Space Team

by Barry J. Hutchison

  “I got a very vivid imagination,” the cyborg said.

  President Sinclair laughed briefly through his nose. “I’m sure you do. And it won’t be disappointed.”

  Cal raised a hand. “Look, I’m not an expert on… well, any of this, but can’t you just call President Bandito or whoever it was you said designed your weapon and ask him about it?”

  “President Bandini,” Sinclair corrected. “And we absolutely could do that, were it not for one problem.”

  “He’s dead,” said Mizette.

  “Well,” said Sinclair, “he was.”

  He nodded to Legate Jjin, who stepped in front of the closest screen and made a few subtle gestures with his hands. The footage rewound to the exact moment the four-armed alien was blasting the back of the waitress’s skull to pieces. It froze, then zoomed in on the glittery trail of green sparkles.

  One of the dots grew larger and larger until it took up a third of the viewing area. It was a little blurry at that magnification, but there was no mistaking the image. It was a face. The smiling face of an elderly man. His eyes were wide, and his hair was blowing upwards. He looked like he was riding a high-speed rollercoaster and loving every bloody minute of it.

  “Who is that?” asked Cal.

  “That is former President Bandini,” said Sinclair. “See, he didn’t just design the weapon. He is the weapon.”

  “A virus,” said Jjin. “A virus that can be transmitted from technology to organic matter and back again, corrupting and enslaving them both.”

  “You can see why we are concerned people might find out about this,” said Sinclair. “President Bandini was a much-loved leader, dearly missed. There were week-long vigils upon news of his death. Strangers – enemies, even – came together to share in their grief. It’s what really helped cement the peace process with the Symmorium.”

  Sinclair gestured to the sparkling green face of the elderly man on the screen behind him. “If word gets out that he’s been reborn as a malevolent mass-murdering zombie virus, the damage to his reputation – and, by extension, the Zertex Corporation’s – will be… well, it won’t be good, let’s put it that way.”

  Cal raised both hands in front of him, palms outwards in a gesture of miniature surrender. “OK, I’m going to let you know where I am on this. I’m out,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, I want to thank you for the opportunity, it’s been eye-opening. You know, getting to meet Robocop, Sexy Chewbacca and the Silly Putty and everything. But I think I’d like to go home now.”

  “Home?” said Sinclair. “To your prison?”

  “Well, maybe not specifically to the prison, as such,” said Cal. “There’s a place called Australia. If you could drop me off there, that would be awesome.”

  For the first time since Cal had arrived, the president’s expression turned from one of absolute, unshakeable confidence to one that was ever so slightly less so. He shot Legate Jjin the briefest of sideways glances.

  “Yes, you see, the thing is… Earth is not… How can I put this?” Sinclair began. He scratched his head. “The people of Earth are not, broadly speaking, aware that all this is going on. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a wonderful and much-loved part of Zertex controlled space, it’s just a little…”

  “Backward,” Jjin volunteered.

  “Not quite the word I was reaching for,” Sinclair said. He bolstered his waning smile a little. “You see, it was felt that were we to just abduct you – just snatch you out of your cell – then people might ask questions. We didn’t feel the Earth was ready for the truth yet, so it was agreed that we would cover our tracks.”

  “You started the prison riot?” said Cal.

  “Possibly,” said Sinclair. “I mean, yes, almost certainly. We sent down a number of parasitic organisms which probably took over some of the guards and inmates, driving them to act… unusually.”

  “Those bug-things?” said Cal. “Yeah, I saw those.”

  “Right! Yes, those bug-things,” said Sinclair, squeezing his little basketball. “But, you see, the thing is… there was a slight miscalculation, and we may have sent a few too many.”

  “How many too many?”

  Sinclair studied his basketball. “You know… Three or four trillion.”

  “Jesus. And how many were you supposed to send?”

  “Six.”

  Cal’s jaw dropped. “I’m not sure I’d call that a ‘slight misjudgement.’”

  “Our aim was to keep the authorities occupied while we took you away, and leave enough chaos behind that they’d assume you escaped.”

  “But…?”

  “We may have accidentally killed everyone.”

  Cal’s jaw dropped. “The whole prison?”

  “Yes,” said Sinclair. He waved the basketball vaguely in the air. “And, you know… the rest.”

  “The rest?”

  “Yes.”

  “The rest of what?”

  “Just the rest in general,” said the president. “Of the planet.”

  Cal felt a pressure in the center of his chest and a burning somewhere deep inside his brain, like he was suffering a heart attack and a stroke at the same time. His lungs and voice box chose that moment to both stop working. It took him several attempts to squeeze out his next sound, and it wasn’t really worth the effort.

  “Hmm?”

  “It’s our fault entirely,” said Sinclair. “All I can do is apologize and assure you we’ve taken steps to prevent this sort of thing happening again.”

  “You killed everyone?” Cal managed to gasp.

  “More or less. It’s impossible to say for sure,” said Sinclair, offering a sympathetic smile. “Two-thirds, minimum, we project. More as the next few days go on.”

  Cal realized a hairy, clawed hand was resting on his upper arm. Mech was staring down at the floor. Even the green blob had stopped rocking and had swiveled both eyes to look at him.

  A who’s who of everyone he’d ever encountered flooded Cal’s brain, with everyone shouting to make themselves heard.

  Jenny Porter, his first girlfriend, who’d promised to marry him, then moved away to Oklahoma when she was eight.

  Dead.

  Donnie Wood, his best friend all through high school.

  Dead.

  Tobey Maguire, the Hollywood actor who’d played Spider-Man in the first three movies, although Cal actually preferred him in Pleasantville.

  Dead.

  His mind went blank after that. He could see lots of faces, all jostling for his attention, but other than his parents – who he hadn’t spoken to in fifteen years – there were very few he could put names to.

  There was one face in amongst the chaos he did recognize, though. This one wasn’t shouting or waving or jumping up and down. It was just there, waiting to be noticed.

  It was a girl. Six years old. Hair hanging in ringlets. She smiled, proudly showing the gaps where her baby teeth had been, and the whole universe seemed to fill with light.

  Dead.

  But then, she’d been dead a long time.

  Cal’s fists clenched, without him telling them to. He made to lunge, to swing at the smiling face of the president, but Mizette’s hand tightened on his forearm like a clamp.

  “Don’t, Cal,” she said.

  “Listen to the Greyx,” Jjin warned.

  “Ain’t worth it, man,” said Mech. He motioned around them. The other soldiers – including Loren, Cal noticed – had their weapons trained on him, fingers tensed on the triggers.

  Cal took a steadying breath. “I’m fine,” he said. He tried to pull himself free of Mizette’s grip, but she was far too strong. “I’m fine,” he said again, looking her in the eye this time. She hesitated, then nodded slowly and let him go.

  Rubbing his arm where the wolf-woman had squeezed, Cal stepped back into line. His fists were still clenched. He tried to straighten the fingers, but they refused. Cal’s neck kricked as he twisted it
, trying to loosen the knot of tension in his muscles.

  He didn’t trust himself to look the president in the face. Not yet. “Hey,” he said, his voice dry like late-Fall leaves. “Accidents happen.”

  President Sinclair’s smile brightened. “Exactly! I knew you’d understand!” he said. “Now, back to the mission. I don’t need you to give me your answers right now. Take the evening. Explore the station. Talk it over, if you like. Then, tomorrow morning, you can let me know your decision.”

  “Station? This is a space station?” Cal asked.

  Sinclair laughed. “Yes! It’s a Zertex Command station, one of the many jewels in the corporation’s crown. You should look around the off-duty decks.”

  The president grinned, showing his full complement of perfect teeth. “I think you’ll find it all rather exciting.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Cal sat in a dimly-lit booth at the back of a dimly-lit bar, nursing a glass of something blue and quite probably poisonous. He turned the glass slowly around on the polished table-top, staring but not really looking at the way the light from the booth’s wall-mounted lamp danced through the liquid.

  Sinclair was right – the station was incredible. Wondrous. Packed with sights and sounds and smells unlike anything he or anyone else from Earth had ever seen, heard, or sniffed.

  He’d ignored it all, asked for directions to the nearest bar, and found the darkest corner he could.

  “Tobey Maguire,” he muttered, twisting the glass between finger and thumb. “Tobey fonking Maguire.”

  It was unusual to focus so exclusively on the fate of Tobey Maguire, he knew, but it was the only way he could stop his head imploding. The enormity of it – everyone dead, and at least partly due to him – was too much to comprehend. Any attempt to bend his mind around it was – like Tobey’s final film in the Spider-Man franchise – doomed to failure.

  Looking up from the glass, he studied the bar. The place itself didn’t look anything special. There were fifty or sixty tables, not counting the wall booths. An assortment of stuff Cal would’ve described as ‘crap’ had he not been implanted with a heavily censored translator chip cluttered the walls, giving the place a Hard Rock Café or Planet Hollywood vibe.

  A horseshoe-shaped bar stood in the center of the room. Coincidentally, something that looked vaguely like an upright stallion was in the process of ordering a drink from a portly, but mostly human-looking, barman. Four jokes about a horse walking into a bar popped into Cal’s head. He chose to ignore them all.

  Around most of the tables sat off-duty Zertex soldiers. At least, Cal hoped they were off-duty, otherwise there was a deep-rooted culture of drinking on the job on display.

  At one table, not too far away, four heavy-set… men, he supposed. They were human-like, but not quite all the way. They all had little quirks about them – pointy ears on one, two mouths on another – but they were positively normal compared to some of the bar’s other clientele.

  A short, painfully thin creature with translucent pink skin and beaver-like teeth was nodding and frantically scribbling their order in a notepad. Cal couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the way they cackled and contorted their faces told him they were giving the little guy a hard time. That didn’t stop him bowing and scraping after everything they said, though.

  “Hey.”

  A towering hairy figure stepped in front of the booth, blocking his view of the other table. Cal groaned inwardly, but did his best not to show it.

  “Hey… Mizette, wasn’t it?”

  “Miz is fine. My friends call me Miz,” she said, leaning a muscular arm on the edge of the booth. It was a little lower than she expected, and she was forced to bend awkwardly.

  “Miz it is,” said Cal.

  There was a long, drawn-out moment of silence. “I sniffed you out,” Miz said, at last. “You know?” She sniffed the air, in case he didn’t understand. “You have a really unique smell.”

  “Well… thanks. Nice of you to say so.”

  “Really masculine,” Miz said.

  “Yeah, I haven’t showered in a couple of days,” Cal admitted. “It’s probably that.”

  “Want some company?” Miz asked.

  Cal twirled his glass. “Uh, honestly? Not really,” he said. “Sorry. Nothing personal. It’s just… It’s been a big day, is all.”

  “Finding out everyone you’ve ever known has died, you mean?” said Miz.

  “Yeah, well that certainly didn’t help,” he said. “So, you know, I’m probably not going to be the best company right now.”

  “Saw a bug attack once,” Miz said. “Wasn’t pretty. People were clawing themselves apart, ripping people to bits – cubs, even. Little cubs, just torn apart.”

  “Right,” said Cal.

  “They started eating each other at one point,” Miz said. “Although, you know, I guess you’d like that part.”

  Cal frowned. “What?”

  “You know, the cannibalism.”

  “Oh. Oh, yeah. Definitely. Good old cannibalism.” He rubbed his stomach. “Yum.”

  Miz shifted her weight. Clearly, leaning on the booth was rapidly becoming uncomfortable, but she’d committed to it now, and didn’t want to draw attention to her error in judgement by moving at this late stage.

  “I can sit down, if you like. For a little while.”

  “Thanks, but… honestly, I’m fine.”

  Miz nodded. “Is it because of the way I look?”

  “What? No. No, of course not,” said Cal. “You look… fine. Great. You remind me of an old friend, actually.”

  Miz’s eyes shone hopefully. “Girlfriend?”

  “No. God, no. Dog. Lucky.” Cal smiled fondly at the memory. “I loved that dog.”

  Mizette frowned. “What’s a dog?”

  Cal snapped himself back to the present. He met Miz’s gaze, and was almost crushed by the weight of the hope in her eyes.

  “Man’s best friend,” he said. “Back where I come from, everyone loves dogs.”

  Miz’s tail flicked from side to side. Her snout curved into something that either meant she was happy, or was about to tear Cal’s throat out.

  “Oh. Oh, OK,” she said, brightly. “Well… I guess maybe I’ll catch you later, then?”

  Cal nodded. “Maybe I’ll sniff you out.”

  Miz’s tail stopped wagging and stuck straight out behind her. Her tongue flopped out of her mouth and hung there, panting gently.

  “That came out… I didn’t mean that to sound quite so…” Cal cleared his throat. “I meant I’ll find you. Later. To chat.”

  Bending over the table, Miz dragged her claws across it in what was presumably supposed to be a playful way, but which left four deep gouges in the otherwise immaculate surface. She let out a deeply un-dog like purr. “I’ll be waiting.”

  Cal watched her back away, giving her a wave as she retreated out of view around the edge of the booth. Only then did he allow himself to let out the breath he’d been holding for the past several seconds.

  “You fonking cretin! Look what you’ve done!”

  One of the off-duty soldiers at the nearby table gestured down at his uniform. As far as Cal could tell, there was nothing different about it. It was still an oppressive shade of black leather and metal. Clearly something had annoyed him, though, as he snatched a glass off the table and tossed it at the feet of the trembling pink-skinned waiter. The sound of it exploding into fragments brought silence to the rest of the bar.

  “So many apologies, endigm,” the waiter stammered, shifting anxiously from foot to foot as all eyes in the place turned to watch him. “You moved quite unexpectedly and nudged my arm.”

  The soldier’s face darkened. A set of what looked to be gills flared on either side of his neck. “So what? This is my fault?” he demanded. “You’re saying I just spilled my drink on myself?”

  “N-no, endigm,” the waiter said. “That is not what I meant…
”

  “Sounds an awful lot like it. Right boys?” the gill-necked alien said. His friends all murmured and nodded their agreement.

  Cal twisted his glass between finger and thumb. He looked down at the table and tried to keep his gaze there, but it crept back to the soldier and the waiter despite all his efforts.

  “No, I am entirely at fault, endigm, not you. You are the blameless victim, as always,” said the waiter, bowing and nodding. “Please, accept my apologies. I will bring you a new drink, yes?”

  “A new drink? You think a new drink’s going to pay to have my uniform cleaned?” the soldier said. “We’ll all have free drinks. All four of us. Indefinitely.”

  The waiter bowed so deeply his head almost clonked off the floor. “My apologies, but I cannot do that, endigm. I am sorry. I do not have the authority to offer such recompense.”

  The soldier’s hand slammed into the skinny waiter’s throat, his fingers meeting at the back of the pink-hued neck. “Well how about you go find me someone who does?” he growled. “Or I’ll see to it that you’re transferred to the Remnants. Let’s see how long you last there.”

  The waiter’s eyes bulged as he choked. The soldier studied him with amusement, like that one kid who pulls the wings off flies so he can watch them writhe around and die.

  “Get me the manager,” the gill-neck said, releasing his grip just before the waiter passed out. The pink-skinned creature flopped to the floor, wheezing and gasping for air.

  “I’m the manager. What seems to be the problem?”

  The soldier looked up to find Cal standing over him. Cal reached down and helped the waiter up. “You OK…?” He squinted at the waiter’s name badge, but the collection of symbols printed on the rectangle of plastic made no sense. “Sorry, what’s your name again?”

  The waiter opened his mouth and emitted a sound that might have been his name, but equally there might just have been something caught at the back of his throat.

  “Gyryrxyx,” said Cal, making a valiant attempt to emulate the sound. He put his arm around the skinny waiter and squeezed, but gently so as not to break him. “I always forget that, don’t I? Now, off you go. Get yourself a drink. Take the rest of the night off. I’ll handle this.”