Cal sighed. “Ah… fonk.”
He sat up and twisted. “Loren, wait!”
But it was too late. He watched from below as Loren sailed over him, leg outstretched, foot aimed squarely at the Narlup’s chest. She hit him with the force of a small, yet efficient battering ram, the kick driving the air out of him in one big huff and turning his stagger into a stumble, then a fall, then a splintering of wood and shattering of crockery as he crashed through a table.
Cutlery rattled against the floor. Glasses smashed. Food splatted. All this was eclipsed by the thud of the Narlup himself as he landed amongst it all in a gasping and bloodied heap.
Loren stood before the chaos, dusting off her hands and looking pretty darned pleased with herself. With a groan, Cal got to his feet beside her. She smiled at him, a little smugly, and was somewhat taken aback when he sighed and said, “Well, way to go, Loren,” in the same tone he used when she accidentally piloted their ship into an asteroid field, or inadvertently smashed it into the surface of a planet.
“What? I got him,” Loren said, gesturing to the fallen Narlup.
“He was surrendering,” said Cal, exaggerating just enough to still be within spitting distance of the truth. “I’d talked him into giving up.”
Loren regarded the Narlup, then turned her attention back to Cal. “You did?”
Cal nodded slowly.
“Oh.”
Loren chewed her lip. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” Cal confirmed.
“Oh.”
She considered this some more, then shrugged. “If you ask me, he had this coming. He was out of line. It was only right that I taught him a lesson and took him down.”
Only, Cal realized, the Narlup wasn’t down. Not any longer, at any rate. He rose up beside them, eyes blazing, teeth bared, fanuses puckered.
While the Narlup had been violently pummeling him, Cal had been under the impression that the guy was angry. Now, though, he was reconsidering that opinion. Back then, he reckoned, the Narlup had been irritated. Peeved, at worst.
Now, though—now he was angry. You could tell by the way his face was all twisted, his muscles were all tensed, and the manner in which he was bellowing, “I’m going to fonking kill you both!” at the top of his impressively loud voice.
“Not sure he learned that lesson, Loren,” Cal squeaked.
He and Loren threw themselves in opposite directions as the Narlup charged, his fists spinning like windmills, driving his foul stench ahead of him. His feet thundered across the floor, scattering debris.
On the Narlup’s right, Loren rolled expertly into a fighting stance. On its left, Cal got his ass wedged between the legs of an upturned space chair, and spent several seconds muttering to himself as he tried to get free.
The Narlup stopped. The Narlup turned. The Narlup roared.
And then, to everyone’s surprise, the Narlup exploded.
Or rather, bits of him did. Unfortunately for him, they were quite important bits.
His chest went first, erupting outward as if he was a giant birthday cake, and his heart was the stripper lurking inside.
His face registered his own feelings of surprise at this, and then it exploded, too, showering the room with fragments of skull, lumps of brain, and what Cal now considered to be the worst smell he had ever had the misfortune of inhaling.
Or second-worst, if you counted Paris.
Cal and Loren watched as the headless, chestless corpse crumpled itself into a pile on the floor between them. Thick, viscous blood pumped from the wounds, forming a slowly expanding pool. Floating atop it, a lightly scorched fanus parped for the final time.
All this had happened in a sort of slow-motion haze. Cal had watched the exploding Narlup with a sense of dream-like wonder, like a child watching a particularly impressive magic trick.
And now, like a child in the seconds immediately after a particularly impressive magic trick, he tried to figure out how it had been done.
The answer didn’t take long to present itself.
“Zertex,” whispered Loren, side-stepping through the blood and gore until she was closer to Cal. He had successfully extracted his ass from the upturned chair, but hadn’t yet made it as far as standing. The threatening manner in which one of the two uniformed men in the doorway was pointing a blaster rifle in his direction told him that now probably wasn’t the time to get up.
From the corner of his eye, he saw the woman and her children watching on.
“Seriously, lady? You’re still looking?” he called over. “Well, don’t come crying to me when those kids start having night terrors and then murder you in your sleep. That’s all on you.”
“Silence. Stop talking,” barked one of the armed men. His uniform was a series of maroons and grays, reinforced in most of the vital areas by a thin, flexible armor that looked like it wouldn’t stop a well-aimed snowball, let alone a blaster round.
Of course, it wasn’t just armor, Cal knew. It was space armor, and the rules were almost certainly different. You could probably drop the fonker into a volcano and he’d come out unscathed.
Well, except his head, which appeared to be completely unprotected. The rest of him would almost certainly be fine, though.
The man beside him was dressed identically, but with the addition of a shiny metal stripe along the top of his chest-plate, which Cal guessed signified some sort of officer ranking. Either that, or the store had neglected to remove the security tag when he’d bought it.
Cal went for the ‘charming-but-confused-tourist’ play. It had served him well many times in the past, and he was confident he could make it work here.
“Oh, officers! Thank goodness you’re here!” he half-sobbed, widening his eyes and smiling in a way that managed to be friendly, concerned, and yet entirely deferential, all at the same time.
Both Zertex guards glanced around at the ruined restaurant. Their guns remained trained—one on Loren, the other on Cal—as they advanced in formation, picking their way through the discarded crockery, upturned torso, and crispy-fried body parts.
“There we were, minding our own business, enjoying the hospitality of this lovely restaurant,” Cal explained. “When this gentleman began…”
He wiped an imaginary tear from his eye and looked up at Loren. “Well, he went crazy, didn’t he, darling?”
Loren’s brow furrowed for a moment, then she nodded. “Uh, yeah. He went crazy.”
The Zertex guards stopped in front of them, their faces fixed in some sort of regulation sneer. Now that they were closer up, Cal could see that their heads were protected, after all. A ninety-nine percent transparent bubble sprouted from the necks of their armor, completely encasing their skulls. As they breathed, tiny patches of fog appeared on the inside, before evaporating away again.
“Who are you?” the guard with the shiny stripe demanded. His gun lowered, but only by a fraction. “Show me your ID.”
Cal raised his hands by his head and raised himself up onto his knees. Once he was sure no one was about to blast his face off, he began to pat his pockets. “Yes, of course. ID. ID. Now, where did I put that blasted—?”
Cal didn’t like fighting. But then, he didn’t like Zertex, either. And he liked having a gun pointed at him, even less.
That was why he took a little pleasure—not much, but a little—when he twisted suddenly, putting as much of his weight as possible behind an uppercut that rose quickly, then stopped when it found the testicles of the man before him.
There was some reinforcement in the guard’s crotch area, but clearly, whoever had designed the armor hadn’t been prepared for a strike from that particular angle. The force of it lifted him a full inch-and-a-half off the floor, and by the time his partner had figured out what was happening, Loren had driven a palm-strike into his solar plexus. He fumbled with his gun, but Loren kicked one of his knees outward, hammered a flurry of punches into his stomach, then twisted his wrist until the weapon fell from his grip.
<
br /> Meanwhile, Cal’s guy clutched at his abdomen, groaned loudly, and threw up against the inside of his barely-visible visor.
His view partly blocked, the guard fired wildly, obliterating one of the decorative stone columns and filling the air with plaster dust. Cal tackled the guard by both legs, knocking him over. As the guard went down, Cal jumped up. He turned to Loren, his face all sparkling eyes and beaming grin.
“What do you say?” He held a hand out to her. “Run?”
Loren nodded. Her hand slipped into his. So cool. So warm. So Loren. “Yeah”, she agreed. “Let’s run.”
They raced past the guards, bounded over the headless body of the Narlup, and skidded through his blood as they charged toward the exit. As they passed, the woman by the doorway placed her webbed hands over the eyes of the children beside her, so all Cal could see was the little circles of mute horror that were their mouths.
“Oh sure, now they look away,” Cal said as he and Loren hurried past. “Seriously, lady—worst mother ever!”
If she answered, he didn’t hear it. He and Loren stumbled out through the restaurant door, skidded into the corridor, and then stopped when they saw the squadron of six Zertex Shock-Troopers sprinting toward them, electric shock-rods at the ready.
“That’s not good,” Loren hissed.
Cal looked down at his shirt, pants, and both boots, one of which was still untied. “Splurt?” he hollered. “You there, buddy?”
His clothes steadfastly remained just clothes.
“Ah, fonk,” Cal groaned.
And then, they ran.
Three
Word had gotten around that the Shock-Troops were on the warpath. The corridors on this floor had been reasonably quiet on the way to the restaurant, but now they were all-but-deserted, with only the distant ka-thunk of slamming doors signaling that anyone else was here.
Cal and Loren skidded around a bend, ducking as an electro-blast scorched the window behind them. The window stretched from ceiling to floor and ran ahead for hundreds of feet, fully replacing one entire wall. Outside, space was hanging around in that way that space so often did. Stars. Planets. A sun.
That sort of thing.
Once upon a time, the view would’ve blown Cal’s mind. Nowadays, though, he barely even noticed it other than in a general, ‘Ooh, space,’ sort of way.
Besides, he was too concerned about his mind being blown in a much more literal sense right now to take time out to admire the scenery.
A shock-stick whined as it reached full charge. Loren grabbed Cal by the wrist and pulled him into a lurching stagger a split-second before the air popped and fizzled beside them. They both watched the electro-blast streak ahead, and winced as it detonated against the smooth curved glass.
Fonk. That was close.
“Shoot them!” Cal urged. “Why aren’t you shooting them?”
“I don’t have my gun,” said Loren, dragging him around another bend.
“Why don’t you have your gun?”
“Because I didn’t expect you to punch a station security guy in the balls!” Loren spat back.
“Always be prepared for me to do that, Loren!” Cal yelped. “Seriously, have you learned nothing?”
Loren pulled ahead, almost wrenching his arm from its socket. He was usually pretty talented when it came to running away from dangerous things. A crazed gunman normally made him impressively fleet of foot. An angry space bear granted him near Olympian levels of swiftness.
And that time with Ozzy Osbourne, he’d practically become superhuman.
Now, though, he lumbered clumsily along, hindered by his flapping boot, which he hadn’t had a chance to tie again. He’d still been harboring a nugget of hope that the boot would reveal itself to be a certain adorable little shapeshifting bamston, but this had eventually been replaced by the dull, disappointing acceptance that, no, it was just a boot.
A boot that came very close to tripping him when it fell off.
Cal hobbled a few paces, hopped a few more, then stopped, pulling his arm from Loren’s grip. “My boot!”
“Leave it!” Loren barked. “Come on.”
“But it’s my favorite boot!” Cal protested, doubling back.
He was halfway back to the boot when an electro-blast slammed into the floor beside it, scorching the tiles with a fiery red glow.
“Fonk it, I’ve got another one just like it,” Cal decided, pulling a U-turn and sprinting lopsidedly after Loren. Unburdened by the loose boot, and urged on by the threat of imminent death, he quickly closed the gap.
By the time Loren was skidding around the next bend, Cal was just nine or ten feet behind her. Covering his head with his hands, he chanted, “Oh shizz, oh shizz, oh shizz,” below his breath. He usually found this made him run even faster, and this time proved to be no exception.
Two shock-rods whined somewhere behind him.
“Ohshizzohshizzohshizz!”
Cal’s legs catapulted him around the bend as both blasts ricocheted off the window behind him. He ducked and felt the static charge of the bolts careening past above his head, then looked up, half-expecting to see them slam into Loren’s back.
But Loren was gone.
Behind him, Cal could hear the thudding of approaching footsteps. Ahead, the corridor stood empty and silent.
“What the fonk?” he muttered, then a hand clamped across his mouth and he was dragged through a narrow doorway that appeared in the wall beside him.
The door slid closed at his back, and Cal was swallowed by the darkness. The air in the room was heavily perfumed with hints of lemon and suggestions of assorted spring breezes. Either he’d somehow found himself in the south of Italy on a fine mid-April morning, or he was in a cleaner’s closet.
His foot clanked against a mop bucket.
Cleaner’s closet it was.
“Shh.”
The voice was low and urgent in his ear. It was Loren’s, to his relief, and not the deranged sexual predator he’d momentarily imagined it to be when the hand had first grabbed him.
Outside, the footsteps of the Shock-Troops hurried past, accompanied by the whines of their weapons charging.
Experience had taught Loren to wait until the sounds had faded into the distance before removing her hand from Cal’s mouth. He exhaled noisily the moment her hand was away. When he spoke, his voice echoed in the confined space.
“Loren, is that you?” he asked, just to be on the safe side.
“Yes, it’s me. Of course it’s me,” she replied, her voice low.
“Oh, thank God,” Cal whispered. “I was worried you might be a rapist.”
Loren didn’t really know how to respond to that, so the inside of the closet lapsed into an awkward silence. Cal rushed to fill it.
“Do you have those in space?” he asked. “Space rap—?”
“Just stop talking,” Loren told him.
Cal concluded that this was probably for the best. He stopped talking.
It occurred to him for the first time just how close Loren was to him. He could feel her breathing in the darkness, her chest heaving against his arm. The smell of her mingled with the lemony freshness of the closet.
Was she wearing perfume? That was new. Had she worn that for him?
He crinkled his nose and sniffed in her general direction.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“Hm? Oh, nothing,” he said. He sniffed again, less obviously this time, and decided it was probably just bleach.
“We should get out of here,” she said. “Shock-Troops aren’t the smartest, but they’ll figure out they’re no longer chasing us soon.”
Cal nodded, although given how dark it was, this was largely pointless, so he said, “Agreed,” instead. He didn’t remember ever saying, “Agreed,” before, and found that he quite liked it. It made him sound efficient and in charge, he thought. It was the sort of thing Captain Kirk probably said all the time. Or maybe the bald one who came later. What was his name? Pr
ofessor X.
Whatever. They’d be all over agreed, those two. Cal made a mental note to use it again in the future. He might even nod knowingly next time, assuming the lighting situation permitted.
“Cal,” Loren hissed. “Did you hear what I said?”
“Yes. Absolutely,” Cal lied. He was dimly aware of Loren having spoken, but he’d been too busy with the whole Captain Kirk thing to pay attention.
He decided to press on.
“What level are we on?” he asked.
“Five-five-seven,” Loren replied.
“Agreed,” said Cal, even though it wasn’t a particularly appropriate response, given what had come before it. He glossed over that fact and continued. “And what level is the ship on?”
“Eight.”
“Fonk, that’s a long way.”
“It is.”
“Agreed,” said Cal.
Loren hesitated. “I was agreeing with you.”
“I know. And I was agreeing with you agreeing with me,” Cal said.
Loren’s tone took on an edge of concern. “Do you have some kind of head injury?”
“Let’s worry about that later,” Cal said. “Right now, let’s figure out how the fonk we’re going to get down…”
He began to count quietly below his breath.
“Five-five-seven minus eight… Or plus eight? No. Minus. It’s minus.” He took a breath. “OK. Five-five-seven. Five-five-six. Five-five—”
“Five-hundred-and-forty-nine levels,” Loren told him. “It’s five-hundred-and-forty-nine levels.”
“Jesus, seriously?” said Cal. “That’s a lot of stairs.”
“OK, good luck with that,” said Loren. The door opened a crack, letting light come flooding in. “I’ll take the turbolift and meet you there.”
“Can we take the lift?” Cal asked.
Loren peered out into the corridor, then glanced back over her shoulder at him. “Why wouldn’t we?”
“Won’t they have it on lockdown or something? They’re hunting us.”
“It’s a big station,” Loren shrugged. “They can’t lock it all down.”
Space Team- The Collected Adventures 4 Page 33