To infinity and outside!

They boarded the ship with haste, not wanting to wait for any possible survivors who would be so kind to lead them back to their cells. Mark saw a clean, alien design inside, expecting initially lots of exposed wires and computers, and yet he saw none of it. Just a small, slick corridor with a scanning panel, and then a big room with several armchairs and a huge table that had a lot of blue lights on it. They didn't display anything.

Kaliasi guided him to the front, to what he expected was a pilots cockpit, and Mark did his best to not notice her shapely butt and focus on environment. There was a chair in there, some holographic panels in front of it, and screens that showed cameras from the front, sides, above, below and back of the ship. If there were some dead spots not covered by them, there were very few of them.

The red skinned woman pressed some button on the wall, and a new console popped up. A second later, the hatch from the ground opened through and a new chair showed up. Mark noticed that there were three more hatches like that in this room, possibly for more piloting crew.

"Ready?"

"No, not really." Mark answered still taking in a lot of alien tech at once. "But like you said, we should go."

"Ok, sit, I'll start the engines. Can you override the bay's door and open it?"

"Me? Now how would I do-" He began, but she cut him off.

"-with your broken implant. I wouldn't tell you to do that if I didn't know that you can."

She showed him her tongue, and began working on the piloting console.

Mark saw a small screen in front of him, but it said something unrecognisable in the alien language. Without much thought he just raised his arm and let his implant scan it.

'Welcome, pilot!'

Then he saw several options, like his ship, permissions, contacting the authorities and the environment. He chose the last one.

"What's taking you so long?" He heard Kaliasi's question.

"Shush, I'm trying to focus."

He heard a laughter in response but he paid it no mind. The environment option just showed him cameras from outside, but that didn't lead him anywhere else. Veers came back and this time he selected the permissions option. A lot of the sub choices where greyed out, like landing one, permission to unlock weaponry, but after some scrolling down he saw it. Permission to open the hatch bay doors.

He pressed it, and then noticed on the cameras that red light turned on in the cargo bay and there was a voice urging everyone to go out or hide in ships. After several seconds of waiting, the cargo bay sealed doors began to open.

"Finally, I was beginning to think that you'll take a whole cycle to do that." He heard alien woman's remark.

"It only took a minute or two." Mark responded, mildly irritated."Did you start the ship?"

"Of course I did. What do you think, I'm some kind of primitive?"

***

In another time, in the great hereafter, there was a room with a huge mirror on the wall. The room had a desk inside and two chairs. On one of them there was sitting someone. A tall man, cuffed to it. He looked tired, he looked like he was done with a lot of things in his life.

On the other, shorter than him woman. She was nicely dressed, her brown hair had a shape of the perfect office bun. She was carrying an electronic tablet in her left hand, and intently listened to the man. When he was done talking, it was time for her to ask questions.

Always more questions.

"Your alien companion killed the - again - alien monster."

"It was a team effort."

The woman raised one of her eyebrows.

"A joint kill of alien monstrosity. I'll be impressed if your story checks out."

"Checks out?"

She smiled.

"What did you think we would be doing? Your story barely holds together, it's insanity after insanity. So we are also interrogating that alien for matching facts. And lies."

He sighed and shook his head.

"Look, I told you-"

"-I know. But that's the protocol. Now, what happened after?"