“It looks dead,” said Loren. She studied the spinning craft, doing her best to ignore Splurt who sat pulsating gently on the floor beside her chair, gazing up at her. “I mean, there are lights on, but… I don’t know. There’s something about it.”
“What kind of ship even is that?” asked Miz, slouching in her seat. “It’s so…”
“Lame,” said Tyrra from the guest chairs along the rear bulkhead.
“Totally lame,” Miz confirmed. “It’s so fat and ugly.”
“Hey now, it’s what’s inside that counts,” Cal told her. “Kevin, any luck finding out what’s inside that thing?”
“Still running analysis on the signal, sir. No immediate species matches found.”
Mech tapped some controls on his console and a lot of symbols, numbers, and other information appeared overlaid on the display. “I found something interesting,” he said. A series of wavy green lines materialized behind the ship and led off-screen. “I’m picking up warp emissions.”
Cal nodded encouragingly. “Right…” he said, but Mech didn’t add anything more. “Oh. Was that the interesting part? You should’ve made that clearer. Next time, maybe wink and point.”
“It means they suddenly came out of warp at the exact same place as we did,” said Loren. She looked at Mech. “That can’t be a coincidence, can it?”
“I doubt it. Must’ve been some kind of…” He shot Cal a sideways glance and stiffened slightly. “Space disruption.”
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Cal couldn’t keep the smile from his face. “Now you’re getting the hang of it,” he said. “So, it’s like a disruption… but in space. A space disruption.”
Mech shook his head. “That’s a term. It’s a known term. I ain’t just putting the word ‘space’ in front of anything. It’s a fonking space disruption.”
“Oh. Oh, gotcha,” said Cal. “You mean a ‘space disruption’ is an actual term? It’s an actual thing?”
“Exactly,” Mech confirmed.
“So, it’s like a space space disruption?”
From the back of the room, Tyrra voiced a thought that wasn’t a million miles away from the one in Mech’s head. “Can I stab him again?”
“Maybe later,” said Miz, not looking up from where she was fiddling with her claws.
“The point is, could be that they’re as fonked as we are,” Mech said.
Loren gestured to the screen. “Looking at those warp emissions, I’d say they’re a few weeks old at least,” she said. “See the fragmentation?”
Cal saw only wavy green lines, but nodded anyway. “Yep. Definitely old. That’s not even a question at this point. But we know there’s someone aboard. Kevin, any—”
“Yes, sir. I think I may have found a match for the life-sign I’m tracking aboard the other ship,” said Kevin. “Would you like me to put it on screen?”
“Go for it,” said Cal. “Let’s see who we’re dealing with.”
The right-hand third of the screen change to show a stock image of a spindly green thing with eight evenly spaced limbs.
Cal looked to the ceiling.
“That’s a houseplant,” he said, after a pause.
“What is, sir?” asked Kevin.
“That. The picture on screen. It’s a houseplant.”
There was a lengthy silence, during which Cal was almost certain he heard the sound of a page being turned over and then back again.
“Is it?” asked Kevin. “How can you be so sure, sir?”
“Because I’m looking at it. It’s in a pot. It has foliage. It’s a plant,” said Cal.
There was another slightly shorter pause.
“Perhaps we should send a rescue party anyway, sir,” Kevin suggested. “You know, just in case?”
“It’s a plant, Kevin. Granted, it’s a nice plant, but we’re not launching a rescue mission to…” Cal said, then a thought struck him. “Although, it would mean we’d get to leave the ship for a while. It’d be good to get out and stretch the old space legs.”
“And maybe their warp disk is in better condition than ours,” said Loren.
“And that, yes,” Cal agreed. “We picked up new space suits before we set off, right?”
“We did,” Loren confirmed. “We have a full complement. Try not to destroy them all this time.”
“No promises, but I’ll do my best,” said Cal. He slapped his hands on his thighs, then jumped to his feet. “OK, then. We have a plan. Let’s do this.”
He turned on his heels and pointed dramatically to the door. “Mech, suit up. We’re mounting a rescue mission!”
A moment of confused silence followed.
“I don’t need to suit up,” Mech said.
Cal sighed and lowered his arm. “No, I know. I was using dramatic license. I just thought ‘Mech, suit up, we’re mounting a rescue mission,’ would make it sound more exciting than, ‘Let’s go and pick up a houseplant.’”
“Oh,” said Mech. “Did it work?”
“Not really,” Cal admitted, wrinkling his nose. He made a much less enthusiastic gesture in the direction of the door. “So, we going to do this thing, or not?”
“Be careful,” said Loren, as Cal and Mech made for the door.
Cal stopped, turned, and fired off both fingerguns in her direction. “Aren’t I always?”
“No.”
“No, you’re right. I guess that’s fair,” Cal conceded. “But that’s because I haven’t had you waiting for me until now.”
There was a retching sound as Miz threw up in her mouth. She held Cal’s gaze as she swallowed it back down.
“Thank you for that,” Cal told her. He rapped the back of his hand against Mech’s metal chest. “Come on, big guy, let’s go.”
As Cal passed her, Tyrra jumped up from her chair, swung with her little hammer, and cracked him across the back of the head, sending him staggering into the corridor.
“Ow! What the fonk?”
“Ha!” Tyrra ejected. She grinned proudly, showing off all her teeth as she retook her seat. “Bested!”
Cal’s voice echoed inside his helmet as he leaned through the inner airlock of the rotating ship and looked both ways along a wide, clinically bare corridor.
“Yoo-hoo?” he called. “Anyone home?”
“We already know there ain’t no one here,” Mech grunted, shoving him into the corridor. “Get out there.”
Cal stumbled in his oversized space suit until he bumped into the wall opposite the airlock. He tried to turn and give Mech the finger, but both those movements proved difficult in the cumbersome suit, and by the time he’d successfully maneuvered himself around, Mech was already marching off along the corridor.
“Wait for me,” Cal protested, shambling after him. “That’s an order.”
“How about you just keep up?” Mech suggested, not slowing.
Cal did his best, but it felt as if someone had cranked the ship’s gravity up a couple of notches too far, and he quickly started to sweat inside the suit.
“Man, I feel heavy,” he wheezed.
“Eight pounds in six days,” Mech reminded him.
“Travel weight!” Cal countered. “It’ll fall right out of me. And anyway, I don’t mean like that. I mean the gravity feels stronger.”
“It’s up maybe fifteen percent,” Mech confirmed.
“Well, that’s just mean,” Cal muttered, as he fell into step behind Mech.
“You know they didn’t turn it up just to annoy you, right?” Mech asked him. “You do understand that whoever’s ship this is must live on a planet whose gravity is fifteen percent higher than the one you’re used to?”
“Of course I knew that,” Cal lied. “Although, they might have done it to annoy—”
“Shh. Quiet,” Mech hissed.
Cal’s eyes darted along the corridor ahead of them. “Why? What is it?”
“Nothing,” said Mech. “I just want you to stop talking.”
“OK, that was mean,” Cal sa
id.
Mech smirked. “Yeah. That was mean.”
They continued along the corridor. It was pretty uninteresting, as corridors went. It had walls, a floor, a ceiling – the usual set-up. There were some symbols stenciled here and there on the bulkheads, but Cal’s visual translation chip didn’t seem to have much interest in deciphering them, and he was too busy trying to keep up with Mech to waste too much time on them.
“I like the bloops,” Cal said.
Mech frowned back at him. “What?”
“The bloops,” Cal replied. He raised a finger and waited, then said, “Bloop,” in time with a steady chime being emitted by the ship. “It’s like on Star Trek. They had bloops. And, like, a woo-woo-woo noise. Sometimes, if you were lucky, a bting.”
He counted in his head, then said, “Bloop,” in time with the chime again. “We should get bloops for our ship.”
Mech stopped walking and just stared down at him for quite a long time.
“Bloop,” said Cal, after a while.
“I hate you,” Mech told him, then he turned and continued along the corridor, tapping at the sensor panel on his arm.
“Is there air in here?” Cal asked. “Can I breathe?”
Mech check the sensor display. “Well, the atmosphere won’t kill you.”
Cal reached for the clips on the base of his helmet.
“But it will knock you unconscious.”
Cal hesitated. “Oh.”
“And give you extensive brain damage.”
Cal decided to leave the headpiece where it was for now, even though it had started to steam up on the inside, turning the corridor blurry and indistinct.
“Look at this,” said Mech, stopping by a screen that was fixed to the wall.
Cal peered through the visor-fog at the screen. It was a nice screen, from what he could see of it. Smooth. Curved. Bezel-less. Probably Ultra HD, with killer surround sound. The perfect TV, aside from one tiny detail.
“Someone smashed it to pieces,” said Mech. “There’s a big hole in the middle of the screen.”
“Damn, that’s a shame. We could’ve set that up in my room,” Cal said. “I could’ve watched my Murder, She Wrote box-set that someone—naming no names, but it’s you, Mech—won’t let me watch on the main screen.”
“I watched forty-seven motherfonking episodes,” Mech protested.
“Exactly. We’ve barely scratched the surface.”
“Check this out,” said Mech, ignoring him. On the floor below the screen was a spattering of dark green spots. “Looks like dried blood.”
“Space blood,” Cal corrected. “Normal blood’s red.”
“There’s another one,” Mech said, continuing along the corridor in the direction of a second screen. At first, it seemed to be intact, but as they drew closer, Cal saw that this one had been destroyed just like the first.
“What a waste,” Cal said, looking from one TV to the other. “They’ve got to be fifty inches. Maybe fifty-five. Imagine Lansbury on one of those.”
“Why are they broken?” Mech wondered. He gestured to the wall below the second TV, and to the streaks of green that had dried onto the metal. “What the hell happened?”
Cal thought for a moment, then tried to click his fingers. The space suit gloves paffed disappointingly. “I got it. Maybe they fell off.”
Mech looked from Cal to the screen and back again. “What?”
“Maybe they fell off the wall,” Cal explained. He mimed the TV falling off the wall, and added a crash sound effect for good measure. “Kpshhk! You know?”
“So… you’re saying they fell off the wall, smashed, then someone put them back on the wall all broken and in pieces?” said Mech. “That’s what you think happened?”
Cal had to admit it did sound a little unlikely, but he doubled down, regardless.
“Rule out the impossible and whatever’s left, however improbable, must be what happened,” Cal announced grandly. “You know who said that, Mech?”
“No.”
“Well, neither do I,” Cal admitted. He patted Mech on the chest. “That’s something fun for you to find out.”
They continued along the corridor, Mech scanning for information, Cal occasionally saying, “Bloop,” in a gratingly high voice.
“It’s cold,” said Mech, consulting his scanner. “Real cold.”
“I’d say I’d give you my jacket, but I don’t think it’d fit,” Cal said. “Also, the whole unconsciousness and brain damage thing is pretty unappealing.”
“I ain’t saying I’m cold, I’m just saying the ship’s cold. I think life support might be failing. That don’t bode well for the condition of the warp disk.”
“That’s just what I was thinking,” said Cal. He glanced at another broken screen as they passed it, and noted another spray of space blood on the wall and floor beneath it. “Still, this is nice, isn’t it?”
“What is?” asked Mech.
“This. Us. Getting out, doing guy stuff. It’s nice. We should do it more often.”
“We definitely should not,” Mech countered, visibly shuddering at the very thought.
They plodded on toward where the corridor became a T-junction ahead.
“So, what do we think happened?” Cal wondered. “Did everyone abandon ship?”
Mech shrugged noisily. “Fonked if I know. Maybe. Or maybe we’ll turn this corner and find their bodies all piled up,” he said.
“Why would they be dead?” Cal asked. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Wait, do you think they were all murdered?”
He gasped.
“What if whatever killed them is still here?”
“Unless it was the fonking houseplant, then it ain’t here,” Mech said.
“Right. Right,” Cal said, relaxing a little. He stretched himself up so he could see above the fog that now completely covered the bottom half of the visor. “Where are we going, by the way? Do we even know?”
“Engine room,” said Mech.
“Right, but do we know where that is?”
“Yeah. Kevin ran a full diagnostic scan of the ship and found it in the hour it took you to put the suit on. I know where it is.”
“Good. Perfect,” said Cal. “We’ll salvage what we can of the warp disk, pick up the plant, then get out of here so I can get out of this suit. I forgot to go to the bathroom before we set off.”
Mech’s top half partially rotated so he could look back at Cal. “What do you mean you forgot? I specifically asked you if you needed to go to the bathroom.”
Cal blinked. “You did?”
“Yes! And you said no, and I asked if you were sure, and you said, ‘Jesus, Mech, I’m not a child. I know when I need to use the bathroom.’ You said those words.”
“Those actual words?” said Cal, staring blankly. He shook his head. “No. No, I don’t recall any of that.”
Mech muttered something uncomplimentary, but chose not to pursue that particular conversation any further.
“You ain’t seriously going to pick up the plant?” he asked instead.
Cal nodded. “Sure. I mean, I thought it’d be nice.”
“For who?”
“For Kevin. He seemed to really want us to get it,” Cal said.
“So? He’s an artificial intelligence. The fonk’s he going to do with a plant?”
“I don’t know. I guess I kind of feel sorry for the guy, you know? He’s got no one,” Cal said. “Miz has got Tyrra, I’ve got Splurt and Loren, you’ve got me. Who has Kevin got?”
“I got you?” Mech spat.
Cal rubbed a gloved hand across the cyborg’s back. “You bet you do, big guy,” he soothed. “Always.”
“Shut up.”
“Ah, come on now, Mech,” said Cal, grinning. “Don’t fight it. I know you feel it just like—”
Mech whirred insistently as he placed a metal finger to his lips. “Stop talking,” he whispered. “Listen.”
Cal listened.
“You hear that?”
Mech asked.
Cal listened again, then nodded slowly. “Yeah. You mean that breathing sound? Like… huuup. Huup?” He narrowed his eyes. “Wait.”
Mech watched with growing impatience as Cal exhaled and inhaled several times in turn.
“No, that’s me. I’m hearing myself. It’s the helmet,” he explained, pointing to his head in case Mech had forgotten what a helmet was. “It echoes.”
His voice took on a low, ominous tone. “I am your father,” he said, then his eyes widened and he smiled from ear to ear. “Ha! That’s actually awesome.”
Cal held a hand out to the cyborg. “Join me, Mech. Together, we can rule the galaxy as—”
“Will you shut the fonk up for one damn minute?” Mech hissed. “Listen.”
This time, Cal held his breath. He was convinced he could still hear the inner workings of his own head reverberating back to him from the glass of the helmet, but there was something else, too. Voices. High-pitched and screechy, although he couldn’t make out the words.
“There’s someone here,” Cal whispered.
“Sure sounds like it,” Mech agreed.
“I’m going to fonking kill Kevin when we get back,” Cal said. “He said there was no one on the ship.”
Mech gestured to his forearm scanner. “Ain’t Kevin’s fault for once. Look.”
Cal looked.
“It’s your arm. What am I supposed to be looking at?” he asked, after a few seconds of staring blankly.
“I ain’t getting any life signs, either,” Mech said. “Just you and me.”
Cal gave a little gasp. “So… what are you saying?” he asked, searching Mech’s face. “The plant died?”
“No! I didn’t count the fonking plant!” Mech snapped. “I’m saying that whoever’s here, they ain’t registering as life signs.”
“Oh, shizz,” Cal whispered. “What if it’s space ghosts?”
Mech regarded him with barely concealed contempt, then rotated his top half to face front and set off toward the T-junction.
“Or space vampires,” Cal suggested, hurrying to keep up. “Space zombies? They’re real, right? We actually saw those before! We know they’re a thing!”
Mech slowed as he approached the corner, his footsteps becoming a series of solid thuds rather than the usual rattling clanks. Cal stuck close behind him, using the cyborg’s towering metal frame as cover.
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