Meet the idiots:
Jon 'AMC' Rickert: Our hero. Not really, he's just the dude who captured the alien ship. That makes him captain, right? Has a fondness for being greasy, working on stuff, things that go bang, and IT. Nobody can ever spell his name correctly.
Devin 'Cable' Yates: Wants to do the things Jon does, but doesn't have the experience. He's a quick learner, though, and is excellent with his hands. Likes to build his own stuff, despite being fairly well off. Has an unhealthy obsession with rocks and Chinese Cartoons. Don't ask him “what kind of rock is this?”. For everyone's wellbeing, don't.
James 'Jetski' Jescowicz: Professional gamer and Cable's roommate. Not nearly as obsessed with anime as Cable, yet has more figurines. Has a pilot's license, but almost never flies.
Ben 'Serv' Goldman: Skinny, lanky beanpole who loves to crack terrible jokes. Never ask him how to fit a hundred Jews in a Volkswagen. Never. IT repairman professionally, he's an amateur code monkey at best. He can create amazing hardware configurations when he puts his mind to it. Unfortunately, his mind is usually stuck on doing the exact opposite of what he's told.
Dnni: Expedition leader. Zoologist. He owns the ship.
Brft: Second in command. He designed the experiments, and the equipment to carry them out. Neutral about humans.
Kni: Dnni's brother and third in command. Representative of the company that's funding the expedition.
Rndi: Does manual labor and various other things a robot would be better suited for. He's an atavism error, and as such, gets treated like trash by the other Corti on the ship.
Date Point: 2D AV
Some kind of holding cell on a spaceship or something
Jon was intrigued that the aliens would choose to abduct him. What the fuck did they want from him? He was hardly the perfect human specimen. Far from it, in fact.
“What the fuck do you want with me? I'm hardly the perfect human specimen. Far from it, in fact. See this?” The man grabbed at his stomach, revealing an excess of flesh there. “That's called a 'spare tire.' I'm out of shape.”
His small, grey captor said nothing, and stared at the human from the other side of a forcefield. This was the third time the extraterrestrial done this, in the few hours since he was abducted. It was somewhat unnerving.
It wasn't the way the alien looked that set him on edge, it was actually a little comforting that they looked like the Asgard from Stargate, or... the Roswell greys. He hadn't really thought about what other life might be out there, after the Vancouver attack.
He hadn't quite wrapped his head around the fact that there was other life out there, and all the dank memes passing around the 'chans weren't helping. Of course, /sp/ was filled with pictures of little grey men, with the text “>he abducts people for free”. Hell, even Google's front page said 'AYY LMAO.'
“C'mon, dude. Send me home? I'm worthless to you. Uh, not in a 'go ahead and vent me out the airlock' kind of worthless, but like a 'wipe my memory and put me back on Earth' kind of worthless. Pretty please?”
The alien pushed a button on it's tablet's screen, before turning to leave. A pair of grey dough balls plopped down into a dispenser. Jon poked one of them, before picking it up and giving it a cautious sniff. It smelled like... nothing. A small bite told him that sniff was everything he needed to know about it.
Date Point: ~1 week AV, give or take a day
Some kind of ship or something
The boredom and the food were bad, but the tests were worse. As close as he could tell, the day/night cycles were 8 hours long. It was starting to get old.
Every other day, (as best he could figure, the day/night cycles were 8 hours long) the Asgard looking little shits would gas his cell, pull him out, and do God knows what to him.
He knew electroshock was one of the tests, after he had woken up during the first test. After that, they had increased the dose of knockout gas, especially after he had almost gotten free. Now, he just woke up incredibly hungry, and with incredibly sore muscles, and never the same ones each time. The next time they came, though, he would be ready. That should be... tomorrow or so.
The Asgard stood outside the cell, holding a data pad. It felt like it was time for experiments, though the alien's standing there wasn't anything to go by. It just did that from time to time.
Sure enough, a few seconds later, he started to feel a little woozy. Contracting his abdominal muscles and in what he hoped was a subtle enough movement, he began to draw in a deep breath.
After a few seconds, as always, he felt like he wanted to lay down on the floor. Obliging his drowsiness, he did just that, closing his eyes. It took almost a minute before he heard the air handlers begin to spin up and clear the room of it's druggy haze.
Another 15 seconds passed, before he heard the forcefield drop, and the sound of small feet approaching. Several pairs of small feet. And several voices, speaking what sounded like the oddest combination of Chinese and Navajo, with a little Eastern European thrown in for good measure.
The gravity lightened, from the (what he figured to be) three-quarter gee to about a third that.
“Do you think we overdid the dose this time? Or... maybe the effects are cumulative?” Brft asked of no-one in particular, looking at the drooling figure curled up into a ball in front of him. The human was taking unusually shallow breaths.
Kni and Rhnd, the two other two assistants on the ship shared a knowing look.
“Don't be stupid. We gave him the same dose as last time, and the scanners didn't detect any changes in his neurochemistry, either. I think it's just the position he's in.” replied Dnni, the lead researcher. “Now hurry up, there's a Gaoian transport passing near here in a few [days.] They're not going to dissect themselves.”
The four Corti assembled began to lift the human onto a hover pallet. “Ugh, I hate these things. It's like their skeleton is made of lead.”
Dnni held his tongue. He knew the poor Atavism Error couldn't help himself sometimes. He had a simple mind, like the lesser species of the galaxy. But he was still Corti. And being Corti meant being disciplined. He'd yell at young Brft later, in the privacy of his office, where his voice wouldn't carry throughout the ship.
And that was when Kni's head exploded.
He really hadn't meant to kill the Asgard, just knock it out, or at least knock it back so he could kick the shit out of it and the others. But his not-so-graceful drunken arm flail had gone through it's head as if it were a paint filled balloon. Er, a crunchy paint filled balloon. Despite being alien and small, the body still made a hollow thump as it fell to the floor. Between the drugs, the sudden movement, falling off the hover pallet, and the noise, he almost lost his breakfast.
“Waitwaitwait don't kill us! Oh by the void you've killed Kni!” one of the Asgard said, the one that was covered in paint-balloon-head's brains.
“Holy shit, you have translators? Of course you do. Hey, uh... sorry about your friend. You fuckers did kinda deserve it though... that electroshock fucking hurts. Wait, you have translators. Where do you fucking get off not talking to me? Huh? ASKING to perform those tests?! C'mon, I probably would have agreed, given the chance to go to space. Wait, we are in space, right? What the fuck is in that gas anyways?”
Dnni disregarded the accusations and went with the latest thing on the human's mind. It seemed the prudent thing to do. “We call it Dniepr, named after the place we found the plant that contained the compound. Also... now that you're ahem out, would you like to go back?”
“No way dude. No fucking way. I ain't got shit down there, except my cats. Shit, I hope they're ok. Uh, I haven't been to work in a week, and there won't really be anyone to miss me. Well, except a few people. And the cats. Sorry, bud, you're stuck with me.”
“Bu--”
“No buts. Either you're going with me, or you kill me right now. And your dude over there tells me you'll go down before I will” Jon gestured towards the almost-headless body a few feet away.
“Going with you?! We have a schedule to keep! The Directorate will 'make our heads roll,' to use a human saying, if we don't comply.”
“Okay, hold on a minute. Your mission is to study humans, right? Why not uh, extend your mission a bit? Show us the galaxy. I'll take that as recompense for the torture.”
“US?”
“Oh, yeah, we're going back to Earth anyways. I need to pick a few things up.”
Dnni couldn't believe how quickly his world fell apart.
Date point: 9D AV
Geosynchronous orbit above Earth
Jon was standing on the bridge of the... well, he didn't have a name for it yet, looking out at Earth. 'Danny' was next to him, looking for all the world like someone pissed in his Cheerios. 'Randy' and the one with the small head, 'Skippy' (Jon couldn't pronounce his name) were in their quarters, getting some rest.
“One last thing, before we go down. I don't know if the Air Force's new Space Fence is running yet, so we'll have to come in over the pole... not the north pole, NORAD will most definitely be watching that...”
“This ship is equipped with a cloak. None of your primitive electromagnetic sensors could possibly pick it up.”
“I don't care. I'd rather not get shot down.”
“You're paranoid!”
“Nah, I just like to play it safe.”
Phoenix, Arizona
Devin 'Cable' Yates was worried. It had been a full week since he'd heard from Jon. He hadn't even called to ask Cable to feed the cats, and stopping in at Jon's workplace revealed that he hadn't been there for a few days.
His phone chimed.
meet me at soiv's 15 minutes ago. bring jetski
Dragging James 'Jetski' Jescowicz away from his computer was normally a huge undertaking, but was easy once he saw the text.
When they arrived, Jon was standing there swapping Bitcoin jokes with Serv as if he never left.
“JON!”
“Oh, hey. Now you're all here, I have something big to show you guys.”
“Well it can't be your dick, you did say it was big”
“Heh. Shut up, Serv.”
Jon held up a tablet, and pressed a button on the screen. A craft that looked like a cross between the BeBop and Serenity with just a little B-2 bomber mixed in appeared a hundred feet above their heads.
“Wanna take a ride?”
Dnni had counted on the human being stupid enough to go down to the planet. What he hadn't counted on was the human being smart enough to realize the computer would take voice commands in any language it was programmed with. He was a zoologist and not a computer nerd, dammit!
The disgusting human had said he was 'off to take a blurn' and left. Dnni was too preoccupied with trying to comprehend what the human could possibly want with a blurn that he didn't see the human take a data pad on the way out the door, nor did he notice all the command functions being rerouted from the bridge stations. When the savage returned, Dnni made sure he didn't have anything on his hands.
It was about this time Dnni realized he didn't have control of his ship anymore. Even though it was protected by the best security systems the Corti could come up with, the human had somehow broken in. And he had acted as if it were a joke!
Damn it to the void!
Date point: 10D AV
Near Tolleson, Arizona
“Sojon?”
“Ya, James?”
“How did you get control of an alien spaceship?”
“I had to poop, and I wanted something to read, so I grabbed this tablet. Figured I'd poke around the ship's library. Well, the tablet was locked, asking for a password only. I put 'password' in the field, and what do ya know, it unlocked. Turns out, it was Danny's tablet, you know, the ship captain's? I could control the ship from it. I changed the password and made the ship only accept voice commands in English.”
James interjected: “But it's an alien tablet on an alien ship, how could you read what was on the screen?”
“The ship took my voice commands. Massive security hole if I ever saw one.”
It was after midnight, and the men had moved all Serv's possessions into his and Cable's vehicles. Jon was off somewhere, retrieving his car from wherever he left it. As soon as one vehicle was loaded, it's owner would drive it out to the ship, hidden within a half-completed warehouse. James, waiting at the ship, would help load everything into the cargo bay. Once the last load was on, Serv left to leave his car at his parents' house. Cable had other plans, though.
Cargo bay A, as it was being called for now, had more than enough room for a car or two.
“When spess, Jon?” It was the third time that hour Serv had asked that question. James and Devin were in the cargo bay moving their things into their quarters.
“Holy shit, Serv hold on. We need stuff first.”
“Such as? All our stuff's here. When spess?”
“Food, for one thing. You do not want the shit they have up here. All they fed me for a week was little shitty dough balls that tasted like nothing.
“Right, and guns. From what these Asgard dicks tell me, the majority of aliens are weak like those Vancouver dicks, so I want some dakka up here. They probably have some really killy stuff, but I'll trust my Nugget.”
“So where are we gonna get this stuff? I don't have enough money for ammo, let alone guns.”
“Well, we do have an undetectable space ship, and virtually unlimited access to any and all countries. Let's go steal shit from the Chicoms, or the Norks. I wouldn't mind a few AKs up here, or more Nuggets. Shit, let's find out where they warehouse them Soyuz cigarettes and get us a pallet.”
Date point 12D AV
Fort Collins, Colorado
“National Institute of Standards and Technology time: This is radio station WWV, Fort Collins, Colorado, broadcasting on the internationally allocated standard carrier frequencies of two point five, five, ten, fifteen, and twenty megahertz. Providing time of day, standard time interval, and other related information. Inqui--”
“Oh, come on! Gimme something to work with!”
“--dards and Technology, Radio Station WWV, 2000 east county road 58, Fort Collins Colorado, 80524”
“At the the tone, the time will be zero hours, thirty minutes coordinated universal time”
BEEEEEP TOCK TOCK TOCK TOCK TOCK
“There we go.”
Devin had shown off his piloting skill by flying the cloaked ship between the antennas of the government facility in Colorado, complaining about the touch screen controls the whole time. Serv was peeved, claiming that the displays were futuristic and 'spacey.'
Jon and Serv, with Randy's help, had worked out how to make the computer show a spectrogram of what the sensors were picking up in the low RF band.
At first, they set the upper cutoff to 100 yotta... somethings.
Jon eloquently described the situation: “Where the fuck is WWVB?”
Serv replied by twirling his mustache and complaining about Cable's dislike of the helm controls
In the end, they just kept dialing up the range until all the WWV frequencies were on the chart.
Once they got several seconds of the radio station's output, they put a time-domain analysis of it up on the screen. Now all they needed was to figure out length, temperature, voltage and resistance.
Cable had the answer: “Hey, I bet the NIST has precision resistances and voltage sources. We're already here and cloaked. Let's just steal their stuff”
Serv gave him a reluctant look. "That's greasy"
“It's the government. Fuck the police.”
“We should at least leave a note.”
“Deal.”
Like most advanced species, the Corti based their measuring system on absolute zero, the resonant frequency of hydrogen and the speed of light in a vacuum. Once these were known, they completely rebuilt their respective measuring systems.
Humans are neither logical or rational, Dnni mused. They use two distinct measuring systems, each as arbitrary as the other. They knew the energy level at which atomic function ceases, but they still used the freezing and boiling point of water as the basis of their temperature scales. Measured at a specific point on their planet, no less.
As their understanding of the laws of the universe got better, they simply adapted their horribly bad units to them.
And now they were making his ship use those units.
Madness.
Date point: 16D AV
Somewhere over the North Atlantic
It didn't help that the Corti used a base-12 numerical system (They had 12 fingers), but it wasn't hard to figure out how to make the computer show almost everything in inches and feet. In the day, they worked on converting the second cargo bay into food storage. The ship's nanofab needed raw material to make the required shelving units and such. A trip to one of Jon's former employers and a stolen semi later, there was plenty of scrap metal.
By night, they raided Wal Marts across the country, using Jon's Jennings to herd the employees into a circle, then using the ship's shields to enclose them.
By the time they were done, half of Cargo Bay B was a walk-in, two-story freezer. Another quarter of the room was canned goods. The freezer was converted into a refrigerator once Randy had shown the humans what a stasis pod was, and how to use it.
A smaller freezer was built sharing a wall with the refrigerator, and also given a stasis unit. This was filled with chicken fingers, burritos, ice cream, and anything else Wal-Mart had in stock. A quarter ton of ground coffee lined the two of the walls, along with all the components required to make several electric coffeepots.
They had made sure that a map of Wal-Marts they stole from made a giant smiley face.
As a side project, Cable and Jetski were replacing the helm station with controls they were a bit more familiar with. A physical throttle went on the left, and a joystick on the right. Touchscreen monitors went up in a hemisphere where the terminal used to be. After actually trying it, some of the touchscreens came down, being replaced by aluminum panels with dials, toggle switches, pushbuttons and a hodgepodge of neon, LED and incandescent indicator lamps. Anything else felt “really wrong,” and to Devin's surprise, even Ben agreed with him.
“Now THAT is a kickass battlestation.”
Brft wasn't quite sure what to make of the humans. He had spent most of the time in his quarters, trying to stay out of the way of the deathworlders. It was definitely amusing to watch them piss off Dnni, and they certainly treated Rndi better than any other Corti would. The thought of joining them was appealing, but the Directorate would certainly disown him if he did.
The disgusting humans had removed the helm controls, and replaced them with ugly, archaic electromechanical controls, helped by that idiot Rndi. They had also set a number of video screens up around what used to be the helm, and calling it a “posterior-impacting war command pod” over and over.
Once their ridiculous command pod was set up each of them started taking turns flying the ship around in the planet's atmosphere, calling it better than the “Thunder of War”, whatever that was. He couldn't imagine the thunder of war, nor could he imagine it being a good thing.
As long as they didn't try to harm him, or put him in a situation where he could come to harm, Brft was content to let the humans do what they pleased.
Date Point: 18D AV
Somewhere in southwest Asia
Flight practice was fun, everyone agreed. Hell, even Randy seemed like he was having a good time with it. It stopped being fun when Serv crashed the ship into a building.
Nobody knew where they were, Serv having been left in charge of the bridge while they were over the north Atlantic.
But when he rammed a few hundred tons of plastic and steel into a building, everyone noticed.
The ship was undamaged, Serv somehow had turned the pointy end of the aerodynamic shield forward.
The building, on the other hand, wasn't so lucky. Being a plain old Earth warehouse from the '80s, it had no protection against spaceships.
Upon backing the ship out of the wall, it was revealed that there were rows upon rows of crates stacked inside. Crates with Cyrillic runes on them. And one stunned-looking guard staring at a hole that seemed to just appear.
The guard started to yell, but Randy was quick to encircle him in a kinetic field.
Fortunately for the occupants of the ship, the cargo bay doors were still inside the walls of the warehouse. Three humans made their way inside, and started cracking cases open. One stayed behind to watch sensors.
The guard was almost hysterical, having been enclosed inside an invisible prison and now watching these men materialize.
“HOLY FUCKNUGGETS! IT'S NUGGETS!” Cable yelled from a nearby pile.
“Nuggets? Serv! Where the fuck are we?” Jon was still trying to process how they went from flying over open ocean, to being partially inside a building.
“Uh, I dunno, I remember flying over Egypt.”
“Jesus, we leave you alone for two hours, and you crash us into a building on the other side of the planet.”
“Hey! HEY! AKs over here! Looks like '74s and a few '47s... Holy shit, there's a few SKS, too. Let's grab a few and get the hell out of here.”
“Sure. Jon, anyone notice us yet?”
“Nope. Hey, do me a favor? Make sure Serv carries all the heavy stuff.”
“Hey, Jon, I think after this we'll have everything we need. Let's head out.”
Submitted July 27, 2015 at 03:58PM by OperatorIHC http://ift.tt/1JK7JWy HFY
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