Complications chapter 2
(note: I'm writing this in a very odd frame of mind, so it might be a little incomprehensible.)
In the red dimness of Zim's underground lab, alarm klaxons wailed to life. Zim, who had lapsed into exhausted sleep two hours before, jerked awake. All his screens were flashing with proximity alerts.
"Computer! What's happening?"
"Unknown spacecraft in local airspace. Axial coordinates five-three-twelve."
Zim called up a 3-D grid model of the neighborhood, and gasped. The spaceship, indicated with a pulsing red dot, was hovering directly over the Membrane house. Gaz, he thought, frightened at the depth of emotion the name called up inside him. Gaz is in danger.
He watched, frozen, as the ion signature of the spaceship altered and faded. They were still there, close, but invisible to radar scopes. He punched in a command to power up the Voot Runner and hurried up to the roof hangar.
Gir was sitting on top of the curvilinear ship, staring vacantly into space. "Gir!" Zim yelled. "Get in! We haven't got much time!"
"Carrots?" inquired Gir, bouncing off the top of the canopy and landing on his head. "Wheee! I'm a thermos!"
"That's nice," muttered Zim as he started the engines. "Get in, Gir. And quit playing with the radio. I've got to concentrate." Gir found classical music on the Runner's stereo and began to dance along to Mozart's Concerto in D Minor. Zim sighed, but ignored him, and guided the Runner up through the opening doors and out into the green night sky. On the scopes he could just make out a dim radar echo of something very, very big lurking just outside the limit of the Earth's ionosphere. Mother of Irk, he thought, that looks like a Cordanian destroyer....
Cordan was the galaxy's mercenary force. The Cordanians would do anything for credits, and they generally possessed far more advanced weaponry than anyone else, even the Imperial Armada. He knew the Tallests had called in a couple of Cordanian star-destroyers to get rid of a pesky moon that was in the way of their projected resort planet. And Earth had exactly no military capability off the surface of the planet. No one had ever even heard of it, so no one would bother to send a Cordanian destroyer to obliterate it because of a perceived threat. No, he thought, this is demolition. Has to be.
Earth is mine! If anyone's going to destroy it, it's gonna be me. And I didn't go through all that crap with the Planet Jackers to have my planet blown up by a bunch of mercenary idiots!
And besides. They've got Gaz.
He wasn't sure of that, but he thought it was likely. And they'd have Dib too. Curses. Perhaps he could leave Dib with them as an exchange for leaving Earth alone.
He ramped up the power to the Runner's engines, hurtling up through the layers of the atmosphere. Around him the green darkness gave way to the jeweled blackness of space, and as always he felt a slight shiver of relief at being out in that immensity. Irkens were born and bred in space. Planets always gave him slight claustrophobia.
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It was cold. Bright and cold. There was a faint smell of alcohol or some similar volatile disinfectant, and the light hurt her eyes. She managed to focus, after some effort, and looked around.
Gaz lay on a steel floor in a steel cell. There was a small grate in the floor, and air vents pierced the walls just below the ceiling. A door made of something like plexiglass separated her from a corridor with equally sterile metal walls. She rolled over and tried to stretch, but her hands were bound behind her with some kind of metal cuffs.
She tried to remember what had happened. There had been something in the sky.....Dib yelling at her, trying to get her to look up, and then she had been standing hand in hand with him as a wave of intense cold washed over her and the world ceased to turn.
An alien spaceship. Heh. They'd been abducted by aliens.
Gaz started to laugh, too loudly, a shrill sound in that echoing box of a room. Except it sounded more like screaming. Laughing and screaming until something came down the hallway, opened the crysteel door, and pressed an injection gun against the side of her neck. Gaz's vision greyed out, and she slumped back to the cold metal floor, once more lost in blackness.
Squealy little thing, thought the Cordanian, tossing the injector from claw to claw. The male was worse, though. Ever so much worse. We had to do some really intensive treatment before he would shut up. Kept talking about mysterious mysteries, or something. We really picked a strange pair.
"Found anything interesting?" he asked as he came back into the main dissection room. The male specimen was lying unconscious on a metal table, tubes leading to the great vein in his left arm. A sample container was slowly filling with dark blood.
"Nah," said the other Cordanian. "Typical carbon-based bipedal humanoid. Their blood seems to have an iron component I've not seen before. And I'm getting bizarre fluctuations in the brain-waves, but that could just be a side-effect of the drug."
"I love doing this," said the first one. "It's so exciting. We can learn so much."
"I know. It's like unwrapping a surprise present."
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The Voot Runner slowed as the Cordanian destroyer came into view. Looking like a fly advancing on an elephant, the little purple ship approached the behemoth, all jamming systems up, running in stealth mode. "I was right," muttered Zim. "Cordanians. They're going to destroy Earth."
"Wheeeee! Can I watch?"
"No, Gir, that's bad. No one except us gets to destroy Earth."
"Aww," said Gir, but got distracted by the radar scope. "Wow! Flashy!"
Zim guided the cruiser in under low power, and set it down gently under the belly of the destroyer, locking on with powerful electromagnets before cutting a hole in the three-layered hull and slipping silently inside. That much was easy. That much was always easy. Getting the Cordanians to go away would be a little harder to achieve. "Gir!" he hissed. "Stay with the ship. If anything happens let me know as soon as you can. And stay quiet!"
Gir's eyes flashed red for a moment and he saluted. Zim was smarter than to believe Gir would actually do as he was told, but he could only hope for the best. They had broken into an access corridor which hadn't been used recently, judging by the layers of space dust on the floor. As he recalled, Cordanian ships were designed with the command module located centrally; cargo space and holding cells were arranged above and below the bridge proper. First, he had to find Gaz, and Dib if he were here. He sighed, knowing he'd have to decide what to do with the human when he found them. Then, he had to dissuade the Cordanians from destroying his assigned planet.