“Maybe you’re my problem.”
“Oh yeah? Yeah? Well maybe I am!” said Loren.
“Exactly!”
“Fine!”
“OK, then!”
They both turned away and went back to staring at the screen. Nothing much was happening.
It was Miz who eventually spoke.
“Think they’ll be OK?”
“I hope so,” said Loren.
“Yeah,” Miz grunted. “Me, too.”
* * *
Cal and Mech stood together in a room that looked like the inside of a large warehouse. Neither of them spoke. If Cal was asked to estimate the size of the room, he’d have guessed around two football fields long by about one wide. Mech, on the other hand, having never seen a football field before, wouldn’t.
It was only possible to estimate the size of the place thanks to a murky red glow that seemed to seep from the walls all the way to the room’s far end. Emergency lighting, Cal guessed.
An impossible amount of… stuff bobbed listlessly in the space between the floor and the ceiling, rotating slowly in the zero gravity. It varied from tiny nail-sized pieces of metal to complex-looking machinery the size of a small house. Standing looking up at it all, Cal felt like a diver at the bottom of an ocean teaming with marine life of all shapes and sizes. It was pretty awe-inspiring, until something that looked a bit like a microwave oven thudded into the back of his head.
“Ow!” he muttered, rubbing the helmet. He gestured up into the shimmering shoal of ship parts. “You think we can get what we need here?”
Mech squinted, his eyes scanning the room. “Yeah. Yeah, I can see some of it from here. I’ll go collect it. Gimme Splurt.”
Cal undid the pocket on the front of his suit and looked inside. He was surprised – and really quite horrified – to find his own face slumped inside it like a discarded Halloween mask. Splurt quickly dissolved back into blob-form, guilt flitting across his bloodshot eyeballs.
“Come on, dude, cut it out!” Cal said. “It’s bad enough when you turn into me all the way, please don’t start turning into my amputated face.”
He scooped Splurt out of the pocket and passed him to Mech. The green goo wrapped around Mech’s metal hand and twisted up his forearm.
“You sure this is gonna work?” Mech asked.
“Yeah! Of course!” said Cal. “You know… possibly.” He shrugged. “Worth a try, right?”
Mech’s lips moved, but whatever he said he chose not to broadcast to Cal’s radio. “OK, I’m gonna go round up our supplies,” he eventually said.
“Cool! What should I do?” asked Cal.
“Wait here. Touch nothing,” Mech instructed.
“What? That’s it? I can help!” Cal insisted.
“This’ll be much easier if I handle it. You just stay here and out of trouble.”
Cal sighed. “Fine. But what if something comes in?”
“Ain’t nothing gonna come in,” said Mech. “There ain’t nothing or no-one alive in here ‘cept us.”
“OK. Well… just give me a shout if you need me, I guess,” said Cal.
“Thanks,” said Mech. “I won’t.”
The soles of his feet ignited, propelling him off the deck. He lifted up through the floating debris. Pieces of scrap bounced off his hulking metal frame. Cal watched them roll off into the dimly-red darkness, before he lost sight of them.
Mech was up near the ceiling already, the glow of his boosters the brightest thing in the room. “How’s it going?” Cal asked.
“Man, I been gone for twenty seconds. It ain’t started going anywhere yet. It’s gonna take a while.”
“Want me to tell you a joke or something to help pass the time?”
“No!” Mech said.
“OK, so there were these three Mexicans…” Cal began, then there was a soft click in his ear and he knew Mech had switched the radio off. “Well, that’s charming,” Cal said.
He watched Mech for a while, zipping up, down, and around the room. It soon became boring, though, so he tried to find other ways to pass the time. This was quite difficult, as there was nowhere he could go and nothing he could really do.
He stood on one leg for a while, but it didn't do a lot to relieve the boredom.
Standing on the other leg wasn’t much better.
He thought about standing on no legs, but was worried that he’d float away and wouldn’t get back down, so he decided against it.
He stamped his foot on the floor to see if he could hear anything. He couldn’t, but he did feel the impact in his ankle and knee, so decided to knock that on the head, too.
There were a few small bits of metal bobbing around him. He poked and prodded at them, sending them spinning off in different directions. He tried to set up a race between a bulky fuse and a small circuit board, but he misjudged the prods and sent them both off in slightly different directions.
Something that looked like a metal briefcase drifted towards him. At first, he thought about dodging it. He’d spent a quite enjoyable thirty seconds or so dodging other things a few minutes ago, before the novelty had worn off. Then he considered kicking it to see how fast he could send it hurtling up towards the ceiling, but it was coming in just a little too high for him to be able to swing his leg without risking some sort of groin trauma.
Besides, something about the case caught his interest. He caught it, then ran his gloved hands around the outside edge, searching for some sort of clasp or lock. After four complete circuits of the thing, he had to accept that there wasn’t one.
It looked like the type of hard-bodied case that might be used to transport something valuable. Diamonds, maybe. Space diamonds.
Cal flipped the case over in his hands. As well as not having clasps or a zip, it also didn’t have a handle. Cal tapped the top so he could listen to try to figure out if the thing was hollow, but sound’s inability to travel in a vacuum foiled his plan.
He was about to send it floating on its way again when he spotted the buttons. There were three of them, all the same color and texture of the metal. They were each about the size of his thumb-print, and spaced several inches apart.
Cal glanced up into the cavernous warehouse. Mech was darting around somewhere near the middle, paying him no attention whatsoever. Cal looked back at the case.
“OK, let’s see what you’re hiding,” he said, then he pressed one of the buttons. Nothing happened, so he pressed the other two.
“Shizz,” he muttered, when the case remained steadfastly shut. He pressed them again, in a different order this time, with exactly the same effect.
Stretching the fingers on his right hand, he pressed two of the buttons, while jabbing the third with a finger from his left.
The lid snapped open suddenly, flicking the case out of Cal’s hand. He watched it drift upwards beyond his reach as something dark and shiny unfolded itself from within. In the space of less than a second, a series of short metal poles locked together to form a rectangular frame fifteen or more feet high, and seven or eight wide.
A thin beam of white light projected upwards from inside the case, stopping when it hit the inside top of the newly-sprouted frame. The light fanned out, spreading until the whole inside of the rectangle was illuminated in white.
No, not white. Not anymore. As Cal watched, the light became a picture of a blue sky dotted with clouds. He tilted his head, following the image as it drifted further and further away from him.
Was that Earth? He could only see a relatively small patch of sky, so it was difficult to tell, but while there was nothing in the view that told him it was definitely his home planet, there was equally nothing that told him it wasn’t.
“Hey, Mech?” he said, but Mech’s radio was still turned off.
Cal looked at the patch of cloudy-blue again. It was a screen, that was all. It had to be. And yet…
He plucked a cigar-sized bolt from the air as it floated p
ast him, placed it flat on the palm of his hand, then flicked it towards the rectangle of sky. The bolt tumbled, end-over-end, spinning towards the image.
The patch of sky rippled as the chunk of metal passed through the rectangle’s center. It immediately began to spin more quickly, then plunged out of sight as it suddenly found itself under the pull of gravity again. Cal watched for it falling from the other side of the rectangle, but it didn’t reappear.
“It’s a portal,” Cal whispered. “It’s a motherfonking space portal.”
There was a sudden movement on the other side of the portal that snagged his breath in his throat. Something pinkish, and pockmarked with craters, blocked out the sky as it swept down from the top left of the rectangle.
And then, just as suddenly, it stopped. Cal blinked. The enormous eye that was now staring back at him blinked, too.
It looked human – well, apart from the size. It had a white bit, a brown-ish bit, and a shiny black pupil in which Cal could now see himself reflected. He would have said it was definitely a human eye, had it not been several hundred thousand times too large.
“Um… Mech,” Cal said again, hoping he’d reopened the comms channel in the last few seconds. To Cal’s disappointment, he hadn’t.
Cal thought long and hard about what to do next. Unfortunately, no matter how long and hard he thought about it, nothing particularly inspiring came to mind. In the end, he settled for waving. If the owner of the eye waved back, Cal didn’t see it.
The eye moved again, and the view of the sky returned. Cal kept watching, the thumping of his heart and the rasping of his breath the only sounds in the universe.
Seconds passed. The eye didn’t return. “OK, OK, nothing to worry about,” Cal whispered. “Panic over. Whatever that was, it’s…”
The last few words caught in his throat as something else moved on the other side of the rectangle. It wasn’t an eye this time. It was a finger. An enormous human finger with a cracked, dirty nail.
And it was reaching through the gap towards him.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Cal backed away from the probing finger, his magnetic boots snapping him to the floor after each hasty step.
“Mech!” he shouted, as if raising his voice could somehow find a loophole in the laws of physics. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t. Mech, who was currently several hundred feet away in an airless vacuum-filled room, didn’t respond.
The finger wriggled as it tried to squeeze through the rectangular frame of the portal. The tip was easily a dozen feet across the widest point, and Cal could see every loop and whorl of the fingerprint. It reminded him a little of the baby sandworm, only without the mouth or glossy mucus coat.
The underside of the nail was caked with grime, the nail itself chipped and uncared for. It was a fingernail that had never seen a manicure and, more important, one which was currently rapidly approaching Cal’s head.
“Hey, fonk off, you big finger,” he said, jabbing a punch at the end of the fingertip. He didn’t expect to hurt it, but he hoped the impact would send the floating frame tumbling away into the warehouse-like expanse around him. No such luck. Whatever was forcing the enormous finger through – an even more enormous hand, Cal assumed – was holding the portal frame more or less steady. Cal fired off another few jabs as the finger probed closer, then retreated another couple of steps.
He shot a quick glance in Mech’s direction. Mech was way down the far end now, the light from his boot-boosters bobbing around near the ceiling. It reflected, just for a moment, on a bulbous green sack that drifted along behind him.
The finger lurched forward almost a clear foot. Cal screamed as it poked his helmet, leaving a greasy smudged fingerprint on the glass. He stumbled back, hands reaching for anything he could find to fight the determined digit.
He spied a sliver of blueish-green metal with a ragged edge, and snatched it from the air. As the finger reached for him again, he drove the pointed tip of the metal into the rounded tip of the finger. With a jerk that was almost as sharp as the metal fragment, the finger drew back.
A blob of dark crimson squeezed itself through the gap where metal met flesh, and rolled into a pulsing ball. It drifted towards Cal, and he instinctively tried to bat it away. This only resulted in the single large pulsing ball of blood becoming several dozen smaller pulsing balls of blood, and Cal spent the next few seconds dodging them as if they were a swarm of angry wasps.
For a moment, it looked as if the finger was going to withdraw all the way through the portal, but then it stopped and began to squirm forward again, more tentatively this time.
“OK, fonk this,” Cal muttered. He ducked the finger, crouched low, then jumped. Arms outstretched, he flew towards the metal briefcase from which the portal had sprouted. Slamming into it, Cal, the portal, and the massive finger all went spinning upwards towards the distant ceiling.
Cal reached around behind the frame and tried to pull the lid of the case closed, but it wouldn’t budge. He fumbled for the three buttons, spreading his fingers wide again as he pressed all three at the same time.
The slight vibration Cal only now realized he had been feeling stopped. Even through the vacuum of space, Cal could have sworn he heard a distant scream, then the rectangular frame of the portal snapped shut, and the tip of the giant finger went sailing upwards.
Cal was propelled in the opposite direction, and hit the ground after just a few seconds. Clutching the now-closed case to his chest, he frantically tried to plant his feet on the floor before he bounced upwards again.
He felt the reassuring tremor through his foot as one of his boots locked on, then hurriedly planted the other one beside it just as Mech weaved through the debris towards him, dragging a marquee-sized green balloon.
“Everything OK?” Mech asked, looking Cal up and down.
Cal nodded, a little too quickly, and tried not to look up. “Aye, laddie!” he said, in a fierce Scottish accent. He shook his head. “I don’t know why I said it like that. Yes. Everything’s OK,” he said. He smiled too broadly. “Nothing to report.”
Mech looked him up and down again, more slowly this time. “OK, then. Well, I think I got everything we need.” He nodded towards the case. “What you got there?”
“Where?” asked Cal. He looked down, appearing surprised to discover his arms wrapped around a bulky metal briefcase. “Oh, this thing. It’s… I thought I’d take it with us. You know, like a memento of our Boys’ Day Out?”
“What is it?”
Cal’s mouth opened, closed, then opened again. “Trust me,” he eventually said. “You do not want to know.”
* * *
It turned out that Mech did want to know. In fact, he refused to let Cal go anywhere until he’d explained in detail what was in the case. He hadn’t believed any of Cal’s story, until Cal had sent him to find the fingertip. He’d switched the radio back on by that point, and shortly after Mech had gone in search of the decapitated digit, Cal’s earpiece had been filled with some really quite inventive swearing.
Cal had assumed Mech would insist they left the case behind, but to his surprise, Mech agreed he could take it. A hole appeared in the side of the Splurt-sack, just big enough to fit the case through.
“Thanks, buddy,” said Cal, posting the box through the slot. Splurt’s gooey green surface squidged together again, so seamlessly it was impossible to tell there had been a hole there at all. And then, with everything they needed floating around inside the little slime-ball’s innards, they’d all headed back across space to the Shatner.
“Miz, I have to hand it to you,” said Cal, when he and Mech stepped out of the airlock, “using Splurt as a big stretchy sack was genius. Genius. Also,” he added, “it gave me an opportunity to say the words ‘big stretchy sack.’ Those don’t come along very often.”
Mizette shrugged, trying her best to look disinterested, but an involuntary wag of her tail gave her away. “Whatever.”
“Anything interesting happen while we were out?” Cal asked, looking from Miz to Loren and back again.
“Nope,” said Loren.
“No space monsters, big shark people…?”
Loren shook her head. “Not that we noticed.”
Cal exhaled. “Well, that’s a first. Good job!”
Miz tutted. “Why? She didn’t do anything.”
“Oh, I wasn’t talking to her, I was talking to you,” Cal said. He winked, and Mizette’s tail went into full-on windshield wiper mode, swishing happily left and right.
Mech clanked past him and stopped beside Loren. He jabbed a thumb back in the direction of the airlock, which was now cluttered with the parts he’d taken from the Scriver ship. Splurt bobbed around on the floor at Cal’s feet, weaving between his legs like a pet cat might do, were cats actually capable of demonstrating genuine affection.
“We should get started,” said Mech. “The odds of someone finding us drifting along out here should be too high to even matter, but we got a bad habit of attracting trouble.”
“Agreed,” said Loren. “We should get to work.”
“Ship repair montage!” Cal cried, thrusting both hands in the air above his head. Then, he unzipped his space suit, wriggled it off, and shot the rest of the group a grin. “You two get your tools. I’ll go fetch the guitar!”
* * *
What Cal had hoped would be a fun, three-minute ship repair montage turned out to be a laborious sixteen-hour process that grew tedious within the first twenty minutes or so. With his knowledge of spaceship maintenance limited to the point of not existing, Cal was relegated to the job of handing Mech and Loren their tools. As he couldn’t tell a Syphoid Wrench from a Thromm Hammer, he was then relegated further to fetching hot drinks, before eventually being demoted to just keeping out of everyone’s way and not touching anything.
After a while, he headed for the sleeping quarters. Once he was sure no-one had seen him, he slid the metal case he’d taken from the Scriver ship out from under his bed and looked it over. Based on Cal’s description, Mech had agreed it was some sort of portable portal, although where it led was impossible to tell. Cal had vague memories of an old TV show called Land of the Giants, but after giving him a particularly withering look, Mech had quite strongly voiced his opinion that it was unlikely to lead there.
Space Team: The Wrath of Vajazzle Page 14
