shit for nanorimo whatevs

backyard hannigan’s back swamp honkey tonk yonkers (working title)


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The pre-flight maintenance ended with a soft thump of the rail-gun's motor revving up. The thump is followed by a low hum as the mag-sled eases forwards onto the track. The shuttle
jerked suddenly, accelerating from 0 to 170 miles per hour in half a second. At roughly 15 gees, I begin to feel the air resistance on the exterior of the plane, or at least I feel like I do.  I was starting to gray-out; I could only see the screen on the seat in front of me.

"PLEASE TO ENJOY FLIGHT!!

NOT TO UNFURL BACK TRAY UNTIL DONE TAKEOFF"

The broken English is to be expected, this is a civilian plane designed and made during wartime.  Made from melted-down cups and car parts, this hulk is barely flyable.  Quality control is second to cost-effectiveness. There's rationing going on, and all the good materials are going towards making guns and tanks.  I forget who exactly is fighting who; alien politics was never really my strong point.
I'm sure my shipmates are worried about their loved ones, their flock, clutch, hive, whatever they might hold dear, if anything.  They look like nothing I've ever seen before, and they might think as strangely as they look.

The two-stage shuttle detached from the sled, resulting in an increase of gees, nearly making me black out. The scramjet had ignited around a minute and a half ago, guess I missed the thump.  I force my way out of the grey-out as the blood in my eyes is pounded against my skull. I begin to feel the harsh vibration of the scramjet, the violent shaking of every component of the shuttle.  The screen in front of me seems to have shaken itself out, which worried me a bit.  This ship is the airborne equivalent of a Khyber pass monstrosity (firearms made by drunken Pakistanis out of melted down scrap, known for exploding). I would be releasing a plurality of profane expletives, if I could get a breath in. The scramjet began to settle down, and another thump marked the separation of the scramjet from the shuttle. We should be around 200,000 feet up; the scramjet ran out of air.


The g-force begins to die down as the side windows open.
The view from my window revealed a blue-black sky over a flat barren wasteland. Or at least it
looked like a wasteland to me, I'm pretty sure the locals would disagree. I imagine they'd point out
the three thin space elevators in the distance, or the top-heavy chromed pagoda
skyscrapers dotting the landscape. These pagodas rose high into the sky, some being about a mile high.
But my sightseeing was interrupted by a low-pitched bellow, followed by some quick scratching
noises coming from over the intercom. It stopped for about fifteen seconds, and then ended with
another bellowing noise, slightly higher pitched. My non-human shipmates then unhooked from their specialized seats (basically a convex plate with some synthetic cushion on it).

My shipmates, who were mostly comprised of aliens of the same species, were one of the few
known species with no minutely human traits, cultural or physical. Their height varied from six and a half to eight feet tall.
They were about one-third as wide as they were tall, with skin that looked like the bastard offspring of a hairless elephant, a rhino, a boulder, and an agave plant, all a spotty dark brown.
They had the radial symmetry of a plant, cut up into fourths.
For each one "arm" were two crab-like legs, underneath a curtain of thick, hardened skin (more like plate mail with inch-thick plates) that covered the legs around the circumference of its body.
The arms looked sort of like an outwards-facing chicken wing, with three stout truncated cones sticking out, two on the bottom, one on the top. These cones held eight purple tentacles, all varying in thickness.
The head, however, was the only feature that broke this quadrilateral symmetry (It instead was bilaterally symmetrical).
Most had between one and six tubes on both the "front" and "back".
With no way to distinguish front or back, I assumed they had two front ends.
All of the tubes have thick androgenic hairs, probably for their equivalent of "sight", packed into the tubes, the spacing between which gets smaller as it goes deeper, soon becoming just thick vertical strands, which must serve as eardrums.
The void inside of these tubes sparkled vaguely, inspiring a sense of wonder and caution in me.  Sparkling dust is never a good thing.  The head was accented with fairly long "spikes", with luminescent membranes underneath smooth, opaque skin. The number of these spikes also ranged between one and ten.

These were quite possibly the strangest creatures I've ever seen.  They floated in the microgravity of the shuttle, grabbing onto the handrails with their awkward chicken wings, moving swiftly all in single file.

After their little exodus was over, a stoic female voice comes over the intercom. "All humans and subspecies proceed to airlock 4."
Then the screen on the chair turned back on.
"DESMOND O'MALLEY-
PLEASE PROCEED TO AIRLOCK 4"

As I make my way towards the airlock I covertly observe my fellow humans in a reflection on the back of one of the alien's chairs. I see a brunette woman of about 30, her jumpsuit's badge says

"MATHEMATICIAN" in bold yellow letters. She must be one of the astronavigators. A bald, freakishly skinny Hermian, with sunken-in green eyes and shallow cheeks. I have never seen someone so damn white. And he must be around 70 pounds in a one-gee atmosphere. Hermians are known for their prudish personality and impatience. The tumultuous political atmosphere of their home planet Mercury has gradually turned them into impatient, fast-talking work machines. The last one seems like a Ganymedi scientist, looking of South African descent with blond hair and brown eyes. His brownish-yellow skin and thick veins is a dead giveaway of (barely legal) genetic modification. Why we need a bionic xenobiologist is beyond me, and why we're docking with a ship capable of going 5% the speed of light is just as elusive.  I'll save the pleasantries for after I find out what I need to do in the airlock. They seem to be doing the same thing. I float past eight small door-less rooms, four on each side, and then drift further down the hall. I then grab a handle (thankfully modeled for a human hand) going down towards the airlocks. I eventually drift down into a cylindrical corridor with metal mesh "trampoline" floor covering the whole 360 degrees of the cylinder, akin to that of a sailing catamaran. That makes sense, I muse. That way the weight exerted on the mesh will be transmitted into the cylindrical structure of the corridor more easily without damaging what exerted it. With heavy EVA equipment that's the best choice. When I impact the mesh floor I notice my human shipmates trailing not far behind me.

"Proceed to airlock one." The stoic female voice chimed in, interrupting my train of thought.
I did just that, maneuvering towards the airlock, whose door opened when I was around three feet away from it. That's unnecessary, I think, pondering the myriad of things that could go wrong with a motion sensor on an airlock door. I guess those chicken-winged tubers probably can't grab things that well.
The airlock floor is about 20 feet in every direction, with a roof of ten feet high. This cavernous room must be for the tubers, and their lack of mobility.

Everybody seems on edge, including me. I'm getting anxious. Not so much with the Ganymedi guy. Without warning the exterior airlock opens, leading into another ship which the shuttle apparently docked with sometime in the last fifteen minutes. Am I the only one that has no idea what is going on?

"Please proceed into the IEV Hermes II and await further instruction." Said the stoic woman's voice, who I'm now almost certain is a shipboard AI.


I look towards the brunette girl and ask ,"Do you have any idea what's going on? I never got a
mission brief."

"Neither did I, I was just going to ask you the same thing." she replied.

The airlock I came in closed just as the other three began into the Hermes. I followed. The interior of the ship was stripped even barer than most ships, probably because this might be a response vehicle. The Hermes' airlock was of the same proportions of the shuttle's and lead into
another metal mesh cylindrical corridor.

We proceeded down the corridor until we entered a square 10x10 foot square hallway about 200 feet long, bustling with the aliens, carrying hexagonal plastic boxes. The stoic woman chimes in. "Proceed down the hall and enter the first room on your left for briefing"

Since nobody had any idea what we were supposed to be doing, we all made our way towards the briefing room by "climbing" a horizontal plastic ladder. Once we arrived, the metal mesh screen draped around the doorway and had large letters spelling out "MACC", and underneath the letters was a strip of colored blocks, many of which were shades of gray or black. MACC is the agreed acronym for "Media and Communications Center". I simply had to touch
an iridescent dot in the middle of the screen, and it rolled up like a scroll, fitting neatly into a crease above us.

Upon arrival in the MACC, a screen on the wall adjacent to the door lit up with a diagram of the Hermes.

"This is the IEV Hermes II, Inter-species Exploration Vehicle 1077, our destination is the asteroid belt at the edge of the system." The stoic woman said.

The diagram showed a ship that looked kind of like the Eiffel Tower, with four large geodesic spheres underneath the base, used for deuterium, hydrogen and helium-3 storage. The ship used He3-Deuterium fusion for propulsion, using hydrogen for fuel and essentially blasting ions out of a magnetic nozzle at the end of the ship. This is for short-range flights. To get out of the planet's gravity well and gain sufficient forward momentum it requires two large antimatter engines. These particular engines are tall, black rhomboids with two long perforated tubes running the length of the engine, where plasma is ejected in case the situation warrants evasive maneuvering. These engines use an "antimatter plasma core" configuration, where 13 micrograms of antiprotons are annihilated by being sent into a small amount of hydrogen, turning it into plasma. This plasma is then forced out of a magnetic bottle containment system and out a magnetic nozzle, resulting in large amounts of theoretical delta-v, or energy required to make a round trip from your starting point to your destination. Surrounding the base of the "tower", or main tensile truss are four large heat radiators, made from a tungsten-aluminum alloy. These eject excess heat from the engines. At the tip of the truss are the airlocks, and above them are two gimballed centrifuges which held the crew quarters. The centrifuge closest to the engines is where the Hermian, the brunette, the Ganymedi and I will be living for the next however long we'll be here. It's made to simulate a gravity well of 0.4 gees, slightly higher than that of Mercury's gravity well, as to accommodate the frail Hermian.

I'm gonna atrophy because of that bastard.

The centrifuge above that is slightly larger, and that's where the thirteen alien crewmembers will
reside. The centrifuge will spin slightly faster, as to simulate a gravity well of 1.6 gees. Both of the
centrifuges are currently stowed, hinges at the hub of the centrifuge can turn them so the "bottom" of the habitats faces the engine, as to simulate low gravity while accelerating.


Directly above the two centrifuges is the radar array, and above that is the egg-shaped bulkhead,
where the advanced astronavigation computers are held, along with several mathematicians. Beyond that is a "Whipple shield", a molecule-thick shield to protect the hull from micrometeorites.  It's,currently stowed in a mesh bag at the front of the ship, given that any acceleration would destroy it.
A chart of the star system appeared on another screen, to the right of the first.

"We are currently orbiting Typhon, an oceanless, moonless planet of 1.9 gees. Being as none of
you were made uneasy by your shipmates I assume you've encountered them before."

I'm not sure why we wouldn't have.  We've been on this godforsaken planet for several years now.

"We will begin a twenty minute burn in thirty minutes. It is advisable that you enter your respective habitat. The briefing will resume upon arrival in the habitat."
Straight to the point.  I like that.  AIs don't need to make bullshit small-talk.

I begin to feel uneasy, and I can tell the feeling is mutual after looking at my shipmates...

OH SHIT IT'S CHAPTER TWO!!!!!

My journey is sluggish and clumsy, the colors of the hall all blurring together, and light-memory is staying much longer than it should.


I wake up on a foam cot, gravity pinning me down. I sit myself up in a jerky motion; my
head swung violently as I sat up. I placed my hand on my head, my upper forehead
was pulsing rapidly, and my muscles were twitching.

"Glad you're awake." said a scratchy, deep voice.
I looked to my right, seeing the pale Hermian.
"You seem to have taken a particularly adverse reaction to the in-flight stims. You've
been out about twenty minutes. Sebastien and Avery are waiting upstairs on the centrifuge
floor."
"Alright." I mumble, still in a drugged-up daze, not making eye contact.
"And who's Sebastian and-"
"Sebastian is the other guy who came with us." he snapped back.
Fucking asshole.
I stumble across the bedroom from my bed, touching the colored dot on the door and waiting for it to roll up.

The centrifuge is laid out like this: At the "bottom" of it are two parallel bunk beds, and
two dressers with five drawers each integrated into the wall between them.  On the wall parallel to the dressers is a red plastic ladder, and on each side is a metal mesh door designating "male" and "female" bathrooms. There's a small fire extinguisher in each. It leads up to the centrifuges' "main floor", where there are four screens equidistant from each other on two parallel walls. There is a higher roof on the main floor, with load-bearing x-shaped scaffolding with a plastic net a few feet above it, where the ceiling would be. On the other side from the ladder are two fairly large couches suited to fit four people, with a table in front of it, and in the corner to the left of the ladder was a large plastic freezer.

Avery was standing by one screen, Sebastien by the other.
I got off the ladder, and stood there for a few seconds, clutching an intense pain in my abdomen. Must be the stims fucking with my kidneys.

"Hey." I grunt.

Sebastien turned around, after Avery snapped her head towards me, her eyes wide, mouth closed tenaciously.
'You must be Desmond." Sebastian said, with a deep Afrikaner accent.
"Yeah." I reply.
I stumble towards Sebastien, and started using the screen next to him, and the screen
immediately opened up a mission brief, and the stoic woman's voice chimed in after a
sharp "zap".


"The pain in your kidney will subside in about an hour. The in-flight stims do that to
some people.
We are on a rescue mission to the outer rim of the system, beyond the third sun."
"Third sun?" I reply.
A map of the solar system appeared on the screen, displaying a binary star system, with
two yellow stars orbiting each other, the planet Typhon, the arid home of the Rhodes.
Beyond Typhon, was the ellipsoid brown dwarf Mixcoatl, about as large as Saturn, with
rings almost as spectacular. Even farther beyond, about where Neptune would be in our
solar system, was a third yellow star, smaller than the two orbiting each other. This
hellish configuration leads for a scorching, nightless planet, with no ocean and almost
no humidity.
A large asteroid belt is the last thing I'd expect from a system such as this. Yet there was
one, warped by the third sun and looping between Typhon and Mixcoatl.

The stoic woman's voice chimed in again, after I studied the map for a few seconds.

"Our destination will be passing by Mixcoatl by the time we arrive, in about a week and a
half."

"Who exactly are we rescuing?"
"A group of Helium-3 miners, funded by a Rhodian headed corporation."

I snapped.
"Why are we- three humans with specialties that vary immensely- needed to rescue some
alien rock miners without their consent? I don't even fucking remember how I got here!  Look, we're prisoners of war but holy shit you are committing so many war crimes right now."

Sebastian quickly jabbed his palm on the side of my neck, immediately seizing me.
"Look, we're all a little on edge right now, let me explain." He said, in an accented
voice similar to the Hermian's.
"The in-flight stims were poorly mixed and caused nausea, fainting,
irritability, and short-term memory loss. Your memory will return in a few hours."

No shit irritability.  The cunt suckerpunched me.

Avery had a shocked, panicked look on her face.
Sebastien slowly pulled me up.
"Watch it." He said, staring directly at me after I was fully upright.

He was a fairly large man; he looked accustomed to about 1.3 gees, and was
consequently wider and bulkier than the rest of us. He seemed of an almost exclusively
South African descent, yet genetic modification made his skin a dark yellow, with large
purple and red veins sticking out almost wherever possible.
"Just mess around with the touchscreen for a while, research our destination or
something."

He walked over to Avery, put his arm around her shoulder and whispered something in
her ear. He stayed on that side for some time, which is when I looked at some
information on the screen regarding our destination. It was a large, roughly oval-shaped
asteroid with a circular torus attached to one side, as to produce artificial gravity.
There were 6 climate-controlled "veins" coming out of a stout circular base underneath
the torus, leading into several caves, and two leading into another circular base with eight
large geodesic spheres stacked on top of each other, and a large solar array on one side.


"Three-day burn to initiate in ten minutes. All humans exit your habitats and enter a
static zone."  The A.I. ordered.

"Static zone?" I asked Sebastien.
"Anything that isn't spinning." He replied.
I'm not used to being on a ship like this.  I've never been on anything larger than an excursion module.

Sebastian and Avery climbed up the ladder into the hub of the
Centrifuge inside the main tensile truss. Almost immediately upon arrival our centrifuge
stopped spinning and began to curl inwards towards the hull, so the "bottom" is facing
the engines. This setup is more complicated than necessary, I thought. This must be an
older model ship.

"Please grab a handrail and put on a safety harness." said the stoic woman.
Sebastien grabbed two, near the entrance to the centrifuge, and fastened himself to the wall
with the harness. I followed. Avery was the last to do so, and the Hermian was nowhere
to be found.

The burn began slowly, and then burst into an incredible velocity, forcing my head into
an unnatural, very uncomfortable position. The same thing happened to Avery, with her
eyes as wide as before. Maybe that's just how she looks, I'm not sure. Sebastian was unfazed.
I had to endure this torture for the better part of two and a half minutes, before it became
bearable. The burn ended soon after.

 "You may return to your habitats." chimed the A.I.
It took Avery and me a moment to gather ourselves after the acceleration. Sebastian waited for us.
Once we recovered, we had to wait for the centrifuges to return to their original position.

We left the truss and went down the ladder into the second centrifuge's main floor, I sat
down on one of the couches for a few minutes, and Avery sat down on the other one.
Sebastian went down the ladder into the bedroom, holding what looked like a transparent
piece of paper.

3.

and then they kill all the minorities