Space Team: The Wrath of Vajazzle

by Barry J. Hutchison

“Well I’m un-decreeing it,” said Miz. “I don’t want to marry you.”

  Kannus stepped back, shaken. “But… But…”

  “I swear, if you say ‘I don’t understand,’ one more time,” said Miz.

  “I don’t understand,” said Kannus. “I am to be king!”

  “And you can still be king,” said Miz. “Seriously, you’ll be awesome. You’ve been training and, you know, all that other stuff. You can totally be king.”

  “How can I be king without a queen?” Kannus demanded.

  Miz shrugged. “You’ll figure something out. How about what’s her name? Horri. From school, remember? She was totally into you. You should look her up. I bet she’d love to be—”

  “Silence!” Kannus roared, his face twisting up in rage. “I will tolerate no more of this… this nonsense. You are my wife, and you will serve your king as you are duty bound to.”

  Mizette spun on her heels and began walking away. “OK, I can see we’re done here.”

  “Do not turn your back on me,” Kannus growled. His leg muscles bunched, his fingers splaying into claws. Before he could pounce a piercing bleep sounded from a metal cuff around his wrist.

  “Kannus,” intoned the voice of Graxan. Mizette stopped and turned to listen. “Join me on the royal transport at once. There has been a development.”

  “Yes, Your Majety. At once,” said Kannus. His eyes went to Mizette. “Your daughter is with me.”

  “Then bring her,” Graxan commanded. “This concerns her, too. The future of the Greyx may be in peril.”

  * * *

  “So, which do you think?” asked Cal, holding up two shirts on hangers. “The black one, which is probably more space piratey, or the blue one?”

  Loren was on the floor of the bench room, rattling through a quite staggering number of push-ups. Cal had no idea how many she’d done before he joined her, but she’d hammered out a solid dozen in the few seconds since he’d arrived.

  She looked up, not breaking her stride, and gave both shirts a cursory glance. “Black one,” she said.

  “You think?” said Cal. He held it at arm’s length and studied it. “It’s not too David Hasselhoff?”

  “I have no idea who that is,” said Loren.

  “He had a talking car. Brought down the Berlin Wall,” said Cal. He lowered the shirt. “I wonder if he’s still alive.”

  “Probably not,” said Loren, dipping into another push-up.

  “I dunno,” said Cal. “If anyone could survive an invasion of alien bug parasites, it’s the Hoff.” He thought about this for a moment. “Actually, no. He’s totally dead.”

  He draped the blue shirt over the bench and pulled off his heavily creased, food-stained purple one, taking great care to tighten his stomach muscles and stick out his chest. To his disappointment, Loren’s stride didn’t falter even for a second.

  “Aren’t you going to take a shower before you put that on?” she asked.

  Cal frowned. “Wait… we have a shower?”

  “Of course we have a shower. How could you miss it? It’s in the bathroom right next to the toilet.”

  Cal gasped. “We have a toilet?”

  Loren stopped at the top of a push-up. “Of course. Why, what have you been doing?”

  Cal smiled, but shifted on his feet. “I mean, yeah, I knew we had a toilet. Of course. I’ve been using it for, like, almost a week. It’s just out there on the…”

  “Right,” said Loren.

  “On the right. Exactly. Totally knew that’s where it was.” He clutched the black shirt to his chest as he backed towards the door. “I’m gonna be back in ten minutes,” he said, then he ducked out into the corridor, turned right and scurried towards a door he’d always just assumed for some reason was a closet.

  Just as he reached the door, he heard a muttering from the engine room further along the ship. Cal hesitated, his thumb poised above the ‘open’ button on the wall.

  With a sigh of disappointment, he shot the door a longing glance, pulled on the shirt, then followed the muttering.

  “Hey, Mech, what’s up?” Cal asked.

  Mech stood over by the warp disk containment unit, his eyes looping in tight circles as he watched the shiny white disk spin.

  Cal leaned on the doorframe, fastening the shirt’s buttons. Annoyingly, there was a security tag on one of the cuffs which he’d forgotten to remove at the store. He fiddled with it, trying to pry it open.

  “Nothing,” said Mech.

  Cal shrugged. “OK,” he said, turning away.

  “It’s just…”

  Cal went back to leaning on the wall. “It’s just…?”

  Mech looked up. There was very little of his face that wasn’t made of metal, but what there was of it looked pained. “They controlled me. Like a fonking puppet. Sinclair, Jjin, whoever. Zertex, they controlled me.”

  Cal nodded. “Yeah. They implanted, what, some sort of space remote control or whatever? You got rid of it. It’s no big deal.”

  He moved to walk away again.

  “But what if I didn’t? What if they got another one? I mean, shizz, for all I know they’re controlling me now.”

  Cal returned to leaning on the door. He sucked his bottom lip. “I can see why that might worry you. Could we transfer your brain to another body?”

  Mech’s brow furrowed. “Say what?”

  “You know, just to be on the safe side until we get that body checked out? We could, like, pop you onto a USB memory stick or something, then plug you into the ship’s computer. I’m assuming the ship has a computer, by the way? You could be a face on the screen, chiming in with wisecracks and stuff, and we’d all be drawing mustaches on you, and that sort of thing. I don’t know about you, but I am very excited about this idea.”

  “I ain’t a robot! How many times do I gotta tell you?”

  “Are you absolutely sure, though?” asked Cal.

  “Yes!” He tapped a metal finger against his non-metal forehead. “You can’t move my brain to another body, least not without a hacksaw, a bucket and a whole lot of motherfonkin’ elbow grease.”

  “OK, OK, you’re not a robot. Fine, I get it!” Cal said, raising his hands for calm. He couldn’t help but notice the white tag on his cuff. “Hey, do you have, like, some sort of robotic attachment or something that can take this tag off? I don’t want it shooting ink all over the place.”

  Mech shook his head, his metal fingers curling into fists. “Fonk you, man.”

  Cal grinned. “Hey, I’m kidding!” he said. “No-one’s controlling you, Mech. You cleared them out. If they were controlling you, would they have let you punch a hole in their ship like you did back at that breakfast buffet place?”

  Mech’s metal shoulders raised and lowered in the galaxy’s noisiest shrug.

  “They wouldn’t. You’re not their puppet, Mech. You’re, like, Robocop, Terminator and the donkey from Shrek all rolled into one.”

  Mech opened his mouth. Cal jumped in before he could speak.

  “I know, I know, you have no idea what any of those things are,” he said. “But trust me. They’re awesome. I mean, yeah, Donkey’s an annoying fonk at times and there’s a fifty-fifty chance the Terminator will try to go back in time and kill your kids, but…” Cal frowned. “I have no idea where I was going with that.”

  He beamed. “Still, good chat!” he said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve recently found out we have a toilet.”

  An urgent bleep rang out from the front of the ship. Cal sighed. “Oh, what now?”

  He headed for the front. Loren stepped out of the bench room in front of him, her shoulders and the patch of her back he could see glistening with sweat. He resisted the urge to say something wildly inappropriate and followed her in silence through to the flight deck.

  A flick of a switch later and Mizette’s face filled the screen. “Hey, Miz, how’s it going?” Cal asked.

  Miz glanced ba
ck over her shoulder. She was on a ship Cal didn’t recognize. Behind her, he could see Kannus deep in conversation with Graxan.

  “Everything OK?” he asked.

  Miz shook her head. “No. Can you guys get over to my dad’s ship? There’s something you need to see.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Lontho Oom was dead. That much was certain.

  His normally rosy cheeks were almost translucently pale. His eyes, known for their sparkling kindness, were glassy and lifeless.

  Also, he had a big hole in the middle of his forehead, through which his brains were visible. That was probably the biggest clue.

  “Who’s the upside-down dead guy?” asked Cal, bending his neck to try to get a better look at the grainy, black and white picture.

  “His name was Lontho Oom,” said Graxan. The king of the Greyx was sitting in a throne-like captain’s chair, raised up in the center of his ship’s bridge. The bridge itself was grand and opulent, but it was a tired and faded sort of opulence, like a palace that had been decorated in the 1970s and never updated.

  Purple curtains draped over wood-paneled walls that were set with little gold lamps. The floor was covered in a vast brown carpet which, given the ship’s inhabitants, Cal thought, must surely be a magnet for dog hair.

  “He was a… friend of both mine and my father’s,” Graxan said. “A long-time ally of the Greyx.”

  “What happened?” asked Loren.

  “He was murdered,” Kannus spat. He jabbed a claw towards Cal. “Because of him.”

  “Me? What did I do?”

  Mizette, who stood beside her mother at the bottom of Graxan’s throne platform, stepped forward. “They think Vajazzle did this.”

  Cal snorted. “Vajazzle,” he said, then he realized everyone was staring at him and cleared his throat. “I mean… why? Why would she kill this guy?”

  “Lontho was the keeper of secrets,” said Graxan, as if that explained everything.

  “Right. OK. What kind of secrets?” Cal asked, when it was clear nothing else was being volunteered. “Like lotto numbers, or…?”

  “Tell me, Earth man, what do you know of the history of the Greyx?” Graxan asked.

  Cal puffed out his cheeks. “Depends. If I say ‘a lot’ is there going to be a quiz? Because I don’t test well.”

  Graxan’s ears twitched, as if flicking away a fly. “There is a… story of a Greyx named Rhaxus. He is the one said to have united the warring Greyx nations under one cause. Before Rhaxus, Greyx was much like your Earth. Nations at war, brother fighting brother over perceived differences that didn’t really exist. Rhaxus stopped that. Rhaxus made us one.”

  Graxan’s voice had become a hushed, respectful whisper. “And then, he took us to the stars. Once he had, once he’d set us on our path, he vanished. His final resting place was never discovered.”

  Cal glanced around the bridge. Mech and Loren stood on either side of him, but they’d left Splurt back on the ship. The moment Cal had spotted the carpet, he knew he’d made the right decision. If Splurt had been rolling around in that thing, they’d be picking hair off him for weeks.

  There were four uniformed Greyx positioned at terminals around the room, and two over by the door. Kannus was with Graxan on his plinth, standing a half-step beside his throne. His amber eyes burned into Cal with an intensity that threatened to make him burst into flames at any moment.

  “That’s a nice story,” said Cal. “I mean, it could’ve done with a car chase and a sex scene, but still.”

  “It is not just a story,” said Graxan. “Rhaxus was very real. He was a great leader, and like all great leaders, his actions were not always noble.”

  “Man, you are dragging this shizz out,” tutted Mech. “What’s it got to do with the dead guy?”

  Mizette took up the tale. Clearly she was keen to get to the end, too. “The legend says he had this, like, spear thing.”

  “The Bladestaff,” said Graxan.

  “Or whatever,” said Miz. “That was, like, magic or something. It let him control the Greyx. That’s how he stopped all the wars, by forcing everyone to do what he said.”

  “Nice guy,” said Cal.

  “Leaders don’t have to be nice,” said Graxan. “They have to be effective. ‘Nice’ is a luxury they can rarely afford.”

  Mech grunted. “I still don’t see what any of this has got to do with the upside-down dead dude.”

  Graxan drummed his claws on the arm of his throne, then turned his gaze to Miz. “You’re certain they can be trusted?”

  Miz nodded. “Yeah. Totally.”

  Graxan inhaled slowly through his nose. “Very well. One of Lontho Oom’s many secrets was the location of a key. Or, more accurately, the location of an individual who knew the location of a key.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Cal. “I think. What’s the key open?”

  “A lock,” said Graxan.

  “You don’t fonking say,” Mech snapped.

  “Don’t mind him,” said Cal, gesturing to the cyborg. “He’s having emotional issues. You were saying something about a lock?”

  Graxan shifted on his throne. He rolled his tongue around in his mouth, as if wrestling the words out. Kannus placed a hand on the back of the throne and leaned closer.

  “Great Graxan, I must advise…” he began, but Graxan waved a hand and dismissed the advice before it could be given.

  “The lock is to a vault. The vault contains the Bladestaff of Rhaxus. Whoever possesses the Bladestaff…”

  “Could rule the Greyx,” said Loren. “You think someone’s trying to find it?”

  “I believe it is a possibility,” said Graxan. “The manner of Lontho’s death suggests he was probed by Vajazzle.”

  Cal bit his lip.

  “Who sent the footage?” Loren asked.

  “We don’t know,” said Graxan. “Possibly the assassin herself.”

  “That don’t make no sense,” Mech said. “If she’s going after this staff thing of yours, why’s she warning you? Why not just go get it?”

  “Did someone turn your brainpower down?” asked Cal, making a show of studying Mech’s power diversion dial. “To lure them out. Or to lure us out, probably. It’s a trap.” He turned to Loren. “Right?”

  “We agree,” said Graxan. “It is a trap.”

  “So, you want my advice? You swoop in to wherever this Bladestaff is hidden, and you get it before she does.”

  “It is not that simple,” said Graxan. “The location of the vault is known only to one person. Another ally of the Greyx. He does not know where the key is, and the keykeeper does not know where the vault is hidden. The Bladestaff is too big a secret for one person to hold. Not even I know where to find it.”

  “They think Vajazzle is going to go after the key guy, kill him, get the key, then go find the vault,” said Miz. “So someone needs to go stop her.”

  Cal rocked on his heels. “Good luck with that,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know the woman, but she looked pretty fierce, with that creepy eye and the robe and everything.”

  “I said we’d go,” said Miz.

  “Say what?” Mech said.

  Cal frowned. “What… ‘we’ as in us four and Splurt? That ‘we’?”

  Miz nodded. “Yeah. Our ship’s faster, we can get to the key guy before she does.”

  “I will come with you,” said Kannus.

  “OK, one, that’s not going to happen,” said Cal. “We’ve only got three seats. Mech already has to stand, and just look at how miserable that’s made him.”

  “Shut up, man.”

  “See? No, we’ve got a full crew already,” Cal concluded. “Still, thanks for the offer.”

  “And what is ‘two’?” asked Graxan.

  “Huh?”

  “You said ‘one, that’s not going to happen,’” Graxan intoned. “Implying a ‘two.’”

  Cal nodded. “You’re right, that t
otally implies a ‘two,’ but I can’t remember what it was going to be,” he said. He shrugged. “Ah, what the Hell? Yeah, we’ll do it. We’ll go.”

  “We will?” said Loren.

  “Just like that?” said Mech. “No discussion, no consultation…”

  “I will take the princess’s place,” said Kannus, stepping down from the plinth. “Her place is here, with her father.”

  “What? No way,” said Miz. “I’m going with them.”

  Kannus bristled. “This is not open for discussion.”

  “Know your place, daughter,” warned Graxan. “The time for your tantrums is past. Kannus will go.”

  “No!” Miz protested. “They’re my friends, I’m going with them.”

  “Kannus! Control your Lifebound,” Graxan barked, slamming a fist on the arm of his throne. Kannus’s orange eyes darkened. His muzzle raised, baring a staggering number of teeth.

  Just before he could make his move, Cal stepped in front of him, a palm-sized device clutched between his finger and thumb. “Whoa there tall, dark and hairsome,” he said. “Let’s just calm down, shall we?”

  Kannus flashed his claws, but Cal raised the device higher. “I wouldn’t,” he warned. “You ever heard of a Dead Man’s Switch? If I let go of this button, this thing goes off and it’s going to make a real mess of your carpet, drapes and everything within a ten mile radius.”

  All eyes went to the device in Cal’s hand. “You’re bluffing,” said Kannus.

  “You know something? Maybe I am,” said Cal. “Seriously, I have no idea if I’m going to let go of this thing or not. But I do know there’s only one way to find out. What do you say?”

  The silence that followed was broken by Miz’s mother, Sorshi. “I am but a woman and know little of such matters,” she said, bowing respectfully to both Kannus and Graxan. “But might it make sense to send Kannus and his ship to whoever knows the location of the vault, while Mizette and her companions protect the keykeeper?” She bowed again, more deeply this time. “Forgive my impertinence.”

  Graxan’s eyes narrowed. He sat that way for a while, before finally speaking.

  “Very well. Both ships shall go. Mizette may go, on the understanding she returns in order to undertake her royal duties.”