Zzzzzzzt!
by Philip J. Lees
All motel rooms are alike, and this one was no different. Don Coyote sprawled on the couch with his bare feet propped up on the Naugahyde footstool, one eye on the TV, the other on his pale, freckled ankles. He was cross-eyed, but you better not say that to his face—Don was NAB trained and he could rip your arm off and stuff it down your throat before you could say “Can I see your ID, please, officer?”
Zzzzzzzzt! Even on the lowest stun setting, one short zap from the ray pistol was enough to fry any mosquito that dared to settle on Don’s exposed skin. He had zapped so many of those little critters that his feet were starting to feel numb, but the phone still hadn’t rung.
Ed Dammenfetter, his NAB Section Head, had ordered Don to wait in this motel room until he called with further instructions and that’s what Don was going to do. It had been sixteen hours now, and his stomach had advanced from grumbling to loudly voiced complaints—even the pile of singed mosquito corpses was beginning to look appetizing. Don belched and tried to imagine what the breasts of that girl singer on the screen would look like naked.
Finally the phone chirped into life. Don’s reflexes had been honed by his training to so fine a pitch that he swiveled in an instant and almost blasted it with the pistol, but he pulled his thumb off the trigger stud just in time, and lurched to his feet.
“Yeah?” he said into the handset.
“Come in.” Just those two words, then a click as the line was disconnected.
Don stuffed the pistol into his waistband, first double-checking that the trigger was on safety lock. He had made that mistake once and hadn’t been able to pee for three days—a good thing the weapon hadn’t been set on ‘kill’. Then he shrugged on his coat and left. Somebody else would come to turn off the TV and the light. Or not. Don didn’t care—he was heading back to base.
§
The National Aliens’ Bureau measured three blocks by two by eighteen stories, but fifteen of the floors were underground. Dammenfetter’s office was on floor minus twelve, which meant he was still on the way up—or down, depending on which way you looked at it. The Bureau’s Director and his staff were on the bottom floor, safe from any attack that didn’t rip the planet apart.
Don stood in the elevator, whistling to himself as he descended. The elevator shaft was a giant MRI scanner and by the time he reached minus eight security would have a complete three-dee picture of his internal anatomy. Any non-humans trying to penetrate this building would be incinerated by the flame-throwers concealed in the walls of the elevator car before reaching any sensitive areas. Unless they took the stairs, but so far none of the extraterrestrials they had encountered had been able to manage stairs. For some reason that seemed to be an exclusively human thing.
Don found Dammenfetter sitting behind his desk, his hands hidden in his lap. Dammenfetter’s Grade A12 status entitled him to the puce carpet that covered two thirds of the concrete floor, but there was no other decoration in the room and the walls were bare, as was the desktop, except for a small, painted porcelain statuette of the Virgin Mary.
“Morning, Ed,” Don said, seating himself in the upright chair that was screwed to the floor at an angle that made looking at Dammenfetter for any length of time give you a crick in the neck.
Dammenfetter grunted, which meant he was in a good mood. He was a large man from the waist up, with a massive torso that the pale blue silk suit jacket, primrose yellow shirt and red suede tie couldn’t disguise. His face looked like the front of a bus that had been run over by a train—if the bus had put on wraparound mirror sunglasses. Ed’s legs, Don knew, were so short he was taller sitting down than standing up—one reason he’d worked so hard to get enough rank in the Bureau to qualify for a desk job.
Don sat and waited while Ed stared at the desk in front of him. It was a game they played, but he and Ed went way back and Don sure wasn’t going to be the one to break the silence.
Eventually, Ed looked up and jerked his head back as if he was surprised to find himself not alone.
“Oh, there you are!” he said. “About time, too.” Ed’s eyes were invisible behind the shades, but Don knew that Dammenfetter was scrutinizing him, alert for any sign of weakness, so he stared calmly back at his twin reflections in the lenses, one eye on each.
“It’s these new aliens,” Dammenfetter said. “I want you to bug them.”
“You mean piss them off?”
“No.” Dammenfetter produced one black-gloved hand from below the desk, reached out and crushed the china Madonna to shards. It was a habit of his that Don had never gotten used to. Don had been brought up as a Catholic and he sometimes wondered if Ed kept a supply of Buddhas, Shivas and golden crescents somewhere in a drawer for the other denominations.
“I want you to plant monitoring devices,” Dammenfetter said, spacing out the words carefully. “On their ship. You can take a shuttle from the pound. You know anything about them?”
Don had heard about the new aliens, of course, but he knew better than to say anything. He shrugged.
“They’re big,” Dammenfetter said. “Very big. The scientists can’t figure out how their planet can be so weak in gravity to let them evolve that way and still manage to keep an atmosphere they can breathe.
“Yeah, right,” Don said, trying to sound interested. So maybe these critters didn’t need to breathe very often. What did he care?
“Anyway, Dammenfetter continued, ”they developed space travel and they’re here in orbit. We need to find out what their motives are.“
“I’ll get right on it.” Don stood up. “Anything else?”
“Just don’t screw up,” Dammenfetter said. He swept the pottery fragments into a waste bin, pulled out another object from the desk and placed it on the spot where the Madonna had stood. It was a realistic model of a camel. With two humps. Now who the hell worshiped a sacred camel? Maybe Ed was having a joke. If so, he wouldn’t rise to it.
“Abyssinia,” Don said, and departed. Outside the door someone else was waiting. Don recognized Ahmed Patel, one of NAB’s newest recruits. Don had heard rumors about Ahmed. Maybe that explained the camel.
§
Don switched to full stealth mode, cut the shuttle’s engines and waited as it drifted slowly towards the hull of the alien vessel, looking for an inconspicuous emergency access port. There had to be one somewhere.
Dammenfetter had said the aliens were big, and if their ship was anything to go by he wasn’t kidding—it had to be as big as the entire NAB building, above and below ground together. It was the ugliest spacecraft Don had ever seen, no symmetry to it at all, just a long central cylinder with misshapen branches sprouting out in all directions at apparently random points along its length. Where sunlight fell on the hull the color scheme reminded Don of the first time he had got drunk in zero gravity—and the unpleasant morning that followed.
When the alien ship first arrived in orbit it had transmitted a short message of greeting, which was believed to have been an automated signal. It was a fractal pixel analysis of the images from that first signal that had provided an estimate of the aliens’ size. Since then there had been no further communication. That in itself meant nothing—maybe they’d traveled in some kind of suspended animation and hadn’t woken up yet; maybe their time perception was different. It didn’t matter. Don had his orders.
Ah! That looked like something. Just below one of the larger branches was a small circular depression in the alien ship’s hull. Don tapped the thruster controls until the shuttle was close enough for the magnetic clamps to take over and waited for the muted thud of contact before activating the docking seal. Then he suited up, slung the carrier with the surveillance devices over his shoulder and climbed into the airlock.
The shuttle’s docking port slid back automatically once the pressure had equalized and Don inspected his chosen entry point, looking for an opening mechanism. There was none. Darn! He would have to cut his way in. Still, with the high-powered laser that hung on the airlock bulkhead it shouldn’t take too long.
It didn’t. After less than five minutes he had sliced two long vertical arcs in the alien hull and only had to cut through two short sections at the top and bottom to open up a complete ellipse. He applied the laser to the bottom of the cut and moved it left to right, joining the bases of the two arcs. Before he could move the laser to the top, the oval hull section swung up like a trapdoor and he had to dodge back out of its way. A river of brown sludge poured out of the opening and filled the floor of the airlock up to his knees, giving off clouds of yellow steam. This was no access port; he had found a waste disposal chute. Great! Don thought, suppressing a more appropriate epithet. All space vessels recycled as much as possible, but there came a point when crap was just crap. Don waded back to the opening and peered inside. At least he was in. There had to be an inspection hatch somewhere if he climbed far enough.
After a few minutes of half crawling, half climbing up the chute, Don’s suit was coated in the brown muck. He had to keep stopping to wipe it off his helmet visor. As he went, he planned how he would get himself out of the suit when he got back, holding his breath the while, then vent the airlock into space as soon as he got away. He really didn’t want to find out what this stuff smelled like.
Eventually, he found what he was looking for. Of course, the hatch was designed to be opened from the other side, so he had to wedge himself in position and spend another few minutes using the laser to slice through the locking bolt. Then he hinged the hatch back and climbed through.
He dropped about six feet to the floor of the chamber—not too high to climb back again, fortunately. He found himself in a compartment so huge he couldn’t see the far side. In fact, the lighting was so low he could hardly see anything at all and the little he could see was tinged brown—or perhaps he hadn’t managed to clear his visor completely. He pulled the first of the bugs from his carrier and stuck its magnetic base to the bulkhead below the hatch. So far, so good.
The ceiling of the chamber was lost in a faintly luminous green mist that swirled slowly like witches’ broth. Don decided he would plant the bugs as quickly as he could and then get the hell out of there. He made his way across the chamber, leaving bugs wherever he could find an excuse—magnetic bases on metal, screw-ins for the softer surfaces.
Suddenly he stopped. Ahead of him, two gross pillars rose from the floor and disappeared into the murky gloom above his head. His suit’s sensors told him that the objects were organic. This must be one of the aliens. If so, ‘big’ was an understatement. Both massive columns were splayed at the bottom in rudimentary feet each with three toes the size of hippos. There was no movement, nothing to suggest that his presence had been detected. Maybe the creature was asleep. If he could plant a bug on one of the critters themselves that would be something to report to Ed Dammenfetter when he got back!
Don moved forward cautiously until he was less than an arm’s length away from the left-hand pillar, then he selected a small sound monitor with an auto-screw-in base. He reached out and jabbed the sharp point into the alien’s thick hide. Immediately it began to rotate, drilling in while releasing a chemical agent that would depress nerve impulses in the surrounding tissue. There was no way this monster would feel it.
He was so intent on its progress that it took him a moment to react to the low booming sound that echoed around him, attenuated by the thin atmosphere and the insulation of his suit. He looked up and could just make out an object poking through the clouds. Don froze. His first thought was that it was part of the alien, but then he realized it was metallic, or at least, not organic, some kind of cylinder with an opening at the end.
That was the last thing Don Coyote saw. The last thing he heard was Zzzzzzzzt!
- End -
© Copyright Philip J. Lees 2002