Space Team- The Collected Adventures 4

by Barry J. Hutchison

  A tiny, panicked voice at the back of his brain objected strenuously, but he kicked it into submission.

  He was going to tell her. He was fonking well going to tell her! Right here, right now.

  He inhaled. His lips parted. His tongue went low, forming the letter “I,” then moved to between his teeth as it began to form the letter “L.”

  He was doing it! He was actually doing it. He was actually saying it!

  And then, with crushing inevitability, Kevin went and ruined everything.

  “Apologies for the intrusion, sir,” he said, cutting Cal off.

  Cal didn’t take his eyes off Loren’s. “What is it, Kevin?”

  “You asked me to let you know if something was happening with young miss Tyrra.”

  “And is something happening?” Cal asked.

  “No, sir.”

  Cal tried not to show his irritation, but didn’t make a great job of it. “Right. Good. Then why the fonk are you—?”

  “It’s the Symmorium Sentience, sir,” said Kevin, interrupting again. “It’s acting rather peculiar.”

  Reluctantly, Cal tore his eyes from Loren and looked up. “In what way?”

  “I rather think you should come see for yourself, sir,” Kevin said.

  Beside Cal, Splurt collapsed back into pancake batter. Cal felt a moment of harsh, biting emptiness as Loren withdrew her hand and stood up. “Come on,” she said. “We’d better go check it out.”

  “Yeah,” Cal sighed. The bench scraped on the floor as he pushed it back and stood. “I guess we’d better.”

  They arrived in the medical bay to find the Symmorium Sentience propped up in the same chair as before, its glassy surface still dormant and dark. Miz sat in a chair beside the mostly motionless Tyrra, one of the girl’s hands clasped between both of her own.

  “She OK?” Loren asked.

  Miz gave a non-committal sort of shrug, then glanced meaningfully to Cal. Loren made a weighing motion and shrugged back.

  Cal, meanwhile, was squatting by the Sentience, peering into its darkened heart. “OK, so… It’s not doing anything,” he said, looking to the ceiling. “What’s the problem, Kevin?”

  “Give it a moment, sir,” said Kevin.

  They gave it a moment.

  “It’s still not doing anything,” Cal pointed out.

  “Hold on, sir. I’m sure it’ll do it again any moment now.”

  They waited.

  “Any moment now,” said Kevin.

  “Kevin,” Cal groaned.

  “Nnnnow. Wait. Nnn—”

  The Sentience vibrated gently in the chair.

  “There! Did you see that, sir?” Kevin asked. “It went bzzzt.”

  Cal sighed and stood up. “That was the chair.”

  It took a moment for Kevin to answer. “Sorry, sir? It was the…?”

  “The chair, Kevin,” said Cal. “We’re moving. The chair shook. It rattled the Sentience. That’s what made the noise.”

  “I don’t think so, sir,” said Kevin.

  “Well, I just watched it happening from six inches away, so…”

  “I watched it, too, sir,” said Kevin.

  “Yes, but from up there, I’m right down… Fine. Look.”

  Cal squatted and placed the fingers of one hand around the stem of the chair, but not quite touching it. “Watch.”

  They waited.

  And waited.

  When the Sentience finally vibrated, Cal quickly grabbed the upright part of the chair. The sound stopped immediately. He raised his eyes accusingly to the ceiling.

  “See? It’s the chair.”

  “Well, I never,” said Kevin. “In that case, my apologies for the interruption. You should go back and continue your meal. Pretend I didn’t say anything.”

  “Thanks,” Cal grunted.

  “I really am most dreadfully sorry, sir.”

  “It’s fine,” said Cal, with an expression and tone that completely contradicted the words coming out of his mouth.

  “Gracious as always, sir. Also, on a side note,” said Kevin. “We’ll be arriving in forty-seven seconds.”

  “What?!” Loren spluttered.

  “Arriving where? At the thing?” asked Cal, suddenly alert. “Arriving at the thing? At the place?”

  Loren was too busy running to answer.

  “Miz, strap yourself and Tyrra in. Now!” she urged.

  Miz, for once, didn’t waste time arguing.

  Loren skidded out of the room and went powering along the corridor, bellowing at Mech as she reached the bridge.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?!”

  Mech looked up from his console. It was mostly covered by the Blufflebag, which he’d been making some tiny and largely pointless alterations to.

  “Huh?” he asked, then he pushed the space bagpipes aside enough to let him see the console screen. The reddish-brown skin on his face paled. “Oh, shizz.”

  “Twenty-three seconds until we arrive,” Kevin announced.

  “Arrive where? At the planet? Surely not at the planet?” asked Cal, who still hadn’t been given an answer. He stumbled onto the bridge half a dozen paces behind Loren and rushed to his chair. “Tell me we’re not arriving at the fonking planet in twenty-three seconds?”

  “Fifteen seconds, sir,” Kevin corrected.

  “Why didn’t you warn me?” Loren barked, strapping herself into her chair and toggling what seemed to Cal to be all the switches on her console.

  “I did, ma’am,” Kevin reminded her. “In the medical bay.”

  “Why didn’t you warn me earlier?”

  “Six seconds.”

  “Aw, fonk,” Mech groaned, activating his magnetic feet and bracing himself against the wall as, behind him, Cal furiously fiddled with his seat belt.

  “Everybody hold on!” Loren cried.

  “Two… One,” said Kevin.

  Loren jammed her feet and hands on several different parts of her control terminal all at the same time, while simultaneously hissing through her teeth, screwing her eyes up until they were almost shut, and offering up a prayer to Alstrong, the God of Space Flight and, she hoped, of Not Crashing into Things.

  Nothing happened. The controls didn’t respond. The screen continued to show the streaking warp effect that they all knew and, with the exception of Cal, loved.

  They weren’t stopping! Alstrong had ignored her prayers, the make-believe shizznod. Loren’s heart leaped into her throat as she braced herself for the end.

  From the ceiling, Kevin gave a little snigger.

  Slowly—ever so slowly—all three occupants of the bridge looked up.

  “Just my little joke, ma’am,” said Kevin, struggling to hold it together. “Oh, you should see your faces. They’re priceless.”

  “You idiot!” Loren cried.

  “Jesus, Kevin!”

  “But… the screen,” said Mech, looking down at his console. “It was on my fonking screen.”

  “My doing, sir!” Kevin laughed. “Rather a clever touch, I thought. Here, allow me to fix it.”

  The data on the console screen changed. Mech blinked.

  “Have you fixed it?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s just it says we arrive in eight seconds,” Mech said.

  Kevin hesitated for exactly one-eighth of this time. “Does it, sir? Oh. In all the excitement, I forgot the actual arrival was coming up in just a few—”

  Loren hit the brakes. Everything that wasn’t fastened down, as well as several things that were, flew forward and thumped, smashed, or in Splurt’s case, splatted against the closest available forward-facing wall.

  Cal’s insides became spaghetti. This nicely complimented his brain, which temporarily took on the consistency of homemade pasta sauce with extra onions and garlic. His skeleton, which had seemed perfectly content to remain wrapped in muscle and skin throughout most of his life, suddenly made a break for freedom. He felt every inch of it as it tried to vacate his body thro
ugh the front, taking full custody of his teeth as well.

  Cal imagined his eyes boinging out from his head, like Daffy Duck when he saw an attractive lady duck, unaware that it was really just a dragged-up Bugs Bunny winking coquettishly.

  At least, he hoped he imagined it. His brain, in between gently simmering and lightly seasoning itself with basil, tried very hard to convince him he was imagining it, certainly.

  And then, every terrible thing that had been happening to him happened again, only harder and in the opposite direction.

  He saw his ears, tasted his feet, and inhaled his own face, all at the same time. His skeleton stormed back in, slammed the door, then raced up the stairs to its room, screaming about how it hated his guts.

  Metaphorically.

  There was a moment that Cal would later come to think of as ‘The Great Jiggling,’ and then the Currently Untitled hammered to a stop just a few hundred miles above the glowing blue atmosphere of a planet that looked to be made entirely of salad.

  “You did it!” Cal wheezed. He looked around the bridge. “Did she do it?”

  “Not yet,” Loren hissed, still wrestling with the controls.

  The problem, Cal realized, was thus: They were still moving.

  Specifically, they were still moving in the direction of the planet below. And, while they were no longer traveling at warp speed, they were still moving really quite fast. Too fast, one might say, as the atmosphere came rushing toward them with no signs of slowing down.

  Cal wriggled upright. “You should probably stop now,” he suggested. “Loren? You should probably stop.”

  “Trying!” she retorted. The yoke, throttle, and various braking mechanisms all shuddered and shook. The atmosphere was almost on them now, too close, too fast.

  Loren groaned. “Fonking Alstrong,” she spat, and then the Currently Untitled smashed into the atmosphere at an unfortunate angle, and ignited into a tumbling ball of fire.

  Twenty-Five

  As the Currently Untitled plunged in a spinning, screaming dive toward the surface of the planet below, a line from a song popped unbidden into Cal’s head. The line in question came from the fourth verse of the 1989 single, ‘Jesus is My Spaceship (Let’s Ride Him Through the Stars)’ by German Christian Rock act, Klaus Hugen, and went like this:

  When flying in the Jesus-ship, you’ll laugh, you’ll love, you’ll cry,

  But don’t go crashing to the ground, unless thou wish to die!

  Sure, some of that was guesswork on Cal’s part, thanks to Klaus Hugen’s mostly impenetrable German accent, but that was the general thrust of it. Crashing was bad. Crashing was to be avoided, even if you were doing so in a spaceship that was, for reasons never fully explained, made out of Jesus.

  Cal didn’t want to crash. He didn’t want to die.

  This was actually quite reassuring. He hadn’t exactly been feeling himself lately, and the whole evil version of himself murdering his way around the galaxy thing had been weighing heavily on his shoulders. It was nice to know, then, that despite all that, he very much did not want to go smashing into the planet below at blisteringly high speeds.

  Not that he had a lot of say in the matter.

  “Controls unresponsive!” Loren yelped. She glanced to the ceiling—a final desperate gambit. “Kevin, can you do something?!”

  A trumpet arrangement of traditional Spanish folk song, ‘La Cucaracha,’ came blasting from the speakers.

  “Something useful!”

  The music stopped as quickly as it had started. Kevin, it seemed, had nothing more to offer.

  The planet that was rushing up on them was lush and green as far the eye could see. Considering they could see roughly one full third of its surface, this was a lot of foliage.

  “Damn. This one actually looks pretty nice,” Cal muttered.

  And it did. Vast areas of it looked like a tropical rainforest, with sunlight dappling the canopy. It was probably full of weird but delicious alien fruit. Maybe some cute monkeys with four tails and a big face.

  Yes. Yes, he’d have very much liked to have seen that.

  “Fire the front thrusters,” Mech barked.

  “I’ve already fired them,” Loren replied, raising her voice to be heard over the increasingly high-pitched whine of their descent.

  “You have?” asked Mech. “Both of them?”

  “Both of them!”

  Mech tutted. “Shizz.”

  “What if we fired all guns forward?” asked Cal. “Just, like, full cannons to the front. Would that help?”

  “It’d help kill everything in a two-hundred-mile radius directly below us,” said Mech. “Otherwise, no. Ain’t gonna help.”

  “Damn it,” Cal spat. He sat back and thought for a moment, then leaned forward suddenly. “Wait! Do we have a big parachute?”

  “No,” said Loren.

  “Can we make a big parachute?”

  Mech sighed. “Man, I ain’t gonna even dignify that with a response.”

  “I’m going to make one,” said Cal, unclipping his belt. “We can use a bedsheet.”

  “Wait, don’t!” Loren cried, but it was too late. Cal was torn off his feet and sent rocketing backward across the room. His scream echoed loudly around the bridge, less loudly as he went hurtling out into the corridor, then stopped abruptly when he hit the raised hatch at the back of the ship.

  The G-force of their descent kept him pinned there, arms wide, testicles AWOL, cheeks merrily exploring the insides of both ears.

  The medical bay was just a few feet ahead on the right. The door stood open, and if he concentrated, he could just make out the bottom of the bed through the swirling patterns of color that painted his eyeballs.

  Tyrra’s feet were there, twitching violently.

  She was going to be extinct, Cal realized with a start. Well, not her personally, but the Symmorium species. And also her personally, he supposed. She was the last of them.

  The Greyx, too. As far as they knew, Miz was the sole survivor of that proud, wet-nosed warrior race, and her odds of surviving the upcoming impact probably weren’t great. The same odds as any of them surviving, in fact.

  Without even trying, they were about to score themselves a double genocide.

  The colors swooshing around in Cal’s vision had become predominantly green. Almost exclusively green, in fact.

  Great. Now his eyes had broken.

  Jesus. What a day.

  He tried to blink the other colors back in, but his eyelids were pinned open. Cal had just resigned himself to the fact that the last few seconds of his life were going to be spent only seeing the color green when the Untitled suddenly decelerated.

  He took off like a missile, rocketing along the corridor and back toward the bridge. He blinked through eyes filled with tears, and gasped through a throat filled with tongue as he sailed through the door and hurtled, headfirst, toward the viewscreen.

  Cal stopped an inch from the screen, close enough to see the individual pixels of the ship’s display. He exhaled slowly, and watched his breath mist across the expanse of digital green that made up the entirety of his current worldview.

  He drifted gently, like a leaf on a breeze, and found himself back in his chair. A pressure held him down while he fastened his belt, then left him with the faintest whisper of relief.

  On the screen, a canopy of greens and yellows rolled by just below them. Far ahead, the lush jungle stretched all the way to the horizon. They all watched it in silence, no one—especially Cal—daring to speak.

  Of course, it didn’t last.

  “What the fonk just happened?” Cal asked, approximately four seconds later. “We stopped. How did we stop? Loren?”

  Loren shook her head. “Not me,” she said.

  “Going by the way you came flying through here then stopped in an eerie fonking green light, I’m gonna just go ahead and say the Sentience played some part in it,” Mech said.

  “I thought it was dormant?” said Loren.

>   Mech shrugged. “Unless we got something else aboard that emits magic green light, I’m sticking to my theory,” he said. He gestured to the screen. “Maybe being here is charging it up. Maybe this is all we had to do.”

  “You know this won’t be all we have to do, Mech,” Cal said. “When is it ever this easy?”

  Loren sat up, looking quite proud of herself. “Speaking of easy, check it out.”

  Part of the screen switched from showing the jungle to displaying a battle raging in space. “I did it. I came out of warp this side of the EDI and Zertex.”

  “Damned impressive, Loren,” Cal told her. “I mean, did it require divine intervention to stop us from smashing into the planet? Yes. Yes, it did. But, still. Good job.”

  “They ain’t following,” Mech announced, checking his console. “The ships up there, they ain’t coming. I don’t think they noticed us.”

  “Holy shizz, you mean it worked?” Cal blurted. He recovered quickly. “Not that I had any doubt, obviously.”

  “Obviously,” said Loren.

  “Where are we headed?” Cal asked.

  Loren waggled her various controls and shrugged. “No idea. I’m not flying the ship.”

  “Kevin? You flying?” Cal asked.

  “Not that I’m aware of, sir.”

  They watched the tops of the trees skim by beneath them. From above, it was impossible to tell how tall they were, only that their foliage was thick and their leaves were a wide variety of shapes and sizes.

  For a moment, Cal thought he saw something flitting from treetop to treetop, but then they were past it. God, he hoped this place didn’t have space squirrels. Those little fonks were vicious.

  “It’s so green,” Mech said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anywhere so green.”

  “Beats another desert planet,” Cal said. He watched, transfixed, as a flock of birds rose from the treetops ahead and took to the air. They each had four wings, two of which flapped furiously while the other set just coasted along, enjoying the ride.

  He liked their style.

  The treetops tilted and slid away as the Untitled turned. A clearing the size of a small Scottish island loomed ahead. The ship straightened and descended smoothly into the clearing, before plummeting the final twenty feet and landing with a teeth-jarring crunch.