TOC MetaStories: Ineen Aldrop's 'He Stood taller Than Most'

Part 5 -Jumping to Conclusions-

Paulie sat back onto the floor, his legs sprawled out in front of him as he listened to the loud bangs coming from the closed air tight door that sealed the bridge shut. Jual seemed to be hell bent on getting inside, it made him wonder why the bridge had been clear in the first place.

Maybe the ‘Great’ Jual wasn’t really as smart as they made themselves out to be, Paulie speculated internally with a grim chuckle.

“What are you doing over there Urren.. I mean, Earth person.” Krissh called out to him.

Paulie looked across the small bridge room as the door continued to clang and clatter loudly. The small alien female sat at what looked to be one of the main control consoles, lines of strange alien script scrolling from top to bottom in continuous lines of bright orange text. The effect was such that he felt his eyes starting to swim from the incomprehensibility of the scene.

Krissh seemed to understand the flowing text just fine, her bright purple eyes flicking all around as she took it in. With her back turned towards him he could see that the small row of horns that ran from her head down her neck seemed to stop near to her shoulders. The small bumps no longer showing under the fabric of her suit.

He stood and nearly smacked his head into the low ceiling as he cursed under his breath again. The entirety of his life had taken a decidedly more interesting turn in the last hour or so, and with a small jolt he sat on one of the too-small seats. He had not yet even taken the time to fully internalise his current situation. Humanity was not alone in the cosmos as he had always been taught as a child, if what the small reptilian looking alien said was true then they were not alone by a long shot. She had made mention of some vast galactic community called the Greater Galactic Intercession.

He remembered the way she had looked at him when she had believed him naught more than a mindless savage, hell bent on slaughtering her and everything else on the ship. No, he was a conscious thinking being, just like the rest of them despite what they may have thought before.

He paused his thoughts and took a second to tap at one of the vacant computer-like terminals. While there were many things about the construction that seemed to be ubiquitous such as the screen and the data input method, there were other things that made his brain do flips inside his skull like a professional skydiver. The control systems were akin to any number of touchpad keypads he was familiar with, but there was no mouse or control pad. Instead he had observed Krissh manipulating the screen via a tiny forest of pressure sensitive crystals set in a cluster. He had touched them and watched as the screen registered his input. His attempts had been clumsy to say the least, wildly inaccurate to be a little less so.

He turned to the small alien female and asked, “So, when do we head out?”

She shook her scaly green head, sharp needle-like teeth flashing as she grimaced. “Not long now, I have already locked out all other non-administrators from the system. We need to jump the ship though, I think there may be at least one engineer still down there though as the commands keep getting manually overridden.. Damn, this is such a bad idea.” She focused back on her computer console, the tips of her clawed fingers dancing over the crystal controls in an impressive display of dexterity.

Her six fingered hands were so alike to what he may have expected, three joints and knuckles with much smoother textured fingertips allowed for the Zen’kkalk to manipulate objects with at least as fine a degree of control as he himself. There were so many things about the ship that filtered through that uncanny valley of near-familiarity. It was as if he was in some manner of hallucinogenic haze, everything just slightly warped from reality.

He tried fiddling with the unreadable controls again and then jerked as the computer hissed out a warning. “Access to weapon systems denied, unknown user. Please place genetic sample into sampler to register as new user.”

He glanced over towards Krissh but she didn’t seem to notice or care what he was doing. He saw a small door open in the lower side of the machine, a device that looked like a finger-pricker sliding out. Paulie shrugged internally and pressed his thumb down on the device with a small intake of breath. The device chirped and then withdrew back into the console and he stuck his pricked thumb into his mouth, a bead of red blood forming on its tip.

The computer seemed to hum slightly, the crystal components he could see glowing more brightly before the device stopped, a string of deep yellow text descending through the middle of the screen as the computer once more barked in alarm.

“Non-sapient genetic sequence detected. Please be advised that provided genetic sample is consistent with extremely dangerous fauna from a known apocalypse-world. An automatic security alert has been logged into the system, if you feel that this was done in error then please contact your system administrator to lift the lockdown.” and with that the screen blacked out and the control crystals went dark.

He frowned. “What the hell?” The computer seemed to have shut itself off entirely, further efforts from Paulie doing nothing to revive the darkened computer so he grumbled and pushed himself away and back into the protesting seat.

As he was about to ask Krissh about it she stood and let out a triumphant bark. “Yes, got it!” She slapped a hand against her chest in a manner that suggested she was congratulating her own efforts.

He crab-walked over to her as he tried to keep from smacking his head on the various lights and pipes that jutted from the room of the small room. “What is it? What did you do?”

She seemed much more used to his presence now as she hardly even shivered when he sidled up next to her. He looked at her screen, it seemed to be filled with small boxes upon which small lines of falling text scrolled endlessly. “What are those?” he gestured to the largest of the boxes.

She poked it with a finger, “These are the control sequences for the ship’s main propulsion systems. I managed to get the gravpol drive controls rerouted to the bridge, that way they couldn't keep overriding it down in the engineering bay. I just need to start the graviton generation sequence..” She trailed off as her fingers once more danced across the crystal controls and the keypad. With an efficiency that spoke of experience she had managed to navigate through a further three levels of the little boxes when she sat back and nodded at her handiwork.

“Okay, that should be good. I managed to get a little extra juice out of the displacement polarizers by switching the ship’s life support to minimum. I tried to turn it off entirely, but there seems to be some sort of direct override protection, damn thing.” Paulie nodded, his understanding a little lacking.

“What is a gravpol drive?” He asked, the word having stood out to him the most. It had sounded complicated, he vaguely recognised the words graviton and polarize but not at all in the way she had used them.

She shook her head. “I don’t think I understand the system well enough myself to explain it to you. But the basics of it is that the ship generates strange energy in the form of gravity-influencing particles called gravitons. These are then released in a burst along a special energy field generated around the ship to open a sort of portal that then takes us where we want it to go.” She stopped. “Simple, as easy as robbing eggs from a nidulk roost.”

He shook his head and muttered quietly, “Damn aliens.”

He was so entirely out of his depth that it had ceased to even compute. Every new development was a shock to his already overstimulated system, eventually there would be a cost. But not yet, he was still mostly functional and he would continue to remain as such for as long as he could hold himself together.

The door shuddered under a much stronger blow than he had heard since the others had started their assault. It impacted the door with enough force to cause the deck plates of the bridge to vibrate under his feet. He looked at the small zen’kkalkian female next to him, the scales around her purple eyes going pale as she felt it too.

He gestured towards the screen. “How much longer till the jump?” he was almost afraid to ask her what they were using to try and break through the doorway. He wasn’t so sure he really wanted to know anyways.

She shook her head and gestured to the door. “Not long, but this jump won't even get us close to an outpost, your home system is pretty damn far off the beaten path, human. No, unless that door holds for another dozen jumps it is unlikely that we will get out of this without further bloodshed, and even with you here I dont like those odds. We will die, alone and far from loved ones.” She seemed to break down a little at that, her gurgling hisses taking on a much more sorrowful tone as she wept quietly.

Paulie stood as tall as he could and puffed out his chest in an attempt to comfort the clearly demoralised alien. “Bah, there is nothing they can do to us while we are in here. We control the ship’s systems, if they blow up the room then they will lose control of their ship anyways.” She looked over to him, the smallest vestiges of hope seeming to manifest in the normalisation of her facial color.

She hesitated, nodding at him a moment later. But he could tell the small alien was still stressed. “Well, I don’t know about all of that. But I suppose that it can’t hurt to try anyway.” She turned back to the console, her small hands dancing over the controls. The screed flashed a deep blood orange in color and another alarm swept through the ship, the previously yellow lights switching to a deep umber brown.

He chuckled in spite of their situation. “A brown alert, nice.”

Krissh started to strap herself into the seat as the banging on the main bridge door grew in intensity. “You might want to hold on to something, jumpshock is a real pain in the lower vertex even for veteran spacers. And you are by no means that.” She punctuated her comment by pulling a strap over her forehead and tucking her arms into small pouches to the sides of the chair.

The alarm lights went from flashing to a solid color as a deep thrum started to build through the air. Paulie wedged himself into the chair he was sitting at more securely, the rests to the side groaning as they tried to encompass his bulk. He pulled several of the straps across his lower gut and chest as she had and then grabbed the sides of the chair as hard as he could. He wasn’t exactly sure what was going to happen, but if her mood was any indication then he might be in for a singularly unpleasant experience.

The humming grew in pitch and intensity for another few seconds, and then something fundamentally different happened. He couldn't describe exactly what had changed, but one second the sound was building and then the next it was as if the sound itself had stopped while still leaving the impression of itself behind. Like the echoes of awareness. This was nearly immediately followed by a twisting sensation, but not sideways or forwards, more like things were being twisted inwards. This odd feeling only grew more and more intense until his mind was screaming in confusion at the sensations that wracked his body. His vision went misty from the sensory overload and his last coherent thought was that the ship was being squeezed through an infinitely small point and him along with it.