by Inc. HDWP
We were dressed to blend in - at least so long as the guns stayed hidden - and that should get us close enough. The rest would depend on how quickly the fight crowd organized when we struck. I wanted to pretend that this could go off without any bloodshed, but I am a fact checker and the evidence was all to the contrary. True believers of any flavor - religious, patriotic, chauvinist, UFO-ist - they all tend to view the enemy as lesser; expendable. I was sure that each of these people were seething over the very idea of someone beating aliens. I’m sure that most of them would be willing to die tonight if they had to, in order to get the proof out of the sewers. Even Kate, with her witty quotes, was likely be willing. She had the most guns.
We were getting close. I could hear the echoes. We didn't make it. The force field was invisible and solid. Being believers, they took a moment to be in awe before remembering what the field kept them from accomplishing. It was the perfect monument to crazy: the proof you seek keeps you from the proof you seek. The force field was nearly as good a proof of aliens as the fighters would be. Still, it was down here with us, not up there in the light of day.
Fact check: it was actually dark up there at this moment, but the metaphor holds. We needed to get past the field and get the living proof. It took no time at all to confirm that the field had formed around us. There was no going forward and no going back.
My team was a survivalist crowd, as it turned out. They didn't expect this, but they still passed a hat - literally - and came up with a hat full of odds and ends which might help short out something electric. Since we didn't know where the field was projecting from and we didn't know what sort of power it ran on, this was a shaky plan. Still, I didn't have anything better in the way of ideas and I had nothing worth putting in the hat, so I shut up and watched.
I didn't see which one, but one of my companions pulled out a little baggie of gray powder and threw it at the field. The powder slid down, and as it did, we could see that the field was curved slightly at the bottom. A second handful of powder went upward and showed a deeper curve at the top. This excited them, but I didn't know why.
They all started bending down and putting their hands in the fetid water. Suddenly I caught on. The field was essentially egg shaped and that meant the projector should be somewhere near the middle. Ollie yanked on something hidden below the surface and I felt the slight whooshing of a door opening. It was the air moving in response to the collapse of the field. We were free to move.
Something bothered me as we completed the last distance and joined the crowd. Shouldn't ripping the generator out have set off some sort of warning? Hell, now that I thought about it, shouldn't activating the field have set off an alarm? If we were already screwed, we were. I couldn't do anything about it now. We had to proceed as if we got away with this. We were here, at the fights.
The crowd was just reforming into a ring around the center as we got there. That meant that a fight was about to start. The crowd looked to the center for the fight. I knew better. I looked to my companions. The center was just for bare knuckles. Our fight had hollow point bullets and serrated hunting knives the size of my arm. I could not pretend that this would be bloodless. I had to believe the goal was worth the human cost.
At the first sight of one of the not-quite-right combatants, my team went into action. We were each wrapped in our own egg this time. The force fields might as well have been cocoons, they were so tight to the body. Outside our transparent cells, the fight crowd eyed us warily but made no move against us. That didn't make sense. Unless every person here was an insider, at least one of them should be reacting to the odd way we held our bodies – the way the force fields held us. I had misread this. These were not just a bunch of lowlifes who came to bet. They were a cohesive group. We couldn't possibly blend in here. They knew their own.
One of the women stepped toward us and the others gave her room. She pulled out a small device, perhaps the size of a small cell phone and pointed it in our direction. Everything went black. Not black like when you pass out. This was different. I couldn't feel my limbs. No sense of my own heart beat. I was fully awake but fully unaware. I could only relate it to articles I had read on sensory deprivation. I’d never tried it, so my comparison may be flawed. I had the time to think about it. The unawareness stretched out over a very long time.
When it stopped, it was abrupt. Imagine truly escaping gravity and pain and every other constant of the physical aspect of being alive. Then imagine it all coming back in less than an eye blink. I nearly wept. It actually took me several seconds to realize that the force field was gone. A moment later, I realized that the stench was gone. We were no longer in the sewer. Instead, we were in some sort of metal room. Three walls were straight, one slightly slanted. There was a faint hum coming from - well - everywhere. If this wasn't a spaceship, it was certainly something designed to evoke that feeling.
I shook my head to clear it and then looked around the small room carefully. I counted heads. We all made it here. If I lived through this, I wanted another ride in that teleporter. That bit where I was just esoterically me was something I was longing to experience again. It was more impressive to me than aliens, spaceships, or anything I had ever experienced before. Ten minutes ago, I didn't know it was possible. Five minutes ago, I was in transit, feeling that rush. Now, barely recovered from having just gone, all I wanted was to go again.
I tried to get focused on the situation at hand. I looked more closely at the walls. There were seams, nearly smooth, but still seams. Any one of these thin lines might denote a door, but which ones? The others were mostly showing signs of shock. They were believers who could finally abandon faith for facts. Their first look at a UFO , and that look was from the inside. One of them, I didn’t know her name, finally spoke.
“Friends, we have arrived,” she said.
It looked like she wanted to say more, but the moment overwhelmed her. A section of the wall lit up, further interrupting the chances of a second sentence. The light softened and the image resolved into a man’s face. I was surprised at how blurry and low definition the picture was. Perhaps our eyes are a lot better than those of the intergalactics.
“So, now that we have you, what am I going to do with you?” asked the man on the screen.
The look of disappointment on my team's faces was palpable.
This was a man, not an alien. He was probably in his late thirties, weathered face, with a boyish expression despite the receeding hairline. They had just had force fields, teleportation, and started a ride on a UFO; without an alien on the screen, the whole experience was like a stomach ache in the middle of the best meal you ever had. The one on the screen didn't seem to react to their emotional state. The likely answer was that he didn't care. The nagging thought in the back of my mind was: maybe the alien technology wasn't two way.
I started ticking through the shortfalls. The force field had a projector which was vulnerable to the beings trapped inside. The teleport wasn't instantaneous. The view screen was low resolution and possibly less advanced than earthly video chat technology. Sure, we were on a spaceship -- assuming we were on a spaceship -- but these aliens were starting to seem less advanced, the more I thought about it.
How do people who can’t master video chat traverse interstellar distances? Certainly not with a slo-mo teleport. My journalistic instincts were on overdrive. There was a story here that was much deeper than ‘Aliens on Earth.’ What had I stumbled into? All I wanted to do was protect some homeless people from exploitation. One good deed…
“Our policy is to never kill our own. Still, we have made exceptions in the past. I guess it really is up to all of you. An hour from now, I'll be ready to hear what each of you is willing to do in order to come out of this alive,” our captor said before shutting down the view screen.
The silence was uncomfortable and protracted. These people had seen too much. Their brains were on overload. Even Kate seemed unsure. As for me, I was too busy being an observer to take the
lead. Personally, I wasn't worried for my own safety. Other than my desire to file the story, I had no skin in the game. My integrity was not so overreaching that I wouldn't trade spiking the world’s greatest story in exchange for being allowed to live. I could continue on happy without ever discussing aliens again so long as I got to live my life. Yes, I had some obligation to these other five. It wasn’t affection or connection; merely obligation.
I started trying to parse the captor’s message. Not the words, they were clear enough, but the other clues. The area behind him in the video feed looked a lot like this room’s walls, so he was probably on the same -- or similar -- ship. He spoke English. His voice had very little accent, maybe a hint of New Jersey, but nothing very far from American standard. That told me he was probably decently educated, possibly trained in public speaking, and likely to be open to reasoned conversation. That meant that his ‘I might let you live’ attitude was probably code for ‘I’m looking for an excuse to let you live, please give me one.’ That bodes well.
My phone was dead, so I couldn't take pictures or even use it to keep track of the hour until he came to talk to us. Eventually, a door in one of the straight walls opened up, just to the left of where the view screen had lit up. If we had expected alien bounty hunters or rugged space marines, we were sorely disappointed. The two men who stepped into the room looked like they’d rather be on the beach wolf-whistling at girls. They held earth-normal rifles, they wore baggy shorts which had seen better days, and one of them was wearing a yellow ‘Livestrong’ bracelet.
They looked, in a word, stupid. In my book, stupid and armed is a bad combination. In all the fiction I've read, bullets and airtight spaceships are also a bad combination. I, for one, was going to give them no cause to do anything that resulted in bullets ricocheting through a small room.
They signaled for me to step forward and I was quick to do so. I flashed a reassuring smile to the others. The last thing I needed now was a selfless rescue or an escape attempt. Fortunately, no one here liked me enough to cause trouble. One of the perks to being the only outsider traveling with a group. I liked my chances in a discussion more than I liked my chances in a firefight, anyway. These guys were taking me to the best possible arena for my skill set. If I said the right things, I might survive this. I might even be able to get the whole team home.
He looked more impressive on the view screen. The leader, I assume, was a short man with a pronounced limp. He paced back and forth in the small room while he waited for his cohorts to drop me off for a chat. There were three chairs in the room and a tiny table in front of each. The tables looked like those little snack tables some people keep in their homes except they were made of a highly polished metal and didn't have any legs. They just hovered. The chairs, by comparison were wooden, foldable, and completely unremarkable. I think my Aunt Anne had the same set in her kitchen.
“You are a problem,” the leader said as the others left me with him.
I nodded in agreement. I wanted to let him do the majority of talking so I could suss out what he wanted to hear. Meanwhile my head was running every fact it could. They didn’t check me for weapons, for example. Did that mean that they already knew I had none? Did it mean that the force field or the teleport had done something to nullify any conventional weapons? Or, perhaps it meant that these guys were really sloppy and not good at this? I liked the last one. The less experience they had in kidnapping and murder, the more chance I had of talking them out of anything drastic.
“We don’t like to kill our kind. Their kind, well, hurting them is fun, but we don’t really like to kill them much either. I’m a civilized man and all. I hope you have thought up a lot of good reasons to not be an exception,” the captor said.
“Here’s one," I said. "Who’d believe me?” I offered.
“You mean, aside from the dozen cops who came in to raid us? You showed up there at nine. You’ve been here more than an hour. They raided us at ten. Ring any bells? You think I’m stupid, don’t you?” He said in a dangerously calm voice.
“No. The way I see it, you have a trove of alien technology and know how to use it. I have a few minutes to try to save my own life. From where I sit, you are much smarter than I am. What do you want to hear?” I said.
“That was a little more honest. Of course, you still do think I’m stupid, but I expected that,” he said as he finally took a seat.
We were now eye level and only two feet between us. He leaned on his tiny table and closed nearly half that gap. There was an intensity in his eyes that made me really worry for the first time since I entered this room. He was predisposed to hate me for some reason - ‘I expected that’ - was code for your kind has an issue with my kind.
When I walked in, the line between his kind and not his kind was right between human and extra-terrestrial. Suddenly the line was tightening up such that only some humans were on his side of it. I didn't know what part of me created the exclusion. Race? Profession? For all I knew it was an eye-color thing. The people who judge you have no obligation to sanity. How do I get back on his side when I don’t know what put me over the line. There’s a great quote from the Charles Schultz comic Peanuts, where Lucy Van Pelt advises: “If you can’t be right, be wrong at the top of your lungs.” I went for it. It was all I could think to do.
“You want honest? Kidnapping is asocial. Murder is extremely asocial. Acting against the common good is essentially the post-religious definition of evil. You are the bad guy in this scenario. As the good guy, I have a right to look down. You don’t want to be seen as stupid? Then stop using the untold power of all of this alien tech to put on intergalactic bum fights in a stinking sewer. You could be heralding man’s entrance into the community of the larger universe, but instead you are wasting breath bullying me. How stupid are you? You tell me,” I said, regretting each word the second I stopped speaking.
Here’s a little tip: Lucy is not a role model. All I could do now is look confident. The only thing I could do to make this immediately worse would be to wimp out. There was still the off chance he would respect the honesty or the emotion behind what I said. It was all the chance I had left myself.
He stood up with his back toward me and took three slow, deep breaths. Instead of turning back to lash out at me, he tapped the wall which apparently signaled the guard who brought me here. I was returned to the previous room without further comment. The team surrounded me and asked questions, but I had nothing I wanted to share with the group. I wanted them to just leave me alone to contemplate the hash I had made of things, but even asking them to stop was more effort than I was willing to muster. I was misery wrapped in regret. All my lofty reasons were gone and my entire self was boiled down to one thought: Please don’t kill me.
It was hard to keep track of time but I began to realize that they hadn't taken anyone else out of the room. Either everyone had been interrogated in the brief time I was away or… or I had effectively spoken for the whole group. It was dawning on me that I might have sentenced everyone in the room to death. My skill set is words and I failed in that area to the tune of every life I had brought into the situation. Suddenly dying seemed acceptable. My new worse case scenario was surviving with the guilt of having gotten everyone else killed. I had gone into this expecting bloodshed. I knew I might be creating a situation where some people would be killed. It wasn't theoretic anymore. Everything was my fault.
The ship stopped humming abruptly. I braced to the loss of gravity, which I expected would come with a system failure, but that didn't happen. Apparently whatever happened was intentional. The door opened up again and we were escorted out through a different hallway from the one I had been taken down before. We exited into sunlight and there was sand under my feet. The air was breathable. If this wasn't Earth, it was remarkably close in every way I could observe. Maybe I hadn't gotten us all killed. Maybe.
We were led to a small cave. My brain started working again. It was dark when we were whisked up to the ship. It co
uldn't have been more than three hours since, but it was daylight here. We had to be on the other side of the world – Australia? New Zealand? I wondered how fast that ship was. Intellectually, you assume a spaceship would have to be incredibly fast to traverse the vastness of space, but this much lesser show of speed was so much more concrete and visceral. We just went roughly twelve thousand miles in a ship that betrayed no sense of motion. For all I knew, we had been still all but the last second before landing began. That’s when the other thought hit me. The ship may not have moved at all. We might have been teleported from the other side of the Earth to a ship that was already hovering over this beach.
The cave was relatively dry and clean. Inside was nothing that suggested it was a base or whatever popular fiction meme you might expect. It was just a cave. All the guards left once we were inside. One of my team tried to walk back out and encountered a force field. We weren't surprised. Just outside, my interrogator leaned on the rock wall and looked in on us.
“Don’t bother digging for the transmitter. This one was sealed in poly carbon. Now that that’s out of the way, we need to talk about your fate,” he said.
A hand went up. Seriously, someone in that cave raised their hand like this was school. Who were these people I’d thrown in with?
“Yes?” he asked, amused.
“I know you want to get to the freeing us or killing us, or whatever, but I really need to know how the hell you got your hands on a spaceship?” He asked.
I would have happily killed him myself at that moment. Still, our ‘friend’ outside seemed to be responding to it. He had, accidentally -- or on purpose -- asked our captor to talk about himself and his accomplishments. I withdrew the thought about killing him. So far, he was doing better than I had done. If we lived through this, I really should learn all their names.
“This is the beach where they first set down. We were here, on vacation, playing volleyball. I estimate it was maybe thirty minutes between their arrival and our victory. They suck at fighting. One of them did cut my calf pretty bad, but that was the only decent shot they got in the whole fight. And, bear in mind, we were all pretty wasted at the time and we still took them down,” he said.