“Because we can’t just—”
“I don’t know!” Cal said, more firmly this time. He could almost hear Miz’s hackles rise, but he didn’t care. So what if she was angry? It didn’t matter. Nothing much of anything mattered now.
Cal made a cup shape with his hand and picked up some of the gooey puddle. He watched it drizzle like snot between his fingers.
“God, we’d been through so much, you know?” said Cal. “How many times did he save me? Did he save all of us?”
“A lot, man,” said Mech.
“And now he’s a fonking puddle,” Cal said. He exhaled slowly. “I can’t believe I’m not going to see that face again. Well… I mean, not face, exactly. Eyes, or… You know what I’m trying to say.”
“Yes,” said Loren. She put a hand on his shoulder. “We know.”
Cal placed his own hand on top of hers and their fingers interlocked. He looked up to the sky and closed his eyes for a moment, composing himself.
“Splurt, buddy,” he began, then the puddle of goo erupted upwards like a drowning swimmer breaking the surface for one final frantic breath. It spun upwards into a tumbling tangle of slimy tendrils, whipped at the air for several frenzied seconds, then compacted together with a gloopy kurschlopp.
A green blob, a little smaller than a basketball, plopped onto the ground at Cal’s feet. Two eyes gazed up at him, unblinking on account of having no eyelids to speak of.
Cal and the others all gazed in disbelief. After a moment, Cal flicked the slimy residue from his fingers. “Ew,” he muttered, then: “Splurt!”
Snatching up the little guy, Cal held him at arm’s lengths, spinning around and around, tears and laughter and snot and surprise all ejecting themselves through various parts of his face in turn. He pulled Splurt in close then, and they sort of danced together on the spot, cheek to blobby cheek. Admittedly, it was Cal who did most of the dancing, but it was obvious that Splurt was enjoying himself if you knew what to look for.
“Don’t you ever do that to me again!” Cal told him. “You hear me? Don’t you ever almost sort of die on me again.”
“Should’ve known he’d be back,” said Miz. She reached over and gave Splurt a half-hearted pat. “Between you and now Splurt, seems like no one on this team ever really dies.”
“You’d better believe it,” said Cal, his grin coming back broader than ever. “Although I do now feel even more guilty about killing all those clone guys. Is that weird?”
“You flattened dozens of people with a monster,” Mech pointed out. “No, feeling guilty ain’t weird. In fact, I’d say it’s pretty fonking mandatory.”
He half-smirked, then gave Splurt a gentle dunt with a metal fist. “Glad you’re OK, little guy.”
Splurt’s eyes shook from side to side with the impact but they still somehow managed to look grateful, nonetheless.
Cal deposited Splurt on his shoulder. The little blob grew, just a fraction, as he sucked up the smear of goo that had been keeping his spot warm for him.
Turning, Cal addressed the rest of the group. “Well, all’s well that ends well, I guess. Another Space Adventure is over, and we’ve once more…”
He faltered.
“Wait. What did we do?”
“We ain’t done nothing yet,” Mech said.
Cal raised his eyebrows. “Seriously? Nothing? Because it feels like we’ve done quite a lot.” He began to count on his fingers. “So, getting old, coming here...” He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth a few times. “Actually, I guess that’s pretty much it. Jesus, we have done nothing. We need to hurry this up. What’s the plan?”
“Well…” Loren began.
“Time bomb! That was it!” said Cal. He looked to the others for confirmation. “Right?”
“We identified the location of a Quanturum deposit,” confirmed Tim.
“There we go!” Cal said. “I mean, I don’t exactly know what – if anything – we’re actually going to do with that information, but it’s a start.”
“We should go check it out,” said Mech. “Maybe there’ll be, you know, clues or something.”
“Boom! Yes! Thank you, Spacelock Holmes,” Cal said. He smiled, quite proudly. “You like that one? Because, like, Space Sherlock Holmes is too much. It’s overly complicated.”
“I don’t know who that is,” Mech pointed out.
“No, I know, but… Spacelock Holmes,” Cal said again, mostly just because he liked it. He shrugged. “Anyway, clues. We should go check out the Quantrus thing.”
“Quanturum,” Tim corrected.
“And that. We’ll check that, too.”
Skipping across to Soonsho, Cal gave her a hug. “You know you can come with us, right?”
“I know,” she replied. “And thank you. But I’ll stay. For now.”
“Fair enough,” said Cal. “But you shout if you need us. Chances are we’ll hear you even if we’re on the other side of the galaxy.”
He moved on to Dorid. “Sorry for the dead arm. And, you know, for killing all those others yous. And partially destroying your castle.”
“All my own fault,” Dorid assured him. “Well, maybe not the arm…”
“We’d stay to help you rebuild, but…” He reached for a suitably diplomatic end to the sentence, but came up short. “I don’t really want to.”
Dorid chuckled. “Thank you for your honesty.”
“Hey. Any time.”
Once the others had said their goodbyes, Cal bounded up the ramp ahead of them. “Come on, we haven’t got all day,” he said, hurrying them on. “Places to go, clues to find, galaxies to save.”
Soonsho and Dorid retreated a few paces, picking their way over a mound of rubble, then watched as the Untitled’s landing ramp raised and its take-off thrusters ignited. It was quite breathtaking, really. The ship rose gracefully, churning the dust up in great clouds below it as it took off into the—
CLUNK. It hit the semi-transparent dome protecting the castle, scraped upwards along it for about forty feet, then plunged almost all the way to the ground. Even through the ship’s hull and over the roar of the thrusters, they heard Cal’s screams.
A moment later, a speaker on the underside of the ship crackled and Loren’s voice emerged. “Uh, could you lower the shield, please?”
Dorid fumbled in his pocket until he found a palm-sized remote control. He pressed a button and the shield shimmered away into nothing.
“Thanks!” said Loren, then the Untitled rocketed upwards and became just another far-off star in the darkening evening sky.
FOURTEEN
CAL STOOD in the Untitled’s kitchen, alternating between flattering and punching the shizz out of the food replicator.
“Look, I know you can hear me,” he told it. “Surely you can’t be completely empty? What about, like, one jelly bean? A single jelly bean, color of your choosing?” He thumped himself on the chest a few times, psyching himself up for the several seconds of unpleasantness the machine put him through whenever he asked it for something new. “Do it. Let’s go, you beautiful big bamston.”
The replicator’s lights pulsed faintly. They had been pulsing faintly since it had produced that tiny banoffee pie slice, though, so this didn’t bode well for anything exciting being about to happen.
“Come on!” Cal yelled, raining hammer-blows on the machine for almost a full second before it became too painful, then just shaking it for a while instead. “One fonking jelly bean. Is that really too much to ask?”
“Apparently so, sir,” Kevin intoned. “The Mush supply is entirely depleted. Perhaps you should have asked to borrow some back at the castle.”
Cal’s jaw dropped. “Son of a… Of course we should have done that. Why didn’t you suggest it then?”
“Was that while I was being buried under debris, or while you were all mourning the loss of Master Splurt, sir?” Kevin enquired. “Or perhaps while we were battling a monstrous mutated clone that could’ve killed us all at any mom
ent? I mean, there may have been a slight window of opportunity between all those, but to be honest I’m not sure if—”
“OK, OK, I get it,” Cal told him. He turned away from the replicator, then attempted to surprise it by spinning and slapping it hard on its side. This hurt his hand quite a lot, and he decided to stop hitting the thing now, before he did himself any real damage. He settled for shooting it an indignant look that he hoped would have a devastating effect on the fonking thing’s self-confidence.
That done, he left the kitchen and joined the others up on the bridge. The view screen was filled with space. Lots and lots of space, moving quite quickly. He did his best not to look at it for too long, and slumped into his chair.
“Replicator’s still broken,” he announced.
“It ain’t broken. You just used it all up,” Mech replied.
Cal waved a hand. “Look, let’s not argue semantics. It isn’t working. That isn’t anyone’s fault.”
“It’s your fault,” said Loren.
“OK, but what does ‘fault’ even mean, anyway? Right?”
Kevin made a sound like a throat being cleared. “According to the dictionary…”
“Rhetorical question, Kevin. We all know what it means.”
Cal spun his chair until he was facing Tim. The Time Titan sat in one of the chairs positioned along the bridge’s rear wall, holding onto his seat belt like his life depended on it. Which, with Loren flying, it probably did.
“But it’s not a problem,” Cal said. “I know how we can get our Mush back. Tim can rewind it.”
At the mention of his name, Tim tore his eyes away from the screen. His lips, which had been muttering a silent prayer ever since the ship-meets-shield incident outside the castle, pulled into a downward curve.
“Sorry?”
“The Mush. The stuff that makes the replicator, you know, replicate. You could do your time magic on the bag, fill it back up, and problem solved.”
Tim shook his head. “What? No. No, I’m afraid not. I can’t do that.”
“Can’t?” asked Cal. “Or won’t?”
“Both. Either,” said Tim. “Time isn’t as straightforward as that. I can’t just wave a hand and rewind something back on itself. Well, I mean, I could, but there would be repercussions. Perhaps lethal ones.”
He gestured to Cal’s stomach. “If I was to refill the machine, where does it all come from? If I’m reversing its timeline then every piece of the stuff you ate will be uneaten. You might be able to feast today, but it won’t matter, because you’ll have starved to death a month ago. Or been so light-headed with hunger you didn’t see something about to leap at you from the shadows.” Tim gestured to Miz. “Or she couldn’t move fast enough to save you from something.” He continued on to Loren. “Or her time line changes so she crashes due to sheer calorie-deprivation, killing you all.”
“Like, is that why you keep doing it, Loren?” Miz wondered. “Are you hungry all the time?”
“I cannot rewind something in isolation is my point,” Tim concluded.
“You rewound me,” Cal reminded him.
“Because you had side-stepped into a different flow of time, and therefore your actions had no – or few – repercussions on this time line. You see?”
“Not really,” Cal admitted. He puffed out his cheeks. “So, quit beating around the bush, Timbo. Cards on the table time. What are you saying? Are you going to magic us up some Mush or not?”
“No. No, I’m not,” said Tim.
“Well, why didn’t you just say so?” Cal asked. He crossed his arms over his belly and rocked in his chair, making it squeak. “Man, I am fonking hungry. Is there, like, a Pizza Hut or whatever on the way to where we’re going?”
“One, no. And Two, we have no money,” Loren reminded him.
“We stole this spaceship. Pretty sure we can steal a pizza,” Cal reasoned.
“Anyway, it’s too late,” Loren said.
There was a collective ‘Wargh!’ from everyone on the bridge as the Untitled stopped with Loren’s usual spine-shattering level of abruptness.
“We’re here,” she said, her voice becoming a slightly awestruck whisper.
Cal coughed his testicles back out of his lower abdomen and blinked rapidly until colors no longer swam before his eyes. He drew his gaze across the viewscreen from left to right. There, in front of them, was space. Lots of space, and yet no more space than was probably normal.
“We’re where?” he asked. “There’s fonk all here.”
“We’ve entered Gooramy Space,” Loren said. “That’s where Dorid’s co-ordinates point to.”
“They point to the middle of nowhere?” Cal groaned. “So, what are you saying? That creepy son-of-a-bedge stitched us up?”
“No. They point to a planet within Gooramy Space,” Loren said.
“Then let’s go there,” Cal said, rocking in his chair and gesturing ahead. “Come on. Chop chop. Drive, or fly, or whatever. Let’s go to the planet and get on with finding clues, or… God, I don’t even know what we’re supposed to be doing. Tell me someone else knows.”
“We can’t,” said Mech. “Gooramy Space is sacred. We can’t go any further without their permission.”
“Come on, no one will know!” Cal said. “Look outside, there’s nobody here.”
“They’ll have picked up our approach,” Loren said. “They’ll be on the way.”
Cal sighed and slouched back in his chair. “Miz, what do you think?”
“About what?” Miz asked, flicking her eyes up.
“This whole Gooramy Space situation.”
Miz shot the view screen a look that bordered on contempt, then shrugged. “I have no opinion.”
“See? Miz agrees with me,” Cal said.
Mech scowled. “What? No she don’t.”
“OK, well she does, obviously, but I’ll be the bigger man here and you and I will just agree to disagree on that one,” said Cal.
“How come we have to bring him anyway?” Miz asked, flicking her head in Tim’s direction.
“Because we have no idea what we’re supposed to be doing,” Cal said.
“No, I mean, how come he can’t just, like, teleport or whatever? Like he did before when he was the giant baby thing.”
Cal creaked his chair around. “That’s a point. Couldn’t you just beam yourself over to the planet, check it out, then beam back?”
Tim shook his head. “As I said earlier, I am the Time Titan, not the Time and Space Titan. I was only able to travel to the Odyssey via the chronal disturbance itself. I traveled through its cracks, if you like.”
“Oh. OK. That makes sense,” said Cal. He leaned in Mech’s direction and whispered. “That does make sense, right?”
“Fonked if I know.”
“Meh. Sounds plausible enough,” Cal said. “You know, compared to everything else that’s ever happened to us.” He sighed again, louder this time, and rotated his chair back to the front again. “Who are these Gooramy guys, anyway? Are they the orange ones with nipples for eyes?”
Everyone turned to look at him. Even Splurt lowered himself down from the ceiling a fraction to join in.
“Wait. No.” Cal made a switch-around motion with his fingers. “I mean eyes for nipples. Nipples for eyes would be horrifying.”
“Oh. No, those are the Groonkshuks,” said Loren.
“Right. Right, yeah. Groonshuks,” said Cal, over-enunciating the word for reasons he wasn’t really sure of, but which he quite enjoyed all the same. He tapped his armrest and thought. “Are the Gooramy the porcupine guys with the cute little bunched up faces? You know? Their faces are all…”
He screwed up his face, but failed in his attempt to make it particularly cute.
“Like that. All bunched up. They sing all the time. Remember?” He gave a half-hearted performance of a tune that no-one recognized, and that probably didn’t exist. “Always with the singing. Is that them?”
“I don’t know what the fonk yo
u just described. But for their sake, I hope I never meet one,” Mech said. He brought a hand to his waist and indicated some invisible line there. “The Gooramy are half fish, half… you know, person.”
“Come on, Mech. I’m sure they’re all person,” said Cal. “We’re not living in the dark ages here. Just because someone’s half-fish, doesn’t make them any less of a…” He drew in a gasp so sharp and sudden that a little oxygen warning light flickered briefly on Loren’s console. He moved to stand up, but the seatbelt had other ideas and slammed him back down. He didn’t notice.
“SPACE MERMAIDS!”
“Say what?”
“We have those! On Earth!” Cal cried. “Except not space ones. Normal ones.”
Loren and Mech exchanged puzzled looks. “You have Gooramy on Earth?” Loren asked.
“Yes! But we call them Mermaids. And they’re entirely fictitious. But yes!” Cal gushed. He put his hand to his waist, just as Mech had done. “So, half fish, half human, right?”
“Humanoid,” Loren said. “But yes. That’s sounds like them.”
“And they’re in space? What are they doing in space?”
“What are any of us doing in space, sir?” Kevin asked. “I often ask myself that same question while everyone else is asleep, and I’m sitting here all alone in a cold, endless void.”
“Uh, OK,” said Cal.
“In case you’re wondering how I know you’re asleep, it’s because I watch you,” the AI continued. “Closely.”
“That’s… good to know,” Cal said.
“Just joshing, sir. Don’t be concerned,” Kevin said. “I don’t watch that closely.”
“Right,” said Cal, dragging the word out.
“On an unrelated note, I thought you might like to know there are a number of ships approaching from over that way.”
The crew all held off from saying anything while they waited for the penny to drop.
It didn’t.
“Again, can’t see you pointing there, Kevin,” Cal said. “Maybe you could help us out here?”
“No need,” said Loren. On screen, four smallish fighter ships and one cruiser appeared one by one in the space ahead of them. “They just dropped out of warp.”
Space Team: The Time Titan of Tomorrow Page 16
