Chameleon in Chrome Ch. 02

He'd never had any trouble with the fighting, no matter who it had been that his unit had to fight, human or Morgarod -- as long as they were there under the same circumstances that he was. In that regard, Ryan considered the average Morgaron trooper to be a worthy opponent, and one who likely had the capacity for more battlefield honor than most of the humans that he'd ever fought beside or against.

When the human thirst for resources had turned in another direction, the undeclared war with the Morgarods had simply stopped. The human settlements and facilities were abandoned and we went elsewhere as we always had. The Morgarods were left with their raw materials, since we'd found much more in another direction, that was all. When they'd exhausted the little that was left, they'd just moved on in another direction themselves, but Ryan had a feeling that the two forms of life would meet again one day.

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She'd stopped hiding herself as she reached the top of her climb inside the low mountain. There was nothing here to hide herself from and she wanted so much to speak to her father. He'd have wanted to be told about what had happened. If he was still alive.

It had been so long, she thought. She could have used his wisdom now.

She walked to the window to lower the shield which protected them against the screechers every night.

Her words failed her as she looked out of the portal to see the shuttle begin its approach to set down on the plateau where they lived. Taela stared and groaned, not quite believing this.

Out of the whole uninhabited landscape on a whole empty world, they'd had to come here to land.

The first of the sand and small pebbles kicked up by the downward thrust of the shuttle's engines began to click and hiss against the transparent screen. She lowered the shield.

"I know what this is," her mother said, walking into the chamber, "and that is not a warcraft, though the crew more than likely are military.

She gave up the rest of her reply as the sound of Ryan's turbines grew to a pitch that precluded speech for the moment, even through the thick rock wall.

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After one pass which told him that there was plenty of room to set down in, Ryan raised the dust collectors over the engine intakes and made his slow approach, lowering his landing gear to hover the massive shuttle in and set it down. He waited for a minute, and then he shut his engines down. As soon as they were cool enough for it, he closed up the intake and exhaust covers of the engines.

On Earth, it was said that hornets or sparrows would only need about five minutes before they began building their nests in an intake. Ryan knew of a few other life forms on other worlds who didn't even wait that long, liking the residual heat of turbine exhausts just fine. He finally closed the protective covers over the windscreen and went to the galley. He came back a few minutes later with a bowl of noodles and sat there as buttoned up as he could get while he ate.

There were sounds from outside as night fell around him, some form of flying life which whistled shrilly as it flew. There seemed to be many of them. He had a thought to use his external cameras in night vision mode, but decided against it, not really caring for the moment. He was sure that he'd find out all that he needed to know about them at some point. He didn't seem to be in any danger where he was at the moment, and he really didn't give much of a damn.

He had a lot of things to think about now, the only human here, all alone on this world.

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She walked to her mother, a lovely middle-aged female. Taela was fretting over breaking out the old weapons from their storage racks. Her mother took her arm in her hand to cause her to pause.

"Calm yourself," she said in Morgaron, "The craft that has landed is not the kind which can fly from world to world. From what you say, I doubt very much that there was a fight of any kind. We would know it if a Morgaron craft was coming for us.

This is something else," she said quietly, "We will need to see in the morning, but I think that this was the same sort of unfortunate event which trapped us all, your father and the others, me as well. They use this sort of craft to go down and up from worlds that the crashed ship visits. The big ones cannot land. If that large craft had crashed, then this one here is not going anywhere far."

"Then we will be faced with how many, Mother? Five?" Taela asked, "Ten? Twenty of the hated ones?"

She stared as the older female laughed softly.

"What have I said to make you laugh?" she asked, "I see nothing to laugh at."

Her mother chuckled and turned to her with a smile, "As far as what we face, I believe that the usual crew for the large ship is less than ten, unless there are passengers, and that is unusual. That was not a passenger craft, not as large as that one was from the fire that I saw from here. So we are faced -- as you say -- with ten or less. Perhaps even two, since that is how many are needed to fly the one which landed. We will have to see.

But you should stop thinking that the war continues here. It does not. Even if the belly of that craft opens and twenty of their warriors jump out, we are all in the same circumstance here. Where can they go?"

"But they are the hated ones!" she exclaimed.

The female sighed, ""I wish that your father had softened his lessons to you." She reached toward one wall, modified in its structure by her mate long before and chosen for its flatness. The sandy stone surface smoothed out to reveal a mirror-like surface where they both stood together regarding themselves.

"I would like you to try to remember the lessons that I taught you," she said, "I've always been able to take a moderate view in all things. Which was a good thing as far as you are concerned, isn't it?" she smiled as she watched her daughter roll her eyes.

"The hated ones were what they were called as the two races fought each other over bits of pebbles and shiny rock, "she said, "In something like a war, it helps to have some insulting term for one's enemy. They called Morgarods the Frog People in the time that your father commanded."

"But he fought them," Taela objected, "He killed them in battle, many I was told."

"When one is young," the old one said, "it is easy to allow one's blood to be roused by hatred. But war is a game where young ones die and old ones grow rich. I am sure that it was this way on both sides.

He killed them," she nodded, "many of them. But what he learned, after the heat of his own hatred had cooled a little, was that aside from the way that they looked unlike Morgarods in some ways, we are very similar in many things."

She looked from her own reflection to her daughter's with a proud, warm smile, "Once more, a good thing -- for you. You should perhaps think of some other term for them. The files which you have watched from his old ship were made at the height of the hatred. The night when you were born, Taela, when he lost his heart for the second time in his life, that was when he stopped calling them the hated ones."

Her mother seemed to not be much more excited over the news than Taela. "We'll have to be a little careful," she said in English, "they tend to spook easily, and when they're like that, they always shoot first."

"Why?" her daughter asked, "if they are such fighters as you both said to me, I would think that they wouldn't have that much to fear, would they?"

"Well," her mother smiled, "Morgarods have an ability which disturbs the hell out of humans. To their eyes, Morgarods can vanish in plain sight -- often in broad daylight, can't they? It tends to make them nervous. You know what I'm talking about, Taela. You can do it too. Sometimes I'm very thankful for it all the same, or I'm sure that I'd have killed your father if he hadn't been able to get close enough for me to get a really good look at him."

Taela' interest was piqued now. She'd heard this tale before a time or two, but she loved to hear it all the same. Her mother saw it in her eyes and laughed softly for a moment before she began.

"I knew that I wasn't alone," she said, "and that's something that you need to consider, whatever you do, because humans have a sense.

They don't know what that sense is, and they don't even really have a name for it, but it's there in most of them anyhow. We know it when we're not really alone. We feel it somehow when we're being observed or watched.

I was busy trying to stay alive and salvage what I could out of the wreck of my ship. I'd bellied it in as gently as I could, but even so, the pieces were scattered for about a half a mile. I was just really lucky that I wasn't killed or worse, injured. Most of what I found was wrecked and smashed, but I was able to gather quite a few things.

So there I sat, with all of what I'd saved around me, years away from rescue -- even if my distress calls got through to somewhere. I'd found a way to hide from the screechers, but they were kicking the shit out of the hull section that I was hiding in every night. By the third day, I'd gotten pretty much everything that was still any good, and my situation just came crashing down on me. I might live here for a while, but I'd always be alone, and I was going to die here.

I started to cry. I've never been a weepy thing, but that day, I just couldn't help it anymore. I'd run out of things to keep myself occupied, and I just started to cry.

After a while, I noticed the proximity alert cheeping at me. It meant that something not too far away from me was moving. I grabbed my gun and looked around as carefully as I could, but I didn't see anything. The damn thing just kept cheeping and I kept looking, so after a long while, I assumed that it must have been damaged in some way that I hadn't been able to determine. So I did about the most stupid thing that I could have done under the circumstances."

"You turned it off," Taela smiled.

"Hey," her mother grinned, "you want to hear this again or not?"

"I want to hear it," her daughter said, pushing her long dark hair behind her ear as she sat down next to her mother and hugged her, "I have always loved to hear this, but I think that I would have turned it off too, if it had been me."

"Well, if I'd left it on," the woman said, "then it would have screamed at some point, because your father was getting slowly closer the whole time. It didn't matter anyway. I knew that I wasn't alone. I could feel it. I even had an idea what it was, since I'd seen the wreck of the Morgaron ship. Whenever I'd look around me, I couldn't see anyone, but I could see something shift a little. Now I know that it's from his motion, but I didn't know that then.

She grinned and kissed Taela, "I never told you, but that's how I was able to keep tabs on you when you were little, once you'd figured out that you could do it. You always thought that you were invisible, but I just had to look for that shifting of some detail or other and I knew that was you. You couldn't hold still to save your life for longer than a second. I only had to wait.

Anyway, the day that I met your father I stopped seeing that shift after a while. It was because he'd stopped moving. But I knew that he was so close, I could tell by the way that normal sounds had changed from behind me. I turned around, and he stopped hiding. I saw him then, from almost right against me. I thought that I was about to die."

"What happened then?" Taela asked, knowing the outcome the whole time.

The old woman shrugged, "I fell in love -- just like that. I remember thinking that I hoped that he wouldn't kill me, not then. I'd only just gotten my first look at him and I was lost."

"I have always wanted to know," Taela said, "just how it was that you fell, as you say, for one who was so different from you. I would think that one must see features that one likes in one who has that effect."

"Well I did," the woman smiled, "There's not all that much difference. My legs were different from his and yours, but I liked his, and he liked mine. A lot of human girls like men with a bit of strength to them, and a lot don't like that at all. I've always liked that, and there he was, right there. I liked his hair, his face, everything right in that one instant.

I'd never seen one of them before, either. I remember thinking 'Whoa, what the hell are we fighting with them for?' I had a whole long list of what I wanted to do come to mind, and honey?" she laughed, "Shooting him was not on that list at all.

I tried to speak to him, you know? I did my best to keep it simple by telling him my name and all, but then he smiled and my knees damn near gave out. I hadn't even gotten past that when he started speaking English to me. I mean, he'd taken lessons for that, but I didn't know it, did I?

Right about then, one of the big cat-things came after us. We'd been so busy staring into each other's eyes that we hadn't noticed it. But we both spun around and shot at it. His shot went wide, but I drilled it first shot, and I shot three times. There wasn't much left. Your father put his arm around me and asked me to protect him. I agreed and that was that."

"It was not so simple as that," her daughter said, "from the way that he always told it to me."

"Ok," the woman grinned, "alright, it wasn't, Taela. It was murder trying to get him to stop trying to drag my stuff up here. He just went on and on, working like a dog, saying that he was so happy that we'd found each other, because at least now there was something to live for. He said that with a little kindness and friendship, we'd have a reason to go on, each of us.

Well I was already way past that part of it. I finally had to stop him just because I wanted to be close to him for a while. He was right and I knew that, but Jesus, I wanted to get to know him a little. I had to kiss him to get him to slow down and stop. It was getting dark anyhow, so before he ran out to get one more load with me walking shotgun and carrying a lot of stuff myself, I just kissed him.

He had the sense to close up the place, and he took me to where we could wash, and I showed him what I thought before he could get all shy on me. Hell, it would have taken months if I'd left it up to him. He'd been here for a while already and he was scared to death to offend me or something.

What he wasn't thinking about was that I'd been cooped up all alone on that probe ship for three years, most of that in cryo. Damn, I needed to get laid in the worst way, and there he was, ripped and gorgeous. Well there's limits to everything, and we found mine right then. My Momma wasn't here to tell me no, so, ..."

Taela had never heard this part of the tale before and sat with her mouth open and a huge grin there as well. "So, there was no, ... courtship first? I read that Morgarods and humans both have courtships to their relationships. There was, ... nothing between you?"

"Well yeah," her old mother laughed, "and we did that. Don't forget that we'd been walking up and down the mountainside for most of a day, hauling my stuff here. It did give us a chance to talk an awful lot.

I decided, and then I kissed him like I meant it. I was so happy. He almost fell down himself, but that started it between us. You have to look at it this way, honey; a courtship is to allow both people, the girl mostly, to decide, right? She has to decide if the guy is the one for her, out of all of the men that she might have a chance at. We had two things working in our favour here.

We were both stranded here. There were no others for us to choose from. That's one. And two, it just happened that he liked what he saw, and I LOVED what I was looking at."

Taela laughed along, but afterwards, she sighed silently to herself. It might have been rough and tumble -- a regular prospector's love affair, in the words of her mother, but her parents had each other when they were younger while she had no one. She was about to get up to eat something when her mother took her hand.

"You might have noticed that I'm not really all that upset that there's a shuttle parked outside tonight. Now, the people in there might just turn out to be stupid jerks, but I'm a little hopeful that at least one of them might have something to catch your eye -- if they don't just open the door and come out shooting.

I know that you identified with your father a lot more than with what I am," she said, "but I think that you ought to at least try for a peek at one of them. You never know."

Taela shook her head. "I feel upset for some reason that I do not understand. I have a want for a mate, but, ... like this, with one of them? I have seen the pictures in the files. I doubt that it is possible. Good night," she said as she got up to go.

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Taela sat in her chamber, looking at the old screen that her father had configured for her so that she'd have some way to learn of her heritage. It was ages old, but it still worked. She accessed the files which related to the war at the point of the system's last update while her father's warship had been in port.

She looked for illustrations of Morgarod males. She liked them, she decided. A male like her father -- though they didn't always get along -- was pleasing to her eye. They looked like her or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she resembled them, since she was a mix. She didn't care. She liked the way that they looked to her anyway.

She closed the files and searched for pictures of human males. What she found were a sorry-looking lot, thin and weak-looking. She didn't like their legs, or their little undersized feet. Even their thin fingers did nothing for her. They had dirty-looking faces, most of them. She couldn't believe that she had some of that DNA in her. She saw nothing which gave her a feeling that she had the slightest thing in common with those things.

"Try to remember something," her mother said quietly from the doorway where she stood with a smaller figure who held her hand.

Taela jumped visibly as she spun around, feeling about the way that she had years before when she'd been curious about reproduction and her mother had caught her just this way then. She was an adult now, she told herself. She had nothing to be ashamed over.

So why was she having a bit of difficulty holding her mother's gaze?

"When a people go to war, they try to cast their opposition in a bad light," her mother said with a nod to the screen. "They say things about their enemies which may or may not be true -- and usually aren't. Did you know that Morgarods eat their captives?"

Taela's mouth fell open in shock.

"Oh yes," her mother nodded, "They roast them over fires alive for what the fear and pain do to the taste. They prize pregnant female human captives. They cook the babies separarat-"

"No, they do not!" Taela said, hotly. "Those are lies!"

"I know it," her mother smiled, "I'm just telling you what I was told. If you read the garbage in there carefully, you'll find some things that they said about humans which are patently untrue as well.

I was once trained as a military pilot, but I was routed a little differently, once they found out that I was really good at finding my way out of bad situations all by myself, and I didn't seem to mind being alone all that much -- uh, at the time.

I saw photos just like that, only the males in them were Morgorods. They all looked like bags of beaten shit -- which is pretty much what they were, since they were prisoners just like the guys in those pictures that you have open there." She walked into the chamber and smiled down at her daughter.

"I get the feeling that you're feeling upset because of the humans up there. You don't have to be. In fact, you can ignore everything and put your head in the sand if you want to. You are half-human though and you might make a friend even if that's as far as it goes. So why not at least take a look? They might move on and be gone by the early morning, I don't know. All that I'm saying is that you shouldn't think that they look like these poor guys. The Morgoroths that you were drooling a little over were at their prime then and in fine shape. Human males can look pretty good too, that's all that I'm saying."