Space Team: Return of the Dead Guy

by Barry J. Hutchison

  Colors began to emerge from the darkness. Galaxies bloomed like spring flowers. Nebulae swirled across the universe like paint droplets in water. Planets of all shades and hues spun on their orbits, and the whole thing got a bit psychedelic for a while, before Cal’s eyes adjusted to it all.

  Even though his eyes had started to get the hang of what he was looking at, his brain was taking a little longer to catch up. No matter which direction he looked, he could see forever. Not in that same way he could looking out through the Untitled’s viewscreen at space – then, he could merely see a ridiculously long way. Now, though, he could see for infinite distances, whichever way he looked, and the sheer mind-boggling enormity of out there made a layer of cold, clammy sweat form on his lower back.

  Miz, Mech and Loren were standing behind him. He had no idea how long they’d been there for. Hell, he had no idea how long he’d been there for, staring out at the endless abyss. Seconds? Minutes? Days? It could have been any of the above.

  Except days, he decided. That would be ridiculous.

  The other Carvers were there, too. Judging by the expressions on most of their faces, very few of them had ever seen anything quite like this, either. Even Carver Two, who had come through last of all, seemed equal parts impressed and disturbed by it.

  The only one who didn’t seem in the least bit put out was Lily. And possibly Splurt, although he’d turned, quite inexplicably, into a woman’s shoe, so it was difficult to tell.

  Lily stood facing the others, hands on her hips, foot tapping the floor with growing impatience. “Yes, yes, it’s all very impressive,” she said. “But we’re not here for the scenery. Eyes on me, Carvers.”

  The assembled members of the Carver Council – all sixty or seventy or so – gradually tore their eyes away from everything in the universe, and shifted their attention to their leader. She pointed to Cal and indicated for him to come forward, then motioned for him to stop when he was still a dozen or so feet away. The Caltarnates (which Cal was starting to feel was actually pretty awkward, now that he’d said it in his head a few times) all shuffled aside, leaving plenty of space around him, presumably in case he tried any funny business.

  “For those of you who haven’t yet been properly introduced, this is Carver Ninety-Nine, the newest addition to the council,” said Lily.

  Cal smiled and waved at the others. “Hi. Hello. Nice to meet you all.”

  Lily continued. “And the man who has doomed all of existence to extinction.”

  Cal winced a little, but continued waving. “Sorry for the inconvenience. Although, ‘doomed’ is a strong word.”

  “Oh? And what word would you use?” Lily asked.

  Cal thought for a moment. “I don’t know. ‘Condemned,’ maybe? Or is that worse?”

  A murmuring went through the other Cals. Cal smiled at them, but most of them had used that same smile themselves, so were immune to it. “Hey, relax, I was kidding. Nobody’s doomed or condemned.”

  “Are we cursed?” asked one of the Carvers. He was a tall, blond-haired Cal, dressed in chainmail armor, and spoke with an English accent.

  “What? No. Lightly jinxed at worse. And I mean lightly,” said Cal. He pointed to his chin. “Look at this face. Would this face lie to you?”

  “Yes,” said the Carvers, pretty much unanimously.

  “See for yourself,” said Lily, raising her voice as she took back control of the room. Without her apparently doing anything, everyone went zooming towards a distant sector of space.

  Many of the Carvers screamed. A few hastily pulled bags from their pockets and vomited noisily into them. Cal looked around him with a growing sense of disappointment.

  “Jesus, was I ever this bad?”

  “You’re still this bad,” Mech pointed out.

  Loren nodded. “Often worse.”

  She looked away as Cal heaved up in his own mouth, then swallowed it back down again. “It’s not the movement, it’s the puke smell. Honestly,” he managed to say, before gagging again.

  They arrived – if, indeed, they’d even moved – somewhere between Earth and Mars. Ikumordo was there, looking as big and orange and cloud-like as ever.

  “Ikumordo is no longer approaching Earth,” Lily announced. The other Carvers swapped puzzled glances and shrugs.

  “Well, that’s good, right?” asked Old Man Carver. “Isn’t that what we wanted?”

  Carver Two joined Lily at the front. “It is no longer approaching Earth because it intends to devour the entire multiverse, instead.”

  “OK, that’s less good,” the old man conceded.

  “Hoo hus this come aboot?” asked Eighty-Three, his stubby fingers twirling a strand of his bushy ginger beard.

  Lily raised her eyebrows. “Hmm?”

  “I wis jist sayin’, hoo hus this come aboot?”

  “Right,” said Lily. “Yes. Good… question? It was a question, yes?”

  “Twis.”

  “Right. Yes.” Carver Prime looked a bit lost for a moment, then she gave a little nod. “We’ll come back to that. The point is, we had a plan. A plan we all agreed with.”

  A few hands went up in the crowd. “A plan most of us agreed with,” Lily corrected. “But a plan all the same, sacrificing one universe so that the other Earths – so our homes – could live. There was a consensus. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.”

  Cal had heard enough. “OK, OK, listen, Spock. That kind of thinking might get you places back on Science World. But here in the real world…” He gestured around himself, remembered he was currently floating in what he assumed was a simulated version of the entire universe (or an entire universe, at least), and so quickly stopped. “I mean, out there in the real world, or wherever, that’s not how things work.”

  “Even the math doesn’t add up,” said Loren, stepping forward.

  “What did she say?” asked one of the Carvers.

  “Yeah, I didn’t get that,” added another.

  There was a murmuring of consensus among the Carvers. It became clear that most, if not all, were unable to understand a word of what Loren had said.

  “They don’t have chips,” Mech realized. “They don’t have translation chips. They can’t understand us.”

  “Now he’s at it,” said another Carver. “He’s talking gibberish.”

  “Then how can they understand me?” Cal asked. He caught Mech’s withering look. “Oh, yeah, we’re all talking the same language. Gotcha.”

  It took a moment for Cal to realize the significance of all this. He turned to Lily. “Wait, so none of these guys have ever been to space?”

  Lily sucked on her bottom lip for a moment – a move Cal remembered his Lily doing whenever she was preparing to talk her way out of trouble. “Not until I recruited them, no,” she said.

  “But they have now?” said Cal.

  Lily’s eyes darted away. “No. Not space. Other dimensions, yes. But not actually outer space, as such.”

  “Aha! That’s why they all agreed to let that thing eat my universe!”

  The same few hands went up.

  “Why most of you agreed, I mean.” Cal turned his back to Lily and addressed the crowd. “I was like you guys once. A long time ago. Well, like, a month or two, you lose track in space. Clocks don’t work. Or, you know, something like that. I mean, they have space clocks, but… Know what? It doesn’t matter.”

  He shook his head, just briefly, and started again.

  “The point is, I used to think Earth was it, you know? That Earth was the place to be. And, don’t get me wrong, Earth is pretty awesome. It’s got ice cream and rocks and, you know, walls.”

  He frowned. “I don’t know why I picked those three things. It’s got other stuff, too, obviously. Better stuff than that. Ghostbusters! It’s got Ghostbusters.”

  There was a general murmuring of approval. Cal rocked back on his heels, as if his point had been made, then remembered it hadn’t.

  “Anyway, then I discovered t
he rest of the galaxy. No, I glimpsed it. I met people. Yes, many of them tried to kill me in a number of unpleasant ways, but I made friends, too.”

  He looked back at the crew. “A family. We’ve saved planets together. Hell, we’ve saved the galaxy. Even a god. And I’ve barely even scratched the surface of what’s out there. Of who’s out there.”

  “How nice for you,” said Lily. “But the point still stands. The needs of the many. We were trying to save an infinite number of Earths.”

  “And if space is infinitely big, which, you know, I’m pretty sure has been said by someone at some point,” said Cal, floundering a little. He glanced back at Loren, who nodded her confirmation. Bolstered, Cal pressed on. “Well, then, you were going to sacrifice an infinite number of people to save an infinite number of people. There is no ‘many’ and ‘few’ there, just people dying for no reason.”

  Lily’s face darkened. “And now everyone is going to die. Everyone, everywhere, all at once.”

  “Then why hasn’t it done it?” Cal asked, pointing to the orange cloud floating in the gulf between them. “Hmm? If this thing is so all-powerful that it can gobble up every universe, why hasn’t it started? What, is it waiting for its appetite to build up? Is it hoping for an appetizer first? Why isn’t it doing anything?”

  Lily rolled her eyes. “Argh. You’re such an idiot. You don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “Look, I’ve had just about enough of your attitude, young lady,” said Cal, his temper building. He pointed in an entirely random direction. “Go to your room!”

  Lily blinked in surprise. They stared at each other for a few long, awkward moments, and the universe around them seemed to fade into the background. Cal lowered his arm.

  “Dad?” Lily croaked, then she cleared her throat. “I mean, you sounded like him. Sound like him. I mean…”

  She shook her head and stepped back, gesturing for Carver Two to take over. He stepped in front of her, blocking Cal’s view.

  “As Carver Prime has said, we are now facing a graver situation than we had anticipated,” he said. “It seems likely that Ikumordo – the All Death – shall live up to its name. If so, everything we know, everything we have ever known, will be gone. The multi-verse will be no more, leaving only the void.”

  Emo Cal raised a black fingernailed hand. “So what do we do? We can stop it, right?”

  Anxious muttering rippled through the group. Cal watched the Carvers on both sides as they exchanged worried looks.

  “There’s a plan, isn’t there?” asked Old Man Carver. “We do have a plan.”

  Carver Two rolled his staff in his hands, took a deep breath, and braced himself for the reaction to the words he was about to speak.

  Cal jumped in before Two could give an answer.

  “Of course he does. He’s Cal Carver. We’re all Cal Carver,” said Cal. He pulled himself up to his full height and looked as many of the other Cals in the eye as he could. “We take the fight to it. We hit that big orange fonk with everything we’ve got, show it what happens when it messes with the Carver boys.”

  No one looked particularly convinced by that. “Listen, I know it’s scary,” said Cal. “But no one else is going to do this. There’s a giant death cloud out there, and do you see anyone else trying to stop it?”

  “It’s a suicide mission,” said Emo Cal.

  “Probably,” Cal agreed. “But sitting around here doing nothing? That’s a suicide mission, too.” He looked to Carver Two. “If the universes, or multi-verse, or whatever, gets destroyed, what happens to the blister universes? Do they survive?”

  “No,” said Lily, stepping out from behind her second-in-command. Her face was drawn tight now, like she’d been secretly sucking on a lemon behind Two’s back. “They’ll be destroyed, too. All that will be left is the Void.”

  “There you go,” said Cal, turning back to the Carvers. “Do nothing, and we’re dead. Everyone’s dead.” He pointed to the image of Ikumordo floating around them. “But if we go after that thing, if we try to stop it, then—”

  “Wur still a’ deid?” Eighty-Three guessed.

  Cal pretended he hadn’t heard him. It was that or ask him to repeat himself several times until it became too embarrassing to continue, and then pretend not to have heard him. This way was just quicker.

  “Then we’ve got a chance. Not a big chance, I’ll admit. A tiny chance, but a chance, all the same. Besides, that thing’s no longer just threatening the Earth. If what it’s saying is true, if it really plans obliterating everything in existence, then it’s not just the Earth versus Ikumordo, it’s everyone versus Ikumordo. Every army on every planet in every galaxy in every fonking universe, all focused on one target. That.”

  Everyone’s gaze shifted to the big weird space thing. Orange tendrils were starting to sprout from its vaporous bulk.

  “I know it sounds impossible,” said Cal. “And, you know, maybe it is. Maybe the sensible thing would be to go home, be with the people we care about, and just wait for the end to come. But we’re Cal fonking Carver, and ‘sensible’ has never been our strong point.”

  He rejoined Mech, Miz and Loren, positioning himself so they were assembled behind him. Most of the audience was hanging on his every word now, aside from a couple of members, who were quietly wondering why he had a woman’s shoe on his shoulder.

  “So, I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m going to fight that thing. We’re going to fight that thing.” He gestured to the others behind him. “I mean, I haven’t asked them yet, but I’m just going to go ahead and assume they’re nodding their agreement right now, and ignore any evidence to the contrary.”

  He gestured angrily to Ikumordo again. “This big orange fonk thinks it can come here and start its shizz on our planet? It thinks it can take a bite out of our multi-verse? Not if I’ve got anything to say about it.” He ramped up his grin and looked out across his now silent audience. “So, who’s with me?”

  Not a single voice responded. No one moved, beyond a general lowering of heads and a bit of awkward shuffling.

  “Anyone?” said Cal, his smile hitting the down ramp again.

  Nothing.

  Lily clapped. “Well, nice speech. Seriously. Really powerful stuff.”

  Miz leaned over to Cal. “I think that was sarcasm.”

  “Yeah, spotted it, but thanks for the heads-up,” said Cal.

  Lily addressed the crowd. “Now that we’ve heard Ninety-Nine, let’s get back to the real world for a moment—”

  She stopped when she saw Old Man Carver shakily raise a frail arm.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll go.” He pointed to Cal. “With him, I mean.”

  Cal’s grin hit the rebound and widened again. He tapped his finger to his brow in salute. “Thank you.”

  The Carver in knight’s armor thrust a hand skyward. “Aye. I am in agreement.”

  “Ach, weel, ah dinnae see the hairm,” said Eighty-Three, raising one of his own stumpy arms. “Wur a’ dun fur, onyways.”

  And with that, the floodgates opened. More hands raised. More murmurs of agreement rose from the council, tentative at first, but quickly becoming bolder.

  “Let’s give it a go.”

  “We can do this.”

  “Let’s shove Saturn right up its shizzpipe!”

  That last one took everyone by surprise. Cal and the others all looked, as one, at Carver Two, who blushed slightly behind his beard. “I mean, maybe not exactly that,” he said. “But let’s go out there and teach it who it’s messing with.”

  Lily started at him in disbelief. “You can’t be serious. You know we don’t have a chance. Ikumordo is transdimensional. We can’t fight it on all dimensions at once.”

  “No,” Two admitted. “But we can try.”

  “You said there was a weapon or something. In the Void,” said Cal. “Something that could stop it.”

  Two nodded, but Lily interrupted before he could reply. “A rumor. A legen
d. That’s all. We can’t pin our hopes on a fairy tale.”

  Cal shrugged. “I bet a lot of folks think the same thing about Ikumordo, too. It’s real, though, so why can’t its weakness be real, too?”

  “Even if it was real – which it isn’t - it’s in the Void. How would we find it? Do you know how big the Void is?”

  Cal took a guess. “Very big?”

  “Infinitely big. No, bigger,” said Lily. “So big it contains an infinite number of infinities. And we don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

  “That may well be,” said Cal. “But ever hear the phrase, ‘a needle in a haystack’?”

  He nodded smugly and crossed his arms, as if he’d just delivered the knock-out blow.

  “Yes. What about it?” Lily asked.

  Cal frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Mech leaned forward. “Uh, what do you think that phrase means?”

  “That you can find even hard to find things, if you look for them,” said Cal.

  Mech shook his head. “Right. It don’t mean that.”

  “Doesn’t it? Since when?”

  “Since always, man,” said Mech.

  Cal looked around and was relieved to see many of the other Carvers looking as surprised as he did. “Well… What does it mean?”

  “It means there are some things that are next to impossible to find,” said Lily. “Some things you shouldn’t even bother looking for.”

  Cal snorted. “Nah. I think my one’s closer.”

  “It isn’t,” said Loren. She caught the look from him and shrugged apologetically. “Sorry. It means what she said.”

  “OK, fine,” said Cal. “Then full frontal assault it is. Our ship has weapons. We’ve got the Omega Cannon.”

  Carver Two’s eyebrows knotted. “What’s the Omega Cannon?”

  “We have no idea,” Cal admitted. “I mean, we think it could also potentially destroy the universe, but that suddenly doesn’t seem like quite such a big issue as it did up until now.”

  “So, we have one ship,” said Lily. “One ship with which to fight a reality-spanning being of unfathomable power.”