Second Wave - Chapter 10
Chapter 10
We were shooting when we came out of the transporter in the storage dome. The two Pugs had been faced away from us and, although I don't like to shoot people without giving them a chance, the blasted Pugs were just too resistant to bullets to let any advantage slip away. I fired off my Win-Mag and the muzzle blast knocked all of the Sunnys to the floor. They lay there in shock, holding their ears.
The Pug that I'd shot managed to turn around and look at me. He had a large hole clear through his chest, but still had enough strength to move. I prepared to shoot him again, but he suddenly dropped.
Frank and Ted had jumped to the side when I shot and then rushed the other Pug. He was trying to draw his splinter-gun but was already missing an arm. Frank was really fast with that large sword he carried.
The Pug finally figured out that he'd have to use his other hand, but just at that time, Ted shoved his smaller knife into the thing's chest. It let out a hiss and grabbed his arm and I could hear his teeth grind in pain. I was trying to get clear where I could shoot without hitting either of the men, but Frank beat me to it. He stepped past Ted and made a back-handed chopping motion and the Pug's head dropped to the floor. It instantly released Ted's arm and collapsed.
Erin was still back in the transporter with the Sunnys. I hastened to hold the door open and motioned them out. The Sunnys were still in shock. Their pacifism didn't prepare them well for this necessary violence. Erin had also been stunned by the wicked muzzle-blast of my rifle and her eyes were practically rolling around in their sockets. She shook her head and tried her best to recover as she helped shoo the Sunnys out.
They came out in a bunch, trying to avoid both the dead Pugs and the weapon-carrying humans. I took a moment to try and allay their fears and repulsion mentally, “Relax. It was necessary to do away with those two. We're safe for a moment and there will be no more violence.”
That last was probably a lie, but I wasn't intending to shoot anyone else, at least at the moment.
As I walked by the dead Pugs, I stopped to gather up both of their splinter-guns. The other humans watched me incuriously. I don't think they realized how deadly the small, plastic-like things were. The two big men obviously had been too successful with their current armament to want to exchange it for a toy gun and Erin wasn't oriented toward weapons, being used to her guards.
The transporter link to the ship was on the other side of the storage dome and we threaded our way across the littered space, avoiding miscellaneous boxes of carelessly stored items. The Sunnys might have been technologically adept, but they didn't seem to have the concept of organized storage down very well. This transporter was set in the face of one of the standard cube-shaped rooms. There was a door leading to the inside of the cube and when I opened it to inspect the inside, it contained an intricate mechanism resting on a bench.
Whistle looked under my arm and said, “Dat be the communicator. Breaks it now.”
I pulled my Sig and fired several shots into the most sensitive-looking part of it. There was a flash and some kind of energy glowed around it for a moment. Then it disintegrated into a pile of rubble. That solved one potential problem. The Pug-bears were now without any means of communication and I didn't care if they knew that we had stolen their ship.
We lined up, humans and Sunnys, in two lines and then entered the transporter when the door opened. It was a larger one than I'd previously seen, perhaps due to it being required to transport cargo and equipment of various sizes. Regardless, it easily held all ten of us, the six Sunnys only taking up about as much space as the four humans.
As I reached out for the go-button, I asked Whistle once again, “Are you sure that the ship is vacant?”
“Yes, me sure. No one would go der without permission of the Great Ones.”
“OK. Here we go, then!”
The door closed and the walls shifted as they do and we came out in what might have been the cargo bay of the FTL ship. I was excited! This was my first time on a spaceship. I realized that I'd been traveling through space using the transporters, but this was somehow different. It was more exciting in a way. I'm too much of a romantic for my own good and the thought of flying through space was distracting.
The reality wasn't quite as awesome as I thought it should be. We were in a fairly large space – about a hundred feet long and about half that wide. The overhead was curved with cables and tubes mixed with metal girders like ribs following the curve up from the floor and disappearing into the vertical wall at the far side. Looking around, I realized that the transporter was located against a flat wall that was the front of a closet-like structure placed against the curved outside of the ship. It was remarkably like the cube-shaped storage rooms in the domes on Titan and Oberon. That made sense, since the same people, the Sunnys, were responsible for the construction.
The Sunnys had been here before and led the way across the vacant space to another transporter on the opposite wall. I thought to myself, “Of course, they'd use transporters to get around in the ship. Why walk, when you can dematerialize?” I found out later that there were also passageways around parts of the ship, but they were mostly in the areas where the Pug-bears resided. The sensitivity of their symbionts to the transporters was a huge weakness that meant they had to physically travel wherever they wanted to go. They could take a transporter across the ship, but that would kill their symbiont and they'd come out the other side as unintelligent, feral beasts. Not a useful outcome for most purposes.
We came out on the bridge. It was a large space, but the ceiling was low, due to the short stature of the Sunnys. The two big men both had to walk partly bent over. The overhead just cleared my scalp by a half-inch, so I had to be almost as careful as them.
The bridge held a few rows of stadium seating that overlooked some consoles in a 'U-shaped' formation around a single Sunny-sized seat. The consoles had video displays and something like a matrix of flat keys on their surface. The most stunning part of the place was a huge, transparent window that curved, seamlessly around the entire front of the room. It currently provided a view of Uranus showing that we were orbiting the planet in an inverted and bow-down orientation. It was a little disconcerting to me and I noticed that the other three humans carefully kept their eyes averted from the view. I guess they didn't feel too secure. It was a bit much. They'd started out the day standing in snow halfway up their calves in the Rocky Mountains and now we were preparing to leave the solar system. When I thought of it that way, it was a tribute to human nature that we were all still functioning.
I hadn't noticed previously, but there was something funny about the place – I weighed about Earth normal! The ship had some form of gravity control. I asked about it and Frazzle explained. The ship had its own gravity as a result of the FTL drive technology. It had something to do with the power core and wasn't dependent on the FTL engines to be running. It was always on, even in this unoccupied vessel. Frazzle tried to describe the mechanism, but his description was over my level.
As Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It was a true statement. Frazzle's explanation was full of concepts that I had no words for and no background to begin to understand. It reminded me of an elderly professor trying to explain an advanced math concept to a preschooler. What I did get from his effort, though, was the fact that their discovery of the FTL drive had made gravity control possible.
The ramifications of that though boggled my imagination. “You mean that the early ships, I mean before FTL, didn't have any gravity?”
“No, dey used centrifugal force to keep all on the floor. Der living spaces rotated,” he explained, adding a visual image in his imagination of a weight spinning on a string.
“I'm glad we have gravity in this ship,” I responded, somewhat inanely.
“Wait! This isn't normal?” Erin was slow on the uptake since she hadn't been able to follow the mental aspects of our conversation, but now she was upset.
“It appears to be normal for this ship,” I said.
“I don't like it! It could stop or be turned off and we'd float!”
She was just too tightly wound and it was starting to bother me. “It won't be turned off. Stop worrying so much!”
The woman was a ball of fun. She was simultaneously fearful and aggressive; not a great combination in my opinion. I regretted having her along. Frank and Ted were useful and the good thing about them was they were normally so impassive that they didn't say much. That made them just about perfect companions in my judgment. Of course, I was going to have to deal with the Warlord issue sooner or later. That might prove to be a fracturing point for our loose group, but I was able to relegate that event to sometime in the future.
As if my thought cued her, Erin started, “Let's take this ship to Earth and get the Warlord – ”
I interrupted, “And, what would he do? We've got to stop this invasion or Earth won't be ours for much longer. The Warlord might just want to use the ship to intimidate other people and expand his domain. We need to find a way to put a halt to the Pug-bears' expansion and this ship is just what we need.”
She started to speak again, but I'd had enough. I held up my hand in a stopping motion. As I did, I surreptitiously inserted a copy of the Pug-bears' controlling mechanism into her mind. I had been studying it during the moments since I'd disabled it in the Sunnys. It wasn't very complex, but then the Sunnys had no defense. It might not work for long in a human, but I wanted her to go along with the idea that I'd been formulating. I also didn't want trouble with Ted and Frank and they were looking at me suspiciously.
She shut her mouth and then opened it to say, “I guess you're right. What do you want to do?”
Both Frank and Ted's mouths dropped open at this unexpected capitulation.
It was exactly the result I'd intended and I felt proud of myself at having learned to use another mental technique. I didn't like the idea of controlling another person against their will and I expected that she'd be resentful if she figured out what I did, but it was easier than arguing.
“Here's what we'll do. I've been planning on our actions and this makes sense to me. We'll fly to one of the Sunny planets to see if we can help them start a revolution to distract the Pug-bears.”
I admit that I knew it wasn't one of my best ideas, but my two furry friends both exclaimed excitedly about it.
“Ders a group of us that are working to overthrow them! We can signal them to break things,” was their explanation.
That was good to know. They did have an underground resistance and they apparently were capable of breaking things, if not capable of violence to other living creatures. I decided that we could work with that. Anyway, we'd have to. There wasn't another option that I knew of.