Disclaimer: Still don't own Toonami.


THE INTRUDER

Episode 3: Aversion


The three active Clydes were all darting about in a loose party outside the Absolution, sweeping their scanners in a more-or-less organized search pattern using the highest settings they were capable of. But there was a lot of space out there to search, and they could to nothing without a signal from TOM's powerless, deactivated body. As long as their automaton inventor was unconscious, the Clydes were useless.

AT the moment, TOM was equally incapable of doing anything to save himself. To avoid damage when the intruder had struck him, his power supply and cognitive systems had shut down, much like going into a coma. By the time they came back online of their own accord, he would be too far away for help of any kind.

While drifting away like a discarded toy, he unknowingly entered an asteroid field that had been lingering off the Absolution's port side for the last hour or so. With the ship's shields present, the floating army of space debris hadn't been considered a hazard until now. Unlike the Absolution, TOM was breakable and extremely vulnerable. His trajectory carried him straight past a frozen rock, mere inches from smashing into it. Had he been conscious, he would have commented on the close call.

The next asteroid, however, he struck.

But rather than worsening his already damaged condition, the collision had the same effect as striking a mechanical appliance to get it started. TOM shook his giant round head and glanced at the lights in his potbelly and hands to make sure his power was coming back online. The Clydes immediately responded to his signal and came racing out to him.

"Ugh. Hey, can you get me a jetpack out here?" he asked after a groan, observing a crack in his visor. Although shaken up, he was quickly regaining his cool.

"On the way," Sara promptly responded. "What happened?"

"No idea," TOM replied. In about a third of the time it had taken for him to get so far away from the Absolution, the jetpack caught up to him. A minute later, he was inside the ship and floating into the communications room. He landed in the center of its broad, disc-shaped platform surrounded by armature-mounted screens. Sara was using the screens to display her face and some ship-wide statistics.

Prying the propulsion unit off his back, TOM grumbled, "Let's see it."

"The whole thing?" Sara asked.

"Yeah." TOM sheepishly scuffed his foot against the floor while Sara replayed the Clydes' recordings of his failed encounter with the Intruder. "Hey, do you know where it is?"

"Yes; it's still on level forty-nine. But ... it's kind of on forty-eight and fifty as well."

"What?"

"It's growing."


Down on one of these levels, a Clyde was approaching the Intruder. It scanned the blob visually, providing Sara with her first clear analyzation. Once the Clyde determined that none of its other equipment could discern any information other than a 3-D outline, it came in for a closer look. That was a bad idea on the Clyde's part.

The two remaining Clydes floated around the corner just in time to see the Intruder's pulsating mass pulling something inside it. They jerked to a halt and adjusted their sensors. Their companion was nowhere in sight until the red blob gave a spurt, and a tiny lense came rolling out across the floor. The hovering droids watched it clatter to a stop between them. They glanced at one another, then back at the Intruder, and slowly drifted back a few inches, hoping they were out of reach.


"It's eating the Clydes," Sara said.

TOM was only half-listening, focused more on the replays of the storage room incident. The same scene had been recorded from different angles. "Man, that could've been handled better," he commented. Returning to the current line of discussion, he said with exasperation, "This is the weirdest day! What does this thing want?"

"Tough to say. It ate through the hull quite easily. Maybe it's just hungry?" TOM thought the tone with which she proposed this idea made it sound like she were talking about a small, cute animal that had infiltrated someone's kitchen. He watched as one of her screens brought up a three-dimensional diagram of the Intruder. "It's ... formless."

She was right, TOM thought. It was just a big, asymmetrical slug. He changed the subject to his deflated ego. "How did I get blasted?"

"Carelessness?" Sara suggested with mock-snideness.

"Thanks. But now what do we do?" The moment he asked this, another alarm went off.

"It's moving," Sara informed him.

"Where?"

"Heading through the ship's skeleton toward the starboard engine." She brought up a forward-facing 2-D visual of the engine's blueprint with a large icon marking the Intruder's progress.

"Sweeet ..." TOM sighed, letting his shoulders sag. He pointed to the screen's engine schematic, asking, "Has it left the room on forty-nine yet?"

"Affirmative."

"I'm goin' down there." With a little less enthusiasm in his jog than the last time he went alien-hunting, TOM proceeded to the elevator pod. His feet alighted on the touch-sensitive light in the middle of the floor, sending the elevator into motion.

More red-limned darkness marked his route through the bowels of the ship, deep shadows broken by crimson bars of emergency lighting. The constant shift of light and dark was playing so many tricks on his vision that he had to skid to a stop when the floor opened up into a gaping chasm.

"Whoa!" The wound in the ship's innards was so wide that his voice seemed to echo, despite the lack of sound waves. It penetrated multiple levels, and as TOM stared into it, he shuddered at the knowledge that somewhere down there, the ship's engine was being consumed by the mysterious and deadly thing that had nearly killed him earlier.

Sara interrupted his ominous musings. "I'm charging your blaster. Come on!"

TOM glanced up in the general direction of the bridge and made placating gestures with his hands. "Wait a minute, hold on. Let's, uh—"

"It's eating through the ship, almost to the starboard engine!"

"Eating through the—?"

"We need to stop it now!"

TOM sighed and relented to the state of urgency. "Okay, okay, I'm on my way." Jogging back toward the elevator pod, he lamented that he was the only one who was capable of doing anything to save the Absolution. It was unlikely that a second round with the Intruder would go any better than his last one, but there was no other choice.