And there, tucked under one arm and attached to a set of industrial-looking bellows, was the source of the unholy racket.
“Fonking space bagpipes,” Cal managed to eject, and then his body gave up, his brain shut down, and his face plopped forward into the sand.
Eighteen
“Uh, hey,” said Cal, shuffling onto the bridge.
He had woken to find himself on the bed in the room they had designated as the medical bay. Or, as Mech had taken to calling it, ‘Cal’s other room.’
His injuries had healed up. His aches and pains were no more. Someone, to their credit, had taken what was left of the spacesuit off him, and presumably hosed his lower half down. He didn’t think he wanted to know who had ended up with that job, but hoped it was a random stranger who just happened to stop by, and who had now left forever.
Loren turned in her chair and stood before it had finished its rotation. She took a step towards him, then her eyes went to Mizette who was slouched in her own chair, and she stopped.
On screen, space cruised by at a steady sub-warp clip, inching distant stars across the darkness.
“You OK?” Loren asked.
Cal scratched his head. After stumbling from the medical bay, he’d taken the time to shower and get changed, but the clinical, bleach-like scent of the Zertex-brand body wash had done nothing to erase the smell of the worm, or the taste of the Library planet’s atmosphere from his memory.
“Uh, yeah. I’m fine,” he said. “Thanks for asking.”
He nodded.
She nodded back.
After a pause, he nodded again.
Loren sat down.
Cal got the impression that everyone else had been watching this closely, and so he hurried to fill the awkward silence that followed. “What about Splurt and the Sentience? Did you pick them up?”
“Mech did,” Loren confirmed.
“And the book?” asked Cal. “Did you get the book?”
Mech frowned. “What book?”
“Oh, you have got to be fonking kidding me!” Cal groaned. “You know what I went through to get—”
“You mean this book?” asked Mech, holding up the leather-bound volume.
Cal’s chest heaved with relief. “You are a mean person, Gluk Disselpoof. I hope you know that.”
He looked over at Miz, trying to do so as casually as possible.
“And how you doing, kiddo?” he asked, smiling a little too widely.
Miz tutted and shifted her weight. “Ugh, like you even care,” she muttered.
Cal blinked. “Huh? What’s that supposed to mean? Of course, I care. We all care.”
“I’m fine. OK?” Miz snapped, shifting huffily and crossing her arms. “Why wouldn’t I be fine?”
Cal met Loren’s gaze. She gave a little shake of her head, suggesting he not go there.
“How’s Tyrra?” he asked, taking Loren’s advice and changing the subject.
“Sleeping,” Miz said. “Or, like, catatonic or whatever. But she’s fine.”
“She’s fine,” Cal repeated. “You’re fine. We’re all fine. That’s good.”
“I’m fine, too, sir,” Kevin announced. “Not that anyone asked, but I thought I’d share it with you, anyway.”
Cal gave a half-hearted thumbs up to the ceiling. “Glad to hear it, Kevin.”
“Master Splurt seems less than fine, however,” Kevin continued. “In fact, I’d go so far as to say that he seems rather down, sir.”
“Yeah, I noticed,” said Cal. “Where is he?”
“Under your bed, sir,” Kevin said.
Cal sighed. “I’ll go talk to him in a minute. Let me know if he does anything weird. Or, weirder than usual.”
“Very good, sir.”
Cal stretched and cricked his neck a few times. “What happened to the librarian-worm?” he asked. He slapped himself on the forehead. “Wait. Shizz. Bookworm. That’s much better. What happened to the bookworm? Did you kill it? Did you bagpipe it to death?”
“No, we didn’t kill it. I just drove it back enough that I could grab you.”
Cal gave a satisfied nod. “Good. A library needs a librarian. Otherwise, it’d just be a room full of books, and where would we be then?”
“In a room full of books?” Loren guessed.
“Exactly,” said Cal. He felt there was probably a point he’d been trying to make, but it now eluded him.
With a shrug, he moved to sit in his chair, and almost sat on the Symmorium Sentience. It lay there, pulsing faintly, its surface lightly scuffed and faded.
“Shizz. Sorry, didn’t see you there,” he said, then he turned and whispered at Mech from the side of his mouth. “It’s in my seat. Why is it in my seat?”
“I don’t know. Just seemed like the obvious place to put it. You weren’t sitting there.”
“But I want to sit there now,” Cal said.
He flashed a smile at the Sentience, then glowered at Mech again. “Can I move it, do you think? Or would that be rude?”
“It looks pretty comfortable, man,” said Mech. “Maybe best not to disturb it.”
Cal couldn’t tell if Mech was messing with him. The Sentience had saved his life, though, so he supposed the least he could do in return was let it borrow his seat for a while.
A little while. It had better not get too used to it.
Cal gestured to the book in Mech’s hand. “You find anything out?”
“I learned a lot—a lot about the Sentience,” Mech said. “Like, way more than I cared to know. This thing is fonking detailed. There’s only one problem.”
“There’s a page missing,” said Cal.
“There’s a page missing,” Mech confirmed. “And it’s a page we need if we want to figure out where we need to take the Sentience.”
Cal leaned a hand on the arm of his chair. “Can’t we do anything? Isn’t there a way of, I don’t know, putting it back?”
Mech brightened. “Oh! You mean like a Repaginator?”
“Yes!” said Cal. “That sounds perfect. A Repaginator. Do we have one of those?”
“There ain’t no such thing, shizznod,” snapped Mech, dropping the act. “No, we can’t just magic a page back into the damn book.”
“What happened to it?” Loren asked. “Did you tear it out?”
Cal shook his head. “Not me. Manacle.”
“The ‘Enslaver of Worlds’ motherfonker?” said Mech. “I thought you blew him up?”
“That’s the guy, and I thought so, too, but it seems not,” Cal replied. “Seems he turned up recently and snatched the page. The Librarian didn’t notice until I pointed it out to her. She didn’t take it well.”
“Great, so… what does that mean?” Loren asked. “The EDI knows where the Sentience comes from? Is that a problem?”
Mech gave a metallic shrug. “Only in the sense that we don’t know where it comes from, which means we don’t know where to take it so it can get its mojo back.”
Cal sighed. Fonking Manacle. Fonking EDI. Fonking Earth. Much as he hated to say it, he actually preferred it when his home planet had been dead. When they’d been dead, he’d remembered them fondly, and had been able to ignore all the bad stuff the human race had done over its lifespan. He’d been able to gloss over all the violence, hatred, and brutality, and to remember a sort of idealized version of his species, instead.
That was right out the window now, though. Cal had always assumed that Zertex was the biggest shower of shizznods in the galaxy, but it turned out that Earth, when given half a chance, was even worse.
And what was more, he was responsible for it. Both hims. Both the actual him and the other him who’d grown up to be a mass-murdering military despot. They shared equal responsibility for the clusterfonk the galaxy had become.
Cal sagged into his seat, only remembering the Sentience was there when it buzzed vigorously against his butt-cheeks. He leaped up like a scalded cat, apologized profusely, then plodded to the back of the bridge and flopped
onto one of the guest chairs.
God, they were uncomfortable.
God, he wanted his own chair.
God, everything sucked.
He blew out his cheeks. “So, what now?” he asked. “Anyone have any ideas? Because I am all out.”
Mech opened his mouth.
“And even if I did have an idea,” Cal continued. “It’d be a bad idea. It would go wrong. It’d only make things worse.”
“Cal—” Loren began, but Cal waved a hand to silence her.
“We all know it, Loren. Think about it. Think about everything that’s happened,” Cal said. He gestured out into space. “Out there. The Greyx are dead. The Symmorium? Also dead. Dozens of other species, hundreds of other planets, all wiped out, because I tried to do the right thing. Because I tried to be… what? A hero?”
He snorted and looked away, unable to hold anyone’s gaze. The floodgates were opening now, he could feel it. All the thoughts and fears he’d harbored since they’d returned to this timeline and discovered the damage they’d caused now came bubbling to the surface.
“You guys? The you guys from this version of reality, I mean? I killed you all.”
“That wasn’t you,” Loren told him.
“But it was me, Loren. Don’t you get it? It was me. It could be me,” Cal said, standing again. “Everything that made up that me makes up this me. Only this me didn’t have another this me butting in and screwing up his life like this me did to that me.”
“Did anyone follow that?” Kevin wondered. “Because I’m afraid I got somewhat lost.”
“Forget it,” Cal sighed, sitting again and staring at the floor between his feet. “It’s just… It doesn’t matter. Forget it.”
A hush fell over the bridge. It was Miz who eventually broke it.
“Bullshizz.”
Cal looked up. “Huh?”
“All that. What you said. It’s, like, total bullshizz,” Miz scowled. “You didn’t kill us. You didn’t, you know, like wipe out the Greyx, or whatever. We’ve been with you the whole time, we’d totally have noticed. And, even if we hadn’t been, we’d know it. That wasn’t you. Like, it could never be you.”
Cal sat up. “Miz…”
“Look, just shut up, already,” Miz told him. She plucked at her fur self-consciously, avoiding everyone else’s gaze. “So, something happened to that other you that turned him into a psycho. Like, so what? Does it suck that he killed everyone? Totally. Do we blame you for it? Why the fonk would we? That guy, he wasn’t Cal. Not our Cal.”
Cal’s eyes stung. His lip wobbled. He dug his fingernails into his palms to distract himself.
“Our Cal has saved us all, like, so many times. Our Cal risks everything to help people who need help. The guy who came into the afterlife and fought what was basically, like, the Devil so he could bring me back? That was our Cal,” Miz told him. “That was you.”
Mech raised a hand. “Technically, I fought that guy,” he pointed out.
“Team effort,” Cal said. His throat was tight again, although this time not thanks to the lack of atmosphere.
Mech lowered his hand and conceded with a nod. “No, man,” he said. He rested a hand on the back of Miz’s chair. “Space Team effort.”
Cal groaned. A bubble of snot burst from one nostril. “Oh, Jesus. That was horrible,” he laughed. “That was… God, I’m actually embarrassed for you, you big, cheesy bamston.”
“So lame,” Miz agreed.
Loren had her eyes pointed at her feet. “That was so awkward I want to die,” she said, smirking.
Mech tutted. “Fonk y’all,” he said. But, for once, he didn’t sound like he meant it.
The door swished open. Splurt rolled unsteadily onto the bridge, found Cal, then oozed up onto his shoulder. Once he was balanced, he wobbled, just a little. Cal scratched him with a finger roughly where his chin should have been.
“Yeah, well I’m worried about you, too, buddy,” Cal told him, leaning his head against the little guy. A thought occurred, and he turned as best he could to see the little green blob. That close, it was hard to focus, and he found himself going cross-eyed from the effort, so he turned away and looked at him sideways, instead.
“Wait, is that what’s wrong? You’re worried about me? Is that why you’re acting all…” He gestured. “This?”
Splurt did nothing.
A blade, meticulously fashioned from pure, solid guilt, twisted in Cal’s stomach. “Now, you listen here, Splurt. I’m fine, OK? I am A-OK. I’m just working some things out. You’ve got nothing to worry about. OK?”
Splurt rippled faintly.
“Well, make sure you do try,” Cal told him.
He gave him a playful tap on what would have been his chin, if he had one, then he slapped his hands on his thighs and stood up. “OK, so sitting around here feeling sorry for ourselves isn’t getting us anywhere,” he announced.
“It was kinda just you who was doing that,” Mech pointed out.
“Let’s not get bogged down in semantics,” Cal said. He pointed to Mizette. “Miz, I love you. I want you to know that. Mech, you’re going to hate me for this, and I can’t believe I’m saying it, but I love you, too.”
His finger swung to Loren. The words dried up in his throat. “Loren, I… Uh, in fact, I love all you guys,” he said, turning away. “And bonus points to whoever cleaned me up after that unfortunate business with the bookworm and the, you know, the…”
He gestured vaguely to his lower half.
“…the unpleasantness.”
“That was—” Mech began, but Cal waved emphatically at him.
“Jesus, shut up, I don’t want to know! I’ll never be able to look them in the face. Just, whoever it was, know that I appreciate it,” he said. “And now, let us never speak of it again.”
He snapped his fingers. “Mech, make a list. There are some things we’re going to need.”
“For what?” Mech asked.
Cal looked confused. “Well, for the plan, of course.”
“I thought you said all your plans sucked?” Mech said.
“I did say that. And they do,” Cal conceded. He rubbed his hands together and grinned. “But isn’t that half the fun?”
Nineteen
Sunstation Kappa-Seven had originally been built as a vast science station in orbit around a dying star. The race who had built it—the No-nee—were a gentle, peace-loving lot, with an intense, all-consuming fascination for pretty much everything in existence.
The thirst for knowledge was there in every man, woman, child, and everything in between. Their driving motivation was to look at things closely, prod them, and make copious notes about the results. Those results would then be analyzed at length by other No-nees, then those findings would be broken down further by a third team, whose data would, in turn, be pored over by others.
And on and on it went.
After one-too-many prods of the wrong thing in the wrong place, and one-too-many subsequent explosions, implosions, and full-scale nuclear meltdowns, the No-nee had collectively come to the conclusion that it was only a matter of time before they wiped out all life on the planet, and so they began to look for alternative locations in which to conduct their experiments.
And so, the Sunstations were born.
Each station took decades to construct, with the manual labor hating No-nees bringing in contractors from all over the galaxy. Each station was built to resemble one of the eight great cities of Noge.
Horus, with its gleaming spires and high walkways.
Pauron, famed for its liquid-metal lake and interconnected podhomes.
Five of the other cities—Troron, Meshik, Muggluk, Doowan, and Bom—were each as spectacular as the other, each a glittering, shining testament to the creativity and intellect of the species who had designed them, admired from one end of the galaxy to the other.
And then, there was Kappa.
The city of Kappa was the capital of Kappanistan, one of Noge’s less aff
luent countries. The citizens of Kappa were just as curious and driven by the same scientific leanings as the rest of the No-nee. It’s just that they weren’t very good at it.
Kappa was a city of tryers, no one could doubt that. The problem was that try as they might, they didn’t actually achieve all that much. Or, not on purpose, anyway. They achieved quite a lot by accident—mostly things that turned their fully intact scientists into lots of little bits of scientists, all flying in different directions.
Kappa had never won any of Noge’s prestigious awards for science and discovery, although a few years before construction of the Sunstations began, they did successfully petition for the creation of an annual “Great Job!” award. This award, which took the form of a golden hand with a thumb extended, was intended to celebrate the city or institution that may not have made the greatest scientific discoveries, but who’d had the most fun trying. Because, they reasoned, it was the taking part that counted. And, while the councils of the other seven great cities vehemently disagreed, they went along with it to shut Kappa up.
None of the plans for the original Sunstations included Kappa, but thanks to persistence, doggedness, and a successful crowdfunding campaign, it was agreed that one station would be constructed in orbit around one of the less-interesting suns. But only a small one.
The then Mayor of Kappa, Froongo Mips, readily agreed to this, and sat down with some of the greatest minds in Kappa to design their station.
Three years and a lot of correction fluid later, with construction on the other stations well underway, they finally settled on a blueprint. It was not as grand as the other stations, nor as well-equipped. From a science perspective, it was the runt of the litter, and it wasn’t even a close-run thing.
What generations of No-nee Historial Sciences students would go on to report, however, was that at the insistence of Mayor Froongo Mips, the first Kappa station possessed two qualities that none of the other Sunstations had.
The order of importance in which each student ranks these qualities varies from study to study, but the qualities themselves are never in any doubt.
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