Space Rescue

Space Rescue

This piece is inspired by the story 'Eleven Pipers', written by yours truly, in the book 'Twelve Days', available through Amazon. It forms part of the background to the war between humans and Nisalans.

Background: The war between humans and the Nisalan aliens has been raging for centuries. No-one is sure exactly what started the war but it had something to do with the 'Offside Rule'. It is doubtful anyone on either side knows the origin of the obscure law. The Nisalans look like 1.5m tall, roughly cylindrical amoebae, with locomotory and manipulative appendages, and their internal organs can be seen roiling around in the bluish-greenish protoplasm.

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Nisalan satellite station Rostov was parked in geosynchronous orbit over the third moon of the planet Quina, fourth planet in the Bellaset system. The moon itself, having no mineral resources or strategic value worth speaking of, had no name, other than its official Terran classification: Bellaset Four Gamma.

Ellis crept along the darkened, frost-coated corridor, lit sporadically by emergency lights and glow panels. The station was deserted, or so intel had indicated, but there were still combat droids and remote sentry guns to avoid. Hence her slow progess. The air would have frozen her lungs by now had it not been for the night-suit that clung to every contour of her body, feeding her body with oxygen scrubbed from the station's atmosphere and warmed to standard temperature.

Her communicator chirped quietly. The arrow on its screen changed direction slightly, indicating a path which followed the curve of the station's corridor. Ellis padded silently for a few more metres, the sounds of her footfalls masked by the night-suit. The communicator beeped, the arrow changed to an exclamation mark and Ellis realised he has reached her goal.

The door to the lab was, of course, locked, by triple-layered security systems and requiring two biometric inputs and a ten character hexadecimal passcode. She knew the code, that bit was easy. Terran Federation spies had gathered intel on the station, and the code, purchased at astronomical price, had been downloaded into her night-suit's on-board computer. The biometrics would be trickier but the aluminium flask hitched to her webbing contained what he needed.

The flask was below-zero and divided into two compartments. One contained an optical organ, of sorts, and the other a selection of manipulative cilia which served the Nisalans as fingers. The optical organ was slippery with congealed protoplasm and it took Ellis several attempts to free it from the flask and press it into the optical scanner. One light came on green. The cilia were trickier still. There were eight cilia and they had to be pressed against the scanner in the correct order. A laminated index card provided Ellis with the sequence. The second light glowed green. He had memorised the hex-code and typed ther into the panel. The third light came on and the door to the lab opened.

Like the rest of the deserted station, the lab was in darkness. Ellis didn't need much light. The goggles on her night-suit amplified available light and gave a greenish tinge to everything she saw.

The bio-cell, a coffin-sized prison capsule intended to keep the captive unconscious, alive and mentally 'accessible' (the thought chilled Ellis) to its interrogators, was wired into the centre of the room. Floating in the thick, yellow gunge was the target of ther rescue mission. A young man by the name of Darius Pugh, supposedly a high-level intelligence asset and double-agent working for both the Terrans and the Nisalans. Why she hadn't been ordered to simply shoot the traitor was a question above her pay grade.

She threw the lever that emptied the bio-cell, the ugly yellow fluid draining away to heaven-knew where with an even uglier sound. Once emptied, the capsule's hatch opened and, coughing, choking and vomiting, Darius Pugh fell forward out of his prison.

Ellis did not attempt to catch the agent, who fell and landed with a loud thump on the deckplates. Pugh groaned and Ellis took that as a good sign and hauled him to his feet. Wires that had allowed the Nisalans to probe his brain snapped or were pulled from his scalp, leaving angry red scars on his shaved head.

"Come with me," she ordered, as she almost dragged the agent to the door.

"Who are you?" he asked in a weak voice.

Ellis ignored the question. "I'm here to get you off this crate and back to civilisation."

"Why?"

"Beats me," she admitted. "You're a traitor. I'd just as happily shoot you," she added, chillingly, resting her hand on the butt of her trazer pistol, "but orders are orders."

Together, they staggered to the array of escape capsules on the port side of the station. "Get in," Ellis said.

"This is an escape pod," he protested. "It'll never get us back to a Terran zone."

"Leave that to me," Ellis said, as she forced Pugh into the capsule at gunpoint. Nisalan vessels were not built for Terran-standard body types, so Ellis rigged a cargo web across the capsule, tied the spy into the heavy duty straps and belted herself in. "Going down," she said, and kicked the release lever.

Explosive bolts powered the escape capsule from the station and the little lifeboat began its freefall to Bellaset Four Gamma, where a Terran Federation insertion force was waiting.