what she would see, which was not much at all. A vast expanse of solid brown, covered in craters and mounds. As far as she could tell, there wasn’t a lick of earth to be found down there and it was consequently of no use to them.

  The engines dropped down to just a whisper. Eban’s back, which was devoid of wings now, rippled as he pulled at the console which controlled the throttle. They weren’t approaching quite as swiftly now, which meant as they were snagged in by the little planet’s gravitational pull that they just began to drift and turn very slowly.

  Beside Saffron, Garem finished his preparations. “We’re ready to go, sir,” he said briskly.

  Way down in front, standing amidst a group of workers she’d been observing, Karree looked up at her commander. Saffron caught the admiration in her gaze and bristled, but she kept her feeling to herself as the first mate called out, “Everything’s ready to go whenever you are, Eban.”

  “Elevation dropping at the expected rate,” someone else called out.

  The answer came swiftly, “Stabilizing for lock-on and entry preparation.”

  Garem looked up. His voice rang out, startlingly sweet and pure in her ear. “Receptacle prepped. Drop into position?”

  There was silence as Eban stared out at the planet. His chest heaved, his eyes wide, and then he went still and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the mask of calm was back over his face. “Drop.”

  “Drop is a go,” Garem echoed, and hit a button on his screen. Immediately, the view on the window swapped, becoming slightly less clear but growing in detail as the receptacle dropped and began to glide down.

  Meanwhile, Karree was working her way through the rows and looking over shoulders. “Gravity is a bit high but not out of bounds. Results on air are coming back. Temperature is higher than we prefer.”

  “Out of bounds?” Eban asked. “Should we pull up?”

  Garem’s hand adjusted, bringing the receptacle to a halt. It hovered, bird’s eye focusing on the ground below. With the planet so close now, they could only see part of it.

  Karree checked something, and then shook her head. “Everything is workable, so far. Garem, adjust your descent a bit though. 4.3% higher gravity levels than we’re accustomed to.”

  “Got it,” he said immediately, sounding a lot less shy why focused on his work.

  “Wait,” Saffron said, trying to follow all of this. “Why?”

  Karree glanced at her with an unreadable expression. The first mate didn’t look very impressed with the new human on board. “Higher gravity, more pull. More pull, more friction. The last thing I want is for our only sample-bearing vehicle to catch on fire.”

  Her face burning was embarrassment at having missed something so obvious, Saffron lowered her head. “Right. Got it.”

  She doesn’t seem to like me much. I guess she knows competition when she sees it. She sighed inwardly. Not that I’m much competition.

  Even though Garem was supposed to be lowering the speed of his descent, Saffron could hardly tell. The atmosphere whirled by in a blur, sparks flashing, dust streaking by. The receptacle trembled, buffeted by the wind and turbulence of its fall. Then, suddenly, there was a flash of green as the wings were commended to snap out and the screen went still but for tiny bobs. Everything was still and silent, but then the descent started again. It was a low, circular spiral like a vulture lowering towards roadkill, and it seemed to take an eternity to land.

  Somehow, that was okay. The longer it took to reach the ground, the more she could see. The world below wasn’t fully dark brown or stone, she saw. There were mountains true, but the craters were soft and powdery and the flat earth was the color of freshly-ground coffee.

  With a sudden powerful yearning, Saffron allowed herself a ridiculous moment of mourning at the thought that she would never taste coffee again. Then, the craft hit the ground. She imagined the thump as the sight shook, and dust fluttered up into the air and simply hung suspended until a gust of wind ushered it away.

  “Okay, Saffron,” Eban said from above. “This is your area now. Seven samples, each the size of the standard flasks in your lab.”

  “Thanks for the reminder,” she said sarcastically, feeling awful when he flinched.

  Karree shot her an angry glare, but she was already slipping into that place where nothing could bother her. Only work remained.

  For the next three hours, she guided Garem around to various different locations and watched in fascination as the robotic arm unpinned a flask each time, expertly uncapping, filling, and capping again. Robotics technology like that on earth was normally reserved for factories, limiting the need for human workers. The similarities only continued to grow…

  But, she forced herself to stay focused the entire time and took stock of the samples she had ordered be collected while the receptacle climbed back up out of the atmosphere with a little more difficulty than when it had entered. Watching all the bouncing around made her nauseous, so she kept her eyes down.

  One in the shade, another out in the open. The third and fourth were taken at a location from the lowlands and a plateau, respectively. The fifth took the longest to find, and required nearly an hour all on its own until she located a section of soil which looked different from all the rest. Sixth came from a crater. And the very last, Garem suggested be taken from a lower layer of soil. He preened, fluttering his wings with pride when everyone congratulated him on his thinking; from there, they spent time finding the perfect angle where there looked to have been a recent rockslide, exposing fresh and loamy earth beneath the upper crust. It was the last bit which excited Saffron more than anything. The dirt looked so fresh and vibrant, there was no way they would have any difficulties with it!

  The receptacle made it back to port, and was sealed in by magnetism. A technician appeared, summoned by Eban to lead Saffron down into the hold, where she was given the container with all seven precious samples.

  Hugging them tightly to her chest and grinning like an idiot, she ran to test them right away.

  Unfortunately, things never turned out the way she wanted. They never turned out the way anyone wanted, really. That was part of her mantra, why she was so often laidback about harsh realities. This was disappointment of the highest level though and would take quite a bit to get over.

  None of the samples were workable. Well, that was a lie. For once in her life, the testing process ran as smoothly as could be. It was just that every single bit of earth she had was dead. Too acidic, too gritty, simply lacking in nutrients or any form of sustenance whatsoever. At least the ship farming plots were kept relatively healthy by a steady supply of fertilizer –she pitied whoever had that job- and the occasional burial, if the family wished it to be so. But this tiny, homely little planet was every bit as uninhabitable as it looked. Even when she scraped together a mixture and supplied it with the necessary vitamins, and even applied a dose of the first generation of her Icari growth serum, not
hing would grow.

  Eban looked stricken when she told him. He stopped by her lab after a week of fruitless testing, looking hollow-eyed and impatient. “What’s the news?” he asked.

  Saffron looked down at the ground. “Oh, Eban,” she whispered brokenly, “I’m so sorry. Nothing can grow there. We’ll have to try again somewhere else.”

  The panicked look on his face grew. “Are you serious?” he whispered back, looking so overwhelmed with a barrage of emotions that he couldn’t even speak up. Everything was all pressing for release at once, and he had nowhere to put it.

  “Everything was all wrong. Even the lower-level stuff is just too flat. I even gave it some of my growth serum, but all it did was make the seed go rotten. It sprouted inside but couldn’t grow, and burnt itself out.”

  “Damn,” he swore, turning and slamming the side of his fist against the blank wall. “Dammit! Damn the flight!” Again and again, he pounded on the wall. His knuckles swelled red with strain.

  Every part of her cried out to go to him, but Saffron just bit her lip and watched. If he didn’t get this out of his system, it would only fester.

  Only when he was still, breathing raggedly and obviously distraught, did she speak up. “It’s not the end of everything,” she said quietly, and walked towards him. He stiffened, the fine muscle definition of his back tensing up hard enough to crack a walnut.

  He moaned, “You don’t understand,” and pressed his forehead to the wall.

  She blinked a little, taken aback. Dread settled in the pit of her gut. “So, explain it to me, Eban. Who am I going to tell?”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, clearly arguing with himself. She saw the emotions sweep over his face, anger and desolation followed by embarrassment; clearly, he was remembering how she’d rejected him but that wasn’t entirely her fault. It was just circumstances, that was all.

  I can’t let him make me feel guilty, she swore. I just can’t. This is how it has to be.

  Finally, he just sighed and looked down to hide his face. The light caught on his tears though, exposing them for her to see. “I have lied to everyone. There was a reason I was so desperate to find you. Or someone like you. And I was so hopeful…”

  Now she knew. “Something’s running out, isn’t it?”

  He nodded against the wall. “Even with your serum, we won’t be able to grow enough to survive. We had less than a year of food before we met you and now we have even less.”

  She felt just awful, suddenly regretting her experiments that had been wasting valuable food. But, it was all for the better, wasn’t it? She would be able to replace more than she took, after all.

  “It’s okay though, isn’t it?” Saffron soothed, stepping closer and laying her hand on his back. “My serum can keep you afloat for awhile longer after that, can’t it? Won’t it be long enough to find something? Hey, where even are we in relation to everything else?”

  Eban sighed but lifted his head up from the wall to rub at his face. “Your serum will certainly help, as will your advanced farming techniques. We have you to thank for many of our recent advancements. And I do not know how long it will take to find another suitable planet. I do not know the name of the galaxy where we are, but it is at the edge of the system nearest to the one which housed your solar system.”

  Throwing her mind back to general science class in elementary school, she figured that probably meant they were at the edge of the Andromeda Galaxy. After that, she had no idea what else was around.

  “This is not charted territories for us,” he explained hesitantly. “We have not been here, nor are there any signs from other civilizations to give us any extra information. We have been scanning endlessly, which unfortunately takes up quite a bit of our fuel even when we just drift. Only that rocky little thing back there had a breathable atmosphere. At this rate, I would even take a gravity so high that we could never fly again.”

  “No!” she said, alarmed.

  Eban spun around to face her, looking serious and determined. “Yes! We can survive anything but we cannot come back from the dead!” The fight went out of him abruptly. “I suppose I should break the news to everyone.”

  “Are you going to tell them about the supplies, too?” she asked. He said nothing, and she knew that was wrong. “You should tell them, Eban.”

  Her urging only seemed to backfire. Eban just shook his head at her. “I cannot. I cannot let their fate hang over their heads. I wish them peace until the very end.” A gleam returned to his eyes, startling her because she’d thought that he was too tired to be angry, but then she saw that it was more tears. “If you tell them…Well, I cannot stop you from telling them. But I swear to you that I will never forgive you if you do.”

  With that, he turned and walked out, leaving her alone in the midst of failures.

  Chapter Nine

  Not long after that, Saffron suddenly found herself with a lot more free time than she was used to. The Icari were in mourning but there was nothing that could be done for it except to continue on with their lives as they knew it.

  Even so, it seemed that for the next while, the children were the only ones who flew at all. Everyone else was simply too heavy with sorrow to even think about it.

  Saffron was sad and heavy too, overwhelmed by the weight of what she knew. She was constantly questioning her decisions to keep Eban’s secret, but she was doing her best to occupy her time even without anything to do. She produced large quantities of growth serum, more than the current plots of land could ever use in a lifetime. As a result, permission was given to open two more plots and she eagerly joined in to help with the planting. Perhaps if she could control everything from the beginning, she could really turn production around.

  Tullia seemed to have formed a sort of girl-crush on Saffron, and often elected to spend time as her assistant and handling small jobs. Unfortunately, that meant there was even less for her to do. And that was when she got the idea. She was still mostly a stranger, wasn’t she?

  It was time to change that.

  So, for the first time in her life, Saffron took on a job serving the people. She learned how to bake muffins and rough bread, and helped service those who came by to purchase a snack. Not only that, but she spent some time observing the children at school, and washed dishes at the meal hall. The workers there were friendly, and she quickly grew closer to them. After a bit of nagging, even Garem and a couple of others in the command room started to take to her.

  For the first time in her life, she learned how to act differently in front of different people. She was raised never to change herself for anything, but now it was a requirement and she actually enjoyed being able to express very different parts of herself.

  Tullia was girly and fluff-minded, but with a startling wit. She and the rest of her family appreciated sarcasm and dark humor.

  The children delighted in silly jokes and human antics.

  Garem and his friends enjoyed scientific talk blended with regular conversation. Surprisingly, so did the kitchen workers. That was when she learned that they had all started out in much more technical positions but gradually gravitated towards a need to interact with more people.

  It was exhausting and rewarding all at once, but the Icari slowly stopped just watching her or bowing to her. Word seemed to travel, for some of them started to wave at her or greet her happily when she walked past. Sadness still shadowed them, rendered them with clipped wings on their emotions, but she was happy at being able to provide even a little bit to boost their moods. And her mood, honestly.

  After a bit, this felt rather more like home and the notion of herself as a human began to fade. She was Icari, now.

  One day after a long session in the kitchen, she dragged her feet on the way back to her room. The lights were dimming but the ship was not entirely quiet yet.

  “Saffron!”

  She turned to find Tullia striding towards her. Alarm shot through her just like it had the last time this happened, and
she was immediately worried. “What is it?” she asked, hurrying to meet the young woman.

  “Eban wants to see you.”

  Her heart seized up, before she noticed that Tullia didn’t look particularly concerned. “Is something wrong?” Saffron asked, cautious anyway. “So late at night?”

  Tullia shook her head and then nodded, making her amused at how earnest this girl was. And so excitable. She did everything with the same enthusiasm that it was often impossible to tell whether she was happy or upset. “Nothing’s wrong. Eban has just decided that since tonight is one of our normal relaxation days, he’s making it mandatory.”

  “Mandatory, huh?” Saffron mused, turning around and heading back the way she’d come. “That sounds like him.”