Knowing

  Ziggy absorbs technical information with the lightest touch of her hand. What will she learn when full contact with a shifter is on the menu?

  Signy Alora, 'Ziggy', was shocked when she was abducted by the Tokkel from her home on the human colony world of Gaia. She was appalled when experimentation was scheduled for her day, and relieved when someone attacked the ship of the invaders. Ziggy used her talent to absorb the information she needed to escape and in the process she managed to help a batch of aliens who had also been slated for torture at the hands of the troll-like Tokkel. She takes knowledge of his language, his ability to fly a starship, and a kiss that renders him senseless.

  Five years later, Ziggy thought that she had made a clean getaway and hidden her involvement in the first crash of the invading ship, but when miliatary men collect her for the anniversary of the initial attack she realizes that her time of hiding what she did was at an end.

  Ziggy had no idea that someone had been looking for her. The moment she spots the shifter that she kissed all those years ago, her time of hiding what she is is over and he couldn't be happier.

  Knowing

  By

  Viola Grace

  The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Knowing

  Copyright © 2012 Viola Grace

  ISBN: 978-1-77111-140-9

  Cover art by Martine Jardin

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

  Published by eXtasy Books

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  www.extasybooks.com

  Chapter One

  Ziggy struggled against the bonds that held her down. The Tokkel were working on another captured human and the screaming was getting to her. One of the four armed beasts was about to mark the interior of her ankle with a glyph similar to the ones on the restrained humans around her.

  As the needle started to buzz, she kicked wildly, causing the creature to snarl at her and call for another to hold her down.

  With two of the Tokkel working on her she tried to scream behind her gag, but only muffled whines emerged. Closing her eyes at the pain, she focused on the hands holding her down.

  The contact gave her the chance she needed. Every other alien had been wearing a glove-like membrane but the male holding her had bare hands. She used their physical connection to reach into his mind and pull out all the information she could.

  He blinked and shook his head violently, trying to clear it. She held her breath, but he spoke to his companion and in seconds, she could understand what he said.

  “That was weird. We must have dipped into the atmosphere for a moment.”

  The tattoo artist looked up. “Why?”

  “Didn’t you feel that? The whole ship rocked.” He was holding her leg with two clawed hands.

  “I didn’t feel anything.”

  He had made a few passes with the needle when the entire ship shuddered.

  Ziggy held perfectly still as a disembodied voice blared out, “Intruder alert. All hands to battle stations.”

  Her persecutors immediately left her and the rest of the humans for their battle stations.

  Ziggy bent her arm as far as she could and caressed the switch that would release her. It took three tries and she knew that she would be bruised for weeks, but a hiss sounded and the restraints retracted to free her limbs.

  She hopped to her feet and unbuckled her gag. Looking around she saw four Gaians who had been captured with her and she released them from their restraints. “Keep quiet.”

  They didn’t need to be told twice, they kept darting frightened looks toward the door.

  Ziggy’s thoughts ran through the stolen knowledge and she nodded. “There are escape pods just outside the door. I can launch you.”

  One of the wounded was holding a flap of skin to his side. “Just show us where to go.”

  She shuddered at the pain in his expression but paused to slap a wide bandage from a nearby storage cabinet across his side. “That should hold you.”

  He looked at her with glazed eyes. “How do you know this stuff?”

  She shrugged. “Just a hunch, now let’s get you back to the surface. Hopefully the attack will have ceased by now.”

  The other subjects were looking at each other but they seemed as eager to get off the ship as she was.

  Ziggy opened the door with the passcode and she slid around the corner to the station with the four emergency pods for this wing of the ship. The Gaians each took a pod and waited nervously.

  They were nowhere as nervous as Ziggy was. Once she launched these pods three security officers would come running. She was going to have to get to somewhere safe awfully quickly, but given her mental situation she had a far better chance than her fellow captives.

  The wounded man smiled. “We are trusting you because you are human.”

  She shook her head. “You are trusting me because I am offering you a way out, now hush and hang on. This is probably not going to be a smooth ride.”

  She closed the pods, keyed in the coordinates for Hestia, the capitol of Gaia, and punched the release.

  The tubes shot the pods out of the ship and hopefully into the atmosphere.

  Ziggy was basing her targeting on the experimenting officer’s thoughts that they were still in orbit.

  With her companions launched, Ziggy ran down the hall toward the secondary holding area.

  She typed in the pass code and slipped behind the door just as the thunder of boots ran past her.

  “Who are you?” The masculine voice shook her to her toes.

  Carefully, she turned to see four men hanging from the wall. She looked a little more closely. They weren’t men. Well they were of the masculine gender, but they weren’t human.

  “I am a prisoner from Gaia. Who are you?”

  “Warriors of the Nine. Can you release us?”

  She blinked and walked forward. The other three men were looking at her, but the one who was speaking stared into her very soul.

  His skin was a dusky brown, his eyes catlike and tawny and his hair deep brown and tangled. He was huge and his ears were decidedly pointed.

  “I can. Why should I?”

  “Because we belong to the ships that are attacking this Tokkel vessel. If we get back to our people, this attack will end.”

  “May I touch you?”

  He looked at her and while exhaustion rode his features, curiosity was there as well. “Yes.”

  She ran her hand along his chest and rummaged through his knowledge. Her talent only allowed her to access conscious thoughts of a technical bent. She could pick up languages easily, but wading through this man’s knowledge base was harder than most. The language that he thought in was musical and very old.

  He didn’t have any connection to the Tokkel aside from being their prisoner. The men with him were under his command and they had been taken from their ship with only the battle with the Gaians keeping them from being executed or tortured for informa
tion.

  Ziggy nodded and pulled her hand back. There was a tingle in her skin from where she had touched him. A pleasurable burn pulsed up her arm. “Fine. I will let you guys go. There is a set of escape pods down the hall on the left.”

  He stared at her in shock. “You speak the language of the Nine?”

  She blinked. It suddenly occurred to her that he had been speaking in Tokkel until now. “I suppose I do, now.”

  Ziggy pressed the releases and all four men collapsed to the floor in heaps.

  “Do you know why they attacked Gaia?”

  Her conversational partner helped his men stand. “Is that what you call it? We called it Underhill.”

  She froze. “What do you mean?”

  “We left that world eons ago. It changes those upon it.” He stood and his men nodded silently to him. “We are ready to leave.”

  She smiled. “I hate a mystery, but you all look like you need to be somewhere else.”

  He inclined his head formally. “I look forward to finding you again when this is all over. You seem to be a woman with mysteries of her own.”

  She chortled. “You have no idea.”

  They didn’t need to be told to be silent. She led them to the pods and the male she had been speaking to calmly keyed in the destination coordinates.

  She helped one of his men into the pod.

  He paused. “There are only four pods.”

  “I know. I have a plan.” She kept her features calm. Her plan involved taking the entire ship into the Northern Ocean.

  “I will not allow you to risk your life to save ours.”

  Ziggy sighed and leaned up to kiss him. As her lips met his she heard a low rumble and hands on her waist. Using the direct contact to his mind via the kiss, she made him sleep. He staggered and she used all her strength to put him in the pod. With a sad smile she punched the release and launched the four to safety.

  Moving as quickly as she could, she hid in a storage alcove as three troopers came stampeding to the pod station.

  Ziggy sat quietly and waited for her chance. Her moment would come and she would do what she could.

  Her planet was at stake after all.

  Chapter Two

  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 workins 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.

  Zig
gy 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?

  Chapter Three

  The fairy held his hand out to her and assisted her from her seat. Ziggy was a little wobbly but her talent surged up and did a rapid reading of the man holding her hand. He was a medic and he was studying human physiology.

  He found her fascinating.

  She blinked and tried not to show her nervousness. Despite the folded wings and pointed ears he looked as far from the minute flitting creatures of Earth myth as he could be. He looked more like a professional wrestler with wings.

  Ziggy stood and gently withdrew her hand from his.

  Instead of being offended, his lips quirked in amusement. “Please follow me, Ms. Alora.”

  She inclined her head and walked down the steps and followed his wings through a shuttle bay and into the ship itself.

  Behind her, the dwarf from the ship followed them as they walked to an internal monorail. A pod was waiting for them, a glowing crystal banded with metal. It looked to seat around six people, but no one entered but their triad.

  She took the seat that the fairy showed her to and waited with her fingers knotted in her lap. The dwarf sat next to her and with a chime the pod on the monorail sealed shut and they started to move.