Space Team: The Search for Splurt

by Barry J. Hutchison

  “It must be thousands of miles across,” Loren whispered. There was a shake in her voice that told Cal she was feeling all the same things he was.

  “What is it?” asked Miz. “I mean, like… what even is that?”

  Cal didn’t tear his eyes away from the rip. He couldn’t. “Mech?”

  Mech didn’t reply. Cal glanced at him, just briefly, and felt a pang of utter, heart-wrenching loss. “Mech?”

  “Huh?” said Mech, snapping out of a daze.

  “Any ideas what it is?” Cal asked.

  “The fonk should I know?” Mech grunted. “Scanners ain’t showing nothing. Nothing that makes any sense, anyway.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Loren whispered.

  “It’s a beautiful big space thing,” Cal agreed.

  They all watched the beautiful big space thing in silence for several pleasant seconds. It was Miz who eventually had to go and spoil it.

  “Uh, should our shields be dropping like that?”

  Reluctantly, Mech turned his attention to the shield integrity readout. His brow knotted. “We just dropped six percent.”

  Cal practically spasmed in his chair. “We’ve only got six percent shields? That’s not nearly enough shield! Does that even cover the ship? Oh God, were going to die, aren’t we? We’re totally about to die.”

  “Calm down, shizznod,” replied Mech. “We’re not down to six percent, we’re down by six percent, to ninety-four.”

  “Oh,” said Cal. “Oh, that’s fine, then. That’s still more than enough shield.”

  “Ninety-one,” corrected Loren. “And falling.”

  “So that’s why there ain’t no ships around,” said Mech.

  Cal frowned. “What?”

  “Big exciting new space thing like this?” said Mech, gesturing at the flickering vortex of color ahead. “Should be science ships. Lots of science ships, with fighters patrolling to keep anyone else from getting too close.”

  “Right…” said Cal.

  “So where are they?” asked Mech. “Hmm? You see anyone else here but us?”

  “You think they blew up?” Cal asked.

  “I dunno. Maybe,” shrugged Mech. “Or they got the Hell out when they realized that thing was eating their shields.”

  Loren’s hands went to the controls. “I’m going to back off and try to get out of its range.”

  “Out of its range?” said Cal. “Have you seen that thing? Nothing is out of its range. And we can’t, we need to find Splurt.”

  “We will,” said Loren. “But we need to figure out how first, and to do that we need the ship to be intact.”

  “Fair point, well made,” Cal conceded. He sighed. “Fine, back up until the shields stop falling, and we’ll work out what to do next.”

  “Uh, guys,” said Mizette, her voice taking on an uncharacteristically serious tone. “You know you sometimes get me to check this little screen thing in my chair, in case, like, loads of little red dots show up?”

  Everyone turned to look at her. “Yes…” said Cal.

  Miz looked up, her eyes wide with surprise. “Loads of little red dots just showed up.”

  “Shizz,” Loren mumbled, tapping some buttons on the panel beside her. Cal felt that jarring sense of loss again when the vortex vanished from the screen, and was replaced by an area of space positively brimming with Zertex fighters. As they watched, another dozen or more came out of warp and stopped abruptly behind the first wave.

  Cal leaned forwards in his chair. “Loren, please tell me that all these ships are not currently right behind us.”

  The screen changed with a sudden jolt, like it was being forced against its will. President Sinclair’s face appeared. His smile had returned, but it was less convincing than ever, thanks partly to the blood drying across his front teeth.

  “Do you know my big mistake, Mr Carver?” the president asked.

  “Matching that shirt with those pants?” guessed Cal.

  “Making it personal,” said Sinclair. “I wanted you brought to me so that I could torture you. So that I could break you. And why was that? Why the obsession with hurting you directly?”

  Cal blinked. “Are you… are you flirting with me, Hayel? Is that what this is? Because – and no offence here, because you’re a very attractive man – but I am not into you at all.”

  On screen, Sinclair’s face twisted in rage. He opened his mouth to shout, but snapped it closed before the words could come out. He smoothed down the front of his shirt, and his face fell into line again at the same time.

  Sinclair smiled, and this time it was closer to the real thing. “Nice try, Mr Carver, but my interest in killing you slowly and face to face has waned. Now, I just want you dead.”

  “Weapons locking,” said Loren.

  “Ours or--?”

  “Theirs,” Loren snapped. “How many times must we have this conversation?”

  “Shields at eighty-five,” warned Mech. “Wait, eighty-two.”

  “More of those red dots coming in,” Miz added.

  On screen, Sinclair’s smile returned to its full gameshow-host glory. “Goodbye, Mr Carver. You were…” He searched for the correct word, then shrugged. “You were. And in a few more minutes, you won’t be.”

  The Shatner rocked as a torpedo slammed against the shields, making them flicker erratically. Five, eight… eleven beams of scorching red blasted from the front line of Zertex fighters. Loren sent the ship into a dive, but the second wave of fighter ships were ready for it, and two more torpedoes found the ship’s exposed belly.

  “Oh, man, that hurt us. That hurt us bad,” said Mech. “Shields in the twenties.”

  Sinclair watched them from the screen, grinning broadly. Cal pointed to the president’s massive face. “Get that fonk off my TV!” he commanded, banging his arm rests with both fists. His weapons controls unfolded into two quarter circle control panels beneath each hand. Above him, a headset visor lowered down and snapped into place over his eyes.

  Cal felt the now-familiar whooshing as his virtual reality viewpoint zoomed in to show the area around the ship. From this view, Cal could see around half of the Zertex ships – far too many to count – and a little over one tenth of the space-hole.

  Despite the real and all-too immediate threat posed by the fighters, Cal couldn’t resist a peek at the vortex. Its colors pulsed and fizzled and swirled and danced. Loren was right, it was beautiful. More than that, it was mesmerizing. Hypnotic. He could look at that thing all—

  A blast of laser cannon fire rocketed past him. The Shatner trembled with the impact, and Cal saw the shields become thin like plastic wrap around them.

  “What are you waiting for?” Loren shouted. “Start shooting!”

  Cal spun in his chair to face the Zertex fighters. Another thirty or forty of them had snapped out of warp, and were moving into what he guessed was attack formation.

  “Shields at seventeen,” Mech warned.

  “Maybe you should, like, warp us out,” Miz suggested.

  “Can’t. Not enough power,” Mech grunted. “If I divert from shields, next hit will take us out. We’ll be in pieces before we can fire up the warp drive.”

  “Cal!” Loren barked. “Return fire, now!”

  Cal’s fingers tensed on the triggers.

  Then relaxed again. What was the point? They were one ship – one heavily damaged ship – against an armada. He didn’t even know what half of the buttons on his gunner controls did, let alone have any experience of using them.

  A fortnight ago, he’d been a petty criminal from Philadelphia. Now, he was being asked to single-handedly destroy an entire fleet of alien fighter ships. He was out of his depth. He wondered if anyone had ever been quite this far out of their depth before, in fact.

  He was so far out of his depth it wasn’t just that he could no longer see the bottom, there was no bottom. He was treading water above an empty, endless abyss that could swallow him up at any...

  At any…

&nbs
p; Cal spun his chair back towards the vortex. He disengaged his targeting visor and his gun controls folded neatly back into his chair.

  “What the Hell are you doing?” Loren screamed. “I can’t dodge them forever.”

  “You’re not dodging them now,” Miz pointed out, as a series of cannon-fire blasts thundered across the hull.

  “That thing,” said Cal, pointing to the rip in space. “Fly into it.”

  Loren flicked a glance back over her shoulder. “Are you nuts? We don’t know what’s in there!”

  “No, but we know what’s out here,” said Cal. “And it’s pretty fonking unpleasant.”

  Loren shot Mech a look. He sighed, then shrugged. “Man’s got a point.”

  “Oh, just do it, already,” said Miz. “Stop making it into such a drama.”

  “Fine,” said Loren, gritting her teeth. She pointed the Shatner towards the swirling, sparkling void and hit the thrusters. “But you might want to hold onto something. This could get bumpy.”

  “Unlike literally every other time you’ve flown us anywhere, you mean?” Miz said.

  Cal clutched his arm rests as the vortex consumed the edges of the screen. The ship lurched and shuddered. Above them, a pipe shook loose of its mount, hissing out its contents in a cloud of hot steam.

  “No,” Cal said, shouting to make himself heard over the creaking and grinding of the ship’s extremities. “This time might even be worse than usual.”

  “The good news is, Zertex ain’t following us,” Mech said.

  “And the bad news?” asked Cal.

  “We ain’t got no shields left and we’re all going to die.”

  Cal puffed out his cheeks. “Yeah, you’re right, that is bad news,” he said.

  The lights flickered. Something high-tech and important-looking fell off the wall and hit the floor with a heavy thonk.

  “Controls not responding,” said Loren. She waggled the stick left and right to demonstrate. The Shatner continued in a steady line towards the now all-encompassing swirling mass. “No backing out now.”

  Something deep in the ship screamed. Mech studied the information flooding the screen. “Outer airlock door’s gone. Inner door holding for now.”

  “It’s OK. It’s fine. We’re going to get through this,” said Cal. “We’ve got through worse.”

  The screen flickered like static. The lights dimmed, became stupidly bright, then snapped off completely, all in the space of half a second. Cal’s voice seemed louder in the darkness.

  “OK, so maybe not that much worse,” he admitted, then something unpleasant happened. He wasn’t quite sure what the unpleasant thing was, exactly, but it made his insides and his outsides swap places, and turned his eyes to Play-Doh. Or, at least, that was how it felt.

  The flight deck was dark, yet simultaneously blindingly bright. It was crammed with light, like there wasn’t enough room to fit it all in, so some parts were overlapping.

  At the same time, it was darker than any darkness Cal had ever seen. It wasn’t just an absence of light, it was an absence of anything. An absence of space and time and everything else in between. Cal was just starting to wonder if he was there, or if even he were absent, too, when the roaring and squealing that had been rising to a piercing, ear-splitting din stopped. Just stopped. Like that.

  The non-light faded. The darkness lifted, becoming just the regular, run of the mill hey-who-turned-the-lights-off variety.

  Cal cleared his throat, and was relieved to find he still had a throat to clear. “Is it my imagination?” he said, offering the words tentatively to the darkness. “Or are we still alive?”

  “Yeah, man. I’m still here,” said Mech.

  “Me too,” said Miz.

  “Yes. Still in one piece,” said Loren.

  Cal threw back his head and laughed. “I knew it! What did I say? I knew we’d get through it. I mean, yeah, it was touch and go there for a while, but… Oh, man, that was… That was… Did anyone else feel themselves turning inside-out, by the way? Or was that just me?”

  “Not just you,” said Miz. “That was so not cool.”

  A thought struck Cal. “Wait… we didn’t actually turn inside-out, did we? We’re not sitting here all, like, innards exposed?”

  From somewhere in Mech’s direction, there was a flurry of keyboard tapping. A dim red light illuminated high in the ceiling, casting its crimson glow across the bridge and picking out four shaken, but very much not inside-out crew members.

  “Oh, thank God,” breathed Cal. “That could’ve been deeply unpleasant all round.” He turned his chair towards the front. It creaked in protest. “Where are we?”

  “Sensors still offline,” said Mech. “Trying to get us visuals on…”

  The screen illuminated in a burst of static. It flickered and danced around, revealing... something. Definitely something. Something quite big, Cal thought. Or something very close.

  Or possibly both.

  Mech banged a metal fist on a control panel. The snow cleared, although the bottom half of the picture jerked off to the left, like an old VHS player in need of a tracking adjustment. It didn’t matter, though. They didn’t need the bottom half of the image to tell them what they were looking at. The top half spoke volumes, all on its own.

  “Planet!” Cal cried. “Pull up, pull up!”

  Loren heaved on the controls, but the Shatner’s course didn’t change. Cal realized he couldn’t hear the humming of the ship’s engines – a sound he had never actually noticed before, and was only aware of now by its absence.

  “Can’t,” Loren hissed through gritted teeth. “Not responding.”

  Beads of sweat formed on Cal’s brow. He tried to breathe, but his chest felt tight. “Is it me, or is it hot in here?” he panted.

  “Atmosphere,” Mech grunted. “Ship’s burning.”

  Cal watched as Mech knelt on the floor and placed his hands against it, fingers splayed. With a magnetic whine, both hands and both knees locked Mech down.

  “What are you doing?” Cal asked.

  “Brace position,” Mech explained. He nodded towards the screen, which was now completely taken up by a bird’s eye view of a dark green tree canopy, the thin blue pencil-line of a river, and not a whole lot else. “We’re going down. Hard.”

  Cal snorted, but it was half-hearted, and barely a whistle through his nose. “What? No. We’re not. Are we? Loren, pull up. Quit messing around.”

  Loren turned enough to look at Cal over her shoulder. She nodded, just once. “The ship’s dead. We’re going to crash.”

  Miz tutted. “Oh, well way to go, Loren,” she said. “You’ve really outdone yourself this time.”

  Cal reached across the gap to Mizette. After a moment, he felt her hand slide into his, and they both squeezed.

  He nodded to Mech, and Mech nodded back.

  He smiled at Loren. One of his good ones, too.

  “Hey,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. You did great, OK? We all did great.” His smile became a devilish grin. “Well, I mean, maybe not Mech…”

  And then, with a sound like all the thunder in all the skies, the Shatner hammered through the forest canopy, and hit the ground in a towering eruption of roots and soil.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Time passed. Ten seconds. A lifetime, maybe. Cal couldn’t say for sure. But time definitely passed, in that way that time does.

  More time passed.

  And some more after that.

  Cal couldn’t tell if his eyes were open. He tried to reach a hand for his face to feel, but his arms wouldn’t move.

  Oh, shizz.

  He was paralyzed.

  Just his fonking luck.

  Time passed.

  Cal tried wiggling his toes. They wiggled. This was good news, he thought, although he couldn’t quite remember why. He couldn’t quite remember why he’d been wiggling them in the first place, in fact.

  He stopped.

  Time passed.

  There was someth
ing important, he thought. He could almost remember it, but not quite. It was something big. Planet-sized. Planet-shaped, too.

  It’d come back to him.

  Time passed. A second. Ten lifetimes, maybe. Cal couldn’t say for sure.

  He wondered if his eyes were open. He tried moving his arms to find out, but they refused.

  Paralyzed.

  Just his fonking luck.

  A memory nagged at him, like déjà vu, or a half-remembered dream.

  Could he wiggle his toes, he wondered?

  Yep. They were fine.

  He was oddly calm about the fact that he couldn’t move his arms, and wasn’t sure why this might be. Maybe he’d never been able to move his arms. Did he even have arms? He had toes, clearly. That was now firmly established. But arms?

  He thought so. He definitely felt like he might recall having had arms at some point in his past. One, at least. Possibly two.

  Three?

  He thought not. Three felt like too many.

  Time passed.

  A planet! That was it. There was a planet, big and getting rapidly bigger.

  He should warn the others!

  But no.

  Loren probably had it all in hand.

  She had hands. And arms. Definitely. He remembered those pretty clearly.

  The more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that he’d had arms at some point, too.

  He tried moving them again.

  Nope.

  Maybe not, then.

  Cal wrestled an eye open. It looked up, down, left right, swiveling in a full circle as it took in every last detail of where he was.

  Except it was dark, so it saw nothing.

  He opened the other eye to see if they’d have more luck working in tandem.

  Nope.

  Still dark.

  “Hello?” he said, but all that emerged were a series of sputtering coughs and a wad of something that tasted like it belonged on the inside.

  A light hit him full in the face. He hissed in through his teeth and inhaled a mouthful of dust. He coughed again and the light redirected to become an oval on the floor beside him. Cal saw that he was lying on a white, marshmallow-like substance. Embedded in it, in fact. The stuff was wrapped around him like a mallow cocoon.