Chapter 701 - Bridging The Gap

The elevator takes around two minutes to reach its destination, but Afton quickly understood why this was when he stepped out onto the bridge... Well, if it could even be called a bridge?

The room he and the few Psyker's that'd accompanied them had walked into was absolutely huge, easily dwarfing the surveillance room they spotted earlier... Similarly, like that room, there was many thousands of desks with terminals atop them, all being operated by aliens, though, these ones looked far higher ranked than them, mainly due to their fancier spacesuits.

Directly in the centre of the room was a huge hologram emitting from the floor, the large multilayered spherical object having many millions of symbols appearing and disappearing from its surface... Even with Afton's understanding of the Alien's language, and incredibly high intelligence, he wasn't able to decipher what that actually was.

Even stranger than the weird hologram, was the fact that none of the aliens seemed to care about their presence.... They definitely noticed them, but, either didn't care or didn't want to do anything about it.

Instead, they just focussed on their terminals, like mindless bureaucratic drones...

"Ugh." Afton inwardly intones while shivering at the thought.... Alien bureaucrats.

He feels someone or something tap his arm, but manages to force down his reaction when he realises that the offending hand belongs to Egil. "What is it?"

"A-are we not gonna do anything?" he tentatively asks, the rest of the group nodding after having watched Afton glare at the aliens for a couple minutes already.

Afton slowly nods in response, "I'm just wondering why they are ignoring us... Whatever, you guys start killing them, see if that'll make 'em react. I'll see if we can gain control of the ship." he states, and everyone moves off to do their own objective.

Egil and the other psykers get to work killing the aliens... Which isn't really hard considering all it took was walking up to their seated bodies and blowing their heads off. Even with how easy it was though, their numbers would make such a task take far longer than one would anticipate.

Fortunately, the other psykers would soon arrive via the elevator as well, providing some much-needed manpower.

As for what Afton was doing? He was quickly moving around the room while looking for anything of interest, the central system's terminal in particular. After all, he'd need the blueprints on how to operate this ship if they were going to get anywhere.

He browses many terminals in his efforts.. Eventually stumbling across something that gave him a cold sweat... This was probably the reason the aliens were ignoring him and the others as well...

[Self Destruction Initiated]

...

He quickly checks to see if there was anything they could do to stop it, but finds that the system is locked in place, unable to alter the order given.

Additionally, he notes that the aliens in the surveillance room, and this room, were rapidly sending as much information they'd researched and discovered during their time monitoring earth to someplace, probably their homeworld if he had to guess.

Essentially, even if Afton and the psykers got off of this ship in one piece, they'd probably have to deal with a full-scale alien invasion not long in the future.

"Fuck." he scowls, recalling why he was even here in the first place... To protect Earth, his Daughter, and all of his other friends. The mothership might be self-destructing, but that didn#t mean the other two large ships wouldn't stop being a problem... They also needed to be destroyed, especially if humanity was going to prepare against the eventual alien invasion.

He chews the inside of his cheek momentarily, taking a glance at the psykers in the room that were systematically killing the aliens present... He needed to get the psykers back to earth as well, they were the next step in human evolution, and depending on when the alien invasion comes, they'd need the manpower represented by these people and their offspring.

Making his mind up, he accesses the terminal and begins looking for any spare flying saucers or escape pods.

Funnily enough, there were enough escape pods of everyone... None had actually been used by the aliens, which meant they wanted to die with the ship? Was it honour? Or were they afraid that Afton would develop a virus against their race, like he had threatened to do earlier?

He shakes his head, regardless, he needed to get the psykers out and deal with the other two ships... He locates the escape pods and memorizes their position, abruptly standing and look over at the large group that'd almost wiped out the aliens in the room. "Guys! Stop this shit and ignore those green bastards! I need you all to follow me!" he shouts in many languages, deciding not to panic the group with his discovered revelation.

It's fortunate that the escape pods are simply in a couple levels beneath the surveillance room, allowing Afton to use the elevators to easily transport all the psykers to it.

They all come out into another large hallway, but this one contains many small doors that lead to individual escape pods, that can hold around eight people in each.

Using the terminal controlling their destinations, he has all of the escape pods target the Mojave, the outskirts of New Vegas specifically... He was slightly unsure how the psykers unable to speak English would react, but knew House would find a solution relatively quickly... He was a resourceful man, and probably had a language database stored away somewhere.

A few object to entering the escape pods, but Afton just knocks them unconscious and shoves them inside, Egil actually being among this group. Most wanted to stay and help Afton out, upon hearing that he may be sacrificing himself for them, but Afton knew that while he might be able to survive the vacuum of space, they definitely wouldn't.