“You don’t say,” Loren muttered.
The Mayor’s office was high on a tower above the city, but Cal could just make out the shape of Papa Nostro through the semi-transparent glass beneath the team’s feet. If he squinted, he could also see a large crowd gathered in what was left of the plaza. Sure enough, even from this distance they looked agitated.
“Those ungrateful froggy bamstons!” Cal said. “I don’t know, you go out of your way to help people, and how do they repay you?”
“With sixteen thousand credits,” said Loren. “Minus three per cent.”
Cal brightened. “Oh! Yeah. Good point.” He extended the middle fingers of both hands and waggled them at the crowd far below. “Suck on that, shizznods.”
Mech stopped walking. He had been tapping at the screen in his arm for the past few seconds, and now stared at it in confusion.
“What’s up?” Loren asked.
“Huh?” Mech mumbled, still studying the screen.
“Come on, Mech, I thought you were in a hurry to get out of here?” Cal said, but then he noticed Mech’s expression. “I know that face. That’s your ‘oh fonk, this is bad,’ face. What’s wrong?”
“They didn’t pay us,” Mech said.
“What do you mean they didn’t pay us?” Cal demanded, stepping in closer and peering at the incomprehensible string of numbers and squiggles on Mech’s arm-screen. “How could they not have paid us?”
“I mean we still got no money,” Mech said. “We’re still broke. They ain’t paid us.”
“Didn’t we, like, see him pay us?” Miz asked.
“Yes! Thank you! Just what I was going to say,” Cal exclaimed. “He pressed the doohickey thing.”
Cal about-turned and began walking back in the direction of the Mayor’s office. “Obviously, there’s just been some sort of glitch or administrative error. I’m sure we’ll get it sorted out in no…”
His voice tailed off as a squadron of armored guards jogged out through the double doors in a tightly-bunched formation.
“This ain’t good,” Mech muttered.
The whining of several ship engines rose up around them. Six one-man fighters emerged from behind the tower and came to a stop on either side of the platform, hovering in the air on shimmering cushions of dense blue light. They were sort of cloud shaped and weirdly cuddly-looking, like something from a video game aimed at six-year-olds. The guns that stuck out from the front were somewhat less adorable, particularly in the way they all swiveled in the team’s direction.
Cal sighed. “Yeah, you can say that again.”
“We should probably go,” said Loren, then she realized that she was standing alone, the rest of the crew having already started running towards the Untitled. “Son of a…” she began, then she, too, broke into a run.
Cal was almost at the ship when the first blast of laser fire tore past him. It ricocheted off the Untitled’s hull and shot straight upwards into the dark night sky.
“They’re shooting!” Cal yelped, covering his head with his hands in the misguided belief that this would somehow protect him from a hail of concentrated blaster fire. “They’re actually shooting at us.”
“I noticed!” Mech spat. He spun his top half so it was turned all the way around, then raised both arms and returned fire on the troops. A wall of shielding flickered in front of them as Mech’s blaster bolts struck it with a series of damp-sounding thwumps.
Meanwhile, the fighter ships had turned their attention on the Untitled, and were in the process of locking weapons. “Kevin, shields up!” Loren hollered, passing Cal and Mech with the confident strides of one of those masochists who not only ran on a regular basis, but who did it deliberately without having to be chased by anything.
“Very good, ma’am,” Kevin replied, his voice rolling out through the open rear hatch and down the ramp. “Raising shields.”
The Untitled’s three landing legs retracted suddenly, and the ship hit the glass platform with a thack that threatened to shatter the whole fonking thing.
“No, wait. That wasn’t it,” Kevin was saying as Cal raced up the ramp behind Loren.
Miz was already aboard, already strapped in, already draping one leg over her arm rest and rolling her eyes in a general sort of contempt for everyone in the universe. She didn’t so much as acknowledge Loren or Cal as they jumped into their seats and grabbed for their belts.
A barrage of cannon-fire slammed into the side of the Untitled, and the ship gouged a deep groove in the glass as the rain of blows shoved it sideways.
“Kevin!” Cal bellowed.
“Found them,” the AI announced, and the next few shots exploded harmlessly against the plasma shielding.
Loren flicked a series of controls and the Untitled’s thrusters ignited.
“Hey, watch what you’re doing!” bellowed Mech from somewhere out back.
Loren winced. “Oops. Sorry!” she called to him. “You in?”
“Now I’m in, yeah,” said Mech, clanking onto the bridge behind them. “Get going.”
Loren pushed something, pulled something else, then winced as the Untitled carved another trench in the glass platform.
“Jesus!” Cal grimaced, clamping his hands over his ears. “Can you not make that noise?”
“Unfortunately, sir, Ms Loren has retracted the landing legs, hence the dreadful din we are all currently being subjected to,” said Kevin.
Loren snapped her head up in the direction of the bridge’s speak system. “Wait, I raised the legs? That was you!”
“If you say so, ma’am,” said Kevin, with the air of someone who knew they were in the right, but was being the bigger person.
“You did!” Loren said. She turned in her seat. “Tell him!”
“Just get us off the fonking ground!” Cal cried. “And stop that noise!”
“It says ‘missile lock’, by the way,” said Miz, flicking her eyes up just briefly from where she had been studying her claws.
Cal spun in his chair to face her. “Huh?”
Mizette huffed out a sigh. “There. On the screen. It says ‘missile lock’.”
Cal flicked his eyes to the screen. Sure enough, the words ‘missile lock’ were flashing in a shade of red that seemed to have been chosen specifically for its ability to inflict the maximum amount of concern. He spun to face Mech. “What does that mean?” he asked. “Or is that a stupid—?”
A missile exploded against the shields. The lights flickered and a jet of steam hissed from a console. Splurt dropped from the ceiling and wrapped himself around Cal like a protective cocoon. Cal gave him a pat, then gripped his arm rests as the force of the impact sent the Untitled lurching over the edge of the platform.
The ship flipped.
Cal screamed.
And the city, the crowd, and the giant headless space vampire all came racing up to meet them.
FIVE
IT WAS NOT the first time Cal had gone hurtling towards the ground completely out of control – it wasn’t even the first time that hour, in fact – but all that prior experience did little to ease his growing concerns.
“For fonk’s sake, Loren, pull up!” he cried, the words echoing strangely as they whipped around inside the tumbling ship.
“I’m trying! You think I’m not trying?”
“Then, like, try harder!” Mizette barked.
“Kevin, help her out,” Cal ordered.
“No! I can do it,” Loren protested.
“The fact we’re still racing straight for the ground kind of suggests otherwise,” Cal pointed out. “Kevin, do it!”
“Are you sure, sir? I wouldn’t want to step on anyone’s toes.”
It was Mech who answered with a resounding, “Shut the fonk up and stop us falling!”
“Very good, sir,” Kevin intoned.
“Wait! I’ve almost got it!” Loren insisted.
“She doesn’t,” said Kevin. “I’m not even sure what she’s attempting to do, exactly.”
“Shut up, Kevin!” Loren hissed.
“She’s making it worse, if anything.”
“Fine!” Loren wrenched her hands off the controls and held them above her head. “Let’s see you do it, if you’re so…”
The ship jerked, twisted, then pulled up. The view of the giant headless corpse became a vista of distant stars and a couple of much closer moons.
Kevin said nothing. It was a very deliberate saying of nothing that did not go unnoticed by Loren.
“I could’ve done that,” she said, crossing her arms.
“Suuuure you could,” said Miz. “You should totally keep telling yourself that.”
Loren unclipped her belt and stood up. “Know what? I’m going to go. I’ll be through the back,” she said, then a staccato burst of cannon-fire slammed into the Untitled’s shields, lurching it violently.
“Yeah, still under attack here, Loren,” Cal pointed out.
Loren stumbled, caught her chair, then flopped back into it and scrabbled for her belt. “Shizz. I forgot.”
“They’re short range planetary fighters,” Mech said, checking the scanners. “Not built to leave the atmosphere.”
“So… what does that mean?” Cal asked. “We can just blast off into space and they can’t follow us?”
“Pretty much,” Mech confirmed.
“Well alright!” Cal cheered. This was the best news he’d had all day. “Then let’s do it. Kevin. Or Loren. One of you, anyway. Take us up!”
“Very good, sir,” said Kevin. “I assume you’re happy to have your lungs burst and your eyeballs explode in their sockets?”
Cal shook his head. “What? No, Kevin. No, I’m not happy to have either of those things happen. At all. What the fonk are you talking about?”
The last word came out as a long, drawn-out howl as Kevin spun the ship, narrowly avoiding another barrage of cannon-blasts.
“The hatch, sir. I’m afraid it’s still locked in place. If we leave the atmosphere… Well, it won’t be pretty for most of you, let’s put it that way,” Kevin said, banking the Untitled away from an oncoming fighter. “Although, I’m sure it will please you to know that I would be quite unharmed.”
“The hatch is still broken? Why haven’t you fixed it?” Cal demanded.
“I’m afraid I haven’t had the time, sir,” Kevin replied. “Also, it may have escaped your notice, but I don’t have any arms, which doesn’t exactly help matters.”
“Fonk. Mech, see what you can do!” Cal said.
Mech charged out into the corridor. “On it.”
The ship lurched suddenly downwards, throwing Cal a few inches out of his chair before his belt tightened and held him in place.
“Jesus. Bit of warning, Kevin. Even Loren wouldn’t pull a move like that.”
“I know!” Loren said, then she turned in her seat, eyes narrowed. “What do you mean ‘even Loren’?”
“What? No, I meant… I just meant…”
A fighter screamed past ahead of them. Something explosive detonated against the Untitled’s shields, flaring the view screen red. “Look, can we talk about this later?” asked Cal. “Now really doesn’t feel like the time.”
He banged his fists on his arm rests, remembered that was the old ship, then raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Kevin, give me the guns.”
“Guns? You can’t shoot them!” said Loren.
“I can’t shoot the guns?” Cal gasped. “Are they broken, too?”
“You can’t shoot those ships!” Loren corrected. “It’s not right.”
“What? Why?” asked Miz. “They’re totally shooting us.”
“Because we destroyed half their city, then ran off without paying for the damage!” Loren pointed out.
Miz stared blankly back at her. “Yeah. So?”
“I gotta go with Miz on this one, Loren,” Cal said. “Yeah. So?”
“So we’re not the good guys in this situation! They’re just cops or the local military or whatever. They’re not bad guys.”
“They’re trying to blow us to bits,” Cal said. “That kind of makes them the bad guys.” He turned to Miz. “Right?”
“Totally.”
“See?” said Cal. “They’re shooting us, we’re good guys, therefore they must be the bad guys. It’s just science, Loren. It’s science.”
The weapons targeting system unfolded from the headrest of Cal’s chair until the needle-like points of the interface hovered just half an inch from his temples on either side. More cannon-fire pummeled the ship, striking a series of direct hits on its belly this time. Cal and the others were shaken like economy class airline passengers in heavy turbulence, albeit without the screaming children, sweaty aroma, or lingering aura of general disappointment.
Cal placed his hands on the weapon’s interface, trying not to think too much about the needles being shoved into his brain. “They’re going to tear us apart,” he said. “We should at least fire some warning shots.”
“Those people are just doing their jobs,” Loren said.
“All those Zertex guys we’ve killed were just doing their jobs, too,” Miz pointed out.
“That’s different,” Loren said. “We didn’t have a choice.”
Cal tilted his head left to right in a sort of weighing motion. “We sometimes had a choice.”
“OK, fine, but Zertex are the bad guys. Or were. Or whatever,” Loren said. She pointed to the view screen. “Them? They’ve just been told to shoot down a ship full of thieves and vandals before it gets away. That’s all they know.”
Cal groaned. He glanced sideways at the weapons interface hovering right by his head.
“Fine. You win. Kevin, put it away.”
“Very good, sir,” Kevin intoned. “I mean, it’s not like I have anything better to do, what with flying the ship and trying to save you all from being blown to smithereens, and everything.”
Cal ignored him. “Mech, you nearly done?” he called.
“It’s stuck!” came the reply.
“We know it’s fonking stuck! You’re supposed to be unsticking it! That’s the whole point of you being back there!”
“It says ‘missile lock’ again,” Mizette pointed out. “Like, three times.”
“Jesus!” Cal ejected. “What a day.” He exhaled slowly. “What a day.”
The warning messages stepped up their shade of redness to a previously unseen level of alarming. A siren blared from three different consoles at the same time. Splurt tightened around Cal like a hug made from marshmallow as three different missiles carved three different paths across the sky towards them.
“Everyone brace yourselves!” Cal warned.
Then there was a clang from the back of the ship, a brief but memorable moment where Cal could see the inside of his own skull, and the Currently Untitled rocketed out of the atmosphere and into the relative safety of outer space.
CAL GAZED down at the plate he held pinched between his thumb and the side of his forefinger, and at the slice of banoffee pie sitting dead center. It was smaller than he had been expecting. Quite a lot smaller, in fact.
He raised his eyes to the food replicator. “Uh, is there a problem?” he asked it. It didn’t reply, which didn’t really come as a surprise.
“Try again. Give me another one,” he said.
The replicator did nothing. No burbling noises. No shuddering or shaking or whirring.
Silence.
Cal thumped the machine on its side.
Still nothing.
He gave it a kick.
The replicator just stood there, silent and still.
His technological know-how now exhausted, Cal shrugged and left the kitchen, still carrying the plate.
The bridge view screen showed a handful of stars and a whole lot of not much else. They were cruising along at a speed even he found manageable, and he was able to look directly at the screen without experiencing full blown vertigo and vomiting into a shoe.
Loren and Mech were hunched over Loren�
��s console, discussing something that might well be important, but which Cal was just going to assume was less important than what he had to say. Miz was slouched across her chair, her head back. At first, Cal thought she was asleep, but then he realized her eyes were open, and she was simply staring at the ceiling with contempt. This was not all that unusual. Miz stared at lots of things with contempt, and Cal hoped the ceiling wasn’t taking it personally.
“Uh, is there a problem I don’t know about?” asked Cal.
Loren and Mech both turned to look at him. Miz did, too, but only after rolling her eyes and groaning theatrically.
“What kind of problem?” Loren asked.
Cal angled his plate so they could all see it. “I ordered a banoffee pie.”
“Again?” said Mech. “Fonk, man. How many of them things have you eaten today?”
“I don’t know. Like… three?” said Cal. “I have no idea when the day starts and ends out here.”
“Let’s say from when you last woke up,” said Mech.
“Oh.” Cal thought for a moment. “Then more like nine. Unless… are we counting when I have it as a milkshake?”
Mech nodded.
“Then twelve,” said Cal, completely without shame. “But that’s not my point. Look at it.”
They all looked at it. “Looks OK,” said Loren.
Cal flicked his eyes down to the triangular slice of pie. Was it him? Was he seeing things?
“What do you mean? It’s an inch long.”
Loren shrugged. “Well, yeah. I assumed you can get it in different sizes.”
“Of course you can,” Cal agreed. “But I asked for banoffee pie. I didn’t ask for the world’s smallest banoffee pie. I didn’t even ask for a smaller than average banoffee pie. I placed the same order in the same way I’ve done, like, a thousand times before.”
Miz exhaled in a way designed to indicate that she was done with this conversation and would be playing no further part in it, then went back to glaring at the ceiling.
“Maybe the replicator’s concerned about you, man,” Mech suggested. “Maybe it’s watching your waistline.”
Loren looked Cal over. “You are getting kind of bulky around the hips.”
Space Team: The Time Titan of Tomorrow Page 5
