Morgan's Return (34 page)

He sighed. What a very interesting game of maneuvers this was turning out to be.

Chapter 29  

T
he pretty nurse brought Morgan trousers, a shirt, underclothes and shoes. "You'll probably appreciate a shower. Take your time. But not too much. Admiral Makasa wants you at a meeting in an hour."

"Sure. Thanks." An hour. In officer cadet training at the Academy they gave you three minutes. She chuckled to herself on the way to the washroom, remembering how she'd always tried to be a fashionable few seconds late. But it sure was going to be nice to feel clean, with clean hair instead of the sticky mess on her head right now.

Clean and dressed, Morgan was ready and waiting when escorts arrived to take her to the conference room. Makasa sat at the head of the table, of course. She glanced around at four officers wearing Intel badges, and the ship's captain, who sat opposite Makasa.

"Hi," she said brightly. "My name's Morgan and I'm a Supertech."

Makasa scowled, eyeing her. "We are here to discuss the strange blue domes which became involved in the skirmish between Morgan here and the late Commander Cruickshank. For the benefit of those who do not know, Admiral Ravindra denies all knowledge of these beings. We don't know what they are, either."

He waved a fat hand at the most senior of the officers wearing Intel badges. "Commander Lim, your report."

Lim, a tall, slim man with shrewd, green eyes, stood. "For the benefit of Supertech Selwood—"

"Call me Morgan." She smiled at him.

Lim's lips curled. Not happy.

"We were lucky. One of the things was unable to retreat, so we were able to get a close look at it." He showed a 3D model of the shattered blue dome.

"Did you touch it? Does it feel like jelly?" she asked.

He moistened his lips . "It… disintegrated when we brought it onto the ship."

"Still in vacuum, I presume?"

The man bristled. "Of course."

"So it's meant to exist in space. No gravity."

"That was our conclusion, yes." He'd straightened, his jaw muscles working.

"Shut up, Morgan," Makasa said. "Let Lim finish."

They hadn't been able to analyze the substance, they'd found no pilot and no recognizable mechanics. The assumption was that electrical impulses lit up the lights around the edges of the dome. Morgan stored what Lim had said for future reference, along with the close-up pictures taken in space.

"So we don't know how it moves?" she said.

"That is correct."

"And we don't know where its companion went?"

"It disappeared," Captain Trask said. "We tracked it until it reached the proximity of Ushas's largest moon. We assume it went into shift space."

"We had considered the possibility the things came from that moon," one of the Intel people said.

No, wrong
. It was instinct, pure and simple but these things weren't from around here. In her head, Morgan played back her own encounter with the two domes.

Makasa's voice interrupted her reverie. "Morgan, can you tell us anything else?"

"I wish I'd been able to see it up close."

"You were in no condition." His words were abrupt.

They all looked at her, expectant.

"I've never seen anything like it." Morgan frowned at the image she raised in her mind, the dome just before Cruickshank attacked, then projected it in 3D on the conference table. "It gave off no signals, no indication it was a form of technology. And yet, when it chose to attack, it did so with enormous force."

"It's interesting it appeared when you were out there." Captain Trask radiated suspicion, staring at her with narrowed eyes.

Morgan snorted. "What are you implying? That this thing had something to do with us? That's just plain stupid." She gazed at the thing on the display, a little like the jellyfish which inhabited the seas where she grew up. "It's just floating there, not doing anything. Maybe they came to have a look, Makasa's little friend, Cruickshank, upset them by attacking and they decided we weren't nice."

Silence, except for the ever-present hum of the life support systems.

Trask cleared his throat. "Well, they've gone. Hopefully, we've scared them off."

"What if we haven't?" Makasa gazed around the table.

Lim lifted his shoulders, arms out, palms up. "We should be able to defend ourselves, since we can break them apart with a missile or beam weapons. They're weird, but they don't pose an insurmountable threat. In my opinion."

"Morgan?"

She shrugged. "How should I know? I'm not Intel."

Makasa glowered at her. "What is your feeling?"

"With respect, Admiral, this isn't about feelings." Lim directed a glare at Morgan. "What intelligence we have indicates that if… if… these creatures return, we can defeat them."

"Wouldn't it be better to try to converse with them?" one of the female officers asked.

Morgan almost chuckled. Memories of her first encounter with
Vidhvansaka
played out in her mind.
Been there, tried that, got the detention cell.
"We can only do that if they're willing to chat. So maybe you ought to give some thought to how you might communicate with them. How do you say 'sorry, we didn't mean it' in Dome?"

That earned her another glare from a few of the officers present, and a glower from Makasa. "Behave yourself," he hissed.

"Whatever."

"However, I think Morgan has made a good point," Makasa said. "If these things are, in fact, alien, we should consider how we might establish contact with them."

"I agree," Captain Trask said. "Commander Lim, I'll leave you to work on a communication strategy."

Morgan grinned. Lim so obviously thought it was a sheer waste of time. He wasn't rolling his eyes now, but she'd bet he would be as soon as he got a chance.

"Are we finished here?" Trask raised his eyebrows, looking at Makasa, then the others, who nodded. "Then I think we all have other things to do." He led the exodus.

Makasa's hand dropped onto Morgan's shoulder. "Come with me."

Morgan trotted along beside him up to the living areas of the ship. Along the way she made a mental check on
Vulsaur
, still in a docking bay. And why not? The ship was out of the way, inaccessible to most people. It was in reasonable shape, too, having set about repairing itself, as she'd configured it to do.

"In here." Makasa directed her into the admiral's quarters, and closed the door behind him.

Nice. But she hadn't expected anything else. It was smaller than Ravindra's quarters on
Vidhvansaka
but well-appointed in Fleet dark blue. She chose one of the five lounge chairs and sat, while Makasa eased himself into his hover chair. The servos whined as the seat adjusted to his weight and body shape. If it had been a person, they'd have had to pay it overtime.

His face took on that faraway look as he gave orders via his implant. She eavesdropped. Room sealed, recording scrambled. So, a private conversation.

"Talk to me. I want you to tell me everything that happened to you from the time you left with
Curlew
on that last mission. How did you meet Ravindra? How did you become involved with him?"

Sighing, Morgan sat back in the chair. Where to start? "Tell me something. Why did you hand over your wonderful new technology to a scheming, conniving bastard like Tariq?"

Makasa's brow creased. "What was wrong with Tariq? We checked his record after you disappeared. He had highest security clearance; he'd worked with Fleet before."

"Apart from the fact that he was a drug smuggler, probably nothing. I was a bit surprised the drive wasn't on a military ship."

At least Makasa looked embarrassed, scratching his temple with one finger. The blue stone in one of the rings he wore flashed. "I had no idea it wasn't to be a military ship."

The thought hit Morgan like a blow. "Cruickshank. I'll bet she was involved. She would've had much greater access to a freighter than a military ship. And fixing Tariq's record would have been child's play." She shook her head slowly from side to side. "That woman must have hated me."

Makasa was frowning. "What happened to
Curlew
?"

"We stopped off at Belsun station. I wasn't happy, it wasn't scheduled. But I did want a look at that shift drive. Something bothered me. It had obviously made the jump, but I felt it had worked a bit too hard for such a short distance. I was just starting work on it when Jones came back with Tariq."

"Jones?"

"Some accountant mate of Tariq's. He was in on the drugs, too. Apparently Tariq tried to swindle his contacts at Belsun station. They killed
Curlew's
navigator and Tariq was badly injured. We had to pull out of there immediately, with the local crime lords on our tail." They'd sent a patrol ship after them, armed with missiles. She'd only just been able to make shift space in time.

"Then sometime while I was having a well-earned rest, the shift drive failed, but not before it took us somewhere way off the navigation charts. I had no idea where we were in space, except I knew we were well outside anything shown on Coalition charts."

Morgan stared at nothing, remembering. Far beyond anything she knew, going nowhere with a man she didn't like, didn't trust. Even now, she could feel the cold fingers of dread on her spine.

"Tariq died. We shoved him in the hold and hoped like hell somebody would pick us up. And then we encountered two lots of aliens."

Makasa's eyebrows shot up.

"Yeah. The first lot tried to take us away, took us in tow. We found out later they were associated with an AI, an artificial intelligence sent out during the Cyber Wars to find and terraform new worlds to be settled by people. Anyway, they had us in tow when Ravindra's flagship turned up and 'rescued' us." She jagged her fingers around the word.

"So there we were, aliens to Ravindra's people. They taught us their language, so they could talk to us. They figured we had to be related. And we were. I won't bore you with the whole story, but it seems the Manesai had a legend that they were descendants of star people, who had round eyes and were multi-colored."

She grinned at Makasa's frown. "All the Manesai look the same in terms of skin color and hair color. Their eyes vary, but that's all. Whereas just on
Curlew
we had Tariq, who was black, with curly, black hair, Jones, who was blond, and me."

Morgan ran a hand through her dark, slightly curly hair, with its hint of red. "You have to understand how Manesai society works. They have four classes which can't interbreed." She shrugged. "It sort of makes sense. Everybody has a role, everybody has a job. The idea seems to have been to eliminate the need for conflict. It didn't work, of course."

Makasa echoed her words. "Of course."

"The military class, the Mirka, were supposed to be in charge. Then came the merchants, the artisans," she pointed at herself, "people like me, and then the workers. But the merchants didn't like not having a say in government. They insisted they had as much rights as the military, so they had a resistance movement. They claimed they had all descended from these multi-colored folk with round eyes. Like me and Jones."

"So they recruited you."

"Basically. Or at least, they recruited Jones. They grabbed me. They paraded us around as the Orionar King and Queen, to prove they were as good as the Mirka." She paused, running her fingers over her mouth.

To talk about it now, she couldn't understand why she'd gone along with Asbarthi as the 'Orionar Queen'. Then again, she could. "A few people asked me why I went along with it, played their silly game." She paused, then continued. "On that planet they were fighting against a despotic, military regime, which makes sense to me. I had nowhere to go, except back to the military and I didn't want to do that." No, because she'd fallen in love with their admiral. But that wasn't Makasa's business.

"Anyway, to cut a long story short, Ravindra and I were flung together during an uprising. We ended up on Artemis, the AI I mentioned."

Makasa frowned.

"Artemis was a ship, a huge, self-sufficient, exploration ship which was supposed to find, and terraform planets for humans. But it had this other instruction, which ultimately took over. If it found intelligence, technology, that life was to be destroyed."

"Out of the Cyber Wars. Anti-machine."

"Yes, strange as it seemed. It found the Manesai, and set about destroying them, so they were forced to destroy the ship. But before they did, Artemis had transferred its route plan to me, so I knew what route the ship had taken to get to Manesai space and I knew it had come from Iniciara."

"Ah."

That was all he said. He understood. Whatever Makasa was, he was smart.

"Do you think these domes have anything to do with this Artemis?"

"It hadn't occurred to me until I started telling you about Artemis. It's a possibility. See, there's more to the story. After I fixed the design of the shift drive, we followed Artemis back here. And then we went looking for the Manesai's ancestors."