The alien’s bloodshot eyes swam around the group, then settled on Cal’s face. He nodded unsurely. “Yes. Uh… OK. Thank you,” he wheezed, then he quickly scurried off, leaving Cal with the table of troops.
“He’s a nice guy,” said Cal, once the waiter had gone. “I mean, yeah, he looks a bit like a huge worm with legs, but his heart’s in the right place. Metaphorically. I’ve got no idea about, you know, physical placement.”
He rubbed his hands together. “Anyway, what seems to be the problem?”
“That imbecile spilled a drink on me,” the soldier grunted, gesturing towards four glasses on the table. From Cal’s perspective, they all looked to be full, but when he bent down to study them further, he realized that one was marginally lower than the others. Cal pointed to it.
“This one?”
“Well, obviously that one.”
Cal straightened and picked up the glass. “I can only apologize, sir,” he said. “I always tell my staff, ‘if you’re going to do something, do something right. You gotta give one hundred percent.’ Clearly, though, that advice wasn’t followed in this instance.”
“Exactly,” growled the gill-neck, leaning forward on his elbows. “So what are you going to--?”
The contents of the glass hit him full in the face. The soldier gasped, flaring the gills on either side of his throat. The other three men at the table stared at him, then at Cal, in disbelief.
“There, that’s much better,” said Cal. He set the glass down and motioned towards the door. “Now, gather up your shizz, and get your ams the fonk out of my bar.” He sighed. “Man, I hate this chip.”
The gill-necked soldier stood up. This took quite a long time, because there was a lot of ‘up’ for him to stand. Cal’s neck craned back, his eyes raising as he followed the man all the way into a standing position.
“You are a very large man,” Cal said. “You did not look anywhere near that size sitting down.”
The soldier ran a meaty palm down his face, wiping off the worst of the alcohol. Cal glanced behind him.
“Seriously, is there something wrong with that chair or something, because you looked almost average height.” He motioned up and down the soldier’s hulking frame. “But this… I mean. Wow. Where do you even get clothes that size? It must be… aha!”
He swung with a punch, hoping to catch the soldier off guard. Unfortunately, the man’s jaw was just a fraction of an inch beyond his reach. Cal swung harmlessly beneath him, was thrown off balance, and landed on his back on the table.
All four figures were on their feet now, glaring down at him. “OK, there’s a chance I misjudged this,” Cal said, then he twisted to avoid a punch from the man with two mouths. Two-mouths grimaced as he drove a fist into the solid tabletop. Cal snatched up one of the glasses and smashed it across the side of the man’s head, sending him staggering.
Rolling, Cal leaped up from the table and slammed a shoulder into the stunned two-mouths, doubling him over. Catching him by the waistband of his pants, he shoved him back towards the table, where he was caught by the guy with the pointy ears.
Cal bounced from foot to foot, fists raised. The other occupants of the bar were all on their feet now, watching events with interest. Annoyingly, they were also blocking the only exit Cal was aware of, and he was starting to come to the conclusion that he very possibly shouldn’t have got involved.
Cal’s introduction to fighting had come earlier than most. One of the first things he’d learned had been the advantage afforded by the element of surprise. A lot of people assumed the element of surprise was lost right after the first attack, but an experienced fighter knew the element of surprise was a weapon to be used any time. You just had to do something surprising.
Roaring angrily, Cal charged, his hands raised above his head like bear paws, his eyes wild and staring.
BAM!
A fist hit him in the face like a piston. He spun, clutching his nose, and crashed heavily into a chair.
“Ow,” he grimaced.
Footsteps raced up behind him. He grabbed the chair, swung, realized to his dismay that it was fixed to the floor, then was hit by a hammer-blow to the shoulder that dropped him to his knees.
“OK, OK, you got me. I give up,” Cal said, then he slammed the tip of his elbow into the groin of the soldier behind him. The man doubled over. Cal jumped to his feet, driving an uppercut into two-mouths’ jaw as he rose.
Two-mouths hit the floor in a wheezing heap of snot and regret. Cal turned, rotating his shoulder to try to work through the ache. The other three figures had fanned out to nine, twelve and three o’clock. Gill-neck towered at high noon, lazily cracking his knuckles.
“You’re not the manager,” the soldier said.
Cal raised his hands in surrender. “You’re right. I’m not. And you know what? I think we’ve all learned a lesson here today,” he said. “A lesson about honesty. About respect. About being kind to other people, even if those other people have thrown your own drink in your face in a moment of madness they now deeply regret.”
He smiled at them winningly. “I like to think that we’re all the manager today. And what are we managing? This difficult situation we’ve found ourselves in,” he said. “So, what’s say we manage our feelings about what’s just happened, and all become the best of friends?”
There was a scuffing at his back.
“The two-mouth guy is behind me, isn’t he?” Cal sighed, then a hand shoved him hard, sending him stumbling towards gill-neck.
The soldier’s hand clamped over Cal’s face and most of his head. Cal yelped as he was jerked off the ground. He kicked out, but his feet bicycled freely, finding nothing but empty space.
Cal had never really given too much thought to his use of the phrase ‘vice-like’ before, but in hindsight he reckoned it was probably overused. He’d used it in the past to describe any grip that was firmer than average, but realized now that this had been inappropriate.
The grip that had him now – that was the type of grip he should have been saving ‘vice-like’ for. It felt like five iron bars were digging into his skull, compressing the bone so much he could almost feel it squishing into his brain.
It was the type of grip which, despite the intense, eye-watering pain it was causing, you really didn’t want to fight against, because the only way of pulling free of it would involve a lot of tearing, and the real possibility of leaving the affected body part behind. Had it been a leg or an arm that gill-neck had gotten hold of, Cal might have considered it a sacrifice worth making, but letting the soldier keep his head while the rest of him made a run for it wasn’t really an option.
“Ow! Ow! This hurts,” Cal wheezed. He caught onto the soldier’s wrist and pulled, taking some of the weight off his neck. “But then, you probably knew that already.”
The gills on the man’s throat flared all the way open. His face twisted into a grimace. “You talk a lot. Think you’re funny, don’t you?”
“Usually, although I’m struggling to come up with any new material right this second,” Cal admitted. “I’ve got something about a fish walking into a bar, but I can’t nail the punchline.”
Another hand wrapped around Cal’s feet. He couldn’t see whether it belonged to gill-neck or one of the others. Pain burned down his spine from the base of his skull as the hand on his head and the one at his ankles pulled in opposite direction.
“Endigm. Release that man!”
“Officer on deck,” barked a voice from a nearby table.
Cal felt the grip on his head ease. He began to breathe a sigh of relief, but it was cut short by the sudden feeling of weightlessness as he dropped to the floor. His skeleton rattled with the impact, and he spent several long seconds lying completely still, waiting for the world to stop spinning, and for the ringing in his ears to die away.
Raising his head, he saw Loren standing in front of the four men, who had shambled to a sort of half-hearted atte
ntion. Gill-neck was sneering in a way that suggested the officer were emitting an aroma he found deeply offensive.
“…not be tolerated. I will have you on report, is that understood?”
“Yes, botak,” said gill-neck.
“You will address me as Gunso Loren,” Loren told him, but Cal couldn’t help but hear the invisible question mark at the end of the sentence. Nor, it seemed, could gill-neck.
“Yes, botak,” he said. “Whatever you say, botak.”
Cal got to his feet, nursing his aching back. He patted Loren on the shoulder. “Thanks, but you didn’t have to do that. Totally had everything under control.”
“Step back, Mr Adwin,” Loren warned. “This is a military matter.”
Cal slumped over to the table and perched himself on it. “Sure. You go right ahead,” he said. “I’m just going to have a drink.”
He lifted the only glass that hadn’t been knocked over when he’d landed on the table, raised it in a toast, then brought the pale orange liquid to his lips.
“Wait, don’t!” Loren yelped, but too late to stop Cal tipping his head back and draining the contents of the glass.
Cal grimaced.
He blinked in slow motion.
“Hurp,” he said.
Then the bar and everything in it went black.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Eugene.”
Darkness swam. It wasn’t as dark a darkness as there had been a moment ago, but it was still really quite dark nonetheless. Through the darkness, Cal could see what he could only describe as ‘other darkness’. This new darkness wasn’t as dark as either the first or second darkness, being more a sort of charcoal gray than full-scale black.
Which was interesting.
“Eugene?”
His head hurt. So did the rest of him, for that matter. It wasn’t an all-over general ache, which would have been preferable. Instead, it was as if hundreds of individual pain points had been set up across his whole body, each one operating independently of all the others. They throbbed, stung, burned and ached entirely on their own schedule, making it impossible to adjust to any of them.
The head was the worst, though.
Oh fonk, the head was the worst.
“Eugene, wake up.”
Cal wrestled with his eyelids. He had not previously realized how stubborn they could be, and they put up quite a fight. It was a close-run thing, but eventually he managed to get them to open.
The light hurt them.
They closed again.
Blindly, he gestured in the vague direction he thought the light was coming from, making a series of incomprehensible groaning noises that he hoped would somehow manage to get his point across.
As luck would have it, it worked. The semi-darkness behind his eyelids became a much richer and more pleasing full-darkness. After much persuasion, Cal convinced one eye to open. It swiveled around a room that was only very faintly in focus, then made a valiant attempt to fix on the figure sitting on the edge of the bed he must presumably be lying on.
“Hey, handsome,” said Mizette.
Cal’s other eye flicked open. “Oh god,” he said. “Oh god, we didn’t.”
The vibration of his voice rattled up into his skull and stabbed at his brain with tiny icepicks. He clutched his head and raised it from the pillow, then realized to his horror that he was wearing nothing but his underwear. Actually, it wasn’t even his underwear. He’d never seen the tight white shorts before in his life.
He scrabbled for the sheet to try to cover himself, but it was too tightly tucked in, so he settled for covering his nipples with his hands instead.
“Relax. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before,” Mizette purred. “I mean, I am almost six.”
“Six?!” Cal cried. It brought an avalanche of pain, but he gritted his teeth and ignored it. “You’re six?”
“Almost.”
Cal let his head sink back onto the pillow. The room was spinning, so he clamped a hand over his eyes and hoped it would eventually see fit to stop. “Six. She’s six.”
He parted his fingers and peered up into her hair-covered face. “Did we… did we… The only word coming into my head is ‘bone’ and I feel that’s inappropriate on a number of levels.”
A movement over on his right caught his eyes. Loren approached the bed, carrying the world’s smallest cup on a plastic tray. Steam rose from the top, along with the aroma of something that wasn’t a million miles away from coffee.
Cal looked between the two women. “Wait… did the three of us…?”
“He awake?” barked a gruff voice from beyond the foot of the bed. Mech stood in the doorway, filling it completely in every direction.
“Please tell me we didn’t all…?” he began, then a sudden jarring flash of the bar fight hit him in a wave of nausea. “Wait. That drink. What the fonk was in that?”
“Nothing designed for human consumption,” said Loren. “Knocked you flat out, so I brought you back here. Miz was good enough to keep an eye on you.”
“I sat here just watching you all night,” said the wolf-woman. “Didn’t take my eyes off you once. Not even to blink!”
“Great,” Cal croaked. “Because that’s not creepy at all.” He pointed at Miz, then at himself. “So… we didn’t…?”
“You’ve slept for sixteen hours. And that’s all you’ve done,” said Loren. “To be honest, after picking a fight with four shock troop endigms, you’re lucky you’re still alive.”
“I think death might be preferable,” Cal groaned, clutching his head. “And what the Hell is a shock troop endigm? Hey, I can say ‘Hell’.” He slowly waggled a fist in victory and let out a half-hearted, “Woo!”
Loren handed him the tiny mug. “Here. Drink this.”
With a lot of effort and a frankly ridiculous amount of huffing and puffing, Cal shuffled up the bed into something that faintly resembled a sitting position. He felt like the gravity he’d missed out on during the time he was weightless yesterday had all come back at once and stacked itself up on top of his head.
He took the cup and sniffed it. It smelled quite a lot like coffee, but the liquid itself was a deeply unappealing shade of blueish-gray.
“What is it?”
“Doesn’t matter what it is, just drink it,” Loren told him. “It’ll make you feel better.”
Cal gave it another suspicious sniff. “Is it space coffee?”
“Argh! Just drink it, shizznod!” Mech snapped. “We’ve wasted enough time as it is.”
“OK, OK, fine,” Cal groaned. He sipped the drink. It tasted like a very sweet coffee-flavored candy. He grimaced, then knocked it back in one.
His headache eased. The room stopped spinning. His many throbbing pains vanished one by one, and the crippling feeling of lethargy that had been making his bones feel like lead was replaced by a sudden hankering for a shower, and a deep, almost primal desire for bacon.
Unfortunately, neither of those were on the menu.
“Good. Now get dressed,” said Loren. She tapped a panel on a wall, and part of it slid away to reveal a wardrobe full of clothes. “We’ve arranged a selection that’s appropriate for the mission.”
“I don’t know if I’m going on the mission yet,” Cal said, swinging his feet down to the floor. “What happened to my own clothes?”
“You urinated in them,” said Loren.
Cal winced. “Did I?”
“Multiple times.”
“Explains the change of underwear,” he said. “I’ll be wanting those back, by the way. They hold great sentimental value.”
“I had them incinerated,” said Loren.
Cal stood up, stretched, then plodded over to the wardrobe. “Ah well, probably for the best. Where are we, anyway? Whose room is this?”
“Yours,” said Loren.
“We all got one,” Mech explained. “Room service, free Headnet, the works.”
“Part of
me wants to ask what ‘Headnet’ is,” Cal mumbled. “But a bigger part is too tired to really care. I’m glad you’re happy, though.”
“I didn’t go to my room,” said Miz. “I stayed here all night.”
“Watching me, yeah, you mentioned. And I want to thank you for that. I feel very reassured,” Cal said. “But, if you’d all excuse me, I’d like to get dressed now, then maybe try to find some bacon.”
“You have three minutes,” said Loren. “Then we’re meeting President Sinclair.”
“Three minutes? Gotcha,” said Cal.
“And don’t be late, Eugene,” the officer added, ushering the others to the door.
“He’s totally going to be late, you do know that, right?” said Mech.
“OK, first, call me Cal, and secondly - I resent that,” he said, jabbing an accusing finger at Mech. “One thing you will learn, my hulking robotic friend, is that I am nothing if not punctual.”
CHAPTER NINE
Seventeen minutes later, Cal stepped out of the room, four-fifths of the way towards being fully dressed.
The contents of the wardrobe had ranged from ‘baffling’ to ‘fashion crime’ and in the end he’d settled for a pair of light tan cargo pants and a white shirt that was several sizes too big. The way it hung in flaps under his arms made him feel like a backing dancer at a Kate Bush concert. It wasn’t, if he were honest, an entirely unpleasant feeling to have.
“Ta-daa!” he said, twirling on the spot. Miz wolf-whistled, without so much as a hint of irony, but Mech and Loren both looked far from happy.
“What kept you?” asked Loren.
“See? I told you. What did I tell you?” said Mech, his metal jaw chomping open and closed as he spoke. “Gonna be late.”
“What? Three minutes. I wasn’t any more than that, was I?” said Cal. He gestured down to his bare feet. “Couldn’t find any shoes. Am I going to need them, or can I make do without, do we think?”
Loren about-turned and hurried off along a drab, windowless corridor. “You’ll have to do without. Let’s move, and pray the president isn’t angry.”
Space Team Page 7