by Jean Johnson
Jackie had no clue how to fire it. At least it operated on squeeze commands, not suction—though she had the impression from his mind that the controls to change the settings were suction-based—but she almost refused to take it. Then realized the others would probably want weapons . . . and that the Space Force would most definitely want samples of these hostile, sentient-eating aliens’ weapons.
Picking it up, she grabbed three more like it, bundled them together, and slung them over her shoulder as if on an invisible carry-strap. The Psi League had developed several different training programs. Telekinetics who could do more than just move a penny a few inches were given exercises on how to carry and hold something in a particular way, even through other distractions. She had learned to carry equipment in the psi version of Basic Training, and even carry injured comrades. Slung over her shoulder, those guns would stay put unless she shifted them herself, someone much stronger than her mental muscles wrested them away, or she lost consciousness.
The lattermost would require vigilance; these weapons were no laughing matter. Being knocked unconscious would put Jackie in a very bad situation. Hyperaware of the danger, she kept scanning all around as she ran beside the naked, red-striped man.
Naked feet and p-suit boots slapped along the metal floor, barely audible over the ongoing wailing of the alarms. They reached an area where she had the impression from his mind that it was a lift, but he took the stairwell next to it instead. Aliens up above, armed and coming for them. She rushed another wall of force that toppled them—broke some flippered feet from the sharp cries and sharper spikes of mental agony—and her guide zapped them with his weapon as they reached that level. Two floors up, the door he picked didn’t want to open.
The mental image she got from her frustrated, naked companion was that it was code-locked. She sent him an image of a frogtopus alien haloed in important shimmering lights, everyone else facing and bowing, with a uniform of the sort lifted from his fellows’ minds. A query of where their commander might be located. She got back an image of down, that these aliens thought of down as more important than his—their—kind thought of important things being located up.
She stabbed downward, seeking the bridge. Found it after a few moments of skipping from mind to mind. Raced from mind to mind within the bridge until she hit on a smug technician who was gloating over the sequence he had played. She prodded his mind—these aliens had no mental shielding whatsoever—into thinking of how to undo it. The moment he did so, she flexed and pulled on the pattern of the door’s control panel in front of her, getting it open.
Another blast of force knocked over yet more aliens. This time, she swept them off their flippered feet, sending even the ones that had braced themselves flailing and tumbling down the corridors in three separate directions.
She let Red Stripes shoot at them as they passed, then it was time to dig out the codes for the prey-brig. That took a full minute, and required three more blasts to keep the corridor clear, plus concentration to ignore the hissed babble of her erstwhile partner. The shock from the mind of the security officer was worth it, however, when the security door hissed open . . . and every last cage lock inside snicked free in a massive k-chunk that echoed up the length of the hall.
Red Stripes barked an order through the doorway while Jackie took a precious moment to expand her mind in a great sphere, sweeping the ship for any other Humans. She did not want to leave anyone behind to a horrid fate of being eaten alive . . . but there were only the five—six including herself—at the prison bay, and the five of her crew in the shuttle bay. No other ships in immediate range, for that matter.
“Robert to Jackie . . . they’re bringing up what look like laser guns,” she heard in her ear.
“One moment . . .” Bare feet slapped their way. Her companion hurried the coming prisoners with hissed words and a swoop of his arm. Jackie barely heard, barely saw. Her mind focused on an old exercise, one developed by the Psi Division of the Space Force for powerful holokinetics like herself. There were a couple others who could pull it off on the scales that she could, but most could only do it in relatively smaller doses. Still, when coupled with telekinesis, it could be very effective at unnerving an enemy.
Mind floating halfway out of her body, attention turned back toward her ship, she watched, readying the illusion. The aliens in the hangar back pulled back from the ship, making room for the big cannon being brought in. A clunk echoed through the bay—sonokinesis—and the ship rocked . . . and collapsed.
Chunks of itself broke apart, and the Aloha 9 reared up, forming a giant humanoid robot that just barely fit under the ceiling. The aliens gaped, then scrambled to get out of the way of the mecha robot. The mecha turned and knelt, swiping fists down toward the cannon being brought in. The aliens guiding it scrambled out of the way, tentacle arms flailing, and the cannon itself was flung aside—another force smack from her telekinesis gave it extra oomph. It smashed into one of the shuttles, spat smoke and sparks, tumbling down to the floor, and died.
With its objective complete, the robot turned, hunkered down, and re-formed itself into the ship. None of it was reality, all of it just a telekinetic blow coupled with a projection of light and sound that had made the ship look like it wasn’t there, that the robot had indeed reared up and attacked. Even the Greys fell for illusions like that, despite their vastly advanced technology; they tread warily around Terran ships because some could “transform” and bash like that. The projection cost her, though. That big an illusion, remotely projected, one she couldn’t see and guide directly . . . she staggered a little, exhausted, and leaned her shoulder against the wall the moment she came fully back to herself.
The other four reached their position. Gesturing with a hand, Jackie brought around the four weapons, separating them and holding them—levitating them—out to each of the others. They gaped at the weapons, gaped at her . . . and Red Stripes babbled something with mental tones of holy and powerful and I told you so.
That last one was a bit weird . . . but it spiked hope in all five of them, particularly the four who had just been freed. Red Stripes gestured back down the hall, started trotting that way . . . and slowed when he realized Jackie wasn’t yet following. Nodding her helmed, visored head, she pushed away from the wall, staggered for a few steps, then breathed deep the recycled air in her helmet and hurried after the quintet.
She had to tumble a few more packs of aliens off their flippered feet, but by the time they got down to the airlock door, the tangled wake of tumbled and stunned bodies piled behind them at various cross-corridors and in the stairwell had discouraged anyone from approaching again. The aliens inside the hangar bay started to surge their way when the door opened, but the Aloha clunked and lifted its robotic head with an audible creak . . . and they quickly scattered, leaping over objects with frightening grace, alarming height, and unsettling speed just so they could land and huddle behind them for cover.
That was the true advantage of the mecha illusion: Pure light and sound was easy compared to wielding enough telekinesis to bowl over a bunch of heavyset beings. It was a bluff, but a very effective bluff.
Jackie’s companions shot at them anyway. Some dropped, insensate. The rest hid. Breathing hard, Jackie extended a ramp from the wing, composed partly of holokinesis, partly of telekinesis—hovering planks of a plain matte gray, since she was starting to get rather winded. Red Striped eyed her, eyed the steps, eyed the airlock door, which slid open—or rather, revealed itself to be open—and quickly mounted, leading the others.
Jackie came last, dissolving the steps in her wake. All six of them crowded into the airlock, and she thumped the buttons for closing it while Red gave an order that had all the weapons being passed to the tall, brown-haired, brown-and-pink-bearded fellow with the vivid spiral stripes several shades brighter than Red Stripes’ hues. Pink Spirals touched a few buttons on each weapon, and their power lights, orange-yellow, dimmed and vanished. Which was good, in her mind. It meant t
hey knew they were in safe territory and that they were going to be good, peaceful guests.
( . . . ?) Red sent to her.
Jackie held up her hand in a wait gesture, catching her breath. Robert was trying to talk to her at the same moment, and his query was more important.
“Okay, so we have some, ah, alien Humans on board, sir. What do we do now, Major?”
“I have . . . one more trick up my sleeve,” she panted, still trying to get her wind back. She rested her hands on her knees, turned sideways to the others in the airlock so that her helmet didn’t thump into anyone. That forced her to avert her eyes from the genitalia of the dark-skinned male with the blue crescent marks dotting his brown hide. “Lars, Maria, get down here and . . . use gestures to get them strapped into acceleration seats in the crew cabin. Feel free to raid the lockers for clothing for ’em. We’re all going to be stuck in quarantine together anyway.”
“What’s the trick?” Ayinda asked.
There, she had some wind back. “I’m going to read the alien commander’s mind, find the command codes to lock out their weaponry, and shut them down by yet more telekinetic manipulation of their control boards. Then I will hopefully also unlock that force field, and if I can, shut down their whole ship. I don’t know how fast they can get everything back up and running, but the moment I do it, we all have to be strapped in, because I want you three to get this ship the heck outta here.”
“Any particular heading, Major MacKenzie?” Robert asked. “Diagnostics claims the projection dish is still viable, thank God.”
“I suggest we take the fastest route to hyperspace that won’t crush or kill us,” Jackie said. “Make a jump of one second, two at most, then execute a vector change by five degrees—any length and direction Ayinda says is clear, up, down, left, right—and let us drift, but keep up the insystem fields, and keep an eye rearward for pursuit. If we’re pursued, hit another rift for two seconds, and another vector change, but make it ten degrees in the direction of home. If not, then just continue on that original bent heading while we figure out what we’re going to do with these people, beyond the obvious of rescuing and clothing them.”
“Got it.”
She could barely hear the others; the five Humans crowded into the airlock with her were babbling in a round of questions and arguments with their red-striped leader.
“That’ll put us either in interstitial space or in the Oort cloud for this system, as its heliopause is bigger than our own,” Ayinda warned her. “I cannot guarantee we won’t hit a rock. Space is vast, but we’re dealing with probability odds nonetheless.”
“The exact distance is flexible; adjust it as you see fit to get us clear of any rocks. The important thing is to get clear long enough that I can learn these people’s language, and finally make real contact with them.”
“What about the ‘contact’ you made with those octo-frog aliens?” Brad asked.
“The only contact they were interested in was in knocking us unconscious so that they could throw Mr. Red Stripes back into his cage, strip and lock me up as well, take apart this ship, and have each one of us for lunch, preferably still alive so we can kick and scream in their version of dinner and a show. I got that directly from their minds and from Red Stripe’s mind, not just hinted at in the precog visions. Those frog-octopus-ostrich things are not friendly to Human life-forms.”
Red Stripe said something curt and sharp, slashing his hand. The others fell quiet, and he started to make his way to her. The door behind them opened, rushing a little bit of air into the cabin to equalize the pressure. Maria eyed the quintet, then smiled and held up bundles of clothing. They all looked at each other, looked at her, looked back at the helmed Jackie, minds filled with a babble of images of children of all odd things to be thinking about in that moment.
Red Stripes gave an order, nodding in permission, distracting them from their thoughts. That was a thankfully Human-interpretable gesture. One at a time, they filed out of the airlock, accepting underpants, shorts and tee shirts. Waiting her turn, Jackie learned what the words for thank you were. So did Maria, she suspected, even without the advantage of “overhearing” the underlying meaning pulsed behind it.
The central corridor was a little awkward with its foot loops on the “floor” of the hallway, but the colorfully marked strangers only tripped a couple times as they spread out. No bras for the two ladies, but that could not be helped; they did manage to puzzle out which ones were the undershorts and that they were meant to be put on first, then the knee-length shorts.
Maria then pulled out the first of the health-monitor bracelets. She tucked it around the arm of the short woman with the most vivid skin coloring—medium brown tan for the majority of her skin, but with lightning-forked stripes like Red Stripes that came in two shades, moss green and soft cream on tanned skin. The non-Terran woman jerked when the doctor touched her, and flinched back at the snick of the bracelet’s clasp catching.
Babbling something, she stared at it in fright and pawed at it, trying to get it off. Jackie, trying to get her helmet off, quickly intervened, projecting directly into the two-striped woman’s mind an image of the bracelet being connected to a viewscreen of a heartbeat line pulsing away, and of her striped self smiling happily. It also helped that Maria held up her arm, showing off an identical monitor bracelet on her own wrist. Jackie quickly showed an image of Maria’s smiling face next to a similar heartbeat monitor. That soothed the short woman’s fears, but the others were now babbling. Returning her attention to the link she had with Red Stripes, she shared the same image with him.
He nodded after a moment, and explained that the bracelets were for monitoring health, nothing more. Glancing her way, he caught sight of her face as she lifted the helmet free of her head . . . and blinked at what he saw. (Child!)
The exclamation was so strong, so startled, Jackie actually turned to look behind her at the closed airlock door. Which, of course, was closed, and had nothing there. She looked back at him. (No child. Adult. Me, adult.)
He blinked, his thoughts a confused whirl for a long moment, then he shook it off and frowned in concentration, sending an image of them leaving the alien ship, of it blowing up, and the however-many-of-them sailing off with happy smiles. She winced a little, since blowing up the alien ship was not on her list of things to do.
So far, they hadn’t killed anyone. Broken a few limbs, yes. Knocked many unconscious one way or another, yes. But killed, no. There was a peculiar feel to the aether when someone or something died. Jackie was no ectomantic psi, capable of communicating with the deceased, or rather, communing with echoes of residual psychic energy, but she did know when someone or something sparrow-sized or bigger died.
Instead, she sent back an image of the alien ship shutting down, all of its lights going away, the bay opening up, and the Humans getting away with happy smiles. With it, she sent a mental image of the five of them following Maria and now Lars into the starboard cabin and letting themselves be strapped into the fold-out acceleration seats set in the cabin floor, preparing for said escape.
He eyed her, then slowly nodded. Gave out more commands in their language. Jackie left them to it, grateful Red Stripes was able to get the others to cooperate.
Closing her mind, she sorted through and set aside the babble of ten Humans in close proximity, and worked her way through the alien minds outside. Orders were being blared, and the lights were still flashing, but the beings inside the hangar were forming an orderly retreat. They were technicians far more than heavy-duty soldiers . . . and no one wanted to risk Robot Ship waking up again; two of their cohorts with badly damaged skeletons were being carried out on stretchers.
If they hadn’t been highly skilled technicians, they might, Jackie realized, have been placed on the dinner list. The threat of being eaten alive was a good tool for crew discipline, it seemed . . . but no one had expected a robot ship, and so the crew members carrying the injured ones weren’t sure if that was to be consider
ed stupidity—and thus reason for being eaten—or a purely uncontrollable accident. For now, they were being treated as accident victims.
She shuddered and moved on. The bridge was down a few more decks, deep in the heart of the awkwardly lobed vessel. Finding the commanding officer, she delved awkwardly into his brain. Long seconds stretched, turning into a minute as she tried to find the right commands.
He only had some of them, she realized. The other belonged in the microtentacles of the chief engineer in an upper position. Splitting her mind, she sought out and sank into his mind as well. Found the right commands. Found the right consoles. Practiced silently—wasting another minute—and then held herself carefully together so that she could open her eyes and move to the cockpit.
That was something she could not do just yet. Lars stood at her elbow, waiting patiently to catch her attention. At some point he, and presumably the other two, had gotten dressed, though like Maria, he wore the Grays of the Special Forces as a specialist consultant. Striped with the black of the Space Force, as all casual uniforms were, and striped with the blue of the Navy to indicate he was working primarily with the latter, but still plain gray.
“Are you back from soaring through mind and space? Yes? Good,” he said. “Maria and I are agreed, one of us should stay with them, to provide noises that are soothing if nothing else, and to provide eyes and ears in case they get into anything. We saw the red-striped male seemed to be in charge, through your helmet cameras. So. Maria has gone to disable my station. He will sit there, and I will take his place with these others. Maria needs to monitor their health from her station, and the rest of you are all needed in the cockpit. I am the one free to sit with them.