Page 22 of There’s an Alien Down My Chimney

“Engaging artificial gravity, now,” the ship added. I fell down into Ru’s lap at the return of gravity and I was immediately impressed, how was a tiny ship (relatively speaking), generating gravity? Didn’t it need some kind of rotational force for that?

Now that we were off the planet, I figured I could finally turn around and properly celebrate this moment. It wasn’t every day I declared my love to someone, so I intended to give it all the pomp and circumstance it deserved. Except a warning light flashed on and then an alarm started blaring obnoxiously inside the tiny space.

I didn’t need to ask what was going on, I could see it on the viewscreens a second later. A spaceship and it was not the ISS, that would have been pretty cool. This ship immediately set me on edge. It was big and black, with a sleek form and a huge engine glowing green at the back of the vessel. It had swung around from behind the moon and while the letters painted on the side of the vessel were not in a script I could read, I was pretty sure that it would say something like ‘warship first class: predator.’ Nobody was ever original when naming a warship in my experience.

“Fuck,” Ru hissed over my shoulder, “Of course, the Dragnell have a warship in orbit, at least it’s not as fast as the Scintilla by the looks of it.” That would have been my assessment too, but right then, hatches spiraled open on the sides of the ship and smaller spacecraft shot out, swarming toward us. Those did look fast.

“Take the yoke, you can outfly those right, sweetheart?” Ru said and he put my hands on the controls and let go. I floundered for a second, shocked that he’d just entrusted a freaking spaceship to me.

“What do you mean? I can outfly those? You’re the spaceship pilot!” I said, my voice higher-pitched from the shock. Was he crazy? Why would he trust me to fly a ship in space when I’d never done that before? Right as we were about to be attacked by other ships?

“I’m not a pilot really,” Ru said casually while he reached out and flipped open a panel in the side of the console. He pulled out a long black cable and brought it up, his voice was grim as he spoke, and when I looked over my shoulder at him, his expression was even grimmer. Lifting the Santa hat aside, he brought the cable up to his head, and with a grimace on his face, plugged it straight into his skull.

“What the fuck?” I said, but there was no time for more questions. Something struck the hull of the ship, vibrating through us. I clenched my hands around the yoke and tried to let my instincts take over, rolling the vessel away from the threat, and pushing on the throttle to give us more speed. It was strange not to feel any of the g-forces on my body as I did that, the artificial gravity kept things feeling like I was simply standing on Earth.

“That artifact is about to go off, if we want to have any hope of riding it back to my time, I’m going to have to navigate,” Ru said. It explained something, but not all. I risked glancing over my shoulder to look at the cylinder we’d risked so much to retrieve, shocked to realize that the ends were glowing blue. Something was happening.

I clenched my fists around the yoke, focusing on the ships following us, the one thing I had control over. I could do this.

Chapter 16

Ru’ol

I was dreading the sensation of connecting with the ship’s navigational computer. I had once sworn never to plug in again, not without Ar’tax at my side, and since he was dead… I was pretty sure that Ar’tax would be yelling at me to get going, to rescue my female if he was here right now.

Hovering on the edge of engaging with the computer, I checked once again what the artifact was doing. Its glow was spreading, but the spread was much slower than it had been last time, though it had already been glowing when I started reeling it in. How long did we have until it was fully charged?

Entering the radio frequency Pike had made me memorize into the communications console was just a distraction, putting off the inevitable for just a few more minutes. Then I explained to Stella what I’d done and that she had a moment to speak to her friend, to assure him we’d made it. “That’s a radio frequency, so anyone tuned into it can hear it, be careful with what you say.”

The warning was unnecessary, Stella was probably more used to working with radio than I was. My ship could broadcast them but I’d never used them before, it was very outdated technology. She was tense in my lap, as tense as I was about what I was going to do in just a minute, but she seemed to handle the Scintilla like she’d done it a million times before.

“Ru and I made it up, but holy crap, there’s this huge spaceship up here. Anyone with a telescope needs to aim it at the fucking sky right now!” Stella immediately announced, with no hesitation or shyness about speaking to the planet rapidly fading behind us. “Thank you everyone for your help, I love you, and I know I will be happy. I wish the same for all of you. Farewell Earth.”

I tapped the off button for her when she finished speaking, then rubbed her shoulder because I could hear the emotion that had choked up her voice at those last words. I felt a sense of sadness too, at knowing that I’d never see that planet again, as pristine and whole as it was now. In my future, Stella and I could visit it perhaps, but it would never look like this again. Not under the control of the UAR.

The viewscreen still showed several vessels in pursuit of us, and if I wasn’t mistaken, they’d powered up their weapons. “I’m going to feed you navigational data at a rapid pace, see that map? Just follow the green line, as much as you can. You can lock in a course with that button,” I added, tapping it. She gulped, scared of being in charge of flying. No wonder, she couldn’t even properly read what was on the screens.

I had to offer a final warning, and I needed to rush through these words as I could see the blue glow of the artifact crawl over the walls toward us. “I haven’t plugged in and navigated in years, I might get lost, I might burn out. If you notice that I’m unresponsive… Pull out the cable.” I didn’t want to contemplate those options, but the risk was real, I’d sustained extremely severe brain trauma that day when Ar’tax died. I had a clean bill of health now, but the stressors of navigating with my implant again… It could be harmful.

“What do you mean!” Stella demanded, right as I connected with the computer and the world faded around me. My vision was now a kaleidoscope of colors, whirling around me like a storm. I was struck with awe all over again, witnessing something that few ever did. The possibilities that lay at my fingertips were endless, with so much knowledge I could now access, or calculate in the blink of an eye.

“Ru!” Stella’s panicked voice pierced through the distractions, pulling me back from the risk of drifting away. “I love you Ru, but I swear to God if you conk out now…” I curled my arms more tightly around her middle, responding to her nearness, using her presence to anchor myself, to find the focus I needed. It was so different from how Ar’tax used to ground me with his steadiness and calm.

“I love you, Stella. I know what I’m fighting for, I will get us where we need to go. You just fly that green line, and avoid the guns.” She made an angry hissing noise, but I felt how she softened against me, how her focus returned to the controls of the ship. Just to ease her into it, I started off with a few easy course alterations and I could see how she picked them up immediately, her focus on steering the Scintilla where I directed.

Plugged into the console I could access the sensor readings and analyze them in microseconds. While that didn’t allow me to fully understand the artifact, it was shielded so the Scintilla’s sensors couldn’t penetrate. I could understand what it was affecting, what it was doing. That knowledge was fleeting, as soon as I unplugged, my brain would struggle to hold onto it. Right now, I knew just when we’d be making the jump to the future, and I could set a course that would lead me back to Strewn, and back to the moment I’d left. I hoped.

“Are you crazy?” Stella squeaked, “That’s going to send us directly into the sun!” Yeah, it would, if we weren’t leaping to the future at right that moment. She sounded more confident now, and I was glad that she already understood how to read the charts on the console. She was a fine pilot.

“Trust me, sweetheart, plot the course,” I said, my vision spinning from the colors cascading all around me. I had all the answers right here, plugged in, my confidence soared and I knew I had the course we needed, the timing just right. As long as nothing unpredictable happened, we’d surf this artifact’s coming wave right back into the moment when I’d left.

*

Stella

Despite my intrinsic desire not to fly straight into the sun and burn to a crisp, I pressed the button that locked in the course Ru had calculated. I did trust him, and the point was to use this artifact to leap us to the future, so I had to believe that it would. I didn’t understand what he was doing, or what he saw, and I was terrified his ominous warning was going to come true. What if he collapsed? What if he hurt himself? I didn’t know how to help him, and I didn’t know anything about the place we’d end up at.

On the viewscreens I could see that three ships were still on our tail, despite the crazy instructions Ru had fed me. Darting the ship around, flying in loops that had almost caused our pursuers to crash into each other. Maybe this final stretch, heading into the sun, was going to dissuade them from following us.