Page 5 of Caveman Alien's Heat
All right. The married girls aren’t too interested in this, but Morgan and I are. Very much. This saucer is our only hope of maybe getting home to Earth, and I want to find out how to fly it.
At least I want to figure out the basic concepts. It doesn’t look as difficult as flying an airplane, more like driving a very simple car.
I glance at the compartment where Theodora put the proto-Plood. I don’t want to see him, so I leave it alone.
I take hold of the cold, alien material of the joystick-like thing mounted on the central console. I wish I’d played more video games that used those instead of the usual controller, but I’ll do my best anyway.
I look over the strange symbols glowing softly across the panels. Most of them mean absolutely nothing to me. They are little spirals, triangles, and shapes that might as well be hieroglyphs. Still, some things feel familiar in a universal, “vehicle-like” way. The joystick sits in the center like it expects to be used, and there’s a row of smooth, raised buttons along the edge of the console. “Okay,” I mutter to myself, “just a quick look. No flying.” I reach out and press one of the smaller buttons.
Instantly, the blue glow brightens, and the curved walls around the cockpit flicker. Panels that looked solid a moment ago suddenly come alive, turning transparent as viewscreens bloom across the interior. The jungle, the red rock of the mountain, thedark jungle below—all of it appears around me in crisp detail, like I’m sitting inside a glass bubble.
“Whoa.” I lean forward, fascinated, turning the joystick slightly just to see what happens. The saucer answers with a low, rising hum. That seems like a good sign… or maybe not. I quickly move my hand away and scan the console again. One of the larger buttons pulses slowly with a pale blue light. That has to be something simple, right? Maybe it says “start engine.” That’s exactly what I need now. Once I get that far, I can turn everything off, sneak back out, and see if I can make more progress some other night. Or maybe Morgan can. We really should take turns with this.
I press it.
The reaction is immediate. The whole saucer lurches sideways with a sickening wobble, as if it dangles on a thread.
I tap my chin. “Okay, that’s notideal…”
The hum explodes into a roaring vibration, and the craft shoots straight upward like a bottle rocket. The mountain drops away so fast my stomach flips as I drop to my butt, as my knees can’t resist the upward push from the floor.
“Shit!”
The viewscreens whirl with dizzying motion as the saucer wobbles wildly, climbing higher and higher into the dark sky before suddenly leveling out. A moment later, the movement stops.
Silence.
My hands grip the console as I stare out at the endless sea of dark jungle spread beneath me, with the occasional little pinprick of a campfire. The Red Mountain is a tiny red dot now.
I swallow hard.
“Great,” I whisper to the empty saucer. “I’m a thousand feet in the air… and I have absolutely no idea how to land this thing.”
3
- Nator’ax-
I jerk awake. The floor is moving, and I’m being pushed into it in the most alarming way.
I fight my way to a standing position, cracking my head against a low ceiling. What on Xren is going on?
Ah. It’s the Plood ship, the saucer. And I am hiding in a space under the floor in order to spy on Dex and find out what he does with this thing. Just as Chief Korr’ax ordered.
But that yelp… that wasn’t the drone’s screechy voice. That was something very different.
The movement stops, and I quietly lift the hidden plate above, then stick my head up out of the hole, partly to be able to stretch my back. From this angle, I can’t see what’s going on and who’s in here. But I can see where I am—high above the jungle. The Red Rock is only a small shape, far below.
I steady myself on the floor to not fall over from sheer dizziness. This thing is flying. And it must be Dex?—
There’s a muted muttering from somewhere I can’t see. “Damn alien bullshit saucer… nothing makes sense…”
Although the words are alien, it doesn’t sound like Dex. It sounds like a boy, or maybe even—I swallow—one of the women.
What do I do? Chief Korr’ax only wanted me to spy on Dex, not on the women. But he also didn’t know that one of them would start to fly around in this thing.
My aversion to spending possibly a long time hiding under that low ceiling makes it easy to decide. I haul myself out of the small hole and replace the plate, then turn the corner.
Indeed there is a person. A small one with a round shape.
