IF: Mishap on the Starseeker

[mDuo13]

(( This is an Interactive Fiction topic. Interactive Fiction is a lot like roleplaying, only it's a story and not a game. Basic rules are: continue the story with a new post, try to use correct spelling, syntax and grammar if possible, and don't do stupid stuff like killing off everyone's characters. Characters are not the characters we all use in Shireroth, though they can be similar if you want. You don't have to make your own character, just go ahead and use the characters in the previous posts, most of the time. (it's okay to add a new character once in a while) For the most part, just follow my lead and make things up as you go along. ))Kefrey glanced at his chrono. 18:00 standard time. That meant that dinner should be served pretty soon. He stared listlessly out the viewport of the shuttle Starseeker, at the bland starscape outside. He couldn't see Earth, or the moon, or even his destination, Armstrong space colony. He yawned. The shuttle's scratchy, lumpy seats didn't allow easily for sleep. The stupid Orbital Transfers company was notoriously cheap, and for a reason. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a stewardess pushing what looked to be a heated food cart down the aisle; he turned his head and looked. It was, and she was handing out hot plates of something that didn't look entirely appetizing, or smell it. Ugh. Cheap food, too, he thought. As she drew nearer to his seat, Kefrey watched the stewardess. She actually was pretty good-looking. The fancy Orbital Transfers uniform -- one of those new Nanofiber instant-spacesuit deals, Kefrey noted -- fit her well. He wondered how likely it was she'd need it, though. It wasn't like the shuttle was going to hit anything and start losing pressure. Besides, the shuttle was pressurized separately for each chamber separately. If they depressurized in one chamber, she'd never make it to the other one before the automatic airlock closed, even with the airtight Nanosuit. She's just be stuck in this one without air, and the suit would just prolong her death. Kefrey supposed maybe it was a matter of making the stewardesses feel secure, no matter how secure they really were. He rolled his eyes.As the stewardess reached Kefrey's seat -- Kiara, her name tag said -- she asked Kefrey whether he would like the soy steak or the bean lasagna. Kefrey was no fan of soy steak, and the cheap shuttle one would probably be really terrible, so he opted for the bean lasagna, though he figured it wouldn't be too great either. Probably give him gas. She reached inside the cart and dug around a bit looking for a bean lasagna, which seemed to be in shorter supply than the soy steaks, Kefrey noted, doubtlessly because the other patrons of the shuttle were as wary of it as he, and while she was doing so Kefrey decided that she was not bad looking at all. As she leaned over, however, to pass his food past the obese man on the inside seat, the shuttle suddenly lurched -- it was so bad, in fact, that she lost her footing and hit the obese man's traytable. Kefrey was startled to notice that the main lights had gone out, and that instead the red "Emergency" warning light was flashing. A mixed chorus of screams, grumbles, and curious utterings filled the shuttle chamber. Kefrey stood up quickly, and he helped the fat man raise Kiara to her feet. She was conscious, but she held one hand just below her ribs."Are you alright?" he asked."Fine. It's just that the corner of the tray table caught me in the rib here. I'll be alright; I'm just going to have a bruise." As she looked down at her stomach where it hurt, she noticed that she had gravy from the fat man's soy steak all over her. "Eew. I'm covered!"Kefrey made a sympathetic face and handed her his napkin. "Here. You have any idea what's wrong?"She took it, and shook her head. "No. As a matter of fact, this has never happened. If I remember right, the only time that light goes off is when something is... well, when something is very wrong." Her voice became a little shaky at the end."Great," Kefrey mumbled under his breath. As he watched Kiara somewhat nervously wipe gravy off her uniform, and he saw how easily it came out -- another byproduct of the Nanofiber, he realized, beginning to wonder if he might want a suit like that himself. He realized, with a silent, wry laugh, that she might get a chance to see how well her instant-spacesuit worked, after all. Edited by: mDuo13 at: 2/8/04 9:50 pm

[Gman Russell]

The shuttle rocked violently again, much to the distress of the stewardess and the rest of the patronage. Something flashed by the small window near him, catching his attention. Looking out, he saw small chunks whizzing by. "a meteor shower?" he looked back to the stewardess, "I think we were just hit by something." This information made the stewardess nearly shriek, but she managed to stop just in time; though her pale face said it all. "Oh... dear... no..."

[mDuo13]

Kefrey wasted no time complaining and worrying. Edging his way into the aisle past the fat man and Kiara, he asked her, "What's emergency procedure in this situation?"She replied, stricken and stuttering, "W-well... I d-d-don't quite kn-know... I th-think the pilots will an-anounce s-something over the l-l-loudspeaker..."Kefrey nodded in understanding, and waited a few moments. Nothing. The cabin didn't seem to be depressurizing, though. He stared back out the window in astonishment. Small fragments continued to whizz by. Then, suddenly, he was taken aback, squinting his eyes. "Wait a second. That's no meteor shower..."Another voice in the cabin said it all: "Those things are alive!"

[SSFSX17]

Kefrey looked out the viewport again. He saw a shining form attach itself to the port, and then he realized precisely what they were. He knew this moment was coming all along. It was the worst possible time for it to happen. He should have already been in the safety of his office building, but no such luck today.He turned back to the people in the shuttle. "Alright, people, listen up. If any of you brought your personal sidearms, you'll need them right now. And tell the Captain to call for the marines, not the fleet."A distant person in the cabin was already on to him. The same one who recognized that the fragments were alive. "No way. No f-ing way. We're being attacked by organohazards? No way. We're just people, I mean, come on! Who's gonna wanna suck the average joe inside out with those things?"Kefrey knew who, but was not telling.

[mDuo13]

Kefrey reached into his boot and picked up a small metal stick - rectangular, about 6 inches long, 3 wide, and a quarter inch thick - and flicked it open into a personal Projectile Cell Disruptor. The stewardess drew in a quick breath of air and stepped back, surprise. The fat man just grunted unintelligeably. Kefrey noticed that few others had anything on them, though here and there he saw others with their own PCDs. He was glad that security didn't confiscate anything that couldn't penetrate the airlocks or walls.The vibrating of one window, two rows up and to his right, alerted him to the imminent entry of one of the organohazard assailants. As he shoved his way past started civilians, he watched it coming through the window with a peculiar fixation, even though he had seen the process before. It was one of the small Infiltrator organohazards, just about as big around as a softball squished flat, and with millions of tiny phlagella-like wings on its edges, and a thin, dark proboscis in the center. They didn't have eyes; they didn't need any, because they hunted by heat and God-knows-what-else. As the wings affixed themselves to the outer windows by some kind of biological adhesive, the proboscis was driven into the window, piercing it so cleanly as to not create a single crack. Then, the amazing part occurred. The Infiltrator began to flow inward toward its proboscis, and melted into a sickening green color which flowed through the proboscis and thereby the window, spreading, hardening, and eventually reforming itself into a mirror image of the Infiltrator on the inside of the vacuum-glass, without even breaking air pressure; Kefrey knew that the tiny piercing in the window was filled by the same adhesive agent that secured the organohazard on the outside of the craft. After all, if you were going to kill someone in space, you couldn't make sure you had done the job right in the chaos of an exploding, depressurized shuttle.The organohazard finished transferring itself into the craft, and Kefrey shoved someone out of his way to point his PCD at it, and fire its ray at the thing.The Cell Disruptor is a mechanism which creates a chemical reaction in the cell membrane's proteins, causing a total breakdown in the structure of an organic cell, and turning whatever living thing it hits into a disorganized mass of cytoplasm and cell organelles -- pretty much just jelly. Its ray of isotopes of this element and that caused a rippling distortion in the air, not unlike that of waves of heat rising off concrete. It flew out to the organohazard in a little ray, just an inch or two across, and where it hit, the organohazard's thick exoskeleton bubbled and exploded, like plastic caught in a fire. The organohazard lost its grip on the window and hit the floor of the shuttle, next to a dim-looking woman in an ugly dress, who screeched as little bits of slime oozed out of it in the general direction of her foot, though it never really stood a chance of going there. The untouched part twitched a little, but, deprived of its nucleus, couldn't move, and its insides soon dried up into a crusty mess.Kefrey didn't have time to watch all this, however, because as soon as he had shot it, another Infiltrator came in through a window on the other side and a few rows away. "Get it while it reorients itself to the inside of the ship!" he shouted to anyone who would listen. "It stops for a second once gets in!"

[SSFSX17]

Over and over again, organohazards dared to show themselves and get melted down into piles of ooze.It was a fundamental struggle of mankind: A few good men with powerful tools fending off a horde of small disgusting creatures in outer space. What mankind did not expect was that these creatures would be provided by genetech companies researching a weapon that did not leave nasty chemicals or radiation. Kefrey wondered if this moment was the final karmic retribution for his involvement with the whole deal.It was not. He saw the organohazards cease to appear, and he also saw that the shuttle was mostly intact. The stewardess and most of the other people were hiding under their seats, some of them with bite marks and missing patches of skin.The captain's voice came through the intercom, "This is the captain speaking, all the organohazards have been dealt with. You may return to your seats. As a safety precaution, the militia alert light will remain on for a half hour. Thank you for keeping your calm and have a nice ride."The people mostly failed to comply. Some of them even began to cry. Kefrey guessed that it was the first time for almost everyone here. He should have known as much: it was a spaceliner so cheap that nobody could have possibly even been within a kilometer of any high-profile target."That was rough," commented the fat man. "Who invited the bugs over, anyhow?" He looked at Kefrey with a penetrating glare. That gave Kefrey a big clue, or perhaps it was just the inherent paranoia of his occupation.

[mDuo13]

"I don't know," replied Kefrey, shaking his head. "I don't know. But I wish I did." Secretly, he was observing everyone in the chamber and looking for out of place behavoir. A cultivated brush of the hair as they stood up and straightened themselves out, an all-too-calm appearance after a near-death situation; any of these things could signify a person who was aware that their life had not been in danger -- and anyone who was not preprogrammed into the bugs' behavioral DNA was in danger. It was theoretically possible for an organohazard's DNA to be reverse-engineered to give the characteristics of whomever they were supposed to spare, but such methods were flawed. First, it required a sample to be frozen in a sterile container almost immediatelly after it's death, or even while it was still alive, before it was brought to the lab, and no such containers were on board a standard spaceliner, let alone one as cheap as the Starkseeker. The other was that even if the analysis could be performed, the bugs' DNA could be programmed to spare innocent people, thus throwing a "red herring," so to speak, into investigators' paths.Kefrey wiped his PCD off on the bottom of his shirt, leaving some dark smudges of melted organohazard behind, and folded it back up, then placed it back into his boot. He figured that it would be a good idea to clean up the rest of the shuttle chamber, too, and asked the stewardess how they would do it, and she shakily pointed him back to the airline personell's station, where a few cleanup robots were stored, as well as some decidedly lower-tech towels. Kefrey was surprised that the ship even had cleanup robots, until he saw them, because they were of course entirely outdated and probably disfunctional. Nevertheless, he had them set to work, and handed out some towels and even a couple boxes of moist hand-wipes out to some of the less-stricken patrons. The stewardess managed to procure a first-aid kit, to help the wounded, and slowly the passengers began to put themselves back together. The ship itself, on the other hand, was damaged more than its contents, and sudden coughs by its fusion engines made it lurch unsteadily. It lasted a few hours, though, long enough for a rescue ship to come its way. The two ships docked, and the passengers disembarked to the Armstrong patrol ship, to be carried to the colony and held for questioning, decontamination, and medical treatment; the pilot felt that the shuttle was in good enough shape to save, so the patrol crew latched it up to the rescue ship, and the pilot stayed inside to manage it while it was towed to the colony.During the next half-hour, Kefrey reconsidered the events of the past few hours. He wondered how they had survived. With just a handful of people fighting the organohazards, they shouldn't have been able to hold out. Perhaps, he mused wryly, he had not been their target after all. If he was, he realized more gravely, then it might've been just a warning, and the real threat would come later. He wondered who else might've been the target -- the other one who recognized the organohazards? The fat man? Or someone else, even, who was even better at masking their emotions than Kefrey had bargained for?Finally, the rescue ship docked at the Armstrong colony, and they were unloaded. For some time they stood in line at a visitation booth, and showed their passports one by one. Kefrey was near the back of the line, so he had plenty of time to waste. Eventually he came to the booth, though, and showed them his passport."Mr. Kefrey... Jinoth?" the guard read off his passport."Yes.""Just a moment."Kefrey narrowed his eyes. "What?"The guard clicked through a few pages of notices on his computer screen, then paused. Kefrey waited, wishing he could see what the guard was looking at."It says here I'm supposed to turn you in to security."Kefrey repeated, "What?" He didn't know what Armstrong security had against him. He hadn't done anything illegal -- at least, not that they should know about -- and he was surprised that word had been given to the visitation control to pick him up. He wondered if perhaps this might be the bite to the earlier warning of the organohazards. If it was, he didn't understand the reasoning behind the original attack at all. Nevertheless, the terminal was crowded, and Kefrey didn't think he'd be able to evade the cops for long, so he went willingly with security when they showed up.

[SSFSX17]

One of the law enforcement officers took out a small cylindrical device the size of a finger. The officer took his hand. Kefrey closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. When he opened his eyes again, he saw a drop of blood drip from his finger while the guard read the sheet-projection from his device."What ever happened to good old-fashioned fingerprinting and eye-scanning?" he exclaimed. "I am a very important member of Allied Cloning, and I do not appreciate being treated as a common criminal.""Listen here, mister Jinoth," replied the officer. "We get a sample of your psycho-pattern with one o' these. We weren't testing yer DNA or anything, ya know, cuz it's so easy to change that nowadays. That's your bidness, ain't it? Now lets see 'ere... Kefrey Jinoth, employ-yee of Allied Cloning, don't say what your job is, don't say what you do or anythin'. We're going to have a talk real quick.""Unless you can provide me with the warrant for my arrest, I must be on my way." He readjusted his coat and walked off.By the time he woke up from the floor, the officer was making a threatening gesture with his sin stick. Kefrey regretted making the necessary advances for such devices to be possible, because they were absolutely useless to his own company yet enabled this officer to literally hit him with the warrant itself. "I get the point." He sat up and brushed off his nice suit. "Aren't there laws against police brutality?""If the stick burns ya, yer not inno-sent. Ya musta been the one we gotta talk to if ya scream from one o' them." The officer pulled him up from the floor. "Now, do ya wanna do this the easy way or tha hard way?""Which ways are those?""Ya talk orelse ya squawk.""Psycho-pattern probes are only allowable by direct permission from the President himself.""Ya got all the permissen ya need from the stick."Kefrey knew the officer was right. He was starting to remember the data from the stick attack, and he was in very deep trouble.

[mDuo13]

Kefrey saw that there was going to be no easy way out, and if he tried to resist, it would only get more painful. Kefrey knew that nobody could put up with the pain that modern torture devices inflicted, especially the psycho-pattern probe.There might be a way out, though. They had his psycho-pattern now, which meant that it would be very easy for them to detect whether or not he was lying, even if he cooperated. But, he realized, if he talked, and told the truth, just not the important part of the truth, he might be able to get away with it. He certainly didn't want to make them use the hard way, because there were a lot of thoughts locked away in his brain that he didn't even want himself to know about, let alone some Armstrong security officer. First, though, he had to figure out what the police wanted. He held up his hands in surrender, and said, "Okay, okay, I'll talk. What do you need to know about?"