Super Fembot Cheerleaders From Space! - Chapter 8

[Teknophile]

Hello, everybody! I just finished my finals for Chemistry and Fitness For Life, so I've had a little bit of down time to work on this story.

Many thanks to Sthurmovik for all of his helpful input, comments, suggestions, and just being a great editor and story coach. You rock, man!

Anyhow, here's the newest installment of Nate and the girls' wild adventures on Earth. Enjoy!

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Chapter 8 — Welcome Home, Nate

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“Uranium? Dude, are you serious? I didn’t know you hated Professor Dawson that much….”

Nate sighed. “No, Landon, I’m not going to try and nuke my history professor. I was just wondering where you get the stuff. I mean, aren’t there like uranium mines or something?”

Landon Richards, technogeek extraordinaire and Nate’s best friend, just shrugged and started searching the Internet. “Well, the closest uranium reserves would be in northern Arizona or Marysvale, Utah. The only places they actually mine the stuff are out in Wyoming, Texas and Nebraska.” The skinny, freckled kid gave him a shrug. “Sorry, dude. It’s just not easy to come by. I mean, you could sneak over to the army base and try pulling the depleted uranium armor off an M1 tank, but that’s U-238, and you need U-235 for a power plant or … well, you know.”

“Yeah, I get it. Thanks,” he said. So, either we drive to Arizona and hope they can dig it out of the ground themselves, or we head over to the mine in Wyoming and try to steal twenty pounds of the most dangerous stuff on Earth from a well-guarded mining operation run by government contractors. Some really great options here ….

Having broached the subject of nuclear fuel, the conversation moved back toward normal topics, or as normal as any conversation between a pair of geeky engineering students can be. Eventually, Nate glanced at his watch. “Hey, man, I need to go and pick somebody up. See you tomorrow?”

Landon grinned at him. “Picking somebody up, huh? Hot date tonight?”

Nate felt a wry smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. Hot? Yes. Human …? “Nah, I have a friend whose car broke down, and I’m just helping them get around until it’s out of the shop.”

“All right. See you later.” With that, Landon packed up his laptop, stuck it in his backpack, and headed for his bus stop while Nate made his way over to the parking lot. The Camry, of course, looked perfectly normal; nobody would ever suspect that its windshield had been shot at, then broken down on a molecular level, reconstructed and installed by alien technology in half an hour. In fact, the windshield looked quite a bit cleaner than the rest of his car, reminding Nate that he ought to get the Camry washed sometime this week. Making a mental note to get that taken care of, he climbed in, started the car, and headed for home.

Only three days after meeting his four alien gynoid roommates, it was amazing just how … normal today had been. Professor Dawson had been his usual self, calling on students to answer questions he knew they didn’t know, thus somehow asserting his own intellectual superiority. Doctor Jensen, Nate’s Robotics instructor, had been as funny and beautiful as ever — Nate had had a crush on her for months now, though he did his best not to show it. His Chemistry professor had even complimented Nate on his essay assignment (done the night before with some assistance from K4L). Nobody seemed to have noticed anything different about him, and no Feds had shown up to drag him out of class. All in all, it had been a remarkably unremarkable day.

Of course, it helped that the girls spent a lot of their time down at the old maintenance yard now, where G2J had set up a kind of spaceship-building garage in an abandoned roundhouse. Because their fabricator machine really did most of the work, the girls had come up with the idea of taking shifts, with two at the roundhouse and two keeping an eye on his place at any given time. Thus, Nate’s only responsibility was shuttling the girls between the apartment and the maintenance yard twice a day. While it still meant that he always had two girls at his place with him, it was infinitely less stressful than dealing with all four of them at once.

Finally, Nate pulled in to the parking lot in front of his apartment complex.

At the door, he tapped in his key code, then walked in. Mr. Nimvicki, the gray-haired landlord, was slouched back in his chair, snoring loudly behind his desk, so Nate just went by and headed up the stairs.

Before he’d even gotten off the stairwell, Nate recognized his Black Sabbath CD pounding through the walls and floor. Uttering a groan, he walked up to his door, turned the key, and was met by a wall of sound as Iron Man came belting out of his stereo system, flooding the hallway with rock music.

“Jeezus! Turn that down!” he shouted over the din.

“WHAT?” E3 called from the couch, putting down the newspaper she’d been reading.

“Turn … the music … DOWN!!! The neighbors are gonna have a fit!”

The blonde gave a shrug, then glanced over at the equalizer. The volume immediately dropped down to bearable levels. “Is that better?” she asked, turning back to him.

“Yeah. Listen, I know I said you could use my music and DVD collections, but could you not keep the sound up so high? People will complain, and then I’ll have to try and explain to Mr. Nimvicki why there are five people in my room, four of whom don’t pay rent.”

“But that was fifteen decibels softer than the concert three days ago,” E3 said. “Don’t you humans like loud music?”

Nate sighed. “I like certain types of loud music, but that’s just me. A lot of people around here are just trying to study, or to get some peace and quiet, and it’s hard to do that when the girls down the hall are playing heavy metal loud enough to set the china cabinet rattling.”

The blonde looked thoughtful for a minute, then nodded. “Okay. I’ll try to keep the subsonics low enough not to cause a disturbance.”

“Thanks.”

That said, E3 turned back to her paper — well, technically Nate’s paper, but he’d take a look at it later. He headed for his computer desk, where K4L sat staring blankly ahead. Though she wasn’t actually looking at the monitor, windows opened and closed faster than human vision could follow. A large rectangular section of her abdomen had been removed, allowing dozens of plugs and cables to snake in and attach to some part of her internal electronics, connecting the gynoid brunette directly to Nate’s computer and, through it, to the Internet, and from there it seemed that she could access pretty much anything she wanted.

Sensing the human’s approach, K4L turned her head toward him, the rest of her body still immobile. “Hey, Nate!” she called out with a smile. “How was school?”

“Not too bad. Thanks for your help with my Chem paper, by the way.”

“Oh, it was nothing. It only took me a couple of seconds to research the topic, and another fifteen to synthesize a rough draft. ”

Nate smiled, noting that K4L had already learned how to tell time in seconds, minutes and hours, instead of in cycles and decacycles. “Well, thanks anyway. So, did you learn anything interesting today?”

K4L gave a shrug. “Lots of facts and trivia about your culture. I think I’ve figured out your calendar and monetary systems, but I still don’t know what a Scrambled is. You know, the creatures that lay those eggs we had on Saturday?”

Nate couldn’t help but grin, both at K4L’s obvious intelligence and her persistent naïveté. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Anyway, isn’t it your turn to work on the ship tonight with G2J?”

The brown-haired girl winced. “Um, yeah. About that ….”

“What?”

“Well ….” K4L leaned over — not an easy task with all the wires and cables connected to her — and whispered. “You know that means you’ll be here with A7C and E3 for the next twelve hours, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay, but do you know that they really, really don’t like each other?”

Come to think of it, Nate had noticed that the tall, leggy blonde and the tiny Japanese girl did tend to avoid one another. “Why is that?”

K4L sighed. “Well, you see, the reason we were using a starship was because A7C had just gotten certified to fly, so we all decided to celebrate by letting her take us to this concert on GDRI-21-5A.”

“Yeah. Of course, what she doesn’t tell us is that she only got certified for light starships up to Class B, not the six-slot Class C luxury ship she asked us to help her rent!” E3 snapped from the couch, arms crossed in an expression of annoyance.

“Well, can’t you get extra insurance for stuff like this?” asked Nate. “One time I rented a car, and the insurance only cost, like, nine bucks extra.”

K4L’s widened. “You mean you had to kill nine horned animals before they would give it to you? Nate, no offense, but your culture is really weird ….”

“No! ‘Bucks’ means ‘dollars’! I thought you said you understood our monetary system?”

“Well, yeah, but the Web site didn’t say anything about bucks. I didn’t even think deer were depicted on the bill anywhere.”

Nate groaned. “Never mind. So you rented a luxury space ship without paying for insurance. What did it have? Chromed fenders? Leather seats?”

“No,” E3 replied. “I don’t know what you organics think of as luxurious, but for us, the big thing is computational power. A Class A is a pilot-only starship, so it just has space for the pilot’s consciousness, their personal data cache, and enough power to run a virtual environment for them while they’re on the ship. Class Bs have space for two to four beings, their personal data caches, and can run individual environments for each of them. What we rented was a Class C, with the capacity for up to six beings, a whole lot of storage space for our data caches, individual environments and an entertainment library. It’s about twice as big as a Class B, and it was a hell of a lot more expensive to rent!”

“Wait a minute … you said a Class B would have had enough space for four of you, right? Why didn’t you just get one of those?”

“That’s what I said, but oh no! Little Miss ‘I’m a certified pilot’ wants a big, comfy, flashy new ship for her first flight. ‘I want it to be special,’ she says! Stupid, spoiled little ….”

K4L shrugged. “Yeah, well, you can probably guess what happened from there. A7C miscalculated one of the hyperjumps because we were in a more massive ship, and we reverted to normal space right next to GDHC-32, which I’m pretty sure you call Alpha Centauri. We managed to get back up out of the gravity well and do an emergency jump, but it used up nearly all our fuel, so when we popped out right by your planet, we had to dead-drop to the surface.”

“Ouch,” Nate said, wincing as he tried to imagine slamming into the ground at supersonic speeds.

“And then,” added E3, “as if that wasn’t enough, she leaves the ship unguarded to go sightseeing, so now we have to build a new one from scratch! Not to mention how pissed the rental agency is gonna be when we tell them that we lost their luxury ship on an uninitiated planet….”

“Without insurance,” added Nate.

K4L gave a sigh, closing the windows on Nate’s computer and disconnecting herself from the hard drive. “Look, E3, could you at least try not to kill her while I’m gone? We’re all mad about being stuck here, but taking your frustration out on A7C will only cause more problems.”

“How?” the blonde fired back. “She’s the one causing problems! I really think we ought to just deactivate her until we get off this planet, so she can’t do what she did on Friday and get us in more trouble!”

K4L shook her head as she pulled out the last of the interface cables, her abdominal panel sliding back into place. “Look, we’ve already talked about this, all right? A7C may have made some mistakes, but she’s still a person, you know? We can’t just switch her off like a cheesy sim.”

“Hmmph! Fine. But if she draws any more attention to us and brings those FBI people, don’t come crying to me!” With that, E3 dropped back onto the couch — making the springs creak dangerously — and buried herself in the newspaper, though Nate could still feel the frustration and anger rolling off her in waves.

Meanwhile, K4L was already by the door. “Come on, Nate. I’ll take my shift with G2J at the construction area, and you need to pick up A7C. Just … um … try to keep them from doing anything crazy, all right?”

This whole situation is crazy! Nate felt like shouting, but managed to keep his cool. “Yeah, sure. As long as they’re in separate rooms, they should be fine, right?”

“I sure hope so ….”

With that, Nate and the brown-haired gynoid went out into the hallway. Just before closing the door, he looked back at E3, still fuming from behind the Sports section.

This is going to be a very interesting night, he thought. A cold lump formed in the pit of his stomach as he shut the door, leading K4L down to the parking lot.

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“Hey! Ya emasculatin’ fembot …!” --Rattrap, to Blackarachnia, after she steals his sword.

Somebody has issues ….

[Stephaniebot]

Nice to see the return of this

[tectile]

Danger Danger! potential cat fight ahead

[DukeNukem 2417]

This just keeps getting better and better.... I can't wait for the next chapter. Keep up the good work, Technophile---and nice avatar pic, BTW.