This Galaxy Ain't Big Enough...
Sep. 9th, 2009 11:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aaaaaaaagh_sky"I'll say we have a problem," Somah said. "We just left the part of the ship that had the death ray in it. I get the feeling going back to disable that thing's not an option now."
"We can't just let them start zapping the Earth!" Elliott exclaimed. "Maybe we should try and go back."
"Or maybe," said Ellen slowly, "as long as we're here, we finish what we started."
"Huh?"
"I see what you're thinkin'," Paulson drawled. Ellen couldn't tell for sure, but she thought he sounded approving. "If you want to kill a snake, you don't mess around tryin' to pull its fangs. You cut off its head." He caught the blank look of confusion on Ellen's face and clarified, "You're sayin' we need to find whoever's in charge of this thing and take that sonofabitch down."
"I don't think we really have a choice," said Ellen. "Unless somebody has a better idea, we need to find the bridge."
"It's all the way at the top," Sally said. "I almost got there once, but they caught me first." She frowned a little. "It's easier with the teleporters. I don't think you're going to like the other way there."
"Whether we like it or not doesn't really make much difference, Sally," Ellen said. "We'll deal with it."
"Okay. Follow me!"
The way was long, and dizzyingly complex. At times Sally had to dive for cover, scrambling into air vents or under tables as aliens burst in on them and battle was joined. Once she paused as they came across a corridor where the walls were liberally splashed with the oozy green of alien blood; they paused while Ellen followed that corridor to its end alone, only to return with a satisfied samurai, reunited with his sword at last. Eventually they came to a room that reeked of unholy chemicals, even through the closed six-part door. "You guys'd better go in there without me," Sally said quietly. "It's kind of scary in there. I'm gonna take another way." She trotted back to the last air vent they'd passed, pulled it open, and scrambled inside.
Ellen glanced at the others. "Any idea what that was about?"
"Not a clue," Somah admitted. "But if that kid thinks it's scary, I'd say we need to make sure we're all reloaded first."
The door hissed open a few moments later. Ellen clapped a hand over her mouth and nose reflexively. That was antiseptic, she'd bet her Megaton house on it- and it was covering up the scent of something else the worker aliens hadn't managed to completely wash away.
Human blood.
There were glass-walled rooms to either side of them, observable by anyone passing through who took an interest. Both of the rooms had-
( silver things moving in from right and left and above, and they're... )
-two chairs, the padding stained dark rusty brown in multiple places, the long slender metallic arms gleaming under the light-
Elliott rested a hand on her shoulder. "Easy, Ellen," he said quietly. "I think we've all been here."
"Can we destroy this place?" Ellen said hoarsely, not taking her eyes away from the chairs for an instant. "With fire?"
"Soon as we find out where they keep the oil, I'll light it for ya," Paulson growled. His movements were angry and short, like- like- Ellen had no words for it. She'd never seen that combination of equal parts blazing rage and instinctive fear before. "This ain't right."
"You're probably right," Somah said after a moment. "Better make it quick, though."
A search of the vile room turned up nothing of the kind, unfortunately. There were a few of the round-ended containers Ellen remembered from the cryo lab. One held numerous tubes of a weird bluish gel that Elliott identified as a kind of alien stimpak. Another had a few bottles of some odd gluey resin, but nothing else chemical presented itself. The last seemed reluctant to open. Paulson thumped it a time or two, and the lid slid away. He glanced inside, then snorted in disgust. "Nothin'," he said. "Just an ol' rifle butt or something, some rubber..."
"Let me have a look," Ellen said, and leaned over. "That rubber might be- oh my God."
Paulson looked at her.
Hands trembling, Ellen lifted the remains of the Chinese stealth suit out of the container. She reached in again, and came up with several disassembled parts of her Gauss rifle, none of them of any use. On the third try she grabbed a fistful of stimpaks, but they'd all been emptied. "You know," she said, "I'm not the kind to swear much, normally, but this really tears it. This sucks."
"You don't mess with a man's stuff," Paulson agreed soberly. "Or a woman's, neither."
"Dammit, they didn't even leave the grenades... what did they..." Ellen straightened up from searching the container again. "Great. Just great. They took all the weapons and ammo, and everything else was either used up or wrecked!"
Somah shook her head. "Hard luck, kid," she said. "Guess this means no joy on the burning front, huh?"
"No." Ellen scowled. "Not unless you mean burning the aliens, anyway."
Somah's answering smile was quick and unpleasant. Elliott's expression, however, was worried. He leaned out the doorway, peering down the length of the room; eventually he said, "Does anyone else hear feet? Not boots, feet?"
"There's a difference?" Somah asked.
"Well, yeah. Boots go thump, feet go slap," Elliott said. "Listen-"
"I think I hear them too," Paulson said. "Let's get moving."
Whatever noise Elliott had heard, it went silent as they progressed back into the room and down the next corridor. The samurai muttered something to himself and drew his sword, moving to cover the group's rear. It was just as well. Mere moments later, something growled in a voice almost human and leapt at them... but not for long. "Onushi wa ittai nani mono?" roared the samurai, swinging his sword in a movement that sent blood and other fluids spraying everywhere. Ellen caught a glimpse of the things attacking him. For the rest of her life, she wished she hadn't. They were tall- human-sized, at least- and a sickly yellowish-green, with arms far too long to be natural and glistening black eyes in bulbous, hairless heads. Their guts bulged with distended organs, their ribs heaved and shifted as she watched. One might almost have mistaken them for alien, but their faces... oh, God, their faces were the faces of humans, resized and rearranged to suit some ungodly alien need...
It might have been edifying to study one of the abominations' corpses, but by the time anyone could get Ellen's finger off the alien gun's trigger, there were no corpses left anywhere. Only piles of ash.
"This is it," Sally called out gaily. "This is the last teleporter! I'm sure this one goes to the bridge!"
They'd battled their way through some kind of alien barracks after the ... after the bio labs. Ellen was by now heartily sick of anything even remotely resembling a little green man, and had learned much, much more than she'd ever wanted to about the little wretches' eating habits and recreational activities. All she wanted was to get the hell out of there; she stepped forward immediately at Sally's words.
Somah stopped her, though. "You sure?" she asked, one hand on Ellen's arm. "Have you ever used it?"
"Well, no," said Sally, "but I've been in here a couple of times, and the captain alien uses it all the time. You can tell he's the captain because he's got a special uniform and the others all do whatever he says. So it's got to go to where the captain alien is, right?"
"That or the officers' bar," Elliott muttered.
"I don't care," Ellen said. "I want to finish this. Let me go check it out and I'll send for you guys once I know where it leads, okay?" She didn't wait for Somah's permission, just checked her weapon, took a deep breath, and strode onto the platform.
Light flared, growing too bright to see through; eventually it faded, and she found herself in a small room that looked for all the world like the waiting area outside her father's clinic in Vault 101. A ready-room of some kind, maybe- and one with only one way out other than the teleporter. She tapped the control for the six-part door, flattened herself against the wall, counted to three-
Yup. The bridge. Control stations, giant windows, cryptic displays floating in the air over cryptic controls. Anyone who had ever, ever read a comic book with spaceships in it would agree with her. So would the aliens at the various control stations, who all looked up in shock before drawing their pistols and running at her. Thank God for cover, she thought to herself, and ducked back a little to return fire from a safer position. When the hail of energy bolts finally stopped, she peeked out as far as she dared.
There was one alien left, and it was watching her. Its uniform was dark, almost black, with thin rims of silver at the collar and cuffs. It stood with its back to the windows, arms folded as it waited in silence. When it saw Ellen looking its way it dipped its head and drew its weapon- the odd pistol Dogmeat had found, if Ellen wasn't very much mistaken. It spoke what might have been a sentence or two in its own language before turning to fire the weapon at one of the corpses; the body promptly burst into flame. To Ellen, the message was clear: surrender, or I'm going to use this on you.
Ellen shook her head in answer. The captain- it had to be the captain- cocked its head, shrugged, and raised the gun again.
Ellen raised hers faster.
A few minutes later, she pressed a button on the transporter console that signaled the others to come through. She was shaking ashes off the captain's pistol when they arrived. Sally took one look into the bridge and sang out, "Stella Skyfire, reporting for duty, ma'am! That's Captain Cosmos' second-in-command- for the first season, anyway."
Ellen smiled a little at that. "You like Captain Cosmos too, huh?"
"Sure! He's my favorite TV program ever. And this place looks just like the controls of his ship!" Sally beamed. "I bet it even works the same, too. Somah, you be the navigator, Elliott, you can work the teleporter controls, Mr. Paulson, you can be Jangles the Moon Monkey-"
"I ain't no space monkey," the cowboy growled.
"-and I get to aim the death ray!" Sally said happily.
Ellen blinked. "What about me?" she said.
"Well, somebody's got to be the captain, don't they?" Sally answered in a tone that implied it was a very silly question. "So that's you!"
Ellen started to say something, but she never knew what. That was the moment that the angrily jabbering alien head appeared just inside the huge windows once more. It yammered at the briefly, then vanished... and as it did so, the vast and terrible bulk of another saucer-ship heaved itself into view. "Holee shit," the cowboy breathed.
"I'm kind of inclined to agree with you," said Elliott. "Captain, what do we do?"
There was only one answer that made any sense. Ellen didn't even have to think about it.
"We fight. NOW."
The battle was horrific, and Ellen was only peripherally aware of most of it. The death ray controls- and the force field controls- had most of her attention. If she allowed herself to look up she knew for sure she'd lose track of something important- she almost did when the other ship's main guns winged them hard enough to knock their generators offline, and Somah had to bring up the emergency system. She kept blasting, though, and Sally kept aiming, even as the aliens on the other ship started teleporting over to try and take the bridge back. Somewhere behind her she could hear the samurai thundering his rage, and the cowboy's bullets ringing out again and again and again. She fired-
"Captain! Paulson's down!"
And again-
"I might be down but I ain't dead yet! I'm takin' you with me, you sons of bitches!"
And again, as the ship rocked-
"Captain, the steering controls aren't responding!"
"The hell with steering!" And fired again. "Dodging's not going to help us now- get the shields working!" And again.
"Yes, ma'am!"
And again, and one last time-
FA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM....
"We can't just let them start zapping the Earth!" Elliott exclaimed. "Maybe we should try and go back."
"Or maybe," said Ellen slowly, "as long as we're here, we finish what we started."
"Huh?"
"I see what you're thinkin'," Paulson drawled. Ellen couldn't tell for sure, but she thought he sounded approving. "If you want to kill a snake, you don't mess around tryin' to pull its fangs. You cut off its head." He caught the blank look of confusion on Ellen's face and clarified, "You're sayin' we need to find whoever's in charge of this thing and take that sonofabitch down."
"I don't think we really have a choice," said Ellen. "Unless somebody has a better idea, we need to find the bridge."
"It's all the way at the top," Sally said. "I almost got there once, but they caught me first." She frowned a little. "It's easier with the teleporters. I don't think you're going to like the other way there."
"Whether we like it or not doesn't really make much difference, Sally," Ellen said. "We'll deal with it."
"Okay. Follow me!"
The way was long, and dizzyingly complex. At times Sally had to dive for cover, scrambling into air vents or under tables as aliens burst in on them and battle was joined. Once she paused as they came across a corridor where the walls were liberally splashed with the oozy green of alien blood; they paused while Ellen followed that corridor to its end alone, only to return with a satisfied samurai, reunited with his sword at last. Eventually they came to a room that reeked of unholy chemicals, even through the closed six-part door. "You guys'd better go in there without me," Sally said quietly. "It's kind of scary in there. I'm gonna take another way." She trotted back to the last air vent they'd passed, pulled it open, and scrambled inside.
Ellen glanced at the others. "Any idea what that was about?"
"Not a clue," Somah admitted. "But if that kid thinks it's scary, I'd say we need to make sure we're all reloaded first."
The door hissed open a few moments later. Ellen clapped a hand over her mouth and nose reflexively. That was antiseptic, she'd bet her Megaton house on it- and it was covering up the scent of something else the worker aliens hadn't managed to completely wash away.
Human blood.
There were glass-walled rooms to either side of them, observable by anyone passing through who took an interest. Both of the rooms had-
( silver things moving in from right and left and above, and they're... )
-two chairs, the padding stained dark rusty brown in multiple places, the long slender metallic arms gleaming under the light-
Elliott rested a hand on her shoulder. "Easy, Ellen," he said quietly. "I think we've all been here."
"Can we destroy this place?" Ellen said hoarsely, not taking her eyes away from the chairs for an instant. "With fire?"
"Soon as we find out where they keep the oil, I'll light it for ya," Paulson growled. His movements were angry and short, like- like- Ellen had no words for it. She'd never seen that combination of equal parts blazing rage and instinctive fear before. "This ain't right."
"You're probably right," Somah said after a moment. "Better make it quick, though."
A search of the vile room turned up nothing of the kind, unfortunately. There were a few of the round-ended containers Ellen remembered from the cryo lab. One held numerous tubes of a weird bluish gel that Elliott identified as a kind of alien stimpak. Another had a few bottles of some odd gluey resin, but nothing else chemical presented itself. The last seemed reluctant to open. Paulson thumped it a time or two, and the lid slid away. He glanced inside, then snorted in disgust. "Nothin'," he said. "Just an ol' rifle butt or something, some rubber..."
"Let me have a look," Ellen said, and leaned over. "That rubber might be- oh my God."
Paulson looked at her.
Hands trembling, Ellen lifted the remains of the Chinese stealth suit out of the container. She reached in again, and came up with several disassembled parts of her Gauss rifle, none of them of any use. On the third try she grabbed a fistful of stimpaks, but they'd all been emptied. "You know," she said, "I'm not the kind to swear much, normally, but this really tears it. This sucks."
"You don't mess with a man's stuff," Paulson agreed soberly. "Or a woman's, neither."
"Dammit, they didn't even leave the grenades... what did they..." Ellen straightened up from searching the container again. "Great. Just great. They took all the weapons and ammo, and everything else was either used up or wrecked!"
Somah shook her head. "Hard luck, kid," she said. "Guess this means no joy on the burning front, huh?"
"No." Ellen scowled. "Not unless you mean burning the aliens, anyway."
Somah's answering smile was quick and unpleasant. Elliott's expression, however, was worried. He leaned out the doorway, peering down the length of the room; eventually he said, "Does anyone else hear feet? Not boots, feet?"
"There's a difference?" Somah asked.
"Well, yeah. Boots go thump, feet go slap," Elliott said. "Listen-"
"I think I hear them too," Paulson said. "Let's get moving."
Whatever noise Elliott had heard, it went silent as they progressed back into the room and down the next corridor. The samurai muttered something to himself and drew his sword, moving to cover the group's rear. It was just as well. Mere moments later, something growled in a voice almost human and leapt at them... but not for long. "Onushi wa ittai nani mono?" roared the samurai, swinging his sword in a movement that sent blood and other fluids spraying everywhere. Ellen caught a glimpse of the things attacking him. For the rest of her life, she wished she hadn't. They were tall- human-sized, at least- and a sickly yellowish-green, with arms far too long to be natural and glistening black eyes in bulbous, hairless heads. Their guts bulged with distended organs, their ribs heaved and shifted as she watched. One might almost have mistaken them for alien, but their faces... oh, God, their faces were the faces of humans, resized and rearranged to suit some ungodly alien need...
It might have been edifying to study one of the abominations' corpses, but by the time anyone could get Ellen's finger off the alien gun's trigger, there were no corpses left anywhere. Only piles of ash.
"This is it," Sally called out gaily. "This is the last teleporter! I'm sure this one goes to the bridge!"
They'd battled their way through some kind of alien barracks after the ... after the bio labs. Ellen was by now heartily sick of anything even remotely resembling a little green man, and had learned much, much more than she'd ever wanted to about the little wretches' eating habits and recreational activities. All she wanted was to get the hell out of there; she stepped forward immediately at Sally's words.
Somah stopped her, though. "You sure?" she asked, one hand on Ellen's arm. "Have you ever used it?"
"Well, no," said Sally, "but I've been in here a couple of times, and the captain alien uses it all the time. You can tell he's the captain because he's got a special uniform and the others all do whatever he says. So it's got to go to where the captain alien is, right?"
"That or the officers' bar," Elliott muttered.
"I don't care," Ellen said. "I want to finish this. Let me go check it out and I'll send for you guys once I know where it leads, okay?" She didn't wait for Somah's permission, just checked her weapon, took a deep breath, and strode onto the platform.
Light flared, growing too bright to see through; eventually it faded, and she found herself in a small room that looked for all the world like the waiting area outside her father's clinic in Vault 101. A ready-room of some kind, maybe- and one with only one way out other than the teleporter. She tapped the control for the six-part door, flattened herself against the wall, counted to three-
Yup. The bridge. Control stations, giant windows, cryptic displays floating in the air over cryptic controls. Anyone who had ever, ever read a comic book with spaceships in it would agree with her. So would the aliens at the various control stations, who all looked up in shock before drawing their pistols and running at her. Thank God for cover, she thought to herself, and ducked back a little to return fire from a safer position. When the hail of energy bolts finally stopped, she peeked out as far as she dared.
There was one alien left, and it was watching her. Its uniform was dark, almost black, with thin rims of silver at the collar and cuffs. It stood with its back to the windows, arms folded as it waited in silence. When it saw Ellen looking its way it dipped its head and drew its weapon- the odd pistol Dogmeat had found, if Ellen wasn't very much mistaken. It spoke what might have been a sentence or two in its own language before turning to fire the weapon at one of the corpses; the body promptly burst into flame. To Ellen, the message was clear: surrender, or I'm going to use this on you.
Ellen shook her head in answer. The captain- it had to be the captain- cocked its head, shrugged, and raised the gun again.
Ellen raised hers faster.
A few minutes later, she pressed a button on the transporter console that signaled the others to come through. She was shaking ashes off the captain's pistol when they arrived. Sally took one look into the bridge and sang out, "Stella Skyfire, reporting for duty, ma'am! That's Captain Cosmos' second-in-command- for the first season, anyway."
Ellen smiled a little at that. "You like Captain Cosmos too, huh?"
"Sure! He's my favorite TV program ever. And this place looks just like the controls of his ship!" Sally beamed. "I bet it even works the same, too. Somah, you be the navigator, Elliott, you can work the teleporter controls, Mr. Paulson, you can be Jangles the Moon Monkey-"
"I ain't no space monkey," the cowboy growled.
"-and I get to aim the death ray!" Sally said happily.
Ellen blinked. "What about me?" she said.
"Well, somebody's got to be the captain, don't they?" Sally answered in a tone that implied it was a very silly question. "So that's you!"
Ellen started to say something, but she never knew what. That was the moment that the angrily jabbering alien head appeared just inside the huge windows once more. It yammered at the briefly, then vanished... and as it did so, the vast and terrible bulk of another saucer-ship heaved itself into view. "Holee shit," the cowboy breathed.
"I'm kind of inclined to agree with you," said Elliott. "Captain, what do we do?"
There was only one answer that made any sense. Ellen didn't even have to think about it.
"We fight. NOW."
The battle was horrific, and Ellen was only peripherally aware of most of it. The death ray controls- and the force field controls- had most of her attention. If she allowed herself to look up she knew for sure she'd lose track of something important- she almost did when the other ship's main guns winged them hard enough to knock their generators offline, and Somah had to bring up the emergency system. She kept blasting, though, and Sally kept aiming, even as the aliens on the other ship started teleporting over to try and take the bridge back. Somewhere behind her she could hear the samurai thundering his rage, and the cowboy's bullets ringing out again and again and again. She fired-
"Captain! Paulson's down!"
And again-
"I might be down but I ain't dead yet! I'm takin' you with me, you sons of bitches!"
And again, as the ship rocked-
"Captain, the steering controls aren't responding!"
"The hell with steering!" And fired again. "Dodging's not going to help us now- get the shields working!" And again.
"Yes, ma'am!"
And again, and one last time-
FA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM....