Jaq managed a scream half way up and the sound did little to ease away the way there seemed an attraction to every part of her body. So when she was drawn through a large hole and deposited somewhat roughly against the …
Not an idiot and just because something was unlikely, didn't make it impossible. Highly improbable, no doubt, but never impossible. And if there was metal under her knees where she knelt, boneless, then someone had put it there. She sucked in breath, coughing past the pain in her throat, then looked around her.
The room was cavernous. Large, storage tanks sat against walls and stacked upon one another, tethered with some manner of thickened rope. Not military issue then. It was silly to think “military” just because she'd been sucked into a room in the sky, but she wasn't ready for what else could be doing the same thing. At that point of time, the probability index got so large and open-ended that anything was possible and she wasn't ready to deal with time travel, aliens, or heaven being a warehouse like space with what had been a very direct beam of light as an elevator.
Her body wracked with another choking cough, almost fell and she planted her hands down, one hand coming down on her magnum. She hadn't lost it. She laughed, lost a bit, then reached for it. If nothing else, she could make some damage for whomever thought it was a good idea to nab her.
Fingers closing around the gun, suddenly the entire floor juddered underneath her and a force, very similar to thrust (who was she kidding? She'd been flying long enough to know thrust – only she hadn't flown jet planes and this was less like her old Cessna and a bit more like a F-13 press), threw her headlong, skittering down the floor. Everything inclined (ascent, then) and she scrabbled at the smooth flooring, losing the gun, and tumbling hard into one of the large crates. Her head hit the side of the container hard and she held tightly to the rope (smooth, thin, like silk almost) as the entire warehouse (c'mon, you can call it a ship) inclined and then put on an extra burst of speed.
There was a knock through the entire space, like atmospheric interference, and then the ride smoothed out. She knew, intellectually, that they had to be going fast or there would have been some deceleration forces to contend with but she'd never thought anything could be so fast without some interaction with the air.
Unless they weren't in air any more.
Her head hurt. And the air smelled funny. She coughed again, pulled herself to her feet, and wobbled across the floor just as a door opened opposite of her.
Frozen at the sight before her, her mind spinning to wonder where in hell her gun had flown, she stared at the... They were strange, alien. With a burst of panic, she turned and bolted back toward where she'd been thrown. She had to find her weapon.
It wasn't like she'd learn any time soon, but it seemed to her that she might have thought of the whole resistance is futile bollocks when she'd been pulled in by their tractor beam. Still, she had to try and she knew the foregone conclusion of something sharp pricking the back of her shoulder was going to take her down. They were fast, too. Faster than she was. She was concussed and couldn't breathe from all the panic and they – well, they were weird alien thingies with alien technology. When she hit the ground, her cheek bloomed into pain and she rolled to one side, pushed weakly at hands that grasped her arms, and then went dark.
Nothing of the panic and all of the pain in cheek and head and back were present when she woke, however. Jaq reached up to touch her forehead. She blinked and instead of the usual white of a hospital room, she saw muted colors and rounded corners. She frowned. “How bad?” she groaned out around the musty feeling of her mouth. How bad had the crash been?
”Good morning,” an unfamiliar voice with a strange accent intoned.
Turning her head toward the sound, she blinked and then rubbed her eyes. “Sorry, morning. My eyes are acting funny. What drugs you guys got me on?”
It didn't matter if she rubbed her eyes again or not. It was worth a try and she found it failed as miserably as the first time. A man sat there, undoubtedly a man. But he wasn't really a man. He looked like a Trekkie cos-player from her brother's geeky friends' facebook accounts. Only, there was something painfully different.
She'd been told they used color tints in movies to help the computer generated images work more smoothly with the real things around them, so that the eye saw movies from a distance, the colors not quite right. Maybe the tint, then, was wrong. This man looked decidedly orange and very much real, down to a slight twitch on his cheek under, was that scaling?
“My plane?” she grasped onto her first supposition that she'd been in a bad crash and fought to quell the sudden wash of bad memory from that awful dream. “Where's Papa Owen? How is my plane?” Her head hurt and she wasn't sure she could sit up, considering she was seeing things across the way.
