Cal puffed out his cheeks. “Well, keep trying. Maybe there’ll be something in there.” He turned to the others. “OK, I guess we go do this.”
One descent down the landing ramp and casual stroll across the grass later, Cal stood facing Carver Two. The options he had been considering – ‘Lie,’ and ‘Tell the truth,’ - had now been joined by a third option: ‘None of the above.’
This third possibility was intriguing Cal in ways the others weren’t, largely because he had no idea what it would actually involve, other than neither lying nor being honest about what had happened inside Ikumordo. Maybe he could just pretend he had no idea what Carver Two was talking about. Or feign deafness.
Maybe he could pretend to be an entirely different Cal from a previously undiscovered universe, who’d wound up here by accident.
No. The more he thought about it, the more he realized, ‘None of the above,’ wasn’t really a viable option at all. That narrowed things down to his original two options.
Before he could decide which to go for, the heavy end of Two’s staff cracked him across the jaw, spinning him to the ground. Loren drew her blaster. Miz flashed her claws. Splurt wrapped himself around Cal’s hand, becoming a giant green fist with spikes for knuckles.
Behind Carver Two, the other Cals pulled their own weapons – blasters, swords, something that looked not unlike a fairy wand – and pointed them in the team’s direction.
“Easy, easy,” Cal urged, raising his hands and gesturing for calm. The fact one of his hands now looked capable of punching a hole in the moon didn’t really help, but he persisted anyway. “No need for anyone to get crazy. We’re all friends here.”
“Friends?” spat Carver Two. “You were supposed to make our offer. You were supposed to appease Ikumordo, not challenge it to a fight.”
“You wanted me to sign the death warrant for my whole universe,” said Cal. “Surely you guys know me better than that?”
Two’s face was red with anger. “What I know is that we do what’s right. We do what we must to ensure the survival of the Earths, even if that means making the hard decisions. Every other member of this council would have been prepared to make our offer. Every single one.”
At the edge of the group, a thin, willowy-limbed Cal with black-dyed hair raised a hand.
“Except him,” said Two, flinching just enough for it to be visible. “Every Carver, except him, would have been prepared to make that sacrifice, but instead you betray us. You destroy our only chance of saving our worlds.”
“OK, I’ll admit, I kinda got a bit carried away,” said Cal. “I’ll be honest, I thought Ikumordo was going to back down. I did my serious face, strong voice, back straight, the works. He’s obviously made of pretty stern stuff. Maybe if I can talk to Carver Prime, we can work this out.”
“You are not getting to talk to Carver Prime,” said Two. There was a bleep from his wrist. He glanced down at the device he wore there, read the message, then read it again because he couldn’t possibly have read it correctly the first time.
After reading it for a fourth time, he decided that, yes, it did actually say what he’d thought it had. He rolled his staff around in his hand until his knuckles turned white.
“Carver Prime wants to talk to you,” he announced through gritted teeth. A murmuring of surprise rippled through the other Carvers.
“Jings, ‘at wisnae whit wi wis a’ expectin’,” said Carver Eighty-Three from somewhere in the throng. The murmuring briefly took on an undertone of confusion, before going back to plain old shock again.
“Great!” said Cal. He gestured for Loren to lower her blaster, and for Miz to put her claws away. “I’m sure we’ll have this sorted out in no time.”
They were led to a pod similar to Carver Two’s. This time, though, when the plastic door was pushed open, the pod was revealed to be completely empty.
Carver Two produced another doohickey, different to the one that had transported the ship back to the blister dimension, and tapped a button on the front. A single blue-white doorway rose up from the floor, reached full size, then sat there, quietly fizzing and popping to itself in the otherwise empty space.
“Carver Prime awaits,” said Two, indicating the doorway with his staff.
“You’re not coming?” asked Cal.
“Prime has requested you and your companions. No one else,” said Two.
“Aw, shame,” said Cal. “You must be disappointed.”
“Far from it,” said Two. “Those summoned before Carver Prime are rarely pleased by the outcome.” He gestured to the door again. “Now go. Go and face your fate.”
Cal squeezed past Two and shuffled towards the door. “Jesus, and I thought I was a drama queen,” he said. He waited until the others had fallen into line behind him. Splurt was no longer being a big fist, and had become a rather fetching garland of flowers around Cal’s neck, instead. Cal wasn’t sure it was quite the first impression he had been hoping to make, but he didn’t have the heart to tell that to Splurt.
“Right, off we go, then. Stay in line. Nobody wander off,” said Cal. “Miz, I’m looking at you here.”
He stepped through the doorway before Miz could reply, and squinted in the blinding glow of the blue-white light. It faded quickly into near darkness when he emerged on the other side, forcing him to blink several times to try to clear the rectangular halo currently filling his view.
The others came through behind him, first Loren, then Miz, and Mech clanking along at the rear. “Where are we?” Loren asked.
Miz sniffed the air. “Don’t know, but there’s someone here. Right there.” She nodded ahead. A figure approached, the gloom making it almost impossible to make out any details.
Carver Prime was shorter than Cal had been expecting. Not Eighty-Three short, by any means, but shorter than Cal himself. Skinnier, too.
“Hey there,” said Cal, waving into the darkness. “You must be Carver Prime. I’m Cal. But then, I suppose we’re all Cal. Except these guys, who aren’t.” He pointed to Mech and grinned. “Although some of them would like to be. Am I right?”
Mech sighed, but said nothing. Carver Prime came closer through the gloom, and Cal got the impression of blond hair. This also caught him off guard. He’d been expecting Carver Prime to be big, mean and scary. Possibly bald, but in that shaven-headed military sort of way, rather than a male-pattern sort of way.
What he hadn’t been expecting was someone short, skinny and blond.
Carver Prime stepped into the pool of electric-blue light that was being emitted by the door, and Cal’s surprise levels peaked up to ‘full blown shock’. Carver Prime looked nothing like Cal, but then that, in itself, wasn’t really a surprise, because Carver Prime wasn’t Cal. Not even some weird, alternate version of him.
A Carver, yes, but not that one.
The blond-haired teenage girl in the shadows met his gaze. “Hey, Dad,” she said.
And the bottom dropped out of Cal Carver’s world.
CHAPTER TEN
It had been nine years since the accident. Nine years since he had last seen her face.
She was older now, of course. She should be sixteen, but looked older still. Eighteen or nineteen, maybe.
The last time he’d seen her hair, it had been hanging in ringlets. She’d smiled at him, proudly showing off the gaps where a few baby teeth had recently fallen out.
Now, her hair was tightly scraped back, and all her adult teeth had come in. He could tell, because of the way she was angrily baring them.
Cal fumbled through a couple of attempted sentences. “How can you be…? I mean, I know how you… But how can…?”
He gave up at that point, and went back to staring, slack-jawed, instead.
“Wait, ‘Dad’?” said Loren, looking between Cal and the girl. “What does she mean?”
Cal licked his lips, which were suddenly dusty and dry. “She means… Well, she means I’m her dad. It’s a pretty self-explanatory statement, really.”<
br />
“You’re not my dad,” the girl spat.
Mech frowned. “OK, now I’m confused. And I was already confused. You just said he was, now you’re saying he ain’t? What the fonk is going on here?”
Cal clenched and unclenched his jaw a few times. He blinked, hoping it would stop the prickling at the back of his eyes. It didn’t.
“I have a daughter. Had a daughter. Or, I don’t know, maybe have,” said Cal. “Lily. She… Uh, she died.”
There was silence from the others while they processed this. The flower garland around Cal’s neck pressed itself more firmly to his chest, and he gave it a reassuring pat.
“Shizz,” said Mech. “I’m sorry, man.”
Loren placed a hand on his arm and squeezed it, but said nothing.
“Like, why didn’t you tell us?” asked Miz. “I mean, that’s not… I don’t mean…”
“I know,” said Cal, shooting her a half-smile.
The Lily in front of him crossed her arms over her chest with an air of indignation almost worthy of Miz. God, she was beautiful. She’d always looked like her mother, but she’d grown into Caroline’s looks even more as she’d gotten older.
“How did she die?” Lily asked.
Cal wrinkled his nose, pushing the tears back. “Car accident. She and her mom, they…” He looked down, cleared his throat quietly, then looked up again. “Car accident.”
“That’s funny,” said Lily, then a pained expression flitted across her face. “No, I mean, as in ‘ironic’ not ‘ha-ha’. See, where I come from, you died in that accident. You and Mom. Or, no, him and Mom. I survived.”
Cal tried to think of something appropriate to say to that, but for the life of him couldn’t come up with anything. He settled on, “Oh,” because he felt he should probably offer some sort of response.
“Yeah,” said Lily. “Pretty much.”
“Who took care of you?”
Lily shrugged. “Grandparents. Both sets. Yours, mostly. They looked after the money, and the directors ran the company until I was old enough.”
Cal nodded, pleased to hear his parents had stepped up. It took a few seconds for the rest of Lily’s statement to filter through.
“Wait. Company? What company?”
“Your company,” said Lily. “The other you. Pandime Labs.”
“What is that? A dog breeder?” Cal asked.
“Labs as in laboratories,” said Lily. “Not as in Labradors.”
“Ah. Gotcha.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” said Mech, pointing to Cal. “You saying he was a scientist? Because, despite all the crazy shizz I’ve seen lately – and, girl, you have no idea – I’m finding that very hard to believe.”
“Where I come from, there is no religion, no music, no art. There’s science. Just science. I’ve been to thousands of Earths, and mine was the most advanced, by far.”
She gave a proud little tilt of her head that Cal recognized, and his heart almost exploded.
“My mom and dad ran a company, Pandime, investigating the possibility of inter-dimensional travel. They figured out other universes existed, and were working on a way to reach them.”
Lily shifted her weight onto her boot heels and briefly looked down at the toes, as if she’d find something interesting there. “And then the crash happened. And they were gone.”
“Oh, sweetheart, I’m so sorry,” Cal whispered. He reached for her, but she pulled back, all vulnerability leaving her as her face became hard and cold.
“I worked out Ikumordo was coming. I figured out Earth was next on the menu, but no one would believe me. I didn’t know how to stop it. How to fix it,” Lily said. “So I went to the one man I thought could fix everything.”
“Your dad,” said Loren.
Lily nodded, not taking her eyes off Cal. “I found hundreds, but none of them were him. Not really. Some of them looked like him – not as much as you, though. You’re… You look like him. Very much like him. But none of them knew the things he did, or could do the things he could.”
She began walking around the outside of Cal’s group, forcing them to turn to keep her in view. “See, my dad, he’d have stopped Ikumordo, whatever it took. He’d have saved our Earth. Every Earth. My dad could fix anything. But you?”
She looked him up and down, her face twisting into something like disgust. “You’re nothing like him. You didn’t fix things. You broke them. You made it all worse.”
“They were asking me to sacrifice a whole universe,” said Cal. “Do you really think your dad would have done that?”
“Yes!” Lily said, the word coming out halfway between a snarl and a sob. She stopped in front of the glowing doorway. “He would, if he’d had to!”
Cal ran his tongue across the back of his teeth. “Then I guess you’re right,” he said. “I’m not your dad.”
For a split-second, Lily looked wounded by that, and Cal wanted to run to her, hold her, tell her he was sorry, and that everything was going to be OK. But then she pulled herself together again, and the barrier went back up.
“Good,” she said, then she drew herself up to her full height and adopted an officious tone of voice that really didn’t suit her. “For your betrayal of the Carver Council, I have no choice but to inflict the maximum penalty. You will be banished to the Malwhere, the endless shadow realm, where you shall spend all eternity, haunted and hunted by the monsters contained within its walls.”
“Uh, yeah, we’d rather not,” said Cal. “Besides, you need us. We can help stop Ikumordo. We can save everyone, my – our – universe included.”
“It is the will of the council,” Lily said. She hesitated, then stumbled over the next few words. “It is the will of Carver Prime.”
“OK, fine. Fine,” said Cal. He folded his arms and very deliberately planted his feet on the ground. “Try to make us. We’re not going anywhere. This? This is a temper tantrum. We’ll just stand here and wait it out. You can’t make us go.”
Lily smiled, and for the first time ever, Cal saw her looking like him. He recognized that smirk, and realized, too late, his mistake.
“Oh, Cal,” said Lily, stepping backwards towards the door. “You’re already here.”
She retreated into the light. Miz pounced, but the door dropped down into the ground before she could reach it, plunging the area into darkness.
For a long time, no one said a word. It was Cal who eventually broke the silence.
“Tch,” he said. “Kids, eh?”
* * *
Much of the next twenty minutes passed in a string of aborted conversations and awkward, misspoken platitudes.
“Guys, it’s fine,” Cal finally told them, hoping that would draw a line under it all. It didn’t.
“But, I mean, a daughter, man,” said Mech. “And here I am, ragging on you all the time, or whatever, and… Why didn’t you say something?”
“How would that have worked?” asked Cal. It was still dark, but his eyes were becoming more accustomed to it now, and he could at least figure out roughly where everyone else was in relation to himself. “Like, ’Hey, my wife and kid died almost a decade ago, so don’t retaliate when I deliberately try to drive you crazy’?”
“You were married?” said Loren. She heard the accusatory tone in her voice, even if no one else did. “I mean, you were married. Right. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Jesus, what is this, the fonking Hallmark channel?” said Cal. “Nothing has changed here. I’m still me. You don’t have to act differently because my kid… Because of what happened.”
He looked over at where he thought the door had been. “Besides, she’s back now. You know, kind of.”
“But, like, she abandoned us in some kind of Hell dimension. Maybe you didn’t notice?” said Miz.
Cal conceded that one with a shrug. “Granted, not quite the family reunion I would have chosen, but it is what it is. Besides, there’s no way she’s going to leave us in here. She’ll be back.”
&n
bsp; “You sure, man?” said Mech. “Looked to me like she was leaving us here permanently.”
“That’s because you don’t know her like I do,” said Cal. He sat down on the rocky ground, stretched his feet out in front of him, and leaned back on his arms. The stone was cold beneath him, but that was fine. He wouldn’t be sitting there long.
“She’ll be back. Mark my words. She’ll be back. Any minute now.”
* * *
Cal shivered. He had been shivering for some time now, despite Splurt transforming into a thick winter coat with a luxurious fur-lined hood, and a colorful pair of mittens attached to the sleeves. Loren sat shoulder to shoulder with him, also shivering. Splurt had made himself into a coat for her, too, although of the two, Cal’s was definitely nicer.
“F-for a Hell d-dimension, it’s f-f-fonking cold,” Loren stammered, her breath forming wispy gray clouds in the chilly darkness.
“A-a-any m-minute nnnnow,” Cal said, for about the hundredth time. He looked longingly at the spot where he thought the door had been – in actual fact, he was looking in completely the wrong direction – and crossed his fingers for the fifth or sixth time in as many minutes.
“Face it, man, she ain’t coming back,” said Mech. He and Miz both seemed unaffected by the cold, although Miz’s nose was bothering her, judging by the ways she kept sniffing. “We need to find a way to get you two warm.”
“Who u-us?” said Loren, her teeth chattering. “W-we’re f-f-f-f-f—“
“Fine,” Cal finished for her. “We’re f-f-f-f-f- Oh, f-fonk it.”
Mech held out a hand to Cal. “Gimme your guns.”
Cal blinked. This took quite a long time, due to the cold briefly making his eyelids stick together. “W-why?” he asked. “Are you g-going to sh-shoot us?”
“Yay!” said Loren, waving her clenched fists. “J-just kidding. D-don’t shoot us,” she said. “N-not yet.”
“Just gimme the motherfonking guns,” Mech snapped. Hands shaking, Cal passed the cyborg both his blasters.
“Guys,” said Miz. “We might have a problem.”
“One thing at a fonking time,” Mech muttered. Through the darkness, Cal saw him snap one of the blasters in two. Cal wanted to make a joke about Mech roughly manhandling his weapon, but decided it was too cold to bother, and that he should probably concentrate on not dying, instead.
Space Team: Return of the Dead Guy Page 9
