*
If the ugly creature was one of the imbeciles, the Captain had thought as he’d downed a third bottle of Xlab beer, the strongest ale on Throwgus and very likely to paralyse a lesser lifeform, then he would probably not want any harm to come to them. He’d witnessed this kind of week altruistic response in a race of dumb animals on a small moon in the Xrashtianx system five years before. Armed with his new plan, he hurled the empty bottle against the remains of his skull collection and rushed to the bridge. The bridge crew were busy analysing the course of a small object that they’d been tracking. It was too small to be a ship, too slow to be a missile, and if it were a missile then it was going to miss. They’d concluded that it must be a piece of space junk. The gunnery commander had made a bet that he could hit it with an electron pulse without any computer guidance. The rest of the bridge crew had all gathered around his workstation to place bets and the activity was becoming extremely heated. The target was one hundred and sixty thousand kilometres away and it was still moving at a fair pace, so the gunnery commander was going to need all his skill to pull this one off. He was tapping away at his keyboard as his screen showed a flashing dot, representing the target and the cross hairs moved across the screen to meet it. He had to match the speed of the target with the movement of the gun and fire just in front of it, to allow for the split second that the pulse would require to traverse the void of space. He took a deep breath as he lined up the shot. His fat, stubby thumb began to apply pressure onto the highly sensitive firing button, then suddenly the Captain burst into the bridge, causing the congregation of hopeful punters to scatter indiscriminately around the bridge, leaping to their workstations in a frantic show of action.
“Take the ship to a stationary orbit above the most densely populated city on the planet!” he gurgled without blinking an eye at the obvious chaos surrounding him. The gunnery commander jumped as he made the shot and there was a flash as the electron pulse discharged and missed the target by twenty kilometres.
“What the hell was that?” shouted Flameout.
“No idea.” Pitcher replied. “Could it have been a meteor?”
Meteors don’t burn up in space numb nuts, thought Captain Bugsey Buckhannon, resisting the temptation to voice his thought. Nothing more was said on the subject as they continued hurtling through space, blissfully unaware of their close encounter with oblivion.
The bridge on the Throgloid ship became a blur of activity as everyone jumped to their stations and prepared to move the ship into an Earth orbit.
“Then I want it targeted with the plasma burst weapon,” the captain continued.
He left the bridge and stomped towards the hanger bay with renewed vigour, rattling the deck plates as he went. Pardy saw the Captain enter and walk under the ship, running his hand down the underside of the hull. He was grinning in a way that could only be described as disturbing.
“I know that you can hear me in there,” said the Captain. “You have ten seconds to open the ship and give me full control of this, and the larger vessel. If you don’t,” his grin widened, virtually dividing his head in two, “I’m going to destroy one major city on the planet below every ten seconds thereafter.” Robbie made a quick calculation. Ten Throgloid seconds were equivalent to three Earth minutes. The Throgloid Captain left the hangar and, with an aura of impending victory about him, rushed back to the bridge.
“Doctor Branith,” called George, “it’s moving!”
Doctor Branith hurried across the room and George explained that the object was moving at about half a million kilometres per hour towards the Earth. At that speed it would reach Earth orbit in twenty minutes.
“Should we inform the Secretary of Defence?” asked George.
“Not yet. After all, they didn’t show any signs of hostility before, did they?” He secretly wanted the scoop on this discovery. If he told the Secretary of Defence, then they would take over. He wanted to be the one to welcome the aliens to Earth.
“Just keep tracking it.” He patted George on the shoulder but this time he didn’t return to his desk, but hovered, breathing excitedly down George’s neck.