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by CreateSpace

  “What are you doing?”

  “Taking my helmet off.”

  “Didn't you see that movie? Your head is going to explode.”

  Dawes reached up and tapped a digital readout where it should be on Carver's faceplate. It showed cabin pressure.

  “We should be alright.”

  “If your head pops I ain't cleaning it up.”

  Dawes pulled his helmet off and took a deep breath. Carver had his eyes squeezed shut just in case while he waited to feel a spray of goop across his space suit.

  He cracked open one eye and relaxed in relief. Dawes was busy running his fingers over the control panel, hovering over the buttons without pressing any of them.

  Carver struggled with his helmet and finally got it off. He dropped it on the cushion next to him.

  “How long we gonna be up here?”

  “Four hours,” Dawes answered.

  “Four hours!” he stuttered. “How do you know?”

  Dawes tapped a digital timer that counted down from three minutes and twenty seconds.

  “Damn man, four hours up here and we don't know what the hell we're getting into.”

  Dawes hummed the same country song from the truck under his breath as he continued to study the panel layout.

  “Hell no, man. Hell no,” said Carver.

  “This isn't your cousin's truck,” Dawes reminded him.

  He sang louder as Carver sank into the cushioned seat and tried to bury his head in his arms to block out the sound.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The silence came back when Dawes got tired of teasing Carver. The automated systems in the shuttle meant they didn't have to do anything, but the lack of training and preparation meant they didn't know where to look for food or water or anything. Neither man wanted to touch anything on the off chance that it would open a door and shoot them out into the vast vacuum of space.

  So they sat in silence watching the starlight sprinkle through the view screen. Dawes dozed, but it was restless sleep without his hat. Carver was bored. Bored with the silence, bored with space, bored with his partner. But mostly he was bored with being alone.

  He knew he liked to talk a lot. He grew up with a Daddy that didn't let him talk much and for a smart mouthed boy that was an oppression he couldn't wait to escape. When he finally hit eighteen, he moved in with his cousin, started talking and rarely shut up since. Folks just had to deal with it, was his philosophy. If the good Lord didn't want people to talk he wouldn't have made voice boxes and speech.

  “Where did you grow up?” he asked Dawes when the silence became too much.

  “Dallas.”

  “Redneck,” he said.

  “I should have been a cowboy,” Dawes offered. “You?”

  “Cali-,” said Carver. “Straight outta Compton.”

  “I can tell by our accent.”

  “You ever heard of Bad Leroy Brown?”

  “From a song about Chicago.”

  Carver put his feet up on the panel and settled back into the cushion, all confidence and cockiness.

  “I kicked his ass,” he bragged. “No bullshit.”

  “That's why you picked your feet up, cause it's getting deep in here.”

  “You don't believe me? Hell I was the baddest ass in my hood. Did y'all ever play king of the hill growing up.”

  “On every pile of dirt we could find.”

  “I did too. Once. I stood on top of that hill and used my Nine on anyone that tried to knock me down. I'm that crazy. I must have killed about thirteen, maybe fifteen people.”

  “That many?”

  “Fifteen!” Carver grinned. “Fifteen. Maybe more.”

  “Sounds like you're a tough hombre.”

  “You have no idea,” Carver agreed. “I'm the baddest man in the whole damn town.”

  “Then you can be in charge.”

  “Yeah, in charge,” said Carver. “Wait, what? Hold on. In Charge of what?”

  “A tough guy like you should be able to handle this mission. You're the boss.”

  Dawes turned his head away and settled back into his doze.

  “Damn right I'm the boss,” Carver nodded.

  He wasn't quite sure what that meant up here but he liked the way it sounded.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Space is beautiful and cold and deadly and boring. Dawes finally got tired of staring through the window at the twinkling stars. Mostly he was tired of Carver fidgeting in the seat next to him, sighing every thirty seconds in long loud huffs that made sleep impossible.

  “Damn man, there ain't nothing to do in here.”

  “Go for a walk,” suggested Dawes. “Let me get my helmet first.”

  “Ha ha very funny,” Carver said. “What if I opened the door and died?”

  “I could get some sleep.”

  “That ain't right man. I haven't wished you dead.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Yet.”

  Dawes adjusted in the cushion so he could see the panel and Carver from the corner of his eyes.

  “We could read the briefs.”

  “I'm wearing boxers,” said Carver.

  “They took mine off.”

  “No man, I'm just playing with you. Damn, ain't you got a sense of humor.”

  “Briefs on the computer,” Dawes said ignoring him. “We could try to figure out what's going on.”

  “I know what's going on. We're sitting on our asses going who knows where and there ain't nothing to do.”

  Dawes reached up, clicked on a button. A monitor slid up out of the panel and lit up with blocks of text.

  “Is that them?”

  “I think so.”

  “They ain't got no pictures?”

  Dawes scrolled through the thick blocks of tiny text.

  “Just words.”

  Carver made a disgusted sound.

  “You read them. That's what the boss says,” he kicked back in the seat again.

  “I ain't ever been too good at reading. I can do it,” he said. “I just don't like it.”

  “I believe you.”

  “I don't give a damn if you believe me or not. My thing was track. I could run like the wind. All-State three years in a row. I could have gone to the Olympics.”

  “Why didn't you?”

  “Man, did you run in school?”

  “Depended on who was chasing me.”

  “Football, right? You rednecks love football. Like it's the only sport out there.”

  “Football. Wrestling. Chicken.”

  “You wrestled chickens?”

  “Only when I caught them. They were running from the track team.”

  “Man, shut up. What kind of wrestling? Like Hulk Hogan and the Rock?”

  “Real wrestling, like the Olympics.”

  “Two guys covered in grease rolling around on the floor?”

  “Yeah, but we had nicknames though,” said Dawes.

  “What was your wrestling name? Mr. Sleeps-a-lot?”

  “They couldn't fit that on my jersey,” said Dawes. “I was Dawes. #27.”

  He looked down at his chest.

  “Or 72. I took a few hits in practice.”

  Carver watched him for a minute to see if he was kidding. Dawes gave him a half grin to let him know he was.

  “Man you so crazy.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Carver rustled in his seat and edged forward so he could access the control panel too.

  “Don't touch that,” Dawes warned.

  “I ain't touching it.”

  “I can see your fingers on the keys.”

  “My hands are over the keys,” Carver explained. “I wasn’t touching them though.”

  “Just stop doing it,” Dawes said.

  “Stop what? This?”

  Carver waved his and over the board and pretended to mash a couple of keys.

  “Don't mess it up.”

  “Man, I was just playing with you. I wasn't going to fuck it up.”

  Miniature
rockets on the front of the ship lit up with long blasts of flame that throw them against their restraints. Carver's fingers jam into the keyboard, lighting up several buttons. He jerked his hand back like he had touched something hot and stared over at Dawes with wide eyes as the monitor and control panel flickered into darkness.

  “What did you do?” Dawes breathed.

  “That wasn't my fault, man,” Carver said quickly. “The damn rockets kicked on.”

  Dawes tapped the keyboard in a futile gesture, more hope than anything.

  “Damn it,” he sighed.

  “Look man, you've just got to relax,” Carver began speaking quickly. “My Auntie's got a computer that does this shit all of the time. Here, let me look at it.”

  He leaned up to the monitor and punched the side of the screen. It flickered and the lights came back up.

  “See there, it's all in the wrist.”

  “What did you do?” Dawes asked with a crease between his eyebrows.

  “I fixed it. It was broke. Now it's fixed.”

  “It's different,” said Dawes.

  “It ain't different-”

  Carver trailed off. The blocks of text were replaced by a blue screen that was blank.

  “Course it's different,” Carver shrugged. “I gave it an upgrade.”

  “I think it's worse,” said Dawes as he glanced around the cabin of the shuttle. The darkness was deeper as exterior lights on the black shuttle winked out.

  “Man, what do you know? You know anything about computers? Are you a geek?”

  “No,” stuttered Dawes, still worried about the dimming lights in the cabin making it as dark as the exterior.

  He reached for his helmet without looking, wanting it close at hand on a just in case basis.

  “I didn't think so,” said Carver. “This is perfectly natural thing that's going on right here. This is what it's supposed to look like. This-”

  The Shuttle engine whined as the body started shaking. The interior lights flickered with a surge of power and shut off, bathing them in complete darkness.

  “Is this perfectly natural?”

  “Yeah?” Carver stuttered. “Yeah. Everybody knows you can't drive a car at night with the lights on inside. You can't see. Now it's better cause we can see outside.”

  “What do you see?”

  Carver peered through the view screen into the quiet vacuum of space.

  “Nothing.”

  “Do our headlights work?” he asked after a few moments.

  “I don't think we have headlights.”

  “Headlight, spotlight, night light whatever the hell you want to call it. Look around and tell me if they got a switch for some outside lights?”

  Dawes clicked on the heads up display in his helmet and washed the control panel with meager light from the inside.

  “Ha!” Carver shouted in triumph and pressed a button.

  A spotlight on the nosecone of the shuttle lit up and pierced the blackness of space. It splashed over a dark hull of an enormous ship that filled the view screen as it barreled toward them.

  “Is that what you want?” Dawes whimpered.

  Carver scrambled for the switch.

  “How do you turn it off?”

  Outside of the shuttle the spotlight played across the sleek hull of the ship. It slid across a name LUCAS painted in giant black block letters larger than the shuttle. The light moved up the dark ship floating like a derelict in space. It's lean and symmetrical a triumph in engineering.

  Except something that looked off about it. Something other than the lifeless hulk sitting against a star scape backdrop. The light touched on a structure on the stern, an alien vessel latched onto the Lucas like a parasite.

  Dawes and Carver watched the ship in fear and a mixture of wonder as it closed in on them. Or they closed in on it. They weren't sure.

  “I think this is where we're supposed to be,” said Dawes.

  “I think we need to get out of here,” Carver gulped.

  Dawes tapped on the keyboard.

  “I can't.”

  The Lucas loomed closer blotting out the stars.

  “Come on man, do something.”

  Dawes punched the keyboard, trying different combinations. Nothing happened except the Lucas crawling closer each second.

  “You do something.”

  Carver leaned up and slugged the monitor. The whine of the engine changed as the Shuttle slowly rolled over and began flying upside down.

  “Do something different,” Dawes shouted.

  The Shuttle kept rolling in a tight spiral as it lined up with a docking clamp. It latched onto the larger ship with a tight metallic clank.

  The monitor flickered to life and showed the systems of the shuttle powering down one by one until all that was left was a faint golden glow from the screen. It bathed the faces of Dawes and Carver as they sat in the cockpit and wondered what was going to happen next.

  “What now?”

  The locking mechanism on the hatchway rolled open and unlocked as the doorway folded open and up into a dark corridor on the ship.

  Dawes unstrapped from the seat and pushed his way toward the hatch. Carver followed him, muttering as they lined up on either side of the opening and peered through into the darkness.

  “I ain't going in there.”

  “Yeah,” said Dawes. “Good idea. It's probably safer in here.”

  But the darkness beckoned. Dawes took a tentative step over the threshold. Nothing happened. He didn't explode, nothing jumped out of the darkness to grab him.

  Curiosity won out and he leaned to take the next step out.

  Carver grabbed him by the suit and dragged him back in.

  “It's all true, right? Everything that man said. I didn't believe him at first. I thought he was full of shit. Even when we were floating through space I still thought it. No way, right man. But he's right. There's a big ass ship and it's got another ship on it and that means there are aliens in there and we're supposed to fight them and I don't want to to fight because I ain't really good at it and I don't really want to do it-”

  Dawes slapped him. Carver grabbed his lapels and yanked him nose to nose.

  “Fool!” Carver shouted. “You trying to get yourself killed.”

  “There it is,” Dawes smiled and clapped him on the shoulders. “That's what I'm talking about.”

  “Alright then,” said Carver as he regained his composure, shrugging off the slap with a view askance at the cowboy.

  “We good?”

  “Yeah man, just don't be slapping me and shit. That gets me pissed, and trust me, you won't like me when I'm pissed.”

  “Like Leroy Brown.”

  “You're starting to piss me off.”

  “Am I?” asked Dawes. “Good. Cause you know those aliens?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think they heard us land?”

  “What do I look like? 411?”

  “If they heard us land, do you think they would come to check it out?”

  “Shit,” Carver exhaled.

  “It's easier to hide out there,” Dawes pointed to the dark interior. “It's a big ship. Lots of little places.”

  He pointed to the shuttle.

  “Here, little ship. There, big ship. Big ship. Little ship.”

  Carver glanced back into the tight confines of the shuttle and then out into the dark expanse of the corridor.

  “I ain't staying in here.”

  Dawes started out into the corridor. Carver brought him up short again.

  “What?”

  Carver pointed to a glass sheathed cabinet with a plasma rifle resting inside. It's made from a metal alloy, lightweight and fully charged according to the light meter on the battery pack. It looked like water guns designed by a mad scientist. A scientist who was really mad at aliens trying to invade earth.

  “You think we ought to take that?” Carver asked.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Two figures shuffled up the dark
corridor as they searched for the interior of the ship. The smooth walls are slick an unadorned, hiding a network of pipes, wires and cables. A giant letter F is painted at an intersection of corridors.

  “This is surprisingly big for a space ship,” Dawes whispered.

  “What the hell did you expect? A fucking cruise ship?”

  “Yeah exactly,” Dawes nodded as they crossed into a new corridor and kept following the low-level LED lights in the floor every dozen meters.

  “I expected something built like we build ships for the Navy or a submarine, you know. Tight quarters, cramped, mostly engine and ammunition. This is huge.”

  “Don't you remember what we saw outside? This mother is huge.”

  Carver clings to Dawes spacesuit, partially not to get lost and partially because he's the one with the rifle. If something comes out of the dark at them, Dawes would be the one to shoot it. He would also be the one the aliens would eat while Carver took off for the shuttle, but he didn't share that information with his partner.

  “What are we looking for?” he asked.

  “I think he said find the crew.”

  “You think this ship can talk? Like on that TV show? Star Track?”

  Dawes stopped. Carver bumped up against the back of him.

  “Damn it man! Warn a brother when you do that.”

  Dawes holds up his hand as he attempted to listen to the silence that echoed down the corridor.

  “What?”

  “Shh.”

  “Don't shush me mother fucker,” Carver said. “I know how to be quiet.”

  “You want those aliens to find us?”

  “I'm starting to think there ain't no aliens. We been walking up and down this goddamn ship for half an hour and we ain't seen nothing. They probably just made them up.”

  “Yeah, you're probably right.” Dawes barely paid attention to Carver, just letting him talk.

  “Of course I'm right,” the man continued. “If there was aliens taking over this ship, don't you think they would have found us by now? Come out of somewhere and tried to kill us or something?”

  Dawes felt keyed up. Something in the air maybe. He couldn't be sure. On earth, he could feel when something was off, like being picked up while hitching by someone who wanted a favor in return. Sometimes it was a blow job they asked for or one time help in burying a dead body in a field, but whenever he felt that instinct kick in, he knew it was time to get gone. He just wished the feeling came sooner so he didn't have to deal with the requests.