“It is time,” he announced in an authoritative gargle. “The Shoal Queen awaits in her chamber.”
Mech snorted.
“It is time for the mating ritual to begin.”
“The…? Wait, the…? No.” Cal was suddenly on his feet. “No. God, no! No way. Not happening.”
“Arrangements have been made,” the diplomat insisted. “The deal has been done.”
“Well it can be fonking well undone! Because there is no way I’m screwing a fish-person,” Cal said. “I mean… maybe if it’d had been the other way around. But even then.”
“If the agreed arrangement is not undertaken, we shall have no choice but to destroy your ship and class you all as prisoners,” the diplomat continued. “The boarding tunnel is still connected. We could deploy an explosive that would bypass your shielding and detonate inside the ship itself. Anyone on board would be killed instantly.”
His bulging eyes swam as he considered this. “Almost instantly.”
Cal shot Mech an accusing look. “I thought you said they were nice?”
He exhaled forcefully, just in case anyone could be in any doubt about how unhappy he was about this whole situation.
“Seriously?” he groaned. “With the big eyes and the gills and everything?”
“Just don’t look at her face,” Mech suggested.
“They’re all face!” Cal pointed out. “They’re legs, fishy body, then boom. Face.”
“You could close your eyes,” said Miz.
“But then there’s the smell,” Cal protested. “So much smell.” He tutted. “Do we even need the ship? Will it really be that much of a loss? The guys would understand.”
“Just go mate with the damn fish queen,” Mech told him.
“Fine. Know what? Fine. I can do this. It’s not a problem,” Cal said. He strode over towards the waiting diplomat, got halfway, then about-turned. “No. Jesus. No, this is not happening.”
Two robotic arms grabbed him by the shoulders. A trident jabbed into his back, buzzing its electricity across his skin. “Guys! They’re taking me!” Cal yelped as he was dragged backwards towards the door.
Mech waved, his metal mouth smiling more broadly than Cal had even known was possible.
“Try to be quick,” Miz called after him.
“I fonking hate you guys!” Cal managed to blurt, before the guards dragged him out of the room. The diplomat nodded curtly to Mech and Miz.
“It is a great honor to be chosen for the mating ritual. He should be pleased.”
“Secretly, I think he’s delighted,” said Mech. “He just doesn’t want to show it.”
The diplomat gave another nod, then retreated backward through the door. “Someone will come to attend to you shortly,” he told them, then the door slid closed, leaving Mech and Miz alone in the room.
Miz chewed anxiously on her bottom lip. “Think Cal’s going to be OK?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Yeah, he’s gonna be fine,” Mech said. He chuckled. “Physically, I mean. Psychologically? That shizz is gonna stay with him for a loooong fonking time.”
SIXTEEN
CAL WAS DRAGGED through a number of doors as he was carried through the ship. He grabbed for a few, digging in with his fingertips until one of the robotic arms pulled him free, but it was only delaying the inevitable.
Finally, they reached an imposing set of double doors fashioned from a metal much shinier and more expensive-looking than any Cal had seen elsewhere on the ship. There were ornate symbols carved into each door. The translation chip in Cal’s eye started to decipher them, but he was too terrified to read what they said.
“Look, guys, let’s talk about this,” Cal began, but then the doors slid open and a single shove sent him stumbling into the beckoning gloom.
He skidded several feet along the ground, then scrambled upright and made a dive back in the direction of the exit. The doors slid closed before him, trapping him inside. Cal hammered a fist against them, shouted a few desperate pleas for help, then stopped when he heard a slow, lumbering squelch and the pup-pup-pup of a fishy mouth flapping open and closed from somewhere close behind him.
“Oh God,” he whispered. “This is it.”
He didn’t want to turn. It was pretty much last on his list of priorities, in fact, but he knew he had no choice. Steeling himself, he shuffled around in a half circle.
Something from a nightmare stood before him.
Somewhere around fifteen years previously, Cal had been flicking through TV channels one night, when he’d come across a documentary about fish. Specifically, it was about the Lumpfish – a creature the program makers had deemed to be the single ugliest thing living in the ocean, and which resembled an overfilled colostomy bag with fins and a face.
The thing wheezing in front of him now reminded him of it a lot, although admittedly the one he’d seen on the show hadn’t been wearing a knee-length skirt with stylish strappy shoes.
Cal flattened himself against the door, as if he could somehow seep right through the metal and out into the hallway beyond. Mood-lighting candles flickered around the room, casting flickering shadows across the Gooramy’s slimy scales and reflecting in her hideously bulging eyeballs.
Even her legs – the one part he thought he could rely on to take his mind off the whole horrifying experience – had let him down. He’d been praying for supermodel legs. Or just model legs. Or just vaguely attractive woman legs. Instead, she had two thick poles of meat that went straight up and down with no hint of a curve, and were decorated all over with dots of stubble.
Still, at least the Discovery Channel had never made an hour-long documentary about them, so they were still a step-up on the rest of her.
Cal realized he was staring wide-eyed at the queen. Not as wide-eyed as she was, obviously – that would’ve taken a serious thyroid condition and a foot pump – but pretty wide-eyed all the same. He also realized he hadn’t said anything, although his brain was currently running around screaming inside his head, so he thought he could probably be forgiven for his temporary lack of manners.
“Hey… you,” he managed, his voice croaking out of his throat on the third attempt. “I should probably warn you, I have a headache.”
“Here. Now,” the Gooramy commanded, pointing to a spot right in front of her. For an alien fish-queen, her accent was surprisingly Russian-sounding. “Stand before me.”
Cal fumbled his fingers along the wall by the door, hoping to find some control panel or emergency exit button there, but he was out of luck.
“I do not have all of day,” the Gooramy snapped. “Here. Now. Before me.”
Looking back, Cal didn’t remember moving. He certainly made no decision to move, but his legs must have got together and planned it on their own, because the next thing he knew he was standing in front of the… he felt ‘monster’ was probably too harsh a word, but his mind kept bringing him back to it.
“You must be cleaned.”
Cal swallowed. It was partly through nerves and partly to push back the feeling of nausea brought on by the Gooramy’s overwhelming fish-stench.
“I had a shower yesterday,” he said, leaving out the fact that fifty or more years had passed since then.
“Not enough. You must be Gooramy clean before you are permitted to see Shoal Queen.”
Cal blinked. “Huh? Wait… You mean you’re not the queen?”
“Ha! No. I am but servant, not Shoal Queen. Though you will wish I was.”
“I doubt that very much,” Cal said.
“It is true. Trust me. Shoal Queen has many deformities. Physically. You will find her upsetting to look at. She will make you sick,” the fish-woman said, really selling the idea by dry-heaving a few times. “Like this.”
Cal’s brain started doing panicky laps again. He was about to throw himself at the fish-woman’s mercy and beg her to either help him escape or kill him quickly when she spat a gush of stinking salty liquid in his face. The force of it knocked him back several
steps. He coughed and spluttered out a mouthful of briny sea water, blinked several times, then yelped as the big Gooramy appeared behind him and used her bulk to bundle him towards another door that had been hidden in the shadow near the back of the room.
“Now you are Gooramy clean,” she said. Cal tried to side-step clear, but her weight and momentum shoved him through the door just as it opened. It clanged closed so quickly he felt the wind of it at its back.
Several spotlights illuminated high on the wall in front of him and he hissed, blinded by their glow. Shielding his eyes with one hand, he tried to size up the room he’d landed in, but his night vision had been all-but obliterated, and everywhere he looked he saw nothing but the imprint of the spotlights on his retina.
“Hello?” he said in a low, throaty whisper. “I, uh, I think there’s been a mistake. I’m just here to fix the refrigerator, and somehow ended up in here. So, if you could…”
“Silence.”
The voice came from somewhere in the darkness ahead. Several feet higher up, too. Fonk, how big was this thing?
It was smoother and markedly less Russian than the servant’s voice. There was something snake-like about the way she dragged out the s sounds – ssssilenccce – that didn’t exactly make Cal feel any more confident about his current predicament.
“You wish to see me?” the voice asked.
Cal swallowed. “Not really.”
“I will dance for you.”
A spasm of horror shuddered through him. “That’s a lovely offer, but really not necessary,” he said. “Just point me towards the busted refrigerator and I’ll—”
A low, pulsating beat throbbed from the walls and up through the floor. It was slow, steady and almost tribal - the sort of tune the residents of Skull Island might hammer out when summoning King Kong, Cal reckoned. This thought, too, did little to make him feel better about the whole situation.
A shape moved in the dark gaps behind the spotlights and Cal made himself as flat as possible against the door.
“Oh Jesus,” he whimpered. “Here we go.”
The spotlights swung down, sweeping their glow across the floor until they picked out the bare feet and ankles of the Shoal Queen and continued on up her legs.
Cal screwed his eyes shut in horror. A moment later, after his scrambled brain had processed the data it had been given, one of the eyes opened again.
The Shoal Queen stood on a raised stage at the opposite end of the room. She was a little taller than Cal, and boasted the supermodel legs he had been praying for.
To his surprise, she also boasted the supermodel torso, arms, head and face. She was human. Or mostly human, at least.
Her hair was long, green and told tales of the ocean. Her skin was immaculately smooth. Colors danced across its silvery sheen as she gyrated sensually in the eyes of the spotlights. She wore a skimpy swimsuit of seaweed and shells that clung to her impeccable curves as she rolled her hips and curved her arms and performed for her would-be mate.
As the Shoal Queen turned, Cal noticed she had a set of small gills on the side of her neck. Meh. He could live with that.
“Uh… You’re…”
“Does my deformity scare you?” she asked, weaving her mesmerizing frame a step closer.
“No. Well, I mean, I’m sure I can soldier through it,” Cal said. “It’s what’s inside that counts, right?”
The Shoal Queen giggled with delight. It instantly catapulted itself into Cal’s top three favorite sounds.
“Thank you. None has ever been able to look beyond my grotesque appearance before,” she said, twerking another step closer. “You shall be my first.”
Cal swallowed again. It was a very different swallow to any of the others he’d done in the past ten minutes.
“Your first?”
“Hmm-mm,” said the Shoal Queen, biting her copper-colored bottom lip. “You do not mind?”
Cal laughed. It was quite a high-pitched and slightly hysterical laugh, and it lasted just a fraction of a second. “No. No, I don’t mind. I mean… someone’s got to do it, right?”
The beat of the music had replaced Cal’s heartbeat now. He could feel it resonating through them – through them both – as the Shoal Queen closed in.
Fonk, she was beautiful. And not just in a she doesn’t have a giant fish head kind of way. Genuinely, by any available standard, bona-fide gorgeous.
“Then we shall be joined,” she said, sliding the seaweed strap of her swimsuit over one perfect shoulder. “Together. Here and now.”
“OK. Well, obviously it’s under protest, but…” He reached for his belt buckle, and had just started to undo it when the door behind him was torn open and he fell out into the other room. “What the fonk?!” he yelped, then he found himself looking up at an all-too familiar metal jaw. “Mech?”
“We couldn’t let you go through with it,” Mech said, grabbing Cal and hoisting him to his feet. “Sorry, man. We should never have agreed to this.”
“What? No! I mean… you made a deal.”
“And now we’ve unmade it,” said Miz. She stood over the unconscious form of the weirdly Russian Gooramy woman, claws extended and ears pricked up for danger.
“Is that wise?” Cal asked. “I mean a deal’s a deal, right? This is going to make us look bad. We don’t want to get a reputation for going back on our word!”
Mech hoisted Cal over his shoulder. “You can thank us later. For now, we need to get back to the ship.”
Cal grabbed for the Shoal Queen’s door, but Mech was already off and running. “Seriously, it’s fine!” Cal insisted. “I’ll take one for the team!”
“There’s no way we’re letting you do that,” said Miz, bounding along beside them. “Like, no way.” She bumped him gently on the arm. “We’ve totally got your back.”
Cal could only watch as the door to the Shoal Queen’s chamber got further and further away. He caught a glimpse of her outline – her perfect, perfect outline – silhouetted against the spotlights, and just managed a, “Call me!” before a blaster bolt exploded against the wall ahead of them, forcing Mech to take a detour into a different hallway.
“Shizz. They found us already,” Mech grunted.
“Just take me back. Seriously, I couldn’t live with myself if anything happened to you guys because of—”
More blaster fire screeched past them. Up ahead, the corridor was filling with robot-armed fish-people. It was hard to read their boggle-eyed expressions, but from the way they pointed their guns, it was safe to assume they weren’t happy.
“Hold on!” Mech warned, then he thrust out an arm and charged through a wall, collapsing it as if it were made of cardboard. Two guards on the other side reacted in surprise, turning and raising their trident weapons just as Mech came barreling through.
A metal fist took one of them out. A succession of claw swipes cut down the other.
“Sorry!” Cal called back to the fallen fish-people as he was carried on. “Tell the queen it wasn’t my fault!”
Another wall came up. Another sound like thunder rolled along the corridors as Mech charged straight through it.
Angry shouts spat at them along the passageway. Mech spun his top half around, making Cal simultaneously scream and throw up in his mouth. Six pulsing laser blasts streaked from the cyborg’s arm, driving back the Gooramy soldiers.
“We need to get back to the ship,” said Mech.
“If, like, they haven’t already blown it to bits,” Miz pointed out.
Mech shook his head. “Nah. That guy was bluffing. They wouldn’t,” he said. “I mean, I have nothing to base that on, I guess, but here’s hoping.”
Another wall loomed ahead. This time, Mech fired a couple of shots at it, blowing it outwards before they reached it. Alarms screeched through the ship now, and the sound of running feet filled the corridors.
“Do you even know where you’re going?” Cal asked.
“Yes. Hold on,” Mech said.
“I
can run, you know?!” Cal yelled, but Mech ignored him. A set of security doors snapped closed ahead of them, blocking the corridor. A volley of blasts from Mech’s arm cannon bounced harmlessly off the barrier, barely scorching the metal.
“Hold on,” Mech grunted.
“Will you stop telling me to hold on?” Cal cried. “I’m fonking holding on!”
Most of his sentence was lost to the thunder of rending metal as Mech shoulder-barged the wall beside them and crashed straight through it into a room filled with insanely complicated looking equipment.
“What’s this stuff?” Cal asked.
“Comms relay,” Mech said, hurrying for the door – the actual door this time, not a hole in the wall – that led out of the room.
As he reached it, he stopped. He thought for a moment, then his upper half spun a full one-eighty, whipping Cal’s arms and legs out. Mech opened fire, turning the equipment into a tangle of burned spaghetti.
“That should stop them reporting back for a while,” he said. “Should buy us enough time to get off here, find the Quanturum and—”
“Quit fonking monologuing!” Cal cried, watching the first of a platoon of Gooramy clamber through the hole in the wall. “And run!”
The next few minutes were a blur of sharp turns, screaming gunshots, and exploding walls. When they finally reached the airlock, they found it guarded. Not well guarded enough to stop them, or even slow them down, but guarded all the same.
Miz took out three of the soldiers, while Mech dealt with two more. Even Cal managed to knock one of them out when Mech turned too sharply and his flailing feet connected with a fishy head. It was entirely accidental, but he was claiming it, all the same.
The outer airlock door was locked. This didn’t prove too much of a problem. One punch-and-pull from Mech ripped it out of its housing, exposing the white plastic boarding tunnel beyond.
“Great. This again,” Miz groaned.
“Still, got to be more exciting this time, right?” said Cal. “You know, what with us running for our fonking lives, and everything?”
Mech raced into the tunnel. Every step he took on the less-than-solid floor bounced him up towards the top of the tunnel, where Cal’s head was then clunked against the plastic ridges.
Space Team: The Time Titan of Tomorrow Page 18
