Even writing quickly, this took an hour. And I could spend another hour tightening it. Sigh. Too little time for all the awesome things one can do...
Flutoztron 324
Quarkwoz Da'a'dvoi Ahhaaztgz Flubootz, also known as Quarkwoz, Daredevil of Sector B, and also That Joyriding Asshole, gunned the engines of his stolen single-seater Flutoztron 324 and sliced through the troposphere of the blue-marbled planet. Immediately the indicator bank lit up and transludic alarms shot through his glabrous mantle.
He extruded a tentacle or three, disabled the annunciators (the trembling disturbed his digestion terribly), and launched anti-missile defenses just as the blue-marbled planet shot an array of warheads at his needle-like craft.
The attacking warheads vaporized in a shower of ions, positrons, and shredded thermal insulation.
The Flutoztron 324 screamed closer to the planet's surface.
Panicking hordes scurried from the site, shouting things like, “Oh, my God!” and “Don't forget the wedding DVD!”
Massive defense robots, until now a secret from the general populace, raced to the projected site of impact. They energized their plasma bolts and other weapons previously thought to be the domain of mere science fiction. At Cheyenne Mountain and other locations around the globe, including ones so secret that they can not even be implied in a short story, hard-faced men and women prepared to make decisions and sacrifices until now only contemplated in horrifying red-team, blue-team, chartreuse-team simulations.
The Flutoztron 324 drew nigh. The defensebots placed massive carbon-steel-foam cushions upon the ground, confident in their hyper-fast AI brains that the nanotech mattresses would slow and trap the alien that was hurtling closer, ever closer by the microsecond.
Quarkwoz chortled with glee, or more accurately his mantle strobed with a thousand shades of the ultraviolet, for he was amused and even delighted at the Earthlings' puny conceptions of defense.
Down the street from the projected crash zone, over the growling engines of the defense robots, a lone dog could be heard to bark.
At last his ship reached the surface and, without stopping for even a second of digital parley with positronic brains of the defense robots, and easily shaking off the continued missiles, lasers, and destructor beams showered upon his hull, he plunged through the carbon-steel-foam cushions and into dark black topsoil of Alligator, Mississippi.
Not pausing to contemplate the agricultural riches or historical import of his crash site, Quarkwoz powered on, slicing easily into the bedrock as the defense robots, with their heretofore unheralded capacities, transformed into needle-form pursuit-bots, tunneling after the intruder with remarkable speed, unwilling (in their loyal, robotic way) to allow our virgin soil to be raped by this unknown but definitely alien scum.
Quarkwoz saw their pursuit and again he chortled. He activated the Nimbuz 4 Caltrop-Dropper, and oxy-titanium spikes shot out behind him as his ship burrowed ever further in.
The oxy-titanium spikes disabled most of the pursuing 'bots, but one persisted, the one whose creators dubbed Evertrue. Evertrue hardened its little positronic heart, and with an extra burst of power endeavored to close the gap with the alien intruder.
Quarkwoz ceased his chortling, his mantle shifting into a sullen shade of pink. He reviewed the array of input-points before him, pondering hard. As he shot ever deeper into the Earth's crust, his options would narrow as the density and temperature of the medium through which he traveled increased.
Quarkwoz for an ultra-micro-second experienced a rare feeling: panic. For time was running out. Something must be done. But what?
Then, in a stroke of inspiration, he fired the Enveloping Sludge of Capulon Beta. The brown, slimy Enveloping Sludge flowed out behind him, expanding to twenty times its original volume, and then becoming paradoxically even more viscous.
Clever as it was, and ever so full of heart, Evertrue could not anticipate this nefarious tactic, and ran headlong into the congealing goo, which fouled its intakes despite their sophisticated filter-cowlings and grabbed onto Evrtrue's Ultra-Teflon skin like hooks finding loops.
Forty kilometers deeper into the crust, Quarkwoz coasted to a stop, pausing to glory in his latest exploit. Hey, he'd buzzed far more sophisticated cultures in craft of a much higher Yleem-power, even by today's revised Yleem-power ratings, but he never tired of his joyriding thrills.
Quarkwoz finished his savoring, his mantle now strobing in a pleasing alternation of puce and ultrablue, started the Flutoztron 324 into the first leg of a three-point turn.
As he did this, the stolen craft pulsed rhythmically, and Quarkwoz cursed its owners. Stupid back-up beepers! What a buzzkill.
Then the craft juddered and began to wind down. Indicators and annunciators trembled, flexed, and chimed. The craft's lighting dimmed. All was still.
Quarkwoz extruded another tentacle, or ten, and beat the indicator banks and displays of his disabled craft. How could he be so stupid! Stupid, stupid, stupid!
To run out of fuel!
After his tantrum subsided, he collected his seventeen variegated wits, and energized the long-ranged ethersplort communicator, tentacling in a long and obscure code he knew now by heart.
After a few rings, a connection was made, and he could perceive the vibrations of his answering party, and he replied, using the same mode of communication:
“Mom? Can you come pick me up?”
(c) 2011 Michael Bernstein
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