“How long have you guys been here?”
“Too long,” the Nogem replied. He sucked gently on his bottom lip. “Much too long.”
Giving himself a shake, he placed a fist against his bearded chin. At first, Cal thought he was adopting the traditional ‘thinking hard’ pose, but then realized it was some sort of Nogem greeting.
“I am Red Hat,” he said. “I am sorry for my curtness earlier.”
“Red Hat?” said Cal. “Your name is Red Hat?”
On the one hand, the name made perfect sense—the guy was, after all, wearing a red hat. And quite a nice one, too. On the other hand, it felt just a little too on the nose to be his actual name, and Cal could see several flaws in any such naming methodology.
What if he took his hat off, for example? Or got one that was a different color? Would that necessitate a name change, or would he become the Nogem formerly known as Red Hat?
Also, he wasn’t the only one in the group wearing a red hat. Far from it. Were they all called Red Hat, or were there variations? Was one Burgundy Hat, for example? Or Jauntily Angled Red Hat?
The Nogem tapped a spot behind his ear. “Translation chip,” he explained. “Our names are quite literal in our own tongue, but the chip makes them even more so. When I say my name, you hear ‘Red Hat,’ but it probably translates more accurately as, ‘Man who owns a red hat.’”
“Oh yeah, that makes much more sense,” Cal said. “I mean, ‘Red Hat,’ is ludicrous, whereas ‘Man who owns a red hat,’ is way better. If I ever have a son, that’s absolutely what I’m calling him.” He shook his head and flicked himself behind the ear. “Stupid chip.”
Red Hat gazed up at him expectantly. It took Cal a few moments to figure out why. “Oh! Sorry. Cal. Cal Carver. You know, of Space Team fame? You’ve probably heard of us.”
Red Hat’s expression went from expectant to inquisitive.
“We saved the galaxy a bunch of times?” said Cal, hoping this would be enough to trigger some sort of recognition. To his disappointment, Red Hat’s expression didn’t change a bit.
Cal sighed. “Guess you don’t see the news much, either,” he said. “Still, good to meet you, Red Hat. And thanks again for the save. I owe you one.”
After a bit more trudging and a few more twists and turns, they emerged into a large room, most of which was taken up by several long tables, each with a dozen or more chairs positioned around them.
Red Hat led Cal to one of the tables near the middle of the room. Cal sat down while Red Hat and various other Nogems began clambering into chairs that were clearly much too large for them. When one of them tried to take the seat beside him, Cal placed a hand on it.
“Sorry, I’m holding this for a friend,” Cal said.
The Nogem grunted and moved to the next chair along. “And I’m holding that one for this guy I barely know,” he said, smiling apologetically. “Sorry.”
“You’re new. You don’t get to claim seats,” the Nogem spat.
Cal ratcheted up his smile. “Look…” He glanced at the little man’s headgear. “I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess Green Hat? Look, Green Hat, we’re all tired, we’re all grumpy, but let’s not fall out about this. There are lots of chairs. Take one of those. Hell, take two of those.”
“Why would I need two seats?” Green Hat snapped.
“I don’t know. Think of it as an adventure,” Cal said. “Go wild. But, you can’t have these two because—”
Cal spotted Loren and Garunk filing in through the door. He whistled loudly and thrust a hand in the air to get their attention. “Loren! Over here. I’ve kept you seats!”
He shot Green Hat a kind but quite meaningful look. “See? My friends are here. Sorry.”
Green Hat muttered something below his breath, made a hand gesture that may well have been some sort of curse, then stomped off to find a seat at another table.
Aside from the two that Cal had claimed, all twelve of the chairs around this table were now filled with Nogems. Red Hat sat on Cal’s immediate right, and while Cal hadn’t been introduced to any of the others, he was reasonably confident he could have a stab at all their names, assuming they all stuck to the same ‘color+hat’ formula as had now been established.
“Hey, you OK?” asked Loren, sliding into the chair beside him.
“I’m fine,” said Cal. “But you’re sitting on my hand.”
“Shizz, is that what that is?” Loren asked, raising herself off the seat. Cal pulled his hand free, while quietly wishing that he hadn’t said anything.
“What about you? You OK?” he asked her.
“Been better,” she said.
“Yoo-hoo!” said Garunk, as he pulled out the chair beside her. “Can you all squeeze in a large one? Oh! Cheeky!”
Several Nogem fists banged on the table. Cal looked around and saw that all their eyes were on Garunk, their little faces screwed up in distaste.
“Uh, is there a problem, guys?” Cal asked.
“Yes, there’s a problem. We don’t sit with people like that,” a Nogem whose name was—presumably—Blue Hat sneered. “People like that turn our stomachs.”
Cal gave a reproachful tut. “Seriously? In this day and age? You should be ashamed of yourselves,” he said, standing and placing an arm around Garunk’s hefty shoulders. “Garunk is a friend of mine. Or, you know, a friend of a friend. But the point is, who the hell do you guys think you are to judge his choices? Is he a little on the flamboyant side? Sure. Do his sexually suggestive remarks make me a tiny bit uncomfortable? You bet they do. But he’s a kind, generous, beautiful soul.”
Cal shrugged. “I mean, probably. I don’t know him that well, but that’s the kind of vibe I get from him,” he said. “So, he’s attracted to members of the same sex. So what? Love is love, people. Love is fonking love, and where he chooses to put his… whatever he has going on down there, well, it’s no business of ours.”
Red Hat cleared his throat. “Um, Slurrits, we meant. We don’t like sitting with Slurrits.”
“They stink,” said Blue Hat.
“Oh,” said Cal. He removed his arm from Garunk’s shoulder and sniffed at it. “Jesus. They’re right, you do stink,” Cal said. “But, you know, that’s fine too, I guess. We don’t judge at this table.”
“Well, they do,” said Loren, looking around at the Nogems.
“Yeah, but they’re just little. They don’t know any better,” said Cal, inadvertently setting human/Nogem relations back several years. “Besides, none of us are exactly fragrant right now after all the digging. Take a seat.”
Garunk looked anxiously across the faces of the Nogems. “But what about…?”
“Fonk it. They can hold their noses if they have to. Sit down.”
Trying his best to ignore the grumbled complaints of the Nogems, Garunk took his seat and pulled it in closer to the table. He leaned past Loren and his muddy features formed something like a smile aimed in Cal’s direction.
“Thanks for what you said there. But I’m not gay.”
Cal snorted. “Ha!”
He waited for the punchline, but it didn’t arrive.
“Seriously? You’re not?” Cal asked.
Garunk shook his head.
“Are you sure?” Cal asked. “Like… I don’t know. Have you checked?”
“Slurrits are omnisexual,” Garunk explained.
“Omnisexual?” Cal’s lips moved silently as he worked this through. “Is that better or worse?”
Loren slapped him on the leg under the table.
“I don’t mean better or worse,” he quickly corrected. “There is no better or worse when it comes to these things. There’s just, you know, weird and—”
Loren slapped him again.
“Not weird. I meant, like, normal and—”
Another slap.
“Not normal. I didn’t mean normal. Everything’s normal,” he corrected, reddening slightly as he felt the weight of Garunk and the Nogems’ stares on him. �
�I just meant… different. But not, like, freakish deviant different. Good different. That’s what I was… That’s all I was…”
He cleared his throat, smiled weakly, and tried to find a way out of this conversation. He turned to Red Hat. “How about you guys? Are Nogems omnisexual?” he asked.
Red Hat shook his head. “We lay eggs through flaps in our stomachs,” he said.
Cal blinked several times, slowly. “Right,” he said. “Of course you do.”
“Food’s here,” said a Nogem from the far end of the table.
“Oh, thank God,” Cal exhaled.
He turned in his chair at the sound of clattering plates. It had been a rough few hours, and a grim couple of days. The weeks and months preceding those had been pretty thoroughly awful, too, but the sight he saw when he turned caused him to laugh out loud. Although, in the interests of his own personal safety, he quickly reined it in.
“Well, look at you!” Cal said, almost chewing his mouth off in an attempt to fight back his mirth. “Aren’t you just pretty as a picture?”
Mizette of the Greyx stood behind a wheeled trolley, wearing what appeared to be a maid outfit. Or, more accurately, several maid outfits all hastily stitched together in order to accommodate her size.
Her hairy torso was squashed into a sensible-yet-suggestive black pinafore, while her head was adorned by a little white hat that was patently designed for a skull of a completely different shape, and several times smaller.
“Miz. What have they done to you?” asked Loren, gazing up at her crewmate in horror.
“They’ve made her all purty-like,” said Cal. He gave her an appraising look up and down. “What do you think of your new look? Do you love it? I bet you love it.”
“It totally sucks,” Miz said. Her voice was a hoarse, shaky whisper, and the smile immediately fell from Cal’s face.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
Miz tilted her head to reveal a collar of dark metal. There were ten LED lights set into it. The first three were lit up in green, which brought gasps from the Nogems.
“What?” Cal asked. “What is it?”
“Three lights,” Red Hat whispered. “They’ve got her on three lights.”
“Meaning what?” Loren demanded.
“It’s the pain level,” explained Red Hat. “They use the collars to control the most disobedient of us. No-one has ever survived past five before.”
Cal’s chair toppled back as he jumped to his feet. “They’re hurting you?”
Miz gritted her teeth. “Sit down,” she told him. “It’s, like, nothing I can’t handle.”
“They’re hurting you.” Cal said again, the words coming as a hiss of indignation and rage.
“Cal. Please,” Miz whispered. “Sit down. I can handle three. I don’t want to go back to four.”
She held his gaze, her deep brown eyes shimmering with moisture. “Please. I’m OK. It’s fine.”
Cal wanted to argue that it wasn’t fine. He wanted to grab the collar, tear it off, and set Miz loose on the fonks who had done this to her. But if the collar could’ve been removed by brute force, she’d have already done it.
“Sit down, Cal,” Loren urged, tugging on the leg of his pants. “Don’t make it worse.”
Cal, to his own disbelief, sat down. What else could he do? He heard Miz give a sigh of relief, then he watched as, with shaky hands, she began setting bowls in front of the people at the table. She started with Red Hat and worked her way anti-clockwise until she reached Loren.
“They’ve got Splurt in some kind of, like, lab or whatever,” she whispered as she deposited the bowl in front of Loren.
“Can you get to him?” Loren whispered back.
Miz moved around her so she was between Loren and Cal. “No,” she said, depositing Cal’s bowl in front of him. “They have cameras on it and guards at the door. I tried. That’s why I’m on three lights.”
Cal placed a hand on her arm and squeezed it. “We’re going to get out of this,” he told her. “We’ve been in worse.”
“We have?” said Miz, and the hoarseness of her voice made Cal’s heart sink. “When? We’ve got no ship, Splurt’s out of action, I can’t do anything.”
She shrugged. “I guess Mech might show up and rescue us. Have you seen him? Like, since they brought us here, I mean?”
Cal shot Loren a sideways glance. “Uh, no. No. Haven’t seen him,” he said. “I’m sure he’s working on some kind of rescue mission somewhere. We’ll get through this. OK?”
“Sure,” said Miz, sounding unconvinced. She withdrew her arm and returned to her trolley. “Whatever.”
Cal watched her rattle away with it, her tail drooping so low behind her it brushed across the dusty floor. Several other people, all from different alien races, pushed other trolleys around the place, delivering food to the hungry workers.
Around Cal’s own table, Red Hat and the other Nogems were already getting tucked into the food, scooping it up with their tiny hands, before cramming it into their mouths.
Cal looked down at his own bowl, and the gloopy yellow substance nestled at the bottom.
“Is it custard?” he wondered.
“Close,” said Red Hat. “Almost custard.”
The bowl itself was not very big, and the contents barely came a third of the way up the sides. Cal’s stomach grumbled in disappointment.
“Uh, I think I got a Nogem-sized portion,” he said, looking around the table. Loren and Garunk both had identically sized bowls to his own. Garunk was sniffing the contents cautiously, while Loren was still watching Mizette trundle her trolley toward the exit.
Cal looked around the tabletop. “Don’t we get a spoon?”
“No spoon,” said Red Hat between mouthfuls. “Fingers.”
Not for the first time, Cal was relieved his hands had grown back. He didn’t much fancy trying to shovel the custard into his mouth using his elbows. The fact the hands were still smaller than usual might even give him an advantage when it came to scooping the stuff up.
“Well, here goes nothing,” he said, cupping his hand into the semi-solid sludge and bringing it to his lips. He stuffed it in his mouth, masticated it noisily for a moment, then ejected it in a single explosive outburst through his nose and mouth, splattering the three Nogems sitting across from him.
“What the fonk is that?” he coughed. “I thought you said it was custard!”
“I said it was close to custard,” said Red Hat, shoveling more of it into his mouth. It drizzled into his beard, caking the hair in yellow-brown. “It’s mustard.”
The plumbing in Cal’s head was on fire. Everything from his sinuses to his throat felt like it was under chemical attack. His eyes wept in sympathy. His stomach, fearing the worst, immediately put itself on ‘vomit standby,’ signaling its readiness by throwing up a little into Cal’s mouth.
His tongue was melting, he was sure of it. He could smell nothing but mustard, yet wasn’t convinced he still had a nose. Sweat beaded on his forehead. He became convinced that jets of steam were blasting from both his ears, and even more convinced that his heart had stopped beating.
Cal was thumping himself furiously on the chest, trying to restart his heart, when a tall pitcher of ice-cold amber liquid was deposited on the table in front of him.
“Beer,” said the server, as he or she—Cal couldn’t see clearly enough to tell which—set twelve cracked mugs beside the jug.
Cal couldn’t wait. Grasping the pitcher, he gulped down several cooling mouthfuls, then poured a good glug of the stuff over his face.
For a moment, all was well, but then the fire ignited again, worse than ever.
“WHAT IS THAT?!” he screamed, leaping to his feet and clawing at his skin.
“It’s mustard beer,” said Red Hat.
Cal set off at a sprint, half-blinded, like he could somehow outrun the agonizing assault on his respiratory system. Everyone watched in stunned silence as he ran in laps around the room, yelping and s
hrieking and making noises that, had anyone present ever heard a baboon before, they would have almost certainly have said it sounded a bit like a baboon. But not a healthy or happy baboon. A baboon with problems. A baboon, most likely, whose face was on fire.
Three Harvesters entered from two different doors. Cal couldn’t hear their barked commands to stop over the sound of his own screams, and didn’t notice them chasing him until one feinted in front of him, arms outstretched to grab him.
There was no way Cal was stopping, though. Something primal was driving him now. He ducked one pair of hands, hoofed the owner of another pair in the balls, then continued on his desperate-yet-pointless run.
He was on lap four before anyone caught him. Even then, it was only because he’d had to slow down to vomit, after his stomach had decided to go full nuclear in its response to the waves of fire creeping steadily down Cal’s throat.
Cal didn’t see where the puke went, but from the high-pitched chirps of protest, he guessed a few Nogems had found themselves plastered. He slurred out what he thought was an apology, but what was actually a series of pig-like snorts and a sob, and then a Harvester slammed into him, smashing him into a table, somersaulting him over the top of it, then depositing him onto the rough stone floor.
Elongated fingers pinned his arms down. He tried to kick, but a sudden weight on his legs made it impossible.
He heard Loren shout something, and made out a flurry of movement through his watery eyes. It ended abruptly with a short cry of pain from Loren. Cal wrestled against the hands that held him down. He blinked away his tears just in time to see a Harvester leaning over him, a finger extending toward Cal’s forehead.
“We do not appreciate this disturbance,” the Harvester hissed through his undulating teeth. He extended two more fingers. “You shall be taught a lesson.”
All three fingers pressed against Cal’s forehead, just above his eyes, and Cal knew nothing but the pain that followed.
Sixteen
Cal woke with a cold, damp compress on his head, and a body that ached so badly he suspected it would never forgive him.
Space Team: Sting of the Mustard Mines Page 16
