An Adventure of Zacharia Zook III

“Zack? Are you there?” Deena’s high-pitched voice crackled with static.

“Grrnnnn. What is it?” I croaked into my comms as I strained. Shipboard rations played hell with my digestive system, and it had been a couple of days since the last time I’d gotten to the head. I could feel my ass going numb from sitting so long.

Soooo long.

“You need to come to the bridge.”

“Hrrrrnnn. Why? Awwhhhh.” I sighed long and loud. The sense of relief at finally achieving splashdown flooded my body.

“Just get up here… now.” Deena’s silken yet panic-stricken voice made me sit up straighter.

“OK, OK, gimme a minute.”

Two minutes later, I strolled nonchalantly onto the bridge, feeling several pounds lighter and with a weightlessness of spirit only successful bathroom visits can bring to the truly constipated.

“You might want to give it a few minutes before you use the bathroom,” I said with a grin.

“Gross, Zack.” Deena glared at me from under her blonde, shoulder-length hair which seemed to be in worse shape than I’d ever seen it before and believe me I’ve see…

OK, maybe it wasn’t the right time if her steely eyed look through narrowed eyelids was anything to go by. I’d known her for five years, and I’d never seen her smile, but this face?

This was her ‘We’re in the crap’ face, and I’ve seen that often enough to know, well, we must be in the crap.

“That’s me. Now, what was the almighty rush you humorless Jenovian?”

Deena pointed a perfectly manicured, and extremely sharp claw toward the front of the ship. I knew how sharp from experience… many unpleasant experiences, actually.

I turned the way she pointed.

Everything looked normal to me.

Probably.

Lots of equipment, buttons, dials, LED counters going up, LED counters going down, other stuff, most of which I didn’t understand, most of it flashing, and some of it flashing red which I didn’t think seemed right.

The main navigation screen I knew, and it showed the ship on course for the dead-end planet we were headed to.

Yellow Drip.

I mean, who calls a planet Yellow Drip?

I didn’t hold out much hope for a good time there, but a good time wasn’t the main reason we were headed to Yellow Drip, only the rest of the crew were, shall we say, not in the know about that. That was a secret only I knew. And you too now, of course. All the other screens were dark, which was unusual but not unknown.

I shrugged. “What?”

“Go look at the captain.”

The two high-back chairs at the flight console were facing front as they should be, so I had to step forward a few paces, then I realized why Deena was in such a panic.

The captain, and when I looked, the first mate too, were both missing the tops of their heads, and their brains had been scooped out, leaving their heads like the shell of a pink boiled egg.

Empty vessels.

“Shit.”

“No shit, Sherlock. What the hell are we going to do?” Deena asked. “We’re due to land on that scrap heap of a planet in exactly seven minutes from now. We’re on the final approach to atmosphere in two minutes thirty seconds.”

“What the hell happened?” I squeaked, transfixed in horror by the inside of the captain’s empty skull and pointing with a wavering finger. I looked back at Deena.

Deena shrugged, which tossed the curled-under ends of her hair up before they landed back on her broad shoulders with a little bounce.

Hmmm. Cute. Maybe… nah, not Deena, we’d been through too much together.

I shook my head quickly. “The… the AI can land us. DORA, can you take us in?” I said loudly and hopefully.

The sound of blood slowly dripping from the dead men currently not flying the ship was all I heard after my words echoed around the flight deck.

“DORA’s gone dark.”

I whipped around quickly to look at Deena again.

“Dark?”

“No response. Life support is running down too, just for good measure.”

“Fuck me! So, let me get this straight. The captain and first mate are dead, our shipboard AI has bugged out without so much as a goodbye, and Sirm is where? She’s the technical one on board.”

“Last time I saw her she was in her cabin, holding her knees, and rocking back and forth, muttering about brain-eating monsters.”

“What a wuss. There’s no such thing.”

I’d lied. No point worrying the crew about what only I knew was in the cargo hold, or wasn’t as it now seemed, judging by the state of the two eggheads up front, but there was no time to fret about that then.

Taking a crafty look around the bridge, just to be certain, I was reassured there was no obvious sign of the… things.

I pressed a bloody button on the console, wondering what the hell I should do about what had topped the captain’s and first mate’s noggins. That would come later, or if I could get away with it, never.

Nothing happened when I pressed the button. For all I knew, it was the ship’s self-destruct system. I resolved not to press any more buttons unless I knew what they did.

A radio finally crackled and the light next to the microphone came on. See, I knew it was the comms!

“Sirm. Get your ass up here… please. We have a situation we need to manage.”

The sound of sniffling and gentle sobbing filled the bridge. “OK, I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Deena. How long before we all choke to death?” I asked.

“We have enough air for a couple of minutes.”

I rubbed my hands over my face, then ran them over my buzz cut hair.

“Right, you’re the computer geek. Hack into the life support system and find a way to keep it going for a few minutes longer.”

She stood there for three seconds before I yelled at her. “Now! Come on! Move your ass or we all die.”

Deena ran off the bridge in the direction I’d come from just as Sirm arrived, looking worriedly around the bridge. Sirm’s skin was green which meant she was pissed at me… again.

“Listen, Sirm, we don’t have time for another argument.” I could feel the first trickle of sweat running down my back into the top of my pants. “In five minutes, we are due to land on that planet,” I said, pointing at Yellow Drip filling the screen. “DORA’s gone exploring somewhere, so we need a landing vector and a means of handling this lump of metal. If you can find a way to override the security system and give me control of this heap of junk, I think I can land us, OK? Can you do that?”

Sirm’s skin had already turned blue with fear. Her extremities were still green though, so I knew I wasn’t entirely forgiven.

She put a two-fingered hand on each hip. “You want me to override all the safety systems, something nobody has ever done before in the history of space travel, something that’s expressly forbidden by every protocol, and hand over complete control of this vessel to you? A human?” She looked me up and down with one of her chameleon-like eyes while the other was looking over the console. I hated it when she did that. I never knew if she was looking at me, or for me.

“Yes.” I pulled myself tall and pushed back my shoulders into what I hoped was a heroic pose. “Yes. I know I only hired this junker for the trip but I, Zachariah Zook the third, aka Zack, the human, am going to save your lizard hide.” I jabbed a finger at her. “Now, can you do it? Time’s-a-wasting here.”

She stood looking at me with what I thought was disdain, judging by the purple patch that appeared on her skin for a full ten seconds, then she shrugged and said, “Sure, why not.” She reached out one curved finger and flipped a switch on the console. “There you go.”

The second the words left her mouth, alarm klaxons bellowed.

I grabbed what was left of the captain and heaved him out of the chair, depositing him against a wall which the captain’s body slid slowly down, leaving a bloody smear.

Then I jumped into the sticky seat.

With no recent training, no history of flying this kind of ship, no co-pilot, and my usual high-level bad luck, I didn’t hold out too much hope of saving our asses, but I was going to try.

“Kill those alarms and give me an entry vector.”

Sirm shifted the first mate with difficulty then eased slowly into the chair, her skin turning yellow in disgust at the blood and gore.

“Quickly, Sirm, they’re driving me crazy,” I yelled.

The alarms went silent at Sirm’s deft touch.

“Entry vector three-eight-seven,” she said while she killed as many flashing red lights as she could.

I thought back to my pilot training—most of which had passed me by, shrouded by the cloud of tranceweed I seemed to have existed numbly within for those two years—desperately hoping enough of it sank in sufficiently for me to remember now, then I pressed the comms button again.

“How’s the life-support coming, Deena?”

“Nearly there. It should kick in any second.”

“Great. You’d better strap in, this could be bumpy.”

“You ready?” I asked Sirm who had already strapped in and was slowly turning blue again.

She nodded, and that instant, we hit the atmosphere with the ship’s shields at a hundred percent. The glow was adjusted automatically by the screens, and it seemed like only seconds had passed before I had to grab the manual flight controls as our craft emerged into the atmosphere, pitching and yawing in the turbulent Yellow Drip air.

We were being buffeted around, throwing us both from side to side in our seats.

“What’s the gravity reading,” I yelled over the rumbling noise of atmospheric flight. Whatever it was, I wanted this ship down on the surface and everybody onboard safe… me included. Trying to fly it was like trying to wrangle an out-of-control horse and cart, and I remembered then why I never became a pilot.

Because it sucked.

“One point two Earth gravity.”

“Shit, so I gotta come in higher and slower, right?”

Sirm’s left eye swivelled slowly to look at me. “I’m a technician, not a pilot.” If she had any eyebrows, I’m pretty sure one would have been raised at me.

Helpful… not.

I gulped and concentrated on the controls, constantly adjusting the trim to keep the ship level.

As the ground came more and more into focus, I set the scanners to look for a safe landing spot, while I concentrated on keeping everyone alive.

At last, a flashing dot appeared on screen, and I set the course and speed to get us there as soon as possible.

A minute later, a large, flat, sparsely vegetated plain between some low, steep hills appeared before me.

I pitched up the front end of the ship to aid slowing to landing speed and retro-fired rockets to gently slow the ship even further.

“Ready?” Sirm said.

I nodded. It made sweat run down my face, but I couldn’t spare a hand to wipe it away.

I wasn’t ready, but I was desperate, and in my experience, desperate men do really stupid things, like imagining they could fly a ship when they obviously couldn’t.

Sirm spoke calmly. “Engines powering down. Hover rockets in ten, nine, eight, six—”

“You missed seven.”

“Huh?”

“You missed seven you stupid lizard. Look, no time now. Hit those hover rockets before we drop out of the sky.”

Sirm sat, counting up to three, which took a while as she only had two digits on either hand. Then she nodded and with one eye on me, she hit the button.

My stomach tried to erupt out of my ass, curing my constipation forever as the rockets kicked in, rapidly slowing the momentum of the ship, and prompting a series of loud, ear-piercing screams and retches from Deena that hadn’t needed the comms system to echo through to the flight deck.

I couldn’t spare a second to find out what the problem was. I just hoped the thing that killed the crew wasn’t scooping out Deena’s brain right at that moment.

 The entire craft lowered to a three-second hover within six feet of the surface.

“You dropped the landing gear, right?” Sirm asked, her nearest eye still looking at me.

I swivelled both eyes over the console, hearing my heart pounding in my ears.

“Shit. No.”

My stomach leaped up then, trying to escape through my throat as the ship dropped the last six feet like a stone, crashing onto the surface.

I must have missed the landing gear lesson.

Metal shards erupted through the floor as the cargo bay below the bridge collapsed, forcing its contents upward.

Eventually the creaks and groans subsided, and so did the noises the ship was making.

“Everyone OK?” I kind of yelled and coughed at the same time through clouds of dust.

“I’m fine,” Sirm said, having checked herself over already. She was faffing about with the buttons in front of her, but it looked like we’d lost power completely.

Her skin was bright green!

I knew what was coming soon.

“I’m OK,” Deena yelled from back in the ship.

“So why all the screaming? Did something happen back there?” I shouted back, remembering the brain-eating things I wasn’t talking about just yet.

“Err, yeah.”

“What was it, Deena, come on?” I asked.

“When the ship slowed down fast?” Deena’s shrill voice grew louder as she approached the bridge.

“Yeah?”

“The bathroom door flew open. You really are a pig, Zack.”