Space Team: The Search for Splurt

by Barry J. Hutchison

  “I’d long given up hope of ever seeing you die,” Vajazzle told him. “Years ago, in fact. The day you turned up… Well, it was like all my Kroyshuks had come at once.”

  She tightened her grip further. “The annoying thing is, I don’t even know why I despise you quite as much as I do. What was his name? The president? I forget. He said the same thing. There’s just something about you that brings out the worst in people.”

  “I… try,” Cal gargled.

  “You thought you could escape, didn’t you? You thought you could come here, rescue your friend, and get away. Were you going to kill me? Was that part of your plan?”

  Cal tried to find a reply, but they all floated out of reach somewhere in the oncoming darkness. The tentacle jerked and the assassin’s voice took on a scolding tone. “Look me in the eye, Mr Carver. Don’t turn away. I want to see you go.”

  Cal almost didn’t give her the satisfaction, but he was damned if he was going to die with her thinking him a coward. He met her gaze, angry and defiant to the last.

  And he was glad he did. Because if he hadn’t looked, he wouldn’t have seen the cartoonishly-huge green hand clamp down over her head and lift her off the ground.

  Nor would he have seen the brief but brilliant expression of absolute terror on her face right before a gloopy green fist cocooned her whole upper body.

  The tentacle on Cal’s throat slackened. He ripped it free, just as Vajazzle began to shimmer with purple sparkles.

  She vanished, revealing the owner of the hand in all his full squidgy glory. Two bloodshot eyes gazed unblinkingly back at Cal from within a foot-high blob of lime-colored jello.

  “Splurt?”

  The massive hand waved, became a thumbs-up, then twanged back into Splurt’s body like elastic. Cal was on his feet in an instant. He ran towards his little pal and scooped him up in his arms.

  To the casual spectator, it would’ve looked pretty strange - a grown-man spinning around at the bottom of a hole, excitedly hugging jelly. Cal didn’t care. Splurt probably didn’t, either, although it was hard to read his expressions at the best of times.

  “I knew you were in there, buddy. I knew you’d come back to me,” Cal said. He pressed his nose against Splurt’s head and inhaled deeply. “Silly Putty. Christ, I’ve missed that smell.”

  The ground shook, sending pebbles clacking down the side of the pit. “The tanks,” Cal realized. “We need to stop the tanks shooting the others to bits.”

  Splurt wrapped himself around Cal, then launched a rubbery appendage that quite closely resembled a string of snot up to the top of the pit. Cal felt a sudden sense of acceleration as Splurt propelled them up and out of the pit.

  Two of the tanks stood facing the forest, guns trained on the tree line. Cal looked from them up to Vajazzle’s ship and back again.

  “She knows we want out of here. She’ll destroy the ships,” Cal said. “I have to go after her. You think you can handle the tanks, buddy?”

  Splurt flopped to the ground and gazed up at Cal, impassively. Cal grinned. “That’s my boy. Go get ‘em, then bring the others and meet me inside. We’re getting off this shizzhole. We’re going home.” He began to turn, then stopped. “You know, ish. Not my actual home, because everyone there’s dead and its full of monsters, but that sort of area, at least. That neck of the… forget it, doesn’t matter. Fonk those tanks up, buddy. Splurt-style!”

  Without a sound, Splurt formed himself into a ball, rolled in a circle around Cal, then shot off towards the tanks. Cal wasted a few seconds watching him go.

  “God, I love that guy,” he said to the world in general, then he turned towards the city-sized AX11, lowered his head, and ran.

  * * *

  Miz, Loren, Mech and the others arrived at the edge of the woods to find two tanks on fire. And one of them upside-down.

  “What is that thing?” asked Dronzen, taking aim with his rifle as a thin green shape wormed its way into the sand, and vanished below the surface.

  “Oh man, he did it,” Mech said. “He actually did it.”

  Loren frowned. “Was that…?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Miz. “It was.”

  Mech gestured for the Zertex crew to join them up front. He’d spent the past five minutes finding out all their names but, despite having access to Zettabytes of onboard memory, had immediately forgotten every single one of them.

  “What is it? What are we looking at,” asked one utterly unremarkable woman.

  “Something awesome,” said Miz.

  The ground rumbled. “Quake!” said Dronzen.

  “No,” said Loren. “Look!”

  A sand worm flew upwards out of the sand, twisting and wriggling, its mouth open wide as it screamed. It flipped in the air a few times, then landed with very little in the way of grace or dignity on its face.

  For a moment, the worm went limp and flaccid, but then it twitched back into life, started to burrow beneath ground, thought better of it, and zig-zagged off towards where the sun was starting to peek over the horizon.

  The ground rumbled again, as six or seven enormous shapes churned along below the surface, following the first worm’s lead.

  A patch of sand directly in front of Miz began to tremble. Dronzen took aim with his rifle. “What is that? What the Hell just did that? What’s coming?”

  “Chill out, handsome,” said Miz, gently nudging Dronzen’s gun away. A ball of green goo popped out of the ground. “The little dude’s with us.”

  * * *

  “Vajazzle!” Cal’s voice echoed along the empty corridor. “Come out, come out wherever you are.”

  Silence.

  More silence than he had been expecting.

  He’d been anticipating a fight when he’d gone charging into the wreckage of the crashed ship. He’d almost been hoping for one, actually. The scrapes and bruises he’d earned in his battle with Splurt had completely healed. If anything, he felt even better than he had before it, and was very open to the idea of getting into a punch-up with some Zertex bad guys.

  But the corridors were empty, and there was no-one for him to fight.

  He had no idea where he was going, either. He knew that somewhere on the ship were lots of other smaller ships, but where they were located was anyone’s guess. Even running at full speed, it would take him weeks to search the place.

  He thought about searching for a computer terminal that still had power to it, and trying to pull up a map, but he doubted the maps would take into account the fact that a third of the ship had been reduced to scrap, and so probably wouldn’t have been helpful.

  Still, ‘when in doubt, have a shout,’ that was his motto. It hadn’t been his motto long, he’d admit – a bit less than fifteen seconds at that point – but he felt it was a solid one, all the same.

  “Yoo-hoo! You want me, old lady? Come get me!” Cal listened to his voice fade away into silence. “Come on, don’t make me make fun of your name, because you know I will.”

  An earth tremor rumbled through the ship. Cal staggered, bracing himself against a wall as the whole ship vibrated, then plunged several feet.

  “Ooh, shizz,” Cal yelped, the floor beneath his feet bucking him around like an unhappy horse. The corridor tilted sharply, and Cal suddenly found himself halfway up a steep slope. His boots slipped. His hands slapped against the smooth vinyl flooring trying, but spectacularly failing, to find a grip.

  Another tremor gave him a nudge and he began to slide, hurtling faster and faster towards a particularly solid-looking corridor wall that waited below.

  “Ow, ow, ow, gonna hurt, gonna hurt,” he winced, then a cloud of purple sparkles enveloped him and he was no longer sliding but falling instead.

  He hit a metal walkway, bounced once, and rolled towards the edge. A gust of raw heat blasted up at him. Hissing with the shock of it, he hooked an arm around the walkway railing, stopping himself tumbling into a churning bit of white liquid below.

  Pain seared his skin in a thou
sand places at once, and he hurriedly flopped his whole body back onto the walkway, shielding it from the blazing heat.

  “You’re wondering where everyone is,” said Lady Vajazzle. She stood a few feet along the walkway, her hood pushed back to reveal the full wrinkled horror of her face. There was a second face on the back of her head, Cal knew. This one was bad, but unless he was very much mistaken, the other one was worse.

  The assassin had raised herself off the ground on a squirming mass of tentacles. She balanced there, swaying gently back and forth and giving him the evil eye. Two evil eyes, in fact.

  Possibly even four, although it was impossible to tell from this angle.

  “I’m wondering a lot of things,” said Cal, pulling himself upright. “That’s actually pretty far down the list. But yeah,” he admitted. “Where is everyone?”

  “Dead,” said Vajazzle. “After they let you escape, they had to be punished. And, to be honest, they were all a bit boring.” A smile tugged the corners of her mouth. “And, if I’m being completely truthful, it was just plain amusing to watch their little faces as I snuffed the life out of them. Hilarious, actually.”

  Cal puffed out his cheeks. “Jesus. And Mech thinks my jokes are bad. What about the tanks?”

  “On auto-pilot,” Vajazzle said. “Set to kill anything that wasn’t me or the shapeshifter. Or you. I wanted to kill you personally.”

  “Very considerate of you,” said Cal. He jabbed a thumb towards the bubbling morass of liquid below. “What’s that stuff?”

  “Warp drive coolant, they tell me,” said Vajazzle. “The warp disk’s somewhere down there, too. The whole thing ruptured when the ship crashed. Terribly radioactive, of course.”

  “Haha. Yeah,” Cal said. “Wait, you’re serious? That stuff’s really radioactive?” He shuffled to the center of the walkway and cupped his hands over his testicles.

  “It’s been seeping into the ground for years,” Vajazzle said, sounding genuinely delighted about it. “Between the impact and the coolant burbling around down there, they say that’s what’s causing the quakes.”

  “Who says?”

  “Oh, just they,” said Vajazzle, waving a withered hand. “They’re dead now. Everyone’s dead now.”

  “Before you killed them, did they tell you the planet is shaking itself apart?” asked Cal. “It doesn’t have long left.”

  “It has long enough,” Vajazzle spat. “Long enough to watch you die.”

  She grasped the air and yanked it towards her. Cal flew across the walkway towards her, but he’d been ready for it. He used the momentum to drive a shoulder into her stomach, sending her teetering backwards on her mass of tentacles.

  One of the assassin’s thinner tendrils snapped out for his neck, but he threw up an arm, blocked it, then wrapped it around his wrist and tugged. Vajazzle hissed in pain and rage as the appendage snapped off in Cal’s hand.

  “Whoops,” he said. “You lost one.”

  He tossed the still-twisting tentacle over the railing, then hurled himself at the assassin, fists and feet flying. He moved like he’d never moved before, Tullok’s life force making him faster, stronger, more agile.

  Vajazzle’s tentacles were everywhere, swiping and striking and slashing at him from every direction at once. He dodged them all, ducking and weaving through their rubbery mass, hammering her with knees, elbows, and anything else he could think of.

  The assassin wrenched a blaster from inside her robe. Cal caught her wrist before she could fire, twisting her grip until her withered fingers were forced open. The gun clattered on the walkway. Cal kicked it out of reach of her tentacles and slammed a shoulder into the old woman’s stomach.

  “You’d think I’d feel bad about this,” Cal said, leaping to drive an uppercut into her wart-covered chin. “You know, with you being a thousand years old, or whatever.”

  Two tentacles grabbed at him. He stamped them both against the walkway, one after the other. “But guess what? I really don’t. I mean, seriously, not even a tiny bit. If anything, I’m actually enjoying kicking your—”

  Vajazzle thrust out both hands and an invisible force battering-rammed into Cal’s chest. He hit the railing hard, then continued over it in a full flip.

  The heat howled at him as he rolled over the top railing and plunged towards the churning lake of coolant. A sulfurous stink snagged in his throat, tightening it. Resisting his ‘third time lucky’ instinct to try flying again, Cal threw both arms out in front of him. The fingers of the right hand brushed uselessly past the bottom of the walkway, but the left hand caught, jerking him violently.

  Cal’s legs swung down beneath the bridge. The coolant’s heat swirled around him, biting at his skin and slicking him with sweat.

  Grimacing, he threw up his right arm until he found the walkway’s edge. His muscles bunched, but before he could pull himself up, Vajazzle stepped up to the edge, blocking him. She scowled down at Cal, her red eye flickering like there was a faulty connection in her head.

  “Well, well, well,” said the assassin. “What are we going to do with you?”

  Cal grinned hopefully. “Help me up and let me go?” He watched the expression on Vajazzle’s face darken further. “No, I guess it was a bit of a long shot,” he sighed, then he braced himself as the tentacles beneath the assassin’s robe began to roll and heave.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Cover me!” whispered Loren, sprinting from cover and racing in a zig-zag pattern towards a docking bay control terminal.

  Mech looked around them at the vast, empty deck. Splurt, who was sitting on his shoulder, looked around, too. “From what? There ain’t no-one here,” Mech called after her. “Hellooooo? Bad guys?” He listened for a reply. None came. “See? Nothing.”

  “Why is she running like that?” asked Miz, slouching on one hip and crossing her arms over her chest. “She looks like an idiot.”

  Across the deck, Loren dived into a forward roll, twisted mid-maneuver, and stopped with her back against the free-standing terminal, blaster pistol raised in front of her.

  “Clear!” she shouted.

  “Wow. She really likes this sort of thing, doesn’t she?” said Dronzen. He set off after Mech and Miz, beckoning for the Zertex troops to follow him. They all shuffled out of cover behind him, close together, so they looked like one enormous multi-headed entity.

  By the time they all reached Loren, her fingers were flying across two different touch screens, tapping and swiping, her head tick-tocking back and forth between each display.

  “What’s the situation?” asked Mech.

  The left screen flashed red and let out an angry buzz. Splurt quivered uneasily.

  “I’m guessing it’s not great,” Mech added.

  “There are only a few viable ships,” Loren said, not lifting her eyes from the screen, or slowing her tap-tap-swiping. “Most are damaged, some are stuck, a few just aren’t where they’re meant to be.”

  “What about the other decks?” asked Dronzen.

  “Worse than this one,” Loren replied. The screen on the right flashed green and let out an altogether more friendly ting. “OK, I got one transporter. It’ll take ten.”

  A murmur went around the Zertex group. “Leave him,” one man suggested, pointing to another. “No-one likes him, anyway. Sorry. No offence.”

  “Er… quite a lot taken.”

  “No-one’s getting left behind,” said Dronzen. He looked to Loren and lowered his voice. “Right?”

  Loren’s fingers flew across the screens for a few more seconds. “I have that transporter, and enough one-man fighters for the rest. Unlocking them now.”

  She frowned and moved both hands to the right screen. They worked together, blurring as she drilled through screen after screen of data.

  “Problems?” asked Mech.

  “No, there’s… I think there’s another ship,” said Loren. “But I can’t see what it is. It’s like it’s hidden.”

  “A test project, maybe?�
�� asked Dronzen.

  The screen blinked green. Loren let out a sharp, “Ha!” of triumph. “Guess we’ll find out,” she said, drawing her blaster again. She nodded to Mech. “Cover me!”

  “Sure,” Mech replied, as Loren tore off along the deck. “Whatever you say.”

  * * *

  Cal’s fingertips ached. His arms burned. His legs burned, too, but that was more to do with the searing pit of liquid beneath him than the effort of holding onto the walkway.

  Vajazzle’s tentacles inched towards him, wriggling like vipers across the metal bridge. Cal shuffled his hands sideways, trying to put distance between himself and a particularly unpleasant-looking purple appendage, but stopped when he saw something thin and gray, like an eel’s tail, slithering in from the other side.

  There was nowhere to go. Nowhere but down, at least, and he was keen to explore all other possible options before settling on that particular route.

  “So… how’s it going?” he asked. “Anything you’d like to get off your chest or anything? Considering, you know, I’m probably going to be the last person you ever talk to. It’s going to get pretty lonely here, all on your own.” He raised his eyebrows and gasped. “Wait, here’s an idea. Don’t kill me.”

  Vajazzle’s withered lips pulled into a mirthless grin. “Nice try, Mr Carver. Utter isolation will be an endless joy, compared to another moment in your company.”

  “OK, I know you probably didn’t mean it to be, but that was actually quite hurtful,” said Cal. “And, of course, you’re forgetting one thing.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “Now, Splurt!” cried Cal.

  Vajazzle didn’t react.

  “Attack her from behind!”

  Vajazzle tutted in disappointment. “I literally have eyes in the back of my head, Mr Carver,” she said, turning to reveal the horrifically misshapen face protruding from the back of her skull. It hissed at him, showing what he felt was an unnecessary number of teeth.

  As she turned, her robe brushed across his fingers.

  “Ah, fonk it,” Cal mumbled, then he grabbed the robe and jerked hard on it, heaving himself up onto the handrail.