Morgan's Choice (4 page)

“What do you think they’re asking?” Jones
said.

She rolled her eyes and raised both hands and
shoulders in the ‘how the fuck 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; 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 table
top.

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.

Chapter
Five

A trooper shook Morgan awake and tossed her
some clothes, a totally sexless undergarment, trousers and a loose
top. Stifling a yawn, sticky-eyed, she dragged herself off the
bunk. What with new and different sounds and weird dreams about
aliens, she hadn’t slept well.

The guard just stood there, solid as a wall.
Maybe they’d sent a woman. How could you tell under a helmet? She
pulled the trousers on. They were loose around her waist and a
little long in the leg but at least it was better than the horrible
yellow jumpsuit. The top wouldn’t rate too high in the fashion
stakes, either, ballooning around her body like a tent.

She braced herself when she was led out of
her cell, ready for the next battery of tests. Maybe this was how
lab rats felt.

She was taken back to the observation room
they’d been in yesterday. Jones was already there, holding a
weird-looking, crooked spoon poised over a bowl. She sat down
opposite him, balanced the spoon as best she could and poked at the
contents of the bowl dropped in front of her. Some sort of porridge
and purplish fruit. “What’s it like?”

He grimaced. “It’s edible.”

She tasted a mouthful and screwed up her
nose. Bland cereal, sour fruit. “It’s horrible.”

“They didn’t offer a menu.” He dug up another
spoonful of the stuff and raising the spoon to his mouth, added,
“If you don’t eat, you die.” He put it in his mouth and chewed.

She sighed and started shoveling. If she
swallowed really quickly maybe she wouldn’t notice the taste so
much. A mug of water washed it all down. When she’d finished, one
of the troopers took the plates away.

Jones prowled around the room. Dark circles
under his eyes bore testament to his lack of sleep. She didn’t
expect she looked any better.

When the door opened it took her a moment
to realize one of the two figures in isolation suits was Prasad. He
offered them a slight bow and said something.
‘Good morning, nice to see you
here?’
she
thought.

A hand-wave to his companion.
“
Pratinidh
Sayvu
es
vara
.”

Morgan did the neck-bow thing in greeting.
She’d seen it often on the holovid she’d watched last night.

The newcomer said something, the voice
soprano. So maybe a woman? It was hard to tell, dressed in an
isolation suit. Yellow eyes, alive with curiosity, sparkled at her
through the transparent faceplate and the lips curved in a slight
smile. She placed a hand on her breast. “
Sayvu
.” She waved a hand at Morgan.
“
Morgan
Selwood
.”

So maybe her name was Sayvu?

Jones seemed to think so. He smiled, bowed to
the woman and said, “Sayvu.” He even managed to not mangle the
syllables completely.

Prasad nodded at Sayvu, once, and she
responded with a deeper bow from the waist. He afforded Jones and
Morgan a swift glance and then left.

Sayvu turned on a view screen at the far
end of the room and took a black device from her belt. The signal
resonated in Morgan’s mind. A communicator. Sayvu said
“
Adami
”. In
response, a stylized drawing of a man appeared on the screen and
beside it, in beautiful, curling script, the written presentation
of the word.

Morgan grinned. Language lessons. They’d be
staying here, for a while anyway.

****

Three chimes, a pause, three chimes, a pause,
three chimes. End of the second shift. Lessons over for the day.
Jones stretched his back while Selwood stood.

“I’m off to find out about navigation
systems. See you tomorrow.” She nodded a bow to Sayvu and headed
for the door, her trooper at her heels.

Jones gazed after her. He’d heard about
Supertechs and he’d watched her work on
Curlew
but he’d never imagined she’d be able to suck up a
language in a few days, while he still struggled after… what was
it?... ten days. Huh.
Language is codes strung together with
rules,
she’d said when
he asked. He wondered if the alien systems were all that hard for
her.

One thing for sure, Lieutenant Sayvu was
good. A nice girl conducting language lessons and at the same time
learning an awful lot about them. She’d shown them a hologram of
the galaxy to find out where the two humans had come from but he
hadn’t known and Selwood couldn’t pick anything out, either. Or if
she did, she hid it well. They asked about the first alien ships,
too. But neither of them had anything useful to say about that.

Then it was where were you born? What’s
your job? Whose is the body in the cargo hold? How did he die? Who
killed him? The same questions, repeated often, phrased in
different ways.

He still wondered if they believed him. How
do you explain to aliens that the ship’s captain and navigator were
drug-runners who had tried to swindle their contacts?

The stop at Belsun station had turned into
a nightmare. He shuddered. He could still see Banstock lying face
up with his chest blasted away and Tariq clutching the hole in his
stomach, blood oozing between his fingers. The journey back
to
Curlew
had been
torture with Tariq slowing down by the minute and the enforcers on
their heels. Selwood got them out of Belsun, but only just and then
the shift drive failed.

Huh. Some smuggling operation. Tariq and
Banstock both dead, no drugs, no money and a one-way trip to
nowhere, stuck on an alien warship with no way out.

Ah well. Another boring night of trying to
understand the alien vids. He made an effort and smiled at Sayvu,
who smiled back.

“I look forward to see you again tomorrow,”
he said, making that little neck bow.

He genuinely liked the girl and he was pretty
sure she liked him. After all, they’d been together now for a
number of days.