by Tanya Allan
The Captain was curious and stayed with her. It found the human amazingly diverting, so was learning things about the humans every second.
Michelle was watching a BBC documentary on eastern European girls being smuggled to the United Kingdom as sex slaves. She had a germ of an idea.
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A moment later, a technician arrived and answered.
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She described what she wanted, so together they managed to find information and designs on the vast database they had accrued by interface with the Internet. The Captain was pleased, as they had all this wealth of knowledge, so for the first time, here was someone to help them understand it all.
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3.
“Sheriff McGuire?”
Steve looked up to see two Air Force Officers at the door of his office.
“Yeah, Colonel Robertson?”
“Jim Robertson. We spoke on the phone. This is Major Kyle Bennett, my number two. The Major is also a Doctor.”
Steve noted the coiled serpent insignia on the Major’s uniform.
The men shook hands and Steve closed the door to his office.
“You mentioned an artefact?”
Steve passed over the mask.
The Colonel looked at it and his colleague went pale.
“Anything else?”
“Nope, just my sergeant lying dead a short distance away.”
“You said it was natural causes, but you also said that there were signs of medical intervention?”
Steve explained everything as they went over to the Morgue to look at the body. Steve had held up the release of the body for a few hours just so the military could examine the evidence. They had been very interested to see it, having flown down from Nevada especially.
Kyle examined the body thoroughly and looked at the Colonel. He simply nodded slightly, to which the Colonel nodded once in reply. The Major then took several photographs before they returned to the office.
“Sheriff, it is important that you tell no one about this. Let the body go for burial or cremation, whatever the family desire. Kyle has taken blood, fingerprints, and a DNA sample, so there is nothing to be gained from upsetting the family further.”
Steve immediately informed the coroner’s officer to arrange release of Dunwoody’s body to the next of kin.
“So, I ain’t stupid?” he asked when he’d finished the call.
The colonel was looking at the artefact. He was certain now.
“No, I’m convinced that your sergeant managed to extract someone or something from the flood, and he died doing so. It is possible that this person was not a human, or even from this planet. Note the formation of this mask, clearly not designed for any human face.
“But they obviously tried to save him in return, but failed. Just forget it, his time was up, so this is one investigation that you will have to just pass over to us.”
“Can you tell me the truth, were they really aliens?”
Jim Robertson stared at him, and frowned.
“If I say yes, then you will get worried. If I say no, you won’t believe me. You already know the truth, so I will simply say that I don’t know for certain, but I have an open mind.”
Steve smiled and nodded. He understood now.
He passed over the rest of the file he had started, including the Polaroid photographs, watching as the Major slipped them into his briefcase.
“Sheriff, you did the right thing. You can go back to your life and forget all about us.”
“So Mike is dead, for sure?”
“Oh yes, your Sergeant is dead.”
Steve was content with this and, when the Colonel left, he breathed a sigh of relief. It was someone else’s problem now and he wasn’t mad after all.
The two Air Force Officers were quiet in the car. The driver was a sturdy NCO who had been on their team for six years.
“Jim, why do you think they broke their own rules on this one?” the Major asked.
“Hell, Kyle, I don’t know, but the theory that the cop saved one of them from a flash flood is highly reasonable. My question would be, why use their medical superiority to let him die?”
“Are you thinking what I think you are thinking?”
“We know they can replicate themselves, we saw that in Utah in ’89. So, it’s reasonable to assume that they have the technology and knowledge of human physiology so that they could reward the cop by replicating him and then discard the old and useless corpse. They never attempted heart surgery, why not?”
“Perhaps they hadn’t the knowledge.”
“Possibly, but why should they if they could replicate? Keep him alive long enough to create the clone, then transfer the personality and mind of the cop when ready.”
“I never saw the Utah ship, what happened?”
“There was an accident. It sounds silly, but one of their craft hit some power lines. There were five aliens on board, all dead, but in a special unit, a clone was being created of another alien, and it was almost complete.”
“Didn’t the evidence disappear?”
“It was taken to a hanger on Base X, but in the morning it was gone. No one remembered it. I had to leave to speak to the General, and I had the videotapes in my bag. We still have that evidence, but nothing else.”
“So, what do we do?”
The Colonel took out some photographs of Sergeant Mike Dunwoody; one that had been taken many years before, when Mike had been a rookie in the NYPD.
“Get these to our computer specialists. Have them make a composite of how he would look as a young adult, say twenty-one or so. Circulate the results, fingerprints, his blood type and DNA to all our people, I have a feeling that Sergeant Dunwoody will be back.”
Michelle was working out.
Her new body utterly amazed her. The aliens hadn’t been kidding when they told her that they’d made certain improvements. They had built a set of weights for her and even a crude running machine. She had managed to bench-press almost twice the load she had managed at her best as a younger Mike, and that was not inconsiderable. Her stamina was truly unbelievable, as she was able to run for an hour at a very rapid pace without tiring.
She had overseen the construction of a few items of clothing, taken from the many Internet sites and TV recordings the aliens had logged in their databases. She had decided to be smart and not a tramp. All her clothes were on the conservative side, but somehow managed to emphasise her feminine shape in a far more effective manner than the more obvious low cut tops, or short skirts.
Their technology could duplicate anything. She was able to supervise the production of the most fashionable styles in the most luxurious fabrics - even synthetic leather, silk and satin.
The underwear had been the most difficult, but they had managed to construct one white and one black lacy bra, and a couple of pairs of panties. She had two dark skirts, a couple of plain white blouses, and one jacket. There was one ‘little black dress’ and a pair of leather trousers and a matching leather jacket. One silk nightdress marked the limit of their resources, with the exception of one pair of black leather high heel shoes.
The leotard she wore for the workout was simple yet comfortable. She stepped into the refresher unit, stark naked.
This unit cleaned and refreshed without water. It cleansed all her pores, and her hair was left feeling freshly shampooed and dried without the hassle of either.
She had found that she had come to terms with her gender remarkably quickly, and the Captain had confessed that they had to ‘tweak’ her mind so as to make it more acceptable for her. She wondered how many other ‘tweaks’ they had done and weren’t telling her.
They had produced identity for her, a Ukrainian passport in the nam
e of Michelle Nadia Czakan. They had even managed to produce a perfect replica of a birth certificate, showing her born in the Ukraine on the 11th August 1980, making her just twenty-three.
She was curious to know how they managed to acquire the original passport from which to copy hers. She was told that a great many encounters with humans (of the third kind) had occurred, so they possessed a vast number of documents. Their mental powers were such that they could eradicate any trace of memory in all but a few isolated cases.
The plan was for her to give herself up to a police station in Britain, and give the story that she managed to escape from a group of men who wanted to use her as a prostitute in London.
She would use her mental powers to ‘persuade’ the Immigration authorities into allowing her to stay in Britain, grant her asylum and then citizenship.
The technician managed to acquire a complete language program, and whilst Michelle was asleep, they imprinted fluent Russian and French onto her hyper-efficient brain. When she awoke, she was immediately aware that she had the ability to converse in all languages (including English).
The Captain found itself intrigued and fascinated by the large human. They would sit and converse for long periods of time, as Michelle described some of the exciting events of her former life, both in the Air Force, and later as a police officer. The Captain was eager to find out more about this strange race.
Their whole non-intervention policy had kept contact, and indeed research of the humans, to an absolute minimum. The Captain had never before been in the position to openly converse with one in a completely open and voluntary manner.
Michelle was a colourful character, and as such was prone to guild the lily whilst spinning a yarn. A concept as complex as exaggeration and deception were as alien to the Captain as was Michelle herself. The Captain discovered the whole ship’s company stopped doing what they were doing to ‘listen in’ to Michelle’s stories.
After several days, the Captain knew that it was time to throw the fish back, and wondered whether to eradicate all memory of the ship from her memory.
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Once again, the woman had managed to discern the Captain’s innermost thoughts, and seemed quite unperturbed that she had possession of such awesome power.
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PC Rob Chapman had been a traffic officer for six years. Having spent five years at Reading as a shift officer, he had transferred to traffic, and loved every minute.
He was on the M4 motorway patrol with his colleague PC Colin Mitchell in a marked Land Rover Discovery. It was six o’clock in the evening and the rush hour traffic out of London was dying away slightly.
It was November 2003 and it was raining, which had already been partially responsible for two damage only accidents on the motorway already. The main cause was people driving too fast and too close to the car in front, but no matter how hard one tried to tell them, they would never learn.
Their 4x4 was parked on a special elevated ramp set off to the nearside of the hard shoulder, so they could observe the traffic safely, yet be a visible deterrent for the speeding motorists.
“I got dragged off Christmas shopping, last rest day,” Colin moaned.
“Already, but it’s only November?” Rob said.
“Yeah, but Rachel likes to get everything done by the middle of December, less panic, she says.”
“Jenny isn’t bothered, the kids can’t make up their minds as to what they want. Apart from Simon, he wants an X-Box.”
“Everything is so bloody expensive. I’ll have to do some major overtime to pay for it this year,” stated Colin.
The radio broke up their scintillating conversation.
There was a report of a lone female walking on the Reading bound hard shoulder, a couple of miles past Maidenhead, in the forest area.
“Silly cow, she’ll get herself killed,” said Colin, as Rob drove onto the Motorway with the emergency rear red lights flashing.
They drove slowly down the hard shoulder, keeping an eye out for the woman.
“Probably some silly tart broken down and decided to walk for it,” said Rob.
But they came across no broken down vehicle.
“There!” said Colin, as Rob saw her at the same moment. A tall woman was walking away from them on the hard shoulder.
Tall?
She was in excess of six foot three.
They pulled along side the woman and Colin wound down the window.
He looked out at the girl, who stopped and looked at them. She was stunningly attractive.
She was wearing a knee length skirt, a white blouse and a dark jacket. She had high heel shoes on and was carrying a small case. She was wet, and her long blonde hair was plastered to her back.
“Get in,” he said, opening the back door.
The girl got in, pulling her hair back from her face.
“Why the hell are you walking along the motorway? It’s so dangerous, apart from being illegal,” Rob asked.
He watched the girl in the mirror, but was shocked and surprised to see how beautiful she was.
“Tank you. I has bin rooning vrom sum ver bad men,” the girl said. Her heavily accented English displayed that she was not English. Even Traffic officers picked up that one. She had an incredibly sexy voice, very husky and melodic.
Michelle smiled, but was rather shocked to find herself the same height as she had been as Mike. The Aliens had been so small, she had not even considered that they would make her in any other size than average. It never would have crossed their minds, as they were almost all the same size, it was inconceivable to them that she should have been smaller than her male counterpart.
“Where are you from?” Colin asked.
“I kum here vrom Ukraine,” she said.
Colin frowned and glanced at Rob, who rolled his eyes. They came across eastern European asylum seekers every day, but rarely looking quite as good as her.
“How did you get here?”
“I vas in a trook. Zere ver eight girls. De men say ve verk as, how you say, helps in hotels, but zen I find zey vant oos to lie viz men for sex?”
Colin looked at Rob, both men were aware that there was a case going through the courts in London about the sex traffic. Girls were being promised good jobs and when they arrived they found themselves forced into brothels and working as sex slaves for East European gangs.
“Why are you here, on the Motorway?” asked Rob.
“I roon avay. I yam not a girl who give sex for men, not unless I vant to.”
“Good for you. Where’s the truck now?”
“I don’t know, ze trook, it slow in ze traffic, und I joomp. Many kilometres I haf walked.”
“Did you know what the truck looks like?”
Michelle shook her damp head.
“Joost a green one, Hungarian, I sink.”
“Would you know the men if you saw them?”
She shook her head again.
“What do we do, Rob?”
Rob shrugged.
“Fuck knows. She’s probably an illegal. There’s no point nicking her, as they will only send her to the reception centre.
“Have you got a passport?” Rob asked, and she produced a very wet and dog-eared Ukrainian passport.
“Da. I hide in my oondervear,” she said, making both men smile.
Colin looked at the passport, and it seemed in order
, except it had no stamp signifying entry to the UK.
“Michelle, is it?”
“Da. Michelle.”
“How did the truck come to Britain, Michelle?”
“By boat. Ve stay in trook all time,” she said.
“Which port?”
She shrugged.
Rob pulled off the motorway.
“I know. If we take her to Heathrow, then she can go speak to the Immigration officers, and we can get back and do what we should be doing.”
Colin nodded, it made perfect sense. Michelle smiled to herself in the back.
Rob drove over the motorway and rejoined it heading east, back towards London.
“Michelle, we will take you to the Immigration officers. Do you understand?” Colin said very slowly to Michelle.
“Da. Vill zey send me back to Ukraine?” she asked, looking worried.
“I don’t know. If you claim asylum, they may let you stay.”
Michelle nodded, and let her head fall back against the rear seat headrest. The big 4x4 was warm and dry, and it was nice to be back on Earth, even if she had to put on this outrageous accent.
She had spent many hours looking at the databases on the Ukraine, and had pictures of Donetsk imprinted on her brain. This city was in the east of the country and sufficiently obscure for her purposes. But she had memorised the street names, local history, and the geography of the surrounding area.
She sat back and watched the lights stream past in the other direction, and the noise of the police radio reminded her of her other life. She experienced a sudden lurch of regret and mourning for things lost forever. All the memories came flooding back.
Tears came to her eyes as she wept for Carol and the kids, Andy and Mary Jane. She had deliberately not thought about them whilst on the alien ship, but now, in the company of two men very similar to the person she had once been, she cried for everything she had lost.
Colin saw their passenger was weeping, so turned round.
“Hey, Michelle, don’t cry, you’re safe now,” he said, misunderstanding why she wept.
His words of comfort and care only made her cry more, and Colin passed over a tissue roll.
