World War Mars 2 by Rick Partlow

Author:Rick Partlow [Partlow, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2024-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

[ 19 ]

“It’s fucking impossible is what it is,” Dr. Hellen Tran insisted, pointing at the image in the flat panel display hanging off a gimbal mount from a floor pedestal.

That was the problem with the Visitor ship, Victoria Morales thought. The walls were nearly impenetrable, and there were things she really wanted to hang on them. Monitors, for one. The pedestal stands were awkward and there were only a handful of them, which meant that the rickety folding tables they’d brought with them were doubling as monitor stands. Rickety in the Visitor’s internal gravity, anyway. They would have worked fine in the external Martian gravity, which was all anyone had expected when the Morrigan had departed Earth orbit.

Tran had made sure to use one of the few gimballed monitors to make her point though. On the large display, the image of the only Faithful they’d seen so far, Darnot Jus, stared back in pleasant detachment, like a computer-simulated greeter at a Walmart. Or more like her family’s general practitioner back in Anaheim.

“So, what?” Gary Modi demanded, motioning so broadly that he nearly splashed his coffee out of the rim of the plastic cup he’d brought with him from lunch. “You think this is a trick? That the aliens the French are dealing with aren’t actually this… humanoid? Perhaps they simulated this man using software?”

“Maybe,” Tran said, crossing her arms and sitting back on an empty cargo crate left behind as makeshift furniture.

“Doubtful,” Morales said. Four sets of eyes turned her way. Tran, Modi, Steinhardt, and Westby, all gathered together in one of the increasingly pointless brainstorming sessions she’d scheduled every day after lunch. Well, pointless until now. “You’ve seen the footage of the Faithful ships landing in Corsica. Those aren’t robots they’re dealing with, they’re people… living beings. If they looked significantly different than this Darnot Jus guy, we’d have heard about it. Hell, we could probably tell just by looking at analysis of their movements even from as far away as those videos were taken.”

“Then it’s not natural.” Tran’s fingers worked as if she were trying to grasp at any idea that made sense and not finding one. “You heard what Captain Skinner said… or what the Visitor’s computer said through her. The Seekers are all the creations of the Blessed. They obviously engineered the Faithful to look more like us.”

“Captain Skinner also said,” Trond Westby put in, the corner of his mouth turning up almost imperceptibly, a hint of how much he liked to tease Dr. Tran, “that we are the creation of the Blessed. I didn’t notice you accepting that as gospel truth.”

The veins in Tran’s forehead stood out and her mouth flattened into a dangerous line, ready to unleash a torrent of abuse on the linguist, but Morales intervened.

“Whether or not the Blessed had any hand in the evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens,” she said, keeping her tone even and calm, “we know that the… specimens we have from the People are based on DNA.

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