In this excerpt from my space opera Morgan’s Choice Morgan’s ship has been taken onboard the alien warship. Now it’s time for her to meet the aliens who have ‘rescued’ her. (If you haven’t read the opening scene, where Morgan’s ship is intercepted, you’ll find it here)
*********************
Two aliens eased into the ship, weapons poised, suspicious, while the other two covered. She watched them through the sensors, prowling along the corridors, easing open hatches, conferring in the common room where the remnants of that last interrupted meal still stood on the table.
Soon enough a trooper appeared at the bridge hatch. He had to duck his head to get through. At least she assumed the trooper was male, there was no way to tell. He gestured, a flick of the wrist with a short-barreled weapon held in one massive hand.
“Time to go Jones,” Morgan murmured. She stood, carefully placing her hands on top of her helmet.
The trooper squeezed into the compartment away from the entrance to let them go before him. She walked along to the forward hatch and down the ramp onto the warship’s deck. Grey walls, low lighting levels, hard floors. A row of troopers waited, weapons held in both hands.
A sharp shove in the back from their escort impelled her toward an open doorway. She stumbled into a low-roofed, windowless compartment with bench seats on either side, Jones behind her. Both of them swayed as whatever they were in began to move. Some sort of isolation vehicle. She checked the suit’s sensor data. Yes, still in vacuum. But the gas levels were rising. They were airing up in here. Nitrogen, a bit of oxygen, a hint of carbon dioxide. Pretty much the same as home. At least they should be able to breathe.
“What will they do to us?” Jones said, perching himself on a bench.
“How should I know? Just keep remembering, it’s got to be better than waiting to die in Curlew.”
“Does it?”
He had a point but she wasn’t going to tell him that.
“Just… be polite, do as you’re told.”
Jones’ lip curled. “You’re telling me?
She looked away. Smartarse.
“Well, come on,” he said. “Surely you can tell something about them, Supertech. You can get into their computer systems, can’t you?”
She scowled. It was always the same. ‘You’re a Supertech—wave your magic wand’. “They’re alien systems. They won’t work the same as ours. I’ll work it out but it’ll take me a while.”
The vehicle stopped. She lurched as it reversed. Then the door slid open. One of the big troopers leaned in and gestured. Get out. Just her. A sharp order enforced with the muzzle of his weapon had Jones sagging back onto the bench.
She clambered down the step into an enclosed room, white walls, all curved. Behind her, the door snicked shut. She gazed around her. Featureless. Not even a sensor in the walls. A door in the opposite wall swished aside to reveal two people dressed in white protective clothing. Like the troopers, they were humanoid but not as tall and bulky. Helmets with transparent face plates covered their heads. The faces looked human, dark skin, straight noses, black hair, two ears, two eyes—all very familiar except for something about the eyes. She enhanced the image, processing out the reflection of the room lights. Their eyes were like a cat’s or a lizard’s, no whites and slit pupils.
One of them came in, took her arm and led her into what looked like a laboratory, the walls lined with cabinets, benches with troughs set in, trays full of equipment.
The hand on her arm had four fingers, opposable thumb. Just like us. If these guys were human, the owner of the hand would probably be female. Her taller companion issued an instruction. Morgan met his gaze and shrugged, hands raised, palms up. I don’t know what you want. He stiffened, legs apart. Angry? What had she done wrong? The other person bowed from the waist and said something to him that seemed to mollify him. She turned to Morgan, smiled and acted out removing her helmet. She moved both open hands toward her face, breathing in, smiling.
She’s saying it’s safe, I can breathe here.
Morgan checked the sensor data from the suit again. Atmospheric gas mix about the same as Coalition worlds. Ambient temperature comfortable. Air she could breathe. They must know that. Maybe they did an analysis on the air they sucked out of Curlew? The meter on the air pack registered about half full, so she could exist in this suit for another three hours or so. But then, what was the point?
She unclamped her helmet and lifted it, ready to shove it down again if she had to. A breath, then another. A little warmer, moister than she was used to but still with that scrubbed spaceship tang. She held out the helmet. The man took it from her and placed it on a trolley. The woman smiled encouragement and mimed taking off her clothes. Morgan complied. Suit first, then boots, shirt, trousers, underwear.
The woman brought out a trolley carrying a tray of instruments. Needles, little bottles, instruments she’d never seen. Just another physical. I hope. She stood quietly, heart beating a staccato, as they took their samples of body tissue, hair, blood. A sting in the back of her neck made her yelp. The woman made soothing noises while Morgan fingered a flat, circular object attached to her skin. She sensed a processor and checked. Alien technology. She didn’t know how to read it. Some sort of controller? Something to collect data?
The male wheeled the trolley away while the female waved her hand, palm open, at a tall, narrow, semi-circular cylinder. Morgan eyed the thing. Was she supposed to get in there? Did this have something to do with the object on her neck? The woman said something, moved around behind her and pushed her between her shoulder blades. Caught off balance Morgan fell inside, hands against the opposite wall. Panic screamed up from her gut to her throat as the cylinder curved shut behind her. Bright light surrounded her. Think, Morgan, think. Panic is useless. A body scan? Maybe. A moment later, the light turned mauvish, like the light they’d used on the ship. She closed her eyes against the glare but she could still see red against her eyelids. She opened her eyes again when the door opened. Trembling with relief, she stumbled out, willing herself to breathe deeply while the sweat dried on her forehead.
The female tech, using both hands held out in front of her, offered Morgan a yellow garment that turned out to be a jump suit that fastened at the front. She pulled it on, fumbling to work out how they did the fastenings. The tech helped. Just bring the two sides together and it seals. Give this part a quick jerk and the seam opens. Too short in the legs and arms, baggy around her body. A pair of utilitarian slippers, nothing more than a sole with a cloth strap over the top, completed the outfit.
Dressed, Morgan shuffled behind the woman down a door-lined corridor. The tech stopped, pressed a panel to open a door and stood aside for her to enter another featureless room with no right-angles. More like a cell, really, four paces wide, four paces long, the sparse furnishings comprising a bunk bed attached to the wall, a small table and a built-in closet. She sniffed at the contents of a cylindrical container on the table and tasted with the tip of her tongue. Water. She hoped. She drank and made herself as comfortable as she could on the bunk, legs crossed at the ankle. Her fingers slid one more time to the device on the back of her neck and wondered what it did. She’d almost forgotten it was there,
Her treatment hadn’t been so bad so far, although her heart still beat far too fast. They’d be checking the samples the medical people had taken for all sorts of things, especially unfamiliar viruses. Breathable air, comfortable temperature, bearable gravity. It might have been a Coalition Fleet ship. Only it wasn’t.
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.
*
“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 Manesai.”
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 Manesai, 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 Manesai, 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 their 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 subtler, 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 Manesai 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.”
*
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 deferring 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 damn 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, looked directly at her. He 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.”
“What do you think they’re asking?” Jones said.
She rolled her eyes and raised both hands and shoulders in the ‘how the hell would I know’ gesture. It seemed to cause some amusement or shock on the other side of the barrier. Well, they hadn’t had to put up with Jones.
“Let’s take a guess. Names?” She pointed a finger at herself. “Morgan Selwood.” Then she pointed at Jones. “Tony Jones.”
The fellow with the silver star looked even more disapproving, brows lowered. The senior man just watched.
“Morgan Selwood,” the man with the three red stars said. “Tony Jones.” He spoke in an even, tenor voice, precise and controlled. The pronunciation wasn’t too bad, either. A rolled ‘r’, a slip on the ‘w’ and the ‘d’.
She pointed a finger at him and he frowned.
“Don’t point,” Jones hissed at her.
She put her hand down. “Why not?”
“A lot of people find pointing offensive.”
Shit. Don’t look, don’t point. The medical woman had sort of waved at the door. She duplicated the gesture pointing her hand at the third man, keeping her eyes on his shoulder. “Kamandara-seban Prasad.”
No reaction. Not from any of them. She risked a glance along their faces. The senior man exchanged a look with the one she’d decided to call Prasad. She licked her lips. Don’t stare. It was so hard not to.
Prasad gestured at Jones. “Kamandara-seban Prasad.”
“Well, come on. He wants you to say it.”
“Yeah, I figured that. It isn’t easy.” Jones stumbled over the pronunciation so much the words were barely recognizable.
Now Prasad rose to his feet. He said something to the trooper standing behind her, then waved a hand at the senior officer. “Daryabod Ravindra.”
She opened her mouth to repeat the words but the trooper stopped her with a hand on her shoulder and a growled, “Nahn.”
She shut up. No prizes for guessing ‘nahn’ meant ‘no’.
Prasad waved at Jones, repeating the words. Jones copied, mangling the pronunciation. And one more time for the fellow in the middle, “Nakhoda Lomandra.”
Prasad turned to her. A slight bow, some encouragement. He waved at the senior man. Her turn? “Daryabod Ravindra.” A tiny smile. Next man. “Nakhoda Lomandra.”
One more unintelligible sentence. He waved a hand at her and waited. She repeated the words back to him. Out of the corner of her eye she could swear she saw the senior man smile. Just a little.
An exchanged glance with his two superiors and Prasad sat down.
It seemed the performance was over. Daryabod Ravindra stood, the two lesser mortals followed suit and all three left the room. So far, so good. With a bit of luck they’d teach them the local language, that was always a good place to start.
“You’re not much good at body language, are you?” Jones said when the door had closed on the aliens.
She bristled. “What d’you mean by that?”
“Be careful what you do with your hands. It’s one of the things you learn in business. The wrong gesture on the wrong planet and you’ll offend somebody. Didn’t they teach you that at military school?”
“No, they didn’t. They taught me how to salute but I wasn’t much good at that, either. They take me as I come.” And if they didn’t, too bad.
“Well… you’re not exactly a people person, are you? But that’s okay. Let me handle the people bit for you.”
“The people bit, huh? So what are you expecting? That we’ll get invited to the officers’ mess for dinner?”
“No, of course not. But we’re going to have to try to fit in—”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself. You don’t know anything about these aliens or what they intend to do with us.”
“Well, given they haven’t done anything horrible yet, I figure we might as well try to set up some sort of rapport with them.”
She snorted. He must fancy himself as a diplomat. Idiot.
Jones frowned. “What are you expecting them to do?”
“I don’t know. But we’re still in quarantine. Better hope they don’t find any exotic bugs and decide to squash the threat.” She ground the heel of her hand into the tabletop.
He swallowed. He obviously hadn’t even considered that option. “That isn’t funny.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be.”
***
“Party tricks,” Lomandra said as the three men walked along the corridor toward the ship’s transit foyer. “Does she really expect us to believe she can’t speak our language? She was word perfect.”
He directed a neck bow at Ravindra. “I recommend we send then to Mahanadi and let the experts at Headquarters assess them.”
Ravindra stared at the captain, who had the sense to lower his eyes. Lomandra had a bad habit of getting beyond himself.
“But the decision is yours, of course, Admiral.”
“With respect, Admiral, I do not agree with the Captain,” Prasad said. “I want to question them further, discover where they come from, how they got here, what they intend. Particularly the woman. I wonder if the strange eyes and the things in her head may have some significance, that her ability to mimic comes from there. And what else it may mean. If they can give us more information about the Yogina, so much the better.”
Lomandra glowered but maintained his silence. As he should. Prasad pressed a button on the control panel next to the transit doors to summon a car.
“I see your point, Prasad,” Ravindra said. “Find out what you can. But they are to remain in isolation until the doctors release them and then they will go into detention.”
Prasad responded with a formal neck bow. “Thank you, Admiral.”
The car arrived and the doors slid apart. Ravindra entered the transit car first, the others behind him. “There is to be no talk of aliens on this ship. We will keep this encounter to ourselves as far as we can for the time being.” The last thing he needed was for some news channel to start a scare campaign.
“We can’t keep this incident secret on the ship, Srimana,” Lomandra said. “Too many people were involved. Troopers, medical—”
“Have the medical staff sworn to secrecy. Let it be known that this new ship is one of our own experimental vessels or something, that the occupants were affected by radiation,” Ravindra said. “Prasad, I will leave the details to you.”
The car stopped and he alighted, leaving the other two to go about their business. The guards at the entrance to his suite slammed to attention as he passed. Inside the privacy of his office he chuckled. She’d repeated Prasad’s words perfectly. ‘You will be taken to the kitchens, killed and served for dinner.’ With not a flicker of understanding. He settled in his chair. Two sets of aliens. Incredible. And yet, when the incredible waves a hand at you… it must be true. And he was still no closer to understanding the Yogina.
When the boffins on Mahanadi heard about his latest prizes, they’d be clamoring, wanting to conduct their tests. He’d have to send them. Eventually. But for now, they may just prove useful in another way.
If you’d like to read Rescued Part 1 tap here.
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