“I still have sixteen space rocks in my pockets,” Cal pointed out. He waved the plate around in front of them, trying to steer the conversation away from his hips and back to the matter at hand. “So nobody knows anything about this?”
Mech and Loren both shook their heads. Miz ignored everything and everyone.
“Kevin!” Cal called. He held the plate a little higher. “Do you know anything about this?”
“Yes, sir,” Kevin replied.
Cal waited for more.
“OK. Well… care to explain?”
“It’s some kind of dessert, sir. I seem to recall you having it before. I think you rather enjoyed it.”
Cal sighed. “No, I mean why is it like this?”
“Presumably, sir, so the firmness of the biscuit base can offset the smoothness of the—”
“No. Jesus. Why is it small, I mean?”
“Oh, that,” Kevin intoned. “I believe we’re out of Mush.”
Cal frowned. “Huh?”
“Mush, sir. We’ve depleted our stocks.”
“What the fonk is…?” Cal began, then he decided to aim the question at the others, instead. “What the fonk is Mush?”
Mech and Loren were just as clueless as he was. “Don’t ask me, man,” said Mech.
“No idea,” Loren admitted.
Cal raised his eyes in the direction of Kevin’s voice again. “What’s Mush?”
“Mush is the raw material used by the replicator,” he explained. “It’s sort of a tasteless pink sludge, the molecular structure of which the replicator rearranges to produce… well, those pies, for the most part, but whatever else is requested of it, too.”
“Wait, so this is really just pink sludge?” Cal asked, pointing to the tiny triangle on his plate.
“Was pink sludge, sir. Now it isn’t,” Kevin corrected.
Cal looked to the others again. “Did you guys know this?”
“No. I didn’t,” said Mech. “But it makes sense. I mean, I never really thought about how the thing can just produce food out of thin air. I just… I guess I just never seen one run out before.”
“It’s most unusual, sir,” Kevin told him. “A container of Mush should last anywhere up to twenty years.”
“So how come we’ve run out?” Loren asked.
“I, uh, I fear some of Master Carver’s more… calorie dense dishes may have depleted supplies somewhat prematurely.”
Miz, who had been doing her best not to listen, couldn’t help but sit up. “Wait. So… what? We’re, like, out of food?”
“I’m afraid so, ma’am.”
“What, none?” asked Loren.
“Oh yes, there’s some, ma’am,” said Kevin, and Loren relaxed a little.
“OK. Good.”
Cal popped the little slice of banoffee pie into his mouth, chewed briefly, then swallowed with visible difficulty.
That done, he proceeded to lick the plate.
“Now there’s none,” Kevin announced.
“Oh, great! Thanks, Cal!” Loren snapped.
Cal waved a hand dismissively. “Relax. It’s fine. We’ll just get some more. We can buy another pack, right?”
“Yes, sir,” said Kevin.
“See? Nothing to worry about.”
“They’re two-hundred-thousand credits each.”
Cal coughed so hard the partially masticated banoffee pie was fired back up into his throat. He pounded his chest for several panicky seconds, turning gradually more and more purple until, with a cry that was bordering on primal, he forced it back down.
“How much?!”
“Two-hundred-thou—”
“I know! I heard you the first time!” Cal yelped. He looked around for somewhere to sit his plate, but nowhere presented itself, and he was fonked if he was walking all the way back to the kitchen. “Splurt!”
Splurt dropped down from the ceiling like a long strand of snot with eyeballs. He enveloped Cal’s hand, then retreated upwards, taking the plate with him. Cal gave him a thumbs up. “Thanks, buddy.”
He sat in his chair and turned it so he could see everyone at the same time. “OK. So how much money do we have?”
“None,” Mech replied.
“By ‘none’ do you mean ‘not a lot’ or do you mean actually none?”
“I mean we got nothing. Not a single credit. Not since your Earth friend hacked us and stole it all.”
Cal stared wistfully ahead into space. “Aah, Dave,” he said, then he shrugged. “Still, we blew him up and stopped his evil plan, so I guess we’re kind of even.”
He drummed his fingers on his arm rests. “So… what do we do? We need to make money fast, right?”
Loren indicated her control panel. “Mech and I were just scanning for work. There isn’t much, but we found something. Pays pretty well.”
“Is it another bounty hunter thing?” Cal asked. “Because, I don’t know if you noticed, but those aren’t going well for us.”
“It’s a humanitarian run,” Loren explained. “Delivering medicine and aid to Mokolai.”
“Who’s Mokolai?” Cal asked.
“No-one. It’s a planet,” said Mech. “There’s a disease – the Gorax Blight, they call it. Anyone suffering from it gets sent to Mokolai.”
“Oh. So it’s like a leper colony?” said Cal. He swiveled his chair from side to side. “What does it involve, this Gorax thing? Is it nasty?”
“Isn’t that the one where people, like, shizz themselves through their eyes?” asked Miz.
Cal’s jaw dropped. “Through their eyes? How is that…? I mean…” He spent a few quite harrowing moments trying to imagine this. “Through their eyes?”
“That’s one of the early symptoms, yeah,” Mech confirmed.
The pitch of Cal’s voice raised a full octave. “One of the early symptoms? Jesus, how does it end? How can your condition deteriorate from shizzing yourself through your fonking eyes?”
“Well, see, there’s this rectal parasite that—” Mech began, but Cal drowned him out.
“No! Stop. Don’t want to know. We’re not doing that one.”
Loren piped up. “It pays almost—”
“Don’t care. Not interested,” said Cal. He gestured to her console. “Find us something else. Something that doesn’t involve butt-worms, or people, you know, soiling themselves through their face.”
“There is nothing else,” said Loren.
“What? That’s it? A whole fonking galaxy and that’s the only job on the notice board? Come on, there’s got to be something.”
“There ain’t, man,” said Mech. “I mean, maybe we could go visit a couple of planets, see if there’s anything going on locally.”
“Or we could just, like, rob someone,” Miz suggested.
“We can’t do that,” said Loren.
Miz shrugged. “Why not? I mean, we’re all criminals.”
“She has a point,” Cal conceded.
Loren shook her head. “No, you three may have been thieves or… whatever, but I wasn’t. I’m not.”
Cal raised an eyebrow. “Oh, really?” he said. “Whose ship is this? Or the last ship we had. Did you buy that one? Did you buy this one?”
“You know what I mean,” Loren said.
“Sure, maybe you were all Zertexy and upstanding member of society before we were all thrown together, but now you’re one of us.”
“Yeah, well maybe…” Loren began, then she bit her tongue and turned back to her console.
“Maybe what?” Cal asked.
Loren shook her head. “Nothing. Forget it,” she said. “I just don’t think we should go robbing anyone. We’re not pirates.”
Cal watched the back of her head for a moment, like he was trying to see inside it. Finally, he shrugged. “Last resort then.” He sighed and leaned back in his chair. “How contagious is this eye-shizzing thing?”
Mech shrugged. “I dunno. Like a six.”
Cal nodded slowly. “Out of ten?”
Mech shook his head. “Huh? No, out of eight.”
Cal frowned. “Out of eight? Who the fonk ranks things out of eight?” he asked.
“I do.”
“But… I mean, it makes no sense. You rank things out of five, out of ten, or out of a hundred.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what normal people do, Mech,” Cal told him. “That’s just what normal people do. It’s the rules.”
Mech grunted. “Fine. Out of five, then.”
“It’s six out of five contagious?” Cal spluttered. “Jesus. Sorry, Loren, we’re becoming pirates.”
“No, it ain’t six out of five. It’s three-point-seven-nine out of five,” Mech said.
Cal blinked. “Are you fonking with me, Mech? Is that what this is? Three-point-seven-nine out of five. Are you messing with me?”
“No! You asked me how contagious it was. It’s a little over six out of eight, but since you want me to adjust my whole motherfonking scale all of a sudden, it’s three-point-seven—”
Kevin, mercifully, interrupted.
“Sorry to intrude, everyone, but I thought you’d want to know about the distress signal.”
Everyone, even Miz, looked up.
“Distress signal?” Loren asked. She turned her attention back to her console and tapped a few buttons. “Where is it coming from?”
“Over that way, ma’am,” Kevin said.
Several seconds of slightly uncomfortable silence passed.
“You know we can’t see where you’re pointing, right, Kevin?” said Cal.
“Ah. Yes. Quite, sir,” said Kevin. The right-hand third of the screen became a star map, with a flashing red beacon positioned just above center. A small green icon down at the bottom right corner showed the position of the Untitled.
“It appears to be a cruise liner,” Kevin explained. “One of those big ones filled with tourists.”
“Rich tourists?” Cal wondered.
“Very possibly, sir.”
“Alright!” Cal punched the air. “Looks like our luck’s changing, boys and girls. A whole load of rich folks just called for help, and we’re the cavalry.”
He spun in his chair, then slapped his hands on his knees. “Loren, plot a course. Kevin, try to scan that ship and find out what’s going on. Mech, try phoning them, or whatever it is we do. Miz…”
He looked over to find her scowling back at him. He winked. “What you’re doing now is just perfect.”
Cal rubbed his hands together and grinned with excitement. “I’ve got a good feeling about this one, guys,” he said. “I think this cruise liner could set us up for a very, very long time!”
SIX
THE CRUISE LINER was the biggest ship Cal had ever seen. Even from this distance – which might have been anything from ten to a thousand miles away, what with Cal having zero comprehension of space distances – it was enormous. Size was pretty much the only thing it had going for it, in fact. It was unlikely to win any prizes for style unless it somehow found itself transported to the early 1970s, and even then only if half the judges had been bribed or blinded.
It was shaped like an old tin bathtub, the back end flat and boxy, the front sloping upwards to form a rounded sort of point. Thousands of pinpricks of light and almost as many pinpricks of darkness lined the side that the crew could currently see, and presumably there was just as many on the other side, too. Windows, he assumed. The windows of thousands of cabins, filled with lots of frightened rich people, all of whom would soon owe him a great debt.
Quite what that debt would be, Cal didn’t yet know.
“Still nothing?” he asked.
Mech shook his head. “Nope. Either their comm-systems are all down, or they deliberately ain’t responding.”
“Keep trying,” Cal instructed.
“Well, it’s on automatic redial, so I was going to keep trying, anyway,” Mech said. “I ain’t doing it just because you told me to. I want you to know that.”
“Fair enough,” said Cal. “Kevin, what do we know?”
“Rather a lot, sir,” Kevin replied.
Cal held up a hand. “Specifically, about this ship.”
“Oh. Oh, then nothing, sir,” said Kevin. “Would you like me to look into it?”
“I would, yes. I mean, I’d have thought that was obvious, but apparently—”
“Done, sir,” Kevin said. “The Binto Odyssey is a luxury cruise liner operated out of Trexus VII by the Binto-Rojaxx Corporation. It was the sixteenth vessel built by the company, and is a Trooloo Class Cruiser with accommodation for up to twenty-thousand passengers.”
“OK…” Cal said, but Kevin wasn’t finished.
“Its hull is primarily made up of a Carillium alloy designed to repel light to moderate cannon-fire. Its shields are quantum phase-based, and powered by several large, if now somewhat outdated, warp spheres located deep within the lower structure. Its top speed—”
“Are they rich?” Cal asked.
“Is who rich?”
“The people. The twenty-thousand passengers.”
“Oh. Them. Yes, sir. Obscenely,” the AI replied. “It’s really rather disgusting, actually.”
“Disgustingly rich,” Cal said. He leaned forward in his chair, as if getting those few inches closer might somehow make him wealthier by osmosis. “You hear that, Mech? They’re disgustingly rich.”
“I heard,” said Mech. “Best news I’ve heard all day.”
“Like that’s saying much,” Miz muttered. She had a point. It hadn’t been a great day so far, but things were definitely looking up.
“Life signs?” asked Loren.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Loren waited, then sighed. “How many?”
Kevin began, very quietly, to count. “One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six,” he said, the words becoming a whisper than drifted into a long, pregnant silence.
A minute passed.
“Wait,” said Kevin, then: “One. Two. Three. Four.”
“Just roughly will be fine,” Cal told him.
“Are you sure, sir?”
“God, yes.”
“As you wish. In that case, I’d estimate there are… lots,” Kevin said. “Likely the full complement of passengers, although without a manifest to cross-reference, that’s merely a projection on my part.”
“Right,” said Cal.
“By which I mean, it’s a complete guess.”
“Gotcha. Now shut up,” Cal drummed his hands on his arm rests. “Mech?”
“Still nothing back,” Mech said.
Cal stared ahead at the Binto Odyssey, and all those blazing lights along its side. “Is there any way we can get aboard?”
Loren tapped her console and a schematic of the rear of the cruiser appeared on screen. “Looks like the landing bays are energy shielded, but this tech is two decades old. We can hack it.”
“Well, then it’s decided!” Cal announced. “We get aboard, find out what the problem is, and save the day.”
He grinned broadly, the prospect of full-sized banoffee pies spurring him on. “What could possibly go wrong?”
THE CURRENTLY UNTITLED shuddered gently as it descended gracefully through one of the Odyssey’s inner shields and alighted in a landing bay.
That done, it bounced twice, screeched thirty feet along the deck, and came to a stop with its nose resting against the ground.
There was silence, like a moment of calm before a particularly nasty storm, then the Untitled’s back end came down and its rear legs slammed into the deck with a ka-klang that rolled off across the landing bay area in all available directions.
Had someone standing outside the ship been blessed with exceptionally good hearing – and had they not just been deafened by the crashing metallic din – they might have heard a single female voice emerge from inside.
“Smooth, Loren. Like, real smooth,” it said. “Seriously, that was totally your best one yet.”
“HELLOOOOOO!”
Cal�
�s voice reverberated along another corridor, and was met with another lengthy silence. They were on one of the accommodation decks – the fourth they’d investigated – and this one was as empty as all the rest.
The inside of the Binto Odyssey was fussily opulent, with lots of wooden paneling, patterned wallpapers, and ornate trims of precious metals and luxurious fabrics. There was too much of all of it, and it was all arranged in a way that was jarringly overblown and unpleasant. Had the Queen of England handed over palace interior design duties to the Kardashian family, this would almost certainly have been the result.
“I don’t get it,” said Cal. “Where is everyone?”
Mech sighed. “That is the eighth fonking time you’ve asked me that question.”
“I wasn’t asking you,” said Cal. “I was asking Loren.”
Loren blinked in surprise, like she hadn’t been paying attention. “What?”
“Nothing. Doesn’t matter,” said Cal.
He knocked on a cabin door. “Room service. Anyone home? I have space burritos.”
They waited for a response, like they’d done at a dozen other doors. As before, none came.
“It don’t make no sense,” said Mech, tapping a series of controls on his arm. “Sensors say this place is full of life. I got life signs showing up all around us. All different species.”
“Could they be invisible?” Cal wondered. He lunged at a couple of empty spots, flailed his arms around in a couple of half-circles, then shrugged. “Doesn’t look like it. Miz, you getting anything?”
Mizette’s nostrils were flared wide. “It’s, like, hard to explain. I’m getting a scent, but it’s not like anything I’ve ever… It’s like, like, a million smells all mixed together.”
She pointed to her ears, both of which were pricked up. “And what’s that noise?”
Everyone listened.
“What noise?” Cal eventually asked.
“That buzzing. Or squeaking. Or, like, humming, or whatever.”
“Not getting it,” Cal said. “Loren? Mech?”
Loren shook her head. “No.”
“Nothing here,” said Mech.
Cal shifted his gaze to Splurt, who was perching on his shoulder. “Buddy? You hear anything?”
Splurt made a gesture that was not unlike a shrug.
Space Team: The Time Titan of Tomorrow Page 6
