Space Team: Return of the Dead Guy

by Barry J. Hutchison

  “Kevin, how are your long range scanners doing?”

  “Fine, sir, thanks for asking.”

  “Good. Fire them up. Full sweep. Tell me if you see anything unusual.”

  There was a moment of silence. Reams of data flooded the right side of the screen. “There’s quite a lot of unusual activity, sir,” said Kevin. “As with Ikumordo, my sensors are having difficulty figuring out what’s what.”

  “Oh,” said Cal, deflating slightly. Lily’s expression turned from one of irritation to one of slightly smug irritation.

  “Although…” began Kevin.

  Cal straightened in his chair. “Yes?”

  “I am picking up something specifically unusual, sir. Unusual in the sense that it’s unlike all the other unusualness surrounding it.”

  “Aha!” said Cal. “What is it?”

  “It’s, well, I’m not sure how best to describe it,” said Kevin. “I suppose you might say it’s a thing, sir. My sensors have detected a thing.”

  Cal used his feet to whizz his chair around. He turned a full three-sixty, before stopping in front of Lily. “Oh snap!” he said. “Kevin done found us a thing!”

  “Why are you talking like that?” asked Loren.

  “I have no idea,” Cal admitted. “Kevin, plot us a course. Find us that thing!”

  “Very good, sir,” said Kevin.

  Lily shook her head. “There’s no point. Conventional physics, remember? He, or it, or whatever this thing is might be able to power on, but there’s no way it can—”

  The Untitled eased forwards as the thrusters engaged, sending Lily staggering backwards. Cal caught her arm and held her while she got her balance back. On screen, the darkness shifted as the Untitled pressed onwards into the Void.

  “No, that’s… This isn’t a Void ship,” Lily said. “How is this possible? It shouldn’t be moving. It can’t be moving.”

  “It is,” said Loren, studying her console. “Impulse power, but moving.”

  Lily shook her head again. “No. No, it isn’t.”

  Cal licked a finger and held it up, as if testing the wind. “Pretty sure it is.”

  “No, but It can’t be. It’s not possible. It’s not even theoretically possible. Well, no, it’s theoretically possible, but you’d need two entirely different drive systems, and unless they were occupying the same point in space and time, then…”

  She ran her fingers through her hair and chewed her tongue. Cal remembered both moves from when she used to struggle with her homework all those years ago.

  “I find it’s best not to worry about it,” Cal told her.

  “Well I do worry about it,” said Lily. “Lives depend on me worrying about it. Maybe everyone’s life.”

  Cal shrugged. “Fair enough,” he said. He unclipped his seatbelt, slapped his hands on his thighs, and stood up. “Then I know just the thing that’s going to help.”

  * * *

  Lily sat on a bench, peering in disbelief at the object on the table. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Cal nodded. “In the flesh,” he said. “Well, not ‘flesh’, obviously, that would be disgusting.” He pushed the plate towards her. “Grandma’s banoffee pie.”

  Lily brought her face closer to the pie and sniffed. “Oh, God, it smells just like it.”

  “It is it,” said Cal. “Well, based on my taste buds, memories, and whatever can be figured out by sticking a probe up by nose. Here.” He passed her his home made fork. She turned it over in her hands, then looked at him, quizzically.

  “Yeah, I had to make it myself. Turns out space isn’t big on forks.”

  “Oh?” said Lily. She considered this for a few minutes. “What do they use?”

  Cal shrugged. “All kinds of stuff. Sponges. I’ve eaten soup with a sponge. I’m not particularly proud of that fact.” He shrugged again. “Well, I’m a little bit proud.”

  Lily rested the fork on top of the pie, hesitated as if scared to proceed, then carved off a chunk. She hesitated a second time with the piece of pie held just in front of her mouth, then she popped it in, closed her eyes, and chewed.

  “Oh. Mm. Oh, wow.”

  “I know, right?” said Cal. He smiled as he watched her dive right in for a second piece. “You always did love grandma’s baking. I mean… she always loved… I mean, you probably did, too, but I meant my…”

  He abandoned the sentence, glanced down at the table to compose himself, then raised his eyes again. “Sorry, it’s just… This is hard. Amazing, don’t get me wrong. But hard.”

  Lily swallowed the second piece of pie and nodded. “I know what you mean. It’s… weird. Sitting here. Like this. The accident, it took… everything. Well, I mean, I guess you’d know.”

  “Ooh, yeah,” said Cal. He began tracing the contours of the table with a fingernail. “I was supposed to have been driving, but I stayed home. No real reason, I just… I stayed home. I’ve always wondered what might have happened, you know? Maybe they’d still be here.” He gestured around at the Untitled. “Well, probably not here.”

  Lily set the fork down on the plate and slid the pie across the table. Cal looked at it for a few seconds, as if he had no idea what it was, then picked up the fork and began to eat.

  “I’ve been all across the multi-verse looking for a Cal Carver like my dad,” Lily said. “You’re dead in a lot of universes. Like, a lot. You’ve been shot, blown up, drowned, executed by alien overlords, carried away by a giant moth…”

  “Jesus,” said Cal, through a mouthful of pie. “Who’d want to shoot me?”

  “Turns out, quite a number of people,” said Lily. “Moderate to high, even.”

  Cal shoveled more pie into his face. “Still, giant moth sounds awesome.”

  Lily nodded. “Yeah, can’t argue with that. But my point is, in at least one of those universes, you and your whole family – I mean, you know, us and our whole family, I guess – were killed in a car accident.”

  She reached across the table and took back the pie before Cal could finish it all. “Maybe you would have made a difference. I mean somewhere, you did, because that’s just how the multi-verse works. But maybe your universe would have been one of those without a Cal Carver in it. And, from what I can gather, you’ve helped a lot of people.”

  Cal nodded slowly, watching her finish off the rest of the pie. “Jesus. When did you get so wise?”

  Lily shrugged. “I get it from my mom’s side.”

  Cal grinned. “You can say that again.”

  They sat in silence for a while, the table like a gulf between them, neither one knowing quite what to say. There was a question on Cal’s mind – Hell, there were a lot of questions on Cal’s mind. He wanted to know about school, about friends – boyfriends? – about her favorite things to do, the places she hung out, the life she’d gone on to live.

  He wasn’t sure, though, if he was ready to hear the answers to all those little questions, so he asked the big question on his mind, instead.

  “Why me?”

  Lily frowned. “Huh?”

  “I mean, you needed someone to volunteer their universe to Ikumordo. Why me?”

  “Oh. Uh, well…” She sighed. “It sounds a bit… clinical. You were the one who had the least to lose. You know, wife dead, daughter dead, parents, other relatives, friends, acquaintances. Basically the whole of Earth dead.”

  “I think we’ve established that,” said Cal. “Everyone dead. Got it. But that’s just Earth.”

  “I didn’t consider the space thing,” said Lily. “I thought you’d gladly sacrifice a dead Earth to save all those people you knew on other Earths. It didn’t occur to me that you’d see the bigger picture, or whatever. The rest of the universe.”

  Cal nodded for several seconds, processing this. “But you knew? You saw the bigger picture? You knew what you were asking me to sacrifice?”

  Lily paused, just for a moment, but then continued. “Yes. I knew. But it’s like I said, the needs of the many.”<
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  “You’d have killed the whole universe. I would have killed the whole universe.”

  “Not us, Ikumordo. And not the whole universe, a whole universe,” Lily said. She pushed the plate aside, and the gulf between them seemed to widen. “Instead, thanks to your pointless bravado, it’s going to kill every universe. It’s going to end all existence everywhere. In what way is that a victory?”

  “It isn’t,” said Cal.

  “Exactly. It isn’t a victory, it’s—”

  “No, I mean it isn’t going to kill every universe,” said Cal. “It’s not going to kill any universe. Because we’re going to stop it.” He raised his voice. “Kevin, how we doing on that thing?”

  “I think we’re getting closer, sir, although it’s difficult to tell.”

  “How long until we get there?”

  “Ooh, tricky to say, sir.”

  “Take a wild guess,” said Cal.

  Kevin replied immediately. “Fifteen thousand years.”

  A micro-expression of panic flashed across Cal’s face, then was gone. “Take a less wild guess.”

  There were a few protracted moments of silence while Kevin calculated. “An hour or two, sir. Perhaps less, but possibly more.”

  “OK. That’s more like it. Can you get a message to Mech?”

  Lily tutted. “Of course he can’t, we’re in the Void.”

  “Master Mech on the line now, sir,” said Kevin. The sentence was followed by a series of screams, the sound of gunfire, and the roar of something that might have been a rhinoceros.

  “Good to hear from you, man, but now ain’t exactly a good time,” said Mech.

  “Argh! My legs!” howled someone in the background.

  Lily gaped up at the ceiling, where the sound was coming from. “No. It’s not. This is a trick. How is this…? No.”

  “Where are you?” asked Cal. “Sounds like fun.”

  “Yaaark! What the fonk is that thing? It’s got two heads!”

  “Long story,” said Mech. He grunted, as if he’d just punched something very heavy, very hard. Which, as it just so happened, he had. “You?”

  “We’re in the gap between universes,” said Cal. “Also a long story. We might have a lead on something that can stop Ikumordo, though. Can you keep it busy for us until we get back?”

  “How the fonk are we supposed to keep it busy?” Mech demanded.

  “It’s breathing fire! Jesus Christ!”

  “You’ll think of something,” said Cal.

  “Fine. I’ll think of something,” said Mech, although he didn’t sound best pleased about it. “How long you gonna be?”

  “Probably a couple of hours,” said Cal. “But no more than fifteen thousand years, tops.”

  Mech’s reply was drowned out by a brief staccato of gunfire, which was probably just as well.

  “I’m with Loren. Is Miz with you?” Cal asked.

  “No,” said Mech. “No, she’s… She’s gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “Just gone, man. The darkness. The Void, or whatever, it pulled her in. It got her.”

  Cal said nothing for quite a long time. He drummed his fingers on the table, staring up at the speaker, hoping Mech was about to pull one of Kevin’s ‘just my little joke’ tricks.

  “Oh,” he said, when he realized Mech wasn’t going to do that. “Shizz. And Splurt?”

  “He’s here. Some of the Carvers, too. Number Two, some of the others.”

  “OK. OK, good,” said Cal. He closed his eyes and for a moment saw Miz scowling at him from the darkness. “Well, do what you can. We’ll be back soon.”

  “Ish,” added Kevin.

  “Get it off me! Get it off me! Oh God!”

  “Will do,” said Mech. “Oh and, you know, take care of yourself, or whatever.”

  Cal nodded. “You, too.”

  There was another burst of gunfire, some more screams, and then the connection dropped. Lily looked from Cal to the ceiling and back again a number of times, her mouth trying to form a question, but unable to settle on which one. She decided to go wide.

  “How?” she asked.

  “How what?”

  “We’re in the Void!”

  “I know. You keep saying that.”

  “But, I mean… How? You can’t just radio out of the Void. It’s impossible.”

  Cal snorted. “I thought you were some kind of science whizz genius? Nothing’s impossible. Everyone knows that.”

  “No, people who make stupid motivational posters know that,” said Lily. “Lots of things are impossible.” She looked up and raised her voice. “You. Ship. How did you do that?”

  There was silence. Quite a deliberate silence, as if someone was making a point of not saying anything.

  “Well? How did you do it? It must be a trick.”

  “Sorry, is she talking to me?” Kevin asked.

  “I think so,” said Cal. He turned to Lily. “His name’s Kevin, not ‘ship’. He’s not the ship. He just works here. He’s one of the crew.”

  Lily regarded him as if he’d just claimed all Norwegians could fly. “Right,” she said, dragging the word out. “Well, Kevin, how did you do that?”

  “Simple. I routed the transmission through those clamp things attached to the outside of the ship.”

  “You jumped the audio feed?” Lily gasped. “That’s… I mean, I don’t know how you… That’s brilliant.”

  “Yes, it was rather, isn’t it?” said Kevin. “It was all going so swimmingly for a while, but they seem to be non-responsive now.”

  “They’re designed for short-term usage. One quick jump, then they need time to recharge,” Lily said. “Alternatively, you’ve broken them, and we’re going to be stuck here in the Void for the rest of our lives.” She met Cal and Loren’s horrified gazes. “But hopefully the first one,” she said, as reassuringly as she could.

  “Being stuck here for the rest of our lives wouldn’t be so bad,” said Kevin.

  “In what way wouldn’t that be bad?” Cal asked.

  “I simply meant that the rest of your lives is unlikely to be a very long period of time, sir.”

  The Untitled rocked as something detonated against the hull. “It appears we’re under attack.”

  “What? That’s impossible!” said Lily.

  “Nothing’s impossible,” Cal insisted, jumping to his feet.

  “Yes, it is!”

  “Who from?” asked Cal. “Who’s shooting at us?”

  “That’s where it gets really rather intriguing, sir,” said Kevin. “It appears we’re shooting at ourselves.”

  He waited for a few moments, before adding: “Bet you didn’t see that one coming, did you?”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “This’n must be our lucky day, boys,” said the voice in the fog. “Two delicious-looking gift baskets in the same hour, delivered unto us by the good Lord Himself.”

  “Amen, Cletus,” sniggered another voice. “We gonna cook them all together, or save these ones for later?”

  The first man – Cletus – cleared his nasal passages in a long, protracted series of snorts and grunts, then spat the wad onto the scorched Earth. “Them little ‘uns looks like they’d make mighty fine appetizers. Maybe we’n should roast us a few of those up, first, before we have us the main course.”

  Old Man Carver raised his hands and gestured for the others to do the same. A couple of the Dwarves joined in, before the dirty looks this drew from the others made them lower their hands again.

  Miz remained slouched on one hip, her arms folded indignantly.

  “We don’t want any trouble,” said the old man. “Please, put down your guns.”

  “Guns?” Cletus sneered. “Come on now, old timer, we don’t need guns.”

  Old Man Carver shot Miz a meaningful look. Miz nodded. “Good to know,” she said, then she bounded into the ring of lights, claws and teeth glinting in the artificial glow.

  “Sweet Mother of Christ!” squealed Clet
us, barely reaching the exclamation point before his insides became his outsides, and his future became a thing of the past.

  The Carvers pulled together in the circle as Miz did the rounds. Screams and wails began to come from all directions. A wild-eyed man with a beard to put the Dwarves’ to shame charged into the circle of light, arms flapping. A clawed hand caught him by the top of the head and wrenched him back into the shadows.

  “No, oh no, oh no!” he cried, then he screamed, briefly, before something snapped with a loud, slightly damp-sounding pop, shutting him up. Permanently.

  “Fit a fine quine ‘at is,” breathed Carver Eighty-Three, gazing into the darkness with something that hovered right on the border between admiration and lust. “Fit a fine, sturdy figure o’ a quine.”

  A minute or so of spectacular violence later, Miz flicked the blood from her claws and tore open the back doors of one of the vehicles. It was a beat-up old truck with a variety of symbols painted amateurishly on the side and, more importantly, a variety of Cal Carvers all tied up in the back. They screamed when Miz appeared out of the ash-fog, gore dripping from her terrible jaws.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she scowled, slicing through their bonds with her fingernails. “Maybe, like, a ‘thank you’ wouldn’t go amiss.”

  The Carvers hurried out of the truck, ran around in panicky circles, then were shepherded into the circle by Miz. They collided with the other Carvers already there, and there was a happy few moments while they enjoyed their reunion, before Old Man Carver opened another door.

  “Right then,” he said. “Let’s see where this one goes.”

  * * *

  Mech leaned out through an energy door, looked around to make sure nothing was going to shoot him, then stepped all the way through. Number Two and the other Carvers followed, emerging into a lush green field fringed by trees.

  Some sheep were grazing at the field’s far end. The animals looked in the direction of the newcomers, then one broke into a canter and began the long run towards them.

  There was a clear view of the sky here, and the sight of Ikumordo sent little gasps of shock through the group. The orange space cloud had grown like a particularly malignant tumor, its fingers stretching almost all the way to the horizon in every direction, and plunging the world into a slightly ethereal shimmering shade.