“Oh fonk,” was all he managed to eject, before the supercharged gravity’s pull took hold and dragged him screaming into the darkness.
Fourteen
Cal hit something hard, bounced off, spun twice, and then hit something harder.
After that, there were several blissful seconds when he didn’t hit anything at all.
These, in turn, were followed by several concerned seconds when it occurred to him that if he didn’t hit something soon, he was going to break every bone in his body.
This spell of worry preceded one final second of absolute panic during which he vividly pictured himself smashed to pieces against some rocks, and then the whole ordeal ended with a crunch that hurt tremendously, but fell just short of shattering any bones.
He lay face down in the darkness, catching his breath. Splurt slithered forlornly across the back of his neck. Cal reached a hand back to pat him through the padding of the suit, but the angle made it impossible.
With some effort, Cal rolled himself onto his back, so he was gazing up at the circle of light overhead. It looked small from down here. If Cal were to form a circle with the thumb and finger of one hand, the area of sky he could see would fit comfortably inside it.
Not that he was going to do any such thing, of course. Everything ached, and the thought of expending unnecessary energy on finger-circles only made it ache worse.
With even greater effort than the rolling over had taken, he managed to outsmart the cumbersome spacesuit to the extent that he was able to successfully stand up.
Raising a hand, he leaned against the wall beside him and wheezed in some of the suit’s stale air.
“What the fonk happened?” barked Mech’s voice in his ear.
Thank fonk for that. The communicator was still working.
“I’m not sure on the technical description,” Cal said, groaning as he cricked his lower vertebrae into something that more closely resembled their original position. “But in layman’s terms, I fell down a big hole.”
“You still got the Sentience?” Mech asked.
“I’m fine, thanks for asking. No harm done. Thanks for your concern, it’s genuinely touching,” Cal replied, sarcasm dripping down the inside of his visor. He glanced at the dimly-glowing ball by his feet. “And yes, I have the Sentience. Now hurry up and get me out of here.”
Overhead, the hole snapped shut. It closed suddenly and without any warning, two semi-circles slamming together, two sets of metal teeth interlocking and plunging him into a thick, oppressive darkness tinted just faintly by the Sentience’s weak glow.
“Mech? The hole just closed,” Cal said. “Can you open it?”
A soft static hiss purred in Cal’s ear, almost too low to hear. “Very funny, Mech.”
Kssssssh.
“Loren? You there? Can you hear me? Tell Mech to stop messing around.”
Silence.
Maybe not quite silence. If he listened hard, he could make out a faint swish of sound, as if he were listening to the ocean inside a shell.
But still close enough to silence to be of no fonking use to him.
“Great,” he said, exhaling slowly. As he did, his breath fogged up the inside of the visor, revealing a spider-web shaped crack in the glass above his right eye. “Even better.”
Picking up the Symmorium Sentience, Cal held it close to his head. The faint glimmer of green better illuminated the crack, and he saw that there was a tiny hole, just a little larger than a pinhead, straight through the glass.
Shizz. The list of ill-effects the planet’s atmosphere could cause came rushing in to fill Cal’s head.
He held his breath.
Some time passed.
He released his breath in one big gasp.
“Fonk. That’s not going to work,” he decided.
There was only one thing for it. Setting the Sentience on the floor, he fiddled with the suit’s neck clasp until it gave a hiss. Twisting, he removed the helmet and held it just a few inches above his head, ready to pull it back on if it turned out to be necessary.
Cal’s nostrils flared as he sniffed the air.
Nothing. No vomiting. No eye-swelling.
He sniffed again.
Still nothing. No blindness. No internal hemorrhaging. No rectal bleeding.
He flicked his tongue out and tasted the atmosphere around him, like a cat lapping at milk.
Still nothing. No violent seizures. No full-body fungal infections. No erectile dysfunction. Or, at least, none that he was aware of.
“I think we’re OK,” he said. He drew in a deep breath, held it, then expelled it through his nose. “Yeah. This is good. I think we’re OK.”
He placed the helmet down next to the Sentience and set about dealing with his other problems. “Now, lights. Lights,” he said, patting the spacesuit. There was a torch on the shoulder, but it had been a while since Mech had explained how to turn it on. Also, he hadn’t been paying any attention at the time, which didn’t help.
He found a toggle switch on the chest and flicked it. The suit immediately inflated until he resembled a beach ball with arms, then all the air farted up through the gap at his neck, making his hair stand on end.
“That might’ve been useful two minutes ago,” he muttered, smoothing his hair back down.
He continued to run his hands over the front of the suit, searching for the correct button.
After thirty or so seconds of this, a thin green tendril reached up through the neck of the spacesuit, clicked a switch on the torch itself to activate it, then retreated again.
“Thanks, buddy,” said Cal. “What would I do without you?”
Splurt trembled, just faintly.
“Now, you take that back, young man! I would not be better off,” Cal scolded. “And I don’t want to hear that kind of talk again. Is that clear?”
Splurt did nothing.
“That had better have been a yes,” Cal warned him, then he turned on the spot, sweeping the circle of white light in an arc across the curved wall.
The wall was smooth and tiled like the wall of a subway tunnel, only without the standard covering of graffiti, or the pebble-dashing of blood and human excrement. There was another wall just like it on the opposite side, with both together forming a wide passageway that, coincidentally, also reminded Cal of a subway tunnel.
Fonk. He hoped this wasn’t a subway tunnel.
There were no tracks or rails, but that didn’t mean anything. This was space. Subway trains probably hovered or something. They wouldn’t need to mess around with anything as primitive as tracks.
Over the next few moments, Cal came to the firm, unshakeable conclusion that he was about to be turned to mush by a speeding underground train. He looked both ways along the tunnel, trying to guess which direction the train might come from.
He couldn’t hear anything approaching, so that told him nothing.
He licked a finger of one of his gloves and held it up. He’d seen people do it in movies, but had absolutely no idea what it was supposed to tell him. Fonk all was the conclusion he eventually drew.
His understanding of science now fully depleted, Cal whispered out an Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe, and let that dictate his direction.
“This way,” he announced, turning on his heels and retrieving the Symmorium Sentience.
It was ten minutes later, after a lot of walking and several spontaneous right-turns down corridors, that he realized he’d forgotten his helmet.
He momentarily entertained the idea of going back for it, but decided that he probably wouldn’t be able to find it, and he might get smashed in the face by a train. Besides, it was broken. It wasn’t like it could do him a lot of good. Also, now that gravity was almost back to full strength, the Symmorium Sentience was getting heavy. He’d already passed it from arm to arm half a dozen times, and the thought of juggling his helmet, too, wasn’t one that massively appealed.
And so, he plodded on, his torchlight bobbing in the darkness, dancing
its clinical white glow across the tiles as he weaved his way through the vast underground maze.
The floor beneath his feet was covered by the same tiles as the walls and ceiling, only flat and level, not curved like the walls. The tiles squeaked beneath his boots as he walked—little squeaks of outrage that anyone would dare tread on them.
Splurt had squeezed his top half out through the neck of the spacesuit. It now lay folded up like a melted stick of toffee on Cal’s shoulder, while Splurt’s lower half remained hooked around his neck. He bubbled occasionally, each one a little sigh of despair whose silence spoke volumes.
“You have to snap out of this, buddy,” Cal said. “If anyone should be depressed here, it’s me.”
Splurt twitched.
“What do you mean, why? Because of everything, that’s why. The Earth stuff. The me being evil stuff.” He rolled the next few words around before letting them loose. “The Loren stuff.”
Splurt gave a tiny shudder. Cal stopped at a junction, shone the torch in both directions, and decided to continue straight ahead.
“Well, no, it didn’t go great, actually,” Cal said.
Another vibration.
“I know I rehearsed it, but, I don’t know. It wouldn’t come out. I couldn’t say any of it, not when she was right there,” Cal said.
Splurt rippled faintly.
“That’s harsh!” Cal protested. “No, I’m not scared, I just… I was going to say it, and then she said she thought it best if we didn’t, and everything just kind of fell apart.”
Splurt shuddered, just a little.
“She said it was a mistake,” Cal said. “Said she shouldn’t have done it. How it wasn’t right.”
Tremble.
“I don’t know. You tell me, buddy,” Cal sighed. “You tell me.”
Cal rounded a bend in the passageway and the floor went paff beneath his foot. Looking down, he saw that the tiles had been replaced by a patterned carpet. The pattern was made up of two very similar grays, set out in little triangles, but it was more welcoming than the tiles, at least. Monsters didn’t have carpets, did they? Even thin, corporate-looking carpets like this one.
No. Monsters didn’t have carpets, Cal was sure of it. Which meant that, given he was now standing with both feet on a carpet, his chances of being eaten alive had just dropped quite substantially.
A few dozen feet further along the corridor, the walls became lined with racks of empty wooden shelves. Cal ran a gloved hand across the top of one, and it came back thick with dust. He gave it an experimental sniff, accidentally inhaled, and sneezed eight times in rapid succession.
Shh.
The sound came from both directions along the passageway, a short sharp shushing that wasn’t much quieter than his sneezing had been.
Splurt adjusted the angle of the torch so the beam cut through the darkness ahead. More shelves were revealed, presumably all with more dust on them. Beyond that, the light fell away into darkness.
“Hello?” Cal called. His voice rebounded along the passageway.
Shhh, came the reply, more insistent this time.
Somewhere beyond the torch’s reach, something squeaked. It was a rhythmic sort of sound, like a gate swinging back and forth, back and forth on rusted hinges.
Eerk. Eerk. Eerk.
Splurt drew closer to Cal’s cheek, his surface rippling in time with the crashing of Cal’s heart. Something was up there somewhere. Something loomed ahead of him in the dark.
Thankfully, he’d remembered to take a blaster pistol. He was rarely allowed to carry one, but as the planet had seemed to be nothing but rocks, Loren and Mech had eventually relented and let him take one, on the basis that there was very little damage he could do.
He’d chosen a chunky looking silver one with hologrammatic sights and a butt that molded itself to the user’s grip. It could stop a Thrynock at fifty paces, Mech had told him, but since Cal had no idea what a Thrynock was, or how difficult they were to stop, he didn’t find the comparison particularly useful.
Whatever, he was glad he’d brought it. He could feel its reassuring weight tucked into his leg holster, just waiting to be drawn should any crazy shizznod come leaping at him out of the shadows.
“Hello?” he tried again, lowering his voice to a stage whisper.
There was no shushing this time, just the steady eerk-eerk-eerk of squeaky metal coming from somewhere up ahead.
Without another word, he pressed on, walking as quietly and sticking as close to the shelves as he could in an attempt to avoid detection.
Obviously, the sneezing fit and his shouting, “Hello!” probably meant he had already been detected, but there was no point making it worse.
He had been walking for three or four minutes before he noticed there were no more walls. Instead, there were only shelves in every direction, set out like rows of dominoes waiting to be toppled over.
Ahead of him, shelves.
Behind him, shelves.
Left and right? Shelves and shelves. Lots of shelves. So many shelves, stretching all the way to the edge of the torch’s narrow cone of light, then onward into the darkness beyond it.
So many shelves. All of them empty.
Eerk. Eerk. Eerk.
It was impossible to pinpoint the source of the squeaking. It whistled and creaked between the freestanding shelving units, echoing in a hundred-thousand strong chorus as it bounced off their dust-covered surfaces.
His torch chose that moment to flicker, and blackness rushed in to fill the void it left.
To his relief, the light returned just a split-second later, albeit a little thinner and weaker than before. Cal tapped it gently. He wasn’t really sure why, since it was already back on. There was a sense of admonishment about it, as if he was telling the torch not to do anything so silly again.
And then he pressed on, winding his way through the maze of shelving, partly hoping to find the source of the squeaking, but partly praying he never did. There was something about it that made him deeply uneasy and caused the hairs on the back of his neck to stand on end. Or, it would have, had Splurt not been draped across the area, pinning the hairs down.
He heard the whispering a few minutes later. At first, he’d thought it was someone whispering to him, specifically. After standing to listen for a while, though, he’d worked out that what he was hearing was a lot of people all whispering at once, and he was fairly sure that none of it was aimed at him in particular.
Because the hairs on the back of his neck were currently inoperable, the hairs on his arms took it upon themselves to stand upright, instead. Cal suddenly felt very hot inside his suit as the whispers rose and the creaking eerked from somewhere around him. On the left, maybe? The right? Above him? Below?
Probably not below, he thought. Below made no sense. It could be coming from anywhere else, though, and the not-knowing was playing havoc with his nerves.
“I, uh, I fell down a hole,” he announced.
The whispering abated, momentarily.
Shh. The air itself seemed to urge him to be silent. Cal found himself complying and dropped his voice until it, too, was just a whisper.
“I fell down a hole. I’m not supposed to be here,” he said.
But the only reply was the chorus of murmurs from somewhere not far away, and the slow, laborious eerk of metal on metal.
Loren’s voice peaked the limits of the audio feed, making the inside of Mech’s head crackle uncomfortably.
“What do you mean he’s gone?” she demanded. “How can he be gone? Gone where?”
“Did you kill him, sir?” asked Kevin, joining in the conversation. “Because I’ve always thought it was only a matter of time.”
“What? No! I didn’t kill him. He fell down a hole,” said Mech. “You heard him, right? You heard him say, ‘I fell down a big hole.’”
“No, I lost his audio,” Loren said. “And what do you mean he fell down a big hole? What big hole?”
“You know. Just, like
, a big hole,” said Mech. “Like a standard hole, only bigger.”
“Then get him out!” Loren barked. “Get him out of the big hole.”
Mech scratched the part of his face that wasn’t made of metal. “Uh, yeah. About that,” he said. He slammed a foot down on the spot where the hole had been. The ground clanged faintly. “It’s closed.”
Loren tried to process this, but failed.
“Closed? What do you mean it’s closed?”
Mech scowled. “Look, I’m only saying what I saw. Seems to me like the things I’m saying, they’re pretty clear. There was a big motherfonking hole. Cal fell in the big motherfonking hole. The big motherfonking hole closed. Tell me what, in any of that, is open to interpretation?”
“And we’re absolutely sure you didn’t kill him?” asked Kevin.
They both ignored him.
“Details, Mech, details,” said Loren. “Why did the hole open? Where did it go? Is he in danger? Is he hurt?”
Mech began to list his responses on his fingers. “Uh, I have no idea. I got no clue. Very possibly. And no. At least, not when I last spoke to him. The comms cut off when the hole closed.”
“He has Splurt, right?” said Loren.
“He’s got Splurt and the Sentience,” Mech said. “Even if he didn’t, the guy can survive anything. He’s like a fonking gronkroach, only without the personality. We both know he’s gonna be just fine. He’ll turn up when we least want him to. Which is potentially anytime.”
“I should come out. We should look for him,” Loren said.
“Except he took the last working suit, and this atmosphere will kill you in seconds,” Mech said. “And not in a way you’d enjoy.”
He kicked away a boulder that was jammed against the front of the hull, launching it toward the horizon. “We stick to the plan and get the ship back on its feet. Mark my words, Cal will turn up before we’re finished.”
He adjusted his dial, diverting more of his battery power to his hydraulics. His voice became flatter and slower, the light dulling behind his eyes. “Until then, him on him own.”
Fifteen
Space Team- The Collected Adventures 4 Page 44