“That looks very practical. Good choice,” Cal said. And it did. Far more practical than he’d been bracing himself for. “Hey, wait. Where’s Splurt?”
He turned away, completely missing the expression of disappointment that flitted over Miz’s face. Splurt lurked in his glass cylinder, his bulbous bloodshot eyes bobbing around inside his gloopy green goo.
“Brought you something, little buddy,” Cal said, reaching into an inside pocket. He unfurled a squashed, battered pirate hat and placed it on top of the tank. Splurt’s gaze shifted upwards for a moment, then his surface rippled ever so slightly. “You’re welcome,” Cal grinned, then he turned back to Loren.
The gunso had slid herself into the pilot seat and was flipping a series of switches on the console above her head. A soft hum from deep inside the ship made the floor vibrate beneath Cal’s feet.
Through the big window at the front of the flight deck – although he was sure ‘big window’ probably wasn’t the correct technical term – an enormous circle of metal opened like the shutter of a camera. Through the hole it left, Cal could see stars shining like jewels in the darkness.
“So, we’re really doing this?” he said.
“Looks like it,” said Mech. Behind them, unnoticed, Mizette extended her claws.
“You’re going to want to sit down,” Loren warned. She flicked a switch. The ship shuddered. She quickly unflicked it again. “Wait, no, not that.”
Cal raised a finger. “Uh… you do know how to fly this thing, yeah?”
“Of course I do,” said Loren. “It’s just… the simulator’s layout is a little different.”
“Simulator?” said Mech. “You’ve flown a real one, though, right?”
“The simulator’s just like the real thing,” Loren assured him. “And I clocked up more time on it than anyone else in my graduating class.”
“No, but it’s not the same, is it?” said Cal. “You just said it’s different. Everyone heard her say that, right?”
“I did. She did say that,” agreed Mech.
There was a rrrrip from behind them. Mech and Cal both turned in time to see Mizette carving a strip out of her outfit. It ran all the way around her abdomen, turning her once-practical one-piece into a midriff-baring crop top.
With another few flashes of her claws, the pants were transformed into shorts that ended in tattered rags just above her knees.
“Not so practical now, is it?” she said, spitting out the word as if it had filled her mouth with a bad taste.
Before Cal could answer, the nose of the Shatner lurched sharply downwards. He grabbed Mech’s arm.
“The paint, man! Watch the pain!”
The ship dropped fast. Cal screamed as his stomach shot up to somewhere around his ears.
“Sorry, sorry, my fault!” Loren called. The ship jerked to a stop and Cal’s stomach twanged down to somewhere past his knees.
“Jesus fonking Christ!” Cal exclaimed. “Can you give us a bit of warning before you do that?”
“I told you to sit down,” said Loren, her pale blue skin flushing a shade of deep purple.
“Why, so you could hit the button for the ejector seat?” Cal grimaced. He tugged on his pants, trying to retrieve his testicles, which had been fired up into his lower abdomen with the force of a kicking mule. “Seriously, is there maybe, like, a manual for this thing or something?”
“I don’t need a manual,” Loren said.
“My balls beg to differ,” said Cal.
Loren reached for another button. “Wait!” Cal yelped. “Let me sit down first.”
He hobbled to a chair that was fixed to the floor just a few paces behind Loren’s and lowered himself onto it. Feeling around the edges of the seat’s high back, he found a couple of V-shaped straps that fastened in an X across his chest.
The chair had two wide metal arms. He gripped the ends and gave Loren a nod. “OK, I’m ready. Everyone else buckled up?”
“I’m all strapped in for the ride,” said Miz, managing to make it sound incredibly dirty.
“Don’t need to,” Mech said. He pointed to the floor. “Magnetized my feet.”
“Yay for space magnets,” Cal said. He pointed dramatically towards the doorway far ahead. “First officer Loren, warp speed now!”
Loren eased a lever forwards half-an-inch or so. The Shatner hummed as it glided gently ahead. “Or, you know, crawl very slowly towards the exit,” Cal said. “Whatever you think’s best.”
The circular view of space grew slightly larger. The ship edged towards it. Cal drummed his fingers on the arms of the chair and whistled below his breath.
“It’s taking quite a long time,” he said.
“We’re in dock,” said Loren, making a series of tiny adjustments to the controls. “This is as fast as we can go.”
Cal rocked in his chair and discovered to his delight that it swiveled. He kicked off and raised his knees, twirling himself in a full circle. He waved at Mizette and Mech as he spun past, then smiled when he saw Splurt watching him from inside the tank. That hat really suited the little guy.
After a few more spins, Cal went back to facing front. The doorway loomed a little larger through the glass, but not a lot.
He puffed out his cheeks.
He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
“Eye spy with my little eye,” he began, “something beginning with S.”
“Space,” said Mech.
Cal tutted. “Oh, well thanks for ruining that. Well done.”
A red light blinked furiously on the console to Loren’s right. “What’s that mean?” Cal asked. “Have you hit the self-destruct? You’ve hit the self-destruct, haven’t you?”
“It means we’re clear to warp,” said Loren, tapping the light to acknowledge it. “Ready?”
“Ready,” said Miz.
“Ready,” said Mech.
“Is it too late to go to the bathroom?” Cal asked.
“Yes,” said Loren, then she flicked a switch, pushed a lever, and nothing whatsoever happened.
Loren muttered quietly as she checked the controls again. “Should we have sped up there?” Cal asked. “I feel like that’s what we were all waiting for.”
“Yes. I just… hold on,” Loren said. She reached up and tapped a few buttons above her head, then took hold of the lever again. “Right, got it,” she said.
“Are we taking bets?” Cal began to say, but his words became long and thin, stretching out of his mouth like soft toffee, as the universe flung itself past them in a shimmering shower of shooting stars.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Cal retched with such force he felt as if his whole body was trying to turn itself inside-out from the rectum upwards. A blob of mucusy bile dribbled from his bottom lip, the rest of his stomach contents having already been forcibly ejected over the previous four long, harrowing minutes.
The sound of the retching echoed noisily around inside Splurt’s glass container. Mech had managed to tip the little green blob out just in time for Cal to splatter the inside of the cylinder in a viscous fountain of vomit.
Splurt, for his part, didn’t seem to mind too much. He rolled in tight circles on the floor, his eyes remaining disconcertingly fixed in place while the rest of him rotated around them.
Cal heaved again. His eyes bulged and his face turned an inhuman shade of red. “Oh God. I’m going to die,” he wheezed between retches.
“Aw, man, that stinks,” Mech protested.
“Yeah? Try having my nose,” complained Mizette. She had retrieved one of the torn-off pieces of her outfit and wrapped it around the end of her snout to block out the smell. It wasn’t helping.
Cal leaned back in his chair, breathing heavily. The stars blurred by outside and he doubled over again as another wave of nausea hit him.
This time, though, nothing emerged. He straightened, keeping his arms wrapped around the container and hugging it close to
his chest. “That was unpleasant,” he slurred, closing his eyes and pressing his forehead against the cool glass.
“Weren’t no barrel of laughs for us, neither,” said Mech.
“The first few warp jumps can be a little disconcerting,” Loren said.
‘Disconcerting’ wasn’t the word Cal would have used for it. It had felt like his insides had all been transported outside in one sudden lunging leap. For a moment, he’d seen himself in third person, and had spent a panicky few seconds assuming he’d died and was now looking down on himself as a ghost.
Then his innards and his soul had slammed back into place, as if attached to his body by a length of elastic. Colors had swum before his eyes. His eyes, in turn, had somersaulted around inside his head like the barrels of a slot machine, while his head itself had dripped down his neck like melting ice cream and pooled in a puddle in his lap.
At least, that was how it felt at the time. It was round about that point that he’d clamped a hand over his mouth and frantically gestured for Mech to tip Splurt out of his container. The cyborg had figured out the meaning of the frenzied flurry of hand movements with barely a second to spare.
“Are we nearly there yet?” Cal asked, enjoying the coldness of Splurt’s container against his face.
“Not yet. About eight hours at current speed,” said Loren.
“Oh, Jesus,” Cal groaned, swallowing back the urge to blow chunks again. “I think I need to go to sick bay.”
“What you talking about, ‘sick bay’?” asked Mech.
Cal peeled his face away from the glass. “Don’t we have a sick bay?”
“No, we ain’t got no sick bay!”
“We’ve got a room with a bench in it,” said Loren. “If you want to lie down.”
Miz unstrapped herself and jumped up. “I’ll take him.”
“No, it’s… it’s fine. I’ll find it,” said Cal, fiddling with the fastener of his seat belts. After some effort, the straps sprang apart. He stumbled to his feet, tucking the puke-splattered tub under one arm. The content sloshed around unpleasantly as he stumbled towards the door.
“I’m just going to go back there and close my eyes for a while. I’m not going to sleep,” Cal said. “But if I do, wake me in… How long did you say it was until we got where we’re going?”
“Eight hours,” said Loren.
“Wake me in eight hours,” Cal said. He started to duck through the door. “Unless, you know, I seem really tired, then give me another twenty minutes.”
“I can watch you sleeping, if you like?” Miz volunteered.
“Thanks for the offer,” said Cal. “But seriously, I’m fine.” He glanced back at the window, where outer space was hurtling towards them at impossible speed. His stomach flipped. “Catch you in a while,” he managed, then he staggered out into the corridor, and set off in search of the room with the bench.
As luck would have it, Cal found the room after only a few wrong turns. He teetered in on unsteady legs and flopped onto the padded bench, hugging it as if it were a long-lost family member. With his free hand, he lowered Splurt’s vomit-sodden canister to the floor beside him, and deliberately turned his head so he was facing away from the room’s single small window. Through it, the stars whizzed past like streaking comets, shooting right to left in fractions of seconds.
Stars. There were stars passing the window.
He was on a spaceship. An actual spaceship. In space.
He hugged the bench while the enormity of that thought sunk in.
“I really fonking hate space,” he decided.
With some effort, he managed to shrug off his coat. He let it fall to the floor, worried for a moment that it might have fallen in the tub of sick, but quickly came to the conclusion that he didn’t really care.
He sprackled around so he was lying on his back, then draped an arm across his eyes, blocking out the constant flickering of the passing stars.
Stars.
Space.
Outer space.
He found himself wondering just how far he was from home. Not that he’d really considered anywhere ‘home’ for a long time, but the planet Earth had a general sort of homeliness to it, even if there wasn’t one specific place where he truly felt he belonged.
A few more faces from his past flashed up behind his closed eyelids. Old teachers. Old neighbors. Old friends. As they passed, their faces morphed one-by-one into that of a solemn-looking Tobey Maguire.
More and more people he once knew whistled past, until soon there was an army of Tobey Maguires, standing in ranks that stretched as far as the eye could see. There were thousands of him. Millions, maybe. They stood in a hushed silence and watched him, almost expectantly.
“I… I don’t know what you want, Tobey Maguires,” Cal said, and his voice seemed to startle them. Cal gaped in wonder as the millions of Tobey Maguires all lifted off the ground as one. They undulated through the air, dancing and twirling on the breeze like a murmuration of starlings. Cal raised a hand and giggled as his fingers brush against one of the Tobey Maguires’ soft, downy faces. They were, without question, the most beautiful thing he had ever--
“Cal!”
The Tobey Maguires scattered as Cal jumped awake. “Whu-?” he cried, lashing out at the empty space in front of him.
Loren leaned back to avoid his flailing arms. Cal saw her, took several seconds to get a handle on what had happened, then cleared his throat. “Sorry about that,” he said. “We there?”
“No,” said Loren.
“Then shouldn’t you, you know, be flying the ship?” Cal said.
“That’s the thing,” said Loren. “We’ve got a little bit of a problem.”
* * *
“So… you broke it?”
Cal and Loren stood in the engine room, surrounded by towering stacks of equipment. They’d visited the room during the tour earlier. Even then, before they were moving, it had hummed and hissed and bleeped like there was no tomorrow. Now, everything was eerily silent, and only a few lights flickered here and there.
They were both staring down at something that had clearly been on fire at some point in its recent history.
“I didn’t break it, it just broke,” Loren said.
“This is the engine, right?”
“It’s part of it, yes.”
“Of the spaceship that you were flying?” said Cal.
Loren shifted uncomfortably. “Yes.”
“You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?” said Cal. He squatted next to the burned out piece of machinery. It was the length of a small car, and maybe a third of the height. Metal pipes ran in a spider-web pattern from a steering-wheel sized circular bump on the top center. Most of the smoke poured out through a narrow strip of metal mesh that ran around the circle’s edge.
“What does it do?”
“It’s the warp capacitor,” Loren explained.
“And we need that to warp?” Cal guessed. Loren nodded, and Cal’s face lit up. “See, this stuff isn’t so hard! Can’t we just fly at normal speed?”
“Well, yes, theoretically, but it’d take a lot longer.”
“How much longer?”
Loren’s lips moved as she calculated in her head. “Nine thousand years.”
“OK, so that’s too long.” Cal turned his attention back to the warp capacitor. “We’ve got a spare, though, right?”
“No.”
“Well that seems a little short-sighted,” said Cal. “Have you tried switching it off and back on again? That usually works.”
“Yes,” said Loren. “But it didn’t.”
Cal whistled through his teeth. “That’s pretty much where my technical knowledge ends. Can we fix it?”
An unfamiliar voice rang out from behind one of the equipment stacks. “To effect a repair on the warp capacitor would be child’s play.”
Cal’s head whipped around. “Who said that?”
Fro
m a passageway between two banks of equipment stepped Mech. While he was physically the same size as he’d always been, he seemed smaller, somehow, and more stooped. His mannerisms were different – a little twitchier and more erratic – and the fleshy bits of his face seemed, for once, to be smiling.
“Have no fear, my boy, ‘tis but I, Gluk Disselpoof, your companion upon this quest.”
“We cranked up his dial,” said Loren, as if that explained everything. When it became clear from Cal’s expression that it didn’t actually explain anything at all, she continued: “Turn his dial left – his left, I mean, our right - and it diverts power to his processors. Turn it right and it diverts to his hydraulics.”
Cal worked this through in his head. “Left makes him smarter, right makes him stronger?”
“Precisely!” chirped Mech. He approached them shakily, leaning on some of the equipment for support. “Warp technology is inordinately complex, hence us taking the decision to turn my intellect up several notches,” he said, indicating the dial on his chest. It was around two-thirds of the way to the left, with only a few degrees left to turn. “Alas, this necessitates diverting power from my body, which has a detrimental effect on its capacity to function efficiently.”
He wobbled unsteadily for a few more steps, then leaned on the smoking machine. “As I was saying, effecting repairs on the warp capacitor itself does not pose any sort of problem.”
“I feel there’s a ‘but’ coming,” said Cal.
“And indeed you are correct. It appears that the warp disk, which gives the capacitor its ability to generate the magnitudes of light speed we require, has been fractured,” Mech explained. “That, as you will almost certainly be aware, Gunso Loren, is far more troubling a situation for us to find ourselves in.”
Loren groaned. “Great. Well, there’s nothing else for it. We’re going to have to call Zertex Command for help.”
“We can do that?” asked Cal. “Great! What’s the problem? We’ll just call your boss and have him bring us another one of those disk things, then boom, we’re good to go. Right?”
Space Team Page 10