Loren nodded. “Yes!” she barked back. She pointed to the guard Cal had just KO’d. “With his voice print.”
Cal shifted awkwardly, then shrugged. “Meh. It was still worth it,” he decided, squatting again. He took Tyrra by the arm. “We need to go. Now,” he shouted at her, and this time she didn’t resist as he and Loren helped her to her feet.
From beyond the stairwell door came the sound of shouting. It wasn’t angry shouting. It was a much more organized and efficient sort of shouting—the type of shouting done by competent, well-drilled people all working together toward some common goal.
Cal suspected he and Loren were that common goal, so wasted no time in steering Tyrra toward the next set of stairs, and hurrying her down through the next few floors.
“Don’t worry,” he told her, leaning in close so he wouldn’t have to shout too loudly. “We’ll have you out of here in no time. Our friends will be primed and ready to fly us out of here.”
He glanced back up the stairs behind them.
“Hopefully.”
Mizette of the Greyx, the once warrior queen of her people, before all the time-travel stuff had fonked everything up, sighed heavily and flicked her eyes to the figure standing in front of her.
“What?” she snapped in a way that suggested she had been fully immersed in some project of utmost importance and resented the interruption. In fact, she’d been looking at the claws on her left hand, comparing each one with its counterpart on her right hand, then lightly chewing them until they were the perfect match.
In Miz’s defense, this was, as far as she was concerned, a project of utmost importance.
“I said, what do you think?” said Mech.
The cyborg had something tucked under his left arm that defied easy description. It looked as if a selection of antiquated diving equipment was trying to exist in the same place and time as both a vacuum cleaner and a car engine. Specifically, the engine of a 1981 Mercury Capri RS Turbo, although Miz wouldn’t have known that, even if she’d been paying close attention.
Which she wasn’t.
“About what?”
Mech’s eyes crept to the contraption under his arm. Various tubes and hoses sprouted from a partially inflated central housing. One of the narrower tubes was taped to the big dial on his chest, the end pointing upward so it was held in place just in front of his mouth.
“About this.”
Miz sighed again. She was good at sighing. If you spent enough time around her, you’d come to realize that sighing was almost a second language to the wolf-woman, each grudged exhale was so subtle and nuanced that it could convey whole conversations worth of meaning in just a single breath.
To those with a cursory understanding, her most recent sigh, for example, said, ‘Why the fonk is he still talking to me? Can’t he see I’m busy?’
Those who’d studied Miz’s sighing more closely, however, would detect the follow-up, ‘Maybe if I ignore him he’ll go away,’ while only those truly fluent in the language would pick up on her closing, ‘What the fonk even is that thing, anyway? He looks so lame. Ugh.’
“It’s a musical instrument,” said Mech, who had something of a gift for languages, breath-based or otherwise. “I made it. I call it a Blufflebag.”
Miz tutted. “Why?”
“Why what?” asked Mech. “Why did I make it, or why did I call it a Blufflebag?”
Miz looked him up and down. “Just, like, why? Why is this happening right now? Shouldn’t you wait to, like, show someone who cares? You know, like…”
She vaguely waved a hand, then sighed again.
“No, no one is going to care,” she concluded. “Fine. I guess you’ll have to show me. Ugh, this is so not fair.”
Mech shuffled excitedly, his feet clanking on the metal floor of the ship’s bridge. “OK, OK. So, I’ve been thinking for a while now that I should maybe find myself a hobby. You know? We’re out here in space, we got a lot of time to kill, I thought maybe I should… Miz?”
Mizette’s eyes snapped up from where they had drifted back to her fingernails. “What? I’m listening,” she insisted.
Mech’s eyes narrowed a fraction in suspicion, but he continued. “So, anyway, I thought, why not take up a musical instrument?”
Miz extended a thumb and took a deep breath, as if to count off the reasons.
“Rhetorical question,” Mech said, cutting her off. “We didn’t have any musical instruments, so I thought I’d go ahead and invent one. The Blufflebag.”
He grinned proudly, his lower metal jaw curving to match the outline of his fleshy top lip. “Want to know how it works?”
This, too, was a rhetorical question. Of course Miz didn’t want to know how it worked. In all the galaxy, there were probably only a handful of things she cared about less, Mech knew. But fonk it, he was going to tell her anyway.
Miz gave another sigh. This one said, ‘Fine, show me your stupid music thing,’ before adding that, under no circumstances, was she ever going to forgive him for this.
“See this part?” Mech said, waggling a metal stem with a series of varyingly sized holes drilled along its length, and four thumb-sized levers attached. It was attached to the body by a length of rubber hose that looped up over his shoulder before re-emerging below his armpit. “I call it the control tube. This is where you play the notes. You know? Like, A, C, F, E, B—”
“You’re literally just saying letters at me,” Miz pointed out.
“Right, right,” said Mech. “Sorry, I’m just… Well, I’m excited. I ain’t gonna lie. I had the idea for this thing for years, but never found the time to put it together until now.”
Miz didn’t sigh. She’d gone beyond sighing now. She tutted instead and rolled her eyes.
Picking up on her dwindling interest, Mech pressed on. “So, you play the notes there, you squeeze these three parts under your arm…”
He squeezed those three parts to demonstrate.
“It’s not making any noise,” Mizette pointed out.
“Right, right. Because I gotta blow into this part first,” Mech said, indicating the tube taped in front of his mouth. “That’s what makes it all work.”
Mizette’s nose wrinkled. She looked the contraption over, paying particular attention to the tubes and pipes. “So… what? It works on air?”
“Exactly!” said Mech, positively beaming with pride.
“You blow into it?”
“You got it!”
“Into that thing?”
“Bingo.”
Miz’s furry brow creased. She gave Mech a moment, thinking it might sink in. When he continued to grin back at her, she decided to spell it out.
“But, like, do you even have lungs?”
Mech opened his mouth to respond.
Then he closed it again.
“What?” he said, after what felt like quite some time.
“Like, to blow with? I thought you didn’t have lungs.”
Mech’s fingers tightened around the control tube, crumpling the metal.
“Motherfonker,” he groaned. He shot the Blufflebag a look that bordered on contempt, then let out a sigh of his own. It wasn’t as elegant or as nuanced as one of Miz’s, but it translated roughly as, ‘Back to the drawing board,’ only with a lot of creative swearing thrown in at random.
“Might now be a good time to interrupt, sir?” asked a voice from up near the ceiling. Mech didn’t bother to look up.
“What is it, Kevin?”
“It’s Master Cal and Mistress Loren, sir.”
“What about them?”
“I think they may want in.”
Mech did look up then. Miz flicked her gaze briefly in the direction of the voice, but then turned her attention back to more pressing matters and nibbled a millionth of an inch off the tip of her right thumbnail.
“What do you mean?”
“See for yourself, sir,” said Kevin.
The screen, which had been showing a view of the docking b
ay the Currently Untitled was parked in, changed to show a view from the rear of the ship. Cal and Loren stood just a few feet away from the camera and were both jumping up and down, waving their arms, and shouting, “Open the fonking door!” in panicky squeals.
Standing between them, a glassy-eyed Symmorium gazed limply ahead, its mouth hanging slightly open to show a frankly bewildering number of teeth.
“And you haven’t let them in because…?” Mech asked.
“Well,” said Kevin. “Because…”
He reflected on this for a moment.
“Actually, I have no idea,” he admitted. “I’ll go ahead and let them in.”
On screen, Cal and Loren both jumped back as the rear hatch opened. Cal hung back just long enough to shoot the camera a dirty look, then he followed Loren up the ramp, pushing and pulling the Symmorium between them.
They clattered along the corridor and onto the bridge. Once there, Loren hurried to the pilot’s seat while Cal gently lowered Tyrra into one of the chairs along the bridge’s rear bulkhead. The guest chairs as he liked to think of them.
“You just sit here, OK?” he told her, fastening her seatbelt. He placed a hand on her shoulder and smiled at her, but she gazed emptily past him, seeing nothing. “That’s the spirit,” he said, then he turned, clapped his hands, and addressed the others.
“Kevin, a little quicker on the door next time. Loren, get us the fonk out of here. Mech, nice space bagpipes.”
“They ain’t—”
“Not really the time, big guy,” Cal told him, cutting him short. He smiled in a way that he hoped would pre-emptively absolve him of any and all blame for what he was about to say. “There’s a chance that we might have a problem…”
Five
The Currently Untitled roared across the landing bay, thrusters blasting, feet throwing out sparks as they scraped across the ground. All around the ship, the other occupants of the dock hurled themselves out of its path, scrambling for cover behind crates, barrels, and stacks of cargo.
Up ahead, the shield gate shimmered. It wasn’t designed to stop ships coming and going, but was instead there to stop all the people, equipment, and oxygen being sucked out into space. The Currently Untitled rocketed toward it, metal feet screeching on the metal floor, a volley of blaster-fire following close behind.
Inside, Cal clung to the arms of his chair, eyes screwed up and face contorted. “Jesus Christ, can no one else hear that noise? Pull up!”
“I can’t pull up,” Loren spat back from the pilot’s seat. “I’ll hit the ceiling.”
Cal leaned forward and looked up. “There’s like, sixty feet to the ceiling! What are you flying, a jumbo jet?”
“Is this even technically flying?” Miz wondered. “Isn’t it, like, skiing?”
“Fine!” Loren barked. “You want me to take off? Fine.”
She pulled back on the stick and the Untitled banked upward. The screeching was replaced by sweet, sweet silence, and then the silence was replaced by the bang of the ship colliding with the ceiling.
“See?”
“You didn’t have to go that far up!” Cal began to protest. He pointed. “See that three-story high area between the ceiling and the floor? That’s the part to aim for. Fly there.”
“Shizz. We got a problem,” said Mech.
“God, I wish we had a problem, Mech. I really do,” said Cal, sitting back in his chair. “As usual, we’ve got multiple problems. People are shooting at us, we’re ruining the paintwork, I lost a shoe…”
“Yeah, well here’s one to add to the list,” Mech said. He jabbed a metal finger in the direction of the fast-approaching exit. Through the shield, they’d been able to see a decent-sized strip of stars. Now, though, the view was developing an odd sort of letterbox effect, with two black bands cutting off the vista at the top and bottom.
“They’re closing the security shutters,” Loren realized. “Fonk.”
“We’re going to make it,” Cal assured her. “Just go, we’re going to make it.”
“We’re not going to make it!” Loren argued. She began to ease back on the thruster. “We have to stop.”
“Don’t slow down! Never slow down. Isn’t that what they say?”
“Isn’t that what who says?”
Cal shrugged. “Fonk knows. Someone wiser than us. Just keep going,” he insisted. He waited until Loren returned to full thrust, then glanced upward. “Kevin, give me control of the torpedoes.”
The ship’s AI said nothing. Cal muttered something uncomplimentary below his breath.
“Jesus, OK. Give me control of the missiles.”
“Very good, sir,” Kevin replied.
“You’re so fonking pedantic,” Cal grumbled.
The weapons control headset dropped down from the ceiling and cracked him on the top of his skull. He hissed and clamped a hand over the injury. “Ow! Fonk!”
“Apologies, sir. I wasn’t aware you were leaning forward,” Kevin explained.
“I’m not leaning forward!” Cal protested.
“Well,” Kevin sniffed. “You have your version of events, and I have mine.”
Up ahead, the gates continued to grind shut. The gap was maybe twice the size of the Untitled now, but closing fast.
Cal pulled the headset on. A couple of sharp, stabbing pains pricked his temples, then he suddenly found himself in gloomy darkness. He’d been expecting his consciousness to be projected above the ship like it had in the past, and it took him a moment to figure out why he couldn’t see.
“Down, Loren. You’re still on the ceiling!” he instructed.
He didn’t hear the answer, but the Untitled dipped sharply, lurching his stomach up somewhere around his ears. Now that his consciousness was no longer jammed between the ship and the ceiling, he could see the docking bay around them, complete with narrowing exit and a squadron of ant-sized Zertex troops giving chase on little hoverbikes somewhere far behind.
“I’m rather afraid our missiles won’t penetrate the shielding in time to destroy the gate, sir,” Kevin said, his voice coming from every direction at once. “Much as we all hate to agree with Mistress Loren, I fear that, in this instance, we have no choice but to stop.”
“I heard that!” came Loren’s voice.
“I wasn’t planning to shoot the gate, Kevin,” Cal said. He raised his hands and felt the tickle of power as the ship’s weapon systems synched with his movements.
He chose a cargo ship half a mile or so away on the right. It was a nice ship. Expensive looking.
Most of its value was lost when a missile struck it, reducing it to flaming debris. Cal grinned and threw out his other arm, sending a second missile hurtling across the dock in the opposite direction.
BABOOM! A stack of house-sized cargo containers met a hot, fiery end.
KABLAM! A sleek silver ship that reminded Cal of a boomerang suffered an explosive fate there would be no coming back from.
PTCHEOW! Another missile slammed into the base of a loading crane. The giant metal arm toppled, smashing through the wing of another ship and crushing a trailer of barrels.
Explosive barrels, as it turned out.
The blast rocked the Untitled, forcing Loren to wrestle frantically with the controls.
“What are you doing?” she yelped.
“I’m making us unwelcome,” Cal explained. He cheered as another missile exploded ahead of the pursuing Zertex troops, flipping them and their fancy-schmancy bikes into the air.
“I think it may be working, sir,” said Kevin. “The gates have stopped closing.”
“Yes!” Cal whooped, then he threw his arms wide and launched another couple of missiles for good measure. At opposite ends of the landing bay, two very valuable things became thousands of not-even-remotely valuable things.
“Gate opening!” Mech announced. “They want us out of here before we do any more damage.”
Cal looked around at all the smoldering wreckage, then nodded. Yes, he was pleased with that.
“Loren, let’s oblige them. Kevin, get me out,” he instructed. “My work here is done.”
Pain nipped at his temples. There was a sensation of movement and something not unlike existential loss, then he was back in his chair, blinking himself back to the here and now.
“The gate’s opening, but not fast enough!” Loren warned. The exit was hurtling up. Five seconds away. Four. “We’re going to hit it.”
“So? You’ve already hit everything else,” Miz pointed out. “What’s, like, one more thing?”
“HOLD ON!” Loren cried, jamming the throttle, jerking the stick, and—unnoticed by anyone sitting behind her—tightly shutting her eyes.
There was a shudder as the ship passed through the phase shielding.
There was a bang as a wing clipped the bottom of the gate.
And then the Currently Untitled cleared the exit and streaked out into space, trailing flakes of paint behind it.
“Holy shizz, we did it,” said Mech.
“We did?” said Loren, sounding as surprised as anyone. She opened her eyes just in time to see Mech turn toward her, frowning. She nodded back at him. “I mean, yes. We made it.”
“Nice work, Loren,” Cal told her. The familiarity of it all—the blaster fire, the bad flying, the skin-of-the-teeth escape—had made him once again forget his earlier awkwardness. He smiled at the back of her head. “Imagine what you could do if you didn’t shut your eyes.”
Loren said nothing, but saluted him over her shoulder with a raised finger.
“Wrong one,” Cal told her.
“Oh. Right.”
She changed fingers.
“That’s your pinkie. The middle one. We’ve been over this.”
Loren tutted and lowered her hand. “You get the point.”
Cal’s smile broadened. “Yeah, I get the point.” He gestured ahead. “Better warp us out of here before anyone tries to pin the blame on us for blowing up the docking bay.”
“That was us,” Mech pointed out.
“Mech, I resent that accusation,” Cal said. “There’s no evidence that we did it.”
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