Trapped on an Alien Spacecraft

[OregonWriter14]

Trapped
on an
Alien Spacecraft

OOC & Discussion Thread​

Burt Lerner skidded to a stop and pointed toward a gap between two tall stacks of cargo containers. "Here! Through here!"

He and eight others -- men, women, and older teens -- turned and squeezed through the crevice, only to pop out into an even more open and exposed location. Behind them, they could here the familiar sound of the Yorno's stun guns, followed by the screams of fear and agony of the slower moving escapees.

"Here!" he hollered, turning and rushing for the open doors of a partially filled cargo container. After the others were safely inside, Burt and another man muscled the big doors shut. "Shhhh... We need to be quiet. Please."

It looked for a while as if they'd escaped their pursuers: the sound of the disabling weapons and the heart breaking human exclamations ended, and soon the only sound Burt could hear was the soft whispers and muted sobs of those surrounding him.

Then, a distant roar of an engine neared, and before he could react, the doors of the cargo container were locked by Yorno shipyard workers. The sound he'd heard was a container mover, now latching onto and lifting Burt and the others into the air ... for loading onto the very deep space transport they'd been trying to avoid...

(FYI: This is going to be a story about 9 humans who find themselves on an alien spacecraft heading out into deep space. If you are interested in writing a character, PM me.)

 

[OregonWriter14]

"That was stupid."

In the darkness of the container, Burt couldn't see the source of the criticism, but he knew that it was the man they called Jax. Burt also knew that the younger man's criticism was meant for him.

"I guess we could have stayed out in the open," Burt said in his typically soft tone, "gotten caught, gotten punished, possibly gotten killed ... then ended up on this ship anyway."

That was the end of the conversation. Burt wasn't the confrontational type: it wasn't his nature. He'd been groomed for the past three years to be what the Yorno called a "PL", physical laborer. He'd been destined for one of the aliens' Earth-like moons, where -- if he was lucky -- he'd slave away for ten or fifteen years before dying of exhaustion, exposure, or non-native environmental conditions.

Jax was the confrontational type. His path had been much different than the other man's. He'd been destined for the Yorno home world, where he'd be pitted against other humans, other alien creatures, or both in to-the-death games upon which the alien masters would wage large sums of money.

But, he let the conversation die as well. Despite the fucked up situation in which they'd found themselves, the other man was right: this had been the better of two horrible choices, and timing simply hadn't been on their side.

"Where are they taking us?" a woman asked in the dark. "Are they putting us on the ship?"

After a moment of nothing, Burt said only, "Probably."



The next minutes felt like hours as the container was dropped onto an automated transfer system and moved about the transport's interior until it was packed in amongst thousands of containers just like it.

Soon, the only sounds the humans could hear were those of the ship's propulsion system, as it lifted them away from their home planet.

"Now what?" a voice asked.

Burt recognized it as Jax again. "When we entered the container, I saw equipment. Maybe we can find something that can produce light."

Burt got up and began feeling around in the dark. At one point, he jerked his hand back in embarrassment as he realized that he'd gotten a handful of female breast. "Sorry."

After several minutes of shuffling in the dark, there was a click, and a low blue light filled one wall of the container. Burt stood taller and found one of the females smiling as she stood before the now-energized monitor of some unfamiliar piece of electronic equipment.

"That works," he said. "Let's look around and see what else is in here."

The container -- which was about 50x12x8 feet -- was crowded with both alien and human things, from pieces of Yorno equipment and tools to hundreds of cases of HDHN -- High Density, High Nutrition food bars -- that the Yorno fed to their human slaves on many of the planetary bodies where food production was lacking or not even present.

"This is a what not," a woman said. When she saw Burt looking at her with a quizzical expression, she clarified, "What not ... left over stuff ... things they wanted to take but didn't fit in another container ... so they threw it in this one."

She was right, of course. There was a little of everything in here. The cases of HDHNs neatly and efficiently filled a third of one end of the container, but other than that, the space was inefficiently used, with this and that and the other thing just shoved inside.

"How do we get out?" someone asked.

"Why would we want out?" another person asked with panic. "The Yorno are out there."

A back and forth conversation -- that was turning into an argument -- ensued with rising volume.

"Shhh!" Jax snapped. When silence returned, he repeated the earlier comment, "The Yorno are out there ... remember?"

The nine went quiet for a long moment, then someone pointed out, "Besides ... there might not be any air out there. I guess we're in a cargo hold. How do we know it's pressurized."

"What does that mean, pressurized?" someone asked.

A conversation ensued about space ships, space, and -- to use the one escapee's word -- what not, during which Burt, Jax, and some others continued to search around.

There was a sudden jolt and feeling of movement, and the group knew that the craft had fired its engines to rise through and out of Earth's atmosphere. Soon, they were weightless, with some holding themselves down, others floating about, and most feeling nauseous.

After several minutes, gravity began to return, although it didn't feel nearly as strong as back on the planet. Someone ventured, "Artificial gravity maybe...?"

The next hour or so was more jostling and noise and occasional panic as the container was moved about. The group went back to searching -- inventorying, in a sense -- the container in which they were trapped. Eventually, the noise beyond the container's walls ended, and the only sound outside their metal prison was a low, constant hum, presumably of the space craft in which they were trapped.

"We have to get out of here," Jax whispered quietly to Burt. When the bigger man didn't respond, Jax said even softer, "We're gonna run out of air."

The two men, along with another man and a woman set to looking for a way to get the container doors open. At one point, someone asked, "Do we even know if the doors will open...? What if these doors are up against the doors of another container?"

That was a possibility, of course, but the four continued trying to open the doors. Their best chance was looking good, as they worked a solid piece of material -- steel like but stronger and lighter -- into the crevice of the barriers.

With a snap, the seal gave way and the doors opened ...



Burt regained consciousness laying face down on the deck, half in, half out of the container. He couldn't -- and never would -- understand that at the moment that they'd forced open the container door, the ship upon which they were trapped had jumped into Faster Than Light Speed mode, which caused disorientation and sometimes unconsciousness in all living animals.

He stood, teetered a bit in disorietation, then stepped out of the container ... and stared in awe. They were no longer in the relatively small inter-atmospheric shuttle that had lifted them from Earth into orbit. They were now inside a gigantic interstellar space craft.

The cargo bay in which he stood measured 100 yards in height width and a mile in length. There were thousands of shipping containers like the one he'd just exited.

Burt turned at the sound of movement behind him and turned to find Jax and some of the others coming to and joining him. As they looked about, someone pointed out, "No Yorno. Where are they all."

"Not here," somewhere said. "And that works for me."