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

by Barry J. Hutchison

  He – if, indeed, that was even the correct pronoun – was a shapeshifter that had been discovered in deep space by a Zertex mining operation. President Sinclair had intended to use him as a bargaining chip for a deal with an alien gangster-type, but Cal had intervened, and now Splurt was considered a valuable and much-loved member of the Shatner’s crew by everyone aboard - with the possible exception of Mech, Loren and Miz. Still, Cal thought he was fonking adorable.

  “You ain’t taking that thing, are you?” Mech grunted.

  “He’s not a thing,” Cal pointed out. “He’s Splurt.”

  “You ain’t taking that Splurt, are you?”

  Splurt’s eyes tick-tocked between Cal and Mech, watching them both. “Of course I am,” said Cal. “He’s part of the crew. If we go aboard, he comes, too.”

  “North Star can be a little… lively,” said Loren. “By which I mean unpleasant and dangerous.”

  “Yeah, I got that from the way you pulled that face when you said ‘lively,’” Cal replied.

  “Something like that – rare species, or whatever – it’s going to attract unwanted attention,” said Mech.

  “It’ll be fine. He’s a fonking shapeshifter. Look.”

  He set Splurt down on the floor. “So, let’s say there’s trouble. Some bad guy has spotted Splurt and fallen in love with him – because, let’s be honest, only a monster wouldn’t.” He shot Mech an accusing glare, then continued. “He decides he’s going to Splurtnap him, then – boom – what does Splurt do? He shapeshifts!”

  With a dramatic flourish, Cal pointed to Splurt. Splurt stared back at him, impassively.

  “He shapeshifts!” said Cal, louder this time.

  Nothing happened.

  If Splurt had eyelids, he would have blinked.

  But he didn’t.

  Cal cleared his throat, leaned down, and spoke out of the side of his mouth. “That’s your cue, buddy. Help me out here.”

  He straightened as Splurt’s surface began to ripple. The green goo expanded upwards, stretching and twisting as it adopted a new form. Cal turned and grinned triumphantly at the others. “He shapeshifts, blending into the background as he transforms to become…”

  He turned back to the now drastically-altered Splurt and stopped. “Dorothy out of the Golden Girls!” he said, the words surprising even him as they slipped from his mouth.

  And it was. There, standing in the middle of the flight deck, was a tall, gray-haired and ever-so-slightly masculine older woman.

  “Who the fonk is Dorothy?” demanded Mech.

  “And, like, what are the Golden Girls?” asked Miz.

  Having lived their entire lives on other worlds, none of the rest of the crew were even passingly familiar with 1980s TV sitcom, the Golden Girls, or its spin-off sequel, the Golden Palace. This extended to Splurt, too, who Cal had to assume had never seen even one of the original show’s one-hundred-and-eighty episodes.

  Despite his inability to speak, however, Splurt possessed some sort of mind-reading ability, which allowed him to draw images and memories from the minds of those around him, and transform his physical form to match.

  But quite why, out of all the billions of memories in Cal’s head, Splurt had selected Dorothy out of the Golden Girls would, Cal supposed, forever remain a mystery.

  “She’s a Miami spinster,” said Cal. He saw no benefit in going into it any further. “But my point stands. Splurt’s perfectly safe.” He patted Dorothy on one sturdy shoulder. “So, you coming, buddy?”

  Splurt nodded enthusiastically. Cal kept his smile fixed in place. “You changing back, or…?”

  Splurt shook his Dorothy-like head. “Well, alright then!” said Cal, sounding just a little too positive about the situation to be convincing. He looked around at the rest of the team. “I guess it’s us four and Dorothy.” He smiled across at the scowling cyborg and gestured towards the corridor leading to the ship’s exit. “Mech, lead the way!”

  With a final glance back at Dorothy from the Golden Girls, Mech shook his head, then ducked through the doorway that led through to the rest of the ship. Cal gestured for Miz and Loren to go next, then followed behind as they made their way down the ramp and into the docking bay.

  There were three other ships in this part of the bay, with enormous hangar-like doors on two of the walls suggesting further areas in both directions. The ship closest to the Shatner was an angry-looking beast of a thing that made Cal think of a grumpy shark.

  “Hey, isn’t that a Symmorium… what’s it called? Thrasher?” he said.

  “Thresher,” Loren corrected. “And yes. The North Star is in Symmorium space. There’ll be more where that one came from.”

  “Well that’s good, right?” said Cal. “They like us, don’t they?”

  “For now,” said Mech. “But I suggest you don’t talk to them too much, in case you make them change their mind.”

  Cal thought about protesting, but shrugged. “Good point, well made.”

  The other ships were types he didn’t recognize. One was small and sleek, and looked barely large enough for one pilot, while the other was its exact opposite – a bulky, clumsy-looking construction that looked like it could have been knocked together in someone’s back yard over a long weekend.

  The hangar itself was a grim affair, like an underground car park in the wrong part of town. The walls were a mish-mash of welded metal plating, each plate a slightly different shade of gray to its neighbors. They were marked with colorful graffiti, and somewhat less-colorful blaster-first scorch marks. The chip implanted in Cal’s eyeball tried translating the stylized graffiti text, but the sheer amount of it was proving overwhelming, and the words swam and slithered disturbingly across the walls.

  “So… where now?” asked Cal. The hissing of a door sliding open in the farthest wall answered the question for him. A squat figure with a lot of teeth and only marginally fewer eyes raised a stubby arm and waved enthusiastically.

  “Coo-ee!” called Harlosh Ko. “Over here!”

  3.

  Cal, Miz, Loren, Mech and Dorothy out of the Golden Girls hurried along an erratically-lit corridor, trying to keep pace with Harlosh. For someone with such short legs and a torso that was basically a chubby triangle, he had the quickest ‘non-emergency’ walking pace Cal had ever seen.

  “So, Gluk and I go way back, don’t we, Gluk?” Harlosh trilled, his voice sounding tinny inside the narrow passageway. They had been hurrying along it now for a good couple of minutes, but appeared to have made no progress whatsoever. Cal was sure they’d passed the same featureless expanse of metal wall half a dozen times already, and he was starting to feel like they were stuck in a chase scene in a particularly low-budget episode of Scooby Doo.

  “Sure. Yeah. Way back,” said Mech, begrudgingly.

  “Former work colleagues?” Cal guessed. “Old roommates? Wait, no! Childhood sweethearts!”

  “Haha. Oh, I like this one,” laughed Harlosh. He led them around a corner into what was, to all extents and purposes, the same corridor. “No, we served together. Didn’t we, Gluk?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, we did,” said Mech, grudging those words even more than he had the last few.

  “What, like, in the army?” asked Cal.

  “We don’t like to talk about it,” Mech told him.

  “Well, he doesn’t,” said Harlosh, stopping outside a door and spinning into a crisp about-turn. “I, on the other hand, will happily spill all once I get off duty.” He looked Cal up and down, then winked. At least, Cal thought he winked. With so many eyes to keep track of, though, there was a good chance it was involuntary. “For a price.”

  “Tempting, but we won’t be staying long,” said Cal.

  “We’ll be here until tomorrow,” said Mech. “I’m getting my paintwork fixed.”

  Harlosh tapped a finger against a few different teeth in quick succession, making a sound like a broken xylophone. “Hmm. We don’t have many rooms. It’s Kroyshuk. Always busy on Kroyshuk.”


  “Fonking Kroyshuk,” said Cal, sighing. He looked expectantly at the others, waiting for them to say something. No-one did. “Anyone going to tell me what Kroyshuk is?”

  “It’s a holiday,” Loren explained. “A celebration. A lot of planets in this sector consider it a special day, where they get together, exchange gifts, celebrate the love of family and friends--”

  “Throw up in their own mouths…” Miz sneered.

  “So, it’s like Christmas?” said Cal. His eyes shifted to Mech. A smile crept across his face. “Which, I suppose…”

  “Don’t say it, man,” said Mech.

  “…makes it…”

  “I’m warning you. Don’t go there.”

  “…space Christmas!”

  Mech’s face darkened. He muttered something below his breath, but resisted the urge to pick Cal up and smash him face-first into the ceiling.

  Cal looked left and right along the corridor. Aside from Harlosh, the crew and Dorothy out of the Golden Girls, there was no-one to be seen. “It doesn’t look very busy,” he said.

  Without a word, Harlosh pushed open the door beside them. A noise rushed in through the gap, flooding the corridor in both directions. At first, Cal thought it was a single overpowering roar, but after the initial assault he began to pick out individual sounds in the din. Music. Laughter. Raised voices. Chinking glasses, breaking bottles and the occasional high-pitched scream.

  Beyond the door was… a room, Cal supposed, although that didn’t really do it justice. It was a vast hall, a couple of football fields from end to end, and stretching a good seven or eight floors high. Moving ramps ferried thousands of... not people, exactly, but individuals between each floor, where they milled around on vast mezzanines, or leaned over the balcony railings, watching the other groups of individuals below.

  The reason Cal didn’t describe them as ‘people’ was that very few of them bore even a fleeting resemblance to what he had, until very recently, considered the textbook definition of a ‘person’. Creatures of all shapes, sizes, textures, colors and consistencies mingled, drank, argued, danced, or found other ways to occupy themselves in every available space.

  It looked like the Cantina scene in the original Star Wars might have looked, had George Lucas had access to a bottomless budget, several thousand jobbing actors, and an unlimited supply of methamphetamine.

  Cal whistled softly between his teeth as he stepped out of the corridor and into the multi-story area. His eardrums protested by vibrating painfully, and only stopped when he stepped back into the corridor and took cover behind the door frame.

  “OK, yeah, that’s pretty busy,” he admitted, as the door closed again.

  Harlosh looked up from an iPad-like device he had produced from somewhere. While it wasn’t easy to read his face with all those teeth and eyes cluttering it up, Cal thought he looked pleased. Or hungry.

  Possibly horny, although Cal hoped it wasn’t that one.

  “It’s your lucky day,” Harlosh said. “I’ve been able to secure four rooms for the night.”

  “I’ll share with Cal,” Miz suggested.

  “Best if Splurt bunks up with me,” said Cal, jabbing a thumb in Dorothy’s direction. Dorothy waved both hands excitedly, then stopped as abruptly as she’d started. He shot Miz a smile he hoped conveyed disappointment, rather than the overwhelming sense of relief he actually felt. “No saying what he’ll get up to if left to his own devices.”

  Miz crossed her arms and shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “Very good, I’ll just go ahead and…” Harlosh tapped his screen a couple of times. “There. All done. You all have rooms for the night. Good ones, too, on our more… amicable floors.” He shrugged, just a fraction. “Mostly.”

  “Mostly?” said Loren. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, as I say, we’re very busy,” Harlosh explained. “You know, what with Kroyshuk, and everything. Ideally, I’d have got you all close together, but unfortunately it just wasn’t possible. Three rooms are located on our more desirable premium decks. The fourth, uh… isn’t.”

  “Great,” said Loren. She looked around at the others. “So how do we decide who gets that room?”

  Cal raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “It’s fine, it’s fine. Let’s not argue about it,” he said. “Mech can take it.”

  “Say what?” Mech snapped. “How come I gotta take it?”

  “Because I’m the captain, and the others are girls,” Cal said. “Women,” he corrected, catching Loren’s expression. “The others are women.”

  “So?” Mech demanded. “They can handle themselves.”

  “You’re not even the real captain,” Loren pointed out. “We’re just pretending you’re in charge until we figure out what we’re going to do.”

  Cal gasped. “You take that back!” he told her. “Of course I’m the captain. I’ve got a badge!”

  “A badge you made from a fonking bottle top,” Mech pointed out.

  “And then lost,” added Loren.

  “That don’t count,” concluded Mech.

  “Fine. You know what? Fine,” said Cal. “If you don’t want to do the decent thing and sleep in what I’m sure is a perfectly pleasant room…”

  “It isn’t,” said Harlosh.

  “If you don’t want to do that,” Cal continued, ignoring the host, “then I guess there’s only one way to decide who’s sleeping where.” He turned to Harlosh. “There’s a bar in there, right?”

  “Several,” said Harlosh. “Why, you planning on buying me a drink?”

  “Hey, you never know your luck,” said Cal. “But actually, I was wondering – does the bar have such a thing as four drinking straws, and maybe a pair of scissors?”

  * * *

  “Well, buddy, looks like we drew the short straw,” said Cal, as he and Dorothy from the Golden Girls surveyed the graffiti-marked metal door set into the wall of the single most intimidating corridor Cal had ever set foot in. Everything about the corridor, from the flickering overhead lights to the blood smears that dribbled down the walls and pooled on the scuffed vinyl floor. “I mean, you know, we literally did draw the short straw, obviously. Whose dumb idea was it to do that?”

  Dorothy shot Cal a slightly accusing look, but then mock-punched him on the chin.

  “You know what? You’re right,” said Cal. “I don’t know what I’m complaining about. It could be worse.”

  He pressed his thumb against the door’s locking pad. The door itself slid open with a grinding, juddering squeak. A smell – no, not a smell, a full-blown stench - billowed out of the cramped, darkened room beyond.

  “Oh Jesus,” Cal groaned. “It’s worse.”

  Turning away long enough to gulp down a deep breath, Cal leaned close enough to the door that he could see almost all of the room, without actually putting any of himself inside it. “I reckon we go back and sleep on the Shatner,” he said. “This place does not look sanitary.”

  A door opened behind them, making Cal jump in fright. He spun, fists raised, and came dangerously close to punching a pregnant woman in the face. Of course, ‘woman,’ was stretching it, as was more and more often proving to be the case these last few days.

  She was not a woman in the traditional sense of the word – most women Cal had known until recently didn’t have such wide eyes, for example, or bean-shaped skulls that curved quite so far back. None of them, as far as he could recall, had skin that was such a vibrant shade of pink, or a neck so agonizingly thin and fragile-looking.

  So, not a ‘woman,’ exactly, but something about the way her features and figure were arranged told him she was female, at least.

  He wasn’t sure how he knew she was pregnant, but he somehow did. Yes, she had a swollen belly that was one of the traditional hallmarks of pregnancy back on Earth, but she also had six fingers on each hand and little fleshy frills around both wrists, so he wasn’t sure the tummy bump counted for much.

  The way she clutched her hands protect
ively across the bump, though, that was a dead giveaway.

  “Sorry,” said Cal, dropping his fist to his side. “You took me by surprise. Hope I didn’t scare you.”

  The… ah, what the Hell, he was going to stick with ‘woman’ shot glances along the corridor in both directions before her eyes darted up and down over the strangers standing in front of her.

  “Cal Carver,” Cal said, smiling warmly. “This is my friend, Dorothy out of the Golden Girls. Presumably she has a second name, but I don’t know what it is.” He gestured to the open door behind them. “We’re in the room right across the hall,” he said. “Although, to be honest, it’s not really to the standard we were hoping…”

  Still looking them both up and down, the woman retreated into her room and closed the door. A moment later, a light above the thumbprint pad switched from green to red.

  “Well, she seemed friendly,” said Cal. He turned back to the open door of his own room, considered venturing inside, then tapped his thumb against the sensor pad. The door shuddered closed. “Come on, buddy,” Cal said. “What’s say you and I go find the bar?”

  4.

  It turned out that Harlosh was right, and there were a number of bars on North Star. In fact, whole sections of the station were nothing but bars. They ranged from cosy little nooks with a clientele that seemed to value the silence as much as the alcohol, to cacophonic nightclubs where heaving, sweating bodies thrashed, squirmed and occasionally floated around in time to a variety of thumping dance beats.

  After some exploration, Cal settled on a place that was somewhere between the two extremes. Not so noisy that his eyeballs vibrated in is skull, but not so lacking in atmosphere that he immediately contemplated suicide.

  The sign above the door was written in an ornate alien language, with lots of swirls, whorls and twiddly-bits. Cal stared at it for a few seconds until the text resolved itself into English, but the word – Mumfle – meant fonk all, as far as he was aware, so he wished he hadn’t bothered.