FRIDAY, APRIL 16, 2410 FORWARD MILITARY COMMAND POST #17 DELTA PETRAKIS V NIVEN SECTOR, NEAR THE FEDERATION-KHUND BORDER Delta Petrakis V was an inhospitable world - hot, craggy, barren, dusty, sharp-edged, arid, thoroughly unpleasant to humanoid life. The troopers at Forward Military Command Post #17, however, were highly trained to ignore such things. Anyway, it wasn't that different from where they came from. To them, the harsh orange light of Delta Petrakis felt just like home. The same could not be said for the figure who knelt at the ridgeline a quarter mile from the facility, observing it through electrobinoculars. She was finding the light most irritating. It was like being aboard a starship at red alert, only brighter. She sighed, dismissed her binoculars, and said, "OK, Max. I'll wait for dark and then go in through that ventilator on the roof. They don't seem to have anybody guarding it. Smug bastards." The small shape next to her did not reply; it only gazed across the space between the ridgeline and the squat duracrete command post with two glowing red eyes. Eyrie Productions, Unlimited presents UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES FUTURE IMPERFECT INVASION Benjamin D. Hutchins (c) 2002 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited Trooper Kreth didn't like pulling night watch. This planet gave him the creeps. There was some kind of creature out there that scuttled on long, thin legs - he had caught glimpses of it the last two nights - and Kreth did not like things that scuttled on long, thin legs. If he saw it tonight, he was going to blast it, and to hell with filing the action report. Just as he thought that, something moved off to his left. He whirled, shouting a challenge. Nothing answered. Kreth snarled, drew his disruptor, and peered angrily into the darkness. He -hated- this planet. Why the hell couldn't they have launched the attack on time, two days ago? What was that fat son of a dretch of a general waiting for? No indigenous life forms, bah! Something out there was - A flicker of motion to the right. Kreth wheeled and fired, every nerve and instinct keyed to the top of the gauge. The green slash of his disruptor's fire split the night, briefly silhouetting a hideous spindly shape above him - - and then it was gone, and Kreth was left wondering if he'd really seen it. All was silent. Curse this place - was his nerve going now? Was he imagining things? Surely the monster would have attacked him if it was real - he had missed it clean, to his eternal shame, there was nothing to have stopped it from swooping down and ripping off his head. So, logically, it must not have existed. That was embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as having his head torn off by it would have been. The truth, of course, was that it had been real, but it hadn't been interested in Kreth's head. It was up on the roof now, its four spindly pointed legs retracting partway into its body, making its outline smaller. It knelt down next to the ventilator it had spied earlier, pulled off the loose grating, and slipped silently inside. As it did, it stretched out a sense beyond those of normal humanoids, probing the bunker. It had no difficulty in isolating, identifying, and vaguely locating two dozen separate personnel, ten of them asleep, two cheating at cards, two being cheated at cards, the rest bored and standing guard. The creature that had startled Kreth climbed sinuously through the ventilation network and into the bunker itself. Carefully, it torched out a grille inside and dropped into a crouch on the floor, then rose up to its full height of about five feet. With a soft click, its four spidery legs collapsed into its silhouette, leaving it humanoid in shape. Humanoid - and female. Once, her name had been Gabrielle Zinaida McBain. Born on Earth, she was a powerful telepath trained in the arts of deception, infiltration, and, if necessary, assassination. Her empathic powers were unusually strong even for a P12, a 'gift' from her Deltan grandmother. Thanks to this, her 'work' eroded her mind and sickened her soul even faster than it would have done for a normal person of conscience, despite her efforts to smother the pain in bitter cynicism. Eventually, some time ago, it had killed her. While carrying out one mission too many for her masters in the Psi Corps, Gabrielle McBain had died. The person who took her place went by a shorter, simpler name, one that evoked the crisp, orderly sensibilities of the culture she had adopted to replace the rotten one that spawned her. Her name was Gaz. Gaz moved silently through the darkened corridors of Command Post 17, wraithlike, avoiding patrolling guards with ease. Her mission was not one of attack, but of intelligence. She was to discover the plans for the attack that, having passed by Trooper Kreth, she now knew was two days overdue, and deliver them to her immediate superior for action. Those would be in the combat information center, which, if this place followed the standard plan for such bunkers, would be two levels down and about fifty yards to the east. No problem. In and out, back through the vent shaft. Maybe she'd leave the jumpy guard alive; maybe she'd leave him in two pieces for his comrades to wonder about. Starting a rumor that this planet -was- inhabited by dangerous beasts might not be such a bad move in the long run. Her way into the CIC was blocked by a standard datalock. She paused, switched on a wristlamp, found the socket, and sent a command to her backpack. It obediently extruded a data tentacle, plugged it into the interface socket, and overrode the lock. The power door groaned open. She paused, feeling around with her mind, but felt no alarm. No one had heard it. She withdrew the data tentacle, eased into the CIC, took a data cartridge out of one of the pockets of her black coverall, and shoved it into the writer slot on the battle computer's main console. The data tentacle came out again, its morpho-metallic connector shifting to match the Khund data interface standard an instant before it plunged home and began feeding Standard Military Intrusion Algorithm #4 into the system. This was a Type Seven Khund Military Data Processor - antiquated, but considered 'reliable' by the hidebound Khund High Command. Cracking it should be simple for - Red light flooded the bunker. An alarm shrieked, almost driving Gaz to her knees with its intensity. On the master monitor, the Khundish characters for "INTRUDER" began flashing. Swearing, Gaz whipped the data tentacle back into her pack, yanked the cartridge from the slot, and whirled. She could feel the minds of the security forces, agitated and angry, converging on her position. There was only one way out of the CIC, and it was about to become very, very blocked. Her mission wasn't one of attack, but Gaz had always believed that the best defense in a situation like this was a strong offense. Effortlessly, she shifted her pack into assault mode. Its four spidery legs deployed, but only to the second joint, then bent around her, pointing forward around her body like an umbrella frame. A moment later, the power door opened again and four riot-armored Khund soldiers filled the opening. one of them barked in Khundish. Gaz smiled nastily, her light brown eyes glittering blood-red in the light of the intruder alarm. She jumped lightly up onto the computer console, her small, slim body coiled for action, and replied in the same language, Blue-white fire poured from the tips of her pack's spider legs, pulses of light spraying from them like bullets from machineguns. Shifting her light weight against the console, Gaz dug in her positive-traction boot soles and leaped. By the time she landed in the doorway, the four Khunds were all down; she was actually landing on one of their backs. "Feh," she muttered as her pack's legs, still smoking, retracted. "Too easy." Then she hopped down from the dead trooper's back and started running. Don't get too cocky, my love, she told herself. That was only the first four. Twenty left... /* Bad Religion "Generator" _Generator_ */ The place was all confusion now, alarms still howling, lights flashing, troopers running here and there, officers demanding to know what in the Infernal Depths was going on. It was becoming harder and harder to keep those twenty remaining signatures straight in her mind, keep reading their relative positions and update the tactical map in her head, despite her training. Rather than try to sneak in this cacophony and make her way back to the vent she'd come in through, she decided to just make for the front door. She didn't relish reporting to her superiors the failure of what was supposed to have been a simple mission. But then, how was she supposed to know that these meatsacks had somebody competent on their IT staff? Someone who knew that Algorithm 4 was the standard for Irken intrusion into Khund databases? Oh, well. Nothing for it now but to get out. As sometimes happened in situations like this, Gaz found herself slipping into something like a trance, running through the corridors of this Khund bunker with her heart pounding and her awareness elongated by the adrenaline flow. Time seemed to slow down, space became slightly fluid. She slid around corners without any real sensation of changing course, as though she were standing still and the world was moving around her. It was an unpleasant sensation, but it had its uses - for example, it allowed her to essentially -dodge- the disruptor bolt lobbed at her by the Khund standing in front of the door to the stairs that led up to the surface. She flowed aside, almost convinced she could see the energy pattern in the disruptor bolt as it flicked past her. When it smashed into the power junction box at the end of the hall, the concussive noise returned time to normal. Relieved, Gaz drove forward. The flickering of the overhead lights as the power grid surged and faded didn't bother her. Flicker, 30 feet from her target; flicker, 20; flicker, 10; the lights stabilized and he was down. She considered the stairs, but there were more of them coming that way, and fighting her way up a stairway didn't sound like much fun. Instead she turned to the elevator across the hall. It was shut down, of course - standard procedure in the event of an intruder alert. That didn't bother Gaz much. Who needed the elevator? All she wanted was the shaft. She set herself, extending her pack's legs into attack configuration again, but this time not for a rapid-fire assault. A concentrated beam of blue-white light slashed through the elevator doors, blasting a jagged hole through into the shaft. A moment later Gaz jumped through. For a moment, she seemed to hover in space, poised on the brink of plummeting twenty feet into the elevator's deactivated magfield projector in the machine space below. Then her pack's legs extended fully, their pointed tips jabbing into the duracrete of the shaft walls, and up she climbed, faster than any elevator car could ever have carried her. At the top, she had to keep hanging on with three legs and use the fourth to cut a round hole in the shaft door, but it was a flimsy one and only took a few seconds to do; then she poked it out and flung herself through. By the time she hit the corridor floor beyond, she was tucked into a roll, her pack fully retracted. She came up onto her feet - - and squinted into a sudden blinding light. Booming laughter filled the hallway. Gaz blinked rapidly, trying to force her eyes to adjust. A moment later, a large shape stepped in front of the light directly in front of her, providing slight relief - at least from the glare. She was surrounded. Caught like a rank amateur. She'd been so busy concentrating on her stunt with the elevator shaft that she hadn't noticed the ten heavily armed troops moving into this hallway; they'd anticipated her maneuver and laid a trap, and she had oblingingly climbed in and grabbed the cheese. The one who had walked in front of the light was big even for a Khund - somewhere between eight and nine feet tall, she'd guess, and somewhere around five hundred Standard pounds in weight. He wore the elaborate braid and armor of a general. He was grey-haired and running a little to fat, but he still moved with the cocksure assurance of an athlete as he swaggered into the circle of soldiers and sneered at Gaz. he observed. Slowly, deliberately, he cracked his knuckles. he told the soldiers. His sneer broadened as he thumbed the swatch of orange fabric hanging from his belt, which Gaz suddenly recognized as the sleeve and rank patch from a Worlds Welfare Work Association Trouble Consultant's field jumpsuit. he added, and lowered himself into a fighter's crouch. Even crouched he towered over Gaz. Illuminated by the security force's spotlamps, she wasn't exactly an imposing sight: five feet or so of twentyish human female, slender of build, with a mussed mop of shoulder-length purple hair and light brown eyes that looked gold in the harsh white lighting. She was dressed in a black coverall over a charcoal-striped grey body glove and had on gloves and sturdy field boots. There was a pack of some sort on her back, but she wore no weapon at her belt. All in all, General Brelt thought she didn't look like much of a challenge for a Khundish warrior, but out in the Border Zones, you took them where you found them. Besides, there was a bit of spirit in those eyes, and though scrawny, she did at least curve in the right places. There might be a bit of fun to be had here. He considered having his men stun her - but no, that would be -too- easy. He moved to one side, then the other, then roared and dove, his huge, corded hands searching for her. Gaz ducked under his first strike, gliding her body underneath one of his arms, and slipped behind him, brushing against the side of his uniform. As the general passed, she plucked the ceremonial dagger from his belt, reversed it, and plunged it into his back. General Brelt never quite knew how he'd died; he was in the Infernal Depths by the time his five hundred pounds of corporeal vessel slammed into the floor and slid across the hall to fetch up against the wall. A data cartridge clattered out of his breast pocket and slid along the slick tiled floor, bumping against the foot of one of the security troopers, who had moved to block the hole in the elevator door in case Gaz should take it into her head to escape into the lower levels again. Shocked to the bone by what he'd just seen, paralyzed by disbelief, the trooper looked down and stared stupidly at the cartridge for a moment. Then Gaz flickered across the hall, picked it up, told him, and shoved him into the elevator shaft. His fading yell of surprised horror startled the others out of their frozen reverie. Bellowing, they opened fire. Gaz ducked under their fusillade - she was such a small target that the Khundish soldiers, trained to fight enemies their own size, had a hard time drawing a bead on her. She dashed up the hallway (muttering "meatsack" to General Brelt's corpse on her way past it) and hung a left, heading for the front door. The rest of the post's security contingent had come up the front stairs and bottled up the entryway. Another trap, though she had expected this one. There wasn't a hell of a lot she could do about it, really, other than charge into it - not with the rest of them from the hallway trap breathing down her neck. The ones in front of her saw her coming and leveled their weapons. The ones behind her slowed, stopped, then advanced at a walk, tightening up the cordon. Now that they felt they had the situation under control, they calmed down and started advancing in that hard-tramping lockstep they were taught would intimidate a cornered enemy. Gaz looked around her, saw the muzzles of eighteen Khundish disruptors leveled at her... ... and smiled. A moment later, the bunker's door exploded inward, careening across the entryway and swatting down two of the troopers like the hand of a disgruntled god. (If Gaz worshipped any gods, she was sure they would be disgruntled.) Shocked once more, the troopers who had been waiting for her turned to look. The shape in the doorway could be made out only by the parts of that glowed scarlet out of the darkness of the night beyond - pauldrons, a triangle between them, and two baleful round eyes. With a zzzzzip! of telescoping mem-alloy, a manipulator tentacle with a powerful three-fingered hand on the end whipped across the entryway, seized the Khund nearest Gaz by the head, and yanked him across the twenty feet separating him from the doorway as if he were no heavier than an apple. His shout of dismay could be heard fading off into the distance for some time, followed by the heavy, clamorous THUD of a fully armored Khund slamming into a rocky ridgetop. All this had quite startled the fifteen remaining security officers, who were all now staring at the door and the sinister red lights therein. And not at Gaz, who turned her back to the door, shifted her pack to assault mode again, and started backpedaling at full speed, blazing away on autofire at the troopers who had chased her up from the hall. Yelling, they fell back (and some simply fell), diving for cover behind the support struts holding up the reinforced duracrete walls of the bunker. Their return fire scattered all around her, wild and inaccurate, but one pulse clipped her anyway, burning through her coverall and spending itself against the dissipative weave of her striped bodysuit underneath. She winced as bleed energy burned her outer thigh, but it was superficial - barely slowed her down. One of the troopers, a little braver than the rest, noted her faltering slightly as she was hit. He came up to one knee, sighted, and squeezed his weapon's trigger, secure in the knowledge that he was about to put a disruptor pulse right through the brainpan of this infuriatingly agile lifeform. Even -she- couldn't dodge this, not with her... whatever those things were... busy serving as weapons. But dodge it she did - not under her own power, but because the mighty hand on the end of the flying tentacle whipped back in from outside, seized her pack, and yanked her bodily back through the doorway. His mistress safely at his side, his field of fire clear, Series XXV S.I.R. Unit M4-X powered up his annihilator array and swept the lobby with a waist-high beam of scarlet energy from his optics. Things got fairly quiet in there after that. The Imperial Irken Starship Magnificent, flagship of the Grand Invader himself, dropped from hyperspace on its way past the Delta Petrakis system to pick up a single Voot-class Irken fighter, then almost immediately jumped back into hyperspace again. In the docking bay, radsuited technicians immediately surrounded the Voot as it locked into a docking cradle, swarming around to attach fueling hoses and begin diagnostics. Ordinary Voots like those the Magnificent carried for her own escort and protection in battle didn't receive such red-carpet treatment, but this one was special. This one's purple color, as opposed to the standard Irken magenta, announced clearly that it was the personal property of an Invader. The canopy hissed open. The technicians immediately moved into two ranks, one on each side, then snapped to reverent attention and saluted as the Voot's august pilot climbed down. With a slight limp, Gaz crossed the docking bay, Max following faithfully at her heels. She went into a turbolift and headed for the VIP deck and her quarters, the only home she'd known since the death of Gabrielle McBain. A large room by Irken standards, with a towering eight-foot ceiling and vast arched windows that looked back on the Magnificent's course (currently a dizzyingly receding swirl of blue-white hyperspace), it was a bit spartan, but tastefully decorated and comfortable. Gaz was a woman of fairly simple needs. "Standby mode, Max," she ordered her SIR unit. Silent and obedient, the robot went to a closet-like door in the side wall. That door opened to reveal a niche the approximate size and shape of his own outline. He turned, backed into it, connected himself to several maintenance lines, and then went dark as the door closed in front of him. Gaz sighed, unzipped her coverall, and was about to shrug out of it when the door annunciator beeped. "Come in," she said, not bothering to zip back up. The door opened and another SIR - this one a much earlier model, smaller and simpler of outline, his optics and markers a friendly green color - bounded in. "GAAAAZ!" he cried, running across the room. Without pausing, he launched himself into the air and wrapped himself around her left thigh like a koala on a tree. "Missed you MISSED you missed YOU!" he went on in a high-pitched, slightly unstable voice, rubbing the side of his face blissfully against her leg. Then he reared back - still hanging on with both legs and one arm - reached into the storage compartment on top of his head, and produced a small blue-spotted cake in a paper cup. "I brought yoooou a MUFFIN!" Gaz smiled, took the muffin, and said, "Thanks, Gir. That's sweet. Only would you mind? I got shot there." Gir blinked, then looked and realized for the first time that he'd just been rubbing his face against a charred spot on her body glove. "Ooooops!" he declared, releasing her and backing up a step. "Sorry! Sorrysorry! I'll get a medical kit - or a doctor - or - aaAAAAaaAAAagh!" He ran in circles, flailing his arms, until Gaz reached down and took a firm hold on the antenna atop his head. That pulled him up short - in fact, she lifted him clean off the floor by it, and his legs kept running for a few moments before he realized he'd been lifted and went limp. "It's all right, Gir," she told him in a patiently exasperated tone. "It only hurts when robots bang their heads into it." "Ohhhhhhhh," said Gir in a tone of dawning comprehension. "So I shouldn't do that then." "Right." "OK!" "Gir!" snapped a voice from the doorway. Gir and Gaz both turned to see the shape of the Grand Invader, Commander-in-Chief of the Irken Elite, answerable only to the Almighty Tallest, standing framed in the extra-tall door of Gaz's quarters. The extra height of the opening magnified the fact that the Grand Invader was not particularly tall, even for an Irken. True, he was taller than Gir; Gir came up to Gaz's belt, not counting his antenna, and with a little effort the Grand Invader might have been able to touch her sternum with his forehead. He had a certain air of grandeur about him anyway, though, which was emphasized by the imposing black and violet of his uniform, complete with gleaming silver epaulets and purple-velvet-lined black cape. Like all Irkens, he had light green skin, no nose or ears, a pair of black antennae rising from his temples, and large glossy eyes. In his particular case the eyes were red, and despite their lack of iris or pupil, they had a certain sharp glint to them which spoke of a keen intelligence. "Yeeeeeees?" Gir responded to the barking of his name. "Stop bothering Invader Gaz," said the Grand Invader. "I must begin her... debriefing. Yes! Go and... ah... monitor the Babylon Foundation's communications network. Absorb everything they are doing... " He grinned wickedly, baring a shark's smile of cruelly pointed little teeth, clenched a fist, and went on in a low, sinister tone, "... and in six hours, report all to Ziiiim." Gir snapped to attention, his marker lights and optics going briefly red as he saluted; then he turned around, waved furiously, and cried, "BYE GAZ!!" before dashing, humming a happy tune, from the room. Grand Invader Zim watched him run down the hall, then stepped into Gaz's quarters and tabbed the controls to close and lock the door. Gir was equipped to override them, of course, but he was far too stupid to actually figure out how to -do- that. "I wonder if he'll ever figure out," the Grand Invader mused, "that the 'Babylon Foundation communications network' is human public television." Gaz reached into her top pocket, took out the data cartridge she'd taken from General Brelt, and tossed it to Zim, who caught it on the fly and then examined it with a look of great interest. "I think that's what you sent me after. Their main computer was boobytrapped, which makes me think they were expecting me - or somebody, anyway. I took that from a flag officer." Zim looked at the cartridge again, then went to a wall panel, tabbed it open, dropped the cartridge into it, and snapped into the nearby speaker in his best voice of command, "Computer!" "What?" the computer's modulated voice said irritably. Thrown slightly off his stride by the petulant response, Zim replied, "Uh... I want this cartridge decoded and analyzed within the hour." "Sure, OK," the computer replied in a bored tone, and the panel snapped shut. "... should really have that thing reprogrammed," Zim muttered before turning to face Gaz again. She sat down on the end of her bed, sighing tiredly. Zim crossed the room and jumped up so that he was standing next to her. "So," he said. "You were expected? They laid a trap?" "Several, actually," Gaz replied. She stretched languorously, cracking her back this way and that with a little moan of satisfaction, then went on, "Nothing Max and I couldn't handle. I only got hit once, and it's minor." Zim knelt down and examined the burn on her leg. Now -here- was a triumph of Irken engineering! Without that body glove, even such a glancing hit from a Khund disruptor at full power would kill a person. But -with- it, ah! With it, here she sat: Alive and well, whole and hearty... ready for debriefing. Yes, indeed. Irken engineering at its absolute zenith. "Mm, yes, quite superficial," Zim agreed, nodding. "But it must be painful. I'll see to it presently." He straightened and smiled at her again. "Good work, Invader Gaz." Gaz reached lazily up and ran a hand over the top of his head, smoothing back his antennae. "Not too bad for a filthy beast of meat and hair, hm?" she asked pointedly. Zim gritted his teeth. "I did -not- call you a filthy beast of meat and hair!" he protested. Gaz chuckled. "Yes you did," she said. "I have the recording to prove it." Grand Invader Zim growled, then conceded defeat. "All right, maybe I did," he grumbled. Then, with a hopeful little smile, he added, "But was I right about the magical love adventure part?" Invader Gaz smiled and unfastened the throat closure of her armored body glove. "That's a work in progress," she said. /* Bad Religion "Can't Stop It" _The Process of Belief_ */ Eyrie Productions, Unlimited I'm incurable but durable presented it's easy to see Lack of restraint is a complaint UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES of those around me FUTURE IMPERFECT I know that others postpone Gratification well I lack that INVASION affectation Let's get it right starring (Let's get it right) There's no end in sight and I Invader Gaz Max Can't stop Can't stop it with Can't stop Khund Expeditionary Force 8 Can't stop it's shocking but I (General Brelt, cmdg.) just can't stop it That's right and Uncontrollable Grand Invader Zim I'm inconsolable Gir My pleasure center is the shelter for a reptile I hate when I gotta tolerate Tallest Frustration see I lack that Benjamin D. Hutchins motivation Let's set this straight This is the fault of (Let's set this straight) John Trussell I never wait and I Anne Springsteen Kelly St. Clair Can't stop Janice Barlow Can't stop it MegaZone Can't stop and Can't stop it's shocking but I Jhonen Vasquez just can't stop it That's right E P U (colour) 2002