“Man, I’m glad I don’t have to steal that uniform,” Cal said. He spun to face Loren. “Found it yet?”
“Yes, five hangars that way,” she said, pointing off to the right. “But if I call it up, everyone’s going to know about it. It’s going to get busy in here. We won’t have much time.”
“I just punched a guy unconscious, we already don’t have much time,” said Cal. He grinned. “Did you see that, by the way? It was pretty awesome.”
“Right, calling it now. Here goes,” said Loren.
She swiped the screen. It flashed red for a moment, then the floor beneath Cal’s feet began to rumble.
“Go, go, go!” Loren urged, setting off at a sprint towards the source of the rumbling. Cal dashed after her, with Mech thundering along behind, Splurt quivering in his hand with every step.
“Halt!” barked a voice from somewhere overhead. A squadron of troops arrived at the balcony ahead, blaster rifles training on the three figures running below.
“Take Splurt,” Mech called, lobbing the little gloopy guy underarm towards Cal. Splurt’s eyes rolled as he arced through the air, before Cal caught him and tucked him under his arm like a football.
Mech swung both arms and launched a volley of laser blasts up at the balcony. An explosion ripped through it, sending large chunks of fiery metal and smaller chunks of soggy Zertex soldier flying in all directions.
Loren and Cal dodged sideways, avoiding the rain of flaming debris as a volley of blaster bolts screamed towards them from behind.
“You call this ‘busy’?” Cal yelped, covering his head with one arm as he leaped a broken handrail. Behind him, Mech opened fire again, scattering the second squadron and sending them scrabbling for cover.
“Next hangar. Almost there!” Loren called.
“Thank fonk for that,” Cal wheezed, but his voice was drowned out by another burst of covering fire from Mech.
Skidding on the metal floor, Loren stopped at the next set of doors. They were large and thick, and made almost entirely of metal with just a small window slotted in at head height. Loren pressed the button to open the door, waited a fraction of a second, then frantically started stabbing at it.
“Come on, open up!” she hissed.
Cal arrived behind her and let out a little involuntary gasp as he saw what lay beyond the glass. The Shatner stood in the hangar, its landing ramp lowered. “Oh, there’s a sight for sore eyes,” he said. “Come on, hurry. Get us in there.”
“It won’t open,” said Loren. She pressed the button another ten times in four seconds, just in case one of those would do the trick. “It’s sealed shut.”
“Mech, can you override it?”
Mech spun, blasting the shizz out of a third group of soldiers that had appeared from a door up ahead. “Little busy,” he grunted.
Splurt squirmed beneath Cal’s arm, then plopped down onto the floor. He wriggled past Loren, then stretched himself up, changing into the shape of an amputated gray arm. With one finger, he prodded the button. The door slid open immediately.
“Now do you see why I love this fonking guy?” Cal asked.
“Starting to,” Loren admitted. She darted through. Mech went next, while Cal reached to grab Splurt. The arm drew back, then violently shoved Cal in the chest.
“Hey?” Cal said, stumbling backwards into the hangar. Splurt tapped the button and the doors locked closed between them.
“Splurt?” Cal yelled, pressing himself against the glass. Back out on the deck, he watched as Vajazzle’s arm became a green blob again, then quickly started to turn into something else. “What are you doing? Open the door. Come on, buddy, we need to go.”
Splurt grew until he was roughly Cal’s height. No, not roughly, Cal realized. Exactly.
“No, no, what are you doing?” Cal demanded. He banged a fist on the glass as Splurt sprouted arms and legs, and a face Cal was very familiar with. “No, don’t!” Cal said, his voice cracking. “You can’t!”
On the other side of the glass, an identical duplicate of Cal Carver smiled. Splurt raised an arm and waved as Mech caught Cal by the same arm and began dragging him towards the ship. “Come on, man, we have to go.”
“We can’t just leave him!” Cal protested, struggling against Mech’s grip. “They’ll torture him!”
There was a roar as the Shatner’s thrusters ignited. “They won’t find him. He’ll hide.”
“He won’t!” Cal insisted, turning away from his double for the first time since Mech had started to pull him. “He’s pretending to be me because he knows it’s me they want. He’s trying to help us get away.”
He turned back, but there was no-one on the other side of the glass now, just the sound of shouting and the screams of blaster fire.
“If we’re going to go, we have to go now,” Mech said, hoisting Cal off his feet. “I’m sorry, man.”
“We’ll come back!” Cal shouted, as Mech ran with him up the ramp. “You hear me, Splurt? We’ll come find you!”
The landing ramp raised behind them, locking into place. The floor rolled as the Shatner lurched upwards, then Cal’s stomach flipped as the ship shot through the docking shield and sped out into space.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Cal slumped down into his seat and fastened his belt across his chest.
“You OK?” Loren asked, busily flicking switches on her control panel.
“No. I’m not OK,” said Cal.
“Well, things ain’t about to get any better,” warned Mech. “We got company coming. A whole lot of those saucer ships just detached.”
“Good,” said Cal, slamming his fists down on his arm rests and flipping out the weapon controls. “I really want to shoot something.”
The headset dropped down into position and Cal found himself zooming through virtual reality space. He pushed back in his seat as his view was filled by dozens of swirling saucer-ships. They criss-crossed towards him, weapons unfolding into position beneath them.
“Wow… that is a lot of spaceships,” he muttered. His hands found the weapon control sticks. “Everything’s working, right?”
“Everything’s working,” Mech’s voice said in his ear. “Knock yourself out.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” said Cal. He squeezed the trigger in his left hand and a beam of red energy scorched through space. He arced the beam in a sweeping loop, taking a potshot at any and all of the countless ships whizzing around him. The ships parted as the beam passed, then closed ranks behind it.
“You missed,” said Loren.
“I know!” said Cal. He tried again, spraying cannon-fire into the fast-moving throng. Again, the ships weaved out of the beam’s path, even when Cal banked it sharply in the opposite direction, then erratically waggled the joystick from side to side.
“Man, they’re fast,” he said, then his eyes widened when four ships all opened fire in a perfectly synchronized attack. “Incoming!”
The Shatner shuddered as the saucers’ energy blasts hammered the shields.
“Bit more warning next time!” Loren hissed, fighting the vibration that rattled through the controls.
“Switching to torpedoes,” Cal announced. He swung the right stick, sending a targeting icon swooping across his field of view. He swung it towards an oncoming ship, but it zipped through the reticle before he could get a lock.
He tried again, tracking another of the oncoming saucers. The targeting sight flickered as it tried to get a fix, but the saucer banked into a loop before the lock-on could complete.
“They’re too fast!” Cal said. “How can they be this fast?”
“Scanners not showing anyone on board,” Mech’s voice chimed. “They’re AI controlled.”
“Watch out!” Cal warned, then he gripped the arm rests as Loren sent the ship into a plunging dive. A volley of cannon-fire flared narrowly past them, then the ship rocked violently as a torpedo slammed into its exposed belly.
&nb
sp; “That just dropped our shields to forty percent,” Mech warned.
“Just go, get us out of here,” Cal said. “Hit the warp!”
“Can’t, they’re too close. The fail-safes won’t let us,” said Loren.
“Mech disabled them last time,” Cal said, blasting a beam of cannon fire that hit nothing whatsoever. “Do it again.”
“Last time wasn’t like this,” said Mech. “Ain’t no way we can warp with all these things around.”
“Well, I can’t shoot them, they keep moving out of the fonking way!”
“We need to shut down the control ship,” said Mech.
Cal spun in his seat until the enormous Zertex ship they’d just escape from filled the sky. He swallowed. “We’re going to need more torpedoes.”
“Not that one,” said Mech. “One of the saucers is telling the rest of them what to do. The control ship. Take it out and we take them all out.”
“Is it slower than the rest of them?” Cal asked. “Or, ideally, completely stationary?”
“Afraid not,” said Mech.
“Then how do we stop it?”
“OK, I got an idea,” Mech’s voice intoned. Cal blinked as the headset was lifted away, revealing Mech’s face just inches from his own. “But you ain’t gonna like it.”
* * *
Cal stood in the airlock, stiflingly hot inside the ship’s one remaining space suit. His arms hung by his sides, weighed down by the spare pair of boots he had wedged his hands inside.
“I’m totally going to die,” he said.
“That outcome is certainly a possibility,” Mech admitted. His dial was turned all the way into brainpower mode, and he was propped up against the outer airlock door, his face pressed against the window. “However, if my calculations are correct, there is a very real chance that you might survive.”
“Well, that’s encouraging,” said Cal. “And are your calculations correct?”
“We shall find out.”
Cal grinned and shook a boot in Mech’s direction. “I know you’re kidding. You’ve totally got this nailed.”
“On the contrary,” said Mech, his voice echoing inside Cal’s helmet. “To the best of my knowledge, such a feat has never been attempted before. Or, if it has, then it has not ended well. Now, please excuse me while I make the necessary calculations. Take your position.”
“OK, but remind me why I’m in here doing this and not you?” Cal asked.
“I require my full intellectual capacity to calculate the exact launch window,” said mech. “Now, please. Position.”
Cal clanked over to the outer airlock and fumbled into a kneeling position. “How do I let myself get talked into this stuff?” he wondered, as he shuffled right up to the door. “OK, I’m here. So you’re going to… what? Open the doors when it’s time to--?”
The door opened and a blast of pressurized gas erupted from a tank on Cal’s back. He screamed as he was sent hurtling into a fever-pitch frenzy of laser fire and spaceships.
“Jesus Christ!” he howled, instinctively screwing his eyes shut.
“Please remember to hold absolutely still,” Mech’s voice chimed. “Any deviation from your current trajectory will mean your path will not intersect with the anticipated path of the control ship.”
“If I get back, my foot is going to intersect with your fonking… Hey, wait a minute. What do you mean ‘anticipated’ path? I thought you had worked out where it was going to go?”
“I have calculated to within an acceptable margin of error the control craft’s most likely flight path,” Mech said. “However, it remains a possibility that the craft may deviate from its--”
“Acceptable margin of…? So you mean you guessed?” Cal gasped. He opened his eyes, then yelped as a saucer rocketed past above his head, weapons blazing.
“In a sense,” Mech admitted. “But it was an educated one.”
“You know what? Forget it. I don’t want to know,” Cal said. “But we’re sure the shield won’t tear me a new one?”
“The shielding deflects energy-based weapons,” said Mech. “You are not an energy-based weapon.”
“Fine, fine, OK,” Cal grumbled. “But if I don’t hit this fonking ship, then you and I are going to have a long serious--”
Cal hit the fonking ship. Or, more accurately, the fonking ship hit him. The curved edge slammed into his torso so he folded at the middle, his legs flailing around beneath the saucer’s hull, his head and arms flopping about above.
“I thank you,” said Mech, sounding far more pleased with the situation than Cal currently was.
“I think… my balls just exploded,” Cal wheezed.
The ship shifted course and he began to slide. Frantically, he tried to plant the sole of any one of the four boots he currently wore against the saucer’s metal shell, but he couldn’t turn his hands or feet enough to get traction, and as the ship spun into a dive, he felt himself being thrown outwards away from it.
“Oh no you don’t!” Cal grimaced, contorting his left leg in a way he’d never contorted it in before, and hoped he’d never contort it in again. He felt the reassuring clank of the magnet locking onto the hull, then he flailed around like a ragdoll as the ship climbed into a spiraling loop.
“Don’t throw up, don’t throw up, don’t throw up,” he whispered, repeating the words over and over like a mantra.
Flicking his wrist, he eventually managed to shake free one of the boots and fumbled in the pocket on the front of the suit. He pulled out the grey disk Mech had given him, flipped it over a couple of times in case there was a right and a wrong way up, then decided he’d better check.
“So I just… what? Stick it on?”
“You just stick it on,” Mech said. “And then you jump.”
Cal’s eyes widened. “Jump? You never said anything about jumping? Why do I have to jump?”
“Technically, you don’t have to,” said Mech. “But I’d strongly advise you to, otherwise you will be killed by the implosion.”
“Fine, I’ll jump,” Cal sighed. He pressed the disc against the hull of the ship. He drew his hand back slowly, half-expecting the circle of metal to float away, but it remained fixed in place. A moment later, a red light pulsed across its surface. “OK, done. So, when should I jump?” he asked.
Mech’s voice sounded worried. “You mean you’re still there?”
“Yes, I’m still here! You didn’t tell me not to still be here. Are you saying I should--?”
“JUMP!” Mech barked, his voice back to being filled with its normal gruffness.
Cal jumped. He didn’t waste time picking a direction or watching out for oncoming spaceships, he just bent his legs, kicked with his feet and launched himself into space, just as the saucer began to collapse in on itself.
It reminded Cal of Splurt turning back after one of his transformations. The saucer’s shiny exterior crumpled up like a ball of paper, as all the outside parts raced to see which of them could get to the inside first.
Cal spun away, flipping and twirling like a stuntman on the high-wire. Behind him, the control ship was already barely the size of a child’s roundabout.
Then a hula hoop.
Then Cal struggled to decide on any more comparisons, and before he was able to come up with ‘dinner plate’ it had shrunk away to nothing.
It was only then that Cal noticed the other saucer ships had all stopped. Well, technically they hadn’t stopped, as they were still hurtling through space, but they were drifting aimlessly now, with no way of correcting their course.
Much like Cal himself, he realized.
“Mech, tell me you’re coming,” he said.
“Yeah, I’m coming. I see you.”
“Good, then pick me up and get me aboard,” Cal said. “We’ve got to save Splurt.”
Ahead of him, the Zertex war cruiser made the leap to full warp. One moment it was there, the next it was stretching out like old elasti
c, and then it was gone.
“On second thoughts,” said Cal. “We should probably go and rescue Miz first.”
“He’ll be fine,” said Mech. “The little guy’s probably tucked away somewhere safe already.”
“Yeah,” said Cal, staring at the empty spot in space the ship had just moments ago inhabited. “Yeah, probably.”
* * *
President Sinclair leaned against his desk, kneading the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb. His lips moved in silent frustration for a few moments, then he raised his head to the screen.
“Escaped? How can they have escaped?”
On screen, a Zertex legate puffed up his already overly-puffed chest. “It was the cyborg, Mr President, sir. It breached security and freed the others, then they made it to their ship. I… I mean, we, generally, it wasn’t specifically my decision or anything, have sent drones in pursuit.”
Sinclair stood. “Do not destroy them,” he said. “I want Carver alive.”
Behind the officer, a door slid open. Lady Vajazzle strode through, shoving a shackled figure before her. Sinclair’s smile lit up the whole room. “Speak of the devil!” he said. “I’d heard you had escaped!”
“He was captured by the hangar,” Vajazzle said. “It appears his companions left him behind.”
“Oh, how disappointing for you,” said Sinclair, sticking his bottom lip out in a mocking sad face. His smile quickly returned. “What’s the matter, Cal? No witty comebacks? No devastating quips?”
Cal smiled, raised a hand, and waved. This seemed to tip Sinclair over the edge. “Enough of this,” he snapped. “Forget the others, they’re irrelevant. Bring Carver to me. Now.” He rolled up a sleeve and buttoned it in place above his elbows. “I think it’s time he and I got ourselves reacquainted.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Greyx Prime was not the largest planet in the Greyx sector. Nor was it the nicest. Almost a full third of the land masses were covered by swamp, and it boasted no less than eleven different types of worm that could eat you from the inside out.
Space Team: The Wrath of Vajazzle Page 20
