RE: [JMC_Blue_Dwarf] Volcanic Pancake
Where: Deep Space
When: Around about the same time the raid is taking place on Kraxor
Who: Lester Seventeen-Dot-Phelps and SNIDE
The trick to talking to yourself, is to know when to stop before it turns into a blazing row.Cramped into a tiny escape pod, Lester seized the tiny robot in front of him and held it up to his face.
"You pressed the button!" He gasped as the pod did another loop-de-loop. "Despite everything you pressed the button I specifically told you not to press!"
The robot raised two of its four legs in a horror, pressed a tiny claw to its dome in a display of woe, then delivered a four-way shrug, followed by a mock salute.
"Where are we? What will we do? We're supposed to be going to the Blue Dwarf!"
Tick, the robot chirped, tick tick, bleep blart, tick.
"Oh. Well I suppose that might explain why we were drifting for so long. But surely they'd have said something about it being missing before now?"
Blart, bleep tick.
"You think they'd do that? Just leave us out there?"
BLART!
"You still shouldn't have ejected us. Well, now what?"
For answer, the robot struggled out of his grip and swished through the zero-gravity like a tiny jellyfish to land on the control console. It began hammering keys with two of its legs while Lester struggled to see what it was doing. A schematic appeared that Lester couldn't really make sense of except it was saying: "Here you are" followed by: "there is bugger all else for light-years around." Suddenly the robot tapped the screen at a point on the corner.
"What's that?"
Bleep tick, blart tick, bleep bleep, the robot paused, gathering it's thought, wort bleep toot tick.
"Oh," Lester frowned, "that's what they look like, and you spotted this earlier? How do you know it goes to the Blue Dwarf."
The robot hesitated, then: Bleep?
"So our choice is: stay floating in space forever, or go through the remains of that artificial wormhole because you have a "feeling" it might lead us to where we want to go." Lester curled up in a ball in mid air and hugged his head, floating gently in a foetal position. "Go on then. At least if we die, I'll know it was on the basis of a simulated emotion in a tiny piece or robotics that's got ideas above its station."
The robot curled one arm around into a semblance of a "thumbs-up" and hammered the engine controls with another. The pod shook and flung Lester and the little mechanoid to the back of the chamber as it rocketed into the tiny, closing gap in reality.
***
<snip>The lava started to build up around [Justin], and then started flowing over the shield. Soon he was almost smothered by lava that was starting to harden.
"Help!" He shouted.</snip>
As the molten rock closed over the last of the shield, Justin spied a tiny flare in the sky above before everything became dark.
***
The pod exploded into being above a moon creasing with volcanic and artificial explosions. The robot scampered over to the control screen, then began performing a bizarre victory dance over and over. Lester unfolded his gangly body, reasserted which way round his lab coat should go and drifted over to the screen.
"OK, SNIDE, you found a planet. Now land us."
SNIDE looked up from mid-somersault. Bleep?
"Yes, land. You do know how to... no, of course you don't. I mean why think that far ahead eh?"
The pod turned into the warm welcoming embrace of the moon's gravity and began to hammer down into the even warmer, no hotter, no scorching touch of the moon's artificial atmosphere.
Fortunately automatic systems kicked in and a tiny set of parachutes deployed. Then promptly incinerated. Struggling against a closing blackness, Lester struggled forward, reaching out with his metal hand to the control console. SNIDE was spread against one wall, limbs forming a star pattern for all the world as if he had been swatted. In his daze Lester contacted the computer, identified a protocol called "Most Gross Danger Routine ZZ-99" and activated it before blacking out completely.
***
The pod slammed into the ground ten feet from Justin the Volcanic Ferrer Roché and the resulting ripple through the rock sent him and his impregnable forceshield high into the air, scattering bits of metamorphic rock that would interest geologists for literally entire seminars. It swung up and over and plunged back down landing who knows where.
The pod lay smouldering in it crater. Bits of Krylon scattered for miles around. Steam rose from its blackened, charred skin and there was a plink-plink as bits of it cooled. Then with a whirr a small lamp emerged and began to flash amber while a robotic voice started to call: "Help Help" in a variety of languages.
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