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.Tiny Little SHADO Figure	By : keithcompany Category: S through Z > UFO Views: 1539 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own UFO, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Tiny Little SHADO Figure
- 2-two
- 1
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Lieutenant Ellis decided that Commander Straker was easily the most infuriating man she'd ever met. It wasn't enough that he questioned her leadership, he had to use sports metaphors to do it.
And not even a decent sport like football. He used American football.
For some reason, the UFO incursions went down in certain months. SHADO took advantage of the lull to run system-wide training drills.
Her superior traveled to the moon to watch a complicated simulation of a mutli-directional threat. Ellis ran her team's response. They'd hit all the numbers and even set a few records on their response times.
And the judgmental bastard had turned to her, smiled and said, "Good quarterbacking, Gay. But I have to wonder if you have any bench.
"What if you get sacked? If there's no quarterback, who runs the offense?"
"The...half-back?" she guessed.
They'd taken a few minutes to make sure they were using the same playbook (more metaphor!).
Then, she'd protested. "My people are more than capable of rising to the occasion, sir."
"Well, it's your job to train them for that. So of course it's your job to maintain that." He'd smiled as if to take the sting out of his words.
"Look, Leiutenant, I'm not saying there's a flat on the play, just wondering if this team is really ready for the playoffs."
"Your colonies left the Empire just to invent your own language, didn't you?" she asked. He'd laughed and gone back to his quarters.
So here she was, sneaking out of her own base. A simulated incursion was scheduled, one that no one but she and Straker knew about.
And she was leaving her Control seat empty, for an excursion no one knew about.
She had arranged for maintenance on the cameras covering one arc of the perimeter. She slipped through it and over the ridge of the valley.
She paused for a while. There were a lot of backups to system security. Turning off the cameras didn't make Moon Base completely vulnerable on this angle, but it did pose a slight, temporary threat.
She readied her space rifle and sat down. She covered the little blind spot until she was sure surveillance would have been restored. Then she relaxed.
The moon's surface had a certain amount of beauty. She never spent long enough appreciating it.   Not since joining SHADO and coming to understand the risks hiding out there.
That took her mind to the aliens, and the usual speculation on why they always slacked off this time of year.
Some of the wags at base said it was their mating cycle. Others suggested religious reasons. The navigators maintained there had to be some sort of orbital body that moved into their flight line every year. Their planet went behind the sun or something.
"Every Earth year?" Straker asked whenever the arguments came up around him. "In the whole wide variety of space, their distant planet is eclipsed by their distant sun at the same time each Earth year? This serves for logic where you work?
"No, ladies and gentlemen. This is something they do on our calendar. It's a trap. One day we'll count on them not coming, let our guard down, and they'll have us.
"That's why we have the games this month. So everyone's at maximum readiness. And when you're prepared for one of Colonel Freeman's doomsday drill sets, a mere UFO invasion is the least of your concerns."
Gay saw something out of the corner of her eye. She used the scope on her grenade launcher to check it out.
Two UFOs were crossing the lunar plain towards Moon Base.
Ellis reached for her comm unit and prepared to break radio silence. Games went out the window when the war was on.
Her fingers curled around the spot on her suit that should have the comm. unit. That's when she recalled leaving the radio off. Its transponder function would have defeated the purpose of hiding.
Well, she thought, there were other ways to signal the base. She readied her weapon and sighted on the closest UFO. There wouldn't be time for two shots. She'd have to hope the base saw the first one and figured things out.
Well, they were competent people, right?
She fired. There was the usual pop at the barrel, then utter boredom. There was nothing much to see of the projectile's travel through the vacuum.
Then the UFO exploded.
There was something wrong, though. The color was off somehow. She'd seen dozens of UFOs destroyed. Mostly surveillance films, but a few by direct eyesight.
This was too big, too colorful. Too... A flaming portion arced across the stars. Headed for her. She rose and started to run. Her shadow flicked ahead of her as the fires burned and the debris tumbled.
The light winked out for a moment. Her feet felt a sudden vibration from the impact. She had just enough time to hope it augered in, then it came back, even brighter than before. She remembered jumping up into the air...
And woke up on her back, staring at stars.
She was alive. Suit integrity was green. She had a little oxygen left.   She'd been knocked out for quite a while. She sat up carefully, making sure each part of her body worked before trying to use it.
And she was in a crater. The moon dust had cushioned her fall. The dust was still falling in the Moon's negligible gravity. She didn't recognize the crater.
She glanced around, trying to find her bearings. There were no marks in the dust around her. She hadn't rolled to a stop, just flown straight down in to a landing. There was no way to tell which direction she'd come from.
Her transponder would point the way back to Moon Base...if she still had it. Well, maybe if she climbed to the ridge of the crater's edge, she could find a landmark. She couldn’t have been thrown that far by the explosion.
She took a swig of water from the nipple and started climbing. Her exertions increased her oxygen use, but there wasn't anything to do about that.
If they hadn't found her yet, they weren't going to.
The dust underfoot felt odd. She pulled off the outer pads of her gloves and scooped some dust up. It felt rougher than usual. She tossed it up over her head. It fell like normal, though.
She mentally shrugged and kept on. The top of the ridge approached slowly, so slowly.
That's when the ship came over the lip of the crater. A huge assembly, it seemed to hover over her. She was surprised to see a Vectors Aircraft emblematic on the breastplate of the spaceship. VA supplied parts for the SkyDiver fleet. Nothing that was orbital capable, much less lunar.
Then she was shocked to realize the reason she thought a ship had a breastplate was because it did. The entire vehicle was designed to resemble an astronaut. A giant astronaut.
"HEY!" she shouted..into her radioless helmet. Well, that's the good news. In space, no one hears you scream ineffectively.
She felt her belt for the electronic flare. The megawatt bulb lit up the immediate area in painfully bright light.
Whoever was piloting the vessel saw the light and halted its progress. She was amazed at the pilot's obvious control of the huge craft.
It had to be 70 feet tall, and even with electronic assistance, bringing it to an instant halt was almost a miracle.
Then she lost all respect as he made the thing kneel so it could hold what looked like the helmet over her head.
There had to be other cameras available to the pilot, using the tinted faceshield for all observations was taking the 'giant astronaut' theme a little far in her eyes.
She played along, though. She had no radio to signal with, so she put out the emergency light and held up her oxygen readout. Even 'giant' eyes would see how much red was showing on the dial.
The glove-looking hand crept over the lunar surface and slowly gathered her up. The vehicle stood, holding her before the visor.
"Take me to your airlock," she said. Then tapped the air gauge once more.
"Now that's lifelike," she heard. The sound vibrations were coming up from her shoes. As if he was speaking inside that great helmet, and the voice was carried mechanically through the two suits.
Internal speakers for an effect that would only work when an astronaut was in physical contact with their vessel? She thought that was a degree of verisimilitude that went beyond crazy.
"And who would pay for that much crazy, Lieutenant?" She would have sworn she heard Straker's voice in her head, poking holes in her careful logic.
Well, the only alternative was that this was a giant astronaut. Just as she had that thought, the unoccupied arm rose and lifted the tinted visor.
A comely giant face smiled down at her.
Later, she would blame the fainting on low oxygen levels. Tough and doughty space commanders don't faint because giants pick them up.
--------
She woke to a pounding. "Wake up! Open your suit!"
Her head hurt. The air was thick and humid, but her mouth was dry. And everything was blurry. God, how much oxygen did she have left?
"OPEN! YOUR! HELMET!" Whatever was screaming at her looked like a blur from hell. And he was hitting her head with a shovel or a wrecking ball.
"You're going to SUFFOCATE! In a standard Earth atmosphere! OPEN UP!"
"What?" she tried to ask, but gagged on her own tongue. If she could only breathe. Two breaths of fresh air, that's all she asked.
What was he yelling about? Helmet? Her helmet was fine. If it wasn't she'd be dead. Bright light shone, then went away. Oh, no, the shadow of his head went away, then came back. The giant head. She remembered the giant. She must be hallucinating.
Something poked at her chest. She looked to see some sort of probing tool in his giant hands. He was going to poke a hole in her spacesuit!
All the air would rush out and she'd die! She didn't really LIKE the air she had, but it was better than vacuum. She screamed, yelling at the illusionary giant to leave her suit alone.
But she couldn’t get a full breath and sound didn't carry far through the helmet.
So she opened it. "Don't poke a hole in my suit, I'll die!" she shouted very quickly.
Then she closed the helmet before all the air rushed out.
Wait...
"I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that?" the giant asked.
The air in her helmet smelled very nice. Dry, like the recycler put out at Moon Base. Cool, compared to the hot humid crap her suit was giving her. Hard to compare on two quick breaths, but probably about 68 degrees. Just like Moon Base.
Sure, there was a giant hallucination hovering overhead, but for a delusional creation of her oxygen starved brain, he was a good host.
Ellis cracked the faceshield open and sniffed. Yep. That was good air. She removed her helmet and tried to sit up.
"Easy," he said, pinning her to the deck with one finger. "You want to breathe fresh air for a while before you stand."
"Thanks," she panted between gulps. Her mental fog cleared as she breathed.
"Do you need water?" he asked. She shook her head no. The nipple was just below the neck seal. The canteen acted as a heat sink for the astronaut. The water was body temperature but that was fine. Cold would have probably hurt her.
She lay still for a bit longer, then rolled over to her side. He let her, keeping a hand nearby to help her.
She managed to stand on her own power, thank you very much. Although in Earth gravity, that probably wouldn't have happened.
The spacesuit was starting to make her feel claustrophobic. She broke the seals and slipped it off.
There was a whistle overhead. She turned to look up at the giant. She knew how she looked. The silver shorts with silvery bodysuit. Bare arms, bare legs ending in the silver boots.
And the duty treatment to her hair, making it a concave purple bob. Not what a giant alien would have expected from the Voyager plaque.
"Welcome to our Moon," she said.
"Your moon?" he repeated. "Lady, Earthlings have been coming to this moon for twenty years. It's orbiting our planet. It's ours!"
"I'm from Earth!" Ellis said.
"That's a cute accent," he said, "but you got a few other details wrong. Earthlings aren't six inches tall."
"YOUR team messed up," she said. "Your simulated human is off by a factor of twelve."
Her brain was running to catch up with the situation. He laughed at her and leaned back. She took a moment to look around. They were in a tiny compartment. Tiny with respect to the giant who nearly filled it, anyway.
There was a bunk and a table and some maintenance panels, all accessible from the one crash chair in the middle. He'd swiveled it over to the table she stood on.
He had an American accent, like Straker's but a bit more human. He was chuckling now. She'd only ever heard Straker laugh, and he only did that ironically.
His clothing did look like a civilian undersuit, and the tech looked human, and his features, hair, sideburns, all looked like what she'd expect if she saw all this through a camera.
Up close, though, the illusion was shattered by the scale problems.
"So, what do you think, you keep insisting you're human, I'll accept you as human?" he asked.
"You'll accept me as human," she said, "because I am."
"And you think I'm an alien construct because I'm so gigantic," he said. She nodded. But part of her brain was waking up.
The aliens she knew about were able to penetrate human society. They used Earthlings as organ donors. Their intel on Shado was greater than even the Fleet Street tabloids could manage.
If there were aliens that could do all this, would they miss 'scale' by such a wide margin?
But what else could he be? Humans just didn't grow to 72 feet tall.
He got a strange look on his face. "You thirsty?" he asked.
She nodded. She'd emptied her suit's canteen before stripping it off. He turned his chair and opened a fridge. There was a water bulb on the top rack. He put that on top of the fridge. Then he took a specimen jar off of a rack and opened it. She watched as he undid the straw and emptied the bulb into the jar.
He placed that beside her and watched carefully. She smiled. "I don't suppose you packed a sewing thimble?"
"No," he said. "On Earth we sometimes drink by cupping our hands."
"On Earth, I've gone through a survival course that had me sucking water out of a mouthful of sand," she said. "This is high tea." She leaned over the jar and reached down with her cupped hands.
The water depressed under her touch. She froze. The surface was cold and slick, and bent down. She plunged her hands down through. She felt the water grabbing her wrists like elastic bands.
"How's that surface tension," he asked. "Same as you remember from Earth?"
She turned up to stare at him. "I'm... I shrank!"
"Shrinking turns your hair purple?" he asked.
"Will you forget about the hair!" she snapped. "It's... It's our uniform." He raised one eyebrow. "The idea was, anyone got a glimpse of our transmissions, they'd think it was a cheap science fiction show, not a secret installation."
"A secret installation?" he asked. "What installation is that?"
"Oh, no," she said. She crossed her arms and started to pace. She felt his eyes upon her. "No, that's what 'secret' means."
"Well, if I don't know where it is, I can't take you back to it, now, can I?" he asked. "If you want to go back."
"Of course I want to go back. And I can tell you how to get there without revealing the secret base's secret purpose."
"So it's...?" he asked.
"Well, where are we?" He nodded and turned the chair around to his control console. "Map grid point 83X."
"I don't know what that means," she said. He spun back smoothly and scooped her up. The world spun and then she was on his keyboard, watching a cursor jiggle around a map.
"We're parked here, I found you...here." She recognized the crater he was parked in. She was very far from Moon Base. But that would make sense if the explosion had caused her shrinking. Pop her up in the air, then take away mass, the resulting acceleration would be pretty impressive.
And in the Moon's gravity...
"Okay, we need to go back to where you found me and about ten miles Lunar Northwest."
"Hmm," was his only reaction. She turned to look. He was staring at the screen.
"Well?"
"Well, there's a problem. That's a restricted area."
"I know," she said. "Secret installation?"
"But if I go in there, they'll know I'm up here." He turned off the map display, moved her to the table and sat back.
"I already know you're up here." She remembered her surprise in the crater. "Why are you up here? Vectors Aircraft doesn't do anything outside of the stratosphere."
"Not officially," he admitted. "But Vector Air just decided to join in the space intelligence defense game."
He waved to indicate the vessel. "I snuck this ship to the moon and no one noticed. If I can get it back home again, we can show some pictures I took, some samples, to the military. That'll prove that VA can compete at the big boy's table."
"Okay," she said with a nod. "But you'll have to call it off. Just take me to Moon Base. Trust me, the fact that you got this far will impress Stra- My boss."
He stared at her, drumming his fingers on the table. It was like being on the Tube platform when a train went by, one with square wheels. She bore through it easily enough, pushing herself up in the air on her toes, drifting slowly down in the slight gravity.
"Okay, little purple haired not-alien," he finally said, "what I'd LIKE to do is take you a day's walk away from your base, give you three days worth of air, and let you go. I'll be on the way back before you can call an alarm.
"But I can't recharge your air systems. Nothing to couple them to. And Mr. Vector made it really clear, I shouldn't make any contact with the military. No matter what we say later, all they'll see is that we couldn’t complete the mission and bailed.
"So, I guess you're going to have to go back to Earth with me."
She stared. "But, but... Vector Air's boss really is named Vector? I thought it was a trigonometry term!" She shook her head. "Say, what's your name?"
"Call me Thomas," he said. "Vector has given me a rank that equals a Lieutenant Commander. So, you call me Commander Thomas. Why are you smiling?"
"It's nothing," she said, covering a grin with her hand. He leaned down close. "Well, if you're ranked with Lt. CDR, you're also a Major, right?"
"Crap," he muttered.
"So, here I am, the Control Room supervisor for Moon Base, shrunk down close to the ground!"
"I think you're still a little oxygen-starved," he said. "Don't say it."
"Grounded Control To Major Thom!" she shouted. Then she sank to the table, laughing. He reached for the oxygen and placed the facemask over her entire body.
"That's it, let the sparkles die down just a bit." One tiny, bare arm extended out from under the rubber cup. She pounded her fist in glee. He cranked up the feed.
-------
After a while, the cobwebs faded and she tried to convince him to cooperate with her plan.
"I'm the base commander. Last I saw, it was under attack. I need to get back there!"
"If it was under attack," he said, "do you really want to go towards a war zone?"
"It's my duty."
"Noble," he said, though his tone was sarcastic. "With no radio, though, you won't be able to contribute anything until you get inside. Which may require walking through a battle zone."
"I doubt it, my people are very good at repelling invasions."
"Then they don't need you. And, sorry to say, they probably think you're dead."
"Pfft," she shrugged. "That's a weekly occurrence. We even have a form for Personnel. The Back From The Dead Notification and Payroll Adjustment Form, SAF-0333." She stepped closer to Thomas.
"Please? It's my responsibility! If you hadn't taken me aboard..." She realized exactly where she'd be if he hadn't come along.
"Yeah," he said, seeing the realization on her face. "You'd be dead. So, really, any time spent aboard the Starbuck is charged to overhead."
He spun the chair around again. "So. Make yourself comfortable, I have to go take some pictures." There was a closet at the end of the bench. Thomas cracked it open to reveal a space suit. "My last trip out was interrupted to rescue a damsel in distress."
"I'm no damsel!" she shouted. "I've killed..." She swallowed back the sensitive 'alien' word.
"Yeah, yeah, you're probably saved Earth from a dozen mutant gerbils." He snapped his helmet in place. "You've got water, and there's an energy bar on the end of the table." He lowered the visor. Then he mouthed, 'maintain radio silence.' And closed the airlock door behind him.
She glanced at the water, the food. And then planned her route to the comms console.
-------
Thomas pumped the air down to the minimum, as close to vacuum as machines could achieve. Then he counted to twenty. And flooded the air back in.
The door stuck a bit as he opened it. He was surprised that he didn't catch his little... What was her name? Anyway, she wasn't on the control console.
It wouldn't have mattered. Mr. Vector himself had disabled the radio systems. He'd have to rebuild it before reentry. He wasn't sure if she was smart enough to figure that out, though.
"Ha," he said, opening the visor. "I'd have been sure you'd be... Where are you?"
The food was untouched and the water seemed undisturbed. He bent to looked at the limited floor space. No tiny aliens there. The console was clear. He sat in the chair and spun around a few times.
"Weren't you going out!?" she snapped. He followed the shrill tones. Just over the ship's windshield was a cable-run. Caught in the snake's nest of wires were two tiny, twitching legs.
"What are you doing there?" he asked. He leaned up to gently close his fingers over the thighs. Muscles flowed under his touch. He didn't try to pull her free, just held her so she had leverage to untangle herself.
When she was clear, he lowered her down to the console. "So how'd you get up there?" he said. "Unfamiliar with the Moon's low gravity?"
"I'm VERY familiar with the local gravity," she snapped. "I don't know what happened."
"Gulliver?" he said softly. "Is that you?"
"What?"
"One of my physics professors in college...she maintained that if Lilliputians existed, human musculature on a mouse's mass, they'd be so overmuscled they'd rip themselves apart."
She stared up at him. "And...?"
"Well. If you've been on the moon for a while, but this was the first time you really tried to jump in this gravity, and you shot into the overhead like a silly purple-haired gooney bird-"
"Will you forget the damned hair!?!"
"It, uh... It seems to confirm your story. That you actually shrank." They stared at each other for a moment, mouths hanging open.
"Well!" he said suddenly. "Those pictures aren't going to take themselves." He stepped into the airlock. "You've got water, food, and cable runs to play in!"
She flipped two fingers at him as he lowered his visor. He laughed.
----
After a day of waiting around, she tried to explain the danger. She was skirting the edge of classified information, and probably crossing that line... But there was a threat.
And she was bored out of her skull.
"Look, Tom, you can't sneak off the Moon. Not right now," she said.
Thomas was paging through pics he'd uploaded, views of various lunar mining ships, exploring vessels, and one shot of a SHADO module. All taken without anyone knowing he was in the area.
He looked down at his guest. "I snuck onto the moon," he said.
"But there's been...an event. Something happened. An attack. People are... The military is going to be on heightened alert. They'll catch you."
"And we'll pay all the fines," he said. "Mr. Vector will probably be glad to do so. It'll show how far I got on a civilian budget. Imagine what we could do with a government one."
"No!" She stamped her foot, then drifted up off the table. He smothered a giggle at how unimpressive her snit was. "I mean, Thomas, they will assume you're... the enemy. They'll shoot us, rather than hail us."
"That's unfriendly," he said, but he didn't seem worried. "Look, we've got pretty impressive radar shielding. My only concern for getting off the moon is our take-off rocket."
He called up a set of graphics and tapped his keyboard. She leaned over and kangaroo-hopped the length of the table, then over to his console. He raised one hand as a barricade to stop her, absorbing her velocity easily.
Then he tapped the screen. "There's a big asteroid that's going to hit the Moon later today."
"BL 3347," she said with a nod. "We've been tracking it for a while."
"Well, what you don't know is that my company put some rockets on it a while back. Long before anyone would have been monitoring it. So I know exactly when and where it'll hit."
"So do we," she said. And that explained the shift in its trajectory. They'd been monitoring for longer than Vector Air knew.
They'd searched for a UFO to explain the change but had found nothing. VA was looking pretty impressive after all.
"Yes, and the angle it'll hit will spray ejecta right over my launch trajectory."
"That's suicide!"
"Nope. We're well shielded against that. But if anyone detects the energy of the rocket, or this ship, in all that crap, they're not going to be thinking to themselves: Hey! I think someone was perfectly positioned to take advantage of the natural cover!"
He sat back, looking more than a little smug. She looked from the display to his smiling face and offered a half-smile of her own. "Okay. In theory. It may work. So even if the military doesn't shoot us down, you're going to fly INTO an asteroid ricochet. That makes me feel SO much better."
Thomas laughed. Then he chivied her back to the table. He hit a button and the chair folded down into the deck. He opened a hatch on the deck and took out a plastic bag with a collar.
"Now, if you don't mind, I am going to take advantage of gravity for the last time."
"You're taking a shower!"
"Yep. You... You can watch, if you want." The plastic was clear.
He stripped and stuffed his suit into a laundry slot. Then he climbed into the plastic bag and closed the collar around his throat.
That sealed the 'shower' so water wouldn't splash everywhere. In zero gravity, it would also keep water drops from floating around behind equipment and into their lungs.
She told herself she was just starved for entertainment as she watched the giant go about his toilet. Water sprayed from the hose inside the bag as he got himself wet.   Then he covered the body with soap from a dispenser on the back of the spray nozzle. Then he rinsed and finally turned on the fans to blow hot air over him.
All water was blown down to the drain suction, and the moist air was dried in a desiccant drum. His large, firm hands stroked over the surface of his body, pushing the water ever closer to the drains.
He methodically covered every inch. She could testify about that. Mostly. He tended to keep his back to her, but the limitations of the hose length and the location of the trains forced him to sometimes face her fully.
She made sure to applaud every time he did. There was no point in pretending she wasn't watching. It's not like she had anything else to do, or someplace to go.
"Like the view?" he asked, standing still and letting the fans take up the last little bit of moisture.
"Well, I'm absolutely sure you're human," she said cheerfully. "No alien could match that mix of modesty and boasting."
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.Tiny Little SHADO Figure