by Adam Moon
It said, “I’m going over there. Do you want to come with me?”
Chris’ brow furrowed. He asked cautiously, “Can you take me home?”
“I have no idea. I don’t know the capabilities of that ship and I don’t know where we are. But if it’s feasible, then sure.”
“How can I trust you? Everyone else says you guys are a murderous race of lunatics.”
“Forget it then. I don’t have time for this. You’re already annoying me half to death. See you later, Earthling.” The Gray then ran from the command station, leaving Chris behind.
Chris considered trying to catch up to him but he knew he’d never be able to. The Gray was far too agile and fast. Plus he had no idea where the Gray was going on this vast spaceship or how he was going to make it over to Samda’s ship.
He regretted asking too many questions. It seemed to piss all the aliens off and now it had just jeopardized any chance he had to get back home with the Gray.
Over the speakers, Number Three said, “The fire’s contained but we lost all the samples.”
The captain called out, “I put the girl into stasis. I want that Gray found immediately before he does any more damage.”
Chris saw a tiny dot, like a mote of dust, on the monitor. It was slowly heading towards Samda’s spaceship. He tried to warn the others but he had no idea how to speak over the loudspeakers. He’d never felt so useless in his life.
Escapee
The captain returned to the command station and Chris told him what had happened, but by then it was too late. Samda’s ship had vanished five minutes earlier with the Gray on board.
The captain tried to home in on it, but he couldn’t pinpoint it.
He called out to his crew members, “Get to your stations. The Gray boarded the alien girl’s ship and escaped already.”
Over the speakers the first mate said, “We need the Gray. He was one of the smartest, most advanced life forms on this ship. We can’t do this without him now that his cell samples have been destroyed.”
“No shit. That’s why we have to find him. Get your asses up here now.”
The captain brushed Chris aside like he was a fly or a piece of trash in his way. That was alright though. Chris was getting used to it.
Number Three and Number Four rushed in first and started to fiddle with their controls. The first mate followed them in a minute later and said, “The sample bay needs to be replenished as soon as we get this situation under control.”
The captain said, “It’ll take too long to recollect the samples. Forget about it and get on with finding that Gray.”
The first mate shrugged his robotic shoulders and sighed. “If he’s far enough away and turns off his systems, we’ll never find him.”
“Do as I said and look for him.”
For the first time, Chris wondered if everyone inside one of the four robots was even a male. It made just as much sense for some or all of them to be female. The robotic voices were only slightly different, and that was probably just for his benefit and the benefit of all the other captives. Then again, maybe his captors were androgynous or something equally exotic and difficult for him to wrap his mind around. Shit, they could be aquatic, sexless worms for all he knew.
The captain barked another order which put an end to Chris’ musings. “Put up the defenses. If he got a signal out already, the Grays could send an armada after us.”
“Then we should jump away from here,” Number Three offered.
“No way. If he’s still here, we’re not leaving without him.”
Chris wanted to ask why they didn’t just go and find a different Gray on the Gray’s home planet, but he thought the captain might smack him for asking too many questions.
The Gray Fleet
A distress call came through that the Gray Admiral Chaybo never expected. He had seven Gray-controlled ships at his disposal and now he finally had some info to go on.
One of his men had escaped from the enemy collector ship, and thankfully he was smart enough to have gathered some intel before he disembarked. He claimed he knew most, if not all, of their arrival coordinates. If he was right, then the days of chasing their tails were behind them.
The escapee was already plugging the coordinates into one of the Admiral’s rear ships. It would be linked to the rest when the info was verified.
They had faced the enemy only twice before, but they’d lost those battles because the meetings had been chance encounters, brought on by luck and good fortune rather than careful planning and strategy. In short, they hadn’t been prepared.
This was a hundred thousand years in the making. Admiral Chaybo would be sure to make the most of the new information and use it to obliterate that blocky ship commanded by those delusional lunatics.
“Plot the first set of coordinates. Get ready for war.”
Retreat
Battle stations, everyone,” the captain ordered. “It looks like seven ships are headed this way and you can bet your ass they’re Gray ships.”
Number Four said, “I have a lock on one of the Grays inside the closest ship. Should I risk bringing it over? We could jump out of here then.”
“You know it’s a trap. That Gray you have a lock on will probably come with a biological or chemical weapon. You know this. You saw the damage it did to the hull the last time we tried to capture one of them that way.”
The first mate turned to face the captain. “You know we stand no chance against seven Gray ships. We need to run.”
The captain paused, deep in thought. “You’re right. Get us out of here.”
A second later, the view on the monitor changed. They were staring at an orange planet twirling beneath them.
Chase
The Gray Admiral Chaybo said to his second in command, “The tech they possess is off the charts. It’s no wonder we never succeed. Their ship looks like a flying brick, yet we can’t outmaneuver it.”
His second in command turned his oversized gray head towards him and said, “The escapee says that they are no longer flesh and bone. He says they have integrated their minds into large mechanized bodies for the purposes of their mission.”
“I heard as much. How odd. If we didn’t have to kill every last one of them, I’d almost feel sorry for their plight.”
His second in command said incredulously, “I feel nothing but hatred towards them. They deserve nothing better than instant extermination.”
“Well, that is the plan. Has the escapee plotted all of the destination points he discovered from their ship’s computers?”
“He has. We’re powering up to jump to the next one.” The second in command paused for a beat. “Did anyone tell you where their final destination is?”
“Not yet, but I have a feeling you’re about to.”
“Their final plot point is Outpost World Eight.”
Admiral Chaybo shook his head in confusion. “We abandoned that dust-ball almost half a million years ago. It’s worthless. The air is poison, the radiation deadly.”
“Maybe they terraformed it. Or maybe that’s why they don’t use their own bodies anymore.”
Chaybo paused, pondering the possibilities. Then he shrugged and said, “Who cares about the details? We need to stop them before they get there. That’s where their experiment will take place and we need to stop it before it does.”
“We could just jump to the outpost planet and attack it before they even arrive.”
“We both know it’ll be too heavily defended for that to succeed. No, our best shot is to give chase.”
“A small Gray at a console said, “We’re ready to jump, Admiral Chaybo.”
“Do it. Let’s destroy them this time.”
Bump and Run
The captain said, “Send the message to the creatures down below. If they don’t answer, bring one of them up and then let’s get out of here before the Grays figure out where we are.”
Chris could only assume that the ship was programmed to jump to ea
ch planet in succession to abduct a specimen. That could be the only reason the captain was so worried the Grays were going to find them — because they couldn’t deviate from the mission or their preset flight path even if they wanted to. What if the ship could only do what it was programmed to do? That meant he’d never get home.
The first mate muttered, “Shit, they found us.”
The view changed on the monitor, showing seven sleek white cigar-shaped ships traveling towards them.
No line of communication was opened before the attack commenced.
Now Chris knew that the escapee had probably checked out the ship’s scheduled arrival coordinates. There was no other way he could explain how they’d been found so quickly.
He knew the ship had been hit because the artificial gravity went out. He floated freely, as did the mechanized alien beings.
The first mate said, “They took out our aft cannons, Captain. We’re defenseless from the rear unless we use manual controls.”
“Get a specimen from the planet and then jump out of here. But skip our next destination. They’ll probably be waiting for us there too. There’s a chance we might be able to circle back later.”
Now Chris knew he was right about the ship. It could only go where it was pre-programmed to go. He couldn’t help but wonder why it had been designed that way.
Immediately a strange creature appeared on the monitor, newly abducted from the planet below. The captain didn’t even bother to greet it before telling the crew to get them the fuck out of there.
Irate Captain
They immediately jumped to another region of space. The gravity generator kicked back on and Chris fell to the floor with a dull thud.
The captain was agitated, so he didn’t mince words with the newly arrived specimen. He told it that if it didn’t comply to his demands it would be jettisoned into space.
It was a pale yellow, round creature with pink, mean-looking barbs all over its body. It had no head that Chris could discern so it had few features he could identify with.
It ate the pills by pushing them into its body with wide, splayed-out appendages, and then, after a few minutes, a weird gas erupted from it like mist from a lake. The gas settled at the floor and the creature then put the translator into its body.
Chris had to wrap his mind around the fact that the creature expelled its waste in mist form.
The captain took off his football helmet device and said directly to the creature, “You will walk the length of the corridor and I will help you go into stasis. Do not fight me. Do not ask any questions. Do you understand?”
In what sounded to Chris like perfect English, the creature said, “Yes, I understand.”
The captain turned to his first mate and said, “I want this Earth-man’s stasis pod fixed too. We’re dealing with too much and we’re too close to completing our mission to have loose ends running around on our ship.”
Chris said meekly, “I’ve done everything you’ve asked of me. I haven’t been running around this ship.”
“You were here when the Gray got into our systems and discovered our flight plan. You were here when it torched the back-up DNA. You were standing right here when it escaped.”
“So what? How does that make me a liability? If I wasn’t here, he’d have done everything exactly the same way.”
“You were in a position to help and you decided to do nothing. Maybe you’re not a liability, but you sure aren’t contributing to the success of the mission. Keep your mouth shut until your stasis pod can be prepared.”
Chris had had enough of the condescension. He said, “Screw it then. Just put me in a different pod. I know you have thousands of others.”
“Only one is suited for your kind. Like I said, shut up and let us work to get you out from under our feet.”
Angrily, he shot back with, “Oh, fuck you. You can’t talk to me like that. I didn’t even want to be here, asshole.”
“But now we’re stuck with you.”
Chris was too upset to quit so easily. He said, “Your stupid mission is going to fail anyway. You’d have to have a screw loose to think you can design God out of spare parts. You failed once and you’re going to fail again.”
“Did the Gray speak to you?” There was anger and trepidation in the captain’s voice.
Chris shook his head. “Why? What does the Gray know about this that you’re not telling me?”
“I fear I’ve already told you too much. Your capacity for knowledge is clearly struggling against the ramifications of our plans. You’re too dumb to understand, so you’ve made assumptions that aren’t true.”
Chris was pissed about being told he was too stupid to understand, but he put his anger aside to focus on why the captain was so afraid of the Gray speaking to him. Did the Gray know something that could jeopardize the mission? Did the Gray know it would fail? Or was the captain just paranoid?
The captain said, “Say another word or ask another idiotic question and I’ll have the translator removed from you.”
Chris just sneered at the robotic figure and put his back against the wall. He missed home more than ever before.
Why couldn’t the collector ship have grabbed his friends Dave and Jackie instead? They had actually wanted to be here. He didn’t.
Leapfrog
Sternly, Admiral Chaybo said, “We can’t hope to catch up to them at this rate. They’re able to jump without waiting to power up.”
His second in command was at a loss. “What do we do then?”
The Admiral stood up quickly and said, “We’ll get ahead of them. Skip the next couple of destinations, and when we’re ready, jump to the third one. We’ll unload on them the moment they appear. I want results this time. I want to know they’re all dead, the crew and the abductees. I want that ship torn to shreds.”
“Yes sir.”
Surprise!
They orbited the icy moon of a gas giant planet, bigger than Jupiter by a factor of seven. Its atmosphere was thick for that of a moon, with swirls of blacks and blues and greens whipping around quickly. Otherwise it was nondescript.
The first mate argued that the aquatic life forms that lived beneath the icy surface of the moon weren’t sufficiently intelligent to include in the experiment. After a harsh but brief exchange, the captain relented.
He said, “Grab a small sample of DNA just in case you’re wrong and then let’s move on. You’re right. The sooner we jump, the better off we’ll be.”
A hunk of blackened meat appeared in the holding cell.
The captain ordered, “Cleanse it and then have a bot put it on ice. It’ll have to do for now.”
The first mate ordered his men, “We need to jump away to the next coordinate. Be quick.”
Their next destination was hellish. They had appeared right beside a star, but the hellish part was that about half a dozen ships were waiting for them there.
The captain yelled, “It’s the Grays! Get us the hell out of here!” But he was too late.
Full Scale Attack
The ship was rocked by explosions and collisions. Chris struggled to keep his feet beneath him as the floor swayed from a now seriously wonky gravity generator. He felt his knees buckle, and then a second later he felt as light as a feather.
The monitor showed flashes of white with each impact.
Number Four said, “They took out our nav systems. We can still jump but there’s no way to know where we’ll end up. We could accidentally jump into an event horizon or into the heart of a star.”
The captain said, “That’s unlikely, but it’s not worth the risk. Fire at them with whatever we have left. Buy us some time.” Then he turned and said to his number three, “See if you can repair the navigation systems. Hurry up.”
Number Three rushed from the room like his life depended on it, which was probably true.
Number Three
When the navigations systems didn’t come back online, the captain yelled over the intercom, “Number Thre
e, what’s the situation?”
No reply came back and the ship was really starting to sustain damage, so the captain said to his first mate, “Go find Number Three and tell him I need him on the turrets. It looks like we’re going to have to fight our way out of this mess.”
Chris stood stock still with his back against the wall. He couldn’t believe any of this was happening. He was right in the middle of a space battle. It looked so cool in the movies, but in reality it was scary as hell. Each new rumble could be the death strike. The hull of the ship was holding up but that couldn’t last forever.
Thankfully, the gravity generator was starting to act less chaotic now.
On the monitor, he saw several large warships zip back and forth as they let loose with barrages of firepower. Some of it came in the form of basic exploding projectiles, but some of it was amplified energy. The ships worked well together, swarming their blocky ship like angry hornets.
The first mate ran from the command station as the captain ordered his number four to activate the automated defenses.
Soon enough, magnified light and physical projectiles started to hit some of the Gray’s ships. One of them was hit so hard that it burped out all of its atmosphere in a white mist against the black backdrop of space. Several bodies floated out of the ruptured hull and the captain ordered, “Find a live one and bring it over.”
A moment later a gasping Gray appeared in the holding cell.
The other Grays must have seen what had happened because they attacked with renewed vigor.
The first mate came back into the command station and said, “Number Three is dead. The Grays must have detonated a nuclear device on the side of the ship he was on, because his consciousness was scrubbed from the resultant EMP burst.” He dragged the dead robotic body of Number Three into the room for added emphasis.