Interview for an engineer

 “I have a question, if I may?”  Threndall was looking around the engine room a little wide-eyed and, being a native of the Oatmaker worlds, that meant that it had eight of them, two on stalks, that were staring.

Kimbull, mostly human with a little bit of doubt on his mother’s side of the family, stuck his thumbs in the pockets of his overalls and nodded.  “Normally we ask for questions to be kept to the end,” he said, “but there’s a lot going on in here and I’m not surprised you have questions.  Go ahead, but remember that we’ve only got an hour for the interview and the HR folk do insist that I do their questions too.”

“Right, yes,” said Threndall.  It was three metres tall though its eyes ranged from one metre above the floor to the two stalks that emerged from the top of its body.  Its head, for want of a better term, was a roughly egg-shaped mass that housed its mouth and olfactory sense buds that stuck out of its torso and could move up and down the full length of it.  Four limbs also had the freedom to slide around its body and could extend to nearly three metres in length as well, but they were currently tidily folded up against its body.  Instead of legs and feet it had many cilia that rubbed against the floor and, given enough friction, could move it as fast as a sprinting human.  Its exposed skin was a pale green, shading through turquoise into blue in places, but much of it was wrapped up in a sari-like fabric that twisted around it and had holes for arms and eyes to poke through.  “I noticed that the engines are baseline human tech—“

“Good for acceleration,” said Kimbull.  “I love me some Derlethian tech but their engines would leave a grandmother screaming for you to get on with it.”

“I don’t really understand that metaphor,” said Threndall trying to sound polite.  Humans were known to use facial expressions a lot to convey information but they seemed to have trouble reading the equivalent muscular variation that the aliens of the Oatmaker worlds used.  Someone had tried to explain it to Threndall as being like trying to understand thirteen different kinds of shrug, which really didn’t sound that difficult.  “But the fuel lines and containment seem to be Aldebaran. Is that normal?”

Kimbull puffed his chest out, alarming Threndall momentarily.  When he didn’t attack, Threndall relaxed a little but remained wary.  “That’s our little experiment,” he said.

“Oh no!”

“No, it’s fine, we do these kinds of things all the time,” said Kimbull.  “I mean, you don’t make progress if you don’t tinker with things, do you?  And on a long voyage everyone needs a little project on the side for when there’s not much else to do.”

“But these are the engines!”  Threndall’s voice got deeper as it got more agitated and already the deck was thrumming in resonance.  “What if they break?”

“Then we fix ‘em,” said Kimbull.  “It happens, and you have to expect that.  I mean, what starship have you ever been on where there’s no breakdowns now and then?”

“All of them!”  Threndall’s eyes were as wide as they could get and were sliding up its body to the top, which was an Oatmaker way of showing distress.  The eyes on stalks were waving around as though caught in a severe wind.

“Really?  Bloody hell, how do you manage that then?” Kimbull sounded sincere to Threndall, which only agitated it further.

“By not tinkering with the engines mid-flight,” it said, its voice almost at its lowest bass.  It practically buzzed.  “By following the manufacturers guidelines on what to combine it with.  By valuing safety over speed!”

“Sounds dull,” said Kimbull after a moment’s thought.  “And what happens if you get pirated?”

“You contact your insurers!”  Threndall’s voice was so deep it was sepulchral and Kimbull wiggled a finger in his left ear as though trying to hear better.

“Right,” he said.  “Sure. But this is a human starship, right, and we get sent on the interesting missions.  The stuff where no-one’s ever gone before—“

“Or will ever go again!”

“— maybe.  Depends what we find there, really.  But yeah, we have to be able to react to new situations and you can’t do that if everyone knows what you’ve got and how it performs.”

Threndall waved all four of its limbs at the Aldebaran fuel lines.  “Those things are intended to push starship four times the size of this,” it said.

“Right, and our engines are built for speed.  We reckon we can probably double the warp speeds if we get it right.”

“If?!  IF!!”  Threndall’s thrashing limbs narrowly missed a passing engineer, and Threndall suddenly noticed that everyone else in the engine room was human, and it tried to calm down.  It was very, very hard to do.  “You could blow the whole engine up!  You could rip a hole in the fabric of space-time!  You could evert a gravity well if it goes wrong!”

“Done that,” said Kimbull.

“What?”

“Everted a gravity well,” said Kimbull.  “We were on the Princess Monocle when that happened.   Shook us all up a bit, I can tell you.”

“And what happened?  Were you all court-martialled and demoted?”  Threndall’s voice was as deep as it could go and from the look of concentration on Kimbull’s face it was clear he was having trouble understanding the words.

“Ah, no,” he said slowly as he puzzled the words out.  “We passed it on to the weapons division.”

Threndall just stared, all eyes now as high up as they would go and hurting from the strain.

“Your government is buying about sixty of them,” said Kimbull.  “As a deterrent, I hear.”

Threndall said nothing; there seemed to be nothing left to say.

“So,” said Kimbull.  “You seem a bit excitable, but I don’t think it’s a big problem.  Do you want the job or not?  ‘Cos if you do we’ve got to get through the HR questions as well.”

Alien Visitor IV

Jonathan sat in the driver’s seat of his Mini, alone in the car-park.  Abigail had driven off while the Pastor was trying to convince him that he wasn’t joking, that there really was an alien holding him and Estelle hostage.  He felt oddly relieved, as the alien explained the anomaly they’d seen earlier, and that meant that the equipment was probably in good shape after all.  He appreciated that, for all he couldn’t tell anyone else now without sounding mad.  But what should he do?  Go home and probably become another hostage himself?  Or take the Pastor’s advice and run, flee to the next town and call the National Guard out.  If they’d believe his story.

He thought back to his wedding day, and looking at Estelle’s face as he drew the veil back, and realising with a sudden cold frisson that this wasn’t who he’d fallen in love with.  Somehow between getting engaged and the day of the marriage she’d changed, turned into his mother when he wasn’t looking.  He’d been telling himself ever since that no-one marries their mother (except maybe that Greek dude in the legends, and he got punished for that, didn’t he?) and that the lovelessness of their marriage must be his own fault.  He kept feeling that it might not be true though.

He started the engine.  He’d go home and see if the alien might trade not killing people for Estelle.  Maybe it hadn’t met her long enough yet to figure out what she was like.

*

The Pastor seized the passenger door of Jonathan’s car as he pulled up, and flung himself inside.

“Drive!” he yelled.  “Drive like the gates of hell are open and looking this way!”

Jonathan switched back up the gears and the car took off, precision German engineering as reliable as ever.  The roads were empty at most times of day this far out, but especially empty now, and he wasn’t worried about hitting anything.

“What happened?” he said.

“He took Estelle,” said the Pastor, his face ashen and his robes messed up.  “They left, she was riding on him somehow.  I don’t know quite how.  They were going to look for cows.”

“Estelle doesn’t know anything about animals,” said Jonathan.  “Why was she going?”

“He – the alien – wanted her, I think,” said the Pastor.  “She can point cows out to it, maybe.”

“She’ll like that,” said Jonathan.  “Always was a back-seat driver.  What do they want with cows then?”

“Explode them?”  The Pastor explained about the alien’s weapons.

“Sounds like a teenager then,” said Jonathan.  “Stole daddy’s spaceship and gun and came out on a bit of a joyride.  Wonder where he parked the ship, I wouldn’t mind seeing that.”

Somewhere in the distance, off to their left, something exploded.

“Cow?”

“Cow.”

“Estelle showed me a very strange magazine,” said the Pastor thoughtfully.

“Men or women?” asked Jonathan.  The Pastor looked sharply at him, but he was concentrating on the road ahead.

“Men, from the cover,” he said.

“Cliff’s,” said Jonathan.  “His kids are over and he’s frightened what they’d think of him if they found out.  Bit silly if you ask me, at his time of life, but there you go.  Estelle’s are all women.  And dogs sometimes.  Bit of puzzle that one.”

“Right.”  The Pastor fell silent while he thought about this.

“Do you have a dog?” he asked.

“No.  Thought about it, then I found her magazines.”

“Oh.  Where are we going, by the way?”

“I looked at the logs of the anomaly, the spacecraft,” said Jonathan.  “When I knew what it was.  It’s a guess, but I reckon the spaceship’s out this way, and I want a look at it.”

“What about Estelle, aren’t we going to rescue her?”

“Nah, I reckon she’d be happier with him than me,” said Jonathan.  “How long does it take to get her declared dead?”

Alien Visitor III

The plane was the pilot, two silent passengers, and the mail bags.  Jonathan waved goodbye to the pilot as he left the building, Abigail walking close behind him.  In the car-park – big enough for six cars and never full – she paused by a white Ford and spoke.

“Going home to Estelle?”

“Of course,” said Jonathan.  “She’ll be waiting for me.  Probably with some problem that absolutely has to fixed there and then, that I never should have left the house without having anticipated.  That’s the way it’s been for the last three months.”

“How can you love a woman who never stops moaning?”

“My mother moaned all the time too,” said Jonathan.  “And my gran.  My gran was worse, in fact.  She’d moan when you did something nice for her, complaining that she felt obliged to do something nice back then.  Not that she ever did.”

“Not all women moan constantly,” said Abigail.  “You should explore that idea, you know.”

“Thanks,” said Jonathan with a smile.  “I’d probably need a divorce first though.”

“Yeah, maybe.  Maybe not.  Would you ask her for one?”

Jonathan opened the driver’s side door of his Mini and shrugged.  He smiled, boyishly at her.  “Probably not,” he said.  “She might like that.”

*

The Pastor opened Estelle’s cell phone cautiously, watching the alien as he did so.  The creature didn’t seem interested in what they were doing at the moment, though it turned round and paid attention when they tried to move away.  It was going through Estelle’s photograph albums.

“Seven, four one.” said Estelle, completing the phone number.  The Pastor tapped the digits in and then pressed the dial key, the one with the little green handset on.  The phone beeped and then did nothing.  The Pastor and Estelle both stared at in, consternation furrowing their brows and puckering their mouths, and then the phone made the connection and start ringing Jonathan.  Dialling appeared on the screen in green letters.

“He won’t answer,” said Estelle acidly.  “I bet he’s found a floozy to spend the night with while we’re here being held hostage by an alien creature.  I bet he’s wrapped in her arms right now, nuzzling into the side of her neck, kissing and licking at the soft, tender skin there.”

She broke off, realising that the Pastor was staring at her.  ‘Well, he might,” she said defensively.

“Hello Estelle!”  Jonathan’s voice from the phone was echoey and metallic.  The Pastor put the phone to his ear and started to talk urgently.  Something soft and spongy gripped Estelle’s elbow, and she started.

Turning her head, she found that the alien had stretched out a long arm, or maybe leg, and had wrapped the end of it around her elbow.  It looked like a strand of grey spaghetti that had been overcooked until it was ready to tear apart under its own weight.  She tugged her elbow, but the alien appendage held firm.  Another arm snaked across, holding the photograph album.  It was turned to a page where Estelle was sitting coquettishly on a log, one leg demurely crossed over the other.  She was wearing her white skirt, completely inappropriate for being out in the woods, and a sailor’s blouse that she’d always felt Jonathan didn’t appreciate enough.  Behind her were cows.  A third tentacular appendage tapped the picture, and she felt the alien’s grip tighten.

“What does he want?” asked the Pastor, who’d ended the phone call.  “Let him have it!”

“I think he wants cows,” said Estelle.  “Unless he wants me dressed in clothes I’ve not worn in ten years!”

“Cows?” asked the Pastor.  “Why?”

Alien Visitor II

The last flight came onto the radar screen exactly on time, and Jonathan instructed the pilot to come straight in and land on Runway 1.  There was a crackle of static and then a cackle of laughter: Maglen airfield was so small as to only have one runway, and that was rolled flat every week by a steamroller that was literally steam-powered.

“Can I pick my own bay?” he asked, still chuckling.

“All yours,” said Jonathan. “But we’re closing up ten minutes after you land, so I wouldn’t park too far away.”

“Reckon I might wait for you to close then,” said the pilot.  “That way I don’t have nothing to declare.”

They both laughed a little, and then the pilot said, “But seriously though, how about that jet that passed by earlier.  Where was that going?”

“What jet?”

“On the way in, ‘bout 10 minutes ago, something fast and long shot past me.  Only really saw its tail-lights, but there’s no military round here so I figured it must be stopping out your way.”

“Couldn’t land,” said Jonathan with confidence.  “Didn’t see it though.  We got an anomaly, but that was going way too fast.”

“Huh,” said the pilot.  “Guess it must have been the bogeyman then!”

“Sounds like it,” said Jonathan, agreeing happily.  “Got a bit of a crosswind rising now, you ok with that?”

“Sure thing,” said the pilot.  “Coming in in two.”

*

Estelle backed into the house, the Pastor following her, and the odd-shaped man waving things around in his long, spidery arms the whole while.

“Does it speak English?” she asked, and the Pastor shrugged.

“He hasn’t answered any of my questions,” he said.  “Foremost of which was what he wanted with me.”

“It’s a he then?”

“Haven’t got a clue,” said the Pastor.  “He doesn’t look human, so those words might simply not apply, of course, but I’d like to think that he’s a he.  He’s waving weapons around, after all.  I saw him kill two cows with one of them, though I’ve no idea how they work.  He just pointed the things and the cows kind of exploded.  There were chunks of meat everywhere.”

“Sounds nasty,” said Estelle, shifting sideways so that the Pastor was directly between her and the alien.  “Let’s hope he doesn’t do that in here.  I’d be cleaning up for days.”

“And why are you thinking that it’s me he’d be exploding?” asked the Pastor.  His face was still smiling, but he sounded hurt.

“Jonathan’s due home in twenty minutes,” said Estelle.  “It’s not like he’s going to know that we’re being held hostage by a mad alien with weapons that explode things.”  She brightened up, suddenly realising that she might not need a divorce after all.

“Well then, we have a human duty to warn him,” said the Pastor.  “You should try to call him, I doubt that the alien knows what a phone is or does.”

“You call him!”

“Estelle, my dear, I don’t know your husband’s phone number.”

“I’ll dictate,” she said, a touch of frost in her tone.

Alien Visitor I

The alien spacecraft came in low and fast, underneath the radar out at Penrith station, and appeared briefly as a blur on the Maglen air-control screens.  Jonathan tapped the screen with a bitten fingernail and sighed.

“Another one,” he called across the room.  There was only him and Abigail in there at this time of night, and they had less than an hour to go before the end of their shift and shutting down the airfield for the night.  “When are we getting this kit checked out?”

“Thursday,” said Abigail.  She was doing a crossword in a magazine while she waited out the end of the shift.  The last flight out had been a half-hour ago, and the last flight in was currently on time and ten minutes away.  “They think we complain too much.”

“Too much?  We get random anomalies like this three nights out of five.  What’re they going to do when we’re getting them all the time and can’t tell where the planes are for the blips?”

“Probably sack us for not doing the job properly and hire some untrained kid who thinks they’re going to flip burgers.”  Abigail scratched out something in her magazine and started chewing the end of her pen.

“Hah.  Reckon I could get a job flipping burgers then, if they’re going to come in here and direct air-traffic?”

“Nope.”

“No?”

“Nope.  You’ve got a lousy attitude, you’ll never pass the customer service element of it.”

*

Jonathan’s wife Estelle stood in front of the closet and poked the cardboard box with a toe.  It was an angry toe, but that was because Estelle was angry all over.  Her marriage had, she felt, been falling apart since the moment she’d said ‘I do’.  She’d had a moment where she almost spoke up and asked for a do-over, but it had passed and then Jonathan had been kissing her and everybody had been cheering – well, everybody was a bit strong for her parents, his parents, her best friend and his parents’ dogs, but they’d been cheering anyway.  Or woofing.  That might be dog-cheering she supposed.  And she’d been looking for a divorce ever since.

She poked the box again.  This, she thought, might be it.  Four dirty, filthy, mucky magazines that she knew she’d not bought.  Four dirty, filthy, all-male magazines.  The ones she bought had women and dogs in, and she kept them better hidden than this, in a cardboard box at the back of a closet under some hockey gear that she was bound to get round to snooping through sooner or later.  How dare he not love her!  She wanted a divorce, but she wanted him to regret it, she wanted him to hate every moment of it.  She wanted, desperately and deeply, to prove to him that she’d made the mistake in marrying him and not the other way round.  And now this, betrayal at a fundamental level.

The doorbell rang, so she bent down and took the top magazine out of the box and then marched down the hall.  She threw the door open and thrust the magazine at the shadow on the doorstep.

“And what do you make of this?” she demanded.

There was a pause as the figure took the magazine and looked at the cover.

“Could you turn the porch light on please?” said a familiar voice.

She turned it on, and started slightly when she realised that the Pastor was stood there holding the magazine.

“Well,” he said coolly, “it appears to be pornography.  According to the address label it belongs to Cliff, which kind of makes me wonder why you have it and why you’re offering it to me.”

“Cliff?” Estelle looked blank.

“Your neighbour,” prompted the Pastor, a gentle smile spreading over his youthful features.  Estelle harboured an irrational fear that the Pastor was so young that he would be easily-polluted by the world.  “You were telling me last week that he’d asked you to look after some boxes for him while his children were over.”

“Oh crap,” said Estelle with feeling.  “Buggeration.”

“Those are not Christian words,” said the Pastor.  “However, I’m a little distracted at the moment, so I’ll let that pass.”

Estelle frowned, and then another shape stepped out from behind the pastor; a thin, emaciated waif-life shape with spindly legs and arms like a spider’s legs.  They had too many joints and kept bending and flexing, and they were holding something that looked gun-shaped.

Eric Soapwort

Eric Soapwort was a butcher by trade, so chopping off a few arms and legs for church sacrifice didn't bother him particularly.  He put on his heaviest apron, the one that went right down to his ankles, hefted his cleaver a couple of times for the look of the thing, and brought it smoothly down on the first wrist.  A seven-fingered hand fell to the ground, and a voice nearby said, "Ow!  You rotter!"  Eric ignored it, and located the second wrist.  A few seconds later, a second hand was lying on the ground next to the first.
It had puzzled him when the vicar first asked him if he thought he could handle church sacrifice.
"I'm not sure what you mean, guv," he'd replied, thinking it was probably about money.  The vicar smiled a thin-lipped little smile at the guv and waved his hands laconically.
"Church sacrifice," he said, his voice all Home Counties and his vowels elongated and wobbly.  Some of the more elderly and female of his parishioners told him weekly that he should be on Radio 4.  "We need someone to chop bits off the sacrifice, otherwise it's not a sacrifice, is it?"
"Well," said Eric, "I can chop things up mate, that's not a problem.  I can do you some lovely sausages afterwards as well if you like, or the missus can, she's a dab hand with the spicing.  But –"
"But what?"  The vicar had a half-smile on his lips and a full-blown full-moon howl in his eyes.
"But... isn't this Church of England?  I thought we'd done away with all the sacrifice stuff because it was messy and... well... expensive?"
"Everything these days is expensive," said the vicar, and Eric found himself nodding automatically.  It was true.  Even the supermarket's own-brand economy goods now came in shit you shouldn't eat and luxury shit that won't kill you this week flavours now.  He checked the meat products when the wife forced him to go in there, and had been impressed to discovered both that they were now putting Polyfilla in their English Bangers and that they were passing fillet of rat off as Parisian Steak.  He'd put the economy digestives back after that and bought the expensive ones, on the grounds that they probably wouldn't explode when he dunked them in his tea.
"Everything is expensive, and yet the church is essentially free for anyone who walks through the door.  The collection plate collects less each week," and he paused meaningfully here, "and so we need to do something to attract the crowds.  Live sacrifice works well, and isn't strictly against our interpretation of the Bible."
"The Bible says to sacrifice people?" Eric has heard a lot about the Bible but never picked a copy up.
"Everywhere," said the vicar with a sigh.  "But that's not the point.  It specifically does not set down prohibitions regarding advertising campaigns, or describe in much detail what should be done with those not made in God's image."
"Canadians?"
"No, not them Eric.  If you're available for the sacrifice though, I can explain more then."

*

And so Eric found himself butchering live aliens on a Thursday evening, slightly curious about where the church had found them from and how they managed to speak English, at least until he'd cut most of their appendages off.  Then they turned pale blue and died.

The vicar grinned to himself, and readied a sermon on how the Godless would speak in tongues to persuade the God-fearing, and crossed another alien off the list.  Soon the nest would be eradicated.