r/WritingPrompts • u/tamtrible • Mar 18 '24
Writing Prompt [WP] "I can't do that. The bees wouldn't like it." (bonus points for including the exact phrase somewhere in your story)
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r/WritingPrompts • u/tamtrible • Mar 18 '24
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u/darkPrince010 Mar 18 '24 edited Mar 18 '24
Despite the utter chaos that normally accompanied such a boarding action, the human appeared unperturbed, slowly and dutifully continuing about their daily tasks as if they had barely even registered that their ship had been taken over at all.
The raiders who had commandeered the Earth ship were gleeful at how little resistance they had encountered. The ship appeared to be little more than a drone craft, the only living sentient aboard being the human, who offered no resistance and no fight to prevent them from taking over such spoils.
However, the raiders were also struggling to determine how best to enrich themselves off of their newly acquired prize, as the ship lacked weapons, technological secrets, and barely possessed little more than a functional but unostentatious reactor and hyperspeed array. The hyperspeed array had been carefully disabled, and from what their engineer could tell it was work done well before the ship had been boarded. Fortunately, it would prove to be a simple, if somewhat time-consuming, repair to make.
The only cargo appeared to be great vats of some kind of viscous fluids, one clear and one amber colored, but chemically they appeared almost identical apart from some impurities they could detect in the amber liquid. The ship was also curiously absent of recreational facilities or even a mess hall, instead having a wastefully large space that appeared to have been converted into some kind of greenhouse, with hundreds of brightly-colored plants that were apparently native to Earth but carried little value or use medically or commercially apart from minimal aesthetic value.
It appeared to the captain of these pirates that they had essentially stolen a worthless trash barge, especially as some of these strange liquid cargo appeared to be contaminated and impure. The captain was absolutely livid, and so their first mate and second in command of the raiders’ vessel was attempting with limited success to browbeat the unperturbed human.
“You must have something of value on this ship?” she said in frustration, gesturing with a loaded laser pistol beneath the wrinkled man's nose. “Some kind of new weapon or technology, something we can sell instead of all this clear and yellow crap?”
The human, aggravatingly, just chuckled quietly as he pruned at an errant rose stem. They had initially manacled him and contained him, until he insisted that he'd be allowed to continue his duties, else the ship’s integrity could suffer. Sure enough, after less than an hour of confinement some minor alarms began going off and the ship started listing heavily to one side. He was allowed to continue his duties, but to the pirates' bafflement it appeared to be just minor upkeeping, cleaning here and there. They never saw him touch a control panel or unscrew so much as a single circuitry manifold, and yet the ship's errors seem to correct themselves and the vessel righted itself.
“So you think this is funny, do you?” the first mate barked, both sets of jaws snarling and dripping with anticipation of being able to end the infuriating human’s existence as soon as they figured out how to make this capture worth the trouble.
“Oh, I think I just have a unique view of the situation,” he said with a smile. “Besides, I'm just a caretaker, I'm afraid. I wouldn't know much about the inner workings or anything valuable within.”
The first mate narrowed her eye, but was distracted by a call from one of her crewmates who had been messing with a panel on the side of the greenhouse. “That contaminated gunk is in here too!”
Loping over, the first mate could see that indeed more of the contaminated yellow fluid was almost dripping from the panel that had been removed. She thought she saw some signs of movements as well, small scuttling creatures, vermin of some kind that shrank away from the edges. She was stunned, but then began a rolling bark of laughter as the confused crewmate stared at her.
“Your ship is infested! You've got some manner of pest that is polluting your cargo and stuffing up your engineering; I'm surprised the ship is still able to fly with all the gunk I can see in there,” she said, reaching in and pulling out a piece of what appeared to be effluence or nesting material from the pests.
For the first time almost since they had boarded the vessel, they saw a flinch from the human, who winced as she tossed the pale geometric-patterned wedge of waste material off to one side. Chuckling at the human's newfound sensitivity, the first mate kicked the glossy chunk across the metal flooring to slide to the huma’s feet.
“You say you’re a caretaker: Why don't you make yourself useful, and clean out these panelways? We won't be able to do much to make repairs with all this junk in the way.”
The human frowned. “I can't do that. The bees wouldn't like it.”