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    Chapter 17: Cats and Clever Mice



Author’s Note: The illustration isn't my favorite, but the Lord of the Rings reference is.



At the behest of the ghosts that haunted it, the small UFO’s batteries had been powered up for the first time in thousands of years. Now that the humans climbed back up through the airlock and started home, the ship’s lights and computers clicked back off, and the entire thing went dormant again.
But its brief period of electrical activity had not gone unnoticed.
The robotic predators in the woods had sensed it: sensed what they perceived as a piece of helpless prey, massive and immobile, trapped in the ground somehow. It ‘smelled’ to them like a feast. A prize to claim quickly before others did. A strange opportunity, but not one to be missed.
And many of them were very, very hungry…
The ship’s electrical activity ceased and they lost track of it. But nevertheless, their red eyes turned in the same general direction. Their antennae extended to scan for even a trace of what they’d sensed moments ago. Saws spun slowly in preparation. And heavy treaded feet began to pick their way through the trees, carefully and silently and very, very quickly…

The trunks of the trees were hard and metal, the leaves cold and sharp, as Dipper and Wendy trudged stoically through the robotic alien forest. Away from the spacecraft, and the ancient aliens that had left it there. Their footfalls were heavy beneath the combined weight of their armor, weapons, and the Power Control Coupling that could destroy this place once and for all.
“Is this the fastest way out?” Wendy spoke up after a while.
“I have no clue.” Dipper glanced back down at his map. “Other ways could be longer or shorter, but this is the way we came in, so… It’s the only way we know.”
“Hmm-ugh.” She made a thoughtful groaning noise, as she hefted the control coupling into what she hoped might be a more comfortable position on her shoulder. It didn’t really work; after just a few seconds, the merely jostling motion of walking caused it to poke and press into her bones in an equally miserable way. But they kept walking anyway.
“Oh, uh… Hey Wendy.” Dipper broke the silence.
“S’up?”
“H-how have things been with you?”
“What things?”
“Like… Things… Like, with your dad, with school… And I know you quit at the Mystery Shack ‘cause now Melody is cashier, and you wanted some other job… How’s all that… Going?”
She shrugged. “Heh… Well… I kinda need a resume if I’m gonna get a good job… But I don’t really know how to start a resume, or what to put on it or what job to apply for… I dunno. Honestly, I don’t want a job. But my dad’s kinda been on me constantly that I need to apply myself and write one and earn some money… You know… Dads, right? It’s just… I try not to think about it… Really, I just like it better out here with you. Adventuring, right? Where we’re actually doing something significant… Ha ha… After this thing with the killer alien robots blows over… I guess I won’t have an excuse anymore…”
Dipper listened carefully. Then he gave a little nod. “Oh.”
“Hope dad won’t send me up to the logging camp…” Wendy mentioned offhand. “It’s kinda a ways away, and… It, like, sucks and stuff. So I better get a resume before he loses patience or whatever…”
Something started getting uncomfortable in Dipper’s heart. He frowned and said. “Oh.”
Will I ever see her again? After the robots were dealt with, and everything in the adventure got finished and signed off to the annals of strangest history… Would it just be him and Mabel again? Would Wendy be gone? Just another friend, who greeted him every so often while passing on the sidewalk? Who waved down at him from the passenger seat of another boyfriend’s car? A idyllic childhood friend from an idyllic time, gone forever but never forgotten? Nothing but a sweet memory…? Was THIS all there would ever be between him and her?
“Uh…” He stuttered. “Uh…! Uh, say Wendy…?”
“What’s up?”
“Well, uh…” He scratched his armor with a sweaty glove. “Uhhhhhhhhh… Do you want to empty your backpack into mine? That way you can put the Control Coupling into your pack, and it wouldn’t be as heavy for you to carry…”
“Oh… Oh yeah! Good idea.” They stopped for a minute to do just that. The Coupling didn’t fit very well into an ordinary backpack, so they couldn’t zip it shut all the way. But when Wendy shrugged it back onto her shoulders, it was much more bearable. Dipper shouldered the combined cargo from both their packs, straightened his knees with a determined effort, and they started walking again.
“Thanks.” Wendy said. “Much better.”
“Y-yeah… No… No problem.”
They fell silent again, but Dipper broke it before long.
“Uh… Wendy, uh…”
“S’up?”
“Do… Do you want me to help write your resume? Like, I’m a pretty good writer I think and I know a lot of the stuff you’ve done and…”
“Naw… I mean thanks, I mean… If…” She sighed, and rubbed her hands across her face. “No. I have to do it myself. My responsibility… A resume is basically bragging. And while it’s kind of weird to write an entire paper of bragging about yourself, it’s even weirder to have a friend write you a bragging paper… Ha ha… You know?”
“Uh… Ha… Uh… Yeah…”
“Thanks though.”
They walked in silence for a few minutes more, then Dipper finally blurted out. “Wendy?”
“S’up?”
“Uh… Like… I don’t know. Never mind.”
“Umm… Okay.”
“Y-yeah, uh… Hey, are you thirsty?”
She shrugged. “No…”
“Oh, okay, because I am. I think a glass of water would be nice.” Dipper took out his water bottle, and took a hasty drink. Most of it missed his mouth. “Do you want any?”
She shrugged a second time. “No…”
“Oh, okay.”
They continued on.
“Hey Wendy?” He asked again.
She looked at him sharply. “Are you trying to tell me something?”
“Ah! Uh… No. No.”
“Oh……………” She squinted down her nose, making a skeptical sort of half-smile. Her Ellipses dragged on. “………......Kay.”
A noise interrupted them from somewhere high above: a noise like a blowtorch, or a rocket. Dipper looked upward in time to see a small, bird-like robot diving out of the tree.
It passed right over their heads, then doubled back around, this time coming to a stationary perch on top of Wendy’s helmet. Dipper saw that the ‘bird’ didn’t have any wings to speak of, but just a pair of rotating rocket nozzles where wings ought to be. Its drill-like beak bent over the control coupling in Wendy’s pack, and began tapping with a sound like a jackhammer.
“HEY!”
“HEY! We need that, you stupid!”
“SCRAM!”
They yelped and began to slap at the troublesome living aircraft, trying to shoo it. It fluttered its thrusters and boosted away, to a perch among a cluster of branches in the nearest tree.
Wendy growled, and reached up to put out a small fire in her hair, where the rocket exhaust had singed it. “This is gonna get old real fast…”
It got old even faster than they thought: a few more birds had gathered around the first, and were all perched above, peering down hungrily from the tree in front of them.
“Come on… This doesn’t even make any sense!” Wendy groaned. “Why do they want this stupid thing? And where are they getting rocket fuel?”
“Maybe they’re solar thermal rockets?” Dipper suggested. “They use the sun’s energy to superheat and compress the surrounding air into their tanks… Maybe the only reason they’re not divebombing us right now is because they need a few minutes to inhale every time they fire their jump jets.”
“…That actually makes a lot of sense.” She frowned.
“I… Uh… read it in a sci-fi book.”
The first bird let go of the branch and fired its jump jets, flying toward them like some kind of pigeon-sized missile. The other birds quickly followed suit.
Wendy brought up her axe, and swung it in the direction of the approaching flock. She missed the first one, and the second one, and the third one… Well, she missed all of them, really; the pests seemed to have exceptional reaction time.
A few latched onto her backpack and began to drill at the Coupling.
Dipper got around behind her and swatted them off. The birds seemed to know how small and fragile they were, and launched off before Dipper could properly hit them. But still they kept returning. They kept circling and dive-bombing and pecking and drilling, as if they believed the Control Coupling was the most delicious thing in the universe and they just HAD to have it.
Seeing as the situation was getting out of hand, Dipper and Wendy turned and began to run in no particular direction, thinking perhaps they would be left alone if they got out of range.
The birds kept up easily, for now…

Its red eyes turned in another direction. Something was nearby, something making a lot of movement and ruckus. Its antenna probed, and made out the signatures of a great number of carrion-feeding birds, all in commotion and activity.
This was definitely something… Perhaps the birds had found the large prey from earlier.
The hungry machine glanced sideways at the others beside it, and saw that they were already moving in the new direction.
Without hesitation, it followed the pack…

Dipper and Wendy’s flight had led them to the edge of some sort of precipice. It was perhaps 3 meters across and maybe 2 deep, though its bottom was filled with a tangle of razor-sharp metal bushes: a perfect deterrent for potential jumpers. It stretched as far as they could see in either direction (not that they could see very far of course, but it would still be pretty hard getting around.)
Wendy noticed the spike-pit just in time, and rocked back on her heels and pinwheeled her arms to keep from falling. Dipper was looking over his shoulder right about then, and would have gone right over the edge if Wendy hadn’t grabbed his backpack, and drug him back to level ground.
His heart leapt to his throat as he realized how close he’d come to the drop; but now was not the time for melodrama, for the birds were still divebombing.
Seeing as how they couldn’t really run any further without braving the pit, they turned and tried to attack the birds once more. It didn’t really work this time either, but after perhaps a minute of this, they got lucky when one of the little creatures made a mistake: it drilled into Wendy’s shoulder, which was covered by her dad’s chainsaw chaps. The fibers of the garment got sucked into the bird’s mechanisms, where they instantly jammed its gears and tangled it in place.
Panicked, the bird fired its thrusters all around, trying in vain to pull away. Dipper noticed the situation, and leapt up to grab the creature in both hands. Its thrusters were burning hot (even through his gloves), but he managed to keep a hold of it long enough for Wendy to bring her axe around.
She struck the bird in the head, and it went limp. Its thrusters wheezed slowly.
Dipper dropped it to the ground, and Wendy aimed another blow. She struck its head a second time, hard, and there was a cracking sound as its eyes went dark. She aimed a third strike at its torso, and there was a sudden small explosion as its compressed fuel tanks burst. A tiny piece of shrapnel bounced of Dipper’s helmet, harmless but startling.
The other birds noticed the death of their brother, and swarmed back into the trees, where they paused for a moment to recharge their jump jets. But then they never launched back down. They just sat there. Waiting.
“Huh.” Wendy paused to get her own breath back, and bitterly kicked the one dead bird into the spike pit. “Just needed to get one to make an example…” She exhaled triumphantly. “They’re… Ugh… They’re smarter than they look.”
“Uh…” Dipper took a deep breath, in through his nose and out through his mouth. “Yeah.”
“Yeah…” Wendy brought one of her gloved hands up, and pointed the palm at Dipper for a high-five. “Nice job, dude.”
Dipper looked up at her hand for a minute. Then he looked past her helmet at her freckled face. Then past the goggles at her winking green eyes. And his mind strayed away, back to a library of happy memories he’d shared with her. I remember the first time I high-fived her… He recalled. That was when I fell in love with her… It feels like so many long ages ago… But I remember it like it was yesterday…
“Don’t leave me hanging.” The present Wendy said, at the same time as the memory.
He high-fived her back.
She smiled and turned away.
“Uh… Uh… Hey Wendy?” He asked.
“Mmm?” She asked over her shoulder.
“If… Uh…” Dipper scratched his head nervously.
“What?”
“Like… Uh… Hypothetically… If I liked somebody… Like Pacifica. If I still really liked her, but… Like… Hypothetically didn’t think she liked me back, what should I d-d-do? Should I just ask her? Like… I don’t know… You know…?”
Wendy stopped. And she turned around, and met his eye. “Like… Ask her if she likes you, you mean?”
“Yeah…” Dipper stuttered, and couldn’t quite bring himself to meet her eyes. “Like… Should I even bother…? You know…? I don’t know… I… I don’t know…”
Wendy stared at him, thinking. She thought for what seemed quite a long time; as if she were confused herself. As if she considered this question to be even more important than her friend did. As if she’d already thought about it many a time, but still hadn’t thought enough. As if the answer meant the world to her. Dipper finally brought his eyes up to meet hers, and they sat like that for a minute, neither of them smiling or moving, just staring and thinking.
So I don’t work at the Mystery Shack anymore. Wendy thought. So what? So this adventure is wrapping up; so what? It’s not like you’ll never see me again. I’ll still be around. You’ll still see me now and again… It’s not like… Not like… Well… Well… No, it would be the end, wouldn’t it? It is exactly as you fear, isn’t it? But we can make plans though! We can make plans and… And… Wait… That’s just what you’re doing, isn’t it? You’re making plans.
Do I like the plan?
Wendy thought hard for a minute more, then set her jaw, and stood up a little straighter. She finally broke the silence with a little smile. “Dude…” She began.
Snap.
Both their heads turned in the direction of the sound, and landed on a point in the shadow of a nearby thicket. From within, 2 large, red eyes stared back out at them.
The eyes of one of the robot lions.
The eyes were moving forward, their owner prowling slowly and carefully, stepping into the light. Dipper recognized the particular creature from a large burn mark in its side. The mate of the one they’d been fighting. And if this one was here it’s mate must be…
Dipper caught movement in his periphery; a gleam of sunlight which gave away a second creature approaching from the right. The second had only one eye, and scars all around its face… This was the mother. Bestial menace of the week, and a real jerk to boot.
Dipper slowly drew his magnet gun with one hand, and glanced at its charge meter. It had maybe 4 electromagnetic pulses left in it; and then its batteries would be depleted. 4 pulses, 2 lions… If he was lucky they could immobilize them both. But as they’d seen earlier, it couldn’t kill them. It only knocked them out temporarily… And he wasn’t the best shot, and the lions weren’t slow to recover… It would be close. Very close.
Then Wendy elbowed him, and pointed off in another direction. He followed her finger deeper into the trees, and noticed more shapes; more predators. They looked just as big and menacing as the two they followed. Big, mean, and hungry.
Dipper lost count at 5. The 4 remaining pulses in his gun began to seem beyond pathetic.
As she drew her axe (and wondered what good it would do) Wendy took a step back, and felt her heel touch the edge of the precipice.
“Dipper.” She said. The word hung tense in the still afternoon air. “This conversation is not over.”

She recognized them.
The ones that had slaughtered her pack. That had stolen all which instinct told her to protect. The ones that had injured her. That had tried to kill her. The mysterious creatures that emitted no electrical signals, that prowled about her territory without concern, and which had evaded her so many times. She knew they were capable of attack; a stinging, strange attack that left her dazed. So it was with a great deal of caution that she approached her most terrible enemies.
She was hungry, and she was angry.
She was crazy, and she was wild.
And she would not be evaded today.

“Wendy.” Dipper whispered, as his eyes swept the approaching predators.
“Gimme ideas.” She encouraged him.
“We can’t fight. We’ve got to escape; jump across the pit.”
Wendy glanced over her shoulder, down the sheer edge, and into the tangle of knives below. Then she looked over toward the opposite end, gauging the distance uncertainly. “It’s a long way…”
Dipper realized she was right. His adrenaline-filled brain sorted rapidly through the available options, and finally landed on the only reasonable one. “Toss me.” He managed to grunt.
She glanced down at him, and raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“I cannot jump the distance! You’ll have to toss me!”
Wendy stared at him for just a second, considering this. Then she gave a slight, understanding nod, spread her feet, bent down, and grasped him beneath his arms.
“GAH Wait wait!” Dipper yelped, delaying the maneuver for just a second. “…Don’t tell Robbie.”
“Not a word.” She promised.
And then she tossed him.
He hung in the air for what felt like seconds, while the yawning pit sped by beneath his feet.
He didn’t try to land on his feet on the other side; he knew he would lose balance or come short if he did. So he straightened his legs and caught the opposite ledge across the shins, and then slid down to level with his arms.
His fingers wrapped around a tangle of grass and a root, and the plants managed to stop his fall before he dropped away completely. His feet kicked at the wall below him, and finally found a small hollow sturdy enough to support his weight. He pushed himself up off the narrow hold, and managed to get high enough to crawl fully up onto the other side.
Beside him, Wendy landed from her own jump more or less squarely on both feet, though stumbling briefly beneath the coupling on her back.
Their eyes spun around to look behind them.
On the other side of the pit, the same place where they’d been standing moments previous, the lions stared back with murder in their eyes. (By the way, can glowing red eyes have anything besides murder in them? Highly unlikely.)
“Can they make the jump?” Wendy asked, as she helped Dipper to his feet.
“Native to a low-gravity moon.” Dipper reminded her. “And made of heavy metal… I think we win this bet…”
The lions seemed to think so too. After a momentary staring contest of sorts, both beasts turned and sprinted off through the trees, following the edge of the precipice around a bend and out of sight. The others stood and made after them, all moving as a pack, low and quiet and fast, following the first two toward whatever path would lead them around the spike pit.
They know a way around… Wendy realized. We still have no time whatsoever.
Dipper racked his brain. The creatures seemed to be somehow tracking the control coupling, so stealth was looking implausible. And with the predators hot on their tails, they couldn’t move very far or very fast… Certainly they’d never made it through the hour-long hike out… There was only one place around here armored enough to keep them safe; only one way to live out the day. “Back to the UFO.” Dipper said.
Wendy nodded.
They managed to jump back across the spike pit (Well, only one of them jumped, but let’s not mind the particulars). Then they paused to tighten the straps on their backpacks, hike up their leg armor, and take a deep breath before sprinting off into the trees they way they’d come.
The sharp leaves of the metal plants slashed and tore at them as they dashed. Jabs that the armor would have warded off at slower speeds now gouged them fiercely, not piercing through, but leaving bruises and scratches, and the never-ending threat that maybe (just maybe) the next collision would skewer straight through.
Up over deadfalls, down under logs, jumping from stone to root to patch of grass, always with an eye open for next stable ground. The footwork was tricky sometimes, and Dipper found himself falling behind. Wendy was 5 feet ahead of him. Then 10. She first noticed this around 15 feet, and stopped in her tracks, having none of it. He came up alongside panting for breath. “Okay, ditch the extra crap!” She told him, and grabbed his shoulders to spin him around and open his backpack. In a mad rush, she scooped out their food, water, spare axe, and all of Dipper’s tools. Binoculars. Geiger counter. Wrench. Wire cutters. Ford’s tablet. All went in an unceremonious rubbish pile by the wayside.
Dipper’s eyes swept the forest behind them, while his hands held the magnet gun ready to fire on anything that moved.
There! One of the robots climbed above the shrubbery to the summit of a fallen log; its eyes swept the landscape and landed on the humans. Dipper pointed the magnet gun at it, and let off a pulse. The gun jumped in his hands with the discharge, and the electromagnetic wave left the weapon at light speed, getting wider and less-powerful as it traveled across the forest. Unfortunately, by the time it reached the target, it was too diffuse to have any effect, and the creature just shook its head and spun its saws, before jumping down from the log and joining its brethren, which must still be approaching under cover of the bushes.
Dang it! Wasted a valuable shot… He glanced at the charge meter. 3 pulses left.
“Okay forget the whole thing!” Wendy yelped, as she yanked the backpack off Dipper’s shoulders entirely, and tossed it into the bushes. “Come ON!”
“Wait!” He rushed over to it, and reached into the back pocket.
“We can replace it all! Just MOVE!”
His fingers wrapped around a blue, leather-bound book with a pine tree on the cover. “Not this.”
“Guh! Gee! Dude!” She grabbed him by the back of his collar and hauled him to his feet. With a little push from her they were moving again, away from the threat which was surely overtaking them.
Finally, Dipper recognized the clearing up ahead as the same one they’d left twenty minutes ago: the UFO. Their sprint ended in the sparse vegetation entwining its hull, and Wendy bent over the entry airlock, working her fingers into the narrow crack. Dipper rushed over and joined her, and together they pried upwards on the hatch. It creaked open stiffly, just as the first pursuing lion emerged from the trees. Its saws extended, and it leapt towards them. Dipper leveled the magnet gun, and fired point-blank. The robot shuddered as its eyes went dark. It slumped over mid-stride and crashed to a stop, its saws barely a meter short of where he stood. That was too close…
“Come ON!” Wendy tugged at the arm of his armor, and jumped down into the airlock.
He was right behind her. But he planned his jump poorly, and happened to land on top of her.
They collapsed into a pile on the floor, their armor clattering in a furious, brief racket, their lungs shocked empty of air by the impact. Above them, the outer door slammed shut, and they found themselves in silence and in darkness.
They were safe.
And so they lay for a moment, locked in a close metal chamber, greedily sucking oxygen into their dizzy brains and trying to collect their wits. Dipper could feel Wendy’s chest rising and falling beneath his, though past his own thundering heart, he didn’t notice for a moment or two. When he finally did, he thought it was a terribly awkward sensation, so he stuttered something polite-ish, struggled to a sitting position, and flopped over against the opposite wall.
In the dark, Dipper heard her ease upright, and unstrap her backpack. A light flicked on in the darkness: her headlamp, one of the few things they hadn’t ditched in their rush.
She pointed its white glow down at her backpack, and the dusty old McGuffin protruding from it. “Well… Ugh…” She sighed. “You know, in the half-hour we’ve had this thing, it’s been nothing but trouble.”
“Well… Hope it’ll be worth it.”
“Ugh.”
“Ugh…”
Above their heads, they heard a scraping on the glass, and a hint of massive, yet soft footsteps. They seemed to linger overhead for a few seconds, then continued on.
Wendy glanced slowly after them. “So… What now?”
“Uh…” Dipper frowned, as he realized his plans didn’t go a whole lot further than ‘get inside and lock the doors.’ “Uh…” He guessed out loud. “Wait it out? I guess? I mean, they can’t get in, so…”
“Are you sure they can’t get in?”
“No.”
The footsteps came back overhead again. This time they seemed to turn in a circle, and stop.
Then a deafening clanging noise sounded from the ceiling, and it seemed to shake the walls. Then another impact, and a tiny crack appeared in the glass surface, drawing whispy white lines of light through the dusty air.
“Yeah, you know what? Never mind.” Dipper admitted.
“Ha ha! Ain’t no rest for the wicked!” Wendy agreed, as she pulled herself to her feet, and began punching at the airlock’s control panel, trying to open the inner door. “Come on come on you stupid…” A second clanging noise sounded, and the ceiling crack widened. A shard of glass fell and clinked on the floor, and a long metal claw reached through the gap. Wendy finally got the door open, and they stumbled into the ship’s main room.
Their eyes swept the small space, looking for any sort of weapon or escape option.
They found it.
“No.” Dipper said.
“Yes.” Wendy said.
“NO!”
“YES!”
“BUT… We don’t know how…!”
“Dipper. Bro.” She spun around to face him, a contented, mischievous, devilish grin on her face. “Look… Uh… Okay. Spending the rest of the Summer hanging out with you would be awesome. But I don’t know if I can; I don’t know how this thing is gonna look, or where we’ll be or… What… But… But if this adventure, this day, is what we’re gonna remember each other for, then I would have it be SUCH a day…! I say we go out in a blaze of glory dude; we take it all with us, and we bring back a trophy worthy of legend. We make SUCH a story that they will be telling it until you’re a Grunkle… How does that sound?”
“I…” Another impact sounded on the hull, this one sounded like it broke through the airlock entirely. Dipper gave the inner door a kick to make sure it locked properly. “But… I don’t want a story, Wendy… I… I just… I don’t care! I just don’t want this to be our last adventure!”
“Oh YEAH?” Wendy cocked her head and put her hands on her hips. “You don’t want it to end, huh?”
“No! I…” He was interrupted by another impact, this one not on the airlock at all, but in the middle of the room’s domed ceiling. “I don’t want you to go…! I…”
“Oh yeah?” Her voice got lower. Over the sound of the robots’ assault, he almost didn’t catch it.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay dude.” She shrugged, and set her jaw. “Then… Th-then…” Something caught in her voice. “Then… S-so…” She stuttered, and shrugged again, as if on impulse. As if for once, she didn’t know what to say. As if for once, the great Wendy had gotten herself so profoundly flummoxed that she’d lost the ability to speak. “So… Then… O-okay. Okay dude, so… So are you gonna ask me on a date or what?”
Another impact above them, and this time cracks were noticeably spider-webbing across the ceiling, crinkling and tinkling with a sound like ice in soda.
Dipper’s heart felt like it was beating out of his chest, and his brain and his soul were leaving each other so far behind that he didn’t even know how to process what was going on around him. “Uh, the, uh… The uh…” How do I do this?? What do I say? She doesn’t want to go on a date, she’s just daring me, but I know she means she’ll miss me and… What do I do? What do I do?
What do I do…? Finally he blinked, and he remembered where he was. And he heard the pounding, and he felt the peril. And he knew exactly what to do. He nodded decisively, and started toward their dreaded escape option. “Let’s go.”
Wendy smiled. “I’m the designated driver!” She reminded him. “You tell me which buttons to press.”
She leapfrogged over the back of the pilot’s seat, and landed squarely on the ancient, busted cushion, throwing up a fine cloud of dust. The seat certainly didn’t fit her butt very well, obviously having been designed for somebody who was ever-so-slightly more squid-shaped.
Dipper climbed more carefully into the copilot’s seat, and found his own butt sagging down through the tail hole. He buckled the ever-so-slightly too squid-shaped harness over his chest, and tightened the straps as far as they’d go, preparing for the ride to come.
All right. She reminded herself, as she buckled up too. Nothing crazy about this; it’s just like driving a car, with some up-and-down throw in, and no insurance. You got this. She closed her eyes and let her mind drift away to her first impromptu driving lessons, back when she was maybe 13. Sitting in her dad’s truck, while he pointed out the controls: The steering wheel… the stick shift… the four petals: parking brake, clutch, normal brake, gas… It was all very new and confusing to her back then, but at least she had somebody to see her through it.
Wendy’s mind arrived back in the present, and she opened her eyes to behold the current vehicle’s controls: Two omni-directional control levers, which looked like arcade joysticks stuck inside gimbals, which were in turn mounted on the end of short suspension arms… There was also a group of 4 small little levers mounted on a console that stuck up between her legs… And an annoying clutter of switches beside each armrest… A HUD helmet could swing down over her head like Luke Skywalker’s targeting computer… And on the dashboard ahead of her? Hundreds of dials, gauges, and weird little blinky lights, all of them too dirty and dusty to make out the labels; even ignoring for a moment that the sparse labeling was all in alienese.
Her eyes landed on the floor in front of her feet, and she frowned.
“Why are there 8 pedals when there’s only 6 directions?” She asked.
Dipper was currently searching in, around, and underneath for any kind of clue at all. “I dunno…” He mumbled. “Maybe there’s a tutorial program…?”
“Or maybe…” Wendy guessed out loud. “We can just get lucky!” And she reached out toward the dashboard, and she tentatively flipped a small, unassuming switch.
Nothing happened.
She turned to another, slightly different switch, and flipped that one. Nothing happened.
She flipped another switch. A loud ‘CLUNK’ sounded from the walls, but nothing else.
She flipped another switch. A reading light came on.
She flipped another switch. Nothing happened.
She flipped another switch. A cupholder extended.
She flipped another. A pink light began to blink.
She flipped another. Nothing happened.
Dipper found what he was looking for: a small datapad that apparently contained some form of instruction manual. It didn’t do a lot of good without Ford’s tablet to translate, and it was about 840 pages long anyway. But it had a lot of pictures to help, so he scratched his head and began to surf, looking for the part where it explains how to start the engine.
She flipped another. An orangish-yellow light began to blink.
She flipped another. Something in the walls deflated with a tired hisssssssss.
She flipped another. 20 bright red lights began to blink, and a siren began to wail. She flipped that one back off.
She flipped another. The windshield defroster turned on. Well, ‘defroster’ kind of undersells it. All the dirt, rocks, and robotic undergrowth that had covered and obscured the vehicle’s canopy all began to melt, burn, and vibrate away. Sunlight began to shine through. Soon it was as perfectly clear and transparent as new, and the teens found themselves blinking up at the glowing red eyes of the robots. Naturally, this means the robots saw them too, and they began to swing their claws at the canopy with ever more vigor. Another crack appeared.
Wendy flipped 5 more switches, and pressed the first and fifth pedals at the same time.
In a language that was most certainly NOT English, a small speaker chimed. “DO NOT ENGAGE HYDRAULIC GYROSCOPE SYNCHRONIZERS WITHOUT ONUBTANIUM CIRCULATION. CHECK ENGINE SOON.”
“UHH, try that one!” Dipper pointed to a little red button. Wendy pressed it. Nothing happened.
“Umm… I don’t know, that was supposed to… Wait, maybe hold the 3rd and 4th pedals in while you do!”
She tried that. “CHECK ENGINE SOON!” The small speaker repeated.
“Try the… Oh wait a minute, that wasn’t the startup. That was the emergency fuel dump… Never mind…”
The robots kept pounding, and the cracks were getting wider.
“YO BETTY AND BARNEY!” Wendy hollered. “I KNOW YOU’RE STILL HAUNTING THIS DUMP; COULD YOU GIVE US A HAND?”
“Try that one over there!” Dipper said. “Turn that dial all the way down, wait no, all the way up, and then hold that swich for 5… Uh… I guess seconds. 5 seconds!”
“CHECK ENGINE SOON!” The small speaker was getting indignant.
“Nothing’s happening!”
“Try one of those over there then!”
“I’M GONNA PRESS EVERY BUTTON I SEE!”
“CHECK ENGINE SOON!”

Barney sat and stared ahead.
It was beautiful.
As beautiful and expansive and welcoming as anything in history had ever aspired to be. A dream of a painting of a child’s naive imagining of an antiquated fable of a green and glowing paradise. A place where things were right, and powerful, and good. It was that life all people long for, that grandest adventure of surpassing purity and courage and meaning…
It was a place inhabited by a purified people, hailing from all nations and peoples and planets in the multiverse… It was a place of peace and goodness, designed and maintained by none other than God himself.
He could see this shimmering vision whether he had his eyes opened or closed. It was before him, and all he had to do was step through. The regrets and sorrows and unfinished business of his past life had haunted him for so long, keeping him here in this ghostly half-sleep to haunt it back.
But moments ago Betty had turned to him. “Well.” She’d said. “There are people here who know the stakes… They’re good people, and they know what has to be done. They’ll bring this all to conclusion. Carry out the justice we couldn’t… But I think our journey is done.”
She’d pointed off into the distance, and showed him how their ghosts had always been so close to stepping into the beyond world. And she’d pointed even further through, and showed him a laughing little boy; a boy he somehow recognized instantly; a boy whose creation had been interrupted in the womb, and who had been stillborn in blood as a twisted wreckage. Never had Barney yet seen this completed product, and he was handsome indeed.
“It’s our son…” She’d said. “God knows what he should have been, and he fixed him… We… We need to go…”
He’d stood there staring, while the seconds stretched into minutes. He wanted to step through. “You go…” He’d told her instead. “I… I’ll follow in a little bit…”
“Oh… You sure?”
“Yeah… I’ll… Just be a minute…”
“…I love you.”
“I love you too.”
And then she’d stepped through. And now this haunted ship was haunted by only one.
And now, half an hour later, his incorporeal face was still bent in a slight frown. Why had he stayed behind? Did he really think so much of this stupid old life? Was it just a whim? Or was it something else…? Did he really have unfinished business left?
In fact, he did.
In the furthest corner of his perception, he heard a great sound; that of beasts beating on the hull of the ship. With such fury that they were beginning to chip and shatter the glass, unsealing it for the first time in millennia. He turned toward the chaos, and in the middle, he saw the humans, buckled into the flight seats, pounding on the controls in a confused and joyous rage, their souls afire in terror and wild anticipation.
The creatures would finish breaking through the hull in moments.
Barney snapped his fingers.

Some three dozen switches on Wendy’s console all spontaneously flipped at once, without anybody touching them. The lights in the cabin flicked over to a dull blue, and then a strange sound began to emanate from the ship’s walls: the sound off immense and powerful electrical humming, the rushing of superheated fuel through generators, the spinning of dynamos.
This was how a spaceship was supposed to sound.
Dipper’s inner ear made a tiny hiccup, as the anti-gravity engines automatically aligned themselves.
“Could it be…?” Wendy whispered to herself.
Hesitantly, but with great anticipation, her hands reached forward, and curled around the main control sticks. She closed her fingers around the grip, and her right wrist twitched.
The floor rocked beneath them, pitching in the same direction she’d twitched.
The robots up on the canopy stumbled slightly, confused.
“Legend.” Wendy glanced at Dipper.
“Legend.” He agreed.
“YES!” Wendy pulled the joysticks upwards. Both their inner ears tumbled completely out of whack, as energy surged through the ships engines and through its gravity drive nacelles. Their craft lifted off the ground, tilted its nose for the sky, and hovered higher. The lions (not natural jumpers) responded with a perfectly logical fear, and hooked their claws into the cracks in the hull for dear life.
Wendy twisted the joysticks left.
The horizon began to spin and flip, prompting the lions to grip all 4 of their claws into glass, while the ship itself nearly plummeted out of the sky.
Wendy twisted them right-side up and pulled up at the last second, and they found themselves cruising over the treetops, nose up.
She pushed both joysticks as far forward as they’d go.
The nacelles began to howl. All the robots that Dipper could see lost their grips, and fell off, plummeting down to whatever grizzly death the distant ground held for them.
Air, light, and even space itself, began to warp and disturb itself around the gravity of the nacelles, as the vehicle pushed itself off the planet’s weight, and blasted upwards toward the clouds on a thundering pillar of raw, fundamental force. Wind whistled off the cracks in the glass, sunlight shone through the cockpit, and on the console, all of the good lights were blinking.
Had anybody been watching from the town, they just might have seen the tiny disk of dirty silver streak skyward, just might have heard its frame shaking as it approached the speed of sound. And maybe, just maybe, they could have heard the triumphant war whoops of the teenagers inside, rejoicing in this, their greatest of hard-won victories.

Barney smiled. Finally, at long last, he felt ready. He stepped through.

She gripped for all she was worth.
The ground was a memory at this point; somewhere up or down or left or right and she’d quite forgotten. All that was real, all that she could hold on to, all that kept her alive, was the dirty and smooth glass surface beneath her, and the jagged hole busted into it.
The claw of her foreleg remained hooked around some truss inside the hole, while her other searched for purchase among the various plants and clods of rock still resisting the wind. Her rear legs had found a seam in the hull, and there she’d kept them, barely daring to move, lest the slightest miscalculation free her to die.
She turned her attention to the hole her foreleg was hooked in. She extended her saws deeper into the gap, and began to cut into the machinery within, hoping to find a better grip, clear enough room to climb inside, or else anchor herself some other way. Anything was better than the horrid heights swirling about her…
With all the grit and savagery of a cornered wild dog, she dug and she pulled and she drilled, her entire killer heart filled to the brim with the single and dominating will to survive.
She would survive.
She would survive.

It was instinctive.

Description

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    Chapter 17: Cats and Clever Mice



Author’s Note: The illustration isn't my favorite, but the Lord of the Rings reference is.



At the behest of the ghosts that haunted it, the small UFO’s batteries had been powered up for the first time in thousands of years. Now that the humans climbed back up through the airlock and started home, the ship’s lights and computers clicked back off, and the entire thing went dormant again.
But its brief period of electrical activity had not gone unnoticed.
The robotic predators in the woods had sensed it: sensed what they perceived as a piece of helpless prey, massive and immobile, trapped in the ground somehow. It ‘smelled’ to them like a feast. A prize to claim quickly before others did. A strange opportunity, but not one to be missed.
And many of them were very, very hungry…
The ship’s electrical activity ceased and they lost track of it. But nevertheless, their red eyes turned in the same general direction. Their antennae extended to scan for even a trace of what they’d sensed moments ago. Saws spun slowly in preparation. And heavy treaded feet began to pick their way through the trees, carefully and silently and very, very quickly…

The trunks of the trees were hard and metal, the leaves cold and sharp, as Dipper and Wendy trudged stoically through the robotic alien forest. Away from the spacecraft, and the ancient aliens that had left it there. Their footfalls were heavy beneath the combined weight of their armor, weapons, and the Power Control Coupling that could destroy this place once and for all.
“Is this the fastest way out?” Wendy spoke up after a while.
“I have no clue.” Dipper glanced back down at his map. “Other ways could be longer or shorter, but this is the way we came in, so… It’s the only way we know.”
“Hmm-ugh.” She made a thoughtful groaning noise, as she hefted the control coupling into what she hoped might be a more comfortable position on her shoulder. It didn’t really work; after just a few seconds, the merely jostling motion of walking caused it to poke and press into her bones in an equally miserable way. But they kept walking anyway.
“Oh, uh… Hey Wendy.” Dipper broke the silence.
“S’up?”
“H-how have things been with you?”
“What things?”
“Like… Things… Like, with your dad, with school… And I know you quit at the Mystery Shack ‘cause now Melody is cashier, and you wanted some other job… How’s all that… Going?”
She shrugged. “Heh… Well… I kinda need a resume if I’m gonna get a good job… But I don’t really know how to start a resume, or what to put on it or what job to apply for… I dunno. Honestly, I don’t want a job. But my dad’s kinda been on me constantly that I need to apply myself and write one and earn some money… You know… Dads, right? It’s just… I try not to think about it… Really, I just like it better out here with you. Adventuring, right? Where we’re actually doing something significant… Ha ha… After this thing with the killer alien robots blows over… I guess I won’t have an excuse anymore…”
Dipper listened carefully. Then he gave a little nod. “Oh.”
“Hope dad won’t send me up to the logging camp…” Wendy mentioned offhand. “It’s kinda a ways away, and… It, like, sucks and stuff. So I better get a resume before he loses patience or whatever…”
Something started getting uncomfortable in Dipper’s heart. He frowned and said. “Oh.”
Will I ever see her again? After the robots were dealt with, and everything in the adventure got finished and signed off to the annals of strangest history… Would it just be him and Mabel again? Would Wendy be gone? Just another friend, who greeted him every so often while passing on the sidewalk? Who waved down at him from the passenger seat of another boyfriend’s car? A idyllic childhood friend from an idyllic time, gone forever but never forgotten? Nothing but a sweet memory…? Was THIS all there would ever be between him and her?
“Uh…” He stuttered. “Uh…! Uh, say Wendy…?”
“What’s up?”
“Well, uh…” He scratched his armor with a sweaty glove. “Uhhhhhhhhh… Do you want to empty your backpack into mine? That way you can put the Control Coupling into your pack, and it wouldn’t be as heavy for you to carry…”
“Oh… Oh yeah! Good idea.” They stopped for a minute to do just that. The Coupling didn’t fit very well into an ordinary backpack, so they couldn’t zip it shut all the way. But when Wendy shrugged it back onto her shoulders, it was much more bearable. Dipper shouldered the combined cargo from both their packs, straightened his knees with a determined effort, and they started walking again.
“Thanks.” Wendy said. “Much better.”
“Y-yeah… No… No problem.”
They fell silent again, but Dipper broke it before long.
“Uh… Wendy, uh…”
“S’up?”
“Do… Do you want me to help write your resume? Like, I’m a pretty good writer I think and I know a lot of the stuff you’ve done and…”
“Naw… I mean thanks, I mean… If…” She sighed, and rubbed her hands across her face. “No. I have to do it myself. My responsibility… A resume is basically bragging. And while it’s kind of weird to write an entire paper of bragging about yourself, it’s even weirder to have a friend write you a bragging paper… Ha ha… You know?”
“Uh… Ha… Uh… Yeah…”
“Thanks though.”
They walked in silence for a few minutes more, then Dipper finally blurted out. “Wendy?”
“S’up?”
“Uh… Like… I don’t know. Never mind.”
“Umm… Okay.”
“Y-yeah, uh… Hey, are you thirsty?”
She shrugged. “No…”
“Oh, okay, because I am. I think a glass of water would be nice.” Dipper took out his water bottle, and took a hasty drink. Most of it missed his mouth. “Do you want any?”
She shrugged a second time. “No…”
“Oh, okay.”
They continued on.
“Hey Wendy?” He asked again.
She looked at him sharply. “Are you trying to tell me something?”
“Ah! Uh… No. No.”
“Oh……………” She squinted down her nose, making a skeptical sort of half-smile. Her Ellipses dragged on. “………......Kay.”
A noise interrupted them from somewhere high above: a noise like a blowtorch, or a rocket. Dipper looked upward in time to see a small, bird-like robot diving out of the tree.
It passed right over their heads, then doubled back around, this time coming to a stationary perch on top of Wendy’s helmet. Dipper saw that the ‘bird’ didn’t have any wings to speak of, but just a pair of rotating rocket nozzles where wings ought to be. Its drill-like beak bent over the control coupling in Wendy’s pack, and began tapping with a sound like a jackhammer.
“HEY!”
“HEY! We need that, you stupid!”
“SCRAM!”
They yelped and began to slap at the troublesome living aircraft, trying to shoo it. It fluttered its thrusters and boosted away, to a perch among a cluster of branches in the nearest tree.
Wendy growled, and reached up to put out a small fire in her hair, where the rocket exhaust had singed it. “This is gonna get old real fast…”
It got old even faster than they thought: a few more birds had gathered around the first, and were all perched above, peering down hungrily from the tree in front of them.
“Come on… This doesn’t even make any sense!” Wendy groaned. “Why do they want this stupid thing? And where are they getting rocket fuel?”
“Maybe they’re solar thermal rockets?” Dipper suggested. “They use the sun’s energy to superheat and compress the surrounding air into their tanks… Maybe the only reason they’re not divebombing us right now is because they need a few minutes to inhale every time they fire their jump jets.”
“…That actually makes a lot of sense.” She frowned.
“I… Uh… read it in a sci-fi book.”
The first bird let go of the branch and fired its jump jets, flying toward them like some kind of pigeon-sized missile. The other birds quickly followed suit.
Wendy brought up her axe, and swung it in the direction of the approaching flock. She missed the first one, and the second one, and the third one… Well, she missed all of them, really; the pests seemed to have exceptional reaction time.
A few latched onto her backpack and began to drill at the Coupling.
Dipper got around behind her and swatted them off. The birds seemed to know how small and fragile they were, and launched off before Dipper could properly hit them. But still they kept returning. They kept circling and dive-bombing and pecking and drilling, as if they believed the Control Coupling was the most delicious thing in the universe and they just HAD to have it.
Seeing as the situation was getting out of hand, Dipper and Wendy turned and began to run in no particular direction, thinking perhaps they would be left alone if they got out of range.
The birds kept up easily, for now…

Its red eyes turned in another direction. Something was nearby, something making a lot of movement and ruckus. Its antenna probed, and made out the signatures of a great number of carrion-feeding birds, all in commotion and activity.
This was definitely something… Perhaps the birds had found the large prey from earlier.
The hungry machine glanced sideways at the others beside it, and saw that they were already moving in the new direction.
Without hesitation, it followed the pack…

Dipper and Wendy’s flight had led them to the edge of some sort of precipice. It was perhaps 3 meters across and maybe 2 deep, though its bottom was filled with a tangle of razor-sharp metal bushes: a perfect deterrent for potential jumpers. It stretched as far as they could see in either direction (not that they could see very far of course, but it would still be pretty hard getting around.)
Wendy noticed the spike-pit just in time, and rocked back on her heels and pinwheeled her arms to keep from falling. Dipper was looking over his shoulder right about then, and would have gone right over the edge if Wendy hadn’t grabbed his backpack, and drug him back to level ground.
His heart leapt to his throat as he realized how close he’d come to the drop; but now was not the time for melodrama, for the birds were still divebombing.
Seeing as how they couldn’t really run any further without braving the pit, they turned and tried to attack the birds once more. It didn’t really work this time either, but after perhaps a minute of this, they got lucky when one of the little creatures made a mistake: it drilled into Wendy’s shoulder, which was covered by her dad’s chainsaw chaps. The fibers of the garment got sucked into the bird’s mechanisms, where they instantly jammed its gears and tangled it in place.
Panicked, the bird fired its thrusters all around, trying in vain to pull away. Dipper noticed the situation, and leapt up to grab the creature in both hands. Its thrusters were burning hot (even through his gloves), but he managed to keep a hold of it long enough for Wendy to bring her axe around.
She struck the bird in the head, and it went limp. Its thrusters wheezed slowly.
Dipper dropped it to the ground, and Wendy aimed another blow. She struck its head a second time, hard, and there was a cracking sound as its eyes went dark. She aimed a third strike at its torso, and there was a sudden small explosion as its compressed fuel tanks burst. A tiny piece of shrapnel bounced of Dipper’s helmet, harmless but startling.
The other birds noticed the death of their brother, and swarmed back into the trees, where they paused for a moment to recharge their jump jets. But then they never launched back down. They just sat there. Waiting.
“Huh.” Wendy paused to get her own breath back, and bitterly kicked the one dead bird into the spike pit. “Just needed to get one to make an example…” She exhaled triumphantly. “They’re… Ugh… They’re smarter than they look.”
“Uh…” Dipper took a deep breath, in through his nose and out through his mouth. “Yeah.”
“Yeah…” Wendy brought one of her gloved hands up, and pointed the palm at Dipper for a high-five. “Nice job, dude.”
Dipper looked up at her hand for a minute. Then he looked past her helmet at her freckled face. Then past the goggles at her winking green eyes. And his mind strayed away, back to a library of happy memories he’d shared with her. I remember the first time I high-fived her… He recalled. That was when I fell in love with her… It feels like so many long ages ago… But I remember it like it was yesterday…
“Don’t leave me hanging.” The present Wendy said, at the same time as the memory.
He high-fived her back.
She smiled and turned away.
“Uh… Uh… Hey Wendy?” He asked.
“Mmm?” She asked over her shoulder.
“If… Uh…” Dipper scratched his head nervously.
“What?”
“Like… Uh… Hypothetically… If I liked somebody… Like Pacifica. If I still really liked her, but… Like… Hypothetically didn’t think she liked me back, what should I d-d-do? Should I just ask her? Like… I don’t know… You know…?”
Wendy stopped. And she turned around, and met his eye. “Like… Ask her if she likes you, you mean?”
“Yeah…” Dipper stuttered, and couldn’t quite bring himself to meet her eyes. “Like… Should I even bother…? You know…? I don’t know… I… I don’t know…”
Wendy stared at him, thinking. She thought for what seemed quite a long time; as if she were confused herself. As if she considered this question to be even more important than her friend did. As if she’d already thought about it many a time, but still hadn’t thought enough. As if the answer meant the world to her. Dipper finally brought his eyes up to meet hers, and they sat like that for a minute, neither of them smiling or moving, just staring and thinking.
So I don’t work at the Mystery Shack anymore. Wendy thought. So what? So this adventure is wrapping up; so what? It’s not like you’ll never see me again. I’ll still be around. You’ll still see me now and again… It’s not like… Not like… Well… Well… No, it would be the end, wouldn’t it? It is exactly as you fear, isn’t it? But we can make plans though! We can make plans and… And… Wait… That’s just what you’re doing, isn’t it? You’re making plans.
Do I like the plan?
Wendy thought hard for a minute more, then set her jaw, and stood up a little straighter. She finally broke the silence with a little smile. “Dude…” She began.
Snap.
Both their heads turned in the direction of the sound, and landed on a point in the shadow of a nearby thicket. From within, 2 large, red eyes stared back out at them.
The eyes of one of the robot lions.
The eyes were moving forward, their owner prowling slowly and carefully, stepping into the light. Dipper recognized the particular creature from a large burn mark in its side. The mate of the one they’d been fighting. And if this one was here it’s mate must be…
Dipper caught movement in his periphery; a gleam of sunlight which gave away a second creature approaching from the right. The second had only one eye, and scars all around its face… This was the mother. Bestial menace of the week, and a real jerk to boot.
Dipper slowly drew his magnet gun with one hand, and glanced at its charge meter. It had maybe 4 electromagnetic pulses left in it; and then its batteries would be depleted. 4 pulses, 2 lions… If he was lucky they could immobilize them both. But as they’d seen earlier, it couldn’t kill them. It only knocked them out temporarily… And he wasn’t the best shot, and the lions weren’t slow to recover… It would be close. Very close.
Then Wendy elbowed him, and pointed off in another direction. He followed her finger deeper into the trees, and noticed more shapes; more predators. They looked just as big and menacing as the two they followed. Big, mean, and hungry.
Dipper lost count at 5. The 4 remaining pulses in his gun began to seem beyond pathetic.
As she drew her axe (and wondered what good it would do) Wendy took a step back, and felt her heel touch the edge of the precipice.
“Dipper.” She said. The word hung tense in the still afternoon air. “This conversation is not over.”

She recognized them.
The ones that had slaughtered her pack. That had stolen all which instinct told her to protect. The ones that had injured her. That had tried to kill her. The mysterious creatures that emitted no electrical signals, that prowled about her territory without concern, and which had evaded her so many times. She knew they were capable of attack; a stinging, strange attack that left her dazed. So it was with a great deal of caution that she approached her most terrible enemies.
She was hungry, and she was angry.
She was crazy, and she was wild.
And she would not be evaded today.

“Wendy.” Dipper whispered, as his eyes swept the approaching predators.
“Gimme ideas.” She encouraged him.
“We can’t fight. We’ve got to escape; jump across the pit.”
Wendy glanced over her shoulder, down the sheer edge, and into the tangle of knives below. Then she looked over toward the opposite end, gauging the distance uncertainly. “It’s a long way…”
Dipper realized she was right. His adrenaline-filled brain sorted rapidly through the available options, and finally landed on the only reasonable one. “Toss me.” He managed to grunt.
She glanced down at him, and raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“I cannot jump the distance! You’ll have to toss me!”
Wendy stared at him for just a second, considering this. Then she gave a slight, understanding nod, spread her feet, bent down, and grasped him beneath his arms.
“GAH Wait wait!” Dipper yelped, delaying the maneuver for just a second. “…Don’t tell Robbie.”
“Not a word.” She promised.
And then she tossed him.
He hung in the air for what felt like seconds, while the yawning pit sped by beneath his feet.
He didn’t try to land on his feet on the other side; he knew he would lose balance or come short if he did. So he straightened his legs and caught the opposite ledge across the shins, and then slid down to level with his arms.
His fingers wrapped around a tangle of grass and a root, and the plants managed to stop his fall before he dropped away completely. His feet kicked at the wall below him, and finally found a small hollow sturdy enough to support his weight. He pushed himself up off the narrow hold, and managed to get high enough to crawl fully up onto the other side.
Beside him, Wendy landed from her own jump more or less squarely on both feet, though stumbling briefly beneath the coupling on her back.
Their eyes spun around to look behind them.
On the other side of the pit, the same place where they’d been standing moments previous, the lions stared back with murder in their eyes. (By the way, can glowing red eyes have anything besides murder in them? Highly unlikely.)
“Can they make the jump?” Wendy asked, as she helped Dipper to his feet.
“Native to a low-gravity moon.” Dipper reminded her. “And made of heavy metal… I think we win this bet…”
The lions seemed to think so too. After a momentary staring contest of sorts, both beasts turned and sprinted off through the trees, following the edge of the precipice around a bend and out of sight. The others stood and made after them, all moving as a pack, low and quiet and fast, following the first two toward whatever path would lead them around the spike pit.
They know a way around… Wendy realized. We still have no time whatsoever.
Dipper racked his brain. The creatures seemed to be somehow tracking the control coupling, so stealth was looking implausible. And with the predators hot on their tails, they couldn’t move very far or very fast… Certainly they’d never made it through the hour-long hike out… There was only one place around here armored enough to keep them safe; only one way to live out the day. “Back to the UFO.” Dipper said.
Wendy nodded.
They managed to jump back across the spike pit (Well, only one of them jumped, but let’s not mind the particulars). Then they paused to tighten the straps on their backpacks, hike up their leg armor, and take a deep breath before sprinting off into the trees they way they’d come.
The sharp leaves of the metal plants slashed and tore at them as they dashed. Jabs that the armor would have warded off at slower speeds now gouged them fiercely, not piercing through, but leaving bruises and scratches, and the never-ending threat that maybe (just maybe) the next collision would skewer straight through.
Up over deadfalls, down under logs, jumping from stone to root to patch of grass, always with an eye open for next stable ground. The footwork was tricky sometimes, and Dipper found himself falling behind. Wendy was 5 feet ahead of him. Then 10. She first noticed this around 15 feet, and stopped in her tracks, having none of it. He came up alongside panting for breath. “Okay, ditch the extra crap!” She told him, and grabbed his shoulders to spin him around and open his backpack. In a mad rush, she scooped out their food, water, spare axe, and all of Dipper’s tools. Binoculars. Geiger counter. Wrench. Wire cutters. Ford’s tablet. All went in an unceremonious rubbish pile by the wayside.
Dipper’s eyes swept the forest behind them, while his hands held the magnet gun ready to fire on anything that moved.
There! One of the robots climbed above the shrubbery to the summit of a fallen log; its eyes swept the landscape and landed on the humans. Dipper pointed the magnet gun at it, and let off a pulse. The gun jumped in his hands with the discharge, and the electromagnetic wave left the weapon at light speed, getting wider and less-powerful as it traveled across the forest. Unfortunately, by the time it reached the target, it was too diffuse to have any effect, and the creature just shook its head and spun its saws, before jumping down from the log and joining its brethren, which must still be approaching under cover of the bushes.
Dang it! Wasted a valuable shot… He glanced at the charge meter. 3 pulses left.
“Okay forget the whole thing!” Wendy yelped, as she yanked the backpack off Dipper’s shoulders entirely, and tossed it into the bushes. “Come ON!”
“Wait!” He rushed over to it, and reached into the back pocket.
“We can replace it all! Just MOVE!”
His fingers wrapped around a blue, leather-bound book with a pine tree on the cover. “Not this.”
“Guh! Gee! Dude!” She grabbed him by the back of his collar and hauled him to his feet. With a little push from her they were moving again, away from the threat which was surely overtaking them.
Finally, Dipper recognized the clearing up ahead as the same one they’d left twenty minutes ago: the UFO. Their sprint ended in the sparse vegetation entwining its hull, and Wendy bent over the entry airlock, working her fingers into the narrow crack. Dipper rushed over and joined her, and together they pried upwards on the hatch. It creaked open stiffly, just as the first pursuing lion emerged from the trees. Its saws extended, and it leapt towards them. Dipper leveled the magnet gun, and fired point-blank. The robot shuddered as its eyes went dark. It slumped over mid-stride and crashed to a stop, its saws barely a meter short of where he stood. That was too close…
“Come ON!” Wendy tugged at the arm of his armor, and jumped down into the airlock.
He was right behind her. But he planned his jump poorly, and happened to land on top of her.
They collapsed into a pile on the floor, their armor clattering in a furious, brief racket, their lungs shocked empty of air by the impact. Above them, the outer door slammed shut, and they found themselves in silence and in darkness.
They were safe.
And so they lay for a moment, locked in a close metal chamber, greedily sucking oxygen into their dizzy brains and trying to collect their wits. Dipper could feel Wendy’s chest rising and falling beneath his, though past his own thundering heart, he didn’t notice for a moment or two. When he finally did, he thought it was a terribly awkward sensation, so he stuttered something polite-ish, struggled to a sitting position, and flopped over against the opposite wall.
In the dark, Dipper heard her ease upright, and unstrap her backpack. A light flicked on in the darkness: her headlamp, one of the few things they hadn’t ditched in their rush.
She pointed its white glow down at her backpack, and the dusty old McGuffin protruding from it. “Well… Ugh…” She sighed. “You know, in the half-hour we’ve had this thing, it’s been nothing but trouble.”
“Well… Hope it’ll be worth it.”
“Ugh.”
“Ugh…”
Above their heads, they heard a scraping on the glass, and a hint of massive, yet soft footsteps. They seemed to linger overhead for a few seconds, then continued on.
Wendy glanced slowly after them. “So… What now?”
“Uh…” Dipper frowned, as he realized his plans didn’t go a whole lot further than ‘get inside and lock the doors.’ “Uh…” He guessed out loud. “Wait it out? I guess? I mean, they can’t get in, so…”
“Are you sure they can’t get in?”
“No.”
The footsteps came back overhead again. This time they seemed to turn in a circle, and stop.
Then a deafening clanging noise sounded from the ceiling, and it seemed to shake the walls. Then another impact, and a tiny crack appeared in the glass surface, drawing whispy white lines of light through the dusty air.
“Yeah, you know what? Never mind.” Dipper admitted.
“Ha ha! Ain’t no rest for the wicked!” Wendy agreed, as she pulled herself to her feet, and began punching at the airlock’s control panel, trying to open the inner door. “Come on come on you stupid…” A second clanging noise sounded, and the ceiling crack widened. A shard of glass fell and clinked on the floor, and a long metal claw reached through the gap. Wendy finally got the door open, and they stumbled into the ship’s main room.
Their eyes swept the small space, looking for any sort of weapon or escape option.
They found it.
“No.” Dipper said.
“Yes.” Wendy said.
“NO!”
“YES!”
“BUT… We don’t know how…!”
“Dipper. Bro.” She spun around to face him, a contented, mischievous, devilish grin on her face. “Look… Uh… Okay. Spending the rest of the Summer hanging out with you would be awesome. But I don’t know if I can; I don’t know how this thing is gonna look, or where we’ll be or… What… But… But if this adventure, this day, is what we’re gonna remember each other for, then I would have it be SUCH a day…! I say we go out in a blaze of glory dude; we take it all with us, and we bring back a trophy worthy of legend. We make SUCH a story that they will be telling it until you’re a Grunkle… How does that sound?”
“I…” Another impact sounded on the hull, this one sounded like it broke through the airlock entirely. Dipper gave the inner door a kick to make sure it locked properly. “But… I don’t want a story, Wendy… I… I just… I don’t care! I just don’t want this to be our last adventure!”
“Oh YEAH?” Wendy cocked her head and put her hands on her hips. “You don’t want it to end, huh?”
“No! I…” He was interrupted by another impact, this one not on the airlock at all, but in the middle of the room’s domed ceiling. “I don’t want you to go…! I…”
“Oh yeah?” Her voice got lower. Over the sound of the robots’ assault, he almost didn’t catch it.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay dude.” She shrugged, and set her jaw. “Then… Th-then…” Something caught in her voice. “Then… S-so…” She stuttered, and shrugged again, as if on impulse. As if for once, she didn’t know what to say. As if for once, the great Wendy had gotten herself so profoundly flummoxed that she’d lost the ability to speak. “So… Then… O-okay. Okay dude, so… So are you gonna ask me on a date or what?”
Another impact above them, and this time cracks were noticeably spider-webbing across the ceiling, crinkling and tinkling with a sound like ice in soda.
Dipper’s heart felt like it was beating out of his chest, and his brain and his soul were leaving each other so far behind that he didn’t even know how to process what was going on around him. “Uh, the, uh… The uh…” How do I do this?? What do I say? She doesn’t want to go on a date, she’s just daring me, but I know she means she’ll miss me and… What do I do? What do I do?
What do I do…? Finally he blinked, and he remembered where he was. And he heard the pounding, and he felt the peril. And he knew exactly what to do. He nodded decisively, and started toward their dreaded escape option. “Let’s go.”
Wendy smiled. “I’m the designated driver!” She reminded him. “You tell me which buttons to press.”
She leapfrogged over the back of the pilot’s seat, and landed squarely on the ancient, busted cushion, throwing up a fine cloud of dust. The seat certainly didn’t fit her butt very well, obviously having been designed for somebody who was ever-so-slightly more squid-shaped.
Dipper climbed more carefully into the copilot’s seat, and found his own butt sagging down through the tail hole. He buckled the ever-so-slightly too squid-shaped harness over his chest, and tightened the straps as far as they’d go, preparing for the ride to come.
All right. She reminded herself, as she buckled up too. Nothing crazy about this; it’s just like driving a car, with some up-and-down throw in, and no insurance. You got this. She closed her eyes and let her mind drift away to her first impromptu driving lessons, back when she was maybe 13. Sitting in her dad’s truck, while he pointed out the controls: The steering wheel… the stick shift… the four petals: parking brake, clutch, normal brake, gas… It was all very new and confusing to her back then, but at least she had somebody to see her through it.
Wendy’s mind arrived back in the present, and she opened her eyes to behold the current vehicle’s controls: Two omni-directional control levers, which looked like arcade joysticks stuck inside gimbals, which were in turn mounted on the end of short suspension arms… There was also a group of 4 small little levers mounted on a console that stuck up between her legs… And an annoying clutter of switches beside each armrest… A HUD helmet could swing down over her head like Luke Skywalker’s targeting computer… And on the dashboard ahead of her? Hundreds of dials, gauges, and weird little blinky lights, all of them too dirty and dusty to make out the labels; even ignoring for a moment that the sparse labeling was all in alienese.
Her eyes landed on the floor in front of her feet, and she frowned.
“Why are there 8 pedals when there’s only 6 directions?” She asked.
Dipper was currently searching in, around, and underneath for any kind of clue at all. “I dunno…” He mumbled. “Maybe there’s a tutorial program…?”
“Or maybe…” Wendy guessed out loud. “We can just get lucky!” And she reached out toward the dashboard, and she tentatively flipped a small, unassuming switch.
Nothing happened.
She turned to another, slightly different switch, and flipped that one. Nothing happened.
She flipped another switch. A loud ‘CLUNK’ sounded from the walls, but nothing else.
She flipped another switch. A reading light came on.
She flipped another switch. Nothing happened.
She flipped another switch. A cupholder extended.
She flipped another. A pink light began to blink.
She flipped another. Nothing happened.
Dipper found what he was looking for: a small datapad that apparently contained some form of instruction manual. It didn’t do a lot of good without Ford’s tablet to translate, and it was about 840 pages long anyway. But it had a lot of pictures to help, so he scratched his head and began to surf, looking for the part where it explains how to start the engine.
She flipped another. An orangish-yellow light began to blink.
She flipped another. Something in the walls deflated with a tired hisssssssss.
She flipped another. 20 bright red lights began to blink, and a siren began to wail. She flipped that one back off.
She flipped another. The windshield defroster turned on. Well, ‘defroster’ kind of undersells it. All the dirt, rocks, and robotic undergrowth that had covered and obscured the vehicle’s canopy all began to melt, burn, and vibrate away. Sunlight began to shine through. Soon it was as perfectly clear and transparent as new, and the teens found themselves blinking up at the glowing red eyes of the robots. Naturally, this means the robots saw them too, and they began to swing their claws at the canopy with ever more vigor. Another crack appeared.
Wendy flipped 5 more switches, and pressed the first and fifth pedals at the same time.
In a language that was most certainly NOT English, a small speaker chimed. “DO NOT ENGAGE HYDRAULIC GYROSCOPE SYNCHRONIZERS WITHOUT ONUBTANIUM CIRCULATION. CHECK ENGINE SOON.”
“UHH, try that one!” Dipper pointed to a little red button. Wendy pressed it. Nothing happened.
“Umm… I don’t know, that was supposed to… Wait, maybe hold the 3rd and 4th pedals in while you do!”
She tried that. “CHECK ENGINE SOON!” The small speaker repeated.
“Try the… Oh wait a minute, that wasn’t the startup. That was the emergency fuel dump… Never mind…”
The robots kept pounding, and the cracks were getting wider.
“YO BETTY AND BARNEY!” Wendy hollered. “I KNOW YOU’RE STILL HAUNTING THIS DUMP; COULD YOU GIVE US A HAND?”
“Try that one over there!” Dipper said. “Turn that dial all the way down, wait no, all the way up, and then hold that swich for 5… Uh… I guess seconds. 5 seconds!”
“CHECK ENGINE SOON!” The small speaker was getting indignant.
“Nothing’s happening!”
“Try one of those over there then!”
“I’M GONNA PRESS EVERY BUTTON I SEE!”
“CHECK ENGINE SOON!”

Barney sat and stared ahead.
It was beautiful.
As beautiful and expansive and welcoming as anything in history had ever aspired to be. A dream of a painting of a child’s naive imagining of an antiquated fable of a green and glowing paradise. A place where things were right, and powerful, and good. It was that life all people long for, that grandest adventure of surpassing purity and courage and meaning…
It was a place inhabited by a purified people, hailing from all nations and peoples and planets in the multiverse… It was a place of peace and goodness, designed and maintained by none other than God himself.
He could see this shimmering vision whether he had his eyes opened or closed. It was before him, and all he had to do was step through. The regrets and sorrows and unfinished business of his past life had haunted him for so long, keeping him here in this ghostly half-sleep to haunt it back.
But moments ago Betty had turned to him. “Well.” She’d said. “There are people here who know the stakes… They’re good people, and they know what has to be done. They’ll bring this all to conclusion. Carry out the justice we couldn’t… But I think our journey is done.”
She’d pointed off into the distance, and showed him how their ghosts had always been so close to stepping into the beyond world. And she’d pointed even further through, and showed him a laughing little boy; a boy he somehow recognized instantly; a boy whose creation had been interrupted in the womb, and who had been stillborn in blood as a twisted wreckage. Never had Barney yet seen this completed product, and he was handsome indeed.
“It’s our son…” She’d said. “God knows what he should have been, and he fixed him… We… We need to go…”
He’d stood there staring, while the seconds stretched into minutes. He wanted to step through. “You go…” He’d told her instead. “I… I’ll follow in a little bit…”
“Oh… You sure?”
“Yeah… I’ll… Just be a minute…”
“…I love you.”
“I love you too.”
And then she’d stepped through. And now this haunted ship was haunted by only one.
And now, half an hour later, his incorporeal face was still bent in a slight frown. Why had he stayed behind? Did he really think so much of this stupid old life? Was it just a whim? Or was it something else…? Did he really have unfinished business left?
In fact, he did.
In the furthest corner of his perception, he heard a great sound; that of beasts beating on the hull of the ship. With such fury that they were beginning to chip and shatter the glass, unsealing it for the first time in millennia. He turned toward the chaos, and in the middle, he saw the humans, buckled into the flight seats, pounding on the controls in a confused and joyous rage, their souls afire in terror and wild anticipation.
The creatures would finish breaking through the hull in moments.
Barney snapped his fingers.

Some three dozen switches on Wendy’s console all spontaneously flipped at once, without anybody touching them. The lights in the cabin flicked over to a dull blue, and then a strange sound began to emanate from the ship’s walls: the sound off immense and powerful electrical humming, the rushing of superheated fuel through generators, the spinning of dynamos.
This was how a spaceship was supposed to sound.
Dipper’s inner ear made a tiny hiccup, as the anti-gravity engines automatically aligned themselves.
“Could it be…?” Wendy whispered to herself.
Hesitantly, but with great anticipation, her hands reached forward, and curled around the main control sticks. She closed her fingers around the grip, and her right wrist twitched.
The floor rocked beneath them, pitching in the same direction she’d twitched.
The robots up on the canopy stumbled slightly, confused.
“Legend.” Wendy glanced at Dipper.
“Legend.” He agreed.
“YES!” Wendy pulled the joysticks upwards. Both their inner ears tumbled completely out of whack, as energy surged through the ships engines and through its gravity drive nacelles. Their craft lifted off the ground, tilted its nose for the sky, and hovered higher. The lions (not natural jumpers) responded with a perfectly logical fear, and hooked their claws into the cracks in the hull for dear life.
Wendy twisted the joysticks left.
The horizon began to spin and flip, prompting the lions to grip all 4 of their claws into glass, while the ship itself nearly plummeted out of the sky.
Wendy twisted them right-side up and pulled up at the last second, and they found themselves cruising over the treetops, nose up.
She pushed both joysticks as far forward as they’d go.
The nacelles began to howl. All the robots that Dipper could see lost their grips, and fell off, plummeting down to whatever grizzly death the distant ground held for them.
Air, light, and even space itself, began to warp and disturb itself around the gravity of the nacelles, as the vehicle pushed itself off the planet’s weight, and blasted upwards toward the clouds on a thundering pillar of raw, fundamental force. Wind whistled off the cracks in the glass, sunlight shone through the cockpit, and on the console, all of the good lights were blinking.
Had anybody been watching from the town, they just might have seen the tiny disk of dirty silver streak skyward, just might have heard its frame shaking as it approached the speed of sound. And maybe, just maybe, they could have heard the triumphant war whoops of the teenagers inside, rejoicing in this, their greatest of hard-won victories.

Barney smiled. Finally, at long last, he felt ready. He stepped through.

She gripped for all she was worth.
The ground was a memory at this point; somewhere up or down or left or right and she’d quite forgotten. All that was real, all that she could hold on to, all that kept her alive, was the dirty and smooth glass surface beneath her, and the jagged hole busted into it.
The claw of her foreleg remained hooked around some truss inside the hole, while her other searched for purchase among the various plants and clods of rock still resisting the wind. Her rear legs had found a seam in the hull, and there she’d kept them, barely daring to move, lest the slightest miscalculation free her to die.
She turned her attention to the hole her foreleg was hooked in. She extended her saws deeper into the gap, and began to cut into the machinery within, hoping to find a better grip, clear enough room to climb inside, or else anchor herself some other way. Anything was better than the horrid heights swirling about her…
With all the grit and savagery of a cornered wild dog, she dug and she pulled and she drilled, her entire killer heart filled to the brim with the single and dominating will to survive.
She would survive.
She would survive.

It was instinctive.