“Oh, I have your permission?” Miz scowled. “Gee, thanks.”
“That was sarcasm, by the way,” said Loren. She and the others followed Cal as he backed towards the door, the explosive device still held in front of him.
“Send over the address or whatever and we’ll get on it,” said Cal. “We’ll find your key guy before he gets Vajazzled. That’s a Cal Carver guarantee.”
The door swished open at his back. “Which, by the way, isn’t actually legally binding or anything, just so we’re clear.”
With a final nod, he lowered his arm, grinned at the room in general, then strode out into the corridor.
A few minutes later, when they were safely off Graxan’s ship and making their way back up the hill, Loren shot Cal’s explosive disk a wary look. “Where did you get that? It wasn’t in the armory.”
Cal looked down at the circle of plastic, as if only just remembering he had it. “What this?” He flipped it like a coin and caught it. “It’s the security tag from my shirt. I managed to get it off when Graxan was talking.” He held it up and gave the pin a gentle tug. “See?” he said, then the disk went pop splattering his face with yellow ink.
“Huh,” said Loren. “You were right. That would have made a real mess of the carpet.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The shower had been magnificent. The toilet, even more so.
And now that his hair was dry and his bladder was empty, and the thing that was a bit like a kitten was playing on the viewscreen, Cal strummed to the end of one of his many number one hit singles.
“I call that one, ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart,” said Cal, who had run out of proper space-based songs to claim credit for, and was really starting to clutch at straws.
He looked around the flight deck, hoping for some applause, then screamed when he spotted a complete stranger standing near the door. No, not a stranger, he realized. He’d know that lion’s mane of hair and eyeshadow overdose anywhere.
It was Bonnie Tyler.
Cal raised a hand and gave Bonnie Tyler a wave.
Bonnie Tyler waved back.
A moment later, she collapsed in on herself, becoming a gelatinous green ball on the floor. Splurt rolled towards Cal and nuzzled against his legs. Cal had almost forgotten about the little guy’s mind-reading ability. He wondered how accurately he could imagine a naked Jessica Alba, but then quickly pushed the thought away.
“Who the fonk was that?” asked Mech.
“Who? Oh, her. Just… someone that I used to know,” said Cal. He plucked out a chord. “Which reminds me of another song I wrote,” he began, but before he could inflict any more of his singing on the rest of the crew the Shatner dropped out of warp.
“Not again!” Cal groaned, as his belt tightened across his chest, slamming him back against the seat. His guitar flew forwards out of his hands until the strap went tight, then reversed sharply as the ship stopped. It hit his face with a thud and a twrang, both of which sounded better than his entire rendition of ‘The Final Countdown’ had, just a few minutes previously.
“What have you done this time?” snapped Miz, her claws digging into the arms of her chair to stop her sliding out.
“Is it the warp disk? I bet it’s the warp disk,” said Mech. “I bet you broke the motherfonkin’ warp disk again.”
“I didn’t do anything!” protested Loren.
“Yeah, you said that last time,” said Miz.
“And it wasn’t me last time!” Loren said. “Sinclair had sabotaged us.”
“So you say,” Miz snapped.
“Ladies, ladies, let’s take a deep breath and just calm down, OK?” said Cal. He smiled at them both in turn. “There. Isn’t that better? There’s no need to panic. I’m sure it’s just a…”
There was a clang as something metal hit the outside of the ship directly above where Cal sat. His eyes went to the ceiling. “OK, maybe we should panic a little,” he whispered. “What the Hell was that?”
Loren began frantically flipping the controls. “Oh no. No, no, no, no,” she muttered.
“That’s a lot of nos,” said Cal. There was another metallic clang from somewhere towards the back of the ship. “What is it? Loren, speak to me here!”
The image of the not-quite-kitten vanished and was replaced by the now-familiar view of outer space. What was less familiar to Cal was the almost perfectly rectangular spaceship floating just above them and to the right. Something about the ship’s blocky, functional construction, and the scorch marks that painted its sides like rust made him immediately think of a garbage truck.
“Who is that?” asked Cal.
“Scrivers,” groaned Mech. “It had to be Scrivers.”
“Who or what are ‘Scrivers’?” Cal asked, then he jumped as something the color of old copper landed on the viewscreen. “Jesus Christ, what the fonk is that?” he yelped.
If he had to describe the thing in one word, Cal would have said, ‘robot octopus,’ even if only to annoy whoever had asked him. It had more legs than an octopus – twelve, he thought, although they were moving too quickly to say for sure – and unlike your more traditional Earth octopus, this one was made of metal.
Before anyone could get a closer look at the thing, the screen flickered. The image of the octobot was replaced by rolling lines of static, as half a dozen other thuds and clanks vibrated through the hull of the ship.
“They’re scavengers,” Loren said, hurriedly flipping more switches. “They intercept ships in deep space then tear them apart for scrap.”
“Yeah, but… they wouldn’t do that to us, would they?” Cal asked.
“They’re doing it to us right now!” Mech barked. “Sensors show a dozen on the hull. More incoming.”
“What do we do?” asked Miz.
“Wait, I’ve got it!” announced Cal. “Do we have a thing where, like, we shoot an electrical charge out of the ship in all directions at once, frying those things before they can do any real damage?”
“No,” said Loren.
“Shizz,” said Cal. “Then I’m out of ideas. We should really invest in one of those things, though. It’ll pay for itself in no time. Assuming we survive.”
The lights flickered, and the ship plunged briefly into darkness.
“Which, I’ll admit, is looking increasingly unlikely,” Cal said.
“Can’t we go to warp and shake them off?” asked Miz.
“No, they’re jamming most of our systems,” said Loren. “That ship’s loaded with tech stolen from all over the galaxy.”
“So what do we still have?” asked Cal. At his feet, Splurt trembled gently. He reached down and scratched the little guy’s head. “Easy, buddy, we’re not done yet.”
“I make life support, shields and weapons,” said Mech.
“They’re on a protected circuit. Makes sense,” Loren said.
“And what don’t we have?” asked Cal. He watched as his guitar and Splurt both lifted into the air and bobbed towards the ceiling. “I’m no expert, but I’m guessing gravity isn’t working?”
“Gravity, impulse engines, warp, sensors, communications…”
“Is the shower still working?”
Loren flipped another switch. “Doubt it.”
“Son of a bedge!” Cal sighed. Somewhere above his head, metal legs scuttled across the hull. “What if we blow up the ship?”
“Then we’d all die,” said Miz.
“No, not our ship. The other ship. What if we blow up that one? Would that stop the octobots?”
“Yeah, that’d stop them,” said Mech. “But how do you suggest we do that? We can’t see it.”
Cal turned his chair to face him. “Can’t we use the scanners to find it?”
“I told you, sensors are down,” said Loren.
“Yeah, sensors are down, but what about the scanners?” asked Cal. His brow furrowed. “Wait… they’re not the same thing, are they?”
“
Yes!” said Loren.
“Sensors and scanners are the same thing?” Cal groaned. “Well, we need to decide on a naming convention so no-one gets…” The lights went out again. This time, they didn’t come back on. “OK, so that’s not good. We need to blow that thing up right now.”
“I told you, we can’t see the ship. How can we shoot what we can’t see?”
Cal thumped the arm of his chair and raised his arms as his control console unfolded. The panels locked into place, forming a quarter circle beneath each arm. The chair gripped his neck, holding him steady as a visor slid over his head and adjusted to size across his eyes. For a moment, he felt like he were seeing a bird’s eye view of the universe, then he gasped as the virtual reality image rushed towards a spot just left of the center.
It stopped in a disappointing blizzard of static. “Fonk it. The gun helmet screen thingy is blocked, too.”
The Shatner creaked and groaned as the octobots scrambled around on the outside. Cal slammed the heel of his hand against the headset, trying to clear the image. “What do we know about these guys? The ones flying the ship, I mean. Anything?”
“They’re scavengers. Scrivers. They track down ships--”
“Yeah, you said that already, anything else?” asked Cal. “So they send their little robot pals to tear the ship a new one, then what?”
“They take the salvage back to their own ship, then they blow whatever’s left to pieces to cover their tracks,” Mech explained.
A screech of metal on metal vibrated through the hull. “They’re going to come through,” warned Loren. “They’re going to tear their way in. We need to suit up.”
“Wait,” said Cal. “They blow the ship up?”
“We’re totally going to be dead by then,” said Miz.
“Yeah, they blow it up,” said Mech.
“Excellent!” said Cal, grinning beneath the visor.
“In what reality is that excellent?” Loren cried.
“We’ve still got shields, right?” said Cal. “And they, the other ship, the Scriver guys, they’ll have sensors or scanners or whatever the fonk we’re calling them today. Yes?”
“Right,” said Loren. “So?”
Cal spun in his chair. “So I know where they are.”
Mech snorted. “What? No way. How can you know where they are? You can’t see nothing.”
“Because if he can scan our shields, he knows we don’t have any at the back,” Cal said. “He’s going to shoot up right up the shizzpipe.”
Cal found the joysticks that let him control the weapons. “Which is torpedoes again?” he asked.
“You can’t fire the torpedoes!” said Mech. “The launch tube ain’t fixed.”
“Fonk it,” Cal muttered. “OK, which one isn’t the torpedoes then?”
“Cannons are on the left,” said Loren.
Cal gripped the left stick. His thumb found the button. “OK, eat this you shower-wrecking shizznod,” he growled, then he opened fire.
“Uh, you know you ain’t facing the back, right?” said Mech.
Cal stopped firing. “No, I did not know that,” he said. “Could someone point me in the right direction?”
He heard the sound of metal footsteps, then his chair was quite forcibly spun to the left. “There,” said Mech. Something up near the ceiling went bang then fzzzt and Cal felt hot sparks rain down around him. “And hurry up!”
Cal’s finger hovered over the trigger. Through the headset, he was lost in a sea of static interference that flashed and flickered erratically all around him. And yet… There was a shape. No, not a shape. A suggestion of a shape that loomed somewhere ahead. He squinted, trying to focus, but the outline – if it even was an outline – was so blurry and indistinct there was nothing to focus on.
It was nothing. A whisper of nothing. But it was the only target he had.
He took aim with the stick. He held his breath. He squeezed the trigger.
Outside the ship, the octobots continued their assault.
“Missed,” said Loren.
“If it’s even out there,” said Mech.
“Hey, wait a minute,” said Miz. “Don’t we have, like, a window at the back?
“The airlock!” yelped Cal. “Of course! Someone go back there and shout directions.”
“I can do better than that,” said Mech. Cal heard the steady clanking of the cyborg’s feet as he rushed out into the corridor and raced towards the airlock.
The Shatner shuddered as several more octobots landed on the hull. “Whatever you’re doing, do it fast!” Cal shouted.
“I see it. Motherfonker, you were right, it is out back!”
“Where? Tell me where,” said Cal, then his eyes widened as a video feed of the view from the airlock window overlapped the snow scene.
“Got you patched in,” Mech said. “You’re seeing what I’m seeing. Shoot that sucker down!”
“Mech, you’re a fonking genius!” Cal cheered. He took aim and squeezed the trigger. The beam of fiery red energy missed the Scriver ship by quite a considerable distance.
“Remember, you’re seeing from Mech’s view,” said Loren. “It won’t line up with the sights.”
“Great! Then how am I supposed to hit it?”
“Use the last shot as reference. Aim based on that,” Loren urged.
“Hurry up, man!” Mech snapped. “They’re onto us. They’re charging their weapons.”
Cal gritted his teeth. He’d been low and to the… left? Right? Which was it? He couldn’t remember. He hazarded a guess and another beam of laser fire punched through space, missing the Scriver ship. Closer, this time, though. Much closer.
“They’re almost in!” said Miz. “I can hear them.”
“He’s gonna fire!” boomed Mech’s voice through the headset.
With a roar, Cal adjusted his aim and jerked back on the trigger. The Shatner’s laser cannon scythed upwards through space, carving a trench into the side of the Scriver ship. Rocked, the enemy craft flipped into a lazy spin. Cal fired again, holding the beam steady and letting the spiraling Scriver vessel spread the damage across all four of its sides.
The clanking and scrabbling on the Shatner’s hull stopped. The virtual reality static vanished. Cal found himself in the unenviable position of seeing the same image from two different directions at the same time, and had to fight to stop his brain shutting itself down through sheer confusion.
“Mech, turn it off!” he shouted, then he sighed with relief as the overlapped image blinked away, leaving just the panoramic original.
The ship let out a rising electronic whine, and even through the headset Cal could tell the lights had returned.
“Systems coming back online,” Loren announced. “Impulse engines ready.”
Cal turned in his seat. He couldn’t see any of the ship itself from his virtual viewpoint, but as he turned he saw the octobots drifting off into space one by one, their snapping, wriggling tentacles now limp and lifeless, like the ‘before’ hair in a shampoo commercial.
“Finish them off,” said Miz. “Tear their ship apart.”
“Meh.” Cal shrugged. He blinked as the visor lifted away. “Let’s just leave them spinning. Maybe they’ll spread the word and tell their buddies not to mess with us again.”
He spun in his chair as his gunner controls folded away. “Can we warp yet?”
Loren clicked a few buttons and checked the readings. “Good to go.”
“Then punch it,” said Cal, gripping his arm rests. He swallowed the nausea he could already feel building. “But do not – I repeat, do not - forget the space kitten,” he added, before a guitar dropped from the ceiling and thumped him on the top of his head.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Kasheeshaktek Shasheeshketak – ‘Kash’ to his friends, of which he had none – stood knee-deep in warm manure, trying to pinpoint the exact moment when it had all gone wrong.
Last season, by
this point in the cycle, he’d have been waist deep in the gelatinous slurry. Output was down, and if he didn’t find a way to bring it back up again, he’d never make his quota.
The worm wasn’t eating. That was the problem. Every week, Kash had made the trek across the blazing sands until he’d reached the head end, pushing his trolley laden with high-fiber roughage. Every week, he’d brought most of the previous delivery back again, untouched.
It was simple biology, really. In order for output to increase at the bottom end, input had to increase at the top end. No matter how enticing he tried to make the offerings, though, the worm wasn’t interested.
Was it dying? Was that it? If so, he was in trouble. There were so few of the creatures left now that finding one to harvest could take months. Years, even. He wasn’t even sure there were any others after this one. The other shizzfarmers had all packed up and left this barren ball of sand long ago. Kash had just been too stupid, too broke and – if he were honest - too damn stubborn to follow their lead.
The valve in the floor of the collection tent groaned. Kash stepped out of the way, hope fluttering its gentle wings in his stomach. “Come on, gimme an eruption,” he whispered. “Gimme a volcano!”
The slurry stirred. The slurry rolled. A disappointing burbling sound bubbled on the surface, and the gloopy brown stew crept an inch past Kash’s knees.
“Shizz,” Kash muttered. And it was. Just not enough.
He took longer than usual to strip, shower and redress on the other side of the tent door. His limbs were heavy with disappointment and worry and everything in between. The heat didn’t help matters, either. The sun was well up in the sky, its boggle-eyed glare staring down at him with rapidly increasing intensity.
It would soon be too hot to be outside. Kash rolled up his coveralls and dropped them in a biohazard bag. Technically, he was supposed to incinerate them, but he’d run out of replacements months ago, so had taken to just hosing the outfit down twice a week, and giving it the occasional airing. He hadn’t died yet, although he had developed a worrying rash on his inner thigh that smelled like old soup, and which forced him to walk with bowed legs.
Space Team: The Wrath of Vajazzle Page 9
