“Right. OK. I’ll give you the code,” Loren said.
“Not yet. I’ll forget it. I’ll radio you when we get there.”
“But… OK, fine. But be careful!” Loren said. “Do you even have a gun?”
Cal regarded the rifle attached to the end of his finger. “I do,” he confirmed. “I’ll be fine. Keep the conn warm for me.”
Loren made a sound that suggested a half-laugh. “I’ll sit on it.”
“Ooh, cheeky!” said Cal.
Legate Rono groaned. “Kroysh. You really do know Garunk,” she muttered. “Where is he?”
“You do not want to know,” Cal told her. He signaled for Splurt to hop up onto his shoulder. Splurt stopped smiling unsettlingly at the children, then rolled up Cal’s back and into position. “You stay here and keep the kids safe,” Cal told Rono. He gestured to the children. “Is this all of them?”
“What?” Rono frowned. “No. Of course not.”
“What are you saying? There are still some out there?” Cal asked.
“I’m saying there are currently over thirty-thousand cadets at this facility,” Rono replied. “And, right now, I can only account for twenty.”
“Well, that seems careless!” Cal groaned. “Fine. OK. Splurt, when we get outside, it’s your job to go help as many kids as you can. Keep them safe. I’ll get to the tower myself.”
Splurt rippled.
“I don’t know yet,” Cal said. “Run screaming, probably. I’ll wing it.”
He took a series of deep breaths, wrestled briefly with the rifle in the hope of catching it by surprise, then grunted in disappointment. “No. Not budging,” he said. “You ready, buddy?”
Splurt quivered.
“You and me both,” Cal said, then he yanked open the door, rushed out into a plaza full of angry mutant space wasps, and stamped like he’d never stamped before.
Twenty-Nine
At first, things seemed to go well for Cal. He crushed a lot of smaller wasps beneath the heels of his boot. Splurt grew a number of scything blades that cleaved one of the larger bugs in two. For a good three to four seconds, things actually looked pretty positive.
And then the wasps all took to the air, and everything went to shizz.
There were thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Far more than had been on the Untitled. They surrounded him like a fog, wings buzzing furiously, gas farting from various orifices, stingers extending until they were almost as long as their owner’s entire body.
The change of wing shape made the buzzing sound different. It was more urgent now, more insistent. The old buzzing suggested the wasps were going to sting you to death. The new buzzing implied that not only were they going to sting you to death, they were really going to enjoy it.
Splurt jumped off Cal’s shoulder, adopting the shape of the queen wasp as he sailed through the air. The other wasps didn’t fall into line beside him this time and instead lashed out, buzzing angrily at him and stabbing him with their elongated stingers.
Cal swung with the butt of the gun, smashing a couple of the rat-sized insects out of the air. They exploded with a pop when he stamped on them, and Cal lined himself up to start swinging through the rest of the bugs to get to Splurt.
Half-buried beneath a mountain of the insects, Splurt gave an insistent shudder. Cal groaned and glanced off at the building towering in the distance.
“You sure, buddy?”
Splurt, still in the form of the wasp queen, vibrated.
“Fine. But get clear as soon as I’m gone,” Cal instructed, then he turned and set off running.
He’d planned on finding some back alleys and navigating through them until he reached the tower, in the hope of keeping out of sight, but Moosh appeared to have just a single street that followed the line of the lakeshore, with buildings lining it on either side, so sticking to the alleyways was impossible.
Cal raced along the main street, instead, jumping at the sound of every middle-distance buzz, and tormented by the sounds of children crying out in fear and distress.
“Got to get to the tower. Got to get to the tower,” he told himself, then another cry brought him stumbling to a stop. It had come from a low, squat building on the left. Three of the windows had been smashed, and there was a hole halfway up the wall the size of a rhino with cholesterol issues.
The cry came again. “No, no, please, please!”
Fonk.
Cal raced for the building, hurled himself in through one of the broken windows, and came face to ass with one of the largest space wasps he’d ever seen, almost impaling himself on its stinger.
Two children—twins, from the look of them—stood pressed against something that looked like a wardrobe, tears streaming down their faces as they stood frozen in the gaze of the wasp-monster.
The children were of a species Cal hadn’t seen before. Their skin was neon levels of pink, and their only hair grew straight upward from their eyebrows, forming lime-green peaks a clear foot above both of their heads.
They held hands, a combined total of six fingers and two thumbs interlocking as they prepared themselves for the worst.
Cal tried to think of something clever to do. Something that an action hero played by Kevin Costner might do, if he ever found himself in a similar situation. Something smart. Something cunning. Something ingenious.
Failing to come up with anything, Cal kicked the wasp up the ass, made a number of high-pitched derogatory comments about its mother, then threw himself back out of the window and ran away as fast as he could.
The wasp, to both Cal’s great relief and immense disappointment, exploded through the window frame after him, pointed wings thrashing furiously as it banked in the air and gave chase.
Cal’s feet thundered across the cobbled street. His arms pumped furiously. His mouth ejected a number of expletives, and his subconscious began assigning his worldly possessions to those he was about to leave behind.
He heard the buzzing grow louder behind him and threw himself to the ground just as the monster-wasp dive-bombed at him.
Cal rolled clumsily to his feet, covered his head with his hands, and ran for the cover of the closest available building. The windows exploded outward as he approached, as several dozen cat-sized wasps came firing through them like furry missiles.
“Oh fonk, oh fonk, oh fonk,” Cal chanted, skidding into a right-angled turn and bolting off along the street.
“You there yet?” asked Loren from his belt.
“Almost!” Cal cried.
He ducked as the enormous wasp flew at him. It slammed against the wall of the building beside him, shattering a spider’s web pattern into the stone.
“What was that?” Loren asked.
“Nothing!” Cal lied, zigging and zagging as the smaller wasps dived at him.
“I’m going to give you my code,” Loren said.
“Not now!” Cal cried. “I don’t have a pen.”
“You won’t need one. You’ll remember it,” Loren insisted.
“I really won’t,” said Cal. “Kind of preoccupied. Running for my life.”
The drone of the giant wasp was suddenly right behind him. He threw himself into a sideways stumble, narrowly avoiding a stinger the size of his leg.
“Got to go. I’ll call you back!” Cal said, then he weaved around something that looked like a garbage can, vaulted over a bench, and collided with what he reckoned was some sort of scooter.
Handles? Check. Seat? Check. Wheels? Not that he could see, but maybe that was the norm around these parts.
He jumped on, searched around for some sort of ignition button, then felt the scooter hum into life as his butt touched the seat. It shot forward several feet, throwing him backward so his legs looped over his head and he landed in a crumpled heap on the ground.
Springing up, he made it back to the scooter before the wasps could reach him. This time, he gripped the handlebars before sitting down, although the rifle stuck to his finger didn’t make this easy. He
held on as the scooter sped forward, hovering just a few inches above the ground.
He hadn’t been expecting much from the thing, but it had an impressive turn of speed. The wasps fell back as he zoomed ahead, the engine purring quietly but confidently beneath him.
As he pulled away, Cal risked a few quick glances around. Wasps zipped above the buildings as far as the eye could see. Blaster fire raged in both directions along the single street. Children cried and screamed in the distance. Things were not, it was fair to say, going well.
The command tower stood just a few hundred feet ahead now, the scooter chewing up the distance with ease. He hoped there was someone there who could do the doodah with the thing, or whatever other technical mumbo-jumbo was required to clear the Untitled for entering the atmosphere. If he was left to do it himself, there was a high probability that he’d activate the self-destruct, or somehow plunge the whole moon into the sun. He had been fine with tech stuff back home, but space tech? That was a whole other story.
Cal expected something big, mean and stripy to come swooping at him any second, but as he trundled the final few feet to the command tower, a sense of renewed hope surged through him. He was going to make it. He was going to—
Wait. How did he stop? Where were the brakes?
A few seconds later, he discovered that simply standing up on the scooter cut power to the engine. Unfortunately, he discovered this when the scooter smashed into the command tower wall, launching him through the window in a cloud of metal and glass.
He lay on the polished white floor for a moment, groaning quietly and regretting pretty much everything, then he fought his way to his feet, pulled some of the larger glass shards out of his face and neck, and went stumbling onward toward a door that was helpfully marked with the words, ‘Command Center.’
The door slid open at his approach, revealing a dark room lit with a network of ominous red bulbs, like the kind a Satanist might decorate the tree with at Satan Christmas. If, indeed, there was such a thing. Cal didn’t have much experience with Satanists, unless you counted the run-in with Ozzy Osbourne.
The room was lined with banks of computer equipment. Most of the screens were tinted with red. At first, Cal thought it was from the little light bulbs, until he noticed how the red was running down the front of the screens and falling in rivulets to the floor.
“Fonk,” he whispered. He tried to get the blaster off again, but his finger was still jammed in there tight. He raised his voice a little and called falteringly into the darkness. “Hello? Anyone home?”
A groan. More of a sob, really. Somewhere in the gloom up ahead.
Cal approached cautiously, his feet splashing softly in puddles of blood. As he passed each terminal, he saw lifeless mounds lying broken beside them. A few of the corpses had their eyes open, wide and pleading, but with nothing going on behind them now.
The groaning sob came again from just beyond an egg-shaped pod. Glancing around to make sure the coast was clear, Cal ducked around it and saw a small figure crumpled on the floor, air wheezing through a hole in its side.
At first, he thought it was another child, but the drooping mustache and wrinkles soon set him straight. The man gawped up at him, mouth flapping as it tried desperately to control the air flowing in and out of it.
“Hey. Hey, it’s OK,” Cal soothed, kneeling beside the man. “What happened?”
The man’s eyes bulged. He coughed, spraying warm wetness into the air between them. The guy didn’t have long. Cal saw the name badge pinned to the chest of his uniform. As he studied the cryptic symbols, his visual translation chip went to work.
“Kollit. That’s your name?”
Kollit nodded, before a series of wrenching coughs made them swim in their sockets.
“Hate to do this, pal, but I need your help,” Cal told him. “I have to authorize a ship. You know? Stop the guns shooting at it? It’s our only chance of stopping these waspy fonks.”
Kollit rasped something unintelligible, then gestured to the egg-shaped pod behind Cal. From the other side, it had looked completely smooth, but there was a screen on this side, and a little glowing keyboard that hovered half an inch above the egg’s curved surface.
With a grunt, Kollit took hold of Cal’s arm and together they wrestled him up onto his knees. Cal watched and offered vague sounds of encouragement as Kollit jabbed unsteadily at the glowing keys. Lines of text flashed up on screen as Kollit navigated the menus.
Blood oozed from the wound in his side. Cal saw it pooling on the floor around the guy’s knees. Fonk. This could be tight.
“OK, Loren, give me that code,” Cal said.
When she didn’t answer, he reached for the communicator on his belt.
Gone.
“Oh, shizz,” he groaned. “No, no, no.”
Kollit looked at him quizzically. Cal gestured for him to continue, then the symbols on screen rearranged themselves to form two short words and a colon.
Enter Code:
“Ha. See, here’s the thing,” Cal said. “I, uh, I don’t have the code.”
Kollit’s face darkened. He blinked so slowly that Cal wasn’t sure his eyes were ever going to open again.
“Isn’t there, like, a generic code you can enter? Like, to shut down the guns so any ship can get in?”
Kollit exhaled slowly. His head dipped forward ponderously, then righted again. A nod.
“Great!” Cal said. “Then stick that in and we can try to do something about that huge fonking hole in your—”
A black-gloved hand reached around the side of the egg, caught Kollit by the hair, and wrenched him out of sight with one swift, sudden jerk. Cal caught just the briefest glimpse of his eyes, wide and imploring, and then they, like the rest of him, was gone.
From the other side of the egg, there came a sound like a balloon filled with paint falling onto an empty oil drum from a great height. It was a sort of thwadoong, with some light splashing at the end, and a bit of a gargle in the middle.
Cal knew then that Kollit was dead. Or, if he wasn’t, he probably wished he was.
“Come out, come out, whoever you are,” sang a voice from the other side of the egg. It had that same electric crackle as earlier, and Cal knew that not only was Kollit dead, but he was almost certainly next.
The screen still glowed before him, waiting for him to enter the code. Fonk. Why hadn’t he just listened to Loren when she was trying to tell him.
What could it be? Her birthday, maybe? He’d try that.
His finger hovered above the digits.
Fonk. He didn’t know her birthday. He had a guess.
June 2nd, Nineteen-eight-five. He punched Enter.
A new message flashed on the screen, the numbers still visible at the top.
Code Declined.
Damn.
“Show yourself,” boomed the voice. “Or face the wrath of Manacle!”
“Jesus. Who are you talking to, Flash Gordon?” Cal asked, hurriedly tapping out another code. Loren’s made-up birthday didn’t work. He tried his own. It was a longshot, but—
Code Declined.
Fonk.
There was no time to input another code. Manacle appeared around the side of the egg, stalking like some ancient predator sizing up its prey. Cal leaned against the egg’s side, hiding the controls. He could still just see the screen and the keypad from the corner of his eye, and subtly tried another string of random numbers.
Code Declined.
“You,” said Manacle, surprise coloring the edges of his crackling tones.
“Have we met?” Cal asked. He tapped another string of numbers. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Code Declined.
“You were on Moktar,” Manacle said. “The slave.”
“Wait. That was you?” said Cal. “Huh. Small galaxy. What are the chances?”
Manacle stepped closer. Cal pressed his shoulder against the side of the egg, hiding the control panel.
“You seem… familiar,” said Man
acle.
“Well, it was only, like, a couple of hours ago,” Cal said. “So, yeah. Not a huge surprise.”
“From before then, I mean,” said Manacle. Cal felt Manacle scrutinizing him through his mask. It made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up and his insides tighten from his rectum to his throat. “Who are you?”
Cal mashed the keypad with his palm and stabbed around for the Enter button.
“Me? I’m no one,” he began, and then another possible road opened up in his mind. It was a road fraught with danger, and probable death. It was a road only an idiot would dare to walk.
He walked it, anyway.
“I’m Space Commander Cal Carver of the Earth Defense Initiative,” he said, straightening and making his voice do that stern thing it did whenever he told Kevin to quit hiding the toilet paper.
Manacle’s head tilted a fraction. “Yes. Yes, that’s it,” he said. His esses came out as zees, which seemed to cause him some concern. He slammed a fist into his chest a few times, then jerked his head violently to the left, as if trying to wrench it off.
He tapped a finger on the back of the opposite glove. Something inside his helmet went bleep, and a red light flashed once in the center of his forehead. Two jets of steam hissed out from vents in his back, blowing his cape around like Superman’s.
“Forgive me, Commander,” Manacle said, once all that was over. “My latest gene splice is still taking root.”
“Gene splice?” said Cal. He cleared his throat and deepened his voice. “I mean, right. Yes. What was it this time?”
“A wazzzp queen,” Manacle said. “Her ezzenzze now flowzz in mine.”
“Uh, OK. Good for you,” Cal said. “But you seem to be having some trouble there.”
Manacle had taken a step back, allowing Cal room to see the message on the screen.
Code Declined.
“It izzzz expected,” Manacle said. “My own genetic material will zzzzoon adjust to compenzzzate.”
“Right. Right,” said Cal. “And, uh, then what? What’s the plan here, Manacle?”
Manacle’s head jerked again. “You mean you were not informed?”
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