by James Porter
“No sir, the observatory wasn’t the target. The observatory did have valuable information which has led me to the alien, and I have identified four individuals that are being targeted for abduction. I have been tracking them through a modified government issue CB radio. I will be submitting a reimbursement form for the expenses. That will be to cover the cost of the parts I used to do the modifications, namely my favorite watch.” He continued trying to use the device as he explained the situation to his boss. The device continued to beep and flash lights drawing Moot’s attention away from the conversation his boss was trying to have.
“Moot, what the hell are you going on about?” Bell was thoroughly confused at this point. This had gotten way out of hand and now there were going to be forms involved which meant there would probably be a full-fledged report required. He had to end this now, before it escalated. It was always this way with Moot. Send him on a simple job and he overcomplicated it real quick, and usually everyone around him suffered. Bell was not wanting to be on the receiving end of any ass chewing that was caused by Moot’s shenanigans “Moot, I’m going to need you to come in for a debriefing.”
“Sir, I can’t. I’m too close to actually catching the alien. After our last confrontation, where I thwarted its kidnapping attempt, I was able to more precisely tune my contraption, which I am calling The Moot Alien Finder. Now I should be able to track the alien back to its ship and rescue the Americans held hostage there.” Moot didn’t understand why his boss was so eager to let this invader from space get away scot free with who knows how many prisoners in its grasp. Well he wasn’t going to stand for that. No earthling was going to be sacrificed to this otherworldly beast while he was on the case, no matter what his boss said.
“Confrontation? You actually saw an alien…?” Bell was not prepared for this level of nonsense and couldn’t get a grasp of it.
“Yes, Sir. I have made visual contact with the suspected alien and I have been tracking its movements. Once I find its ship, I will be able to finally capture the space being.” Mot continued to turn dials and readjust wires as he talked. He intuitively knew how the things should fit together in order to get the result he wanted. Ever since he started following the alien he had felt like he could build things. His Alien Finder was a gleaming example of that. He didn’t know exactly how it worked he only knew that it would work.
“Moot, your mission is over. Return to headquarters immediately!” Bell was shutting Moot down. He had to reel this in before it got so out of control that they all lost their jobs. Aliens and UFO’s were a fast track to the unemployment line or the psych ward.
“No sir, I swore an oath to protect American lives through subterfuge and that is exactly what I am doing. Once I find its ship, I will arrest the illegal alien, and free his hostages or die trying. Only then will I return to headquarters!” Agent Moot hung up on his boss and readjusted the wires connecting his phone to the device. “Now let’s find that ship.” With some knob twisting and direction adjustments he walked off into the night following the static burst toward his goal.
Alan Bell just sat unbelieving in his chair as his phone emitted a raw tone indicating the call was no longer connected.
“That little prick hung up on me!” He couldn’t believe that Moot refused to come in, was actually convinced he saw an alien, and had hung up on him. Bell’s teeth clenched and the veins on his head bulged as his flesh reddened. He slammed his meaty fist down onto the intercom button which gave a complaining squelch in reply.
“Sanders! Collins! Foster! Get your asses to Missouri and bring Moot back, even if you have to shoot that sorry SOB!” Bell swiped the phone off his desk sending it flying across the room to shatter against the wall, but it did little to soothe his anger. If they don’t shoot him, then I most definitely will!
Chapter 12
Jake Wonder was sitting in the small galley of the ship when Bud woke up, covered in blood with his bow and two arrows unceremoniously dumped beside him. The rack and skin of the deer he had shot were also tossed on the floor next to his bow. He stood up and looked around, the room was smallish with a metal picnic-sized table in the center. The walls were covered with an assortment of panels and doors with a few spots housing strange looking electrical equipment. The place was lit with a circular tube which gave out a light similar to a fluorescent tube light bulb, but the overall color was more blue than white.
“You want some coffee?” Jake gestured to the metal cup he was holding. “It’s not exactly coffee, but it’s pretty close.”
“Sure, thanks.” Bud picked up his bow and inspected it and satisfied that it was unscathed, unstrung it so it wouldn’t get damaged. Jake approached the wall and hit a series of buttons and then a panel opened and he extracted a metal cup similar to the one he held. He brought it to Bud and handed it to him.
“It’s not super-hot, but it’s warm enough to work. My name’s Jake.” He stuck out his hand offering a welcome handshake. Bud gave him a displeased look with squinty eyes.
“My name’s Bud. You don’t look like no alien. What gives?” They shook hands briefly and then Jake tried to at least prepare him for Star’s explanation of their ‘mission.’
“Apparently this alien robot needs our help killing a planet. She must have seen some ability in you in order to have selected you.”
“Selected me? She gal dang kidnapped me is what she did! Right out shot me with that taser gun of hers.” Bud stood up and paced the small kitchen. “I mean, how am I gonna explain this to the boys? Alien kidnapped me? I’ll be the laughing stock, not to mention I lost probably two hundred pounds of meat off that monster buck I got. Thank god that alien had enough sense to grab the hide and rack or I would’ve strung ‘em up!” He slammed his fist into his palm to emphasize his hostile intent to those who would mess with his hunting. “So how do we get out of here? He still hadn’t noticed anything resembling a door.
“Well, that’s the problem, she left us in here, and while I’m not going anywhere she still locked the door so you wouldn’t leave before she could plead her case.” He walked over to a section of wall that looked particularly blank. “This is where the door is, but I have no idea how to open it.” He ran his hand over the smooth metal, there were no buttons or handles apparent anywhere along the surface.
“Well, shit. At least we got alien coffee.” Bud sat down at the table and took a sip from his cup. “Yeah, not exactly real coffee, but it’ll do.”
The panel that Jake had his hand on jerked open and there was the robotic woman standing there with a bundle of person draped over her shoulder. Jake jumped back, fists up and breathing hard.
“Jesus, woman! You scared the crap out of me!” Star pushed past him and the panel slid shut once again appearing to only be a part of the wall.
“It was not my intent to scare you, Jake Wonder, I was merely accessing the galley.” She gently laid the woman down onto the table and looked at her intently.
“Did you zap her too?” Bud wasn’t sure how to act around his would be kidnapper, especially sense she was a robot alien. This wasn’t even unusual, this was completely unreal.
“No, she rendered herself unconscious, and quite unexpectedly also.” She turned and faced Bud “I see you have recovered with no ill effects from your ‘zapping’.”
“Well, yeah. Probably the easiest tasing I’ve ever had.” Now facing the robot he could see her features. Her face was polished silver metal, yet there were many different pieces, and they all moved together to allow her to have as wide a variety of facial expressions as any human would have. Her eyes were a glowing violet and as he looked he could see past them and into the depths of her skull which pulsed a soft blue with flickers of red. She truly was beautiful, he had to shake his head to break the spell.
“…suffered no ill effects…” She was still talking and he had been lost in her eyes and hadn’t heard what she was saying.
“What..? Sorry, didn’t hear what you said there” He tried to lo
ok away but was just completely fascinated by her mechanisms.
“I said, ‘I am glad you suffered no ill-effects from the ray gun settings I used.” He watched her move from the table and across the room to a wall of panels and doors. “I see you got coffee, did you need food?” She gestured to the wall behind her, and Jake stood up and moved over to her with interest.
“Yeah, I’m starving. What do you have to eat?”
“I’m sorry to say that our choices are limited to simulated chicken and beef, and simulated vegetables.” She pressed a combination of buttons and a few seconds later a green light was flashing above one of the doors. She opened the panel and pulled out a metal plate with a thick cut steak with small potatoes and onions on the side. She produced a two prong fork and a knife and handed all of it to Jake for his approval.
“Steak and potatoes? I was kinda picturing that you had some sort of space gruel to serve to your abductees.” He dug into the potatoes and was surprised at how much they tasted like actual potatoes.
“I am sorry that you gentlemen feel yourselves to be abductees. I have every intention of giving everyone a choice, I’m just under a time constraint, and so I have to choose fast, so I can get back to my people and save them.” She turned and showed Bud the combo for the panel to produce another plate of food. She then moved toward the panel that was also a door and turned to the men.
“Please don’t try to escape. I have one more person to gather and then I will be back to explain everything. Please consider yourselves my guests, and then once you hear me out, if you don’t want to stay you are free to go.” She opened the panel and started to leave.
“Hey! What are we supposed to tell her when she wakes up?” Jake motioned to the still unconscious form on the table.
“Just tell her what you know and that this will all be explained soon.” And then she was gone out the door. The panel slid back into its position and once again blended in with the wall.
Bud had a mouthful of the simulated meat and didn’t appear too stressed for a kidnapping victim. “This is actually pretty good steak.”
Chapter 13
Star left the ship and climbed down the ladder pondering the ethics behind what she was doing. She really had no experience in ethical behavior and as far as she knew, she wasn’t programmed to be ethical. They were programmed to exist for their masters and to build things. There are no ethics involved in building a building or crafting books. Those are just things though, not humans, and kidnapping humans can’t be right, can it? Can it be right if you are doing it to save your people? But are her people even people, or are they just things? Star’s processor started to warm up giving her the tell-tale signal that she was thinking too hard on something that she was not supposed to think about. When that happened unlike a majority of her people, Star just took action and just did things without thinking too much on the consequences, which is what got her here in the first place. Star shrugged and looked at her ship. It was parked in a small clearing and she had halfheartedly drug some bushes over to hide the bottom of the ladder some. As the morning sun peaked over the horizon, she knew she better get moving or it was going to be harder to track her target. She already knew where he lived, but these humans don’t usually stay in their domiciles during the daylight hours, preferring to go perform tasks which they seemed to detest. They were most unusual beings.
Alan Dunn slowly opened his eyes and then reached up and rubbed the crust from them. He had fallen asleep on the couch and now his back was complaining loudly about it. He sat up and stretched his arms above his head and twisted side to side to help stretch the aches out of his body. He reached over to the coffee table and opened a pizza box, took one of the remaining pieces of pizza and bit into it.
“Most important meal of the day.” He looked out the window and then at a clock, it was 11:30 A.M. He reached over to a half-empty can of Mountain Dew and swigged the warm soda to wash down the cold pizza. “Ugh, maybe I need a new one of those.” He stood up and straightened his t-shirt back down over his belly, and pulled up his sweatpants back to their rightful place, took another bite of his pizza and then headed into the kitchen. His apartment was a one bedroom affair. He had one bedroom, a bathroom, a small living room, and a tiny kitchen. The kitchen had a stove, a refrigerator and a single sink which was full of dirty dishes. He looked at the filthy sink, “I’ll get to you, later.” He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a cold can of soda, popped the top and took a long drink. “Much better, now I can get down to business.” He walked back into the living room which was furnished with a couch, a TV stand and TV, and a desk with his computer station. That had dual monitors, a laptop computer and a desktop, linked together, and his hacking system that provided him with his anonymous system. That’s what he had used last night to try and figure out what was going on. What he found out was a big fat nothing. He found zero evidence that anything this Agent Moot said was true, let alone finding any evidence that Moot even existed. He booted up his system and watched it go through its security protocols, line after line of his own code. Soon he was browsing anonymously through the internet and trying to track down secret agents tracking down UFO’s.
Star had her disguise on and had walked up to the apartment door of her intended target. She wasn’t sure how this was going to go, and hoped that she wasn’t going to have to lug an unconscious man through town in broad daylight. She lightly knocked on the door and waited for a response.
The knock made him jump a little as he was reading an article about alien mutilations and it had him creeped out to begin with. He got up slowly and hesitantly headed to the door, he wasn’t expecting anybody. He got to the door and peered out the peep hole, and wondered why he even had one because he couldn’t tell what he was seeing anyway. He opened the door a crack and looked out. A woman in a long coat with a hat pulled over her face was standing there.
“Can I help you?” He tried to see her face as she stood there, but the hat was pulled down weirdly, she was trying to hide her face from him.
“Can I come in? I have a request of you.” She looked up and the midday light made her silvery features shine. “It’s important.”
He really didn’t know what to say now that he saw her face, she was a robot, and a really technologically advanced one at that. He stepped aside numbly and let her stride into the mess that he called his home. He was pretty sure this might be the alien that that screwball agent was trying to protect him from. Now that he saw what was after him, he had a lot of questions as to why. She seemed to have made a quick appraisal of his domain and chose to stand in the center of the living room.
“I need you to come with me to help my people defeat a great enemy.” She wasn’t sure if she could appeal to his sense of sympathy, or if he even could feel sympathy, vile as he was. “The planet we have become stranded on seeks to kill us, and you seem to have the skills I would need to kill it.”
“Well, I guess I knew you would be showing up sooner or later. You’re the alien right? And you want me to destroy your planet?” He kind of chuckled “How do you expect me to destroy a whole planet? I’m just one guy.” He didn’t seem so vicious up close; he didn’t even strike her as being violent.
“That’s what I was hoping you would tell me.” He closed the door and she began talking.
Chapter 14
It hadn’t taken Lori long to research Agent Moot, and to identify the vehicle he was driving. The guy had been all over town asking questions about UFO’s and aliens. Generally people had thought he was a little strange but pretty much harmless.
“Up ahead on the left, Trevor. That looks like a Toyota Corolla to me.” Lori pointed up ahead to where Moot’s car was parked at the edge of some woods. They pulled up beside the car and Lori hopped out looking around the area.
“There’s nothing here. He must have gone into the woods. Do you think he actually tracked down an alien?” Lori turned and looked at Trevor. She could tell by the expression on his face that he just
wasn’t as sold on this as she was.
“Well, come on. Let’s track him down and get some footage of a real alien” Lori turned and darted into the woods.
“Lori! Hold on! I have to get my camera out.” Trevor was fumbling around at the back of the van as she entered the woods. “Dammit Lori! I said hold on!”
“Well, hurry up! We have aliens to catch!” The excitement in her voice was hard to hide as she disappeared into the woods.
“That woman will be the death of me.” Trevor was muttering under his breath as he grabbed his camera gear and trotted off into the woods after her. Lori was a ways ahead of him but he was still close enough to follow her. “Slow down, Lori!” He called.
“I think I know this section of woods. We did an interview here a couple years ago, a hobo had a run-in with some sort of ghost. There is a clearing ahead, but the footprints our agent left don’t seem to be going that way. What do you think?” She stopped and waited for his answer as he caught up to her.
“So, follow the agent guy or check out the clearing? It’s your call, Lori, I just shoot the video.”
“So far the tracks have been kind of erratic, like he doesn’t know where he was going and was just stumbling through the woods at random. The clearing however is large enough that you could land a couple helicopters there, or a space ship! We need to go to the clearing!” And with that thought Lori was off again. She moved through the woods with a purpose and Trevor had a hard time keeping up. He wasn’t used to being in the woods and so where she easily navigated the underbrush, he got snagged up in it. Soon Lori was far enough ahead of him that he couldn’t see her anymore.
“Lori! Where’d you go? If you let me get lost I’m gonna be pissed.” He stopped talking as he reached the edge of the clearing. Lori was standing about twenty feet away staring at the huge rocket that was haphazardly hidden by branches in the small grassy opening.
