Morgan's Choice (3 page)

They seemed to be very like humans, but then
again, they may just look superficially similar. They might be
quite different inside, reproduce differently, process food
differently. She’d seen cases like that. Animals that looked for
all the galaxy like first cousins, but turned out to be
physiologically totally unrelated.

They would have found Tariq’s body in the
cargo hold. What would they make of that? And what would they do
from here? Scenes from a silly holovid she’d watched as a kid
replayed in her mind, bug-like aliens abducted humans and used them
for experiments.

It didn’t seem so silly now.

Chapter
Three

“This is amazing,” Admiral Ravindra said,
staring at the holographic scans of the three aliens. He sat back
in his office chair. “Absolutely unbelievable. You could almost
believe they were manesan.”

The images rotated before his eyes, a dead
male, a live male and a live female. Two arms, two legs, two eyes,
two ears, one nose, one mouth. But while the dead male was
dark-skinned and black-haired as a manesan, the living male had
wavy hair the color of dry grass and pale, almost white, skin. The
woman was different again. Long, slightly curly hair; dark, but a
little browner than black, maybe with a hint of red. Her skin was
lighter than any manesan, with a golden tinge and she had silver
eyes, like mercury.

Ravindra exchanged a look with Captain
Lomandra and his intelligence chief, Senior Commander Prasad.
“Apart from skin and hair, what other differences are there between
these beings and us?”

“
Their eyes,
Srimana
.” Prasad split the screen and zoomed in on each of the
three alien’s eyes.

Both men’s eyes had a white ring around a
colored iris and a round pupil. “
Bunyada
would be very excited about the men’s eyes,”
Prasad said, his lips quirking in a brief smile.

Indeed they would. “What does medical say
about the woman’s eyes?” Ravindra said.

“
They appear to be artificial. X-rays do
not penetrate. Just as with the
Yogin
.”

Lomandra peered at the full body images
turning slowly before him. “What’s that in the men’s heads,
SenComm? There behind their left ears?”

The skin bulged noticeably in the indicated
spot on both men, but not the woman. Prasad stopped the rotation,
enhanced the image into a close-up of the heads and flipped the
display to X-ray.

“The men have a circular object in that spot,
fused to the skull, under the skin. The female has not.”

Increasingly intriguing. The two masses in
the woman’s frontal lobes seemed almost to be a part of the living
tissue, of an irregular shape with a network of tendrils extending
from there to the rest of the brain. “This is foreign material?”
Ravindra said.

“
We can’t be sure,
Srimana
,” Prasad said. “But we believe so.”

Ravindra scratched his ear. Foreign
material in the head. Very strange. The one dead
Yogin
they’d found had strange
material in its head, too. But not like this.

“
Artificial eyes, foreign material in their
heads. Just like the
Yogina
,”
Lomandra said. “These beings must be in league with them. Perhaps
they are like our Mirka, their commanders and the
Yogina
are foot soldiers, equivalent
to Shuba.”

“
There is much in what you say, Captain.”
Yet the history of the few
Yogin
encounters so far had been quite different. They didn’t ask
questions, didn’t attempt to communicate; they fought. They
destroyed themselves rather than be captured. On this ship they had
even disabled the vacuum doors. An elaborate ruse to gain his
trust? If it was, they’d already failed.

“
With respect,
Srimana
,” Prasad interrupted, his voice clipped and
unemotional, as usual. “There are marked differences between the
two sets of aliens and their equipment. The only evidence we have
to support the notion that they are related, is that the ships were
encountered in company with each other.”

Lomandra snorted his derision. “And
artificial eyes and foreign matter in their heads.”

“Show me this ship again, Prasad.”

The intelligence chief produced an image of
the alien vessel, little more than a large rectangular cargo bay
with cramped crew quarters in a much smaller oval attached to the
lower front, almost as an after-thought, a parasite on its
host.

“This looks like a freighter to me. Is it
armed?” Ravindra said.

“
Not that we could see. We wondered about
this.” Prasad played the signal, expressed as sound.
Dit dit dit… dat dat
dat
. “It repeated every
few minutes in a short burst. A distress signal, maybe?”

“
If it is, then the
Yogina
arrived to take them home. And we interrupted.”
Lomandra folded his arms, lips set in his familiar
scowl.

Ravindra glanced between the two men.
Lomandra had clearly made up his mind, but that was his manner.
Prasad was more subtle, less inclined to jump to conclusions. “Have
you tried to track the ship’s route back?” he asked.

“The nav database is unrecognizable,” Prasad
said.

So we don’t know where it came
from.
Ravindra flicked
open his
sanvad
and
connected to his adjutant. “Send orders to ‘
Kalanag’
to follow the alien ship’s emissions trail back as
far as possible.”

He put the communicator back on his belt. “If
we’re very lucky, we’ll find a planet. What can we tell from the
ship?”

“
I agree that it is most likely to be a
freighter because of the configuration. But we have found nothing
familiar. The systems are completely unintelligible, totally
different from ours. And before you ask, different from the
Yogin
technology—or as far as we can
tell. Even the material it is built from is different.”

“Food? Air?”

“Air taken from the ship is a similar
composition to our own. The food would be edible.”

“
Display the
Yogin
as a comparison.”

Prasad called up a new image, a thing
resembling a thin child, naked and innocuous. Granted, a thin, bald
child with a number of deformities, such as a nose reduced to
little more than nostril slits, ears reduced to vestiges and no
sexual organs. The eyes were as strange as the woman’s.

Set side-by-side the newcomers’
differences to the
Yogin
were
evident, the similarities to manesa even more obvious.

Ravindra rested his chin on his fingers.
Prasad’s argument that the two were separate entities was
compelling. “So very much like us. And yet not. I think I would
like to see these aliens for myself.”

Chapter Four

Morgan dismissed the bug-eyed monsters of her
memories back to the vault from whence they’d arisen. Stewing
wasn’t going to help. She might as well try looking at the ship’s
computer systems. A sensor was hidden in the cell’s bulkhead where
her feet were pointed. She activated her implants with a mental
flick and stared at the lens. The sensor’s processor appeared in
her mind, an open portal in the device that collected and stored
images. Light waves entered here, were digitized and coded there.
Simple optical systems weren’t so difficult to interpret. She made
a start, working through the logic gates in the circuits,
translating the digital coding for colors, at least assuming they
saw the same colors she did. Yellow for the jump suit, white for
the walls, dark brown for her hair. She could talk to herself, too,
see what the audio digitizer did with her voice.

‘Well, this is a fine situation we are in,
and no mistake,” she said and noted how the sound waves were
translated from analogue into digital.

Perhaps she could even see where they stored
the results. She hitched a ride on a data packet and followed the
flow along the data bus with the other packets, bright globules of
color in her mind, mapping as she went.

Something struck her shoulder. Hard. Morgan
tore her mind away from the computer network. Codes, packets, data,
bytes… white… walls. The room spun. What room? Where was she? Ship…
alien. Her heart thundering, she struggled out of the machine
state, fighting to clear her head back to the here and now.

A figure leaned over her, black and ominous.
He grabbed her arm, shouting an order.

“Okay, I’m coming, I’m coming,” she said,
scrambling to her feet.

The guard pushed her down a short corridor to
another room, gestured for her to enter and closed the door. She
gazed around at pale grey walls, pale grey furniture. Six
stools—round, unpadded seats on top of central columns fixed to the
floor—were arranged around an oval table. Light came from
translucent strips set into the ceiling. The entire wall opposite
the door was transparent. A row of high-backed chairs with four
legs stood on the other side of the partition. Like a zoo, where
dangerous animals were displayed in just this way to keep the
public safe. Which side the dangerous animals were on might be a
matter of opinion in this case.

She picked the stool at the longest end of
the table and sat down.

Not two minutes later Jones, less than
elegant in the same sort of yellow jumpsuit she wore, shuffled
inside. But while her suit was too small, the trouser legs bagged
around his feet and he’d rolled up the sleeves. Pale, mashing his
lips, he sat down on a stool on the opposite side of the table.

“Yellow doesn’t suit you,” she said. “Makes
your skin look sallow.”

He grunted, pushed the sleeves up his wrists.
“I don’t think much of the fashion, either. What happened to
you?”

She told him. He had been treated in the same
way. Of course. Standard procedure when dealing with aliens, no
doubt.

“It’s been hours,” he said, eyes darting
around the room. “You’d think they’d have wanted to talk to us by
now.”

“Probably. But it’s hard when we don’t have a
common language.”

Jones tapped his fingers, a monotonous,
repetitious drumming. She rested her elbow on the table and
supported her chin in her hand. Easy enough to pretend everything
was jolly. But the knots in her stomach weren’t convinced.

She sat up straight at the sound of
footsteps. A trooper came behind her and uttered an instruction,
while at the same time he prodded her with the muzzle of his
weapon. She struggled to her feet and assumed the military at ease
position. A second trooper meted out the same treatment to Jones,
who shot her a glance, his eyes round with fear.

Three men entered the room on the opposite
side of the transparent wall. All of them had dark skin and black
hair, short at the top and sides but when they were in profile she
noticed a long piece of hair like a ponytail hanging down the back
of their heads, tied back with silver clasps. They looked human,
except that their skin seemed to have a slightly leathery quality
and their eyes had vertical black pupils. They wore black uniforms
with different insignia on shoulder boards.

The first man stood close to two meters tall
and exuded an air of calm authority, along with a restrained,
curious interest. The gold rank insignia on his shoulders resembled
a sunburst. He was followed by a man a head shorter who wore one
silver star on his shoulder boards. Hard lines etched his face,
emanating disapproval and distrust. The third man, interested and
calculating, wore three red stars. Morgan examined each of them as
carefully as she dared. So what was this? The captain and a couple
of senior officers? Quite likely. Or maybe even an admiral?

The first man obviously had the highest
rank; the others deferred to him. He seated himself first, followed
by the other two. Not a young man, but younger than the
disapproving fellow next to him. To her right, Jones was reminded
with a shove that almost had him sprawled across the table that he
had not been given permission to sit. Morgan remained standing,
chin lifted, and stared into the senior man’s amber eyes. An
arrogant prick, this one. She’d have to tread carefully.

He frowned, black brows drawn together, and
gave an order in an even, baritone voice.

She stiffened when the trooper behind her
pushed his armored hand down on the back of her head. She tried to
sit but that was wrong; his other hand grasped her arm. Her muscles
tensed. What did he want?

“Don’t stare, Selwood,” Jones said. “Don’t
look him in the eye.”

She shot a furious look at him. She looked
everybody in the eye.

“Look at the floor.”

She tilted her head forward. The pressure
lifted, disappeared. The baritone voice said something.

“Any suggestions?” She ground out through
gritted teeth. “If I can’t see them, how can I do any fucking
thing?”

“Look at his shoulder, or the things on his
collar. You can look at his face. Just don’t lock eyes with
him.”

Settle, Morgan. You’re out of
options. Jones
is talking sense for a change
. She set her gaze on his rank insignia. The
golden strands winked in the light when he shifted.

The third man, the one with the red stars,
put a hand on his chest and said, “
Kamandara-seban Prasad
.” He waved a hand at the second man, the
one with the silver star and said, “
Nakhoda Lomandra
.” Then the first man, the one with the amber
eyes, “
Daryabod
Ravindra.”