Garrett walked up to a seat in the middle of the plane. There was a panel in front of this seat, on which there was a joystick and several levers. There was also another lighted panel, which was very small. Garrett tapped this with his index finger and the ship shook slightly. Several lights brightened on the ceiling. Garrett turned around to Jackie, who was still standing behind him.
"Should we stay or leave?"
"I think we should take this out. If we find a way out with this then we can sell it or do something with it."
"Then get a seat."
Jackie walked over to one of the several seats in the cockpit and sat down.
"Let's see. One of these should be for the engines."
Garrett pulled one of the three levers on the panel. The lever farthest to the left caused the ship to shake slightly, and Garrett could feel it moving forward. Several powerful exterior lights allowed Garrett to see that the ship was nearing a wall. Garrett pulled the throttle to three quarters, and the ship sped up. The sharp nose cleanly cut into the wall, and the rest of the ship followed. Garrett took hold of the joystick with his other hand and pulled up. He didn't want to flood the chamber by coming up in a stream or the river which he knew was nearby, so he pulled up sharply. With the left hand he increased the throttle to about nine tenths full. The ship broke out of the ground at a shallow angle and Garrett pulled up even more. Garrett could only see the ground on the horizon, so he flattened out and relaxed the throttle to about one quarter until he was cruising about two miles up at a speed that he guessed was just subsonic.
"Identify yourself!" shouted a voice in Spanish.
Garrett looked out of the large and thick window and saw a pair of military jets alongside the ship. He looked for a radio and then saw perforations in the panel in front of him. There was no button.
"Testing one, two, three. Can you hear me?"
"Yes," the pilot replied in English and with a heavy accent.
"I just found this underground and decided to take it out."
"Land or I will be forced to fire."
"Where do you want me to land? This thing's so heavy it'll just break through the surface."
Garrett pulled the lever which he had not yet pulled. The two jets where thrown several hundred yards away. They fell behind the ship and Garrett saw explosions on what was apparently a shield that he had just set up. Realizing that he could start a global incident, Garrett pulled the throttle to maximum and sped up. In a few minutes he was orbiting the planet.
Garrett now looked at a screen on the panel ahead of him. He saw that it was a map of the galaxy. Three locations were pointed out on the map. One of these locations was Earth and the other two were unknown. Garrett tapped the screen over the nearest location and it was highlighted. The ship turned and sped up, now out of Garrett's control. A timer appeared on the screen. It displayed the numbers, "237-17-39-04."
"We'll be arriving somewhere in about eight months."
"So we're stuck here for eight months?!"
"Yeah. I guess we better make ourselves at home."
"I hate you!"
"Maybe now, but this location appears to be where this ship came from. That means there will be people there. People that speak a language that we should learn before we get there."
Garrett searched through the ship for the remainder of the day. On the left side of the hallway there was a kitchen, mess hall, four bunkrooms, showers and restrooms, and four officers' quarters. The back half of the ship was the engine room, which contained several massive ion engines. The other side of the ship contained several storerooms an indoor garden. The storerooms contained an unusual machine that used nuclear fusion and a hydrogen collection device to create water. The food in the storerooms had been preserved in freezing temperatures and inert gasses and was perfectly preserved. There were also more things in the storeroom, such as clothing, armor, arms, and raw materials. There was also another one of the fusion machines. This one, however, could use the collected hydrogen to fuse together many different elements.
Jackie found more books aboard the ship and began to use them to create a translation dictionary. In the first month she had created a translation dictionary and began to learn the foreign language. During this first month, Garrett was working on a project of his own. He set up one of the bunkrooms as a lab. With his basic chemistry knowledge, he was able to make extra gunpowder. He preferred having a higher rate of fire and decent accuracy as opposed to the perfect accuracy of the laser rifles. He began by making smokeless gunpowder. He then made a large supply of brass for the casings. However, for the rounds themselves he experimented. He made rounds from many different materials, including lead, gold, tungsten, and uranium. Having nothing to test these rounds on, though, he just made them and stocked them.
Garrett also began to learn the foreign language. It was similar to the Romance languages in the structure of sentences, but was similar to Inuit due to the extensive vocabulary. Since it was similar to two different forms of languages that Garrett had been exposed to, he did not have much of a problem learning the language. Jackie had assembled the translation dictionary for the language, so she also did not have trouble learning it once she had completed the dictionary. Both Jackie and Garrett had learned the language in four months. Once they had learned the translations for the several hundred words that Jackie had originally translated, each of them was able to then use a dictionary that Jackie had found aboard to learn every word in the language. However, whether or not the language was still in use several thousand years after the ship had left its original planet was still not known.
For the remaining three months, Garrett and Jackie had nothing that they could do. They were forced to find clothes that fit them out of the ship's storage. They also found armor that fit. This armor was very unusual. It was very thin on the arms and legs but the body section was much thicker. The body section also had a small pressure-activated screen the folded out. This screen displayed an option to scan, and when this was selected an object that was held in your hand was scanned and was atomically broken apart to be stored inside the body of the armor. Its name was then displayed on the screen, and upon selecting the name the item was run back out of the armor through the scanner and into your hand. The armor could not hold many items, though.
Garrett had also found, stored on a much larger scanning device, that there was additional armor and weapons in storage. Among these things were the laser rifles as well as handguns and short swords. Every weapon used the laser technology. However, Garrett was also able to store other things such as his Kalashnikov in the armor. However, this was not given a name since it was not part of the technology that was aboard the ship. Garrett was able to program a name for the Kalashnikov into its electronic signature with the larger storage device, though. However, since it used ammunition, Garrett also had to store the clips for the Kalashnikov separately on the device. To allow the clips to take up less space Garrett simply put them all into a small metal box and then scanned the box. In that manner he could easily carry twenty clips for his Kalashnikov, which was at total of six hundred rounds. He also did the same thing for Jackie's M4, and allowed her to carry four hundred eighty extra rounds for her gun.
However, Garrett didn't know if the rest of the planet's population would be as friendly as the people he had met in the chamber under the pyramid. Therefore, since he didn't know if he would be able to get back to the ship and reload his clips, he decided to also carry one of the laser rifles. Aboard the ship he had taken apart one of these rifles to see its inner workings. This rifle used a slow chemical reaction to create the electromagnetic energy, which was stored in a partially exposed tube. There were enough of the chemicals aboard to allow the rifle to function at full power for several years without having the tubes refilled. There was also a switch which controlled the valves on the chemicals to create what amounted to an on off switch for the gun. The trigger controlled a high speed shutter on the muzzle of the gun. The lasers had a long effective range and were not affected by wind or gravity. However, the guns heated up in only a few shots, and the shots could be weakened severely, reflected, or completely dissipated by certain kinds of alloys.