“Nothing that’ll help you,” Konto said. “Anything built to last around here is Durium or Nanomesh. Not what you need.”
“Fonk,” Cal muttered.
He peered down into the pit again. The stench made his eyes water. His gag reflex started doing warm-up stretches as it limbered up in anticipation.
He looked at the cables pulling the fleshy outer lining of the stomach open.
The long, sturdy cables.
“Oh, Jesus,” he groaned.
“What now?” Konto asked. “Ready to head back?”
“I wish,” Cal said. “Mech says we need space metal, so space metal is what we’re going to get.”
He took off his leather jacket, folded it neatly, then thrust it out to Konto. Konto made no move to accept it, and the jacket fell onto the platform when Cal released his grip. Neither man commented on it.
“I’ve got a plan,” Cal said. He winced. “But I really wish that I didn’t.”
Seven
Konto sat on his bike, the engine purring, the comm-light on the curved dash blinking furiously in time with the voice that came crackling through the speakers.
“This was a terrible plan!” Cal coughed. “Seriously, why the fonk didn’t you stop me?”
Konto turned and looked at the length of cable attached to the back of the bike. It ran in a straight line up the fleshy embankment of the stomach wall, before disappearing over the edge. As he watched, it twitched and jerked like a fishing line with a catch on the hook.
“I did,” said Konto. “I asked if you were sure.”
“You call that trying to stop me!” Cal protested. “You should’ve punched me unconscious and tied me up!”
Konto shrugged. “You’re an adult. Reckoned you could make your own decisions.”
“Do I look like I can make my own decisions?” Cal yelped. “Are these the actions of a man who can make his own decisions?”
Konto regarded the twitching cable again and shrugged. “You want to get yourself killed? Who am I to judge?”
“No, but you don’t have to fonking help me do it!” replied Cal, the high squeal of his voice making the bike’s speakers peak. “I swear to God, this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever done.”
He said that, but it wasn’t actually the most ridiculous thing Cal had ever done. A few months ago, before he’d been abducted and dragged unwillingly into adventures in outer space, it might have been almost the most ridiculous thing he’d ever done. Now, though, it would barely crack the top ten.
Still, dangling there from the length of cable above a vast pool of luminous alien stomach acid, using his t-shirt pulled up over his nose and mouth as a protective face mask, he certainly felt ridiculous.
Ridiculous and terrified.
But mostly terrified.
The plan had been elegant in its simplicity. He would, as he put it, Tom-Cruise-in-Mission-Impossible-the-shizz out of the situation by having Konto lower him facing downward into the pit. Then, using a pair of thick Nanomesh gloves he’d sourced from the back seat of one of the big work machines, and a sack he’d found in another, he’d gather up enough space tin cans, scrap space iron, and any other metal he could find, before Konto pulled him back to the surface.
He hadn’t expected it to be pleasant, of course, but it was really only as he’d gone plunging over the edge that the full ridiculousness of the idea had really hit home. It was a stomach. A giant, inexplicably detached, alien stomach and he was being lowered into it. It was stupid. It was insane.
But still. He was here now, so he might as well get on with it.
“You see anything?” Konto’s voice spoke in his ear.
“Not really,” Cal croaked. “The acid in the air is pretty harsh down here. I think…” He covered one eye and swiveled the other around. “Yeah. I’ve gone blind in one eye, and I’m not sure I still have lips. On the plus side, I can no longer smell anything, and my face has never been so exfoliated, so I guess it’s not all bad.”
“You want me to pull you up?” Konto asked, in an offhand sort of tone that suggested he wasn’t really bothered either way. “You still have one eye.”
“Not yet,” Cal said. “Besides, the other one will come back. I just need to find—”
A shape swooshed by him, passing through the mist clouds like a shadow. It happened so fast and was over so quickly that Cal decided he must’ve imagined it.
Five seconds later, when the shape came again, he changed his mind.
It passed him on his sightless side this time, but he felt the wind of it as it swept by and turned in time to catch a clearer glimpse of it before it sank back into the fog. It was roundish and lumpy, with colors swirling across its mostly transparent surface. It reminded Cal of a big clump of bubbles all stuck together, but it moved with determination, as if propelled by a powerful gust of wind.
Cal watched the spot where the thing had vanished, then let out a little squeak of panic when something brushed against the back of his legs. He wrenched himself around, which sent him spinning on the cable, his momentum turning him all the way back to his starting position, none the wiser as to what had touched him.
“Uh, I think there’s something down here,” he whispered.
Konto didn’t reply.
“Konto,” Cal hissed. “You there? I think there’s something down here.”
Cal held his breath, waiting for an answer that didn’t come.
The mist ahead of him swirled as the lumpy shape whooshed through it. While Cal was watching it go, another shape passed on his right, darting across his increasingly limited field of vision and alerting him to the fact that the ‘something’ he thought was down here was, more accurately, ‘some things.’
Cal reached for the blaster pistol tucked into his belt. The cartoonishly large Nanomesh gloves proved quite the hindrance, though, and—after half a second of desperate fumbling—the gun plummeted toward the glowing bile below.
Cal watched it tumble for several seconds then, with a plop and a hiss, it sunk out of sight.
“Oh… ass,” Cal groaned. “Ass McAss Ass.”
This didn’t help his situation any, but it did make him feel very slightly better about it all. At least, until one of the shapes came swooping out of a mist cloud and clipped him on the feet, sending him into a much faster spin than before.
The glowing acid pool rotated dizzyingly, swirling around and around as Cal spun on the cable, centrifugal force throwing his arms and legs out into an X-shape.
During his time in space, Cal had accepted the fact that he wasn’t really equipped, either physically or emotionally, for aerobatics. Or spaceobatics. Or whatever the fonk you called it when Loren made the ship do all those gut-churning dives and dodges. Hell, even just flying fast in a straight line was often too much for his stomach to cope with, and he’d come to rely on video footage of cute space animals doing adorable things to help take his mind off his space travel sickness.
Now, spinning wildly in an acidic cloud, high above a churning, sulfurous morass of digestive juices, the inevitable happened. Cal vomited, loudly and forcibly, and with not a little fanfare. Unfortunately, his t-shirt was still pulled up over his mouth, so what had been inside his stomach all splattered down his chest and pooled outside his stomach, before his spinning movement ejected it out through the bottom of the shirt and plastered it all down the front of his pants.
“Konto!” he barked. “What the fonk is going on?”
“Huh? Sorry, I was taking a whizz,” Konto said. “What’s up?”
“There are things in here!” Cal said, frantically flapping his arms in an attempt to stop himself spinning.
“Oh, yeah. Didn’t I mention?” Konto said.
“No, you didn’t fonking mention!” Cal yelped.
“They’re gut flora,” Konto said. “They’re harmless.”
“Yeah, well my gag reflex would beg to fonking differ!” Cal replied.
“Except the bubble ones,” Konto said.
Cal swallowed back another wave of nausea. “What?”
“They’re all harmless, except the ones that look like bubbles,” Konto clarified. “Those things are evil. If you see one of those, you’re pretty much already dead.”
“I did see one of those!” Cal cried. “I saw several of those! It’s nothing but those!”
“Oh,” said Konto. “Well… nice knowing you.”
Something about the way he said it reached Cal even through his panic.
“Oh, haha,” Cal said. “Very funny.”
“They’re all harmless,” Konto said. “Relax. We don’t really know what they are, exactly, but they won’t hurt you. They’re not aggressive.”
Cal could hear the shrug even over the comm-link.
“Well, only sexually.”
“Again with the funny,” Cal said. He hesitated, watching one of the bubble-shapes go swooshing by him. “That was a joke, right?”
“More or less,” said Konto.
“What the fonk does that mean, ‘more or less’?” Cal demanded.
“If you hurry up and get what you’re looking for, you won’t have to find out,” Konto said. “Now, do you want me to keep lowering you or not?”
Cal groaned. He shook the bottom of his t-shirt, letting a few blobs of vomit fall out. One of the stomach’s walls curved below him, all slick and shiny and oozing with green bile. Sure enough, just as Konto had predicted, there was an accumulation of garbage trapped in one of the many folds just thirty or forty feet below.
“How much cable do we have?” Cal asked.
“Some,” Konto said.
“OK, I’m never big on the technical talk, but that’s vague even for me,” Cal said. “Do we have, like, thirty feet?”
“I can give you thirty,” Konto confirmed. “But not a lot more.”
Cal’s spinning had become a slow, gradual rotation. He caught a glimpse of one of the gut floras coming toward him and swung a punch at it.
“Fonk off!” he barked. The flora let out a high-pitched noise like a Munchkin’s giggle, then vanished into the clouds again.
“You talking to me?” Konto asked.
“No, these bacteria things,” Cal said. “Never a course of antibiotics around when you need one.”
He adjusted his t-shirt mask, flexed his fingers inside his gloves, then gave a nod. “OK, let’s do this,” he said. “Lower me down.”
The cable jerked and he plunged, screaming, toward the bubbling pit of bile. “Stop, stop, stop!” he yelled, before he face-planted into the slimy sloped wall, bounced off, and found himself flailing helplessly upside-down, the cable tangled around his right leg.
It jerked to a stop, almost wrenching the leg out of the socket. “What the fonk was that?” Cal cried, once he’d recovered enough to successful form words.
“Sorry, that might have been my fault,” Konto said.
“Well, I know it wasn’t my fault!” Cal said.
“Did you get any of the stomach juices on you?” Konto asked.
Cal looked down at himself and was immediately reminded of Bill Murray in Ghostbusters. Faintly luminous green gloop coated him in random chunky blobs.
“Only on my arms, face, head, legs, and torso,” Cal said.
“Can you get it off?” Konto asked. There was an urgency to the question that Cal managed to miss completely.
“Sure. Just send down some soap, a scrubbing brush, and a fireman’s hose and I’ll get cleaned right up,” he said. “No, I can’t get it off.”
“I’m bringing you up,” Konto said.
Cal looked down at the garbage deposit trapped in the stomach fold below him. He was close enough now that he could make out a few partially dissolved cans and canisters in there. Just what they needed.
“Drop me down just a little more,” Cal said. “But slowly this time.”
“I’m bringing you up,” Konto said again.
“No, not yet. I’m so close!”
Cal stretched out an arm, palm open. He closed his eyes and concentrated, like he could somehow will the cans to leap into his hand, Luke Skywalker style.
“Hold on, I’m pulling you in,” said the voice in his ear.
“Konto, don’t you dare!” Cal said. He opened his eyes and extended his arm to its full-stretch, palm spread.
Then he watched in surprise as the arm fell off, tumbled end over end, bounced off the stomach wall, then plopped into the acid below.
“Ooh, that can’t be good,” he said, wincing. “Uh, Konto?”
“Hold on,” Konto urged.
Cal looked down at the other arm. The flesh was dissolving where the gloop had coated his skin. Amazingly, it didn’t hurt, not even when the flesh became bone, and the bone became dust, and the arm fell away into the bubbling pit below.
“Holding on might be problematic,” Cal croaked, then the acid pool retreated as the cable around his leg wound in, hurtling him back up toward the surface.
The next few seconds were a blur of frantic activity, rapidly increasing pain, annoyingly friendly gut flora, and some brief but enjoyable moments of unconsciousness.
Cal experienced it all like a series of snapshot sensations. The jerking upward movement of the cable. The feeling of weightlessness as he was yanked up over the lip of the stomach, and the succession of thumps as he tumbled down the outside.
He experienced water hitting him. A lot of water, blasting him from some sort of cannon.
Konto’s voice, barking urgently. Konto’s face, hard and emotionless, yet somehow betraying his horror at the limp and limbless thing writhing around on the sand like some sort of slug.
He experienced pain. A lot of pain. More pain that he’d ever felt before, which was really saying something, considering the past few months he’d had.
And fear. Not that almost enjoyable seat-of-the-pants escape the monsters kind of fear that he’d grown used to, but something deeper and more primal than that. A fear borne of the certainty that this was it. This was the end. This was—
Konto slapped him in the face. “Wake up.”
Cal opened his eyes. This meant he had eyelids, he realized, which immediately made him feel a bit more positive.
The moons had changed position in the sky. There were only two of them now, down low on the horizon. An orange glow was just starting to tease the other side of the sky, signaling the approaching dawn.
Konto leaned over him. His impatient expression somehow managed to make Cal feel guilty, like he’d been slacking on the job.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” Konto asked, raising a fistful of digits.
“Five,” Cal said. His voice was a little croaky, but stronger than he’d been bracing himself for. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
“None,” Konto said. “You don’t have any.”
Cal craned his neck and looked at where his hands should have been. They weren’t. He had no wrists, either. He did have a bit of both forearms, which was some consolation, but not a lot. The flesh at the end of his arm-stumps was raw and red. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but it itched like crazy. As Cal studied the wounds, he thought he saw some tiny, incremental movement.
“They’re growing back,” Konto said. “You were in quite a mess for a while there, but you’re healing up fast. I even managed to reattach your legs.”
“My legs came off?” Cal yelped.
“Yeah, but they knitted right back together,” Konto said.
Cal wiggled his toes and gave a strangled laugh of relief. “Holy shizz. I’m a regular Dan Deadman.”
“Who?” Konto asked.
Cal waved a dismissive stump. “Doesn’t matter.”
Konto leaned back and folded his own fully-intact arms across his broad chest. “I’ve seen a lot of crazy things in my time, but I’ve never seen anything quite like that. Do all your people heal like that?”
“On Earth? No, just me. I’m one of a kind,” Cal said. He reached an arm behind him to push himself to his feet, forgetti
ng he was missing around forty percent of it, and most of the important parts. He fell back awkwardly and clunked his head on a rock. “Jesus!” he spat. He raised a stump and shook it to the sky. “Haven’t I suffered enough?”
“Wait, you’re from Earth?” Konto asked.
Cal lowered his stump. “Yeah. You’ve heard of it?”
“Of course,” said Konto, frowning slightly to suggest this was an odd question.
Cal didn’t know whether to be amazed or delighted at this. He was tempted to squee with excitement, but felt it was probably unbecoming of a space adventurer, so played it cool.
“Of course,” he said. “Why wouldn’t you have?”
With some difficulty, he got to his feet. Konto’s bike stood close by, and Cal caught a glimpse of his reflection in the curved metal.
“What the hell am I wearing?” he asked, turning to check himself out. His Golden Girls t-shirt, jeans, and boots were all gone. Instead, he wore a bright yellow jumpsuit that was at least two sizes too big and had twice as many arms as he required. His feet were bare, but at least they were on the correct legs and facing the right way.
“I got it from one of the vehicles,” Konto explained. “Your own clothes dissolved. Except this.”
He tossed Cal his leather jacket. Cal attempted to catch it, but—understandably—failed dismally.
“Thanks for that,” Cal said, gazing down at the crumpled jacket.
“Any time.”
Cal went back to checking his reflection.
“My face!” he said, studying himself more closely. “It’s so… pink. It’s like I’ve been sandblasted.”
“You were mostly just skull an hour ago,” Konto told him. “Pink is a definite improvement.”
Cal pulled a series of exaggerated expressions, stuck his tongue out at himself, then ran through a few of his rehearsed smiles to make sure the full repertoire was still available.
Close enough, he thought, although there was something else odd about his reflection. Something he couldn’t quite place.
It’d come to him.
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