“What will they do to us?” Jones said, perching himself on a bench.
“How the fuck 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 had no whites, different pupils; eyes like cats or lizards.
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 comprised 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.
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 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 t
he 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?
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