The question of how two cats could possibly break into a vehicle most definitely not designed to be opened from the outside was thankfully made moot by a clunk and sliding noise above. The door had opened, and the ramp was lowering.
Thank you, plot convenience.
Before the ramp had fully extended, one of the sleds shot off the end of it, sending a ripple of heated air through the grain as it sped away. Two quick leaps took me to a convenient position just behind the ramp, where I could peer after the sled without exposing myself.
The thing was overloaded, bunny-hopping over every hillock and tussock. One of the captured humans was driving it, with the rest piled in the back. No—not all of them. The older man and the young boy with the dog were missing.
I stayed where I was, watching the progress of the sled and waiting for the second, which emerged before the first had made it halfway across the valley floor. Still I waited, in case a third was going to shoot out, but nothing came, and my sensitive hearing picked up no sound of movement immediately above me, so I shifted to a vantage point in the grain that would allow me to look up the ramp into the ship.
There was someone up there, but they were turned away, studying a monitor set by the door.
Farmhouse Grey moved before I could, leaping to the top of the ramp and dashing left. I followed, working to get a better idea of the interior, and to spot a good hiding place, or other people, all in a few glances.
The area just within the hatch was completely clear: a long corridor stretching to my left and right, joining two of the polyhedrons. The opposite wall, however, was a series of doors and hatches, with the nearest two open, revealing empty spaces that must have held the sleds. Almost everything else was closed, and I joined Farmhouse Grey in a determined pelt for a pair of ramps at the very end of the corridor to the left. A door stood open at the top of the up ramp, and we raced to reach it before the person at the hatch turned around—or it shut.
Skidding through the door, I found a room with angled walls that suggested it filled half of the top section of a polyhedron. Two examining tables sat in the centre of the room, while the flat inner wall was taken up by a door and weird glass box shelves whose purpose I only realised when I spotted the boy in one.
That was after I’d dived to the right, trying to put something solid between me and the woman standing at one of the tables. I ended up crouching behind a lump of black and white fur that set my sense of smell into a shocky spiral of Threat: it was the dog, limp but still breathing. I couldn’t see Farmhouse Grey, and concentrated on finding somewhere, anywhere, that I could hide properly.
There were cabinets beneath the examining tables, sealed. A lot of storage built about the walls. And—there! A sliding door, a few centimetres ajar. Not quite wide enough to fit Cat-me, but not too heavy to resist being jiggled a fraction further. More difficult to hook claws on the ridge of the handle indent and shove it back—definitely not a standard cat manoeuvre. It didn’t quite close completely, but that suited me, and I settled down to watch and hope that my heart would stop racing enough for me to think.
Being rather hungry and ragingly thirsty did not help. Gaming with an Actual Body—or virtual facsimile thereof—definitely had some downsides, and I wondered why Ryzonart had bothered to include things like thirst or wet rooms, when they surely could have created a game where food and drink were just perks, not a necessity with consequent revolting expulsions.
Wrestling with distraction, I watched. My view from the cupboard was necessarily narrow, but I could see that the dog was beginning to stir. I could only occasionally see the woman moving around the examining table, seemingly doing vitals tests on the unconscious man, but I had a clear view when she produced a thick metal rod and pressed it to his temple. He jerked in a most unpleasant way, and when she moved the rod away, a silver disk was left behind.
Some sort of…what? Communication device? Symbol of completed processing? The woman wore a disk in the same place, I noted, but from my position I couldn’t see whether the boxed-up boy was similarly decorated.
The door in the central dividing wall opened and a man came in. Another silver disk. He and the woman spoke briefly in a language I didn’t recognise, and then together lifted the older man lying on the examining table. This was my first good look at the captive. All three people were dark-haired, with a skin tone that suggested a Mediterranean region, but while the two invaders were wearing baggy jumpsuits with a scratchy-looking insignia on one shoulder, their captive was dressed in worn but perfectly recognisable jeans and t-shirt. Propped upright, I could just make out the faded image on the front of the shirt: lush lips and tongue. The faint words beneath were in Arabic script.
The two invaders carefully transferred the unconscious man to one of the clear-doored shelves built against the inner wall, and sealed it. Then they stood over the groggily shifting dog, having an incomprehensible debate. The man seemed to prevail, and picked the dog up. Both invaders left through the door to the corridor.
I quibbled, but Farmhouse Grey had no hesitation in emerging from hiding. She was clearly another player character, for no cat in my experience would survey a wall containing boxed humans, and then start poking at anything resembling buttons.
Trotting across, I sent an image of the rod being pressed to the old man’s temple. What, after all, could Farmhouse Grey do, even if she managed to get a box open? It’s not like cats came equipped with smelling salts, and it would only make sense that the boxed pair would have been given a long-lasting sedative.
This message sent, as best I was able, I turned my attention to the inner door. There was a control panel, but it required a few leaps before I managed to swat it with sufficient force to trigger the door to open.
A laboratory. More humans in boxes along the inner wall. Wondering what the invaders wanted with their collection, I quickly toured the room, and then tucked myself into a corner to consider the layout of the ship I’d seen flying overhead.
Chances were good that the engine was located in the central sphere. The sphere had connected to the polyhedrons in some way, but I couldn’t see an entrance here, and didn’t remember one from the first room. Perhaps through the polyhedron’s bottom half?
There was no stair down, only a second door that would take me out to another of the long connecting corridors. I was trying to trigger it when Farmhouse Grey came through from the first room. Tail switching, she sent me an image of a small opaque nub set in the ceiling, and then a more recognisable image of a security camera, and a questioning feel.
Cats can’t shrug, really. I’d noticed the nubs, but if there was someone at a central control point watching Cat Espionage, there wasn’t much I could do about it. Instead, I sent a picture of a man hiding beneath a cardboard box, and learned that cats couldn’t really laugh, either.
Returning to my attempts to trigger the door, I hoped my point was valid. This was a game. Unless I’d steered completely off-course by not going back to report to Black Tom, then there was surely a path to a goal, a definition of success more than "watch those humans get kidnapped". And so it must be possible for cats to run around this ship avoiding notice and achieving…something.
I doubted the aim was to blow it up—unless my goal as a cat was to remove all humans from the vicinity. And a clearly-marked Wake and Release the Captives button would be far too easy. So I was aiming to sabotage the engine—which hopefully wouldn’t lead to the blowing up scenario.