Author Note
I'm working on more chapters for Stargate story for now, but here's a little something to tide you over until then. Thanks to lordanubis6238 for beta reading this chapter. Hail Anubis!
Predator Gothic
Part 25
Alien Mothership. Fallout Universe.
My head was spinning and I could barely open my eyes, and once I could open my eyes I wished I hadn't because it wasn't just my head that was spinning, everything around me was too. Because of this I decided to keep my eyes closed and to focus on using my other senses in order to find out what was going on.
I heard strange noises, none of it made any sense to me, so I risked opening my eyes again. I really wished I hadn't as because this time I wasn't too dizzy and as such I'd been able to understand some of what I'd saw.
What I saw was strange people as they stood over me speaking a language I could not understand. Then something was lowered down and slowly moved towards me. After that my vision became blurred once again and things went dark.
When I woke up I found that my head was killing me, that my mouth was dry, and that I was lying on the ground in a state of undress. This was often the result of me attempting to consume Yautja booze. Only I couldn't recall drinking any recently so something else must have happened.
I looked around to see that I was in a small shiny metal cell and that I'd been stripped of everything other than my underwear and the wire mesh like material I wore under my armor, which was at least keeping me warm.
My armor was gone, and I had no weapons, I didn't even have my wrist device. But what was worse than all that was my honor. I'd been captured, and without a fight. This had dishonored me as hunter, now I had to either take my own life or kill those who had captured me in order to wipe away the dishonor.
If I'd still been part of the Shadow Blades Clan then about now they'd be sending another hunter to kill me and to ensure that my equipment wasn't left in the hands of an enemy. I wasn't sure what my clan would do, but at the very least they might decide that I wasn't strong enough to lead the clan, and so replace me.
This couldn't be allowed. I was the leader of Clan Gothic, the clan ship was mine, the hunters followed my lead, and the servants obeyed my orders. I would not give up the power and glory that came with leading a Clan. I would escape from this cell, slaughter those who had dared to take me captive and return to my clan with many trophies, and perhaps even some new tech.
I'd noticed very quickly that I was cell mates with an African American woman, she had short brown hair and wore a vest and shorts, she also had most of her clothing removed.
"Hey kid you okay?" she asked.
I disliked being called a kid, but it was unavoidable, whatever the Yautja had done to me the first time that I'd been abducted by aliens, made me seem youthful. Also the treatment made me stronger, tougher, faster, and much more agile, but some of that was the training I'd gone through.
"Mostly" was my answer.
The woman nodded.
"Names Somah" she said.
She looked a random wastelander to me. Perhaps that was all she happened to be.
"I'm Gothic" I told her.
That could be Captain Gothic or Clan Leader Gothic, however right now I didn't feel deserving of any titles.
Somah and I exchanged some details, as it turned out we'd both fallen for the same trick. The both of us had picked up a radio transmission, and had tracked it until we found a crashed alien spaceship. Which was course I'd wanted to loot for the tech.
The Citadel of Gothics, normally just called the Citadel, had a strange economy, gold and jewels were worthless there because they had Star Trek style replicators, so only materials that couldn't be replicated were worth anything. Aside from those rare materials, advanced technology and magic items also had great worth.
The Citadel had machines called nano-forges, which could build pretty much anything as long as the design for it. Because of this pretty much any technology, other than biotech and magitech, could be copied and produced in a limited quantity. However this took time, energy and resources, so most of the time people just traded for the tech they needed.
A lot of this trade involved weapons, armor, and tools, and Fallout had all that. It had energy weapons, power armor, robots, and some stuff I couldn't even remember, much of which my Clan could have uses for, or could be traded.
This was why I'd come to this world, and why I'd so badly wanted to loot the alien tech. Sure Sparky Gothic, the alternate version of myself who was a mad inventor (think Rick only far less of an asshole) had spent much time in this universe, but from I understood he spent too much time on his different projects to work as an arms dealer.
"Okay I think now is a good time to get the hell out of here" Somah said.
That was fine with me. I needed to recover my weapons and armor at least. The trophies were of less value, but I would like to recover them as well.
"What's the plan?" I asked.
"Well think about it, they aren't going to kill us yet, they want us alive for something but maybe if we fought each other a bit, you know put a show on so when they come in to break us up, we break them up if you catch my drift".
I took a second to think about that. Her words made sense. These aliens had taken us alive, and were studying us. No doubt they were very interested in me given how different I was from other humans. They would want to keep me alive.
"Alright let's do it. Just no kicking below the belt" I said with a smile.
Her expression let me know that she might not follow that rule before she said anything.
"No promises" she told me as she raised her fist.
She then decked me right in the face. I staggered back, wiped my mouth with the back of the hand, and taking her by surprise, I tackled her, so that she dropped to the ground.
I tried not to laugh as she rolled over and soon she was on top of me punching me in the face. Her first blow had been good, but she was following them up with much weaker punches.
After a few moments of fake fighting the aliens noticed and shouted something at us through hidden speakers. I'd recently had my mask upgraded to translate alien speech and words, but I didn't have it on me so I had no clue what was being said.
By the time Somah got me in a headlock, which must have looked very odd given that we were both in a state of undress, the aliens had arrived in the flesh. They pulled out some metal rods and opened the door.
"Get them!" Somah shouted.
She tackled one and I smashed my fist square into the others face. He dropped the rod and I picked it up and pushed the button I saw on the handle. The end of it started to spark as electricity erupted from it I smashed it into his face. He shrieked in pain before falling dead on the floor with smoke coming out of his mouth.
Clearly it was some sort of hi-tech stun baton, or more likely a type of cattle prod. It was clear that these aliens saw us more as animals than people, if they were capable of seeing us as equals they wouldn't be abducting us like this.
I looked over at Somah who had done the same as me. She gave me a thumbs up and ran forward to the other side of the room. There was no time to stand around chatting as our escape had only just begun. Getting out of the cell was easy but getting off the ship would prove to be a challenge.
Somah and I kept making our way through the ships prison quarters taking down as many of the little alien as we could. No alarms went off and none of the aliens carried any real weapons. From this I deduced that they hadn't dealt with a serious escape attempt before, and that like many aliens they'd underestimated us humans.
I passed a cell that still had a survivor in it. It was a young woman, who like the rest of us was in a state of undress. Unlike Somah and I she was curled in the corner of her cell mumbling something.
While it was cruel to leave her here, I knew that in her current state she'd just slow us down, and we had to move quickly. She might even attack us if her mind was too far gone. Alas some people just couldn't handle stuff like this.
"Is anyone there. Hello?" a voice asked
We walked over to a cell and saw a young girl.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
She nodded.
"Yeah, I'm okay" the girl said "And I can help you get out of here. But you have to get me out first".
I saw no harm in freeing the child.
"Okay, how do I do that?" I asked.
"See that thing over there, press the button on it, then press the buttons on the other devices, it will get hot, blow up and I'll be free" she instructed.
The device the girl had gestured to wasn't hard to miss, I pressed the button and three switches came out. I pressed each one and quickly ran away as lights started going off and in an instant it exploded. This somehow freed the human girl.
"Oh thank you" she exclaimed as she ran up to me. "Are you trying to escape the ship?"
I nodded.
"That's the plan" I said "We'll beat the hell out of these little green bastards and get the hell off this ship" I said.
Maybe blow it up, or better yet I could come back with my clan, cripple the ship, board it, and loot it for profit.
"I'm Sally" the small human informed me.
This was when I noticed that her style of clothing and general level of hygiene seemed wrong for the world below. A mystery to be sure, one to wonder about later, at a time when I wasn't trapped on an alien ship, right now we had to escape.
"I know this ship better than anyone" Sally said "Follow me".
Well it wasn't as if Somah or I had a plan for anything after escaping our cells. So we both followed Sally as we made our way back to the main room and back to the large round door. She tore off a covering on a vent and crawled in.
A few moments later the door opened up and Sally was standing there with a big smile on her face. I too found this amusing as normally it was the alien creature messing about in the vents.
"I sometimes get out of my cell and explore the ship, I just move a few wires around and stuff like this happens" she told us.
As we walked down the hall we heard some more alien gibberish coming from another room. I signaled for everyone to stop as I slowly approached a room that was the source of the noise.
I looked in to see two aliens going through my things. One was examining my wrist device, scanning it and I hoped he wasn't damaging the device as that version of the wrist device had been modified for my use. Plus there was a chance that they could trigger the self destruct.
"Wait here" I ordered the two human females.
I ran in and hit the first one in the head three times before letting it drop the ground, the second one took a swing at my chest, but I stepped out of the way and smashed the baton right in its head killing it while breaking the baton.
"It's all clear" I said.
Next I grabbed my armor and put it on, I then took my wrist device and tried to make contact with my ship. However there was something jamming the communications, and even if I had been able to call for it I'd need to find the hanger bay, assuming this ship had one. Hopefully the jamming was some sort of defense the aliens had and it could be deactivated.
I walked over to a container, and I looked through it. Within I found a 10mm pistol, which I'd taken from a raider, my ceremonial dagger, which was used to take trophies, my shoulder mounted plasma caster, that I was forcing myself to use, my net gun, wrist blades, sword, combistick, grenades, and mask.
Within the other containers were more weapons and equipment. Somah found her shot gun in one container, and her clothes, which were not the clothes of a raider, or worse a Talon merc, she just looked like another wasteland scavenger.
As we left I looked down the hall to see an alien doing what I guessed was some sort of patrol. He didn't seem to be doing a very good job, and he paid the price for his lack of attention when I blew his head off with my plasma caster.
Like other bits of my tech it had been modified for my use, and it was now controlled with a neural implant. Basically I had to focus on the device and think what I wanted it to do. Which made it too easy to use in my opinion, but this wasn't a hunt so I didn't consider it cheating to use it this way.
I patted down the dead alien and found what looked be like some sort of crystals, not unlike the currency used on the Citadel. There they used some sort of crystal coins harvested from a bizarre kind of plant that stored psychic energy.
While I didn't understand how that worked, I figured they used it for money since it couldn't be replicated and because the crystals fed off psychic energy they stored, which meant that they remained alive even when turned into coins.
As for these crystals, well perhaps they were also some sort of money, and if so they could be off some value back at the Citadel.
I also took the alien's weapon. Which looked like something out a cheap sci-fi movie, but when I tested it the weapon it reduced the body of the dead alien into something that looked like ash. Must be some kind of heat ray type thing, I thought to myself. While I was already carrying a lot of weapons the ray gun didn't weight much so I just kept it in my hands.
"C'mon up here. We can use this thing to go up and to where the boss alien is" Sally yelled down to us.
We arrived at a small platform and Sally started to frown.
"Oh no, they must have turned it off. This thing works kind of like an elevator and could have taken us straight to the boss alien's room" she said.
Maybe she meant the bridge, or his actual quarters. Either way taking out the ships commanding officer before the aliens realized something was wrong would have been a good thing.
"So what do we do now?" I asked.
We all stood there before Sally got an idea. She ran over towards a larger room that had a generator in it and immediately ran upstairs.
"I've got an idea!" she shouted "We can ask the astronaut to go out in space and turn on the elevator for us".
Why would the on switch be outside the ship?
Before I could ask about out loud Sally had done something that made a wall move, and behind that wall were stasis pods. I walked up to one and touched the surface to feel nothing but cold. I looked in to see a man dressed in jeans, chaps and a cowboy hat, your stereotypical cowboy.
"How long have you been in here?" I wondered.
Science fiction tended to vary when it came to stasis technology; some seemed to perfectly preserve people for a very long time while others only slowed down the effects of time. This cowboy seemed well enough so this must be good stasis tech.
"Hey push that" Sally called out.
I walked over to the switch and pushed the button as instructed, causing the stasis pods to open up. Mist burst out of the pods and the ice started to melt. In an instant all four people who'd been in stasis fell to the ground.
One was the cowboy, the second was an astronaut and the third was some kind of army medic and the last was what looked like a samurai warrior. They all slowly got to their feat all except the astronaut, he was dead.
"Aww the astronaut died" Sally said in a sad tone.
"What happened to him?" Somah wondered.
Some malfunction of the pod I guessed.
"I don't know these things just happen sometimes" Sally answered.
Someone new spoke next.
"Who the hell are you guys?" the cowboy asked.
He didn't sound much like a cowboy, perhaps none ever sounded that way outside of the movies. Or maybe he wasn't actually a cowboy, the jeans looked more modern than they should. He could just be in a custom.
"I'm Gothic, the girl is Sally, and the lady with the shotgun is Somah" I introduced. "Who are you?"
"Call me Paulson" said the cowboy.
"Elliot Tercorien, serial number 3477809, Medic of the 108th Infantry Battalion in Anchorage" the soldier said.
Wasn't that like 200 years ago?
"Anchorage? You mean that war in Alaska with the Chinese?" I asked.
He nodded.
"Yeah, my squad and I went up to help some of our men when a blinding light surrounded us. We couldn't move or anything. The next thing I know I'm strapped to a table and there are aliens poking and prodding me" he said.
He then started looking around.
"You haven't seen other men dressed like me have you?" he asked.
I shook my head.
"Oh, okay" he said as he walked away looking distraught.
(Who are you boy?)
That had been the Samurai speaking; my mask gave me subtitles in English.
"My name is Gothic. Are you okay?" I asked.
(Yes many thanks for freeing me from my prison)
"So what's the plan?" Somah asked.
I turned to Sally. She was a smart girl and seemed to know what to do.
"Well the teleporter can be turned on from the higher level in space. Gothic can go out and activate it for us and we can all go to the captain's quarters" she said.
Clearly she'd been planning this escape for some time, and she was smart, scary smart. I was starting to wonder if she was a plant of some kind, like an alien in disguise, but I couldn't see the point of that and also I had no way of testing to see if she was an alien without hurting her. I couldn't do that in case she was actually just a very intelligent kid. There was no honour in harming a child.
"You're the only one who's brave enough and smart enough to do this" Sally was now saying.
I sighed at the transparent attempt to appeal to my ego, and then I sighed again when I realized how correct the girl was.
"Okay, so what do I have to do?" I asked.
I already knew that I wasn't going to like this.
"Well, they're probably waiting for us on the other side of that door." she said "So we're going to have to suck out all their air in order for you to pass".
"Even if I turn off their air they probably have a backup in case of emergencies" I pointed out.
My ship did. I couldn't imagine a ship not having a backup for the life support.
"Three actually" Sally told me "In three separate locations, and they are guarded by more aliens and robot guards"
At this point I just sighed some more.
"I didn't say it would be easy" Sally said.
This girl wasn't a plant, she was the devil in disguise I felt sure of it.
(Line Break)
Well it had taken a long time, but I finally managed to get us one step closer to the bridge; which we were going to need to take if we had any chance of getting off this damn ship.
"What's down here?" I asked Sally.
Currently we were going down yet another hallway. This was a big ship.
"There's a storage room filled with a bunch of crates filled with weapons and supplies" Sally said "There's even more in a different part of the ship".
This was when I noticed that we were one short.
"Where's the samurai?" I asked.
Everyone shrugged their shoulders.
"I don't know." Sally said "He walked down stairs and that's the last we saw of him".
While it was harsh to leave people behind, it was also practical as I had no idea where he'd ran off to and I wasn't responsible for him if he chose to run off on his own. Besides I had no desire to get lost while wandering around this big ship, looking for him, maybe I would find him if I come back with my ship to loot this one.
"He's probably dead." Paulson stated bluntly.
Just then an alien appeared. A few of us opened fire only to hit nothing. It turned out to be a hologram. The glowing head fired a laser beam down at earth and babbled about how we should surrender and accept our fate. It was threatening to kill people down on the planet if we didn't cooperate.
"Fuck that." I said.
We all moved on and went down yet another hallway and towards a door when we heard what sounded like a war breaking out. From this I guessed that we must have set others free when I was messing about with the controls for the cells. Or maybe Sally had let them out while I'd been doing my space walk. I didn't really care about them beyond that they were a good distraction for my group.
"Okay you guys stay here while I scout ahead and clear the path for you" I said.
I was about to cloak when someone grabbed my arm.
"This teleporter leads straight to the bridge of the ship" Sally said as she turned to a teleporter" If you can turn it on we can take over the ship".
Yeah I could do that.
"Okay wish me luck." I said as I walked over to the teleporter.
(Line Break)
"It's over" I said.
While the space walk had been time consuming, as well as dangerous, everything else had been rather simple. Clearly whomever else the aliens had been fighting must have been taking up most of their attention.
"We… did it" Somah said in disbelief.
What was this 'we' business. I'd done all the work. I'd teleported on to the bridge and killed the crew. I'd done the space walk, and I'd pressed all those damn buttons.
"Yay go us" cheered Sally.
The celebration, if it could be called that, was cut short when another alien ship was seen outside from passed for windows on his ship. A screen that displayed info on the enemy ship, our death ray, and shields appeared, and thankfully for everyone I understood what was happening. The second alien ship was targeting us. They must have realized by now that something was wrong, and I was willing to bet that they would hail this ship, fail to get an answer from its captain, and then they would blast us with everything they had. I couldn't allow that to happen. I had to act first.
"Firing the laser!" I shouted
A blue beam fired at the enemy ship, but their shield blocked it. They returned fire and our shields went down, but the Xenos didn't finish us off.
Just then more aliens appeared. We all drew our guns and opened fired. They took cover by the wall firing shots of blue plasma at us. They must have teleported on board when the shields went down as I fired the main weapon, and now they were trying to take this ship back.
While under fire I reached for the controls and the ship's big death ray laser thing fired again blowing up the other space ship. They must have lowered their shields to transport more aliens over just as I fired. Once that happened finishing off the rest of the Xenos proved to be a simple task.
"Well that was fun" I said "time for me to leave".
The control layout wasn't that complex and since I could read everything, I was able to lower the shield, which allowed me to summon my scout ship to the hanger bay. Once it arrived I could go back to my clan ship and bring the whole clan here to loot the hell out of this vessel. Heck if the stuff was good enough I'd loot them in an alternate reality.
"Where are you going?" Somah asked.
"Back to my ship" I told her "I have some friends who can help me strip this ship of everything of value".
Somah smiled.
"Need any help?" she asked.
I didn't think she could be a hunter, but she might be a decent servant if I could convince her to join. She admitted to me then that she was a slaver, but this wasn't a big issue for me, as I could use someone to keep the serving girls in line. As long as she didn't do anything the servants hadn't agreed to in their contracts. We could talk about that later. Once she had seen what my clan was like.
"What about you Sally?" I asked.
The cowboy and soldier had been vaporized at some point, and no one was upset about that. As for the Samurai, well he was somewhere around here.
"Oh I'm staying here" she said "Someone has to deal with the aliens if they come back".
I shook my head.
"How can someone so small, be so grown up?" I thought out loud.
Sally smiled.
"I only look small" she said "I've been on this ship for a very long time. The aliens did stuff to me."
Well that answered some of my questions, and gave me a whole bunch more I wanted to ask, but not now as my scout ship had docked. It was time to leave.