Wil has been sitting in his crippled space pod for a day, transmitting his automated distress call, watching the on-board diagnostics fail—then fail again, then again. He’s debating his next steps: stay here adrift for another, what, two days, based on his supply levels? Or sit on the hull until his suit air runs out?
Or there’s always the small pill in a pouch on the chestplate of his suit. A pill every astronaut, ever, has taken with them on their missions; a pill none have ever had to use. Not exactly the first I was hoping for.
He’s reaching for the pill when a blinding light fills the small cockpit. “What the..?!” He can’t see anything but the light. He’s looking all over, trying to understand what’s happening, as the light gets closer and closer, until he finally sees the edges of it, lowering down over his craft… or is he rising? It’s hard to tell in space, with no other objects relative to him.
As the light fades, he feels his pod settle on… something. He looks around, and sees he’s in some type of ship—that much is obvious. It must be a cargo hold or shuttle bay or something. There are no other vessels around, and it’s not that large a space, so he decides it’s a cargo hold. Why is he in it?
He seals his suit—who knows what the atmosphere is out there? Neither his suit or the pod were designed to look for breathable atmosphere, let alone test it. Then he pops the hatch on the cockpit and crawls out. Damn this flight suit, he thinks. No external speakers or mic, so he can’t talk to anyone he does find without opening the visor, so if they breathe methane, he’s definitely toast. Shit. He can’t see anyone. Maybe the ship is automated.
Then he feels the deck plates rumble a little and can feel footsteps. He spins around and sees three… aliens, standing in front of him. Two have weapons pointed at him; the other looks unarmed, but is wearing a long coat and some kind of spacesuit under it. None of them have masks on, or any type of breathing equipment, but they’re all very clearly different species. So they all breathe the same atmosphere. While Wil looks at the trio, a fourth alien appears and walks over to his pod. It crawls up into the cockpit, and connects a hand terminal to it. Aliens use Thunderbolt?
Wil looks at the three in front of him, then the alien crawling around his pod, and back to the three. They’re talking—he can see their lips moving—but his suit isn’t set up for audio once sealed, so he can only hear muffled sounds. He’s trembling, standing in front of four aliens, two of which are armed and pointing their weapons at him. The one he assumes is the leader waves to get his attention. He, she, it? Wil isn’t sure but assumes the alien is male. It makes a gesture that looks like he wants Wil to remove his helmet.
“Well, I was about to commit suicide, so I guess if they breathe methane the end result is the same,” he says to himself, as he unseals the helmet and lifts it up off his head.
“Hi there,” the lead alien says. “I’m Lanksham, the captain of this ship. And you are?”
“Uh. Hi.” Wil blinks a few dozen times. “I’m uh…”
“Think it’s damaged?” one of the armed aliens asks Lanksham, who elbows it in the side and makes a growling sound.
“I’m uh. Wil, Wil Calder, from Denver. Denver Colorado… in uh, America, the United States of America… uh, on planet Earth,” Wil stammers. They speak English?!
“Okay, well hello Wil Calder from Den-var Cah lore addo, planet Earth. As I said, I’m Lanksham, this is my ship the Reaper, and we picked up your beacon.” He looks over at the smaller alien still pawing at Wil’s craft. “Anything we can use or sell?”
The small alien pops up out of the cockpit and waggles one hand. Apparently, this is the universal gesture for not really. “Not a lot, pretty primitive stuff. Surprised this one lived—looks like maybe a first attempt at FTL?”
It looks at Wil, who nods. “Second, actually.”
“Yeah, nothing here we can use, but we can probably strip it down for materials to melt down.”
Wil turns at that. “Hey, that’s my ship you’re talking about!” He starts to move toward the craft, and the two aliens surrounding Lanksham snap their weapons up, stopping Wil dead in his tracks.
“Actually, it’s my ship, such as it is. It’s salvage.” Lanksham’s voice is calm. “Technically, of course, you have to be dead for it to be salvage, so take care what your next words or actions are. They could be the difference between us taking you with us, or us leaving you here.”
Lanksham is a little over two meters tall. His skin has a bluish tint, and his eyes are larger than humans, and are a bright, startling yellow. Otherwise, though, he’s remarkably human-like: he has four fingers and a thumb on each of his two hands on his two arms, and a head about the size of a humans’. There’s no lanky, skinny body and oversized head, like in the abduction movies. He’s got white hair, too. The other three in the room are all sort of similar. The small one is a bit more alien-abduction-movie looking: bigger head, little body, frail-looking limbs. It seems like this one has three fingers, not five, and he’s only a meter or so tall. Okay, Wil decides, the other two aren’t that similar. They’re a little taller than him, and muscled; one is red and the other a milky white. The red one has small horns running upwards from its nose, right over its bald head, while the white one has greenish hair done up in a top knot on its mostly shaved head. Yeah, not similar at all.
Wil looks the alien captain in the eyes. “Oh, uh, okay, yeah. Sorry.” Sorry NASA, don’t think you’re gonna get your spacecraft back. Hope it’s insured. For that matter, am I insured?