Space Team: A Lot of Weird Space Shizz: Collected Short Stories

by Barry J. Hutchison

  Head swimming, Konto crawled off the fallen Xandrie. The door to the inner office opened, and Ranock strode out, his metal muscles flexing as he stormed across the floor. “You fonking piece of shizz!” the Xandrie roared. He raised both fists above his head …

  … and then blinked in surprise when a blaster rifle bolt punched a hole through his upper chest and neck. His mouth flapped open and closed. His arms sagged. He managed to shoot Larry an accusing look before his legs gave out and he toppled forwards onto the floor.

  “Whoops,” said Larry. “That totally went off in my hand.”

  “Larry?”

  Nobosh appeared in the office doorway, his eyes wide and panicked as he tried to figure out what the fonk had happened in the past thirty seconds. There were at least two dead Xandrie on the floor, possibly three. Konto was struggling to his feet, a chunk of his shoulder missing and a really quite remarkable amount of blood smeared across his neck and face, and plenty more of it staining his clothes.

  And in the middle of it all was Larry. He turned the gun away when Nobosh appeared. His classmates all screamed and ducked as the rifle swept towards them.

  “Larry, be careful!” Konto warned. He made it to his feet, but the floor rolled and undulated beneath him, and he quickly dropped back onto one knee. “Put the gun down, Larry. Slowly.”

  “Yes, do as he says, Larry,” Nobosh urged. “We wouldn’t want anyone getting hurt.”

  Konto snapped his head around and growled at Larry’s father. “Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut,” he spat. “I know what you did, Nobosh. I know you’re behind this.”

  He glared until Nobosh began to squirm, then turned his attention back to Larry. The boy looked confused. “Huh?” he said. “What do you mean, Mr Garr? How is my dad behind it?”

  The gun was still half-tucked under Larry’s arm, the barrel still aiming vaguely at the rest of the kids. Miss Tresno and Magazine-Mom, to their credit, had made all the kids drop to the floor. Konto saw Deenia watching him, face-down on the carpet tiles. He gestured for her to stay down, then beckoned for Larry to come closer.

  “That’s not important, Larry,” Konto said. “Just come here. Give me the gun.”

  Larry looked from Konto to his dad and back again. After a moment, he nodded. “OK, Mr Garr. Whatever you say.”

  He shuffled closer. Konto took the gun and ejected the battery pack. Only then did he let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding in. “Well done, Larry,” he said. “Good boy.”

  Deenia jumped up and ran towards him, then screamed as a hand caught her roughly by the hair. Nobosh pulled her in front of him, a blaster pistol jammed against the side of her head.

  “Nobody move!” Nobosh hissed. “OK? OK? Everyone just stay calm and let me think about this.”

  “Let her go, Nobosh,” Konto warned.

  “Dad?” said Larry, his voice faltering.

  “This is your fault,” Nobosh spat, glaring at his son. “You had to go to the bathroom. You couldn’t have just stuck with the group. You had to mess it up!”

  Larry’s face went tight. Tears filled his eyes. “What? I didn’t mean … I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I didn’t …”

  “You’re always sorry, Larry. You’re always so fonking sorry!” Nobosh yelled, with such ferocity he forced his son back a step. Nobosh’s face twisted as he mimicked his son’s voice. “I’m sorry, it’s not my fault, I couldn’t help it! You’re pathetic!”

  “Hey, leave him alone!” Deenia said, then she bit her lip as the blaster was pressed more firmly against her head.

  “Nobosh, let my daughter go,” Konto growled. “I am warning you!”

  He tried getting to his feet again, but the blood loss was taking its toll now. The floor was made of rubber, and darkness was drawing a circle around his field of vision – a circle which was steadily getting smaller.

  “I’ll trade you,” Nobosh said. “Send over Larry and I’ll give you the girl.”

  Larry wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “Why do you want me? You already said it, I’m no good for anything.”

  “Because, like it or not, you’re my son,” Nobosh said. “We’ll get out of here. We’ll go … somewhere. I don’t know where. Besides, I need a hostage, and you’ll give me less trouble than this one.” He pulled sharply on Deenia’s hair, making her yelp.

  “What about Mom?” Larry asked.

  Nobosh rolled his eyes. “What about her? We don’t need her. We’ve never needed her. She’s even more useless than you are. Now get over here, now!”

  Konto caught Larry by the shoulder and turned the boy around to face him. “You have to do it, Larry,” he said. “You need to make the swap. You have to do it.”

  He spun Larry around to face his father, then reconsidered and turned him back. “I’m sorry, OK? There’s nothing I can do.”

  Larry nodded his understanding, but said nothing. Konto turned him on the spot, then spun him back the opposite way. “But thank you, Larry. For everything you did. I couldn’t have got this far without you.”

  He turned him back to face Nobosh, hesitated, then twirled him around again. “But don’t listen to him. Even if he tells you you’re useless, you aren’t. You’re a great kid, Larry.”

  “Hurry up!” Nobosh snapped. “Send him over.”

  Konto spun Larry one more time, then gave him a gentle push towards his father. Larry weaved unsteadily across the floor, and stopped when he reached Nobosh’s side.

  “Now send over Deenia,” Konto said.

  Nobosh sneered. “Idiot. Of course I won’t. Two hostages are better than one. I’d hoped to earn big on Larry’s kidnap insurance, but I’ll have to earn big some other way, instead. I hear some of the Remnants warlords pay big money for fresh-faced young—”

  Bleeeeeuurrk!

  Larry erupted. A torrent of vomit hit Nobosh side-on, splattering his belly and lower back. Nobosh jumped back in horror as the second wave of puke cascaded over his right leg and onto his expensive shoes.

  Konto flicked out with his good arm. His knife whipped through the air. There was a hollow-sounding thonk as the handle hit Nobosh squarely between the eyes. He made a noise that was somewhere between a scream and a hiccup, then he toppled backwards, hitting the floor just in time for Larry to throw up on his chest.

  Deenia stumbled forwards and threw herself at Konto. She wrapped her arms around his neck, and he succeeded for several seconds to hide quite how much it hurt. “You came for me,” she sobbed, unwrapping her arms and letting him take her hands, instead. “You came for me.”

  “I did,” Konto said. Behind him, the door was thrown wide. His heart leapt into his throat. Shock-troops!

  “Wait!” he yelped, turning and shielding Deenia with his body. “Don’t shoot!”

  Captain Howlanzer stood in the doorway, his hands raised. “No intentions to,” he said. He smiled. “Seems like someone messed up and sent the shock-troops to the wrong floor. They’re searching one of the under-construction decks right now. Probably blasting the place to bits, if past experience is anything to go by.”

  With a grunt of relief, Konto sank to the floor. Miss Tresno appeared beside him and he felt pressure on his wound. Deenia knelt beside him, a worried look on her face. “I’m going to be fine,” he promised.

  Deenia looked around the room. “You did all this? You fought everyone to save us?”

  “Me? No,” said Konto, gritting his teeth as pain flared on his shoulder. He nodded to Larry, who had now finished throwing up. “We did. I couldn’t have done it without Larry.”

  “He totally could have,” said Larry, waddling over to join them. “Do you know who your dad is, Deenia? Who he really is, I mean?”

  Konto shook his head, but Miss Tresno chose just that moment to lean over him, blocking Larry’s view.

  “Who?” asked Deenia.

  “He’s the most awesome, kick-ass guy I’ve ever met,” said Larry. “That’s who.”

  Miss Tresno moved, just a little, and Konto caug
ht a glimpse of Deenia’s smile. “I know,” she whispered.

  And with those two words rolling around inside his head, Konto Garr closed his heavy eyelids, and drifted off into a deeply satisfying sleep.

  THE END

  The events of this story take place between Space Team: Song of the Space Siren and Space Team: The Guns of Nana Joan. Find out about the strange old woman with the pet vac pack in Nun Shall Pass which begins on the next page.

  NUN SHALL PASS

  Originally published in The Expanding Universe Volume 2

  1.

  Ronda Sallas had killed a number of men in her time – but then, what nun hadn’t? It had been quite a large number, too. Not three digits, maybe, but close. But she had never - at least, not to the best of her knowledge - used a frying pan to do the job. And certainly not one of her good ones.

  She hadn’t actually killed the man yet. But she would. Soon. In four minutes and forty-seven seconds, in fact.

  Her son, Narp, was not a bad boy. He was a good boy who occasionally did bad things, and that was an important distinction, as far as Ronda was concerned. Besides, even the bad things he did were never his idea. He was forced to do them against his will. Most of the time, at least.

  Ronda stopped outside a building she knew very well, despite never having been there before. She looked up at its featureless gray frontage, taking in its shuttered windows and reinforced front door. Yep, this was the place from her premonition, alright. From the premonition, she knew Narp wasn’t in there, but she knew that someone inside would lead her to him.

  She hoisted the bag containing her second-best frying pan higher on her shoulder, approached the metal door, and knocked.

  Almost immediately, as she knew it would, a hatch opened. It was a small hatch, through which Ronda could see a tiny bit of a larger-built gentleman. He was, of course, neither gentle nor technically a man. He was a Turlap, a species renowned throughout the galaxy for their size, stupidity and willingness to hurt others for money – although not necessarily in that order.

  His name was Gunth. He would die, screaming, impaled on a number of metal spikes. But not today, and not by her.

  “What the fonk you want?”

  Ronda’s smile flickered, but rallied quickly. She’d resisted having a translation chip implanted for years, preferring to learn languages the old-fashioned way, via months of lingo-tank submersions and agonizing frontal lobe stimulation. Once she’d heard about the chip’s censorship functionality, though, she’d relented. Murder, she could deal with. Bad language, though, that was another matter entirely.

  “Hello, dear,” said Ronda. “How’s Aliss?”

  The eyes blinked, slow and cow-like. “Huh?”

  “Your mother, Aliss. How is she? She should get that swelling under her upper armpit looked at. Tell her that from me.”

  “Uh, she’s fine.”

  Ronda made a well, actually, face, but said no more about it. “Is Narp there?”

  Another blink. “Huh?”

  “My son, Narp,” said Ronda, broadening her smile. “Tell you what, Gunth, let’s hurry this along. You’re going to say he’s not there, I’m going to say I know, and that I’d like to come in and speak to Katona.”

  Gunth blinked so slowly that a casual onlooker would be forgiven for thinking he’d fallen asleep. “Stay with me, here, Gunth,” Ronda continued. “You’ll say Katona isn’t here, I’ll say he is, you’ll say he isn’t, this will go on for some time, then you’ll eventually ask me for the passcode.”

  “What’s the passcode?” demanded Gunth, latching onto the one phrase he felt on more familiar ground with.

  “Eight-seven-zeta-nine.”

  Behind the door, Gunth’s lips moved silently. Once he was confident the code matched the one he had painstakingly memorized, he shrugged and slid the hatch closed.

  Ronda heaved her bag higher on her shoulder as locks unlocked and bolts slid open. A moment later, the door swung inwards, revealing Gunth in all his four-armed enormity. He still looked a little uncertain about what he was doing, but she had the code, and he was supposed to open the door to people with the code.

  “Thank you, dear,” said Ronda, stepping inside and patting Gunth on one of his upper arms. “You’ve done very well.”

  “I have?” said Gunth, brightening.

  “You have.” Ronda’s smiled dipped, just a fraction. “And tell your mother she really should get that swelling checked out.”

  “I will,” said Gunth.

  Ronda smile returned, but it was a different smile this time. There was a sadness to it. “No,” she said, shuffling along the narrow hallway towards the only visible inner door. “You don’t.”

  One of the downsides of Ronda’s gift was all the additional knowledge that came with it. Being able to see along the personal timelines of the people she encountered brought all kinds of advantages – advantages which her time at the convent had taught her to … well, to take advantage of.

  However, alongside the usable intel came plenty of other baggage. Feelings, mostly. She’d learned long ago not to get attached to the people in her visions, or even to think about them too much. Sometimes, though, she’d see suffering she felt compelled to try to alleviate, even when she knew it was pointless. At least she could console herself with the fact she’d tried.

  “Who the fonk are you?” demanded an expensively-dressed figure in the next room. There were three people in the room, not including Ronda. In a little under three minutes, there would be two. Or, at least, two living ones.

  The man who had addressed Ronda was Katona, a Sloortian gang leader who’d made too many enemies back home on Sloorta, and had sold his services to Shornack, a notorious female warlord. Katona ran one of Shornack’s space-based outposts, dealing in drugs, slaves, illegal tech and anything else that would bring Shornack a profit. Shornack, in return, generously resisted nailing his genitalia to a table, or devouring his skull.

  Katona slouched in a large, imposing chair that had been positioned in pride of place across from the door. Two henchmen – the closest thing Katona had to friends, although they were quite some distance away from being that – stood up suddenly, hands reaching for blaster pistols strapped to their legs.

  With a gesture, Katona told them to wait. He looked Ronda up and down, running his shovel-like hands over the ridges of his bald head. He curled a lip, deliberately showing off a mouth filled with gold teeth. “I’m gonna ask you again, old lady. Who the fonk are you?”

  Ronda closed the door. There was a hook on the back of it, just as she knew there would be. She raised an index finger, gesturing for the men to wait, then removed her frying pan from her bag and hung it over the hook. She closed her eyes for a moment, remembering, then adjusted the pan’s angle.

  “Now,” she said, turning and rubbing her hands together. “I’ve come for Narp.”

  Katona raised a sculpted eyebrow. “Say what?”

  “Narp. My son. I’ve come to collect him.”

  The gangster raised his arms to gesture around the room, but Ronda jumped in.

  “Oh, I know he’s not here. I’ve known that since the day he was born.” She tapped the side of her head. “I was a nun. I foresee a lot of things. Not everything, unfortunately, otherwise I could just have gone straight to find him. But I foresaw you telling me where to find him. I just didn’t catch the actual location.”

  At the mention of the word ‘nun’ all three men had stiffened slightly. The henchmen’s hands, which had frozen halfway to their blasters, inched closer.

  “Me?” Katona said, snorting the word out in disbelief. “You think I’m gonna tell you where to find him?”

  “Actually, not you, dear, no,” Ronda admitted. She pointed to the henchman on the left. “He does. You’ll be dead by then.”

  Katona’s brow furrowed. He snarled, baring every one of his golden molars. “Hunch, smoke this bedge.”

  Hunch, the henchman on the left, drew his weapon and fired in on
e smooth motion. In one even smoother motion, Ronda leaned to her right. The blaster bolt scorched past her head, ricocheted off the frying pan, then rebounded off the room’s solitary light fitting.

  Katona’s face registered a short-lived look of surprise, before his head exploded, showering his sidekicks with smoldering chunks of skull, brains, and several thousand credits worth of gold.

  Hunch and the other henchman both watched silently as Katona’s headless corpse slumped slowly forwards out of his chair, and hit the floor with a soft, but definite thud.

  “Now,” said Ronda, unhooking her scorched frying pan and hefting it from hand to hand with precisely the right amount of menace. “Where were we?”

  2.

  Four minutes and one impeccably respectful conversation later, Ronda exited the elevator and shuffled across the station’s lower docking bay, searching for a very specific ship.

  Even after all these years, these converted mining stations took her breath away. The sheer scale of them – six hundred levels, all packed with homes, malls, museums, theaters, and other ‘entertainment’ she tended not to dwell on too much. The Zertex stations were even bigger, she’d heard, although she’d never had call to visit one, and hoped she never did.

  She was reasonably confident she never did, of course, but there were a few aspects of even her own future which weren’t entirely clear, so she kept her metaphorical fingers crossed, just in case.

  A large group of children filed past, walking hand in hand in pairs. They were accompanied by four adults, spread out along the line. A school trip.

  Regret gnawed at her conscience as the children skipped excitedly by her. So much so, in fact, that she felt compelled to step into the path of the trailing adult helper. He stopped instantly, his weight sliding onto his back heel. His already grimly-determined expression became even more so, and the way he held his hands suggested he not only knew how to use them, but also knew that harmless-looking old women were often anything but.