“I didn’t understand it,” Mehta admitted. “What are the Spirits?”
“Ah,” Aahliss murmured, her expression one of near bliss. “The Spirits are our guides, our assurance in danger, our help in times of trouble.”
Yeah? Then why aren’t they helping you out now?
Aahliss gave her a stern look. “You don’t believe in them.”
She’d been exposed to many religions, including her mother’s Catholicism and her father’s Hindu beliefs, and by the time she’d reached adulthood, she’d decided not to believe any of it. The Spirits looked to be more of the same, divine beings who granted blessings and gave guidance, but whom no one could see or truly contact.
Still, it wouldn’t be a good idea to offend Aahliss.
“I’ll try to keep my mind open.”
At the table next door, Davis and his Mralan table mates burst into laughter. They looked like they were having so much fun… And other tables were humming with cheerful conversation. Why did her table have to be so serious?
“This looks really delicious,” Trel said as he plucked some slices of alien fruit or vegetables off a tray. “Hmm?” he said, looking at Mehta as he chewed. “Take some.”
She chuckled. “Anyone ever tell you not to talk with your mouth full?” She slipped a disk of the food into her mouth. Anything to get her mind off these Spirits and the awkwardness that could bring.
At that moment, Opash stood. “Everyone, um, if you would give me your attention…” Opash waited, fidgeting, while the room grew quiet. “I have an important announcement,” she said, then looked at Mehta. “The council had a second meeting, after you said we should take you back to Earth.”
Mehta swallowed her food, one piece still a little too large so it struggled to go down. Now what? Were they going to decide they wouldn’t take her team home? Would they keep the humans on the ship, even though the Mralans refused to work with them?
“We have decided that… we want to live. We can’t let one person cause this experiment to fail.”
Mehta took a deep breath and sat up straighter, her fingers grasping the edge of the table with nervous excitement. Had she pulled it off? Had she gotten them to agree to select a different Mralan to be Captain?
“So we discussed it further, and decided that there is only one person who would be able to do the—what did you call it?—the caption thing?”
“Captain,” she said, smiling. Her voice sounded strong and sure, and her back straightened even more.
“So, we have agreed… and all of us have voted for this option,” Opash said, bringing her hands together as though praying, “that the new captain should be Colonel Mehta.”
“Woo hoo!” Davis shouted. “Great decision!”
Mehta looked around. A smiling Hiranaka clapped, and her table mates emulated that gesture. Davis shook his fists in the air and cheered.
And Ramirez sat back, a dark expression on his face, arms crossed over his chest.
Well, you can’t please everyone.
“First thing in the morning,” Fmedg said, “We’ll get you ear prostheses, so that you can deal with other aliens without them realizing you’re not Mralans.”
“Why would we need to do that?” Mehta said to Trel.
“If they see humans on our ship, they’ll know we’ve made contact, and that will nullify our ability to protect you.”
“I see.”
Opash grinned, waving her arms. “Let’s give a cheer for the new captain!”
Then Aahliss stood. “I object!”
Silence fell on the room like a collapsing ceiling.
“What’s wrong?” Opash said, her voice squeaking.
Aahliss filled her lungs, no doubt so she could project loudly, give her the sound of authority. “She disrespects the Spirits.”
“Not true,” Mehta said, standing. “You don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You think they’re something we’ve invented, a pretense to allow certain people in our society to take advantage of the others, to control their behavior.”
Mehta shook her head. “Wow. I don’t know where you got that. I never even thought through it that far.” And yet, she knew that was exactly what she’d assumed. Aahliss was right.
Aahliss turned away from Mehta, now addressing the rest of the group. “We cannot expect the Spirits to ever return if this is the attitude we’ve brought onto our ship.”
“But you selected her,” Fmedg said.
“She seemed reasonable at the time, but now I know that choice was a mistake.” The words echoed off the tubes in the front of the room—mistake, stake, take…
“This is our life we’re talking about here,” Rbemfel said, standing. “We’ll deal with the issue of the Spirits later.”
“There may be no later if we continue with this course.”
Silence stretched the seconds into eons. Mehta looked down at Trel, and he gave her an apologetic shrug, almost as if he had spoken the words out loud, sorry you got put at the same table with Aahliss.
She looked back up again, scanned the frightened faces, then realized what she had to do.
“I’m sorry, everyone. I understand this is an important issue. If it’s going to stand in the way of me being captain, I’ll defer that position to someone else. Perhaps Lieutenant Colonel Davis.”
Davis was smart, dependable and knew almost enough to do the job. With her mentorship, they could probably pull it off.
“No,” Opash said. “The council decided. Aahliss is not a member of the ship’s council. Her vote doesn’t count.”
Aahliss made a grunting noise. “You’re making a terrible mistake,” she shouted, then stomped out of the room, her dark robes whooshing behind her, flaring up with her movement, then disappearing around the corner.
Opash eased herself back into her seat, as did Rbemfel after a moment’s hesitation. The only one still standing was Mehta.
“Well,” she said, feeling tentative for the first time since she’d come on board, “we were all having a good time before, so let’s see if we can ease back into that.”
“Damn straight,” Davis said.
The buzz of conversation returned, and Mehta slowly sat. Trel patted her shoulder, grinning. “Well done.”
“Yeah,” she said, but her smile was feeble. To command a ship, a person had to have an intimate knowledge of the equipment, what it could do, what it couldn’t do, and how it all worked. A person had to know what commands to give, and in what order things needed to happen. She knew almost none of those things. She’d be just as successful if she was put on a Spanish galleon from the sixteenth century, where the only command she knew was “belay that order.”
Not to mention that she didn’t really know how to work with the Mralans. She’d been getting lots of looks from them, like they thought there was something wrong with her. What if she couldn’t get them to follow her? What if she couldn’t teach them everything they needed to know?
She turned to Trel. “I think I’ve just bitten off more than I can chew.”
The party lasted for several more hours, and by the time it was over, she had decided to ask Opash to be her Mralan executive officer—not because Opash was particularly confident or even authoritative, but because she seemed to have good rapport with the other crewmembers.
And it was clear, after a few glasses of whatever sugary drink they had served, that it was spiked with alcohol. She had a buzz, a lightheaded feeling, a propensity to laugh a lot more than normal. This wasn’t good. She was liable to say or think something else that would offend someone, and right now was the worst time to make such a faux pas.
So, she asked Trel to take her to her quarters, and soon they were on their way.
As she walked beside him, her mind went back to the flower garden of her childhood, to the joy that encompassed her as her granny wrapped soft arms around her and told her how special she was. Why was she resisting love? Why was she pushing Trel a
way?
“So,” she said, gathering her courage, “tell me about your family.”
“My family? Or Mralan families in general?”
“Yours.”
“A very ordinary, nuclear family,” he answered. “I have two brothers who work in space. I also have one sister, and a sister-in-law who both live in the same apartment building as my parents. That way, everyone can help each other.”
“Wow,” she said, trying to imagine such a situation. “That would be great, as long as everyone gets along.”
“Sounds like a human problem to me,” he said with a laugh. He stopped walking at a non-descript door, then pulled a plain gold ring from his pocket. “Here’s your ring. It allows you access to your quarters and other authorized areas.”
She stared at it for a moment, then realized she could use this moment for a little pretend romance. He wouldn’t know what happened.
She held out her left hand, palm down. “You put it on me.”
His brows went up. “Surely you’re not so drunk you can’t…”
She closed her eyes. “I can barely stand up.”
His breath came out so strongly she felt the air move against her hand. “You know, if you want me to touch your hand, you don’t have to go to all this subterfuge.”
She snapped her eyes open, then felt relief to see that he was smiling. “Please.”
He nodded, took her hand in his, and her body reacted with shimmering waves of pleasure running up her arms and down her torso. Then he slipped the ring onto her middle finger. He pulled his hands away. “That disappointed you somehow.”
“I’m okay,” she said, giving him a weak smile. No reason to be disappointed just because he didn’t put it on her ring finger. The touch itself had been more than she’d expected. That was enough.
“Wave your left hand, like this.”
She did, and the door slipped open.
“Let me show you around the room.” He stepped past her and through the door, pointing toward the other side of the room. “Over there is the bed.”
A wave of dizziness passed over her. All of a sudden, her romantic ideas and fantasies seemed stupid, even dangerous. But he had picked up on them, she was certain. Now, did she dare go in there? Was he going to take her thoughts to heart and try to give her what he must think she wanted?
He glanced back at her, and his face became... well, about as serious as he could make it. “You do need this little primer, so get in here.”
“You’re not going to...”
He cocked his head. “Let me put it this way. If I’m in physical contact with you, I’ll feel what you feel, and if you’re uncomfortable or upset, I will be, too. So, I’m not going to do anything to upset you.”
A part of her, way in the back of her brain, registered a slight disappointment at that. Not that she wanted him to upset her, just that it sounded like he wasn’t going to make any moves on her, and maybe not any physical contact at all. Darn.
She entered the cozy room. It was an outside berth, with a huge window, where the Milky Way cut a diagonal swath across her view, millions of stars so distant they blurred into a single irregular band, a ribbon of dark snaking its way through the center.
“Over here’s the closet,” he said. “Come wave your hand in front of it.”
She did, and the door opened onto a small storage space with several shelves. On the top shelf, three spherical objects rested in small divots.
“So, tell me,” she said, “how do Mralans pick their mates?”
“Good question,” he said. “But I don’t know if we have time to go into that right now.”
“You do it empathically, don’t you?”
He gestured at the spheres. “These are your extra clothing balls. You put the used one in this slot, and you’ll always have a fresh one here.”
“So, you just decide you like someone? You can sense they’re trustworthy?”
“Trust isn’t an issue,” he said, closing the closet. “Over here is the hygiene unit.” He pointed to a nearby alcove and walked in that direction.
“Then how do you decide who’s the one for you?”
“This knob will give you water,” Trel said. “But the main cleaning operation is done by stepping in here, and you press this button.”
“Clothes off or clothes on?” she said, her voice turning husky.
Damn, what the hell had brought on that kind of talk?
He cleared his throat. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Oh.”
“This controls the lights,” he said, indicating a small panel by the window. “It has three settings: on, off and automatic. With automatic, the lights will go off and the window will turn opaque as soon as you lay down.”
“Very nice.”
“Shall I leave it on auto?”
“How do you decide?”
He scrunched his face. “You’re not talking about the light setting, are you?”
“How do you know you’ll be happy with someone?”
He let out a noisy sigh. “Okay. I give up. We can sense what another person’s personality is like. If I take your hand, I can see it.”
She frowned. “Then you saw my personality when you gave me this ring.”
He looked away.
“What does a personality look like?”
“This’ll probably sound strange, but it’s a multi-sided, non-symmetrical geometric figure.”
“Yeah, that is odd.”
“We have counselors who do nothing but matchmaking. They sense the personalities of all the unmarried people in an area, and when they find two who match up, they introduce them.”
“Sounds like a good system.”
“Other times,” Trel continued, “when you meet someone, you have a sense of it. Then you ask to be allowed to see their personality.”
Her smile wavered. “So, taking the hand isn’t an agreement to marry, then.”
“No, just to see if there’s a match.”
She swallowed hard. Did she want to ask the question? Did he know the answer?
“We can usually come up with a percentage. So, you could say, ‘That woman and I are an eighty-five percent match.’”
“What’s a good number? What would be the minimum you’d go for?”
“Ninety percent.”
She nodded, not daring to look at him.
“I do know what our percentage is,” he said. “Are you interested?”
She looked out the window. She was crazy to have brought it up. Maybe she should let it go, tell him she didn’t want to know.
But, damn it, she did want to know.
On the other hand, maybe this attraction to him meant she was “going native,” just like Colonel Freeman had warned her. For that reason alone, she should keep her distance.
But one little piece of information couldn’t hurt, could it? It could put her mind at rest, let her get focused on her job again.
“I am curious,” she said finally.
“I will tell you this,” he said, his smile now too smug, “it’s either 47 percent or 97 percent. You can figure it out from there.” With that, he headed toward the door.
“Trel!” she said, “you can’t do that!”
The door slipped open and he stepped into its frame, then turned and looked at her. “You’re tired and a little tipsy. Get some rest.” Then he moved into the hallway, and the door closed.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It wasn’t until Mehta stood at the hygiene unit, clothes on, that she remembered her conversation with Trel the night before. Then, her face turned redder than the nose of a Mandrill Baboon. What in the hell had she done last night? And what had Trel thought of her blatant overtures? He probably went to his room laughing.
Oh, stupid, stupid, stupid!
It had happened because she was drunk. She had never taken a drink in her life, for fear she would turn out like her father, and now, it looked like she was right. She had been an over-the-top idiot, because she’d ass
umed they wouldn’t consume alcohol. Why hadn’t they told her? Why had they let her get plastered?
More importantly, would Trel believe that was the explanation for her behavior?
Would he refer to it? Would he decide it was time to come on to her?
No, he would feel her discomfort, her embarrassment, the moment he was in the same room with her. Worse yet, now that the subject had been broached, she would probably find him more than distracting.
What she needed to do, then, was dive into her work. That would keep her focused. She took a deep breath, then as she stepped into the hygiene unit, she started going over the things she needed to do.
Next came breakfast.
As he stepped into the dining facility, Trel’s eyes were guarded, and he seemed to approach her carefully. “How are you?”
She motioned for him to sit, and he deposited his tray in front of him.
“Today,” she said, “I need to learn what your technology can do.”
“So that you know what commands you can give?”
“Right.”
He picked up a mug of some hot beverage, took a sip, then held it near his mouth while he appeared to think.
“I also need to learn a lot more about your culture and history.”
He sighed, blowing the steam from his drink until it was so diffuse it disappeared. “That’s a lot. Takes most people months, if not years, to get all that.”
“Then give me the basics.”
“Dirt.” He set his cup down, then ran a hand over his face.
Mehta smiled and tilted her head. Dirt? Had to be another strange Mralan expletive.
He lifted one brow and smiled back. “If you want, I can say something stronger.”
“Oh, please do.”
“Vomit.”
She chuckled softly, and he joined her. Damn, she enjoyed being with him, felt so good around him, so relaxed… And now was not the time to feel that way.
Focus. Focus.
“So first, let’s talk about the ship and its capabilities. How would be the best way to learn that? Do you have some manuals that describe it?”
“We could take a tour of the ship,” Trel said.
No Plan Survives (Tales from the Protectorate Book 1) Page 11