Mizette flicked her gaze to him and exhaled slowly through her nostrils. “Keep doing what you’re doing,” Cal said. He gave her one giant green thumbs up and one tiny pink one. “Great work.”
That done, he hurried off the bridge, out into the corridor, and pressed himself flat against the wall by the kitchen door. “Kevin, report,” Cal whispered.
“On what, sir?”
“The… what do you mean ‘on what’? On the guy in the kitchen,” Cal hissed.
“Oh. Yes. He’s standing up near the table, sir,” Kevin said. “No, wait. He’s sitting down.”
“Is he armed?” Cal asked.
“Well, he is in possession of a spoon, sir,” Kevin replied. “Does that count?”
“I guess that depends on what he does with it,” Cal said.
He raised his Splurt-fist and whispered to it. “You ready?”
The squidgy green knuckles became strips of solid brass. A moment later, several spikes sprouted from the metal.
“OK, let’s do this,” Cal said.
Caught up in the moment, he spun, roared, raised a foot, and fired a kick at the door. It slid open a split second before he connected, and he performed an impromptu splits in the doorway before toppling sideways and thudding against the doorframe.
“Ow. Fonk,” he grimaced.
“Oh, honey, are you OK?” gasped the Slurrit. He was sitting at the table, about to tuck into a steaming bowl of something pink and greasy. Cal recognized his voice at once.
“Wait, you’re Loren’s friend, aren’t you?” Cal said, struggling himself upright and subtly tugging his pants out from between his butt-cheeks. “Garunk, wasn’t it?”
Garunk held up his sludgy gray hands. “Guilty as charged!” he said. “And well done you for remembering. Clever and handsome all in one package.”
Cal’s chest puffed up a little. “Thank you, Garunk,” he said. “It’s nice to be appreciated once in a while. But, uh, here’s a question.”
“I’m all ears,” said Garunk, dipping the spoon in the bowl and stirring the greasy contents in a way that somehow managed to be incredibly suggestive. “Hit me.”
“You’re on our ship,” Cal pointed out. While this wasn’t, strictly speaking, a question, Garunk figured it out.
“Yeah. I know. Double guilty as charged!” he said. He dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I stowed away. Was that bad? Are you mad? I hope you’re not mad.”
Cal gave a shake of his head. “Uh, no. Not mad. Just confused. Didn’t you say you hated space?”
“Yeah,” Garunk conceded. “I mean, I thought I did. But then I went and lived in a hole in the ground for five years and… I don’t know. It suddenly seemed more appealing. Besides, hanging out with Loren? Ah-may-zing. Did I tell you she was number one at the Academy? And I literally mean she was literally number one!”
He scooped something squat and wriggling from the bowl and blew gently on it to cool it down. Cal eyed the thing in horror as it squirmed on the spoon.
“Want some?” Garunk asked.
“Christ, no,” said Cal. “Did that come from the replicator?”
“Guilty again!” Garunk said. “I’ve been eating sand for, like, half a decade. When I saw the replicator I was like, ‘Kroysh! Gimme some of that Bootzoid Gumbo!’ You hear me?”
Cal’s stomach tightened as a hole opened in Garunk’s muddy face and he shoveled the squirming thing inside. It crunched unpleasantly as he chewed.
“Yeah,” said Garunk, spraying little blobs of the stuff onto the table. “You hear me.”
Cal found his eyes drawn to the replicator. For an inanimate piece of machinery, it somehow managed to convey the impression that it had been recently violated. Cal made a mental note to scrub it out before ordering up his next batch of banoffee pie.
OK, maybe not scrub it. Scrubbing was hard. All that elbow action and rubbing. He’d give it a light hosing down, instead. Or, failing that, a polish with his sleeve.
Fonk it. It’d be fine.
“So, you just stowed away?” Cal said. “You could’ve asked us to take you.”
“I know, but I was like… eeek. You know? Like, I absolutely could’ve asked, but I was like, ‘But what if they say no?’ and then I’d be all, like, ‘Waaah! Nobody loves me! I should just crawl in a hole and die. Wait, I’m already in a hole. That’s my life. Waaah!’ You know?”
Cal pulled a non-committal sort of face. “I mean, I guess, but—”
“I knew you’d understand,” Garunk said. He shoveled another spoonful of gumbo into his face-hole, crunched noisily, then gestured around with his spoon. “So, what’s the plan? Are we off on some big adventure somewhere?”
Cal shook his head. “No, we’re… Oh, fonk. I forgot. We’re being captured.”
“Captured?” Garunk gasped. He jumped to his feet, toppling the bench he’d been sitting on. “O-M-Fonking-G! So exciting! I’ve never been captured before!”
“Meh. The novelty wears off pretty quickly,” Cal said. He eyed Garunk, who seemed to be having difficulty breathing. “You OK?”
“Palpitations. I swear, I’m having palpitations. We’re being captured!” Garunk squeed. “Who’s capturing us? It is a bad guy? I bet it’s a bad guy!”
A loud clank rattled through the ship, and Cal got a distinct sense that they had stopped moving. “No idea,” he said. He crossed to the small kitchen window and raised the blind, revealing a vast elephant’s graveyard of rusting spaceships. “But I get the feeling we’re about to find out.”
Ten
“So, what’s the situation?” asked Cal, half-crouching behind Loren. On screen, he could see pretty much the same view as when he’d left—a lot of stars, a couple of suns, and a bit of planet. The edges were cut off by two vertical black blocks, though, which Cal quickly came to realize were the walls of a ship. Everything else—what he thought of as ‘the space stuff’—were all beyond a docking bay force field. Whatever had snared them had successfully reeled them in.
“We’re aboard the big ship,” Loren said. “Engines are non-responsive, weapon systems are locked. The ship’s pretty much dead.”
“And Kevin?” Cal asked.
“I’m fine, sir.”
“Damn. Was hoping for some kind of silver lining there,” Cal said. He raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Kidding, Kevin. Glad you’re still with us, pal.”
He shot Loren a look and gave a shake of his head that was almost imperceptible, but not almost imperceptible enough.
“I saw that, sir,” Kevin told him.
“Still kidding,” Cal assured him.
He shook his head at Loren again, even more incrementally this time.
“I also saw that, sir.”
“Whoa! The ship talks! That is lush!”
Everyone except Cal turned. He gave a vague wave with his Splurt-hand in the direction of the door. “Oh, yeah. Guys, you know Garunk. Garunk, you know the guys.”
“So you’re our stowaway,” said Loren, her eyebrows raising in surprise. “I thought you hated space?”
“We’ve done that part,” Cal said. He pointed two Splurt-fingers at his eyes, then directed them to Loren’s console. “Focus. Less of the chit-chat. We need to get out of here.”
“Do we know who’s got us?” Miz asked.
“No, but the fact they wrenched us out of space against our will makes me think they’re not going to be looking out for our best interests,” said Cal. “Also, I don’t know if anyone has looked out of the side window recently, but there are a lot of broken ships in here, and I don’t think they came for the nightlife. I think they were captured, like us.”
“But they didn’t escape!” Garunk said in a breathless whisper. He placed the back of a lumpy hand against the muddy expanse of his forehead. “Trapped. Forever. Doomed to spend eternity in this forsaken place!”
Mech looked from Garunk to Cal. “What the fonk is he talking about?”
“I have no idea,” Cal said. “I think h
e’s romanticizing the whole ‘being captured by evil aliens’ thing. I don’t really want to pop his bubble quite yet.”
“Oh. Shame,” said Garunk, then he slapped himself on the wrist and gave a snort. “Cheeky!”
“We are receiving a hail, sir,” said Kevin. “Should I answer?”
“Yes,” said Cal, hurrying back to his chair. “But wait until I’m sitting down. And high angle, again. But not top of my head high. Oh, and this time, when I say something dramatic, can you do a sort of zoom in and add some music? Nothing fancy, just a sort of dun-dun-duuun at the key moment?”
“But, sir—”
“Trust me, Kevin. It’ll look great. It’s going to scare the shizz out of these fonks. We’ll be out of here in no time.”
Cal stooped to retrieve the armrest that had broken off his chair, made a valiant if ultimately unsuccessful effort to fix it, then tossed it into the corner. He sat in the chair and angled it so the broken half wouldn’t be visible, then drew himself up to his full sitting height and tucked the hand with his tiny thumb down out of sight beside him.
“OK. I’m ready. Go,” he said.
It was only then that Cal realized that the comm-link was already active. The ‘face’—for want of a more accurate word—on screen looked more or less identical to the one they’d seen earlier. It was positively ugly with teeth and had just the merest suggestion of eyeballs blinking in the dark, hairy caverns of its nostrils.
“How long has he been there?” Cal asked. He shot the ceiling a reproachful look. “You just immediately connected him, didn’t you?”
“That depends on your definition of ‘immediately,’ sir,” Kevin replied.
“I meant the standard definition,” said Cal.
“Oh. In that case, yes, sir,” Kevin said. “I connected him immediately. Although, in my defense, you left almost a third of a second gap between your ‘Yes,’ and your ‘But wait until I’m sitting down,” so I rather think we both have to take our fair share of the blame on this one.”
Cal fought the urge to argue further, drew in a breath to compose himself, then smiled at the camera. “Hi—” he began, before the little window-within-a-window that showed the video feed of himself zoomed in suddenly, and a dramatic dun-dun-dunnn, echoed around the bridge.
“Not yet, Kevin,” Cal said. “You’re supposed to wait until I say something dramatic.”
“That was quite dramatic, sir.”
“I said ‘Hi.’ That was it,” Cal argued.
“Yes, but it was the way you said it, sir,” Kevin replied. “To be honest, it gave me the shivers.”
“Me, too,” said Garunk. He made a clawing motion in the air. “Mrwooow!”
Cal pinched the bridge of his nose, muttered something uncomplimentary about the universe in general, then raised his head and smiled at the screen. “Hi. Again,” he said, then he caught sight of the window within a window again. “Kevin, you’re zoomed right in on my neck.”
“Indeed, sir.”
“Well… can you not? Could you maybe pull back?”
“Of course, sir.”
Cal nodded to the monstrous face. “Be right with you,” he said, watching as the camera angle widened. When it was in a comfortable midshot, he nodded. “There. Now…”
Cal tutted. “Jesus, Kevin. You can stop zooming out now,” he said, watching as the smaller image continued to retreat until it showed the entire bridge from one side to the other. “How the fonk are you even zoomed out that far?” he wondered, pointing with a Splurt-finger. “The camera’s there. How can you be zoomed out further than...? Know what? Forget it. Just leave it like that, it’s fine. We’ll do it like this.”
He took a moment to compose himself, then tried again from the top.
“Hi there. Sorry about that. Just a little confusion there,” Cal said as brightly as he could manage. “Speaking of confusion, I think there’s been some on your part, too. You see, I couldn’t help but notice that you’ve accidentally captured us and brought us aboard your ship.”
He raised his mismatched hands and chuckled. “I know, I know. It’s an easy mistake to make. We’ve all done it.”
Cal leaned forward, his friendly demeanor falling away. “But here’s the thing. You have thirty seconds to give us back control of our ship…”
His eyes narrowed. His Splurt-fist thudded on the intact-but-crumpled armrest of his chair. “…or suffer the consequences.”
Cal glared into the alien’s nostrils for a while, then flicked his eyes down to the smaller screen. “Now, Kevin,” he whispered from the side of his mouth.
“Now what, sir?”
“Do the… Oh, forget it.”
“Already forgotten, sir,” Kevin replied.
Cal sat back in the chair and glowered at the toothy monstrosity. “Those are our terms. Let us go, or there is going to be hell to pay. You have thirty seconds.”
“You already gave him thirty seconds,” Miz chipped in. “It should be, like, twenty seconds by now.”
“Fine. You have twenty seconds,” said Cal.
“That’s not enough time to disengage a tractor beam,” Loren remarked.
Cal tutted. “Jesus. It isn’t? OK, how long does that take?”
Loren shrugged. “I don’t know. Depending on the technology, like… forty seconds?”
“This ship looked pretty old,” said Mech. “It ain’t going to have the latest tech. Could take maybe a minute and a half to fully disengage.”
“God. OK, fine,” Cal said. He addressed the screen again. “You have between twenty and ninety seconds to disen… Kevin, why are you zooming in?”
“It felt like the right time, sir.”
“Well, it isn’t! Just hold it there. Medium close-up. No, medium close-up. No! What are you doing? Not of Loren, of me.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“That’s still Loren. A medium close-up of me.”
“Is it? Oh yes. One moment.”
A moment passed. The screen changed.
“Of my face, Kevin. Jesus Christ, how hard can it be?”
Cal waited until his face appeared on the inset screen again. When it did, it was patently out of focus, but he chose to cut his losses and not say anything about it.
“OK. Just hold it there,” Cal instructed. He breathed in, counted to five, then breathed out again before addressing the monstrosity on the comm-link. “Sorry. It’s been a long couple of days,” he explained. “Now, as I was saying, you have… I don’t know even know anymore. You have some time to release us, and then we’ll say no more about it. Deal?”
The creature on screen flared its nostrils, giving a clearer glimpse of the eyeballs lurking inside. Its teeth rippled like seaweed on an ocean current.
“Bokosh-tun,” it spat. “Aburrop naakta shash.”
Cal groaned. “Oh, yeah. I forgot. We don’t understand a word these guys say.”
A sound blared out from the speakers.
Dun-dun-dunnn!
On screen, the inset image of Cal rushed forward until only part of his forehead and the edge of an eyebrow was visible.
“Kevin, end transmission,” Cal said, burying his face in his Splurt-hand.
The image of the creature blinked off and was replaced by the view of outside. Silence descended on the bridge, only to eventually be broken by Kevin.
“I don’t know about anyone else,” the AI intoned. “But I think that went really rather well.”
“Going to have to agree to disagree on that one, Kevin,” Cal said, heaving his chair around until he faced the rest of the crew. “That was horrible.”
“He’s right,” Mech confirmed. “That was embarrassing. They’ll probably talk about that conversation for years.”
“OK, so…”
“It’ll be on, like, their clip shows on TV. ‘Galaxy’s Most Cringeworthy Comm-Link Broadcasts,’” Mech continued. “You’ll be famous.”
Cal tutted. “Right. We get it,” he said. He jabbed a Splurt-thumb at the scre
en. “Who are these guys? Why don’t we understand them? What the fonk is going on? And what’s with the eye thing? That’s just unpleasant, right?”
“You couldn’t understand him? Lucky you!” said Garunk. He shuddered. “He was saying some pretty nasty things about you. Like, so harsh.”
“Wait, so you did understand him?” asked Cal. “How is that fair?”
“Butterfly effect,” said Loren. “Got to be. When we went back in time, we affected the future. The Carvers put us back in the reality that evolved from that version of the past.”
“So… what?” asked Miz, flicking her eyes up in a rare display of interest. “This isn’t our universe?”
“No. I mean yes,” said Loren. “I mean, I think it’s probably the closest version of it that exists, once you factor in the effects of the changes we made.” She looked over to Mech. “Right?”
“Fonked if I know,” said Mech, shrugging noisily. “Sounds plausible enough, I guess, but I ain’t no expert.”
Cal nodded, frowned, raised his eyes in surprise, then fell into a look of sort of stupefied confusion. “So… hold on,” he said. “Mech told younger me about the car accident that killed my…”
He couldn’t bring himself to speak the words out loud.
“About the accident. So, theoretically, younger me went on to become slightly older me, and stopped that car accident from ever happening, right?”
“Theoretically,” Loren confirmed.
“So, without going into too much detail, if that happened, then I didn’t wind up going into the whole spiral of self-destruction, petty crime, almost being killed by Ozzy Osbourne lifestyle that led to me being imprisoned on Earth. Right?”
“Makes sense,” Loren said.
“And we know Sinclair didn’t run his abduction scheme on the Butcher, because we killed him. Agreed?”
Mech and Loren both nodded their agreement. Miz had gone back to not listening. Garunk had absolutely no idea what anyone was talking about, so was electing to just stand quietly in the hope that everyone forgot he was a stowaway.
“Which begs the question,” said Cal, leaning forward in his chair. “How am I here? How come any of us are here? If we stopped me going to prison and stopped Sinclair’s abduction plan, then why am I still here? Why are any of us still here?”
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