Space Team: The Search for Splurt

by Barry J. Hutchison

  The knife hacked through the tendril and the tension eased across his throat. Loren caught Cal under the arm. She kicked off the silty riverbed and launched them towards the surface. It rippled lazily above them, a shimmering lightshow just beyond their reach.

  Cal’s arms spasmed. His lungs shriveled away to nothing. Darkness swept in from all sides.

  And then Loren’s hands were on his face, her lips pressing against his. Cal’s eyes went wide as he felt air – sweet, beautiful, Loren-filtered air – fill his lungs.

  All too soon, she broke away. She kicked, and this time Cal kicked, too. They broke the surface together, Cal coughing and hacking and spluttering, Loren already vaulting up onto the banking.

  Miz’s hand snagged Cal by the back of his shirt and heaved him onto dry land. He collapsed onto his back, gulping in lungful after lungful of oxygen, or whatever the local equivalent might be, and clutching the wound that ran around his neck like a thin red seam.

  “What the Hell was that?” Mech demanded, as if being strangled by one had turned Cal into some sort of expert.

  “Don’t know,” Cal wheezed. “Came out… of the rocks.”

  Miz’s ears picked up. She tilted her head, just a fraction, listening for the sound she’d just heard to come again.

  “The rocks?” Mech grunted. “How could it come out of the rocks?”

  “How should I know?” Cal panted, heaving himself onto his elbows. The sun was pushing through the trees, and he had to squint to look up at Loren. “Thanks.”

  “No problem,” said Loren.

  Cal winced. “Bit quicker next time, maybe? That’s my only criticism. Literally, just ten seconds earlier would’ve been perfect. That’s all. Otherwise, faultless rescue.”

  Miz’s ears twitched. There it was. A faint krick, like cracking porcelain. Close. Very close.

  Right behind them, in fact.

  Mizette turned to the rocks that she now knew were nothing of the sort. “Uh, guys,” she said, then jumped back as a dozen or more luminous vines stabbed outwards through the shell of one of the eggs in the water, and made a grab for her.

  Swishing with her claws, Miz sliced two of the tendrils in half. They continued growing out of the shell, some of them whipping and snapping at the air, while several others snaked through the grass towards her feet.

  Cracks splintered across the egg’s surface as more and more of the luminous threads forced their way free.

  “To Hell with this,” said Mech, raising a metal foot and pressing it against the egg’s rapidly disintegrating surface. With a shove, he sent the whole thing tumbling over the drop and into the fast-flowing river below. Mech knocked the second egg in after the first, and they both bobbed on the surface a few times, then spun as the current caught them and dragged them downstream.

  “Eggs,” Mech muttered, as they watched them float away. “Should’ve seen that coming.”

  “Space eggs,” Cal corrected. “And yeah. I mean, based on our past luck, how could they not have been eggs filled with evil spaghetti?”

  “You know what I want to know?” said Miz.

  “Whether you can convince Cal to get himself out of those wet clothes?” Loren guessed.

  “Well, that,” said Miz. “But, like, if those were eggs…”

  “Space eggs,” said Cal.

  “Shut the fonk up,” growled Mech. “They’re eggs, man. Just eggs.”

  “Whatever,” Miz scowled. “If those were eggs, then what laid them?”

  They all looked at each other in silence for a while. Eventually, Cal sighed.

  “You had to ask,” he said.

  And then he threw his hands over his head and ducked, as the surface of the water behind them exploded in a stinking mass of eyes, tentacles and razor-sharp teeth.

  “Run!” Loren shouted, incorrectly assuming that everyone else hadn’t already thought of that. They backtracked into the woods, crashing through the undergrowth and dodging between trees, as the monstrous whatever-the-fonk-that-thing-was gnashed and whipped at the air in fury.

  A luminous tentacle, no thicker than a piece of string, snapped past Cal’s face, splintering bark from a tree right beside him.

  Another of the threads tangled around Miz’s tail and yanked back hard. She yelped, then turned, swiping with her claws. Behind them, the monster’s screech tore through the forest, sending birds scattering from the high branches.

  The screech became an eardrum-shaking crash as the thing forced its way between two of the taller trees, forcing the trunks apart and bending them until they could bend no more. They both toppled, tearing up thousands of roots and tons of soil from the forest floor.

  “It’s following us!” yelped Loren.

  “Mech, light it up,” Cal instructed.

  Mech’s top half spun, while his bottom half kept running forwards. He raised both arms and fired a series of bright red shots from his wrist blasters. They slammed into the creature’s front, eliciting another screech and a shambling stumble backwards.

  It stopped chasing, but they kept running anyway. The monster wasn’t just hideous, it stank, too – a foul, acrid stench of fish guts and seaweed, and of things long dead. Although he’d only glimpsed it for a minute, Cal wanted to get as far away from the thing as possible. He’d love to know how big the planet they were on was, so he could run exactly half way around it, and stay there. Although, even that would still be a bit too close for his liking.

  Despite his near-overwhelming desire to get away, it was Cal who stopped running first. This was partly because he felt they were safely out of the creature’s reach, but mostly because his lungs were cramping, his legs were burning, and he’d just been a little bit sick in his mouth.

  Even more than that, though, was the fact that his toe caught on something hard lying in the grass, and he fell, head-first, into a bush.

  “Ooh! Ow! Pointy! Pointy!”

  The others slowed to a stop. Miz, who had been powering ahead, doubled-back just as Cal extracted himself from the shrubbery.

  “Has it stopped chasing us?” whispered Loren, peering back through the trees. Mech tapped his scanners. Miz sniffed the air.

  “Yes,” they both said at the same time.

  Cal, meanwhile, had bent and pushed aside the grass to find out what he’d tripped on. “What the Hell?” he muttered, once he’d cleared enough of the undergrowth away.

  It was a rifle. Cal thought he recognized it as being of a type he’d had pointed at him fairly recently, but this one was rusted in patches, and partially coated in a purple moss.

  Loren peered over his shoulder. “That’s a Gloxom N7,” she said.

  Cal nodded. “That’s exactly what I was thinking. Except for the ‘Gloxom N7’ part. It’s a gun.”

  “A Zertex gun,” confirmed Loren.

  “So maybe Vajazzle’s ship did come through here,” said Cal, but Loren shook her head and pointed out the obvious.

  “Look at that thing. It’s been here for years.” She frowned and squatted down. “Except, that doesn’t make any sense…”

  “Uh, guys,” said Miz. “I found something.”

  Mech and Loren headed over to join Mizette, who stood a dozen or more feet away, gazing down at something in the grass. Cal moved to follow, then stopped when he heard a sound from high above them in the trees.

  Using a hand to shield his eyes from the sunlight that beamed between the leaves, Cal searched for the source of the noise. A sudden flurry of hops and jumps on one of the branches caught his attention.

  There, skipping along a thin branch, was a little orange-furred creature with perfectly round eyes and a ludicrously fluffy tail. It stopped running when it spotted Cal and peered down at him, tilting its head in curiosity.

  “Aw, a space squirrel,” said Cal.

  Meanwhile, Mech and Loren had joined Miz in looking at the thing in the grass. It was a dead body. Or bits of one, at least. A partially-intact skeleton sat propped against a tree, the meat picked clean fro
m its bones. Grass and roots had grown around the leg bones, while the ribcage was two-thirds covered in the same purple moss they’d seen on the gun.

  “I just found this guy,” said Miz. “He’s dead.”

  “Is he?” asked Loren. “Are you sure? Did you check for a pulse?”

  Behind them, Cal waved to the space squirrel. Rather than wave back, though, the space squirrel instead launched itself from the branch towards him. It fell in slow motion, its light body buffeted by the breeze, but still too fast for Cal to move out of the way.

  The space squirrel landed on Cal’s face and immediately clamped itself on, digging its claws into the sides of his head. Cal opened his mouth to scream, but a fluffy tail suddenly filled it all the way to his throat, silencing him.

  Frantically, and unable to see anything but squirrel tits, Cal whirled around, yanking furiously at the creature as he tried to pull it free.

  A pair of sharp teeth dug into his scalp, just above the hairline. Cal tried to scream again, but all that came out were a series of faint, muffled gagging sounds as the fluffy tail expanded to fill his entire airway, and Cal began to choke.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A few feet from where Cal was being silently murdered by a space squirrel, Mech studied the corpse. “It’s too clean. The flesh didn’t just rot away, it was stripped.”

  “You mean he was eaten?” said Loren. “That thing from the river, you think?”

  There was a faint whirr of a motor as Mech shook his head. “Look at the bones. You can see bite marks. Whatever ate this guy was small, but with sharp teeth and one nasty bite.”

  Behind them, Cal tugged and wrenched at the rodent on his face, desperately trying to wrench it off. He made a grab for its head, his thumbs searching for its cartoonishly-wide eyes, but the nasty little fonker sunk its teeth into the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger, and he quickly yanked his hand away again.

  Spotting something shiny in the grass, Miz knelt down. “That’s a Zertex badge,” said Loren, as Miz held up the silver emblem. “This guy was with Zertex.”

  “So, what? Zertex were here years ago?” Miz asked.

  “That’s what I thought,” said Loren. “But here’s the thing – the Gloxom N7. That gun? It was only manufactured in—”

  “What the fonk is he doing now?” grunted Mech. He had looked back over his shoulder to find Cal jumping and jigging on the spot, his back to them. From that angle, they couldn’t see the creature that had attached itself to his head, and he appeared to be dancing.

  “Cal?” said Loren. “Uh… I was saying to the others, the Gloxom N7?”

  Cal spun in their direction, pointing frantically at the space squirrel. “Ooh, shizz,” hissed Loren. “What is that thing?”

  “I don’t care what it is, get it off!” cried Cal, although only inside his head, due to his throat still being jam-packed with tail.

  “How does this stuff keep happening to you?” Mech muttered, striding towards Cal and wrapping a hand around the squirrel’s body. He tried to yank it off, but its claws and teeth were holding on too tightly, and Cal remained attached. “Let go, you furry little shizznod,” Mech grunted, tugging on it again.

  Cal screamed – internally again, because of the tail thing – and pointed to the thing’s head. Taking the thing, Mech placed a thumb on one side of the creature’s skull, and a finger on the other. He began to squeeze.

  The space squirrel spun like a tornado of fur, detaching itself from Cal and whirling itself free of Mech’s grip. Screeching, it made a dive for the nearest victim that wasn’t made almost exclusively of inedible metal.

  Unfortunately for the space squirrel, the target it chose to lock onto was Mizette. It launched itself towards her face. Its wide eyes widened even further as it saw her jaws opening, and realized it had almost certainly made a pretty significant miscalculation.

  Mizette’s mouth snapped shut. There were a series of damp crunches as she chewed. “Huh,” she said. “That’s actually pretty delicious.”

  Cal, meanwhile, had dropped to his knees, coughing and spluttering and hacking up a hairball. “Man, I hate this forest,” he wheezed.

  There was a sound not unlike thunder and the ground trembled beneath them. Cal froze, clamping a hand over his mouth to stop himself coughing. Deeper into the woods there were a series of creaks and crashes as a number of trees were toppled by the tremor.

  When the rumbling stopped, Cal cautiously moved his hand away from his mouth. “Was that me?” he whispered. “Did I annoy the forest?”

  “Well, you manage to annoy everyone else, so it’s possible,” said Mech. He tapped the controls on his forearm and studied the in-built screen. “Looks like it was just an earthquake.”

  “Oh, well as long as it was just an earthquake, and nothing serious,” said Cal, getting to his feet. He stuck out his tongue and plucked a few flecks of fluff from it. “Man, I am going to be tasting that thing for weeks.”

  “Me too,” said Mizette, although she, unlike Cal, seemed pretty happy about it. “I hope we find some more.”

  “I really hope we don’t,” said Cal, his eyes darting across the branches above them. “So, what did we find?” he asked, when he was confident no more space squirrels were preparing to hurl themselves his way.

  “A dead guy,” said Miz.

  “Zertex,” added Mech. “Been dead a while. Probably killed by one of those things that you found.”

  “I didn’t find it,” said Cal. “It found me.” He hacked up another wad of fur and spat it onto the grass. “So, what are we saying? Zertex knew about this place years ago?”

  “Looks like it,” said Mech.

  “No, that’s what I’ve been trying to say,” said Loren, stepping over to the moss-ridden rifle on the ground. “This is a Gloxom N7.”

  Cal nodded and resisted the urge to sigh. “Great. You know your gun types. Well done. How does that help us?”

  “The Gloxom N7 was introduced as a replacement for the Wessal Flux, although in my opinion the Flux is the superior weapon, thanks to its twin coolant chambers that…” She caught Cal’s expression and cleared her throat. “Anyway, my point is, it’s new.”

  “How new?” asked Cal.

  “First manufactured eight months ago. First introduced to Zertex within the last six weeks.”

  Everyone looked down at the gun. Rust had claimed most of the barrel, while most of what was left belonged to the moss. “That is not a six week old gun,” said Cal.

  “Except it is,” said Loren. “It has to be.”

  “Then you got it wrong,” said Mizette. “I mean, it wouldn’t be the first time you messed up. It’s a different gun.”

  “No, you can tell by the shape of the stock and the way the trigger-guard curves forward to a point at the bottom,” said Loren, squatting beside the weapon and pointing to the various parts as she spoke. “Trust me, I know my firearms.”

  Cal leaned on her back and looked down at the rifle. “Also, it says ‘Gloxom N7’ on that handle bit at the top.”

  Loren’s pale blue skin darkened, just a shade. “Yes. That, too.”

  Cal straightened and leaned one hand against a tree, taking a moment to gather himself together. The past few hours had been taxing, to say the least, with the last, oooh, eight minutes or so being particularly unpleasant.

  He had a fiery red scar around his throat, two deep claw-marks on his temples, and a bite on his scalp that was currently weeping blood along the length of his nose. A chunk of the fleshy web between his forefinger and thumb was gone. He was wet, his face was crisscrossed with whip marks from branches, and his whole body still ached from the catalogue of bone-shuddering impacts that had been inflicted upon it.

  Also, he could still taste squirrel.

  He tried to ignore the pain and focus on the gun situation. So it was old, obviously – you could tell just by looking at it.

  But it couldn’t be old, because it was new.

  But it couldn’t be new,
because it was old.

  Cal decided to stop focusing on the gun situation, because it was making his headache worse.

  “So, what are we going to do?” he asked. “Anyone have any suggestions? Anything at all?”

  Miz’s ears pricked up. She sniffed the air.

  “What is it?” asked Cal, then he grimaced as something tore into his shoulder. He looked down to find the wooden shaft of a short, stubby arrow protruding from his body, just to the right of his left armpit.

  He stared at it.

  For quite a long time.

  Finally, he sighed.

  “Man, I fonking hate this forest,” he said, then his legs went up, his head went down and he collapsed in a heap in the undergrowth.

  * * *

  Cal stirred. He wasn’t sure why.

  He didn’t feel like stirring. Stirring was one of the last things on his mind. Being awake had proven to be almost exclusively awful of late, whereas unconsciousness had been pretty much plain sailing.

  Nothing had tried to drown him or eat him while he’d been unconscious. Or not that he’d noticed, anyway.

  He hadn’t been involved in any spaceship crashes while asleep, or almost asphyxiated in the cold depths of space. Or, again, if he had, he couldn’t recall any of it.

  But still, he was stirring. And as he stirred, he felt the pain begin to peck at him. His head. His face. That bit between his finger and thumb.

  His shoulder. Oh Jesus, his shoulder.

  Cal stopped stirring and jumped awake with a sound that came from some animal part of his brain he rarely tapped into. It was a terrified sort of, “Waururgh!” sound, and was accompanied by some karate style hand slashes and a jerking kick from one leg.

  Loren caught his hands and placed them gently by his side. “It’s OK. Everything’s going to be fine,” she said.

  Cal’s eyes swiveled around him, taking everything in. He was lying on a single bed in what appeared to be a hospital where a riot had recently taken place. Half the equipment was toppled and broken, and the floor was a minefield of broken glass, empty IV bags and bloodied gauze.