by Elle Simpson
The coughing stopped. I started. “Kal—”
But Kal interrupted. “How do you know my name?”
“Oh my god! How much does that not matter right now?”
“Is that a rhetorical question or…?”
“Oh my god!” I reached up and flicked Kal hard on the forehead.
“Jeez!” he yelped. “What was that for?”
“Because I need to know if it’s you in there. Like, non-creepy, non-alien-mind-bended you. Just you. Is it you?”
Kal blinked a few times more – in both directions. “Yeah, I think so.”
“Oh my god, I’m going to need something a little more definite than think, you absolute bumwipe!”
Kal went still a second, big silver eyes tracking as if he was thinking, remembering maybe. “I was under Affliction Class compulsion,” he said slowly. Then, with more certainty, “Baakatarin ordered me to kill you, but you disengaged the control strip, and I pushed aside the residual compulsion – it’s me.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” Kal looked me right in the eye, all silvery and sincere. “Hannah, I’m sure.”
“Okay,” I said, flopping back with relief. “Okay, whew. You were too pretty to be an evil alien mind slave. I’m glad you’re not anymore.”
(Once again, for the record, I’d just had a near death experience.)
But on the subject of evil aliens, and specifically on the subject my rebooting brain had just suddenly chosen to remind me of: “Oh my god, that’s why I’m here! Creepy Bob – we have to stop her, Cheekbones! She’s trying to take over the world with High Compulsion and this creepy terraforming blood clot of a ship.”
Kal’s freckles went for a ride along with his eyebrows. “Creepy…Bob?”
“B’oab Baaka-whatever. Her? We’re calling her Creepy Bob now. Run with it. Or, like, stagger maybe? While holding me up, please?”
Kal held out a gloved hand and hauled me to my feet. “C’mon. You can explain, but we need a more defensible position first.”
“You sound like a man with an intergalactic plan,” I said faintly, wondering how dizzy counted as too much dizzy, because I was hella dizzy right then. “An alien with an aim. An extraterrestrial with a…a…”
“Expedient?” Kal offered.
“Yup. That’ll do, Mr Alien Zombie Jesus Supermodel Supersoldier Thesaurus.”
“Uh…?”
I ignored the baffled look on Kal’s face, took a few staggering steps – then almost pulled the patented Schwarzy face-first flop.
But Kal caught me by the arm, easy as anything. “Whoa, there.”
“Sorry, still feeling a little light-headed. That was…like…” I gestured to the wall, to the floor. “A whole lot of strangling going on.”
“I know,” Kal said, “and I’m sorry for that, but we gotta keep moving. You good to move?”
“In theory. We could totally try in practice too as long as you’re still holding me up.”
“Can do.” Kal used his grip on my arm to propel me out the door.
But I startled to a stop as soon as we got there. My booting-up brain had discovered another pretty important file in the recycle bin. “Oh god, wait – I have a plan too.”
“Does that plan involve standing out here in full view of anyone using this access corridor?”
“No?” I said.
“Okay, cool,” Kal said, and hauled me into the shadows of some big, slimy support strut. “The plan?”
I fumbled up the back of my hoodie and womanfully restrained from the “Voila!” as I whipped the crystal out and brandished it triumphantly.
(Gotta say, I’m pretty glad I did restrain myself, because there was a sum total of absolutely nothing in my hand.)
“Uh…” Kal said.
“No wait, it’s cloaked. How do you uncloak it? Please tell me you know how to uncloak it.”
Kal reached out and in the same second the crystal rippled into view. He pressed it to his chest, where the slatted straps clamped to his flight-suit. “C’mon, we gotta keep moving.”
Off we went at a pace I never reach unless Buckford Academy’s Girls 1st XI are down at least five goals in the fourth. Pretty good thing that my legs were cooperating again. Lungs though? Not so much.
“The crystal’s got – this compound in it,” I said, gasping for breath, “that – sedates the Akanarin and – wipes out their compulsions.” I stopped to suck in some vital oxygen. “But it needs to be plugged into the environmental controls. Please tell me you know how to do that, because I’ve forgotten basically everything Colin told me.”
“Yeah, I know how,” Kal said. “Pretty easy to do, actually – if we can get to Engineering.”
“Big if?”
“Kinda medium sized if, maybe?” Kal took another quick glance down at the crystal. “This is really sophisticated tech. Where did you say you got it?”
“From Colin,” I said. “Creepy Bob’s holding him prisoner right now. He’s…uh…” How, exactly, did you explain a Colin? “He’s, like, an outer space ethnographer? Got this giant cockroach-scorpion hybrid-type thing going on. I can’t say his name. His proper name, I mean. It’s all clicks and stuff. So I just call him Colin.”
That didn’t seem to matter, though. Kal bit down a sigh, but not hard enough that I couldn’t hear the annoyance in it.
“Wait, do you know Colin?”
“Yup.”
“But why do you know Colin?”
“Not really relevant right now,” Kal replied tersely.
“Will it eventually be relevant?”
Kal's mouth was a grim line. “Oh, yeah.”
37
We skedaddled along the terraformer’s weirdly deserted corridors. Kal kept scooting us down little side channels and through slimy bulkhead doors, so I guessed he knew where to avoid, and we did manage to totally not get killed – which I very much appreciated.
When we finally stopped skedaddling though, it was in some random dead-end. Nothing much going for it really. Dim lights. Slimy, sticky walls.
“I’m guessing this isn’t Engineering?”
“Nope,” Kal said, busy doing something to the wall that made it squelch in a way I really didn’t want to think too hard about.
“So how far away are we from where we need to be then?”
Kal pointed to the ceiling. “Fifty levels. Straight up.”
“Fifty levels?” I echoed faintly. “Wow, that’s just…more heights. Great. Thank you, universe.” And then I kept talking because at least our voices covered up a little of the squelching. “What are you doing?”
“Checking in,” Kal said, tapping his fingers against the wall, leaving little indents in the squishiness that faded away just as quickly. “Letting Baakatarin know you’re dead. And hacking the surveillance sensors so she thinks I’m busy running a security sweep.”
“She’s so going to twig something’s up.”
“Eventually, yeah,” Kal agreed. “But this will buy us some time. She’s gonna need me up on the bridge soon, but if we can get to Engineering first…”
“We can unleash the paella apocalypse,” I finished, catching on. “But Creepy Bob won’t be in Engineering, though? I mean, I’m hoping? Wishing. Praying – like, if praying was actually a thing I did.”
“Nah,” Kal said, attention still to the icky, squishy, ‘squelchy in ways a wall should never be squelchy’ wall. “Baakatarin’s gonna be busy right now powering up the biomatter regenerator. That’ll take her, maybe, half a human hour? And those controls are hardwired to the bridge. They’re too important. Too powerful.”
I didn’t like the sound of any of that, but I especially didn’t like the sound of, “The biomatter what now?”
“Biomatter regenerator,” Kal said, offhand. “It uses forcibly decayed organic matter as a fuel stuff to power the terraforming process.”
“Forcibly decayed…” I stopped. Thought about it. Didn’t much like any of the thoughts I’d thought. Bu
t asked, anyway, “What kind of organic matter are we talking about, specifically?”
Kal glanced over his shoulder at me. Both sets of eyelids blinked. “Uh…”
I took a really careful breath. “Is Creepy Bob going to put all of humanity into some kind of freakjob cannibalistic compost bin and then use us as biofuel to terraform our own planet?”
“I mean, technically no one’s eating anybody, so it’s not really…” Kal trailed off, and I’ve got to assume that had something to do with the look on my face.
(It did. And given that Kal’s faced down the rabid horde of Andexia Majoris, survived a fall from the top of the Grasofin Hyperfalls, and taken down ten Ondrongian in a bar fight with a broken arm and a hangover ‘from the depths of Pilori Prime,’ I’m going to choose to take that as a compliment.)
“Oh god,” I said faintly. “I’m pretty sure I get why Col left this part out, because I would’ve freaked out hardcore.”
“You’re freaking out hardcore right now.”
“True,” I said, because it was. “Like, that’s a totally smartarse answer, but yeah – true.”
Kal left me to my freak out and turned back to the wall. He held up his left hand, which was gloved until it wasn’t, and his palm, completely silver, one huge freckle, glowed a little, dimming then brightening with the light of his pulse.
He pressed his hand flat to the wall.
“What are you—”
Kal shushed me. “Hold up. I need to concentrate.”
For, like, a second apparently, because that was all the time it took for a hatch to appear on the wall out of nothing and nowhere.
“C’mon,” Kal said. “This way.”
I followed him and clambered through to the little platform on the other side. Took in the view. Then double-shot double-taked like I never had before.
Because the view—
“Oh my god.”
—was a huge, empty tunnel, this shaft stretching out below us and above us for what seemed like miles. God, I couldn’t even see where it started, let alone where it finished.
And standing there, staring up at the shaft’s massive hollow support struts, all of them white as bleached bone – it was weirdly, creepily like being stood inside of…some kind of…some kind of…
“Backbone,” I murmured. And then a thought that I never ever needed to strike – struck. “Oh my god, wait. Is this ship alive?”
“Used to be,” Kal said.
I blinked, possibly hard enough to strain something. “Are you telling me that we’re currently standing inside a space corpse spaceship?”
No answer from Kal. Just a noncommittal grimace.
“Oh god,” I whined. “Why is that a thing? Why does that have to be a thing? Why of all the things that are things does that have to be a thing?”
Kal squished the hatch shut behind us. Then he pointed up. “C’mon. We gotta get moving.”
“Uh…then point of pretty important order?”
“Yeah?”
I pointed to the point of pretty important order: slimy space corpse walls. “Hate to break it to you, my pretty alien friend, but there is no ladder. There are no hand holds. We will try to climb up the inside of this space corpse spaceship, and we will fail, plummet to our all but certain death, and Earth and everyone on her will die in a spaceship space corpse compost bin.”
Then I had to stop to breathe, because breathing was a thing I’d neglected for a while.
“Well? Thoughts? Opinions? Suggestions?”
“Eh,” Kal said, shrugging.
“Eh? Eh! What is there about this situation that could possibly be described as eh?”
“Because we can get up there no problem.” Kal’s gloves flicked out of existence again, both of them this time. He held out his silvery, glowy hand. “C’mon. Climb on my back.”
“Excuse you what now?”
“Climb on my back. Arms around my neck. Legs around my waist.”
“Uh…” There was some pretty inopportune thrum of the yearning kind happening, not gonna lie. “Climb on your…why do I need to…” I looked up the backbone again, traced the route in my head, did some mental gymnastics, and ended up with the only possible conclusion. “Oh my god, can you fly?”
Kal snorted. “Of course I can’t fly.”
“Oh no!” I threw up my hands. “Of course not! Silly me! Come back from the dead, yeah! Live without a head? No problem. But fly? Completely out of the question. Why would the stupid human ask such a stupid question?”
Kal raised an eyebrow at me, put his hand to the wall, then his other hand and then—
In less than a second he was ten metres above my head, looking down at me expectantly, sticking to the wall with just his fingertips like a ridiculously attractive space gecko.
“I retract the previous rant,” I said. “Yes, I will totally, absolutely cling to your back like a startled koala.”
Kal dropped down to the platform as easily as stepping off the bottom step. “C’mon, then. We don’t have much time.”
38
When Kal zipped to a stop somewhere further up the backbone tunnel, it was as suddenly as he’d started. He pressed his palm flat to the wall, and in the darkness, I could see the pulse of light leak out all around.
(Incidentally, really helped to highlight the lovely reddish tinge of the space corpse spaceship’s rotting innards.)
“This is it?” I asked. “Engineering?”
Kal nodded.
“Where’s the hatch?” Because there were definitely no hatches making themselves known.
“There isn’t one. Security measure.”
“Then how do we…”
My answer?
“Yeah,” I whispered, “great idea. Hang above the gaping chasm of space corpse death with me clinging to your back, and do it with just the pretty silver fingertips of one pretty silver hand.”
“I need a hand free,” Kal explained, reaching for his barcode scanner, “to cut us an access route.”
Then some lazar-beam hatch burning took place.
(And that’s all the description you’re getting, because honestly? Even just thinking about that moment is still enough to make me want to puke.)
“I have never smelled anything worse in my entire life,” I whispered, “and I have smelled Mum’s attempt at making liver and onion.”
Kal holstered his barcode scanner, then eased out the rotting flesh of our new access hatch. He let it drop down into the darkness below. And I spent the next ten or so seconds mostly trying hard to avoid thinking about why I never heard an answering squelch when it hit the bottom.
“Ready?” Kal asked.
“Not even slightly, but when’s that ever stopped me?”
“I’m guessing never,” Kal muttered.
(And he guessed right, as my GCSE results will no doubt testify.)
Kal crawled through with me still clinging to his back. But the second we were clear of the liver and onion hatch, I toppled to the floor as covertly and gracefully as possible.
(So for ‘covertly and gracefully’ read ‘like a drunk wombat.’)
Kal had brought us through the wall behind a slimy console, a big semi-circle about waist high. Pretty effective for hiding behind anyway, so I could grudgingly admit that maybe our resident supermodel supersoldier did actually know what he was doing. And what he was doing right at that moment was peeping over the top of the console.
I joined the peeping – and then I totally understood why the corridors of Creepy Bob’s ship were so empty.
“Oh my god.”
Because if there were two hundred Akanarin on board, one hundred and ninety-nine of them had to be in Engineering.
Kal pointed to the far wall, past the bumtonne of Akanarin. “We gotta be over there.”
“And yet,” I whispered back, “we are over here.”
Kal checked some setting on his barcode scanner. “I’ve got just enough juice to take ’em all down.”
“Take the
m all down before Creepy Bob realises what we’re up to and, like, throws us out an open airlock? Because I get that’s not a problem for you, but it would be a pretty major problem for me in that I would actually and totally die.”
Some grimacing happened and not just on my face. “I guess there could potentially be some airlock action involved,” Kal admitted.
“Okay, alternative plan that doesn’t one hundred percent involve me dying? Col told me that I could just ‘walk among them with seeming purpose’ and they’d ignore me.” I gestured to the compelled Akanarin. “So maybe we could just try walking with some seeming purpose first and see how that works out. I mean, what have we got to lose?”
“Basically everything?” Kal said. “Primarily, our lives? Specifically yours?”
“Valid points,” I allowed. “Annoyingly valid, actually.”
“But I guess we don’t have a choice.” Kal reached down to fondle his barcode scanner again. “If any of them even so much as twitch…”
“Then you can totally shoot some people, all right? As long as your barcode scanner is still set to stun.”
“It’s a pulse pistol,” Kal muttered. “And it’s always set to stun.”
“Okay. Time to be stupid and or brave then. Delete as applicable.” I took a steadying breath and stood up slowly, filling my purpose with as much seeming as possible.
If this didn’t work…
I stood there, half-hidden by the console, for one long second. Then I lady’d up and took a step out into the room.
And Colin was right. Not a single scrambled-egg lizard eye turned my way.
I took another breath, much shakier than the last. “C’mon,” I whispered to Kal out of the corner of my mouth. “Time to shift your pretty bum.”
We made our way with some hella seeming purpose through the crowd of non-zombie alien zombies. A vague, confused half-glance passed over us every few seconds, but those glances never seemed to register or stick. My alien non-zombie buddies were all too busy with whatever compelled evil nonsense Creepy Bob had them up to.
“Here,” Kal whispered, tugging at my sleeve. “This is the access point.”
