“Miz? You still there?”
Nothing.
Cal sat up, his body pulling free of the bog with a shlop. Sitting upright meant the top of his head protruded from the top of the fog. Through the thin uppermost layer of vapor, he saw the flag in one direction, and nothing whatsoever in any of the others.
“Mizette?” he whispered.
A hand grabbed him from behind and he screamed.
“Shh! It’s me!” Floora whispered. “Sorry, did I startle you?”
“What do you think? Yes, you fonking startled me!” Cal spat. “Jesus. Don’t do that.”
Floora clambered onto his back again. “Where did it go?”
“She.”
“Huh?”
“She, not it. Her name’s Mizette. And I don’t know.”
The host spoke, his tones rolling across the sector like the voice of God.
“Special challenge mode!” he said. “The Prey has seventy-four seconds to capture the flag. If successful, Reduk Topa may advance to Sector Three. If unsuccessful, the Eviscerator shall feast on his remains.”
“Seventy-four seconds. Who the fonk sets a timer for seventy-four seconds?” Cal muttered.
“The countdown starts…”
Cal searched around for any sign of movement, then eyed the flag. He tensed, getting ready to move as soon as the host gave the order.
“…when I blow my whistle.”
Cal started to move, then stopped. “Sorry. Sorry. False start,” he said, raising a hand to the camera. “I thought that was the cue to—”
A whistle blew. Cal jumped up in panic.
“Shizz, shizz, shizz!”
The flag was only ten feet away. There was no sign of Mizette.
Easy.
Way too easy.
He dived to the ground just as Miz launched herself out of the fog, claws and fangs bared.
Cal threw an arm out to save himself, only for it to sink into the ground all the way up to the shoulder.
Over on his left, he heard Miz splat down in what sounded to be an equally messy landing.
“Get up, get up,” Floora urged.
Extricating himself from the bog, Cal launched himself forward again. Miz had recovered even more quickly than he had, though. He dodged as she swiped at him, but her claws tore through his suit, slashing four bloody grooves across his ribcage.
“Fonk!”
He staggered. His foot found a soft, marshy area of the terrain, then the ground sucked him all the way down into its marshy depths.
Cal kicked and thrashed in the sudden darkness. The stink was all around him, testing his defenses, forcing its way in. He grasped for the surface, flailing wildly, his ribcage on fire.
And then, with a burp, he shot up out of the slime and landed heavily on a patch of more solid ground beside it.
Floora coughed and spluttered in his ear as he pushed down his nausea and sat up. The flag was tantalizingly close, but Mizette stood between it and him, her hackles rising, every single one of her teeth on display.
“OK, Miz. Sit,” Cal ordered, raising a finger admonishingly. He knew it was unlikely to work, but it was the best he could come up with at the moment. “Stay. Stay.”
Mizette’s claws extended from the tips of her fingers. Her snout creased as she lowered her center of gravity and prepared to pounce.
“Down! Stay! Sit!” Cal said, rattling off all the dog commands he could think of.
All of them except…
“Oh, shiz. I am so sorry,” he said, as one final idea flung itself to the forefront.
“Why are you apologizing to her?” Floora whimpered.
“I’m not,” said Cal. Reaching back, he caught the Floomfle by the arm. “I’m apologizing to you.”
He raised his voice to a shout.
“Miz? Fetch.”
With a flick of his wrist and a flicker of remorse, Cal tossed Floora as far and as fast as he could. She howled as she went sailing off through the air, arms, legs, and wings all flapping at different rates.
“You baaaaaamston!” she hollered.
Miz’s eyes flicked from Cal to the tumbling Floomfle. Her stomach rumbled, and some primal instinct forced her to spring after the moving target, silver threads of saliva dangling from her teeth.
Cal launched himself forward, kicking and scrambling through the fog and the filth.
His hand found the cool metal of the flagpole. A musical chime rang out, and the fog magically cleared as if it had simply been switched off.
The gate to Sector Three appeared just a few feet ahead of him. He could be through it in four seconds. Less if he ran.
Two down, two to go.
No longer hidden by the mist, Floora lay on her back, her hands raised in a pleading motion as Mizette advanced. The wolf-woman licked her lips, a low growl resonating in her chest, harmonizing with the noises her stomach was making.
“Please, no, don’t,” Floora whispered.
Mizette’s jaws opened to their full terrifying limit.
A whistle from behind her made her stop.
“Hey.”
Mizette turned, snarling.
“Down, doggy,” said Cal, then he swung with the flagpole, cracking Miz across the head with the weighted metal end.
Her head turned, but she didn’t fall. It took her just a second to compose herself, her hackles rising again as she fixed him with a furious glare.
Cal swallowed. “OK, so that didn’t go anything like how I imagined it would.”
He barely had time to bring the pole up between them before Miz pounced. He jammed it across her chest, the red square of the flag fluttering and flapping violently. A corner of it whipped her in the face, and she tore the fabric to ribbons with her claws, before wrenching the pole from Cal’s grip and tossing it aside.
A red cross appeared above her head. “The flag was captured. The Eviscerator has been defeated,” announced the host.
A circle of yellow light appeared beneath Miz’s feet. She barely had time to glance down at it before it opened, pulling her down into the ground below.
She roared with fury, but it was quickly silenced as she plunged out of sight and the glowing circle became just another patch of uneven boggy ground.
“Reduk Topa is victorious,” said the host. “Can he survive Sector Three? Find out, after this word from our sponsor.”
“Don’t you just hate junkrats and pirates?” asked an upbeat female voice. “Doesn’t it drive you crazy when they take your cargo, wreck your property—even murder your families?”
Cal held a hand out to Floora. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
“Get off me,” Floora snapped, slapping his hand away. “I could’ve died!”
“No, you couldn’t. I had it all worked out,” said Cal.
“How? How could you possibly have had it worked out?”
“OK, worked out was an exaggeration,” Cal admitted. “But I was confident it’d all be fine. Or, you know, quietly hopeful.”
He held a hand out again. This time, against her better judgement, Floora took it and allowed herself to be helped up.
That done, Cal bent and retrieved one of the torn strips of the flag. “Those fonks think they can use my friends against me,” he said.
Stretching out the fabric, he placed it against his forehead and glared at the closest Hovercam. “You shizznods want a war?”
He pulled the strip of cloth around the back of his head and tied it in a knot, forming a Rambo-style headband.
“I’ll give you a fonking war!”
Thirty-Four
Tyrra sat in Cal’s chair, twisting it lazily from side to side and watching nothing interesting happening on screen. She idly fiddled with the remote access module of Nushtuk’s robot that Cal had picked up, clunking and unclunking the magnetic connectors to the chair’s armrest.
The Currently Untitled still sat on the landing pad outside the Controller’s office, pointed slightly away from the station so it was most
ly looking out at a particularly uninteresting area of outer space.
Tyrra had seen outer space a lot of times before, and had no real urge to look at it again now. Once you’d seen one patch of darkness dotted with stars, you’d seen them all.
“Voice!” she barked.
There was a prolonged sigh from the ceiling. “Yes, miss?”
“They are taking a long time,” Tyrra said.
“Indeed, miss,” Kevin confirmed.
“Why are they taking a long time?”
“I’m afraid I do not know, miss. The station’s security prevents me running any scans.”
Tyrra tutted. “You are useless.”
“How very kind of you to say so,” Kevin said.
Silence fell, broken only by the creak-creak-creak of Cal’s chair.
“That isn’t annoying at all,” Kevin said.
Tyrra continued creaking the chair.
“By which I mean it is. Extremely annoying, in fact.”
Creak-creak-creak.
“I wonder if there’s anything good on television,” said Kevin, trying to distract her.
The screen changed to show a heavy-set gentleman wandering around in a circle, wearing nothing whatsoever on his lower half.
“Who’s got the pants on?” he yelled, waving his hands in the air above his head.
“Not you,” hollered back an off-screen audience, then they broke into laughter and applause, and the partially clad gentleman skipped gleefully around and around.
“Well, that looks utterly awful,” Kevin said.
Click.
The screen changed. The Puppetopia puppets were hugging each other, accompanied by a heartstring-tugging piano arrangement, and an, “Awwww!” from the two watching children.
“Not that,” Tyrra said. “Change it.”
“With all due respect, I’m in charge of the monitor, ma’am,” Kevin said. “You are but a guest aboard this ship. I’ll decide what we do and don’t watch.”
He flicked the channel.
“I mean, we’re not watching those puppets, obviously. Ghastly things.”
The next channel was running a singing contest. Kevin and Tyrra both listened to a three-mouthed woman tell a touching story about her how her grandmother used to sing to her, before launching into a high-pitched warble that made Tyrra’s gums ache, and screeched feedback throughout the interior of the ship.
Click.
The next channel they landed on was playing a clip show of hilarious spaceship crashes. Kevin was tempted to keep watching in case the Currently Untitled showed up on there anywhere, but the laughter track quickly proved grating and he pressed on.
Click.
A documentary.
Click.
Someone dancing. Or possibly having a fit.
Click.
A man smashing a big hairy creature in the face with a flagpole.
Click.
An animal doing the funniest things.
“Wait,” said Tyrra, sitting forward in the chair. “Go back.”
“Back where, ma’am?” Kevin asked.
Tyrra gestured to the screen. “On that. Go back to the thing before.”
Kevin clicked back a channel. A young woman in smart-casual dress was strolling along a street, talking directly to the camera.
“Don’t you just hate junkrats and pirates?” she asked, pulling a face that suggested they were a mild—but irritating—inconvenience. “Doesn’t it drive you crazy when they take your cargo, wreck your property—even murder your families? It’s so aggravating, and can often be upsetting.”
She shrugged and pulled a sad face.
“But, what can you do? I mean, it’s not like you can shoot a bunch of pirates, right?”
She stopped walking and put her hands on her hips. She was back to smiling, but suddenly all-business. “Wrong!”
The footage changed to show the same woman lit dramatically from below as she blasted dozens of screaming pirates with a rapid-fire blaster rifle in agonizing slow motion.
“Was this what you were looking for, miss?” Kevin asked, as the woman’s voiceover started listing the merits of, it seemed, shooting pirates to bits with big guns.
Tyrra frowned at the screen. “No, it’s… I thought I saw…”
The chair groaned as she sat back again. “Doesn’t matter. I was mistaken.”
“What was it you thought you saw, miss?” Kevin asked.
Tyrra shook her head. “Nothing. I am so bored I am seeing things that aren’t there.”
She began to twist Cal’s chair again. “They are still not back. They’ve been gone too long.”
“Perhaps we should play a game,” Kevin suggested, switching back from the broadcast feeds to a live view of space. “To take our minds off it.”
“Is it a math game?” Tyrra asked.
“Would you like it to be?” said Kevin, trying to keep the tremor of excitement from his voice.
Tyrra shook her head. “I’d rather die a thousand agonizing deaths.”
“Oh. That’s a shame. You rather got my hopes up there, miss,” Kevin said. “Still, there are plenty of other options available to us on the game front.”
“Like what?” Tyrra asked, glancing up.
“Tell me,” Kevin began. His eyes would have twinkled merrily, if only he’d had any. “Have you ever heard of a little something called ‘Charades’?”
Thirty-Five
“You’re bleeding.”
“Yes, I know,” Cal grunted.
“A lot.”
“I can see that,” he said through gritted teeth.
“We should stop somewhere, and take a look at it,” Floora suggested.
“Sounds great,” said Cal.
He stopped climbing and glanced around them, being very careful not to look down.
“Where do you suggest?”
“Well…”
“Because, I don’t know if you noticed back there, but we’re climbing up a big cliff.”
“I mean, yes, but…”
“And there aren’t a lot of places to stop for a sit down.”
“No, I suppose…”
“So, probably best to just press on, really?” Cal said. He glared Floora, who had taken up her usual perch on his backpack, almost daring her to argue. “Do you agree?”
Floora sighed. “Yes. Yes, I guess so,” she said.
Cal reached up, found a handhold, then grimaced as he heaved himself another few inches up the vertical cliff-face. A few feet away, one of six Hovercams kept level with them, watching them with its beady electronic eye.
“It’s just that you really are bleeding a lot,” said Floora.
“Again, I know,” Cal grimaced, kicking with a foot until he found somewhere solid to put it. “I don’t understand it.”
“You got cut open,” Floora explained.
Cal sighed. “No, I understand the process. But I should be healing. I have this, like, Wolverine healing factor. I recover from damage like—”
He took a hand off the wall in order to snap his fingers, but then his other hand began to slip and he hurriedly grabbed back on.
“Jesus,” he whispered, clinging to the rockface like a limpet. “That was close.”
How long had he been climbing for now? He couldn’t say. It felt like hours, but he suspected that was just the fire in his muscles talking, albeit backed up by the cramp in his lungs, the pain in his spine, and the terror that filled everything that was left over.
How high up were they? Again, he couldn’t say, mostly because he refused to look down. There were clouds below him, he knew that much. He’d passed those a while back. Climbing through them had been interesting, with visibility reduced to practically zero.
Floora had told him that her big eyes meant her vision was much more powerful than his, which had given him some hope. But then, she’d confirmed that even with her giant peepers, she could see fonk all whatsoever in the clouds, and that hope had quickly evaporated again.
<
br /> Below the clouds, the weather had been fine. Not great, but dry, mostly clear, and—importantly—not in the least bit windy.
Above the clouds, it was a different story. Thanks to another layer of cloud far above the clifftop, a depressing endless drizzle had turned the rock face dark and slippery. His home-made Rambo headband was helping to keep the worst of the water from his eyes, but his face had numbed to the point he felt he’d never be able to change his expression from the current pained grimace it was fixed in.
The wind wasn’t constant but came in sudden gusts that caught between him and the mountain and tried its best to separate them. It was usually preceded by a high-pitched whistle, giving him a half-second to brace himself for the main event.
There were a few… birds, he guessed, circling around. Big fonkers, the size of pterodactyls. They were also, he realized as one swooped by above him, the shape of pterodactyls, with long jaws, pointy heads, and wings the texture of old leather.
Great.
Seriously, just fonking great.
Space pterodactyls. Just what he needed.
Cal grabbed for the next handhold and dragged him and Floora another foot up the side of the cliff. Every single part of his body objected, with the exception of his survival instinct which was rooting for him all the way.
“Jesus. Maybe the guys were right about the Banoffee pies,” he muttered, taking a moment to catch his breath.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Cal found a toehold and pushed on.
“So, why isn’t it working?” Floora asked. “Your healing thing, I mean?”
“You tell me,” Cal grunted. “You’re the science guy.”
The wind whistled through gaps in the uneven cliff surface.
“Hold on!” Cal warned, tightening his grip and flattening himself as best he could against the wall.
The wind came a moment later, buffeting him, forcing its way between him and the rocks. He clung on, his fingers cramping, his eyes closed against the onslaught of rain the wind always dragged along with it.
Floora squeaked in distress as she buried herself in against Cal’s bag, the gales battering her wings around on her back, as if objecting to their very existence.
“I can’t hold on!” she yelped.
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