“OK, yes, he’s creepy. But he’s also a genius. A creepy weirdo genius with a gajillion clones is still a genius, right? And we need a genius.”
Cal spun in his chair until he faced Tim. The Time Titan was back in his own clothes now, his smock only lightly stained and very faintly smelling of vomit.
“This guy we’re taking you to see, he’s an inventor. He made this ship, actually. He also made Kevin, but don’t let that put you off. He knows his stuff.”
“He also had a whole big room full of weird monster versions of himself,” Mech added.
“But again,” said Cal, smiling. “Don’t let that put you off. If anyone knows how to build a Time Bomb, it’s…”
“Dorid Tarkula,” said a voice from the screen. A younger version of the man they knew – another clone, unquestionably – stared out at them. “Who’s calling, please?”
CAL and the others stood outside the tall doors of Castle Tarkula, listening to the sound of approaching footsteps on the other side. Splurt was sitting on Cal’s shoulder, trembling almost imperceptibly.
“I know, buddy. I’m excited to see her, too,” Cal said. “But we don’t know if she’s even still…”
The door opened, revealing a slight-framed young girl with red hair, pastel green skin and an array of raised white bumps that were dotted across her nose like freckles. Excitement shimmered in the piercing blue irises of her wide oval eyes, and despite what appeared to be a piece of industrial machinery clamped across her mouth, Cal could tell she was smiling.
“Soonsho!” he cried, then he was almost knocked off his feet when she slammed into him and wrapped her arms around his back. Splurt grew several arms of his own so he could get in on that action, and Cal’s eyes bulged slightly as he was sandwiched between both their bodies.
After dragging herself away from Cal, Soonsho worked her way down the line, hugging Loren, Mech and – a little more warily – Mizette.
She stopped before Tim, her long red lashes blinking as she gazed up at him.
“Hello!” Tim said, a little uncomfortably. Soonsho stared at him in absolute silence. “Um… Interesting mouth thing.”
“She’s a Cantaloupe,” Cal explained.
Mech tutted. “She’s a Cantatorian.”
“You sure?” asked Cal. “Then what’s a Cantaloupe?”
“How the fonk should I know?”
Cal shot Mech a slightly patronizing half-smile. It was an expression he had spent a lot of time perfecting, and which was intended to suggest that Cal knew the person he was smiling at was wrong, but he was far too magnanimous to press the issue. It was one of his favorite expressions, because he knew how much it wound Mech up.
“She’s a fonking Cantatorian!” the cyborg grunted.
“Sure she is, Mech. Whatever you say,” said Cal.
He contemplated raising both eyebrows and chuckling wryly, but wondered if that was perhaps a step too far.
He did it, anyway. The way Mech’s expression darkened told him he’d made the right decision.
“Anyway, she has a stupidly powerful voice.”
“You mean like a singing voice?” Tim asked. “That’s what Cantatorians are famed for, isn’t it? Their hypnotic song.”
“I mean like a one word will destroy mountains voice. You know that planetary shield we almost hit? That was made using her voice. Or something. I didn’t really listen to the details, but I’m pretty sure she was involved.”
“We didn’t almost hit it,” Loren objected.
Miz sneered. “Then why were you screaming, ‘Oh shizz, oh shizz, we’re going to hit it!’ over and over?”
Loren shifted her weight uncomfortably. “I was… being overly cautious. We weren’t anywhere near it.”
“We definitely were,” called Kevin’s voice from inside the Untitled. It was parked a few feet behind them, just inside the castle’s courtyard walls, and a full fifth of a mile away from the clearly designated landing pad Loren had been aiming for.
“And… what?” asked Tim. He pointed to the gadget on Soonsho’s face. “Is that to stop her talking?”
“No.”
The word emerged from the mouth device as an oddly inhuman sounding synthesized voice, taking everyone by surprise.
“It’s so I can talk.”
Cal beamed at her. “Well, listen to you. A whole sentence, and our skeletons are still intact! Way to go, Soonsho! I guess this is working out pretty well for you, huh?”
“For both of us.”
Dorid Tarkula – the original Dorid Tarkula, with his wrinkled-but-rosy cheeks and slightly stooped frame – stepped from the doorway with an almost imperceptible electronic whine. He wore a pair of what Cal could only describe as ‘robot pants’.
Actually, there were lots of other ways he could’ve described them, but of them all, ‘robot pants’ was by far his favorite.
“Dorid!” said Cal. This time there were no hugs – the guy had tried to kill them all with deformed clone-things, after all – but the old man didn’t seem too disappointed.
“Greetings to you all,” Dorid said, nodding at the group in general. He was a little out of breath, and a little more red-faced than usual. “What brings you back to Castle Tarkula? Problems with the ship?”
“Hmm? Oh, no,” said Cal. “Well, I mean, there’s Kevin… But no. The ship’s great. We just need to ask you something.”
“Oh. I see. Well, it’s not the best time…”
“It’ll only take a minute,” Cal assured him.
Dorid glanced back into the castle, then pulled the doors closed. “Go on,” he said.
“What do you know about Time Bombs?”
Dorid ran his tongue across the back of his teeth, considering the question. “Like with the clock on the front?”
“No, but great minds think alike,” said Cal. He shot Mech a look that claimed victory for some imagined argument. “I mean like a bomb that… In fact, know what? I’m going to let Tim explain.”
Cal beckoned Tim forward and made the introductions. “Dorid, this is Tim the Time Titan.”
“It’s just The Time Titan.”
“Tim the Time Titan, this is Dorid Tarkula. And not just a Dorid Tarkula, the Dorid Tarkula. The original and – to my mind, at least – still the best.”
While Cal had been speaking, Dorid had taken to looking Tim up and down. “Time Titan, you say?” He placed a thumb on Tim’s cheek and pulled down, revealing the gooey red bit beneath his eyeball. “What does that involve, exactly?”
He pulled his hand away, as if only just realizing what it was up to. “Sorry. Force of habit. Used to being around clones all day.”
“Think nothing of it,” said Tim. “I quite enjoyed it, actually!”
An awkward silence fell.
Tim softly cleared his throat.
“I don’t know why I said that,” he muttered. “Nerves, probably. I’m not great with new people.”
Cal clapped his hands together. “OK. Moving on. Yes, Dorid, Tim is a Time Titan. He has command over time and space.”
“Just time,” Tim corrected. “And I don’t have ‘command’. I just have a certain… influence.”
“Whatever,” said Cal. “The point is, he’s asked for our help – it’s another save the galaxy sort of a deal – and we thought you might be able to point us in the right direction.”
There was a muffled thud from somewhere inside the castle. Soonsho’s eyes darted anxiously to Dorid’s, but he either didn’t notice or deliberately didn’t meet her gaze.
“What was that?” asked Miz.
“Nothing,” said Dorid. “Continue.”
Another thud came. This time, it was followed by a crash.
“It don’t sound like nothing,” said Mech.
“We’re moving some equipment around. That’s all,” Dorid explained. “Quanturum.”
Cal, who had been staring at the door like he was trying to see through it, shifted his attention back to Dorid. “Huh?”
/> “Quanturum. This ‘Time Bomb’ you speak of, I’m assuming it is something built to catastrophically disrupt the time stream, yes?”
“That is correct,” Tim confirmed.
“Then, if I were building such a device, I’d use Quanturum.”
“What is that?” asked Cal. “Like a fabric softener?”
“Of course. Yes,” said Tim, patting his beard like it was a much-loved pet. “Quanturum is a metal – an ore – with unique time-altering properties.”
“In what way?” asked Loren.
“Think of it like a magnet,” Dorid explained. “Only instead of attracting and repelling metal, it attracts and repels time.”
“Obviously,” said Cal, shooting Loren a withering look.
“Depending on its polarity, it can speed time up or slow it down,” Dorid continued. “Although its effects are so infinitesimal as to be barely noticed.” He nodded with the satisfaction that came from solving a puzzle. “Yes, if I were building a Time Bomb, I’d use Quanturum.”
“OK. So where do we find this stuff?” Cal asked.
“Nowhere,” said Tim. “It’s dangerously unstable. It tore itself apart eons ago.”
“Not all of it,” said Dorid. “I’m aware of one remaining source. If someone did build a Quanturum bomb, then that had to be where they got it from.”
“Well, that’s convenient!” said Cal. “So, give us the address and we’ll go check it out. We’ll have this whole thing wrapped up by lunch time.”
“I’m afraid it won’t be that simple,” Dorid began, then the doors behind him shook as something hit them from the other side.
“OK, that doesn’t sound like someone moving equipment,” said Loren, her hand slipping to her blaster.
Miz’s ears had pricked all the way up now. “It isn’t,” she said. “Get back!”
The warning came just a fraction too late. The castle doors flew outwards, sending Dorid sprawling onto the rough, stony ground. Dozens of other Dorids – some just a little younger than the original, others barely out of their twenties – poured out of the exit, their faces fixed in masks of terror, their voices raised in alarm.
Grabbing the fallen Dorid by his feet, Soonsho heaved him out of the path of the stampeding clones. The old man coughed out his gratitude through a mouthful of gravel, then leaned on the girl as he got back to his feet.
“You got five seconds to explain what the fonk is going on!” Mech barked. “One.”
“It wasn’t my fault!” Dorid sobbed. “It should have worked. It made perfect sense.”
“Two!” Mech continued. “Don’t make me say ‘three’.”
“We thought it would protect them. Make them more resilient!”
“Three. Shizz, man, you went and made me do it!”
Soonsho put her hand on Mech’s chest. “It was my idea,” she said through her voice synthesizer. “I wanted to help.”
“Four!”
“Help do what?” asked Cal.
A sound shuddered through the castle wall, shattering the brickwork and ejecting rubble several dozen feet through the air. The falling rocks clanked down on the Untitled, pitting the hull with dents and making a terrible mess of the paintwork.
“My ship!” Cal yelped.
“My house!” Dorid cried.
“Four-and-a-half!” Mech bellowed.
“Jesus, will you stop counting? No one is listening,” said Cal. He spun and caught Dorid by the shoulders. “What is it? What did you make?”
A fist erupted from inside the castle, sending more of the brickwork crashing down on top of the Untitled.
“Ow,” said Kevin from somewhere inside.
On the side of the fist, two misshapen eyes glared down, and a horribly stretched mouth pulled into a furious snarl.
“Th-that,” Dorid whispered. “I’m afraid I made that.”
Mech’s metal bottom jaw dropped open with a clank. Like the others, he gazed up at the huge face-fist, quietly wondering if this day could get any worse.
“Five,” he muttered, then the fist hammered down on him, driving him three feet into the ground.
“Told you to stop counting,” Cal said. He recoiled in horror as the thing’s actual face appeared through the hole in the castle wall. It looked like someone had made a giant wax sculpture of Dorid’s face, then accidentally left it on a radiator for forty minutes. The features all bled into one another, so it was impossible to tell where an eye ended and a nose began.
Loren groaned. “I’d say ‘well there’s something you don’t see every day,’ but we literally just fought a giant monster a few hours ago.”
“Meh. Fifty odd years ago,” said Cal. “Depends on your time line. Also, what do you mean ‘we’? If memory serves, I totally fought that guy on my—”
Splurt yanked him to the ground as the fist became an open backhand that swept towards them. Loren dived clear, shoving Dorid and Tim ahead of her, while Miz and Soonsho scattered.
Cal let out an oof as he hit the dirt. The bottom of the hand passed just inches above Cal’s face. As it did, something wet and slimy slobbered across his skin.
“Did that… Did that thing fonking lick me?”
Splurt stretched towards the Untitled like a giant green slinky, pulling Cal along by the feet and introducing his head to a number of large rocks.
“Ow! Fonk! Hey, buddy, I thought – Jesus, that’s going to leave a mark – you were supposed to be on my side?”
Closer to the castle, Mech heaved himself out of the hole and primed his arm blasters. “So, that’s how you want to play it, huh? You want to bring the rough stuff, you ugly fonk? I can bring it right back.”
He raised both arms. The face-fist crunched into him, sending him somersaulting across the courtyard. There was a screech of bending metal as he hit a gun turret that had been in the process of rising up out of the ground.
“Castle defenses initiated,” it announced. “Commencing fire.”
The turret spat laser blasts up at the monster, making it thrash furiously. This did the castle wall no favors, and Cal was just able to hear Kevin’s despondent sigh as yet more rubble collapsed on top of the Untitled.
“It’s not working,” cried Loren, drawing her own blaster and opening fire on the monster. “We’re just getting on its nerves.”
“It’s sonically shielded,” Dorid explained. “I incorporated some of Soonsho’s DNA into the clone formula. I thought if my clones could be provided with organic sound-based attack and defensive capabilities, it might help if we ever found ourselves under assault by invaders.”
“And how did that work out for you?” asked Cal. “Because from where I’m standing, it… Wait.” He frowned as he replayed Dorid’s sentence in his head. “Attack?”
The mouth on the thing’s fist opened and a blast of concentrated sound obliterated the top half of the gun turret. Mech had taken only a glancing blow, but it was enough to drive him back into the turret’s wreckage and scramble several of his less heavily-shielded systems.
His legs spun so they faced backwards. One of the rocket boosters in his left foot briefly ignited. He said the word, “Prong!” loudly, and for reasons he didn’t understand.
“OK, I was going easy,” Mech grunted. “But now we’re gonna do things the hard way.”
Grabbing the dial on his chest, Mech gave it a three-quarters twist. His limbs hummed with the additional power, as his eyes became duller and more distant. “Now Mech fight!”
The giant hand caught him by the head. With a sudden flick, he found himself hurtling upwards at speeds that would have killed anything not principally made of a semi-indestructible metal alloy.
With his brainpower muted, Mech’s first thought was that he was going to fly all the way up into space and keep on going. His second thought was, ‘Ooyah!’ as he smashed against the roof of an invisible dome shield. This was quickly followed by his third thought – ‘Waaaaaargh!’ – as he plummeted back in the direction of the ground.
&n
bsp; “Splurt, break his fall!” Cal cried.
The little green ball became a much larger green limb.
“My word,” gasped Tim. “That’s… that’s impossible.”
“You think this is impressive? You should see his Dorothy out of—”
A screech from the Dorid monster’s fist shook the ground beneath them. For a moment, the soundwave was practically visible as it emerged from the twisted aperture and vibrated through the air.
Another sound followed, just barely audible over the piercing squeal of the monster. It was the fast, sudden squelch of Splurt exploding.
The shockwave of sound tore through his still-gelatinous form, scattering him into a thousand individual blobs that splattered across the ground, and across the faces of Cal, Tim and the others.
For a moment, the world stopped turning.
Cal stared. Not at anything in particular. He just stared.
Loren looked from Cal to all the little green smears that had been Splurt.
Had been.
Past tense.
Several feet away, Mech hit the ground with a crunch and quite a lot of swearing.
Miz grimaced. “Ew. Like, he’s in my fur.”
“Splurt?” whispered Cal, scooping a blob of green mush off his cheek and addressing it directly. “Buddy?”
He had hoped for a tiny pair of eyes to appear in the goo, but the Splurt chunk didn’t respond. All around them, all over the ground, the Splurt chunks didn’t respond.
“No, no, no, no!” Cal spat, dropping to his knees with a soggy thunk. Bits of Splurt were all around him, like blobs of congealing grease. He frantically pulled them towards himself, smooshing them together on the ground between his knees. “No, no, come on, buddy. Come on!”
“Cal,” said Loren. She put a hand on his back, but he shrugged it away. “Cal,” she said again. “It’s no good.”
Cal stopped scooping. The pile of goo he had assembled between his knees oozed outwards until it was nothing but a shallow puddle.
“It killed Splurt,” Cal whispered. He deposited a single lifeless handful of slime on his shoulder, then slowly got to his feet, his fingers curving into fists. “That thing just killed Splurt!”
Miz looked up from where she was picking bits of the little guy out of her fur. “Wait, what?”
Space Team: The Time Titan of Tomorrow Page 14
