A Beginner's Guide to Invading Earth

by Gerhard Gehrke

  “I did it,” she said to herself. “I'm actually on board an alien spaceship.”

  Jeff looked at the room they were in. Some kind of cargo bay. Definitely big enough for a van. This must have been the ship that picked him and Oliop up and brought them from the school unless the Bunnie had more than one. No way of knowing, and he didn't want to wait around to ask Not-Kim.

  Oliop moved to a colorful panel on the wall. On it was a painting of a shimmering tower standing alone on a cliff. Jeff walked over and looked at the painting. The effect of the artwork was hypnotic, as simple colors, upon examination, proved to actually be hundreds of complementing flecks that must have been painted with a brush the size of an eyelash. The tower itself looked alien, with a curve in its structure that continued up to a twisted turret at the top. A lone figure stood at a high window of the tower. The tiny figure looked like a Bunnie. Jeff stopped looking at the painting.

  “Oliop, how do we keep those guys out of here?” Jeff asked.

  With effort, Oliop looked away from the painting and considered a set of control panels set into a long steel counter. He moved from one panel to another, muttering “hmm” as he studied them. A few lights changed color without his doing anything. Then a large circle of light came on from above. A bright beam descended through the translucent floor of the cargo bay to the hangar beneath, the same light that had drawn them up into the ship.

  Panicked, Jeff said, “Oliop, they switched on their lift again. Do something!”

  Jordan grabbed a wrench from a rack of other tools and began to whack at a panel.

  “Don't,” Oliop said, putting up a hand.

  “We need to do something, you know,” she said, but she stopped. “If we break the beam, they can't get up here.”

  Oliop checked underneath one console, opened a panel, said, “Aha,” and pulled a plug. The circle of light died.

  “Old tech,” Oliop said. “Access beam power is shut off. They're stuck.”

  “That's just the first step,” Jeff said. “What about us? What can we do with a ship that needs a spider with extra legs to pilot it? And it's only a matter of time before they figure out some way to get up here. They can climb.”

  “All in due time,” Oliop said. He pocketed the ship fob and walked about the room, looking at the controls but returning his attention to other pieces of artwork on the walls around them.

  “Oliop, focus,” Jeff said, but he found himself drawn to another painting. It was of a trio of trees with yellow, green, and purple leaves, towering over a waterfall. Layers of detail unfolded as he studied it. He recognized smaller bits of foliage supporting hammocks of webbing holding tiny Bunnie in spidery repose. Except for the spiders, it was beautiful. He looked away, walked to Oliop, who had returned to the first painting, and placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “There might be other Bunnie aboard,” Jeff said. “And we need to get rid of her.” He looked over at Jordan.

  Jordan's eyes narrowed. “What?” Jordan said. She brought up the wrench. “You're not dropping me down there with those things.” She moved the wrench about as if she were waiting for a softball to be pitched.

  “Relax,” Jeff said. “We're not doing that. But once we find somewhere safe, we're leaving you.”

  “You mean if,” she said. “Oliop might not even get this thing moving, you know.”

  “Let's explore,” Oliop said. “I'll get us moving.”

  He went through a doorway, and Jeff followed with Jordan close behind. She hung onto the wrench. The ship's interior proved just as interesting as the cargo bay, with tidy hallways and art hanging everywhere, all of alien landscapes, some with frolicking Bunnie. They found one room with nothing but paintings in it. Several unfinished pieces hung from taut wires that crisscrossed the room. There they discovered boxes of what turned out to be paints and other art supplies. As they moved on, Jeff guessed at what other rooms might be after a quick look inside, including a sleeping berth, gym, planning compartment with a marked-up chalkboard, and a chamber populated floor to ceiling with obelisks adorned with blinking lights.

  “This is it, isn't it?” Jordan said as they walked through the obelisk chamber. “It looks more important than the other stuff. There must be a cockpit or control to fly this thing.”

  “It's already flying. Or hovering,” Oliop said.

  “Close enough,” she said.

  Oliop wrinkled his nose as he looked about. “This isn't it. We keep looking.”

  “Ship, wake up,” Jordan said. She circled one of the obelisks. Ran her fingers along its surface.

  Jeff couldn't find any input devices. Maybe she was on to something. A voice control was all within the realms of possibility. The ship understanding English? Doubtful. But he said, “Computer, respond. Hello. Prompt C. Acknowledge your new masters.”

  Oliop ignored them, making another cursory tour through the obelisks. He then produced the fob that got them aboard the ship and exited the room.

  Jordan and Jeff found one horizontal obelisk among the vertical ones with only a pair of lights on its surface. All the others had dozens of flashing points. The two lights were white and didn't blink.

  “Could this be the control?” Jordan asked, but Oliop wasn't around.

  Jeff examined it, began to touch its surface in various places with no results. “Maybe there's a power button that needs to be pushed to activate it,” he said. “Look for anything.”

  He touched the two lights, but they were fixed with nothing to depress. Some of the side panels had rivets of some sort, but he had no way of opening them.

  “Give me the wrench,” Jeff said.

  She tightened her grip on it.

  “It's for the panel. Maybe we can get inside. Find a button to reboot this thing, and it will give us access.”

  She handed the wrench over. “You think this thing will have a power button? Seriously?”

  “The elevator to the Commons had one,” he said.

  “The what?” she asked, but he didn't elaborate.

  He fumbled at the panel with the wrench but couldn't fit the tool into anything to gain leverage. The obelisk's surface was smooth, made of an unknown material, and cool to the touch. Jeff found visible seams in the back and what might have been tiny vents for heat dispersal. The wrench didn't fit in the seams or the vents. He sighed with frustration. The Bunnie didn't believe in easy access points to their technology. Jordan watched his futile efforts to get into the obelisk.

  “Ha,” Jordan said. “You're the kind of guy that would use the back of a screwdriver as a hammer, aren't you?”

  “Only in emergencies.”

  He gave the panel a frustrated whack. The ship lurched.

  “What did you do?”

  “That wasn't me.”

  “Where's Oliop?” Jordan asked.

  ***

  They backtracked room by room and found Oliop in what Jeff guessed was the gym. From the ceiling hung pulleys and cables with small handles. Waist-high hand rails stood in the center of the room. They looked like they belonged to a treadmill but without any rolling treads. On the floor were several plastic-y receptacles about the size of a Bunnie's enormous butt. The receptacles looked like shallow hot tubs without the water. Oliop sat in one of these tubs, his tail and fingers working at small openings on the sides. With his foot, he held the fob that got them aboard the ship.

  “Are they about to get inside?” Jordan asked. “What was the shaking?”

  “What are you doing?” Jeff asked.

  Oliop ignored them. The fob's blue lights blinked, brightened, flashed. Oliop's toes touched the remote's face. He was grinning.

  “Did you figure something out?” Jeff asked. “Does the gym have something to do with flying this thing?”

  “Can you get us moving?” Jordan asked.

  Oliop continued to concentrate on working the tub full of levers. He said, “We are moving. We're about thirty miles from the hangar.”

  “Really? Besides that one
shudder, I don't feel anything,” Jeff said.

  “We hit a tree,” Oliop said. “That had the side benefit of removing one of the Bunnie from the bottom of the ship. Other than that, we won't feel it when we move.”

  “So this isn't a gym,” Jordan said.

  “Nope,” Oliop said. “This is the cockpit.”

  CHAPTER 28

  FIFTEEN MINUTES AFTER the Grey introduced his special cocktail of particles into the Commons security system, all hell broke loose. Every alarm in the city went off. The hue and cry began in the security building itself, but soon every citizen that wasn't deaf could hear their local alarm blasting a warning. The sound fluctuated between a high pitched shriek and the clanging of a bell, all generated by the alarm protocols and designed to keep anyone from ignoring the awful racket.

  The event startled the attendant at the Commons Sound and Audio Pollution Monitoring desk. The attendant, a large worm-like millipede, almost spilled his bowl of crisped, salted termites when the sounds blasted through his office and echoed in from the street outside. This was normally a quiet job, requiring not much more of the attendant than to field the occasional complaint and to fill out and file a report. No one visited. No one bothered him in his office. An ironically quiet job, considering the department.

  The com line on his monitor blinked. An incoming call. Just before he answered, another line lit up, then a third. The attendant next saw an entire line of lights flash to life. Fifty lines waited for him to pick up, and more spilled over into the message system.

  He wiggled his multiple fingers over the answer key, not sure which one to answer first. He looked at his monitor, then the com answer key. The noise around him overwhelmed him. The entire Galactic Commons blasted with wailing, ringing, gonging, and whistling, and he didn't know what to do about it.

  Something slammed up against the window.

  He got up and looked outside. A crowd moved past the window, the varied citizens of the Commons spilling out onto the usually calm streets. Larger beings pushed aside smaller ones. Tailed folk had their tails stepped on. A frail-looking pink stick of a humanoid pushed over a much slower quadruped, knocking a bundle of papers from the creature's hands. Two children stood at the quadruped's side, wailing.

  The attendant went outside and tried to help her up.

  She knocked his multiple limbs aside with a panicked hiss, scooped up her children, and merged back into the crowd. The attendant watched her go. He then looked in through the window. The monitor flashed madly at him, desperate for attention. He looked back at the passing crowd and at one of the speakers vibrating with its warnings. A mist sprayed from a nozzle below the speaker, packets of data for citizens that used scent-based languages. Red lights blinked. His home building was twenty blocks away, where his wife tended the latest clutch of their eggs. He didn't wait for an opening in the mob, but charged ahead, faster than most, crawling on and over anyone that stood in his way, never looking back.

  ***

  A mass of beings pushed into the Commons security building. Throughout the lobby, like everywhere else, sounds blasted and lights flashed and warnings fired off.

  Captain Flemming and Detective Ceph moved through the wild crowd. Citizens tugged at their arms and fired off questions and concerns as the two were the only security personnel still in the building that weren't bots. Flemming calmly brushed off a clingy petitioner's claw, climbed atop the empty receptionist's desk, and put a hand up to get the people's attention. The crowd circled around him, straining to hear.

  Flemming caught part of Ceph softly saying something about being between a rock and another unyielding object, but the alarm noise drowned most of it out. Flemming looked around at the crowd, his eyes impassive. A dozen questions were shouted from scores of beings, voices fighting to be heard. “Report,” came an orotund shout above the rest. “Tell us what's happening!”

  Flemming held a hand up for silence. The crowd settled down. Flemming cleared his throat, unaccustomed to shouting as he addressed the citizens in the lobby.

  “There seems to be a problem with the security alert system,” Flemming said. “We can't yet turn it off. The techs are working on a solution.”

  “What is triggering it?” someone asked.

  “We have an undocumented non-member species loose in the Commons,” Flemming said. “It is the suspect in a triple homicide down below the hangar level.”

  The questions flew: “What alien?” “Why not caught?” “Is it contagious/edible/traceable?”

  Flemming waited until the shouting died down.

  “The undocumented entity is traceable,” he said. “And therein lies a problem. We've had multiple positives on our sensors from the alien in different parts of the city, all over a short time period. As if there were many of them, even though we only trace a single organism.”

  The crowd began to speak all at once, both to Flemming and to one another.

  “Mitosis?” someone suggested.

  Flemming shook his head. “Not likely. Evidence suggests its species is two sexed and engages in live birth. Plus, a creature that large couldn't self-replicate in such a short time.”

  More suggestions from the room: “Clones,” “Teleporter,” and “Moves, really, really quickly.”

  “All possibilities,” Flemming said. He cleared his throat again. All this shouting above the alarms was proving challenging. “The sensor records follow the intruder's presence when it first arrived in the city. It moved about like what you would expect from a single creature. Then it appeared in multiple locations in quick succession. And then it's as if the alien vanished. Or aliens if there are indeed more of them. The investigation continues. We are currently backtracking any possible traces from earlier before the multiple readings were registered. We're having problems accessing some of the records and are locked out of much of our system due to the nature of this alert.”

  Complaints and suggestions surged from the room, drowning out one another.

  In a low voice that somehow cut through to the least sound sensitive, Flemming said, “My posting is available for any who wish to volunteer.”

  The crowd became silent.

  “So for now, go home and listen for further instructions.” Flemming got down off the desk and grabbed Ceph by an arm. They moved through the crowd and back outside. The citizens were placated, at least for now.

  “Captain,” Ceph said. “Maybe this is like calling the ocean wet...” He paused, his mouth tentacles trembling.

  “Go on,” Flemming said.

  “But if the sensors detect the human at more places than he could possibly be, with our understanding of a human, could the sensing equipment be compromised?”

  Flemming released Ceph's arm and looked back at the building behind them. The buzz of the crowd of concerned citizens came muted through the front doors. The darker upper floors betrayed nothing external, all part of the building's purposeful design to be unobtrusive and to blend with the rest of the Commons cityscape.

  “Ceph, you should speak up more,” Flemming said.

  He reversed course and marched back into the building with Ceph close behind.

  ***

  Whistle and the Grey went out a back door of the security building. The Grey had switched off all the cameras and locks, so they were able to exit via an unused hallway to avoid the crowd milling about the first floor lobby. Once outside, they kept to the lesser-traveled byways of the Commons, eventually coming out at a confluence of tunnels near the transportation terminal's lower levels. A security door let them in. The Grey found an unused elevator.

  It touched a sleepy control panel on a stand beneath the elevator. The panel blinked to life. DNA sniffers acknowledged the user and unlocked the elevator. The system turned a blind eye to anything else the Grey did and didn't even peek as the two walked the short gangplank up to the elevator's door.

  “Get in,” the Grey said but didn't wait for its large companion. Whistle followed, ducking to fit inside. She
was careful not touch her smaller master.

  “Back to the human world?” Whistle said.

  “Yes.”

  The Grey turned the elevator on. With a few finger strokes, it set the destination.

  Whistle stared at the Grey's whitened hand. “You okay, boss?”

  The Grey dropped the white left hand and poised the darker right on the elevator's activation key. “Never you mind that. We now go to take care of our last loose end,” it said. “And the rest will fall into place.”

  Whistle didn't reply, which suited the Grey just fine.

  CHAPTER 29

  JEFF FELT USELESS as Oliop piloted the ship along. There was no sensation of movement, no more jarring impacts, and barely any sound but from the pilot. Oliop hummed intermittently in a screeching tone as he discovered the nuances of flying the alien craft, clicking and tapping the tabs and indentations of the Bunnie cockpit. With each discovery came an “ooh” or a snicker. Jeff detected condescension in the technician's mirth, each laugh marking the discovery of a crude design choice on the part of the Bunnie.

  “Need help?” Jeff asked.

  Oliop ignored him. He was absorbed in the eye-hand-foot coordination required to pilot the craft. A monitor above him proved disorienting for Jeff, displaying the world outside the ship like the view from a child's toy telescope, fragmented and distorted but no doubt perfect for the Bunnie's multifaceted eyes.

  Jordan watched Oliop with amusement. “Is there anything you need us to do?” she asked. “Oliop?”

  “Hmm?” he said without looking up from the control. “No, I'm fine.”

  “I'm going to look around,” she said.

  They left Oliop in the cockpit. Jeff followed Jordan as she explored the corridors of the ship. He had mixed feelings about her being here but also didn't want her out of his sight.