PART 3: RESCUE

Chapter Nine

ZIM was walking home after a hard day at Skool. It had been a good day of work, however, and he had planted brain probes into twelve more children today. It was very simple to do, really. He simply had to hide probes in the strange porcelain thrones in the bathrooms, wait until a student went into one of the little cubicles, and press a button on a remote control. At this point the probe's drill begins to spin, and it leaps up and, well, the rest should be obvious.

However, as he rounded the corner into his cul-de-sac, he noticed something he'd never seen before. Not from the outside, at least. The roof of his house was slowly opening, and inside, next to his severely outdated Voot Cruiser space flight technology...

"Oh, hi ZIM! Hope you don't mind me borrowing this!"

And then ZIM's spaceship took off and zoomed away into the empty blackness of space.

ZIM stood open mouthed, staring at the place where the ship had dwindled from view.

"#$#," was all he could manage to say.

Chapter Ten

X looked down at the screens surrounding him. It had been a while since he'd actually flown a ship. Being a thief in a big city didn't really require it, but as a child he had been taught to fly. It was all part of the military training.

The ship was very old, but thankfully this meant it had the same controls as one of the training ships X had learnt in. In fact, it was uncannily familiar. X stuck his head underneath the main control panel and grinned. There was still a small sticker loosely clinging to the underside of the controls that read:

Irken Military Training Ship

Model: Light Travel Class (Voot)

Serial Number: 10011100110101010101

X made a note that someone had crossed out the word "Serial" and written in crayon "CEREAL!" It must have been that weird robot that ZIM had... What was its name again? Not that he had to remember anymore, a quick check through his hard drive would reveal any of those minor details.

The thief stared at the control panel and let his mind scan it for data. The scan revealed the same information as the sticker did. The military always recycled old ships, though, so the only way ZIM could have got his hands on this would be by stealing it. X decided that ZIM, having his request for a ship declined, had decided to "borrow" a vehicle anyway so that he could go and help "invade." Not that ZIM was even an invader.

His attention returning to the controls, X found the navigation screen and punched in a few numbers.

"Voice?" he asked cautiously. The voices had remained relatively quiet since he had decided to help Zeffie, but X was in no mood to get them talking again.

"What?" replied a lone voice. Not having a whole chorus chant out the answer definitely made it more bearable, although having your own brain talk to you is always disconcerting. It makes you question your sanity.

"Where did you say Zeffie was banished to?"

"I didn't. But if you must know, it's planet Laborisian, the empire's main planet for menial, pointless, and grueling mindless labor."

"Oh."

"Coordinates 297285-953812-4198734"

"Thanks."

X punched the numbers into the controls and hit the big red button labeled "Go." The Armada went with the philosophy that anything that sounds confusing can be dumbed down to grade school terms. The Voot owners manual was probably filled with pretty water color pictures and text like, "Bob likes to fly. Bob flies by typing in the nineteen digit destination number key (see Intergalactic Coordinate Flying System, page 26087)."

The Voot sped through space, occasionally doing unnecessary loop-de-loops and emitting clouds of smoke. X was surprised, he'd thought even ZIM could do better than this!

However, the journey passed uneventfully, and soon Laborisian loomed up in front of the ship. The planet was simply one giant lump of rock, filled with meteor craters and seemingly lacking any atmosphere. There were three huge clear domes jutting out of the rock, and in the middle of each was a huge tube that seemed to constantly be jettisoning small chunks of the planets surface into space.

The voice explained, "The laborers are forced to mine away at the planets surface every day, and every night the produce of the day is shot into space."

"Produce?"

"I'd say rocks, but in a colony of several billion, do you really think that rocks are the only stuff that is produced?"

"Stuf- ooh..."

"No one ever bothered to make a sewer system, you see."

"Yuck."

"Very."

The Voot slowly began its course towards the docking bay of the nearest dome. However, as the ship neared, the communicator sprang to life.

"What the hell are you doing? No one is allowed to visit! NO ONE"

The speaker was a Hobo, technically, but a more viciously scarred and brutalized one X had never seen. Not in the streets of Irk, where being a guard meant being hit over the head with a blunt (or sometimes not so blunt) instrument each time you started to regain consciousness.

"Wow," said X, "I guess you've been through your share of riots here."

"No," replied the Hobo, slightly confused, "I've never sustained a single serious injury in my life. Unlike Bob here. Why do you ask?"

"Uh... no reason."

"Ooo-kay... Anyway, NO ONE!"

"Oh, that;s fine," said X as he hurled himself out of the Voot and into space.

His spider legs snapped out, grabbing onto the docking bay's huge metal doors. Tracker be damned, they knew he was here anyway. He crawled along the doors until he came to the thin line where the doors met. It was airtight, obviously, but that could be easily fixed. A thin laser whipped out of his Pak on a small prehensile wire and focused a beam on the crack. He didn't want the hole so big that he couldn't weld it shut again.

The hole made, two of X's spider legs whipped into it and started trying to wrench the doors apart. X could feel the insane pressure, even in a fully robotic body. Slowly, however, the doors began to inch away from each other. Soon X could crouch down and swing his hole body into the crack between them and set all four of his spider-legs to work on pushing the doors. The gap widened far enough to let a small space ship through, and X leapt out between the doors and into the airlock. A tentacle whipped out of his back as he landed, grasping the Voot Cruiser and hurling it through the rapidly closing doors.

"Hey..." thought X, "I didn't tell the suit to do that... I didn't even know I could do that..."

"I did," said the voice in his head, "You'll find it much easier to rescue Zeffie with a ship inside the station rather than floating in the vacuum of space. She'll have been stripped of all her military issue equipment, and that includes an Atmospheric Bubble Projector. There would have been no way for you to get her onto that ship, had it been outside."

"Oh. Okay. Thanks, I guess."

X tuned his communicator to the channel that had been transmitting to the ship. In the corner of his vision, a screen bearing the malformed Hobo appeared again. He seemed to be having a fit, yelling hysterical orders to someone off camera. He obviously hadn't ever had someone break into his labor camp before. He was probably trying to figure out the mentality of someone who'd even want to break in.

X cleared his non-existant throat in order to gain the guard's attention.

"Hello?"

In the little screen, the beast turned around.

"What do you want? Why?"

"Listen, and listen closely. Either open up these secondary doors and let me inside, or I swear I'm going to bust the open myself and seriously f--- up everything inside. Thank you."

X closed the line, and the screen faded.

"Tactfully put," said the voice.

"Shut up," replied X, welding the hole in the outer door shut again.

More coming soon!