The Hunt for Reduk Topa

by Barry J. Hutchison

  Cal glanced around at the others as he contemplated starting again, but then decided against it. He waited, certain in the knowledge that the moment he opened his mouth someone would interrupt him.

  “Sorry,” said King Floomfle, his voice a husky whisper that suggested a lifetime spent chain-smoking. “You were saying?”

  “Uh, right. Yes.” Cal flicked his eyes to the musicians, then back to the old man. “I was just going to say that you must be King Floomf.”

  The fanfare blasted. The cymbal player shut his eyes and smashed the disks together.

  “Whatever gave you that idea?” chuckled King Floomf, and Cal instantly warmed to the guy. “And you must be…” He snapped his fingers.

  “Captain Cal Carver, Your Greatness,” came a voice from below the platform.

  “Ah, yes. Sorry, memory’s not what it once was. A pleasure to meet you,” said King Floomf. His eyes wrinkled up as he peered at the others. “And these must be your minions?”

  “Say what?” Mech barked, and the two musicians both took a wary step back.

  “Ha! No, they’re not my minions. I wouldn’t call them that, exactly,” Cal said, rushing to smooth things over. “They’re my…” He waved a hand, searching for the right word. “Not ‘underlings.’ Like… subordinates.”

  Tyrra growled, baring her teeth.

  “Kidding. I’m kidding. They’re my friends,” Cal said.

  “Friends…” said King Floomf, a little wistfully. “That must be nice. I have minions coming out of my ears. But friends? Friends are harder to come by, Captain. Treasure them.”

  “Well, I’ll try, but they don’t make it easy,” Cal said, shooting a reproachful look back at them. “Now, you have something for us?”

  “Ah, yes. You are here to take possession of the cargo, correct?”

  “That’s right,” Cal confirmed. “We’re taking it to the TV people. I’m hoping they might let me be on a show.”

  “You wish to go on a show?” asked the king, peering up at Cal like he was having difficulty seeing him properly. “How brave of you.”

  Cal rocked back on his heels. “I know. A lot of people don’t like the thought of being on TV. They think they’ll freeze up or look stupid, or whatever. But not me.”

  “Because he got used to looking stupid a long time ago,” said Mech.

  “Because I’m a natural in front of the camera,” Cal said.

  “You know they say the camera adds ten pounds, right?” Mech told him.

  “Seriously?” snorted Miz. She looked Cal up and down. “Like, how many cameras must he have pointed at him right now?”

  “For the last time, it’s travel weight,” Cal protested, sucking in his gut.

  King Floomf ran his stubby fingers through his beard. “Very well. I wish you the best of luck with your endeavors, Captain. Perhaps we shall see you on our screens before long.”

  “Perhaps you shall, King Floomf,” Cal replied, then he almost jumped out of his skin when the horn blasted and the cymbals crashed.

  Behind him, Mizette’s stomach rumbled loudly enough for all the Floomfles to shoot her a worried look. Cal thought the time had probably come to bring things to a close, in the interests of Floomfle safety.

  “Now, if you could just point us in the direction of the crates,” he said. “We’ll be on our way.”

  “Oh man, you should’ve seen them, Loren,” said Cal, sitting back in his chair as the Currently Untitled curved up through the moon’s atmosphere, two domed crates safely tucked away downstairs. “They were adorable.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Loren. Splurt sat on the back of her chair, watching over her. He turned one eye to shoot Cal a look of disdain.

  “Obviously not as adorable as you, buddy,” Cal said, which seemed to give Splurt the reassurance he needed, and he fixed both eyes on Loren again

  “They had these big heads and eyes. But, like, the rest of their faces were… They were all…” Cal made a valiant attempt to shrink everything from below his eyes to just above his chin. “You know, like that. But smaller. And some of them flew! They had these little bug-wings, but not creepy bugs. Like, I don’t know, dragonflies, maybe. Just flap-flap-flap-flap. Little wings.”

  “Right,” said Loren.

  “You know?”

  “Little wings. Sounds great.”

  “It was great,” Cal confirmed. He looked to the others for confirmation. “Right?”

  “It was one of the worst things I ever saw,” said Mech. He grimaced as he tried to force his arm fully back into its socket, with little success. “I ain’t big on dancing midgets.”

  “Please, Mech. We don’t use that term aboard this ship,” Cal scolded. “It’s space-midgets. And how could you not instantly fall in love with them?”

  He began to sing. “Flooooomfles, we’re the Flooooomfles. How could you not love every moment?”

  Miz looked up from her claws. “Maybe if you’d let me eat one…”

  “Well, I think it sounds delightful, sir,” said the voice from the ceiling.

  “Thank you, Kevin. I’m glad somebody sees sense around here.”

  “All that singing and dancing you describe, it sounds like a lot of fun.”

  “It was,” Cal confirmed. “It was a lot of fun.”

  “Indeed, sir. It sounds wonderful,” said Kevin. “Also, on an unrelated note we’re under attack.”

  “Flooooomfles, we’re the—Wait, what?” Cal spluttered. “What do you mean we’re under attack?”

  “Shizz!” Loren spat, twisting the controls.

  Cal gripped his chair as the ship spun. On screen, a torpedo curved past them and tumbled into the distance, before looping around for another try.

  “Someone’s shooting,” said Cal, as if he were the only one to have noticed this. “Someone’s shooting. At us!”

  “Well-observed, sir,” said Kevin. The ship banked sharply, avoiding the torpedo’s second pass. “What gave it away?”

  “Is it the Floomfles? It can’t be the Floomfles. Tell me it’s not the Floomfles!”

  “It isn’t the Floomfles,” Kevin assured him as, on screen, a ship rose into view. “It’s them.”

  Eighteen

  The ship that appeared in front of the Currently Untitled was, Cal thought, up there with the ugliest ships he’d ever seen. In fact, he couldn’t recall ever seeing a ship quite so awful-looking before, and he felt like he’d seen quite a few of the things by this point.

  This one wasn’t just bad, it was horrifying. It looked as if it had been built by the winners of an episode of Junkyard Wars that was too terrible to have ever been publicly aired.

  In fact, it was worse than that. It looked as if it had been built by the winners of an episode of Junkyard Wars that was too terrible to have ever been publicly aired, and then the whole team had gotten drunk and smashed it repeatedly into whatever God-awful abomination the episode’s runners-up had built, before inexpertly spray painting the subsequent mess, setting it on fire, and taking it in turns to defecate upon it from a range of different heights.

  Only somehow worse.

  It resembled a spaceship only in the sense that it was in space and, if you closed one eye and then closed the other one ninety-five percent of the way, could possibly be mistaken for a vessel of some description. It was a crash scene, frozen just after the point of impact. It was a vaguely rocket-shaped depiction of chaos itself, and just looking at the thing made Cal’s eyes water and his skin itch all over.

  “Who the fonk is flying that thing?” he wondered.

  A face appeared on screen. On reflection, it was precisely the type of face Cal would have expected to find behind the controls of a ship like this. Indeed, had anyone shown him a picture of the ship and asked him to draw the pilot, this thing was what he’d have scribbled. Probably before begging forgiveness from all those who’d seen it, projectile vomiting on the page, and passing out.

  He, she, it, or whatever the fonk it was looked as if someone had asse
mbled a vaguely humanoid form out of animal excrement, teeth, and assorted lengths of barbed wire, then brought it to life with a bolt of lightning. And not nice lightning either, Cal thought. Bad lightning. Lightning from the wrong side of the tracks.

  “Want!” it bellowed, the word bursting as a bubble of black gunk on its bloated, crusty lips.

  Cal shifted in his chair and glanced to the others. “Do we know this… thing?”

  Mech shook his head. “No.”

  “Oh, thank God,” Cal exhaled. “You know you have problems if that’s part of your social circle.”

  He did his best to smile at the face on screen. If it even was a face. Sure, it shared certain characteristics with a face, but Cal wasn’t ready to fully commit.

  “Uh, hi.”

  “Want!”

  Cal blinked. “What is it you—”

  “Things!” the creature spat, splattering the screen with muddy brown phlegm. “Want things!”

  “Well—Jesus!”

  Cal frantically gripped the armrests as Loren spun the ship, avoiding a third near-strike from the torpedo. Mech staggered, then watched in dismay as his arm fell off and dangled from a tangle of wires.

  “Great. Way to go, Loren,” he muttered, watching the arm swinging back and forth like a pendulum.

  The torpedo came streaking past them again, forcing Loren to pull off another sudden dodge. This time, as it flew by, its fuel source seemed to burn out and it glided limply off into space.

  The Untitled settled back onto an even keel facing the horrifying monster-ship.

  “Want things now!”

  “Hey, easy there, buddy,” Cal said. “You can’t just start shooting at us, then demand things.”

  “Want things!”

  Cal raised his hands. “I’m getting that. It’s really coming across,” he said. “But I’m going to go ahead and counter with: No. You can’t have things. They’re our things, and we’d like to hang onto them.”

  The monstrosity on screen banged a fist against its console, making the image flicker and jump. “Give things! Give things now!”

  “OK, you asked for it, buddy,” Cal said. “Kevin, do the Universe a favor and blow that ship to pieces.”

  “We can’t, sir,” Kevin said. “I’m afraid our situation with the temporary warp disk has been steadily worsening. It has left us rather compromised on the weapons front. Were we to land, we might be able to open fire, but that’s not really an option at the moment. Also, our shields aren’t in great condition, either. And by ‘not in great condition’ I mean we don’t have any. One good hit and we’re done for.”

  Cal’s eyes flicked from the ceiling to the screen and back again. “Kevin, can I assume that you did mute the microphone before you said all that, yes?”

  “You may go ahead and assume what you like, sir,” Kevin replied, after a pause.

  Cal pinched the bridge of his nose. “OK, so you didn’t mute the microphone.”

  “No, sir,” Kevin admitted.

  “You think maybe you should have?”

  “Hindsight’s a wonderful thing, sir.”

  “Want things!” the monstrosity on screen babbled, dribbling a thick gray liquid down its hideous chin. “Or blow up. BOOM!”

  “OK, one second. Be right with you,” Cal said, then he lowered his voice to a whisper. “Kevin, mute the microphone.”

  “Very good, sir.” There was a soft bleep. “Done.”

  Cal creaked around in his chair. “OK. We need a plan. We have no weapons, no shields… Any thoughts?”

  “We could ram him, sir,” Kevin suggested.

  Cal looked up. “Would that work?”

  “Almost certainly,” Kevin confirmed. “Although, we would also be destroyed.”

  “Jesus, Kevin,” Cal muttered. “OK, let’s put that one on the back burner for now.”

  He clicked his fingers and sat up straighter in his chair. “Wait. Got it. What if we use Mech?”

  “What if we use Mech for what?” Mech demanded, looking up from where he was trying to reattach his arm.

  “To shoot. You could stand on the roof and just, you know, fire at him with your arm guns,” Cal said.

  “That’s the dumbest idea I ever heard,” Mech grunted.

  “What, worse than Kevin’s kamikaze run?” said Cal.

  “Fine. Second dumbest,” said Mech. “Even if I wasn’t down one arm, my cannons ain’t gonna put a dent in that ship’s shields.”

  “Are we sure it even has shields?” Cal asked. “I’m pretty sure it’s held together by string. Hell, we could probably open a window and toss something at it, and that’d be enough.”

  “Or we could, like, let whatever that thing is board us,” Miz suggested.

  “What?” Cal spluttered. “Have you lost your mind? You heard it. It wants our things.”

  “But there’s, like…” Miz counted quietly. “Six of us, and one of it.”

  “But what a one,” said Cal. “Look at it. I don’t want that on the ship. I don’t even want it in the same galaxy!”

  “It might be our best chance,” said Loren. “Let it come aboard, then take care of it when it gets here. I don’t see many other options.”

  Cal groaned. “Fine. Let’s do that idea. We’ll tell him to come over and get our things, then kick the shizz out of him when he arrives. Well, you can kick the shizz out of him, I don’t want to touch him, or even necessarily be in the same room.”

  He glanced from crewmate to crewmate. “We all agreed?”

  “Works for me,” Mech said, crunching his arm back into his shoulder socket. It stayed there, but stuck out at an awkward angle.

  “It was, like, my idea, so…” was all Miz had to say on the matter.

  “I will best the beast personally,” added Tyrra from her seat in the back.

  “You’ve done quite enough besting for one day, young lady,” Cal told her. “We still have to discuss what you did to Nutmuck.”

  “That wasn’t his name,” Mech intoned.

  “Whatever. The point is, you’re on thin ice, missy. You and me? We’re going to have words.”

  “I will kill you with my bare hands,” Tyrra warned.

  “That may be, but I’ll come back to life, and then you’ll be grounded, so we’ll see who has the last laugh,” Cal said. He eyeballed her sternly for a moment, then jiggled his chair back around so he was facing front.

  On screen, the thing was ranting in silence.

  “What’s he saying?” Cal asked. “Why can’t we…?”

  A thought struck him. A terrible thought.

  No.

  No, surely not.

  Cal looked up.

  “Kevin?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You know when I said to mute the microphone?”

  “I recall sir, yes.”

  “Whose microphone did you mute?”

  There was a pause. It was quite a lengthy pause, as if all the participants in the conversation were being hit by the same dawning sense of realization and dread.

  “Sorry, sir, whose…?”

  “You heard me, Kevin,” Cal said. He ground his teeth together. “It was his, wasn’t it? You muted his microphone.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Not ours.”

  “No, sir.”

  Cal buried his face in his hands, let out a primal-sounding roar of frustration, then sat up suddenly. “OK, turn him back on. Let me talk to him. Or it. Whatever the fonk it is.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  The audio from the other ship rushed back in.

  “—tricks! I not fall for them! I not get things, you not get keep things!”

  “Hey, easy, pal. Easy,” Cal soothed. “Whatever you think you just heard, I can assure you it was all just a misunderstanding. No one is trying to trick you. We’re just going to hand over our things…” His eyes went to the little inset image of the enemy ship in the top right corner of the screen. “…aaaand, he’s shooting again.”


  Loren’s hands flew to the controls. She jerked a stick, twisted a twisty thing, and kicked down on a pedal all at the same time. The Untitled bucked.

  The Untitled stuttered.

  “Uh, honey?” said Cal. “There’s a torpedo. There’s a big torpedo.”

  “I know!” Loren barked. She untwisted then retwisted the twisty thing, pumped the pedal a few times, then flipped open a panel and flicked a series of switches inside.

  “And, it’s just that we don’t have shields…”

  “I know! Impulse thrusters have misfired.”

  “Well, can you unmisfire them in the next five seconds?” Cal yelped, pushing himself further back into his chair on the off-chance that this would somehow buy them more time. The little square window that showed the live feed from the front camera was almost filled with fiery red now. An impact was coming, and it was coming soon.

  “Ugh. Great. We’re totally dead,” Miz complained.

  “Loren!”

  “Got it!”

  The ship jerked into life, then dipped just as the torpedo rocketed past. Something at the back of the ship went clank as it snapped off. Cal hoped it was nothing too important. The fact that they weren’t currently being sucked out into space told him it was something they could live without for now, even if only on a temporary basis.

  “Nicely done,” said Cal. His chair groaned with relief when he stopped forcing himself back against it.

  “We ain’t outta trouble yet,” Mech said. “It’s looping around.”

  “What the fonk is it with these things?” Cal demanded. “Since when did torpedoes…?”

  He made a frantic zig-zagging motion in the air with a finger.

  “How is that suddenly a thing?”

  There was a crunch as Loren shifted a stick on the control panel. “Ah, fonk it. Everyone hold on,” she warned.

  “You’re flying. We always hold on,” said Miz, not looking up.

  Jabbing her console, Loren switched the screen windows so the ugly-ass ship took up the majority of it, relegating its monstrous pilot to the smaller inset box.

  The Untitled gave a lurch as Loren kicked the pedal and wedged the thrust control into a full forward lock.