Space Team: Sting of the Mustard Mines

by Barry J. Hutchison

  Despite his best efforts, he thought about the word ‘falling.’ It was inevitable, really. As soon as it entered his head, it expanded to fill all available space, until it was all he could think about. All that mattered. All that he knew.

  He kicked and thrashed, and would’ve screamed had the oncoming air not shoved every sound and syllable back down his throat.

  Cal tried to remind himself that, technically, he wasn’t falling. He was being carried by Splurt.

  Granted, Splurt was falling, but Cal was pretty sure this still counted as a loophole. He was being carried safely to the planet below, by someone who—yes, as chance would have it—was plummeting helplessly out of control, but he wasn’t actually falling himself. Not exactly.

  He presented these findings to his subconscious brain. It gave them all due consideration, then continued trying to scream.

  It was the wings that were the problem. Splurt looked like a giant wasp queen, but he wasn’t actually one. It seemed that he could no more fly than he could recite Kevin Costner’s dialogue from Waterworld, or make disparaging remarks about Blanche’s promiscuousness as Dorothy out of The Golden Girls.

  He looked the part, but he wasn’t actually the part.

  Sure, would it have been nice for him to explain that before he and Cal had jumped out of a spaceship at the edge of the atmosphere? Yes. Yes, it would. But this was not the right time for repercussions. That would come later.

  First, there was the falling to deal with, and the subsequent impact that was sure to follow.

  They weren’t falling alone, at least. That was something. Not much, but something. The entire swarm of wasps fell beside them, wings folded in, stingers stabbing upward to the retreating Untitled.

  The larger wasps bunched around Cal and Splurt like a royal guard. The smaller ones trailed out behind, forming a long tail. From the ground, it looked almost like a comet. From up here, it felt like an accident waiting to happen.

  The water continued to race up. Cal was dimly aware of being told that falling from a height onto water was like falling onto concrete. He hoped they meant wet concrete, rather than the hard stuff, but suspected that probably wasn’t the case.

  His healing factor had been stretched recently, and he had no idea how much of it he had left. He’d lost it once before, and after what felt like a lot less punishment. In the past twenty-four hours alone, he’d lost his arms, most of his skin, and then been bludgeoned to death. And that didn’t even include the wasp stings, the scalding mustard, or the hundred-and-one other painful indignities that had been inflicted upon him.

  Would he have enough left to recover from the impact with the water before he drowned? Would Splurt survive? Shizz. What if Splurt didn’t survive?

  Splurt’s legs tightened around Cal, pulling him in against the wasp queen’s body. It was, Cal reckoned, supposed to be a reassuring gesture, although he was pretty sure it cracked at least one of his ribs.

  As Cal thought this, Splurt relaxed a little. The rib popped back into place, and Cal felt the familiar tingle of the bone knitting together. So, the healing mojo was still working at this point. That was something.

  All he could see now was water. All he could hear was the whooshing of the wind as it…

  Wait. No. Not just that. He heard something else, too.

  Buzzing. Screaming. Blaster fire.

  Craning his neck, Cal looked over to a building below and to the left, just as a group of kids came crashing through the front door, sobbing and screaming. A man in uniform emerged behind them, backing into the open air, pumping round after round from his blaster rifle back into the building.

  A window smashed. The guy in the uniform looked up just as something big and vaguely wasp-like exploded out of the building. He brought up the blaster, but his shot was knocked wide when the wasp-thing landed on him, its stinger piercing him through the stomach and staking him to the ground.

  Another of the wasp creatures raced out through the open door, little puffs of gas rising from its matted green fur. It was hard to be sure from this height and angle, but Cal thought he saw the bug’s eyes crackling with an eerie yellow glow.

  These things weren’t wasps. Not like the ones currently flanking the falling Cal, at least. They were something else. Something monstrous.

  The children ran, screaming, as both wasp-monsters took to the air on their sharp, angular wings and buzzed toward them.

  “Children, in here!” cried an older woman. It was the same face they’d seen on the comm-screen earlier. Legate someone or other.

  She carried a blaster rifle of her own, and opened fire at the horse-sized monster bugs, hammering one with enough shots to knock it out of the air. It bounced on the ground behind the fleeing kids, its stinger lashing out at them, its mandibles mashing hungrily at their heels.

  It occurred to Cal that he hadn’t checked the water situation in a while. He tore his eyes from the children and looked straight down, instead.

  Oh, fonk.

  “Shiiiiizzzzz!” he howled, screwing his eyes shut as the water came racing up to meet them.

  From all around him, there came the sound of buzzing as the wasps opened their wings. Cal felt very heavy for a moment, then very light, then very surprised.

  He opened his eyes and saw the water skimming by just below his feet, close enough that he could point his toes and break the surface. Cal felt Splurt ripple above him. The wasp queen’s wings hummed in the air, steering them toward the shore.

  “Actually, no, I don’t think it’s funny,” Cal said. “I was fonking terrified!”

  Splurt wobbled.

  “Yes, it’s cool that you can fly, but on the joke front, It was mildly amusing at best,” Cal said. He looked around at the other wasps, all flying in formation alongside them. “Were these guys in on this? Did everyone know this whole time?”

  Before Cal could get his answer, three of the larger escort bugs flying alongside them pulled ahead as they streaked toward the remaining monster-wasp.

  “Looks like they’re making a bee-line for the big guy,” Cal said. He looked up at Splurt, but only saw the enormous mandibles above his head. “See what I did there? Because wasps are a type of bee. You know, kind of.”

  The royal escort wasps slammed into the big green one, knocking it out of the air. They all crashed to the ground together, tumbled for a few feet across a neat little paved square, then smashed into a fountain, shattering the stone and sending a jet of water thirty feet into the air.

  Cal yelped as the female Legate raised her rifle and took aim at Splurt. “Wait, no, wait! We’re the cavalry,” he yelped. “Don’t shoot, we’re here to help.”

  She hesitated, her finger on the trigger, then lowered the gun and ushered the children inside. Splurt released Cal directly in front of the woman with no warning whatsoever. His momentum carried him running toward her, and she barely stepped clear before he came clattering past, straight into the building’s hallway, and then plowed two-thirds of the way through a group of terrified children, scattering them like space skittles.

  “Shizz. Sorry. My fault. Coming through!”

  The Legate slammed the door and pointed the rifle at Cal’s head. “Who are you?” she demanded. “What are those things?”

  “I’m Cal. Cal Carver. Leader of Space Team. You’ve probably heard of us.”

  “I haven’t.”

  Cal looked around at the children surrounding him. Some of the older teens were doing their best to stand up straight and eyeball him. The younger ones—those who he hadn’t shouldered to the floor, at least—cowered at the back, fighting back tears.

  “You’ve heard of us, right? On, I don’t know, Space Twitter, or whatever?”

  Nobody responded, but there was a general vibe that no, they hadn’t.

  The Legate stepped closer, giving him an all-too-detailed close up of the gun’s barrel. “What are those things? You have five seconds to explain, or I’m going to shoot you. Is that clear?”

>   “Lady, do me a favor and stop pointing that thing in my face,” Cal said.

  “Five.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Four.”

  Cal jammed his finger in the rifle’s barrel. “There. Now you can’t shoot me.”

  The Legate frowned. “How do you figure that?”

  “Well, because my finger’s stuck in it.”

  “And what’s your finger made of?”

  Cal looked at his hand, as if this thought had never occurred to him before. “I don’t know. Finger. You know, like, flesh. Bone.”

  The Legate nodded. “Both things this weapon is literally custom-designed to shoot through,” she pointed out. “You have two seconds.”

  “Oh,” said Cal. He tried to remove his finger, but it was wedged in past the first knuckle and wasn’t budging. “Fonk, it’s stuck. Give me a second here.”

  “One.”

  “Wait! Wait! Teela Loren!” Cal said.

  The Legate hesitated. “What did you say?”

  “Teela Loren. She was a cadet here? I’m with her.”

  “Loren?” said the Legate. “She’s here? That’s impossible. She died.”

  “Fonk. She did, didn’t she?” said Cal. “But, uh, she’s back.”

  “Time’s up,” said the Legate.

  “Wait! Garunk! Remember Garunk? With the mud and the… well, mostly just the mud. I’m friends with Garunk. And, uh, the other guy. With the eyes. You know? Like, eyes. Him, too.”

  The woman’s face was giving nothing away, but she hadn’t fired yet, which Cal took as an invitation to keep talking. “I’m on your side. We got your distress signal. We’ve come to stop Manacle.”

  There were gasps from the children. They backed away from him quickly, as if just the sound of Manacle’s name might do them harm.

  “Manacle? Manacle is here?” the Legate whispered. “How? Why?”

  “Well, let’s just say he isn’t looking for an honorary diploma,” Cal said. “All we know is he’s got some monster wasps, and he wants to kill all these kids.”

  The children’s gasps became sobs and cries. Cal winced. “Probably could’ve phrased that better,” he admitted.

  The Legate lowered her gun, taking Cal’s finger with it. “Ow. Ow. Can you…? It’s jammed in there pretty good?”

  “What were you hoping to achieve?” the Legate asked, reluctantly releasing her grip on the weapon.

  Cal tucked it under his arm and tried to pull his finger free. “I don’t know. They do it in the movies. I thought it’d make the gun blow up, or something, and you’d be all like, ‘Aah! No, now I can’t shoot him.’”

  He pulled hard, gritting his teeth and heaving until he went red in the face. “No. No, it’s stuck.” He turned to the kids. “I know it’s a long shot, but do any of you have any butter? No? Fonk.”

  “Legate Rono,” whispered one of the older students. He had crept over to the window and was peering out into the square beyond. “Something’s happening.”

  “Get away from there,” Rono hissed. She and Cal swapped places with the kid, so they could check out what was going on outside.

  It wasn’t good news.

  The three wasps who had knocked the green-furred monster out of the air were squirming on the ground, apparently choking in the noxious gas the wasp-mutant was farting out through holes in its body.

  As Cal watched, the squirming became a thrashing. The wasps screeched in pain as their wings changed shape, becoming sharper at the edges, and the yellow stripes of their fur took on the same green tinge as the monster-wasp’s.

  “That’s not good,” Cal remarked.

  “They’re metamorphosizing,” whispered Legate Rono. “That gas, it’s changing them.”

  There was a sudden frantic knocking at the door. Cal raced to it, knowing who was there before he’d even opened it.

  “What are you doing?” Rono demanded. “Don’t open that door!”

  “Sorry, lady, it’s a friend of mine,” Cal said, opening the door just wide enough for a blobby green ball to roll hurriedly inside.

  Cal caught a glimpse of several thousand wasps of all sizes twisting and convulsing on the ground behind Splurt, then quickly closed the door behind him again.

  “Uh, we may have made an error in judgment,” Cal said.

  “What do you mean? And what is that thing?”

  “Oh, Splurt, Legate Rono. Legate Rono, kids, Splurt,” said Cal.

  Splurt developed a large and disturbingly human-looking set of teeth and smiled goofily at the children, dooming many of them to a lifetime of recurring nightmares.

  “We brought some wasps with us. But, like, friendly ones,” said Cal. “Because, it’s like they say, the best way to fight evil wasps is with good wasps. We all know that old proverb.” He puffed out his cheeks. “Only, turns out it’s bullshizz, because appearances would suggest that our good wasps have… Well, there’s no other way to really put this. They’ve become evil and joined forces with the bad guys.”

  He held both arms up and shrugged, the gun still attached to his finger. “I know, right? Who saw that coming. Not us, that’s for sure.”

  He smiled encouragingly. “But relax. I have a ship. My guys are just working on a way to get your cannons to stop trying to shoot it to pieces, then they’ll swing in, blast the wasps, save the day, and so on, and so forth.”

  Cal beamed at Rono and the children. “It’s going to be fine. Trust me.”

  The communicator on Cal’s belt hissed into life. “Cal. It’s no use. Mech can’t get past the security. I can’t enter my code.”

  “Shizz. OK, I guess I take all that back,” said Cal. “We’re fonked.”

  Legate Rono stared at Cal’s communicator in disbelief. “Loren?”

  There was a moment of surprised static from the device. “Legate Rono?”

  “How is this possible?” Rono asked.

  “No time to explain,” said Loren. “I need you to authenticate our ship so we can get down there. Can you do that?”

  “Not from here,” said Rono. “From the command tower.”

  “Can you get there?”

  Rono and Cal both glanced out the window. Thousands of the monster wasps now amassed in the square. A few of them buzzed up into the air, then zipped off between the Academy buildings in search of prey. Most of them, though, just sort of hung around, looking menacing and monstrous.

  “Not easily,” said Legate Rono. She indicated a tall building a third of a mile away along the shorefront and flicked her eyes from Cal’s crotch to his face. “It’s that one.”

  Cal groaned. “Shizz. OK. How complicated is it?”

  “How complicated is what?”

  “Authenticating the ship. Is it difficult?”

  “No, you just enter the code,” said Rono. “And there will probably be someone in there. When the wasps arrived, our communications went down, or I could just call over and have them do it.”

  Cal looked out the window again. A third of a mile. A fonkload of monster wasps. Doable. Not easy, but doable. Especially with Splurt.

  “OK, Loren, I’m going to do it,” Cal said, stretching and limbering up. “Splurt and I will make a run for it.”

  “Right. OK. I’ll give you the code,” Loren said.

  “Not yet. I’ll forget it. I’ll radio you when we get there.”

  “But… OK, fine. But be careful!” Loren said. “Do you even have a gun?”

  Cal regarded the rifle attached to the end of his finger. “I do,” he confirmed. “I’ll be fine. Keep the conn warm for me.”

  Loren made a sound that suggested a half-laugh. “I’ll sit on it.”

  “Ooh, cheeky!” said Cal.

  Legate Rono groaned. “Kroysh. You really do know Garunk,” she muttered. “Where is he?”

  “You do not want to know,” Cal told her. He signaled for Splurt to hop up onto his shoulder. Splurt stopped smiling unsettlingly at the children, then rolled up Cal’s back and into position. �
�You stay here and keep the kids safe,” Cal told Rono. He gestured to the children. “Is this all of them?”

  “What?” Rono frowned. “No. Of course not.”

  “What are you saying? There are still some out there?” Cal asked.

  “I’m saying there are currently over thirty-thousand cadets at this facility,” Rono replied. “And, right now, I can only account for twenty.”

  “Well, that seems careless!” Cal groaned. “Fine. OK. Splurt, when we get outside, it’s your job to go help as many kids as you can. Keep them safe. I’ll get to the tower myself.”

  Splurt rippled.

  “I don’t know yet,” Cal said. “Run screaming, probably. I’ll wing it.”

  He took a series of deep breaths, wrestled briefly with the rifle in the hope of catching it by surprise, then grunted in disappointment. “No. Not budging,” he said. “You ready, buddy?”

  Splurt quivered.

  “You and me both,” Cal said, then he yanked open the door, rushed out into a plaza full of angry mutant space wasps, and stamped like he’d never stamped before.

  Twenty-Nine

  At first, things seemed to go well for Cal. He crushed a lot of smaller wasps beneath the heels of his boot. Splurt grew a number of scything blades that cleaved one of the larger bugs in two. For a good three to four seconds, things actually looked pretty positive.

  And then the wasps all took to the air, and everything went to shizz.

  There were thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Far more than had been on the Untitled. They surrounded him like a fog, wings buzzing furiously, gas farting from various orifices, stingers extending until they were almost as long as their owner’s entire body.

  The change of wing shape made the buzzing sound different. It was more urgent now, more insistent. The old buzzing suggested the wasps were going to sting you to death. The new buzzing implied that not only were they going to sting you to death, they were really going to enjoy it.

  Splurt jumped off Cal’s shoulder, adopting the shape of the queen wasp as he sailed through the air. The other wasps didn’t fall into line beside him this time and instead lashed out, buzzing angrily at him and stabbing him with their elongated stingers.