“Hello?” Cal said, directing the word towards the light, as if it were a living thing come to rescue him. “What’s your name?”
“The fonk you talking about, man?” grunted a voice in the darkness. Mech crawled into the pool of light, and Cal saw it was being projected from a torch on the cyborg’s shoulder. “It’s me.”
“Mech!” Cal wheezed. “Are we… are we alive?”
“Yeah, we’re alive,” said Mech.
Cal let out a high-pitched little, “Oh!” of delighted surprise, but then grew suddenly serious. “Both of us?”
“We’re both alive,” Mech confirmed.
“Oh!” said Cal again, a woozy smile returning. “Can I ask you something?” he whispered.
Mech bent low, studying the white mallow substance that surrounded Cal. “Yeah, man. What?”
“Be honest,” said Cal. “Can you remember if I have arms?”
Mech’s eyes searched Cal’s face, but found only sincerity. “Yeah, man, you got arms. You’re just stuck in this safety putty.”
“I knew I had some! One or two. Not three, though,” Cal slurred, then he squinted as he tried to focus on the rest of Mech’s sentence before it slipped away. “Safety putty? Is that was this stuff is?”
“Yeah. The chair spits it out if the ship crashes.”
Cal gasped. “Did we crash? When?”
Mech swung the torch across a mangled tangle of wreckage. It took Cal a moment to recognize it as the Shatner’s flight deck. “Jesus. What about the others? Are they dead?”
“No, I got them out already,” said Mech. “Just you left.”
Cal let out a sigh of relief, then scowled. “Wait, you got me last?”
“Reckoned it’s what you would’ve wanted,” said Mech.
“Well you reckoned wrong!” said Cal. “In future, definitely get me first, OK?”
Mech shrugged. “Whatever you say, captain,” he muttered.
“Or is that mean?” Cal wondered. “Yeah, that’s mean. Get the others first. Just rescue me whenever.”
Mech nodded. “Like, now, for example?”
“Oh! Yes,” said Cal, brightening again. “That’s a great idea. Rescue me now.”
“Sure thing,” Mech said, then his arm whirred as he clamped a hand down on the mallow cocoon. “Now shut up and hold on. I’ll get you out of here in no time.”
* * *
Time passed. About ten minutes, by Cal’s reckoning.
He sat in his chair, still ninety percent covered by marshmallow and largely unable to move, gazing forlornly at what had once been the dread ship Shatner. Loren and Miz stood either side of him, watching Mech search through the debris for anything useful.
The crash had carved a twelve-lane-highway wide trench in the ground, uprooting trees and shattering rocks as the hull ploughed up the terrain. But if the damage to the ground was bad, the toll it had taken on the ship was even worse.
It wasn’t a ship any more. It barely even qualified as ‘the remains of a ship.’ It was metal. Lots and lots of bent, buckled and broken metal plates, with cables and pipes scattered like dropped noodles all across the ravaged ground.
A section near the rear of the ship – a part Cal tended to think of as ‘that sticky-out bit’ – was partly intact, but mostly on fire, so it was unlikely to stay that way for long.
“So,” said Cal. “Reckon we can fix it?”
“Maybe. If we can swap out a few parts,” said Loren.
“Which parts?”
“All of them.”
“That sticky-out bit is still--”
That sticky-out bit exploded. Shrapnel whistled past Mech and embedded itself deep into Cal’s safety putty.
“No, I tell a lie,” Cal said. “That bit’s gone, too.”
He looked down at the twisted piece of metal that had been stopped just inches from his heart. He looked up at Loren and Miz.
“Hey,” he realized. “How come I’m the only one sitting in a marshmallow?”
More time passed as Mizette used her claws to remove Cal from the safety putty in what he felt was a recklessly cavalier manner. The only area she spent any time lingering over was his crotch. She slowed right down and really took her time over that particular area, which Cal was both relieved and concerned by in almost equal measures.
By the time Cal was free, Mech had deposited just a single box on the ground in front of them. Loren squatted and rummaged in it.
“Is this it?”
“That’s all we got,” said Mech. “A few blasters. Couple of tools…”
“My guitar?” asked Cal, hopefully.
“Thankfully not,” said Mech. “So, at least some good’s come out of this.”
Loren stood up, a blaster pistol in her hand. She checked it over, then tucked it into the back of her belt. “It’s not much.”
“You can say that again,” agreed Mech. “There might be more, but I didn’t want to waste more time looking.”
“My guitar,” Cal sobbed. “My fonking guitar. I am going to kill Sinclair for this.”
“Yeah, well good luck finding him,” said Mech. “Because I have no idea where we are.”
Cal got up out of his chair for the first time since Miz had carved him free of the putty. His skin and clothes still felt tacky, and made a faint thack sound as he pulled himself off the seat.
“Wait, what do you mean?” said Cal. “What about your sensor things? I thought you had, like, GPS or whatever.”
Mech shrugged. “If you mean a location positioning system, then yeah. I do,” said Mech. He tapped his forearm. “This thing can pinpoint wherever I am in the galaxy, down to a few feet.”
“So, what?” said Cal. “It’s broken?”
“Naw, man, it ain’t broken,” said Mech. “We just ain’t in our galaxy anymore.”
Cal stared at him. After a moment, a smile split his face. He clapped his hands together and pointed at Mech. “Aha! You totally almost had me there. I was this close to falling for that.” He laughed and patted Mech on the arm. “No, but seriously.”
“Yeah,” Mech intoned. “But seriously.”
Cal’s face fell. “But seriously seriously?”
Mech nodded. “But seriously seriously. This ain’t our galaxy.”
“Well whose galaxy is it?” asked Cal.
“Fonked if I know.”
“How is that even possible?” asked Mizette.
“We flew through a giant wormhole thing,” Loren snapped, stabbing a finger towards the sky. Cal looked up, half-expecting to see the swirly vortex thing above him, but there was only a coppery-orange sky with flecks of purple cloud. “You think, I don’t know, maybe that had something to do with it?”
“The Hell should I know?” Miz sniffed. “I’m not a scientist.”
“Oh really?” spat Loren. “You do surprise me. With an intellect like yours?”
Miz’s nostrils flared. “Are you being sarcastic?” she said. She turned to Cal. “Is she being sarcastic?”
“No, not even a little bit,” said Cal, shooting Loren a look. “I get it, we’re all a little stressed out here, but that’s no reason for us to start fighting.”
“We always fight,” Miz pointed out.
“She’s right,” agreed Loren, the worst of her anger escaping her in one big breath. “It’s kind of our thing.”
“Then maybe it’s time it stopped being your thing,” said Cal. “Maybe becoming best friends and working together so we don’t all die should be your new thing?”
He looked beyond them to the edges of the forest that hemmed them in. The taller trees were gnarled and bent, each trunk made up of several thinner trunks, all twisted around one another like cables behind a TV.
Beneath those stood fatter, smaller trees. These ones had smooth, bulging trunks with two branches sprouting upwards from the top. They looked like giant slugs wearing leafy wigs, and Cal made a mental note to keep an eye on them, in case they started to move around, or made any attempt to eat hi
m.
“Mech? Picking anything up?”
Mech tapped the controls on his arm. A stream of information flashed up on the display. “Lot of lifeforms in those trees.”
“Any you recognize?”
Another tap on the controls. Another flash of data. “Nope.”
Cal clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth. “Miz? What does your nose tell us?”
Miz tilted her head and sniffed the air. “Right now, it tells us there’s a burning spaceship ten feet away, and that we might be near some trees,” she admitted. “I need to get somewhere less smoky.”
“We should stay here,” said Loren. “Near the ship. Someone’s bound to have heard the crash, or seen us come down.”
Cal nodded. “Yes. But we don’t know if it’ll be someone we want to hang around for. I mean, out of all the people we’ve met since we were brought together, how many of them haven’t tried to kill us? Statistically, the chances of someone friendly turning up are pretty fonking slim.”
“Fair point,” Loren conceded. “We should move on.”
“Anyone got any preference of direction?” asked Cal, gesturing into the wall of woods around them. “Because I’m easy.”
“Oh, really? Well, in that case…” Miz began, but Cal held up a finger again.
“Miz. Please. Now probably isn’t the best time,” he said, then he bent down, grabbed a couple of blasters from one of the boxes, and limped towards a narrow gap in the wall of trees. “I guess this looks as safe a direction as any,” he decided.
But, as was so often the case, he was wrong.
CHAPTER SEVEN
They trudged through the trees, Mech leading the way. Branches whipped and tore at them, which didn’t seem to bother Mech or Mizette, but annoyed the other two immensely.
“You’re doing that on purpose,” Cal said to Mech’s back, as another thin branch slapped him in the face.
“Doing what on purpose?” asked Mech, not turning around.
Another branch stung Cal’s cheek. “That! You’re bending the branches back, then letting them go so they hit me in the face.”
Mech chuckled. “Oh, that. Yeah. Yeah, I’m doing that on purpose.”
“I don’t know what you’re complaining about, Cal. You’re doing it to me!” Loren pointed out from just behind him.
“Yeah, but when I do it it’s funny,” Cal explained. “When he does it it’s workplace harassment.”
They had been walking for an hour or more, headed vaguely east. Mech’s positioning system might not have been working, but his in-built compass helped them stick to more or less a straight line. What was at the end of that line, though, was anyone’s guess.
At first, the forest had been wonderfully terrible, or terribly wonderful, or some other combination of the two words. They’d taken it in turns to point out the pale blue illuminated berries on some of the larger trees, the red and yellow flowers whose tongues flicked like party-blowers at passing insects or, in Miz’s case, some interesting-smelling animal feces.
After a while, though, they’d stopped. It was hot in the forest, and those insects were beginning to tick everyone off. Even Mech, who barely had eight inches of skin to his name, spent half his time waving a hand in front of his face and muttering angrily.
Now, barely sixty minutes after they’d set out, the novelty of the forest had well and truly worn off. Even the chirping of the birds in the trees, which had seemed so joyous and carefree when they’d first heard it, was now the single most infuriating noise any of them had ever heard. Fortunately, Cal knew how to lift their spirits.
“What would you rather, right?” he began. “To be constantly followed by a hyper-critical ghost that only you could see and hear – one who’s giving it, like, ‘you’re rubbish, everyone hates you, you should just kill yourself,’ or whatever in your ear all the time. Or to be a hyper-critical ghost following someone else around?”
“Am I following Loren?” asked Miz from the back. “Is that why I’m hyper-critical?”
“You’d make an excellent hyper-critical ghost,” said Loren.
Cal smiled. “There you go! That was almost a compliment!”
Loren shook her head. “No. It wasn’t.”
“No, but it was almost a compliment. It was along the lines of a compliment, and that’s a start,” said Cal. Another branch whipped him in the face. He ignored it. “Personally, I’d have to be the ghost. I’m not sure I could handle being criticized all the time. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but my self-confidence is pretty thin.”
All three of the others stopped walking for a moment and looked at him. “Yeah, man,” Mech grunted. “Whatever you say.”
They continued on. The forest floor was a tangle of vines and roots, but it was dry and more or less solid, so walking wasn’t too taxing. The further away from the ship they got, the more Miz’s nose was able to pick up.
She could smell trees, although that one was pretty much a given. She picked up bark and sap and berries and foliage. She could detect fruit in some of the higher branches, but not a kind she’d ever smelled before.
There was water ahead somewhere. A mile. Maybe two. She raised her nose and sniffed. Fresh, not salty, and clean enough. It was just as well, since they hadn’t been able to salvage any water from the ship, and Miz’s tongue was approaching sandpaper levels of dryness.
There was something else, too. Something beyond the water, which she could pick up just the faintest traces of when the breeze blew the right way. It was familiar, somehow, but try as she might, she couldn’t quite place it. It hung just out of reach, like the memory of a dream.
Whatever it was, it made the fur on the back of her neck stand on end whenever it wafted by, which made her think it was probably nothing good.
“Think Splurt’s here somewhere?” asked Cal, as they plodded on through the trees. They could hear the burbling of water ahead now, and had started to pick up their pace.
“Doubt it,” said Loren.
Cal tutted. “Thanks for that, Negative Nancy.”
“Well, I mean, statistically, what are the odds? We don’t know the ship came through the wormhole or whatever it is. If it did, why would it land here?”
“Maybe it crashed,” Cal suggested.
“Yeah!” agreed Miz. “Do you have, like, a twin sister who is also a pilot? Because if you do, and if she was flying that ship, it totally crashed.”
“No, I don’t. I have brothers,” said Loren. Her eyes widened and her stomach went tight. “My brothers. I might never see my brothers again.” She considered this for a moment, then waved the thought away. “Ah, I never really liked them, anyway.”
“Wow,” said Cal. “That was the fastest one-eighty emotional turnaround I’ve ever seen. I’m impressed.”
The trees ended in a wall of branches, and Mech pushed his way through to a clearing beyond. A narrow river blocked their path, the water sparkling as it curved over two large oval rocks, before tumbling into a narrower, faster-flowing stretch of river below.
Miz and Cal both dropped to their knees by the bank and Cal scooped up some of the water. It was icy-cold, and zinged against his skin.
“Are you sure it’s safe?” asked Loren.
Cal paused with his hands halfway to his mouth, and gazed longingly at the little pool as it drained between the gaps in his fingers.
“Smells safe,” said Miz, leaning down and lapping hungrily at the liquid. “Tastes safe.”
“Maybe we should boil it first,” Loren suggested, but Cal couldn’t wait. He dug in for another scoop, brought it to his lips, and slurped.
It wasn’t until the liquid flooded his mouth that he realized what a barren desert it had been in there. The soil-dust from the crash had coated his tongue and gums, and the water didn’t just feel like a drink, it felt like a purification, washing away the pain of the past few hours.
It was the taste of hope. The taste of possibility. It was a taste that cradled him close and whispere
d, ‘You’re safe now. I’ve got this,’ into his ear.
“You know,” he began, sighing contentedly as the icy liquid cleansed his aching throat. “I have a feeling that everything’s going to turn out OK.”
And then, with a splash, something thin and luminous snaked out of the water, wrapped around his throat, and dragged him below the surface.
The water, which had been pleasantly chilly just a moment ago, now stabbed at him in a billion little pinpricks of pain. The vine, or tentacle, or whatever it was tightened around his neck like a garrote. He tried to dig his fingers beneath it, but there was no space to squeeze so much as a nail between the thing and his skin.
He thrashed and kicked, churning up a dark brown sediment from the river’s shallow bottom. It twirled like a tiny tornado, turning the water to murk. Through it, Cal could make out the luminous green thread that had tangled itself around him.
Another glowing tendril snaked towards him, this one moving more cautiously. It sniffed around his feet, then probed around the bottom of his pants. Cal flailed his legs around, trying to kick the thing away.
The murky water swirled up his nostrils. The tightness around his throat made him want to open his mouth to gulp down air, but an aversion to drowning made him think again.
The tendrils, whatever they were, were coming from cracks in the two big rocks. He could just make out where they emerged from tiny crevasses near the rocks’ curved bases.
A shape broke the surface of the river above him. Wrestling with the neck-vine, he turned himself around. He watched with both a growing sense of relief and a desire to shout, “Hurry the fonk up!” as Loren swam towards him with wide, powerful strokes.
The other tendril drew back as she approached. Cal pointed frantically towards the garrote around his throat, and Loren nodded. Her hand went to her belt and she brought out a short knife with a serrated blade.
Cal’s lungs were balloons filled with fire. They pleaded with him, screamed at him to open his mouth. The muscles in his arms and legs were cramping. A lightness was tickling across his scalp. If Loren didn’t get a fonking move on, then—Yes!
Space Team: The Search for Splurt Page 6