Space Team: The Search for Splurt

by Barry J. Hutchison

  Instead, he and Sinclair both gasped and wheezed in the cloud of floating glass, and watched as Mech came hurtling towards them. Behind Mech, the Shatner’s airlock stood open, Mizette’s face just visible through the window of the inner door.

  Cal’s head was already starting to go light. He watched Mech approach through a narrowing tunnel of darkness, saw him silently mouth, “Hold on,” then felt the jarring impact of a metal hand grabbing him by the front of his space suit.

  Cal’s arms and legs flopped limply behind him as Mech made a grab for Sinclair. The president had recovered quickly, and was attempting to fly towards the door controls. With a boost from his thrusters, Mech caught Sinclair by the ankle and spun. Like an Olympic hammer-thrower, he tossed the president out through the broken window and hurtling into the waiting airlock.

  Mech fired up his thrusters again and rocketed back towards the ship. Cal’s tongue felt frozen. The pressure – or lack of pressure, he wasn’t sure which – seemed to be inflating his face. He felt movement. Jerky. Jarring. Abrupt.

  He vibrated, every part of him flooded with a cold more biting and intense than he’d ever known. His heart raced, whooshing his blood around, faster and faster, out of control. He wanted to shout, to scream, but inside and out was a vacuum, and he had no more sound to make.

  The airlock outer door closed. Cal and Sinclair both hit the floor in a coughing, spluttering heap. The inner door snapped open, and Cal felt a pair of hairy hands slide beneath him. They were warm. So warm. He liked warm. Warm was good.

  “D-did w-we g-get h-h-him?” Cal managed to sob through his chattering teeth.

  “Oh yeah, we totally got him,” said Miz, carrying Cal through the door. His head thudded against the thick iron door frame and he whimpered. “Shizz, sorry. Accident,” Miz said as she stepped into the corridor.

  Swinging Cal’s legs down, she stood him against the wall, then turned back to the door. Cal immediately collapsed into a position that was somewhere between ‘sitting down’ and ‘vomited up’.

  Miz closed the inner airlock door, then raised a hand to the window in a thumbs-up. She turned back to where she expected to find Cal standing, blinked in surprise, then helped him back to his feet.

  “Thanks,” he wheezed. “I c-can’t believe that actually w-worked.”

  “We’re not in the clear yet,” shouted Loren from the bridge. Cal felt the floor shift beneath him as the Shatner pulled away from the station. “Got fighters coming in fast. Weapons training.”

  “Their weapons are training on us, or ours are training on them?” asked Cal.

  “Well, since you’re the one who controls our weapons, take a guess!” Loren shouted.

  Cal leaned against the wall. His insides felt jumbled up, like they’d been pulled out then stuffed back inside in a hurry. His skin tingled like bad sunburn, and his tongue was sandpapered meat.

  “Can we send them the video feed of the airlock? Show them we’ve got Sinclair.”

  “Yes. But another pair of hands wouldn’t hurt!” Loren called.

  Cal shot Miz a hopeful look. She sighed and slumped off towards the front. “Fine. Whatever. But how come I never get to do any of the fun stuff?”

  “Next time, OK?” Cal said to her back.

  Feeling his way along the wall, he stopped at the airlock and leaned closer to the window. His arms shook uncontrollably, then gave out on him, resulting in his face smushing up against the glass. He considered moving, but that would take a lot of effort, and it was a pretty comfortable position, all things considered, so he decided just to stay where he was.

  Beyond the glass, Mech was holding Sinclair by the front of his shirt, and had hoisted him a couple of feet off the floor. The president wasn’t struggling, but was instead glaring at Cal through the window, his eyes firing concentrated beams of pure hatred from one end of the airlock to the other.

  With some difficulty, Cal pulled back from the window enough to smile and wave. “Hey, Hayel,” he said, and from the way Sinclair glanced up at the speakers, Cal knew he could hear him. “I’d normally do some funny small-talk here, but… well, I’m not in the mood. Where’s Splurt?”

  Sinclair stared impassively at him through the glass. Cal shrugged.

  “OK, let’s do it your way,” he said. “Mech.”

  Mech jabbed the airlock control button and the outer door opened. Sinclair’s legs flew out behind him, but Mech’s grip held the rest of him in place. His face went from slight-green to almost-purple in the space of a breath, but he kept his gaze fixed on Cal throughout.

  With another prod of Mech’s finger, the airlock door snapped shut. Sinclair gulped down air, and the color – the correct color – slowly returned to his cheeks.

  “Where’s Splurt?” Cal asked.

  Sinclair fired off a car-salesman smile. “I forget. Perhaps you should jog my memory?”

  With a nod from Cal, Mech hit the button again. As before, Sinclair held Cal’s eyes as the moisture froze on his tongue and the oxygen was torn from his lungs.

  Mech held the door a little longer this time, before letting it close again. “Where’s Splurt?” Cal asked.

  Sinclair’s laugh was a dry crackle at the back of his throat. “You know, Mr Carver, I suspect my tolerance for being tortured is greater than your appetite for being the torturer.” He turned his head and looked very deliberately at the airlock door controls. “Shall we find out?”

  “Hit it,” said Cal, and Mech opened the airlock door again. “You’re going to tell us where he is, Sinclair,” Cal shouted, as Sinclair’s face turned a deeper shade of reddish-purple. “You’re going to tell us where Splurt is, and you’re going to tell us how we can save him. You hear me, Sinclair? You’re going to tell us everything!”

  The airlock door closed again. Sinclair spent a few seconds wrestling with his breath. “Sorry,” he said, through a series of wheezy rasps, “couldn’t hear a word of what you just said. Vacuum of space, and all that. I hope it was nothing important.” He grinned and gave his shoulders a shake. “You know, this is really quite exhilarating.”

  Cal leaned his forehead against the glass for a moment. His numb skin told him it was either very cold, very hot, or somewhere between the two.

  It wasn’t working. The main part of the plan – the most critical part – involved Sinclair telling them where Splurt was. That was the entire point of the exercise, and if Sinclair wasn’t going to play along, well… that wasn’t fair!

  “Go on, just tell us,” Cal said. “You know you want to.”

  Sinclair raised a perfect eyebrow. “Mmm, no. No, I don’t think I do.”

  Cal sighed and shook his head. “Fine. You know what? That’s fine, Hayel. I didn’t want to have to do this, but… you leave me no choice.”

  “Are you going to come in here and torture me yourself?” Sinclair asked, sounding surprisingly open to the possibility.

  “Oh God, no,” said Cal. “I don’t have the stomach for that sort of thing. I’d be hugging you and saying we should be best friends after I broke the first finger. No, terrible idea.”

  “That is a shame,” said Sinclair. “I was rather starting to enjoy testing my pain tolerance.”

  “Then you, my friend, are in luck,” said Cal. He turned towards the front of the ship and shouted along the corridor. “Miz?”

  “What now?” came the reply.

  “How’d you like to do some of that fun stuff, after all?”

  * * *

  Eleven minutes later, Miz returned to the flight deck and slumped into her seat. Cal and Loren watched her, expectantly.

  “Well?” asked Cal. “Did you get it?”

  “What’s it worth?” asked Miz.

  “My undying gratitude,” said Cal. “And a new chew toy next planet we go to.”

  “I already got my eyes on a new chew toy,” said Miz, her eyes dropping very deliberately to Cal’s crotch. Cal shifted uncomfortably.

  “There is literally nothing sexy about that ph
rase at all,” he pointed out. “You know that, right?”

  Miz smirked, showing off her teeth. “Yeah. I know,” she said, then she held out a hand. There was a small scrap of paper between two of her fingers. Cal took it, and tried not to dwell too much on the blood stains.

  The symbols on the paper swam, becoming some sort of mathematical equation Cal had absolutely no hope whatsoever of being able to understand. “Is this it? Is this where Splurt is?”

  “So he says,” said Miz, shrugging.

  “Is it… I mean, is it an address? What does it mean?”

  Loren held a hand out, and Cal gladly handed the paper over. “Co-ordinates,” Loren said, tapping the details into her controls. The viewscreen, which was currently filled with a ring of Zertex fighters, changed to show a map of space.

  “It’s there,” said Loren, zooming in on a patch of black.

  Cal squinted at the screen. “I don’t see anything.”

  “That’s because there’s nothing there,” said Loren. “It’s empty space.”

  Cal thumped a fist on his arm rest. “He lied. He hasn’t given you anything.”

  “I don’t know,” said Miz. “He was pretty convincing.”

  “I’m going to find out,” said Cal. He jumped up from his chair and stormed through to the airlock. There was no damage to his face, but the expression on it told Cal that Miz had been very persuasive indeed.

  “Oh man, thank fonk it’s you,” Mech muttered, when Cal entered. He shot the inner airlock door a glance. “That girl has issues.”

  Cal stood over Sinclair, his hands on his hips. “The co-ordinates you gave us,” he said. “There’s nothing there.”

  “I know,” said Sinclair. He wasn’t smiling now, and even those two words seemed to take the wind out of him.

  “Miz!” Cal shouted, but Sinclair quickly raised a hand.

  “No, wait, let me explain,” he said.

  “Yeah?” called Miz from up front.

  Cal waited a few seconds, making it very clear to the president that this situation could go one of two ways, and one of them would be harrowingly unpleasant. “Nothing. It’s fine.”

  He raised his eyebrows in Sinclair’s direction. “Well?”

  “It never made it back. The entity. The ship – Zertex’s ship – it never reached us.”

  “You’re lying,” said Cal. “You have him.”

  Sinclair shook his head and coughed. Something wet and black landed on the floor in front of him. “No. We lost contact at the co-ordinates I gave you.”

  “So what did you find?” asked Mech. Sinclair looked at him, quizzically. Mech narrowed his eyes. “Don’t tell me you didn’t send someone to check it out. What did you find?”

  Sinclair gritted his teeth and glared at them both. Cal jabbed a thumb towards the door behind him. “I can have Miz back here in five seconds,” he said. “And she’s just sat back down again, so she won’t be happy, will she, Mech?”

  “No,” said Mech, crossing his arms across his chest. “She will not be happy.”

  “We don’t know!” Sinclair bleated. “It’s a hole of some kind. A rip in the fabric of space. It’s something we’ve never seen before.”

  “A black hole?” Cal asked.

  Sinclair snorted. “Oh please, don’t try to sound like you know what you’re talking about, Cal,” he spat. He managed to rouse his grin a little, and Cal noted the dark blood on his teeth. “No, it’s not a black hole. It’s something else. Something new.”

  Cal shifted his gaze to Mech. The cyborg shrugged. “Don’t look at me, man. I don’t know.”

  “If you’re lying to us, Sinclair, we’re going to come back,” Cal said, squatting down beside the president. “We got to you once, we can get to you again. And this time, you’ll be begging me to hand you over to Mizette.”

  With a smile and a wink, Cal stood and started back towards the inner airlock door. “Can you cobble together a full space suit from what we’ve got?” he asked.

  Mech nodded. “Yeah. It won’t be pretty, but it’ll work.”

  “Good, get him in it and get him off my ship,” Cal instructed. He stopped at the door. “Overarm throw. Really fonking fire him out of here.”

  “What?” Sinclair sputtered. “You can’t do that. I’m the president!”

  “My pleasure,” said Mech. “Give me three minutes.”

  * * *

  Two minutes and forty-five seconds later, Cal sat in his chair, smiling up at the face that filled it. The face wasn’t smiling back. It was quite a round face, and was wobbling a lot as the owner of it ranted and raged about penal code this and targeting systems that.

  Cal wasn’t really listening, though. There was something else about the man that was concerning him. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  Wait. He’d got it.

  “Dan Ackroyd!”

  On screen, the Zertex commander’s words tumbled to a stop. His fuzzy eyebrows met in the middle. “Excuse me?”

  “Dan Ackroyd. That’s who you remind me of,” said Cal. “Man, that has been annoying me for a full… ooh, three minutes now.”

  “Now you listen,” snarled space Dan Ackroyd, but Cal held up an index finger to stop him.

  “One sec. Loren, you all set?”

  “All set.”

  “Disabled the stupid proximity safety thing?”

  “Stupid proximity safety thing disabled,” Loren confirmed.

  “Excellent,” said Cal. He lowered his finger, but jumped in before the officer could continue. “Sorry to cut this short and everything, but you may want to take a look at our airlock door. The president is going to be coming out any second…”

  A flailing white shape rocketed into view from somewhere behind the ship, and quickly grew smaller as it hurtled off into the depths of space. “Now!” said Cal. “Better go catch him. Loren, punch it!”

  Loren gunned the engines. The floor shuddered and the stars became spaghetti as the Shatner shattered the light barrier and left Zertex Command Five far, far behind.

  * * *

  The co-ordinates Sinclair had given them pointed to a patch of space almost slap-bang between two solar systems. It was a two hour journey at full speed, but Cal had insisted they get there in ninety minutes.

  Loren and Mech had both pointed out that this was impossible, unless they wanted the ship to blow up, and he’d agreed that, in hindsight, what did an extra half hour matter, anyway?

  It had been a few weeks since Cal had first experienced faster than light travel, but his stomach, inner ear and – occasionally – bladder control still voiced quite strong objections to it. Watching the stars streaking past was out of the question, unless he wanted to spend the entire journey projectile vomiting into the glass container that had once contained Splurt, but which was now exclusively used for puke catching.

  Instead of the star-streaks, Cal had been having Loren fill the viewscreen with footage of cute space cats doing adorable stuff. He’d gradually come to realize, though, that you could only watch space cats for so long before they got a little… samey.

  “And climb out of drawer,” he muttered, a split-second before an on-screen kitten-thing did just that. “And look around. And fall out of drawer.”

  On screen, the space cat gave a little yelp, then waved its legs in the air as it struggled to right itself. Cal sighed. He was going to have to find something else to watch soon. He wondered if Space’s Funniest Home Videos was a thing. Then he wondered if it turned out that it wasn’t a thing, whether he should claim the idea as his own and start a production company.

  Finally, he wondered why the fonk he was thinking about starting a TV production company in outer space, and went back to watching the cats.

  Loren turned her chair around to face him and the others. “So, tell me about this hole of yours.”

  “Oh, yes please,” purred Miz, her tail twitching through the hole she’d torn in the back of her seat. “I would love to hear about your--”
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  “Mizette. Please,” said Cal. “Let’s not cheapen it.”

  She licked her lips, smirked at him, then went back to studying her nails.

  “I just know what Sinclair told us,” said Cal. “Hole in space. Nothing they’ve seen before.”

  “And… what are we thinking?” asked Mech. “That Splurt’s through there?”

  Cal shrugged. “Sinclair said it’s the last place they had contact with Vajazzle’s ship.”

  “It wasn’t Vajazzle’s ship, it was a Zertex ship,” Loren reminded him. “The AX11. Largest ship in the whole fleet. Largest ship in any fleet, and what? It just fell through a hole? Must’ve been one big hole.”

  “Guess we’ll find out soon enough,” said Mech. On screen, a series of numbers flashed red and began rapidly counting down.

  Loren spun her chair back to the front and began flipping switches. “What? Shizz! Arriving in ten… nine… eight…” The digits on screen blinked rapidly. “Uh, fivefourthreetwoon—”

  The Shatner dropped out of warp with a jarring jolt that threw Cal, Miz and Loren forward, then slammed them back again.

  Any other time, one of the crew would have passed comment on Loren’s piloting skills. Cal would have remarked on how far into his lower intestines his testicles had just been launched, for example, or Miz would have offered an apparently heartfelt compliment, before immediately pointing out that she was being sarcastic. Perhaps Mech might have cursed creatively, or just shaken his head while muttering below his breath.

  Any other time, that’s what would have happened.

  But not this time.

  Cal stared. Loren and Mech stared. Even Mizette looked up from her nails and gazed in wonder at the viewscreen.

  “What,” said Cal. “The fonk,” he added. “Is that?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Why Sinclair had called it a ‘hole,’ Cal had no idea. This thing wasn’t a hole. It was an abyss. It stretched all the way across the screen like a claw-mark in the curtain of space. Colors danced and fizzled inside it – reds and oranges around the ragged edges, becoming yellows then whites towards the center.

  Just looking at the thing made Cal feel simultaneously like the single most important person in the universe, and the most utterly insignificant. A bubble welled up inside him, like he was about to burst into tears. He wrapped his fingers around the edge of his arm rests, then squeezed until the knuckles turned white.