Read Online Indigo Squad by Tim C. Taylor - Free Book Online Page B

stronger physique – an attribute that attracted Loobie’s eye too – but Fant was still a boy. Arun wasn’t. He was a little younger, but he was a man. The Marine’s brown eyes drew her in, hinting at tales of sadness and pride. His crew-cut emphasized the strength and symmetry of his head. And as far as his body, he massed as much as Furn, Finfth, and Fant together.
    She imagined what it would be like to experience that strength embracing her, Arun’s fingertips tracing lines down her spine that sent her heart racing and melted all the strength from her limbs.
    That should do it.
    Indiya ceased trying out hot thoughts about Arun and checked the diagnosis. It reported that her hormone responses had reacted to him as an attractive possible mate, but at levels far short of sexual obsession.
    She wasn’t in love.
    Mader zagh! Thank fuck for that.
    She sighed. She had put off running this self-diagnosis for weeks, frightened that if she found evidence that she was smitten by McEwan, the knowledge would snare her in a self-reinforcing trap.
    Still in flight, after slapping the bulkhead, she somersaulted just before reaching the far wall, and then pushed off back to her starting position. How the hell could normal people stay sane when they fell in love? Without control of their own hormones, they must suffer a temporary psychosis. Perhaps that was the point.
    Her virtual eyes played over recorded memories of McEwan’s body. Her evolutionary programming nagged at her, telling her that if she clothed him and shrank his body to sensible levels, then he would be a handsome young man from an exotic tribe, an irresistible prospective mate. She’d never had much time for boys – or girls in that way – but she understood her evolutionary programming was tagging McEwan with a flashing status light labeled cute .
    But cute was a word Indiya could never apply to McEwan. Not after she’d seen him unclothed and revealed under the scrutiny of medical scanners on her cryo deck. She’d seen his multiple gunshot wounds, the remodeling where his knee had shattered, and the damaged nerve endings that suggested his entire torso had been subjected to prolonged electrocution.
    In other words, he was a bio-engineered war machine clothed in human flesh and then scarred in battle. If he was a baseline human from Earth, he would have died many times over,
    Arun McEwan was anything but cute!
    And yet…
    Indiya shook her head free of him. Arun would have to wait his turn.
    Too many strange occurrences were unexplained. Arun was one thread to unravelling these mysteries, but she’d promised Uncle Purify to leave the matter of the Marines with him. First she wanted to investigate further into Bonaventure ’s destruction.
    Using the correct security tokens this time, Indiya accessed Beowulf ’s sensor archives. Her softscreens came alive with recordings of EM radiation from visual to microwave and out to radio wave. Radiation sensors, chemical sniffers, threat analyzers all added their perspectives and told her absolutely nothing,
    Even stepping through the event millisecond by millisecond showed nothing out of the ordinary, until one moment Bonaventure was fine; the next it had already exploded . It was as if the cause and initiation of the explosion had been cut from reality, the history of the universe re-spliced with that sequence missing.
    Half the crew were shitting themselves because of the rumors that Bonaventure had been destroyed by a stealthed ship: a hidden ship that could destroy Beowulf at any moment.
    Indiya was convinced the stealth ship theory was bullcrap. Even if a ship could hide from every sensor on the ship, there would still be signs of the attack on Bonaventure ; the stricken ship’s destruction would have to start somewhere.
    The screens went blank.
    Indiya trembled. Had they blanked because she’d gotten too close to a dangerous truth?
    The screens reset themselves, reporting that there had been a temporary power