Complications chapter 3
When we last saw our heroes, Dib was well on the way to being a subject in a hideous alien experiment, Gaz was languishing in durance vile, and Zim had just broken into the Cordanian dreadnought. He is currently hurrying through the air ducts (of course there are air ducts, haven't you seen enough bad action movies?) of the enemy ship, cursing in Irken, which I will not attempt to transcribe.
Zim figured he was almost to the command center of the ship. These dreadnoughts were always shaped sort of like an Earth avocado, with the massive seed representing the bridge and officers' quarters (and the controls of the weapons of mass destruction). Spying an air vent ahead, he hurried along the ducting until he could see down into the room below.
Heh. Excellent luck. The fully automated control center lay beneath him, sterile and deserted. There's really no reason why you'd need more than one or two operatives for this sort of mission, he thought to himself. Which means that if I distract them there's no one else to stop me doing some major damage to these targeting computers. He activated his comlink.
"Gir? Do you read me?"
Crackling, and then the buzz of a carrier wave. "Gir, come in." Zim sighed in annoyed resignation. He knew better than to rely on Gir. That had gotten him into trouble before. "Gir!"
"Yeth, mathter?" the bot suddenly replied. Zim made a face.
"What are you eating, Gir?"
"Burritos!" Gir sang excitedly, if rather thickly. "I liiiiike burritos!"
"That's nice, Gir, but I need you to concentrate. I need your help."
He heard the faint clang as Gir saluted. "Yes, master!"
"Disengage the Runner and go distract the Cordanians. Call them and talk to them about burritos, or something. I need you to buy me some time."
"Wheeeeeeee!" cried Gir, and shut off the transmission. Hopefully he'd manage not to crash the Runner into anything, or get it shot to pieces. Zim had other things to worry about.
He dropped down into the command room and quickly began accessing the targeting programs. As he worked, gloved fingers flying over the controls, he couldn't stop his mind drifting to the thought of Gaz. What if she was really here, captured, perhaps being tortured....?
Stop it, he told himself firmly. And even if she is here, Dib's here too. You've got that to look forward to. Concentrate on what you're doing.
Nevertheless he kept seeing a pair of large tawny-gold eyes, a fall of violet hair. So much had happened in the short time she'd been at his house, and he could hardly remember most of it through the haze of fever and pain. He still hadn't come to terms with the bizarre contradictions implicit in his feelings for her, and he was dreadfully afraid he never would. He was on Earth to rule over the pitiful humans, not obsess over one of them. Yet she had shown him something he had never seen before. Not in his entire existence had anyone cared for him. Irkens didn't do that sort of thing.
Perhaps we should, he thought. We might be more successful.
He was into the mainframe. Systematically he began to delete command after command, erasing all trace of a programmed mission to this sector of space. Then he turned his attention to the firing controls for the massive demolition lasers, and shut them down as well. The ship was now defenseless. If he wanted, he could hijack it and take it back to the Massive. Look, he could hear himself saying happily to the Tallests. Look what I caught. And you said I'd never amount to anything.
Go away, Zim. Purple and Red would fold their arms and stare at him. You abandoned your mission to steal a Cordanian spaceship when we're not actually at war with them? Back to Foodcourtia with you.
He sighed. Querying the computers one last time, he suddenly saw something that made him go cold all over. Tabulating results from a hematocrit.
Someone somewhere on the ship was feeding data into a computer; data regarding the makeup of a human's blood. Zim wondered sickly if the hematocrit readings had been taken post-mortem....
****************************************
"It's your turn," said the thing, and the crysteel door to Gaz's cell whooshed open. She was huddled in the corner, curled up to try and preserve some heat in the arctic temperatures of the cell, and for a few moments she refused to move. The thing sighed in exasperation and produced a small silver gadget, pointing it at her. White light shot from its tip, enveloping her, and suddenly she was screaming, jerked to her feet, acid pain running down the insides of her bones. Somewhere, in a safe part of her mind, she found herself coolly reflecting that taser technology had advanced a bit on whatever planet these freaks came from. The pain was extraordinary. It seemed to go on even after the thing had put its weapon away and motioned her curtly out of the cell. Her skin hurt all over, as if she'd been dipped in lye.
"Move," said the thing. Gaz moved. It took her quickly along what seemed like miles of identical metal corridors lined with cells like the one she had been lying in. She wondered apathetically what had happened to Dib. Was he dead? Was she going to die?
She found she didn't much care. All she wanted was warmth. There was no fight left in her; even if she'd had the strength to resist her captors, she wouldn't have. She merely wanted to sleep in a warm place, and wake to find herself......
With Zim. The thought flickered brightly in her fuzzy mind. Zim. There was no reason at all that he would rescue them; no reason for her to believe he either knew or cared about their plight. Yet she began, very slowly, to feel a small and terrible hope burning in her heart.
**************************************************
Zim hurried along the sterile corridors. Whether it was Gaz or Dib, he was going to collect the humanoid and return them to Earth. As a function of his study of the planet. Yes. Nothing to do with personal feelings whatsoever. He picked up the pace. Faintly he could hear the clank as the Voot Runner disengaged from the hull, and he knew that shortly alarms would go off all over the ship to report a proximity warning for an unknown vessel. According to his readouts, he was close to the laboratory. Presumably the Cordanians had taken their abductees there to commit their experiments.
Gaz. Oh, Gaz. If it really is you, there's no way I'm leaving you here. Not after what you did for me. And for you, I'd even save your wretched brother from these aliens.
Crap. I'm thinking of them as aliens. That's not good.
He sighed miserably and ran faster.
*********************************************************
Gaz lay on the steel table. The taller of the two aliens had locked her wrists and ankles into cuffs connected to the table, and she couldn't move except to wriggle. And to scream. She'd decided not to scream, though. She wouldn't give them that much satisfaction.
They'd stripped off her dress, leaving her in a shirt and leggings, and attached sensors to her chest. One of them was wheeling over a gigantic machine encrusted with glowing LEDs, and the other stood at what looked like a control console. She wondered absently what was happening to Dib, but couldn't turn her head to see. The hope of Zim's rescue was quickly fading into a dark blossom in her mind. Whatever happened, she vowed, she would die well.
Am I really thinking this? she wondered. Two hours ago I was asleep in my own bed, with nothing more to fear than a history test tomorrow. Now I'm strapped to an alien dissection table; my brother is I don't know where, and things that look like extras from a fifties B-movie are preparing to do unspeakable things to me. And all I can think of is Zim's ruby eyes. What's wrong with me?
But the machine had begun to crackle with energy, and bright beams of light encapsulated her, and there was simply nothing else to think.
**************************************************************
Zim leaned against a bulkhead, panting. There was a sudden scream of alarms as the Cordanian ship registered his Voot Runner, outside, piloted by Gir. He found time to wonder vaguely what color Gir's eyes were glowing as the tiny purple ship circled round to face its much larger opponent.
That doesn't matter now. All that matters is recovering the humans and getting the righteous nazhka out of here.
He heard footsteps, and a moment later two tall Cordanian officers came pounding by on their way to the bridge. Heh. I wonder how you'll react to what I did to your computers. After ascertaining that no one else was going to come roaring along the corridor, he slid out of his hiding place and hurried along the hall towards the Cordanian labs. Doors were sliding shut ahead of him; he put on an extra burst of speed and hurtled through the closing gaps. Just as he hit the floor, rolling, the massive portals closed behind him with a hiss of hydraulics.
He looked up.
He was inside a room the size of Earthling aircraft hangars. Pipes and conduits encrusted the ceiling; the walls were made up of a matrix of screens showing what looked like microscopic views of human blood cells. Distantly, he could see a mass of machinery hunched over a tiny figure strapped to a table, and beside it another figure, half-buried beneath sensors and connections. He sprinted towards them, and his crimson eyes widened as he saw what was being done.
Dib was stable. They'd drained a lot of his blood and taken some tissue samples, but he was stable. Gaz, on the other hand....
He slammed a fist down on the control panel that corresponded to the machinery hovering over her. The source arm and capsule retreated, the red lights glowing on its housing fading through yellow to standby green. Bending over her, he saw that she was breathing steadily and that only the first part of the experiment had been completed.
Years ago, at the Academy. Biology classes. The teaching program had been given the code name of Kell. He had been sitting in the first row, avidly watching as the machinery bent over the test subject and began to infiltrate the systems. Kell had been lecturing on implantations.
"The most important factor in this operation is the brain of the subject, or at least the primary node of the CNS. The transmogrifier acts primarily on this organ, affecting every other system in the body and bending the subject to the experimentor's will. The chip must be in place before this stage may be completed. Remember that the chip must be situated within the matrix of the subject's CNS."
Shuddering, Zim lifted Gaz's head, turned her so he could see the base of her skull. The Cordanians had set a patch over the insertion point for the chip they'd implanted in her spinal column. He'd managed to distract them just before that chip was activated.
He pulled the sensors from her skin, flinging them disgustedly away, and lifted her in his arms. She was so slight he hardly felt her weight as he lifted her from the table and turned to where Dib lay on his own slab, paler than normal, his eyes sunk in brown shadows.
How am I going to get them both out of here?
"Gir!" he hissed into the comlink. "Bring the cruiser around and link through the hull at these coordinates." He read off the scanner reading for the labs. There wasn't much time; shortly the Cordanians would realize they'd been tricked and hurry back down to make sure their test subjects were secure. Irk was with him, however; almost before he'd begun making emergency plans to take down the Cordanians when they arrived, he heard the clang of two hulls colliding and saw the purple glow of a nionisteel-slicing laser describing a circle in the wall. Good job, Gir. I'll get you a whole BOX of cupcakes for this night's work.
The section of hull clanked to the floor, revealing the interior of the Voot Runner. Hoisting Gaz's limp body over his shoulder, Zim tucked Dib beneath his free arm and ran for his ship.
"Wheeee!" Gir giggled. "I talked to strange tall people!"
"Good, good, good," muttered Zim, strapping his two unconscious passengers firmly into the crash-couches. "Monitor them, Gir. We've got to get out of here, now."
"Yessir!" Gir saluted. Zim slid behind the controls of the ship and disengaged from the Cordanian destroyer, leaving a sizeable hole in the hull open to the vacuum of space. As the thruster jets pulled them away from the larger ship, Zim watched injector guns and random medical objects being sucked out into the void. He couldn't hear the howl of atmosphere escaping through the breached hull, but he'd heard it enough times to imagine what the Cordanians were hearing. And since he'd fried most of their control circuitry, they'd have no way to shoot him, even if their damaged triangulation programs could even find his ship to target it. He flung the Runner around in a wide arc, heading straight back towards Earth, and relative safety.