Chameleon in Chrome Ch. 08

He thought about it briefly, "Actually, it's not a bad idea. The shuttles are in the hold, not in their launch shackles on the sides. Their scanners couldn't pick us up as not being in cryo through two hulls. The only active living entity on board would show up as D'Jymm."

He looked up with a grim expression, "Both shuttles are armed. The second that I even begin to suspect that you're trying to screw us, I'll blow the hold hatches and nail your ass as we slide out of the rear hold doors."

D'Jymm nodded, "Agreed. You are still holding a weapon on me this way."

Three minutes later, D'Jymm sat in the pilot's chair and the crew was divided and placed inside of the shuttles.

His systems reported that everyone but him was aboard one or the other of the shuttles.

"Captain," D'Jymm said as he closed the outer covers over the large forward windows on the flight deck after switching on the outer navigation cameras, "Please let me know when you have checked the weapon status on the shuttles and we may begin our deception. I will advise as to what is happening up here as continuously as I am able if they call this ship. Otherwise it is best that we keep even intercom traffic to a minimum."

"Both shuttles show weapons ready," the man said over the intercom, "Let's see how convincing you can be. You get us through this and I might even ask if you want a full time job on this thing with us, seeing as how you'll sure have earned my trust if this works. Let's get this started D'Jymm."

"Here we go then," the Anubian said as he shut off the IFF transponder which would automatically respond and transmit the ship's ID, type, and registration if queried. Then he switched off the cameras on the flight deck as well as the outside navigation strobes.

He got up and stepped quickly over to the loadmaster's panel where he opened the side bay doors to dump the atmosphere in the hold and he switched off the power and life support connections to the shuttles.

He knew that it would be noticed but he also knew that the weapons in the shuttles had incorrectly reported as being functional, since he'd made sure that they could never actually be activated when he'd sabotaged them and set things up this way a week ago.

His original plan had been to fake a fire alarm by remotely opening the connections to the engine compartment thermocouples which, with the connections to the backup thermocouples removed remotely as well, the temperature alarms would sound and the indicators would show false readings of infinitely high temperatures in there, basically simulating an engine meltdown.

But that hadn't been necessary, he smiled to himself. This scenario was even better.

Back to the task at hand, he checked for zero life support connections to the shuttles, leaving the oxygen ports stuck open so that the atmosphere inside the shuttles would bleed out rapidly. Right after that, he switched off the artificial gravity and actuated the tie-down releases so that the shuttles were no longer fixed solidly to the flooring in the hold but remained in position against the hydraulic cargo jettison rams.

At that point, he got up and returned to the pilot's station for a moment to throttle the engines back to idle and disengage the attitude hold.

Hurrying back, he quickly made the rest of the changes that he needed.

The rear hold hatch remained sealed, but whatever atmosphere there had been in the hold had dissipated when he'd opened the sideward hatches as he severed the shuttles' power connections to the ship's systems.

Ignoring the warnings that the shuttles had no active life support since he'd disabled those systems and faked their readiness readings when he'd disabled the life support fail safes, he ejected the shuttles one after the other from either side with about a seven second delay between them.

The overall result was that all of the crew were either dead or dying moments after he'd cut the connections. With the shuttles being ejected unevenly and with the attitude hold being switched off; the outcome was a matter of physics as the entire vessel began to rotate longitudinally in a slow roll with no navigation strobes showing.

He left the side hatches open and anything that was not secured in the hold began to float out into space in two slow spirals of junk. It didn't bother him because he'd secured what was of value to him, the majority of the rest being illegal goods of some sort which he didn't want there anyway.

The most likely explanation to an outside observer was that some emergency had occurred and the crew had abandoned the vessel.

"Well, I certainly hope that I have shown you how much I can be trusted, "he whispered to himself.

He saw that there were incoming messages on the comms panel on shipping frequencies and he ignored them.

A few seconds after that, he saw that the hull was being scanned and he grinned to himself, knowing that his fur made obtaining life form detection readings of his kind very difficult if they were even obtainable at all.

Given the range, he doubted that anyone could detect him in here as being alive and reading nothing but seeing the shuttles drifting away and the hold doors left open, he was more than a little confident that anyone would interpret what they saw as a crew abandoning their vessel due to an emergency.

He doubted that any of them had put on outside suits since there hadn't really been time to get twenty men suited up and in any event, someone in a suit who'd had the time and the presence of mind to put on and seal a helmet would only have less than an hour of oxygen and would be in a dead shuttle.

He scanned for nearby low power radio signals and found nothing. The little radios in the suits were for communication with the ship and didn't have the range to reach any other vessel.

The exact reason for the hasty evacuation would likely be taken as a containment breech and nobody would want to get near something like that under these circumstances with a battle going on nearby. Sooner or later, he knew that the shuttles would probably be intercepted and receiving no replies to any hails to them, they'd need to be captured and the hatches opened, revealing a dead crew in any case, pirates or not.

Besides, he chuckled, looking at the free-for-all that he was looking at out there; the cruisers would have their hands full for a good while yet. As unlikely as he personally saw it, his cameras were telling him that the whole mess out there had now attracted at least three more vessels and in the confusion, the authorities would be more interested in apprehending ships which were possibly being operated by pirate crews than a single, legally registered vessel spiralling along on it's inertia with no crew aboard.

Two days later, he could read nothing in the direction of the fight and he closed the side cargo hold doors and plotted a course for the last place that he would be expected to go. With the decision made, he changed course and an hour later, not reading any active comm traffic in range and nothing showing on his scanners as to any vessels nearby, he reactivated the IFF transponder.

He also went through the captain's things and found a proper holster for the pistol as well as spare magazines and boxes of ammunition.

But like anything else in life, it was not quite perfection.

He'd noticed some sensor and bypass tubing which was degrading on both of the engines and he knew that he'd need to repair that before long. A search through the maintenance stores revealed precious little stainless steel tubing aboard and it told him that whatever had been there once had been used, so this condition was likely chronic and possibly due to the engine replacements. With the inertia of the surreptitiously-added armor and the increased mass of it, the new engines were likely oversized and the cooling a touch on the inadequate side.

He increased the thrust to achieve a high cruise velocity and once the speed had gotten there, he pulled the power back again to idle.

There is very little drag in space and an object moving at any given velocity will tend to keep on if nothing external causes a change.

A little more than a month later, he came around the dark side of Earth's moon for his descent and switched off the IFF again. For the next part of this, he would pretend to be a large satellite falling from orbit. He set up an approach for the equatorial west hemisphere of Earth and using resource maps which he'd gathered over his time, he aimed for an abandoned refinery because his topographical overlay indicated the presence of a nearby dormant volcano in the jungle.

He was able to make his approach fairly confidently due to the weather once he'd reached atmo. The approach had been a careful thing to try to simulate the fall of an object such as a satellite and as he'd gotten close, he'd applied much more directional control to fly the forty miles to the volcano crater by weaving through the mountains on the down low before slowing to slip under the natural stone archway formed by three large rock formations to set down carefully underneath it.

To be honest about things, he'd been able to punch down right through the hurricane that was going on at the time and weather like that tends to keep most life forms with a brain out of the conditions if they can manage it. He came in with no lights showing in the middle of the night, staying low in the clutter of the mountainous area. The whole region was far too mountainous for good radar coverage.

It was about perfect.

It worked out even better, once he'd noticed the opening in the crater wall fairly low down on his topo scan.

He'd wondered about the placement of the refinery, given that the location wasn't near to the coast but concluded that there might have been a pipeline nearby to feed it, or maybe it was located to supply products to a set array of consuming clients. He decided that he didn't know and just left it alone.

Coming back to his present circumstances, he looked around as he walked through the dripping jungle away from the refinery. Now that he knew exactly where he could hopefully obtain some tubing, he guessed that he could attempt to reverse this whole return process and make his way to where others of his clan were gathering. He had no idea what would come out of it, but he knew that none of them would be going home. He wanted little out of it all, other than to maybe see a few relatives, hopefully his parents and his sister if that proved possible.

After that, if he was lucky, D'Jymm held a small hope to be fortunate enough to find a mate for himself and a way to make a living somewhere, somehow.

He'd been given this assignment when he'd only been twenty applying Earth years to the time frame because he was exceptionally intelligent and skilled in several disciplines. Now he was twenty-four and alone.

As he walked up to what had become his vessel now, he smiled to himself in a little hope.

He hoped that nothing much had changed in him, because he remembered that among his kind, he wasn't the largest, most powerful male, but he'd been called attractive by many females and after all, he thought to himself, he was still young.

Once inside with the hatch locked down, he shook some of the rainwater from his fur, took a long drink of water and set about deciding on his evening meal.

---------

'Evening' was a relative term for him at present. His entry through the turbulent weather and the long, careful approach (right before the high speed downward part) had been made during the part of his diurnal cycle that he'd have termed his morning. His luck to be out of sync with things now that he'd landed here.

He had his meal prepared and cooked in a few minutes and then sat down in the co-pilot's chair to look at a few things.

Fuel wasn't an issue - at least for now, he reasoned. They hadn't really gone very far measured against the supply that the system showed was available to him, and he'd really stretched things on his way back here, by powering up to apply thrust very sparingly and then coasting on his inertia and kinetic energy as much as he'd been able.

Of course, as far as his arrival was concerned, he'd coasted in on that score too - until he'd needed to apply at least some braking.

The only things bothering him at all as he sat up and looked at his situational awareness console were the heat signatures that he was reading in the vicinity. There were several in one large portion of the flat area ahead of him and they seemed to be moving slowly, spread out a little from each other. He wondered what kind of animal here grazed at night.

The high vegetation thinned out there to tall grasses which had taken the place of the lawn near the refinery. None of the heat blooms were nearby, the closest and largest being almost two-thirds of a mile out and moving away slowly.

Suddenly, everything changed. One which he'd noticed had been fairly stationary began to move quickly in a fairly straight line away from the others. He watched as the rest of the heat signatures began to move in the same direction, grouping closer together as they did and seeming to be trying to converge on the one moving away.

He realized that those things out there, whatever they were, hadn't been grazing or feeding.

They were hunting.

He looked out through the windscreen and tried to see with the camera on the top of the flight deck and then leaned toward the console and closed up the covers over the windows just to preclude the possibility of any slight light leakage.

Other than what he could see using infrared, there was nothing close enough to lock the system onto so that he could get a clear look. He turned up the incoming audio and above the sound of the rain, he could just make out what sounded like faint shouts in Spanish. The hunters were humans from the area, it seemed.

At that instant, the images on his screens dimmed way down to compensate for some sudden brilliance. A bright, hot object came into the field of view, wobbling in a tall arc and landing with a small bounce.

D'Jymm saw ... something and switched to the visual spectrum, his jaw dropping a little as he looked. He now had a clue as to what the hunters were after.

Someone had thrown a construction flare and it had landed on the other side of a person, closer to the hunters, momentarily catching the prey in the glare and ruining whatever night vision the person had. He saw her in silhouette and what he saw told him that he had far more in common with that person than he did with the hunters.

The points of commonality being her upright ears and that tail.

He watched as she ducked down and tried to creep away. At that point, he was still frozen; staring at the screen, but the arrival of several more flares moved him to action.

The hatch seemed to take forever as it closed and he ran off, headed toward the female form that he'd seen. In the steady rain, it didn't take him long to get the direction. The acrid smoke from the flares hung in a thick cloud where they'd landed hissing and sputtering.

Other than his own footsteps and the hissing rain, he heard her gasp as he came near and ran straight past her on four legs. The hunters were using flares themselves now to search, and realizing that no matter which way that they held a flare, it impeded their vision and hampered their efforts. A couple of them were actually walking in circles.

Still, he noted it did make his searching for them a lot easier.

He found them one after another and each time, they were petrified in fear as he came upon them. Some started shouting, as though alerting the others would bring help. Three of them began to recite prayers as soon as they saw what their actions had attracted.

Most were carrying firearms and it was little effort to stand up and rip the weapons from their terrified fingers. The only one who was firing in the direction of his rapidly approaching footsteps stood as though frozen, his eyes wide, too terrified to move or make a sound, other than the wet noise of his bowels voiding themselves. D'Jymm yanked the hot, empty shotgun away and placing it at a downward angle, muzzle-first against the ground, he bent it until the forestock broke off and the barrel bent somewhat.

He swung it like a baseball bat and left the fool with broken ribs.

He didn't know how many there were at the outset, but he found seven of them and left them all with something new to fear, along with broken bones in each case, a dislocated jaw in one, and concussions and assorted bumps and scrapes in four cases.

After that, there was almost silence. The flares sputtered on as though trying to defy the rain until they went out and if you were close enough, you might hear some quiet groans of pain.

As he reached the eaves of the jungle forest and the tall grass began to fade out, he sank again to all fours and sniffed cautiously, expecting at best to learn that she'd been here, but had since gotten away. He didn't mind particularly. Providing her with a commotion for her quiet withdrawal had been his purpose, after all.

But it had been a total of more than three years Earth time since he'd seen a single other Shm'Sha person. He strongly doubted that who he'd glimpsed had been someone from his world, but it would have been nice to at least see that person in good light and maybe try to learn of them.

He sat on his haunches, looked around and then up at the wall of the forest's edge, suddenly sensing her gaze on him.

She was there, sitting on a bough looking back at him. As the moment went on, they could slowly see less and less of each other as the light from the distant failing flares reflected upward against the smoke that they made was diminishing.

He was pleased that she seemed to be alright. He couldn't really see her clearly now, so details of her appearance were disappearing as well.

As much as he'd have wanted to try to meet her, she didn't seem to want to do more than look at him and he thought that he could understand that.

He thought about his situation here.

At the moment, he was an illegal entity on this world. In order to reach others of his kind, most notably his family, he knew that he had to get off this rock and be gone fairly soon. Those hunting fools lived somewhere likely nearby and unless the weather held or got worse, he knew that his vessel would be noticed sooner rather than later.

He needed stainless steel tubing for his repairs and he now knew where he could get some. He looked high up and sniffed. The weather wasn't going to improve markedly within the next day at least and that helped him - if he didn't waste what time that he was given.

Thinking of her as he looked at the now dark spot on the dark branch, he wanted to smile as he considered an old saying among his people - that it is never a bad thing to help a stranger in need.

She watched him stand up on four legs and wondered about that and how he could do it like that, since she'd seen his head over the tops of the grass after he'd run past her so it indicated to her that he could stand either way. As a female, he looked good to her even this way.

She watched him turn and after a quick look back at her, he melted into the darkness and she was alone.

----------

He sat for a time eating his meal slowly after returning to the ship. It had become a bit of a ritual for him. He'd rarely gotten time to eat this way when the crew had been bossing him around. Now that they were no longer an issue, he found that he really liked the luxury of eating slower.

He wasn't feeling particularly tired, but he knew that he might need to move his sleep cycle to match with the locality and so he took out the weapons which he'd 'confiscated' during his discussion with the captain and he cleaned them, not because they were dirty, but rather to reinforce what he'd learned about their disassembly and to give himself something monotonous to do.