by Adam Drake
Ash found his voice first. “Uh, hello.”
“Hello!” the eyeballs said with enthusiasm. “Is that the proper way to greet one of your cultural shade?”
“Sure.”
“Excellent! I am most refreshed by this knowledge. The variance of your species is diverse as it is annoying.” The blue fluid within the drone bubbled, which probably could be taken for happiness. “Maintaining the proper etiquette when communicating with these variances can be hill-climbing of a steep kind.”
Ash leaned over to Femke. “It's talking is making my head hurt, can we shoot it?”
“I dunno,” Femke said, looking at the strange being with a mixture of amazement and revulsion. “Maybe it's worth something.”
The eyeballs grew larger in size than shrank. “Your speaking is of death and money. These concepts, although odd to me, is most entertaining to observe in lesser beings.”
Femke said, “What... Who are you?”
The drone twirled in place causing Ash and Femke to take a step back in alarm, weapons at the ready.
The drone returned to its original position, eyeballs forward. “I am neither, and I am both. But a definition is needed for further communication. You may refer to me as Gishjjhadkuttmalrutttan-ijjkl.”
“I'm not saying that,” Ash said.
Femke held up a hand in frustration. “What are you? I've never seen an alien like you before.” Like most interstellar traveling humans, Femke had run into a veritable encyclopedia of alien species which proliferated this arm of the galaxy. There were so many species it was hard not to bump into one. But this thing was utterly unique.
The eyeballs moved about changing positions with each other. “I am one, like none. Believe that what I am is not what has been before.”
Ash whispered to Femke, “I'd still like to shoot it.”
She held up her hand, again. “You're one of kind? Is that what you mean? You are the last of your species?”
“Incorrect!” the eyeballs declared joyously. “Such an explanation of my being would require further evolution of your shade's intelligence.”
Femke frowned. “You're saying I lack the ability to understand what you are?”
“I am saying that you, and your future offspring, and their future offspring, and future generations calculating roughly 84 times out will fail at this mental task. At the 85th generation of your species we can speak of this again!”
“Maybe we should shoot him,” Femke said.
Now it was Ash's turn to hold up a hand. “Look, uh, what was your name again?”
“Gishjjhadkuttmalrutttan-ijjkl!”
“Okay... Gish. We're kind of in a hurry at the moment and your presence in the, uh, reactor core was messing with our game. Can you not do that, please?”
The alien was silent a moment, then said, “An agreeable contract has been signed! I will avoid myself of the core for fourteen chronometric hours. After which I will return to absorb the beautiful waves.”
Femke frowned, “You feed off the core?”
“That description of this interaction will suffice.”
Ash's scanner pinged. “We got incoming.”
“Who? Can you tell?” Femke asked.
He shook his head. “Too far out, right at the edge of the radar, but they're coming this way. We need to get back to the cockpit.”
Femke sighed and looked at the floating alien. “Well, now what do we do with you, Gish? We can't leave you here in the engine room. And we're not letting you float around the ship. We'll have to restrict you to one of the crew quarters, for now.”
Gish was silent for several moments and the school of eyeballs drew closer together. “You mean a capturing ceremony?”
Both Ash and Femke didn't know how to react to that.
Femke finally said, “No, no capturing. You are not our prisoner. We just don't have time to converse with you right at the moment.”
“This is acceptable within the parameters of the chronometer limitations I have explained.”
“So, you'll let us take you to one of the quarters?”
“Correct!”
Femke and Ash exchanged a look. Ash shrugged and waved the scatter-pistol at the doorway. “Let's go, Gish. Can you float okay?”
Gish floated across the engine room and toward the door. “My forward propulsion is not limited to your lack of understanding!”
As Gish bobbed out into the hall Ash rolled his eyes at Femke.
They guided the alien to the engineer's quarters further up the deck. As Gish entered and floated to the center of the room, he twirled around to look at them with his many eyeballs. “This is not a capture ceremony, correct?”
“No, we are not capturing you nor holding you prisoner. We just need you out of the way for a little while,” Femke said.
“Then this arrangement is acceptable!” Gish said.
Ash nodded at the alien then closed the door, keying it to lock.
He and Femke gaped at each other in amazement.
“What the heck is that?” Ash said.
Femke could only shrug. “No clue. But whatever it is, it's a problem we do not have time for. Maybe we should let it outside. Drop it off somewhere.”
Ash shook his head. “I don't know. It's not native to this moon, or Jarduss Prime, or even this system.”
Femke rubbed her hands over her face with frustration. “We're in a hot transport which is in dire need of repairs, a prisoner we can't push out the airlock, and a thing that speaks gibberish and feeds of core emissions. Could this night get any more complicated?”
Ash's pocket scanner beeped in alarm. “We need to get topside, now.”
“Never a moment of peace!” Femke said, as they raced through the decks.
Once inside cockpit Ash pulled up the overlay of the immediate airspace. Two ships were flying below the cloud cover and moving toward them from the direction of the bunker. From the transport's limited vantage point any information on what or who they were was muddled.
“Scouts,” Femke said staring at the display.
“You think?” Ash said, scratching his chin. “Might be standard shuttles with Karro drunks on a night hunt.” One of the crazier activities Karro residents indulged in was flying around at night and taking pot shots at the wildlife below. It was a common occurrence which sometimes resulted in some shuttles not returning.
Femke watched the ship icons getting closer to the transport's position. “Can we drop further down, or is this as deep as we can go?”
Ash checked over the navigation display. “If we drop any further down we'd have to land.”
Femke shook her head. With the engine maintaining their hover, the transport would be easily detected once the ships got within a certain range. If they could land and shut the engines off, they'd be almost invisible within the chasm unless the ships were looking directly down at them.
And if they were spotted while grounded, it would take too long to fire up the engines again and try to make an escape.
“They must be following our trail,” Femke said. “This can't be a guess on where we would be. There is simply too much area for them to cover beyond the bunker to make this mere coincidence. No, they know we're here somehow and are narrowing it down.”
Ash said, “So we run?” He looked over the map display, widening its scope with a gesture of his hand. “But where to? Threx is the closest settlement past the wastes and that is damn far from our position.”
Femke shook her head. “I don't think it will matter much which direction we go. Once we poke our head out from this chasm, those scouts will be on us. I don't think this transport has what it takes to outrun them.” Her eyes looked out the front viewport and up at the churning clouds.
Ash's eyebrows raised in alarm. “No. I know what you're thinking, honey, but that is a definite no.”
“Why not? Once we're in that soup they'd be crazy to follow us.”
“They'd last longer in that crap than we could. Even with the dam
age to the landing strut this boat is too old to handle those winds for very long. It would only be worth the risk if we were going to try for orbit.”
“That would be plan B,” Femke's fingers tapped across her screen. “Hull integrity is currently at 98.4%, well within safety parameters. We can do this.”
Ash scoffed. “You know that number is just an engineering placebo. I bet once we get in that stuff it will start stripping away the hull plating.”
“I'll take that bet!” Femke said with maniacal smile. She moved into the navigation chair and began plotting a trajectory.
“Oh, we're doing this, aren't we?” Ash said. He looked at the radar. The two scouts were closer and definitely approaching their exact position. “Yeah, they know we're here.”
He dropped into the copilot seat and clamped on his harness. “Safety, first, honey.”
“Yup,” she said and did the same.
“What about the other two?”
“What about them?”
Ash rolled his eyes. “They need to be warned things are going to get bumpy.”
Femke shrugged. “Suit yourself, but we're taking off in ten seconds.”
Ash keyed the internal comms channel to the crew quarters. “Gish?”
“Greetings, disembodied voice!” Gish said.
“Secure your, uh, floating device to something solid. We're going to be experiencing some severe self-induced turbulence, so hang on.”
“Most amazing to know!” Gish said.
Ash clicked the comms off and tapped at the console.
“What about Stacks?” Femke asked.
Ash looked down at the cauterized wound at his side. “Slag him.”
“Reversing hover,” Femke said.
The transport suddenly lurched upward pressing both of them into their seats. The moment the ship emerged from the chasm indicators flashed on their screens.
“They see us,” Ash said. “Here they come.”
“And here we go!” Femke said and burned the upward thrusters to maximum.
In seconds, the rattling transport shot straight up and into the hellish clouds.
The moment they crossed the cloud terminus and into the main storm the ship began to shake violently.
“Oh, boy,” Ash said as red warning messages blossomed across his screen.
“Adjusting angle, moving in the direction of Threx. Maybe these winds can carry us that far.”
The deep sound of metal bending could be heard from somewhere in the ship. Then a strange popping noise was followed by a piece of hull plating whipping up and over the front view port.
“We'll be nothing but a flying skeleton by the time we get to Threx,” Ash said. “If we make it there at all.”
“Positive vibes, honey,” Femke said, her eyes never leaving her screen. “There's a lot of hull yet to go.”
“Very funny,” Ash said. Another indicator, this time yellow, flashed on the radar. “Scout number one just followed us up. Can't see two.”
“Distance?”
Cannon fire suddenly streaked over the transport and vanished into the storm in front of them.
“Close enough for them to take potshots at us,” Ash said.
Another volley hit the port side and glanced off the hull plating. Damage indicators screeched warnings.
“I think they're trying for the engines, knock us out of the sky but not blow us up,” Ash said.
“Good. That gives us a chance, then,” Femke said. “At least until they get annoyed. Taking evasive maneuvers!”
She banked the ship hard and an incoming cannon shot missed them.
Dark angry clouds whipped past the view screen occasionally lit up by arcs of lightning. The ship was shaking harder now as Femke swerved back and forth. Some cannon shots missed, but others hit their mark, melting plating.
“Ship number two is in range!” Ash said as a second indicator appeared on the radar. The two scouts were flying side-by-side behind the transport and closing fast.
“They must really want this old bucket,” Femke said shaking her head. Ships rarely entered these clouds unless on their way to making orbit. For these scouts to even stay on their tail and risk a system killing lightening strike was baffling.
A shot from the second ship hit them dead on. The cockpit lights dimmed briefly.
“Shielding is almost an afterthought now,” Ash said. “Barely 16%.”
“They've slowed their rate of fire,” Femke said. “Maybe they realize we're close to becoming slag. They don't want to destroy us, just wound us enough to drop out of the clouds.”
“Well, their plan is working better than ours,” Ash said. “We need to get out of this crap and fast!”
As if to emphasis the fact a violent shaking suddenly rippled up the length of the transport. Another red warning indicator appeared on Ash's screen.
“We just lost a cell!” he said. He looked expectantly at Femke.
She sighed. “You're no fun, honey!” she pushed at the flight-stick controls and the ship dipped forward at a steep angle. In seconds, they emerged below the clouds and the shaking subsided.
Some of the flashing warning lights winked off, but many damage indicators persisted.
Cannon fire streaked over them.
“Now we've given them a clear view, it should make shooting us down a little easier,” Femke said with a maniacal grin.
Ash pointed toward the ground. “Not if you take them for a ride.”
A series of canyons crisscrossed the wastes ahead of them. According to the map, they led everywhere and nowhere.
Another shot struck and the ship's entire structure began making terrifying cracking noises.
“If we're gonna crash and burn, then maybe we can take them with us!” Femke said and banked hard into a steep descent. Pulsing cannon fire followed them downwards.
The transport dipped into a narrow chasm barely avoiding a tall butte.
“Whoa!” Ash said, gripping the armrests of his chair. “That's some serious piloting skills.”
“You know it,” Femke said with a grin. Her eyes never left the forward screen. “But this crate is like a flying albatross!”
“What's an albatross?”
Cannon shot narrowly missed them, striking the chasm wall directly ahead and above their flightpath. Huge rocks erupted outwards and cascaded down.
Femke shouted in alarm and banked away from the avalanche, but had little room to maneuver.
Ash cursed as rock and debris smashed into the port side. The resulting noise and shaking was bone rattling. Thankfully, Femke had shifted over enough that the large chunks didn't strike them.
The transport blew out of the falling debris cloud and a sheer rock wall blocked their way.
Both of them screamed in unison and Femke pulled hard on the controls. The transport screeched and popped in protest as the ship suddenly tried to make a steep ascent.
“No! No! No!” Ash shouted. The top edge of the wall raced at them.
Femke gritted her teeth and kept pulling back.
The undercarriage of the transport glanced off the cliff's edge. The impact was the worst yet. The cockpit lights flickered off, and the engine died.
“We're gliding!” Ash shouted with fearful amazement.
The transport had become a giant flying piece of metal with no thrust. Momentum kept it moving forward but speed dropped in half in an instant.
Femke cursed and her fingers flew across the console. “Switching to side thrusters!”
“They're not enough!” Ash said as he hammered at his screen.
The ship began to arc downward, rocky terrain filling the view screen.
“Engines!” Femke shouted.
“Trying!” Ash shouted back.
The side thrusters fired up with full power, but were not meant to keep something so heavy airborne. Instead, the ship's arc of descent was simply stretch out over a longer range. They were still going to crash.
The two scouts suddenly appeared abov
e them and banked away from view in different directions. They'd overtaken their prey unexpectedly and were circling back.
Ash looked up from his console to see the ground racing up at them. “Honey,” he said.
“I'm on it!” Femke said jabbing at her screen with one hand while pulling back on the flight-stick with the other.
