In the blink of an eye, Sean had rocketed from the floor and overcome the twenty-foot height of the lift column. With a resounding slap, Sean’s hands made contact with the tile flooring of the upper deck, leaving the rest of his body dangling precariously over a rather unpleasant drop to the floor below. With more frantic slaps, he tried vigorously to pull himself onto the upper deck, losing ground with each desperate slap of his hands. Soon, Sean was dangling from the ledge by his fingers. He gave a quick glance in the direction of his waiting crew who had, during his daring escape, gathered beneath him and subsequently fainted. "That doesn’t help," was all Sean could think before one of his hands gave way and slipped from the smooth surface of the upper deck. As he began planning on how to land to break the minimum amount of bones, he felt small mechanical hands grasp tightly onto his wrist.
“We’ve got you, Captain!” came the voice of the lead crewman. There was a chorus of metal-on-metal clicks as the crewman formed a line behind their leader and blinked their digital eyes in unison. “We’ve got you!”
Sean felt light pressure pulling against his wrist, and he swung precariously trying to replace his other hand to the lip of the deck above. He slipped, the grip of his remaining hand finally giving out, and once he let go, he heard the lead crewman call out,
“Whoops, no, we don’t!” followed by the alarmed shrieking of the other crewmen as they were all dragged off of the first floor with him. As they all fell, there was a melodic chiming, and the lights of the lift activated, creating a landing pad of opaque pink light suspending the group in mid-air with an electronic thud. Sean opened his eyes slowly as he felt solid ground underfoot. He could see the light below him, shining its low intensity pink up through the semi-clear disc that made up the lift’s lower platform. Sean knocked against the opaque landing pad a few times with his knuckles before choosing to stand slowly and cautiously. Once he was up to full height, standing eye to eye with the lip of the upper deck he was hanging from moments ago, he began to move silently upwards along with the crew. In a few seconds, he was in range to simply step off the lift pad and continue his exploration of the Feather Fall's upper deck. Before disembarking, Sean cast another glance below and wondered if that saucer from before was the problem the crewman had mentioned. Cautiously, Sean walked out of the lift followed by his crewmen. Once they were safely on visible, solid ground, the crew formed up around Sean and began to inspect him for damages. Sean shooed them all away from his personal space before rounding on the lead crewman.
“I thought you said the lift was the only way up.”
“It is,” the lead crewman responded with a matter-of-fact tone.”
“Then how did you guys get up here without it? If there aren’t stairs, then that’s a hell of a trick!”
“Like this,” the crewman said as it and the entire crew passed out on the spot and crumpled to the ground. Sean whirled around trying to catch at least one of the rapidly fading crew and prevent them from hitting the ground.
“Yoohoo!” came a familiar voice from the lower deck. Sean peered over the edge of the lift to see the crew hovering in their previous locations from Sean's attempt at unpowered flight. They all waved, and a few mimicked throwing kisses to their captain before promptly passing out again and falling to the ground in several heaps. Within seconds the unconscious crew around him sprung back to consciousness, took up various theatrical poses, and let out a call of “Hey!” in unison. The lead crewman looked up to Sean and stated very matter of factly,
“When we said it was the only way up, we meant it was the only way up for you.”
Sean flicked the lead crewman's screen with a finger and harshly retorted, “Don’t sass the captain.”
“Sorry, sir,” came the response, “Honest mistake. Won’t happen again.”
Bathed in white iridescence, the upper deck laid itself bare to the team of explorers. Sean replaced his boots then he and his robotic company marched through the halls, guided by more holographically displayed maps and charts showing where and where not to go if you wanted to continue to breathe. Time was beginning to move strangely for Sean, as there were no clocks or any form of timekeeping devices in any of the hallways. Whether it was the excitement from waking up to aliens trying to kill him, the subsequent multi-league hike through an unfamiliar and inhospitable starship, or the hangover that had begun to rear its ugly head from his pre-abduction festivities, he couldn’t say, but Sean knew he was dead tired and starving.
“Hey,” Sean began but paused, finding his sailing terminology lacking, “uh, lead crewman?” One of the automatons turned while the others continued to mark debris in their path.
“Yes, captain?”
“Okay, what is your name?”
“I’m sorry, captain?”
“Your name. I don’t want to keep calling you just, lead crewman. Seems rude, so what do I call you?” Sean asked.
“I don’t have a name, sir. None of us do. We are just a system assistant managed by the first mate.” The lead crewman said as he marked another chunk of fallen ceiling with a floating triangle of blue light.
“Do you have a serial number? Some kind of classification in the system for you guys?” Sean asked as he took a seat on the floor, propping himself against one of the walls as he asked.
“Hmmm,” The lead crewman processed the request for a moment before continuing, “Well, we do have serials applied to us, but nothing that translates into human language very well.”
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“Hit me, what you got?” Sean asked, waving his hands as if beckoning the answer from the small robot. A stream of clicks, mechanical noises, and different frequencies of static emitted from the small robot ending in what sounded like a gunshot. Sean blinked for a few seconds after the noises subsided and leaned his head back in thought.
“Sir?” the lead crewman asked, approaching Sean slowly.
“Gunner.”
“Sir?”
“That’s your name from now on. Gunner. When I ask for that name, I want to be talking to you and only you. That work for you?” Sean asked, looking at the robot which was becoming rather blurry.
“Understood, captain. This node is now classified as Gunner.” The response seemed to ring out from the walls and ceiling in the hallway, causing Sean to look for the voice's source. It sounded young, male, and had a Cockney accent but spoke with a robotic sureness. Sean pointed to the ceiling and shot a questioning look at Gunner.
“That would be the first mate, sir. It seems like he has been piecing himself together along with the ship.”
“Oh, that’s nice.” The words rolled out of Sean's mouth as the world around him slowly turned to the right, and the blackness and vulnerability of sleep finally took him down.
Jacob felt his new captain fall to the floor, his impact registering as a fallen cargo container or as an internal fissure due to the power of the impact. Jacob smiled and directed Gunner and the crew to perform a full bodily continuity and nutrition test to see if he had anything that could pass for the kind of food the captain would be used to. Gunner led the robotic crewmen in their task, taking the vital scans as a cargo drone arrived on the scene to help the crew lift and guide their captain to his new living quarters. With the task assigned, Jacob turned his attention to the ship that still sat uncomfortably jammed and anchored into his hull.
There was no way for him to interact with its systems at the moment, as the enemy craft did not have an AI and seemed to be nothing more than a glorified shuttle craft. The damage it unleashed upon the Feather Fall, however, spoke to both the effectiveness of the armaments available in space and the incompetence of Feather Fall's former AI and owners. The possibilities of future enrichment with access to the ship's technology had Jacob champing at the bit to explore its depths, and so he tasked a few of his drones with his want of adventure and sent them into the belly of his parasite for a closer look.
The ship was much smaller in comparison to the Feather Fall, being only fifty feet long, twenty feet high, and 20 feet in span at its widest point. Its blackened metal exterior was made of an impressive array of different metals and silicates, undoubtedly a patchwork made of stolen parts from other destroyed vessels welded crudely together to keep the abominable hunting party moving. The inside of the ship measured at an uncomfortably high temperature for anything that wasn’t human or Annurian, a balmy and humid 85 °F, and seemed to regulate this high temperature by using a damaged core ventilation tube, directing the vented energy waste throughout the ship’s capped off secondary hull. There wasn’t anything that would be considered habitable living quarters or biowaste relief stations by GSFC standards in the forward section of the craft, mostly half full buckets filled with a white slurry that gave off hazardous waste warnings as the drones went past and buckets filled with a variety of other colored liquids under hanging alien corpses in various states of decay and dismemberment. Jacob said a prayer for them through the drone, hoping their souls were able to find peace after their dishonorable demise and would not linger in this God-forsaken place before continuing the investigation of the parasitic ship.
A sensor sweep later and the forward section of the ship had been codified into a digital record and was stored for Jacob's later investigation. Now the only gateway between the rest of this horrid craft and Jacob's need for adventure was a set of pressurized bulkheads. Utilizing the drone, Jacob cracked the bulkhead's security code and broke through into the aft section of the increasingly malevolent ship, and the sight that assailed his sensors made him very glad he didn’t have a stomach anymore.
He had found the living quarters and their ship's mess hall at the same time, discovering how the Annurians preferred to take their meals, kicking and screaming till the end. The entire aft of the ship was nothing more than a ten-foot-wide metal catwalk that extended around the entire section of the ship fifteen feet above what could best be described as a pit of despair and dimly lit hell. Beneath the catwalk was a group of ten alien captives from different parts of known GFSC space, each covered in filth, cuts and bruises, multiple colors of dried blood, and a look of confusion and terror at the drone examining them. From the sensor readings taken by Jacob's drone, each of the unfortunate creatures had had their GFSC subdural cranial language translators forcibly removed, rendering direct communication between them difficult at best. Two of the ten were suffering infection at the removal site, and many of the rest had begun to develop various stages of a host of maladies and diseases due to prolonged exposure to their inhospitable conditions.
Jacob took control of the drone and activated its speaker to broadcast in the Galactic common tongue.
“Oh, you poor things.”
A few of the disheveled creatures looked from one another and back to the drone in recognition of the language.
“You speak?” Asked a Velmure, a short and rather stout avian with features reminiscent of a vulture. “You speak Whip?”
“Aye, that I do,” Jacob replied through the drone.
“Have you [unintelligible]? Are you fire the rainbow hydrant?” Questioned the Velmure, its beak making pronouncing Whip difficult.
“I am not sure what you meant by that, but would you like to leave?” Jacob asked the newly appointed representative of the group of refugees. Seeming to finally gather their senses about them, the imprisoned group of aliens began to shout in a smattering of words they each knew in Whip.
“Vegetable matter! Fiber! Bathroom! Hello! Goodbye!” They desperately shouted at the drone. The Velmure spun to the desperate crowd and squawked loudly, silencing the throng of desperate shouts. It turned back to the drone and thought hard and mouthed a few times to practice before it spoke again.
“Y-yes, leave! Please, us leave.”
“Sure, we can do that,” Jacob said through the speaker on the drone. With a light chime, a rectangular screen of translucent blue light began to hover in front of the Velmure, which was quickly populated with well-practiced English cursive.
“Sign here, please,” Jacob asked through the drone. One by one, each member of the desperate gaggle gained their own small screen containing the same well-practiced handwriting. There was a flurry of dings as each screen was marked, and its color changed from blue to green, affirming that the contract of indentured servitude had been signed, witnessed, and was now being enforced.
Jacob’s drone began escorting the new crewmen from their dark pit of despair by rendering one member after the other weightless with the drone's pink light and floating them to the catwalk. A series of blue blinking arrows pointing the way to escape and a new life aboard the Feather Fall.