“I should’ve brought a gun,” he muttered. “Why didn’t you let me bring a gun?”
“Because I didn’t want you accidentally shooting anything.”
“That never happens,” Cal protested.
Mech fired him a look.
“OK, hardly ever.”
They both listened to the voices. There were at least four of them. Two were high and screechy, the others a little less-so.
“Can you understand what they’re saying?” Cal whispered, looking up at Mech. The condensation inside the helmet gave the cyborg a hazy look, like he was the love interest in a movie from the 1950s.
“No, I ain’t getting a word of it,” Mech replied. “But we’re a long way out of Zertex space. Could be that it’s a language the chip ain’t encountered before.”
“Or maybe they’re talking in code so we just think that’s the case,” Cal suggested. “Try swapping every letter they say for the next letter of the alphabet and see if that works.”
“How the fonk am I supposed to—?”
Mech pinched the bridge of his nose, summoning the self-restraint required to ignore Cal’s suggestions. He pointed along one branch of the T-junction. “Look, the voices are that way. Right?”
“Left,” Cal corrected.
“What?”
“That’s left,” Cal said. He pointed in the opposite direction. “That’s right. Unless, wait, you’re facing me, so I guess that would mean that—”
“Shut the fonk up, you know what I meant! I swear, you do this deliberately,” Mech seethed.
“Do what deliberately?” asked Cal, looking genuinely bemused.
“The voices are that way,” Mech said, pointing. “The engine room is the other way. So, we go for the engine room, and leave whoever’s up there to do whatever they’re doing.”
“What if they need help?” Cal asked.
From the corridor on the left came the sound of uproarious high-pitched laughter.
“They sound like they need help?”
“I guess not,” Cal admitted. “So, voices that way, engine room that way. Got it.”
Mech set off in the direction of the engine room.
“Will I meet you back here?”
Mech stopped. “What? Why would I meet you here? We’re going together.”
“I thought you could go do the engine room stuff, and I could go get the plant,” Cal said. He gestured the other way along the T-junction. “I’m guessing it’s this way?”
Mech glowered at him. “Will you forget the motherfonking plant?”
“I’ll only get it if it’s easy,” Cal said. “I won’t take any stupid risks.”
“You’re already taking a stupid risk,” Mech pointed out. “You’re risking getting caught for a plant.”
“What can I say? It was a good-looking plant,” Cal said. “And besides, I’m not risking getting caught for a plant, I’m risking getting caught for Kevin. The guy literally lives on that ship all the time and has nothing of his own. It’ll be a nice gesture. And, with any luck, it’ll mean he has something to keep him occupied that doesn’t involve watching us all the time like a weird pervert.”
Mech said nothing. Cal made a clumsy thumb-jab back over his shoulder.
“So, are you going to tell me where it is, or should I go ask those guys?”
Mech stood motionless for a while as he considered the options. He could pick Cal up and bring him along, but then he’d have to listen to him the whole time. A few minutes of peace and quiet without him was actually pretty tempting.
He tapped something on his arm. The top half of Cal’s visor became a heads up display, filled with text, flashing icons, and a small map showing the T-junction and two blinking dots.
“Hey! Since when could it do this?” Cal asked, studying the display. It appeared to be coating the inside of the glass and yet simultaneously hovering a few feet ahead of him, projected into thin-air. He quickly found that it moved depending on where he was focusing, so that it was always in sight. Under normal circumstances, this would be incredibly useful. As it was, with the lower half of the visor now completely steamed up, it was a fonking nightmare.
“Since always,” said Mech. “The green dots are us. The arrow will take you to the plant.” He visibly flinched at that, like he still couldn’t believe it was actually happening. “Anything red is another life-sign that ain’t you or me.”
“Got it,” said Cal. “Green, red, follow the arrow. Easy.”
“Yeah. I hope so,” Mech grunted. He turned away, then turned back. “And stay out of trouble.”
Cal held his arms out at his sides. “Come on, Mech,” he said, grinning in what he thought was probably the cyborg’s direction. “What could possibly go wrong?”
Five
Cal fumbled his way along the wall using the HUD map to navigate his way through the corridors of the ship. He’d been walking—shuffling, really—for a few minutes now, and the voices were still ahead of him somewhere, growing slowly but steadily louder as he followed the arrow.
Occasionally, the ship would give off one of its regular bloops from somewhere right beside him, making him jump inside the suit, and forcing him to reconsider the idea of having them installed aboard the Currently Untitled.
Sure, they were fun, but how long would that last? He was pretty sure the novelty would wear off the first time they kept him awake all night. Maybe they could set them up for special occasions, like when they were in space battles, or for the moments building up to Loren’s next crash-landing. That could work.
Bloop.
Another of the fonkers went off near his head at the exact moment Cal’s hand touched the wall, making him eject a little shriek of fright.
No. They were a bad idea, he decided. In fact, if he never heard one again, it’d be too fonking soon.
He continued his clumsy sightless shuffle along the corridor, the arrow blinking in the visor. Visibility was down to maybe five percent now, he thought. He was aware that the lights were still on, and got a sense of the open passageway ahead of him, but beyond that he was pretty much blind.
Maybe he should take the helmet off. If he held his breath, he could probably whip the headpiece off, give the inside a wipe, then get it back on before his brain got too badly scrambled.
Unless he couldn’t. Unless he passed out the moment the thing was unclipped, and the insides of his head immediately turned to meringue. What then?
“Nothing good,” he reasoned, and he decided to persevere through the condensation fog for now.
The HUD map indicated a right-turn down a corridor ahead. Annoyingly, this was the same direction the voices were coming from, and the realization crept over Cal that the plant would almost inevitably turn out to be in the same room as whoever else was on the ship. This would be a problem. It was one thing to sneak around a spaceship to steal a houseplant from an empty room. It was quite another to steal one from a room filled with aliens.
He thought about turning back then. They could find Kevin another plant. They could find him any number of plants. There was no reason it had to be this specific one.
The arrow nagged at him.
Maybe he’d go just a little further, he thought. Maybe the plant and the people wouldn’t be in the same room, after all. Maybe he’d get lucky.
Yeah, right, he thought. Sure.
He crept on, taking his time, treading carefully. Whatever language the voices were speaking, the translation chip was having none of it. The words were a garbled string of syllables, grunts, and whistles, and not remotely like anything he’d heard before.
They seemed to be getting agitated, all talking over one another. It didn’t sound like an argument exactly, more like they were getting excited by something, and…
Wait.
Cal stopped and listened.
Were they… were the voices harmonizing?
He held his breath, ignored the sounds of his own head, and focused. He was pretty sure some of the words were
being repeated every so often. It was like…
“A chorus,” he whispered.
The voices weren’t talking, they were singing. They weren’t singing well—at least two of them were a little pitchy for Cal’s tastes—but they were definitely mangling the shizz out of some sort of melody.
It was kind of catchy, too. Cal found himself humming to it as he shuffled along the corridor in the direction of the sound, the arrow in his visor guiding him in the same direction. As he got closer, he could hear the plinking of some kind of musical instrument, he thought. A xylophone? Why the fonk would there be a xylophone aboard a spaceship?
Then again, why was there a houseplant? Wasn’t that equally as strange?
The arrow in his visor pointed to a room ahead on the right, and to the blinking red dot that lurked in there.
Cal hadn’t been expecting that. Sure, technically the plant qualified as a life form, but should it have a flashy light? Shouldn’t flashy lights—especially worrying-looking red ones—be reserved for things that were actually alive? Properly alive, with the ability to move around and eat things? That’s what he’d expect a red light to represent, and yet based on what the arrow was telling him, this red light represented a plastic pot, some lush green foliage, and the opportunity to not be spied on by an artificially intelligent Peeping Tom.
Cal fumbled along the wall until he found the door. The voices rang out from the room beyond.
Of course they fonking did.
If he cocked his head and squinted sideways through the misted-up visor, he could just make out a window in the door. He leaned in closer to try to peer through, but activated a sensor that made the door swish open.
He stood in the doorway for a moment, frantically waving his arms as he tried to stay upright, then he fell, face-first, into the room.
The voices continued. They had stopped singing now, he thought, and were talking again. There was still music behind them, though, and every so often someone would say something that made a lot of other people laugh and cheer.
A whole audience of people, in fact.
“Jesus Christ, it’s the TV,” Cal said, exhaling with relief. “They left the TV on.”
The process of picking himself up was a slow and clumsy one, made worse by a number of large, lumpy objects that lay discarded on the floor. He couldn’t make out what they were, but they seemed determined to trip him every time he tried to stand up.
Eventually, and with sweat cascading down his back, he finally made it to his feet. When he turned in the direction of the chittering voices, his suspicions were confirmed. Through the fogged-up helmet, he saw a blazing rectangle of moving color.
“No wonder there weren’t any life signs,” he muttered.
He found himself humming the song he’d heard earlier as he shuffled around the room, carefully waving his arms in front of him as he attempted to find the houseplant while simultaneously not tripping over any of the mess on the floor.
The HUD map proved next to useless. As soon as he’d entered the room the arrow had vanished, and the little green dot that was him had overlapped the little red dot that was the plant.
“Come on, where the fonk are you?” he muttered, sliding his feet across the floor and stopping whenever they bumped into anything. “I know you’re in here somewhere, you leafy little—”
Cal’s hand found something large and solid. Not a wall. Not exactly. But big. Bulky. He ran his hands over it, trying to feel it through the thick gloves.
“What the hell are you doing?” snapped a voice, and Cal noticed the second green dot on the HUD display.
“Mech? Oh, thank God,” said Cal, backing away. “I’m glad you’re here. I’m working blind.”
“What do you mean you’re…?”
Mech’s voice faded into silence.
“I’m steamed up,” Cal said, pointing to the visor. “And your stupid display blocks the only bit I can see through. I had to fumble my way here. But, good news, there’s no one here. It’s just the TV.”
“Uh-huh. So I see,” said Mech, flatly. “So, you ain’t looked around this room?”
“No,” said Cal. “I just told you, I can’t see.”
“You do know the condensation is on the outside of your helmet, right?”
Cal stared at Mech. Or, roughly in the direction of his voice, at least.
He wiped a glove across his helmet, clearing it.
“Son of a…”
Cal’s voice faded into the same silence as Mech’s had when he saw the expression on the cyborg’s face. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?” he asked. “Why do you look like that? Is there a problem? Is it my face? Is there something wrong with my face? How many questions do I have to ask before you answer me? One? Eight? Twelve?”
Mech didn’t reply. Instead, his arm whirred softly as he raised it and pointed at the room behind Cal.
Turning, the first thing Cal saw was the television. There were four figures on screen, two of them mostly human-looking, two of them very much not.
“Hey, puppets!” Cal said. “Look, Mech, it’s a couple of—oh good God, there are dead people on the floor.”
And there were. Twelve of them, to be precise. They were small and thin, with shriveled, prune-like skin, although some of that may have been a consequence of being quite so unequivocally dead.
Usually, when confronted with a dead body, Cal would run through what he considered to be his standard life-checking procedure. This involved gently but firmly kicking the corpse, saying, “Hello?” in a quizzical voice, then waiting anything from one to ten seconds before issuing the official diagnosis.
There was no need for any of this today, though. He felt comfortable calling this one based on looks alone.
“Why are they all folded up like that?” Cal wondered.
All twelve of the bodies were contorted into the same position—knees up their chests, arms wrapped around their shins. Most of them lay like that on the floor, either curled up on their sides, or balanced on their backs with their bended legs pointing upward.
One, however, was sitting upright. Like all the others, his mouth was curved into an excited smile, and his eyes were wide open and staring. Mech and Cal both followed his line of sight and stopped when it met the TV. On screen, the two kids were having a tug-of-war with the puppets. The laughter from the audience suggested this was hilarious, but all the corpses were taking the edge off it for Cal.
“They died watching the screen,” Mech said.
“But died of what?” Cal wondered. “What killed them? Obviously not the TV. TV is our friend. It wouldn’t hurt us.”
Mech’s arm emitted a series of low chimes as he ran a sensor sweep. “Beats me. Don’t look like the atmosphere was a problem for them, no sign of toxins, radiation poisoning, or disease,” he said. “Looks like maybe they starved or dehydrated watching the screen.”
He waited for Cal to respond. Cal, however, was fixated on the television. Those puppets looked fun. One was pink and furry, and covered in purple blotches. The other was Cookie Monster blue, with three horn-shaped appendages sticking out of his head that constantly emitted a stream of tiny bubbles.
“You hear what I said, man?” Mech asked, giving Cal a nudge.
“Huh?” asked Cal absent-mindedly.
“Will you quit watching the damn TV?” barked Mech, forcibly turning Cal by the shoulder. “Did you hear what I said?”
“Uh, yeah. Sure. Interesting stuff,” said Cal. His eyes crept back to the screen. “Maybe we should just watch it a little longer to see if it gives us any clues.”
Mech’s arm-cannon discharged. The TV exploded. Cal jumped back, shielding himself from the eruption of hot metal and space plastic.
“Jesus! What did you do that for?” he yelled, once the echo of the explosion had faded.
“Because I fonking hate puppets,” Mech told him.
“Well I don’t! I was watching that,” Cal protested.
“Yeah,” said Mech. He
flicked his eyes very deliberately to the bodies on the floor. “So were they, and look where that got them.”
“Come on, you don’t seriously think they died because of the TV,” said Cal. “That’s crazy talk, Mech. TV loves us. It’d never do anything to harm us.”
“Whatever. Not our problem,” Mech said. He gestured to the door. “Now come on, let’s get the hell out of here. I found us a working warp disk.”
“You did?” Cal performed a clumsy double-fingerguns which was severely hindered by the gloves of the suit. “Great job, Mech! Now, all we have to do is find Kevin’s plant and we can get back to the ship.”
“To hell with the fonking plant!” Mech grunted.
“Wow. You’re like the Scrooge of horticulture, you know that, Mech? And before you tell me you don’t understand the reference, just know that it’s a clever and devastating one, and let’s leave it at that,” Cal told him. He made a vague gesture around the room. “So how about you just shut up and help me find it? It should be around here somewhere.”
He and Mech both looked around the room, one of them far more enthusiastically than the other.
“See it anywhere?” Cal asked.
“No, I don’t. Obviously, it ain’t here. It must be some kind of sensor glitch.”
“It says we’re right on top of it,” Cal replied. “The flashy thing in my visor, I mean. It says it’s right here.”
He pointed to the floor at his feet and looked down, reconfirming the fact that there was definitely no houseplant there.
“Like I said, sensor glitch,” Mech told him. “It happens.”
“Wouldn’t that just affect one of us, though?” asked Cal. “If Kevin got it, and we’re both getting it, doesn’t that suggest that the plant’s somewhere in here?”
Mech couldn’t really argue with that, much as he would like to. “OK, fine. You’re right.”
“I am?!” Cal said. “Cool!”
“But it ain’t here,” Mech continued. “Like you said, we’re right on top of the signal, and there ain’t no damn houseplant to be found.”
Cal sighed. “No. No, I guess there isn’t. Shame. I really thought it’d be a nice thing to do for Kevin.”
Space Team- The Collected Adventures 4 Page 62