The Search for Spark

by Steven Erikson

  “Just get on with it!” Prim snapped, cutting the feed.

  Honorarium Harried lifted one delicate arching eyebrow, signifying the maximum reveal of emotion permissible, and then reached up to stroke her cat—

  Snarling, it savaged her hand—but that hand was the robotic one, the cat having long since destroyed the real one.

  Lopsided and moving with a strange hitch in her gait, the captain took her seat in the command chair. “Chief Engineer Honorarium, prime the T-Drive. Yes sir, at once sir! Combat Specialist Honorarium, all weapons hot, please. On it, Captain! All weapons hot! Helm Honorarium, set an intercept course all speed. Yes, Captain! Dr. Honorarium, stand by for casualties—we’re about to engage the enemy. Really, Captain? There’s not one minor character left to kill! And surely you’re not interested in enemy survivors? No of course not, Doctor, it’s just protocol and we always follow protocol. Very well sir, sickbay on standby! Commander Honorarium, activate science station and prepare for ECM. Yes, Captain! Red alert everyone! We are now engaging the enemy!”

  * * *

  “Massive salvo from the AFS What’s Up with That Cat?, Commander!”

  “Thank you, Polaski,” Sin-Dour said from the command chair. “Galk, weapons free to interdict, if you please.”

  “All of them? I mean, you want me to shoot all of ’em down?”

  “That would be most helpful, Galk.”

  “But I wanted something challenging.”

  “You will be free to return fire,” Sin-Dour reminded him. “Middling Beam Weapons only, however. Disabling its engines will do nicely, Galk.”

  “Got it. Like finches in a barrel. Pew pew pew! Pow, plat, foom, zapzapzapzapzap done!”

  “I believe the phrase is ‘fish in a barrel,’” Sin-Dour observed, pleased at seeing all the incoming ordnance winking out.

  “Not on Varekan, sir. It’s finches in a barrel there. More exciting with all the exploding feathers and whatnot. Now, firing Middling Beam Weapons … oh! Enemy screens down, engine pods permanently disabled … oh, crap.”

  “I’m sorry? What was that last bit, Galk?”

  “Uhm, the enemy vessel did a strange cant and tumble, sir. And, um, a stray beam to the bridge, I’m afraid.”

  “Meaning, Galk?”

  “Uh, I’m afraid the single human life sign on the bridge is now flatlining.”

  Sin-Dour was on her feet. “Galk, are you saying you’ve killed Captain Honorarium Harried?”

  “’Fraid so, Commander.”

  From every deck of the Willful Child there was wild cheering. On the bridge all the officers were on their feet, banners unfurling, confetti and streamers filling the air. On the main viewer, the stealthed Affiliation flagship AFS Portentous Smug Pomposity suddenly revealed itself inside a cloud of fireworks.

  “And the cat?”

  “Even deader, sir.”

  “Combat Specialist Galk, once we’re back on the right side of the Affiliation, I will recommend the highest commendation on your behalf.”

  “Thank you, sir, really, it was nothing.”

  “Now, Acting Chief Engineer Tammy, take us into T-Space, will you? We have a rendezvous to make.”

  “On our way,” said Tammy from Engineering. “But for the record, I still hate it when Hadrian proves right about, well, everything.”

  Sin-Dour rose to her feet, brushing confetti from her shoulders. “Carry on, everyone. I will be in my stateroom discussing matters with our guest. Lieutenant Sticks, you have the conn.”

  “Yes, Commander, like, sure, why not? It’s like T-Space, isn’t it? Nothing to do, like, ever!”

  “Spark,” said Sin-Dour, “you’re with me.”

  “With you!” the robot dog shouted, dancing in circles. “I’m with you! Oh, dead cat and everything, what a day! The best day ever!”

  Commander and robot dog departed the bridge. Entering the stateroom, Sin-Dour paused and studied Lorrin Tighe, who was seated in one of the chairs still surrounding the Ping-Pong table.

  Spark’s lower jaw trembled fitfully. “Attack traitor, Halley? Attack and maim traitor? Traitors, Aisle Nineteen, Overcrowded!”

  “No, Spark,” said Sin-Dour. “Just be on guard.”

  “On guard! I can do that!”

  The commander sat down opposite Tighe. “Adjutant, how are you?”

  “Sobriety is overrated.”

  “Apologies for the emergency displacement, but—”

  “Unnecessary, Sin-Dour. They were about to hang me out to dry. Betrayed, after all I did for them! There’s blood on my hands! Okay, Radulak blood, so who gives a shit. Still, it’s the principle of the thing!”

  “Mhmm, indeed.”

  “And now you’ve all obviously mutinied, and Hadrian and Buck are on their way to Rude Pimente to serve a life sentence until they’re assassinated.”

  “We didn’t quite mutiny,” Sin-Dour replied. “A Purse drone displaced onto our ship and announced that it had purchased Captain Placard. The drone then assimilated with the captain and renamed itself Coin-Cutey-Us. They then displaced, presumably back to the Bag Mother Ship.” She shrugged. “It all happened so fast there was no time to react.”

  “Darwin save us!” whispered Tighe. “They assimilated him?”

  “Yes, with mutagenic plaid and sequins and a rather clever clasp on top of his bald head.”

  “Well, good thing he was hairless—imagine getting your hair caught when closing that clasp!”

  Sin-Dour winced. “Ouch.”

  “I’ll say! So, Commander, what’s going to happen to me?”

  “Why, Adjutant, we have an innocent captain and chief engineer to rescue, and you will be in charge of the mission.”

  “Me?”

  “Indeed. Now, select your team and might I point you in the direction of our resident marines?”

  “Are they out of sickbay then?”

  “No, but the new metal plates in the heads of most of the squad should have healed up by the time we arrive unannounced in orbit over Rude Pimente.”

  “Right, I guess I’ll get right on it, Commander, and, uh, thank you for the opportunity to right this wrong.”

  Sin-Dour smiled. “The captain figured you’d be keen.”

  “I just wish he’d stop kissing me.”

  “You and me both.”

  And what, we all wonder, does that mean? Oooh!

  SEVEN

  Prison Planet Rude Pimente …

  “But what does it all mean?” Molly asked in a furtive whisper.

  The back wall of Tunnel 93F had just collapsed to the flimsy impact of Betty’s pick, revealing a vast glittering chamber beyond. The cavern was fecund with tropical plants rising from beds of moss almost perfectly covering the plant pots under them. Little nozzles misted the cool air. An ambient glow came from cleverly hidden light fixtures. Insects chirped and buzzed and birds tweeted in a rather short tape loop. It looked nearly wild, almost primal, and rising in the center of the vast expanse was a towering monolith.

  “It’s like a…” Molly shook his head. “Like a … hopeless amalgam of tropes!”

  Betty flung the pick to one side and stepped into the chamber. He made his way over to the monolith, stepping around the oblong coffin lying athwart the path. Tentatively he reached out toward the monolith.

  “Don’t touch it!” hissed Molly, coming up behind him.

  “Why not?”

  “It could be, well, like some psychedelic drug, making things spin in kaleidoscope colors as your consciousness expands in unimaginable and frankly baffling ways, scrambling your entire life experience as you disengage from the normal space-time continuum, making you both a baby in a carriage and an ancient one in a rickety wheelchair all at once, with the room suddenly all white and the muted sound of breathing as you stumble into the scene wearing a spacesuit. It could be like that!”

  “Huh,” muttered Betty, and he reached out and touched the monolith.

  Molly gasped.

  Betty grunted. Then
he picked up a stick and began bashing things with it.

  “Oh my!” breathed Molly. “Captain Betty has made a massive leap ahead in cognitive comprehension! Yes, Molly, you can hit things with sticks! Or, that’s right, exactly—you can even pick your nose with it! And that’s it, your ear, too. And your butt, sure, though how you’ll ever fit another stick up your butt I’ll never know. What a huge evolutionary leap!” Molly pushed Betty to one side (he snarled in sudden genocidal rage but Molly wasn’t paying any attention) and ran up to touch the monolith.

  He gasped as the scene before him transformed in a wild cavort of rainbow colors that then converged to a point at one end and became a peacock, only to then blur and re-form as a …

  “Oh crap, I get bad sitcom reruns. That’s not fair!”

  Then Betty hit him on the head with his stick.

  “Ow! Cut that out!” Molly jumped behind the monolith. “Hey! There’s a power cord!”

  “DON’T TOUCH THAT POWER CORD!”

  Molly and Betty froze at the strange stentorian voice that seemed to come from everywhere.

  “Why not?” Molly demanded.

  “YOU WILL DISCONNECT THIS AMPLIFIER.”

  Molly yanked out the cord in a spray of sparks, and then turned to Betty. “Captain! Snap out of it! Put down that stick! We need to get out of here before something terrible happens!”

  “Put down my stick? Are you mad? I have just experienced an evolutionary leap, a burgeoning of my intelligence. Look! I can use it as a crutch, or a baseball bat. I can find another just like it—here! This one! And look! I can juggle! Or be a drummer in a rock band—okay, maybe that’s a step back. But anyway, with this new gift of knowledge and comprehension, why, the universe is my oyster!”

  “Captain! That’s just it! If you were an oyster it would be an evolutionary leap! Instead, you’re a Klang. We stopped using sticks decades ago! We now have spaceships and stuff! That monolith is just the free-app version. To get the real genius-making one, you have to pay!”

  “How do you know all this?”

  Molly pointed at the label on the back of the monolith. “It says so right here, sir.”

  Betty threw down his sticks. “What a rip-off! Who made this piece of crap?”

  “Uh, it’s Klang knockoff, sir. ‘Mondo Liths, Mysterious Artifacts Division. Patent Pending at the Patent Pending Office of the Eternally-Murky-Legality Quagmire Department.’”

  “Oh. Those bastards!”

  Molly then leapt close to a knee-high creepy slimy plantlike thing upthrust from the ground. “And here’s another Mysterious Artifact from Mondo! Look, sir, it’s so ugly you just have to stick your face in it, here, in that flowering bit!”

  Betty edged closer. “Hmm, never seen one of these before! It’s alien and ugly and looks deadly with all that dripping acid and stuff. I know! I think I’ll stick my face in it!”

  “Don’t! I was just kidding. I got one of these things for Christmas, from Uncle Susan. The flower explodes and this nasty little worm dives up your nose, lodges in your body, and then bursts out of your chest. Sue loves his practical jokes. I lost three cousins to the damned thing. Aunt William damn near divorced him over that!”

  “And is that the free-app version?”

  Molly nodded. “Yes. The worm starts shedding skins, getting smaller and smaller until you can’t even see it anymore. The one you pay for gets bigger and bigger, and to get the giant unkillable matron with the mouth-inside-the-mouth-inside-the-mouth-inside-the-mouth, you’re looking at $1.99 sucked out of your account like blood from your quivering body. Even a horrible death costs money these days. It’s diabolical.”

  “Okay,” said Betty. “We should leave. If I can’t get great stuff for free, fuck it. I mean, it’s not like all those creative types making stuff to entertain us should make money off us, is it? I mean, what the fuck do I care if they starve or have to work in Wally Krap? Like, entertaining me is a privilege, right? They should be paying me for crying out loud!”

  The two Klang set out to leave the chamber. A neon sign beside the entrance flashed a message: DON’T UNPLUG THE CORD BELOW!

  Molly pulled out the input keyboard beneath the sign and typed: WHY NOT?

  THIS NEON MESSAGE BOARD WON’T WORK IF YOU DO.

  Molly unplugged the cord. “Okay, we’re done here, sir. Best get back to work.” Then he paused and lifted a frond to reveal a small box with a big red button on it, and a label saying: SELF-DESTRUCT BUTTON! DON’T PUSH. EVER!

  “Molly! Don’t you dare!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because then everything self-destructs, you idiot!”

  “I know! I mean, I can read, right? But—but—but I can’t help myself!” He made a dive for the button.

  Betty tackled him. They strained against each other, Molly reaching, reaching. “Mpff! Got. To. Push. Button!”

  “Dammit, Molly!” Betty managed to reach down and collect up a stick. He whacked Molly on top of his head.

  “Ow!”

  “Back!” Whack! “Get back from that button!” Whack! Whack!

  Whackwhackwhackwhack!

  A final kick sent the stunned Molly back into Tunnel 93F.

  In the distance they heard the Day’s End Klaxon. “Oh crap! We gotta get going, Molly, or we’ll miss out on the custard again!”

  That brought Molly around like a dash of cold water to the face. But Betty decided that another whack on his minion’s head wouldn’t hurt either. Whack!

  “Ow!”

  “Ha! Think I’ll hold on to this stick!”

  “Fine!” Molly snapped, rubbing the lumps on his furry head. “At least it’s not your tungsten-tipped pick which you thankfully left on the ground over there.”

  Betty ran over and collected up the pick. “This pick is a tool, idiot, while my stick is a weapon. Clearly, a massive cognitive leap in intelligence is required for one to be able to make that distinction.”

  “Hmm, undoubtedly, sir.”

  “Now, let’s get going!”

  Together they raced off down the tunnel. Or is it up the tunnel? They went back. Away from the strange cavern. Opposite direction. They ran and ran and the strange cavern got farther and farther away. Behind them.

  * * *

  The Baint Flitter pulled on a cord, lifting the blind. “And now, prisoners, look down on this white frozen planet surface. Yes, that’s it, gather close and press your faces to the cold glass as we make our descent to the lone Inmate Receiving Station. This is the last time you’ll ever see Rude Pimente from orbit, the last time you’ll ever see stars, in fact, or anything but tunnels and pits and pressure doors. That’s right, boys and girls, you’re all on your way to a life of misery and suffering and despair—now, I see that those of you who have experienced the education system look rather unimpressed by that, but I assure you that this version of misery, suffering, and despair is even worse! No recesses, for one. And the cliques down there are murder! Will you fit in? Or will you be one of those loners slinking here and there trying not to be noticed? Will you look fat in your miner’s coverall? Is someone going to point a finger at your hair and laugh? Oh yes, you are all headed for an awful time!”

  The Baint Flitter, who had obviously once been a nanny before the baby-eating scandal outlawed the species from any contact with children without a police check and defanging, continued listing the horrors of the prison planet below.

  Followed by Buck, Hadrian drifted back from the shuttle’s nose-spotted window, leaving behind the alien who clearly loved her work too much.

  A man was leaning against a back wall, not paying any attention to anyone. Curious, Hadrian sidled over. “Well now, looks like you’ve been through all this before.”

  The man’s eyes glowed bright green. “I have,” he said in a low drawl. “No prison can hold me. No planet can keep me down. There isn’t an alien I can’t kill.”

  “And,” said Buck, “you’ve got real cool eyes.”

  “I’m a Fluoridian, the
last of my kind.”

  Buck’s bushy brows lifted. “You’re from the legendary Planet Fluoride? The planet of industrial waste products everyone was convinced were good for them? Captain! This man must be Rillickudick, the last Fluoridian Still Alive!”

  At that, Rillickudick smiled a blinding white smile. “That’s me.”

  “So,” said Hadrian, “you’re planning to break out of Rude Pimente.”

  “Of course. Stick with me and you’ll live long enough to absorb a hail of bullets thus permitting me to escape unscathed.”

  “That’s quite the deal you’re offering there, Rillickudick,” said Hadrian.

  “Man, they just line up when I make the offer.”

  “So your followers are a collection of absolute idiots.”

  The Fluoridian smiled again. “No shortage, ever. Funny, that.”

  Over by the window the Baint Flitter suddenly clapped her de-taloned hands. “Now boys and girls! Everyone back to your seats, as this cheap Klang-knockoff shuttle doesn’t have gravity compensators, meaning the g-forces on our descent are vicious! Strap in now so we don’t get any broken limbs, mashed faces, or pulverized organs—save all that for the mines when the bullies find you and steal all your clothes!”

  * * *

  “You and you,” said Felasha the Purelganni with a wave of a flipper, “wipe that custard from your whiskers and follow me. We have new prisoners to meet and terrorize and dominate and steal from! And because you’ve both done so well stroking my fins I’ve decided to make you my Chosen Slaves.”

  “Oh joy,” said Betty.

  “Now remember, you have to walk slowly as you escort me, since I’m so physiologically ill-equipped for terrestrial locomotion. But you should see me in an ocean, where I swim beautifully for a few minutes before I drown. Oh, and kittens, do say hello to my Zugru bodyguard. You will note his huge muscles, narrow piggy eyes, abundant nose hairs, and sloping forehead. These traits are not disconnected. His name, by the way, is Paul. Paul, you may pat the narrow furry heads of these kitties, but don’t crush their skulls as they need them to hold in their small brains! Oh, and Betty, is that a baseball bat you’re carrying? I don’t like those, no, not at all!”