“Cal! Mech! Get up here!” barked Loren from up front. “There’s a fonking plant trying to wrap us up.”
Mech’s expression didn’t change. Cal mustered a small, slightly pathetic smile. “OK, reasonably unlikely,” he said.
Thirty seconds later, Cal stumbled onto the bridge, one leg still wedged inside his spacesuit. The screen was partly obscured by greenery, half-cutting off the view of the other ship, which now resembled some sort of fat, sprouting seed.
“Jesus, how big is that thing?” Cal wondered, hopping to his seat as he wrestled with the suit.
“Enormous, sir,” said Kevin.
“Rhetorical question,” Cal said, shooting the ceiling a dirty look. “I thought you said it was a houseplant?”
“I believe it was you who said that, sir,” Kevin reminded him. “Besides, I suppose it technically still could be, assuming one had a very large house.”
“Where’s Mech?” Loren demanded. “Did you get the warp disk?”
“Yeah. Turns out they had a spare,” Cal said. “We should really look into that.”
The ship shuddered as another vine latched onto it. Loren tapped a button on her console. “Mech, how long?”
“Gimme fifteen minutes,” crackled Mech’s voice over the intercom. “This shizz ain’t easy.”
Loren groaned. “OK. I’ll do my best.”
“Kevin, break out the guns,” Cal instructed. “Blow the ship to pieces.”
“This ship, sir?” asked Kevin.
“What? No! Not this ship,” said Cal, finally freeing himself from the suit. “The other ship.”
“Right, sir. Yes, it did seem rather an odd request,” Kevin replied. “However, I’m afraid I am unable to carry out your instructions on this occasion.”
“Why the hell not?”
“To do so would draw more power from our own ship than is currently available,” Kevin explained. “Ironically, firing on the other ship would only destroy ourselves.”
“Damn it,” said Cal, thudding his armrest with his fist.
“There’s a moral in there somewhere, sir,” said Kevin. “Just don’t ask me what it is.”
The ship creaked and groaned, and Cal found himself sucking down a deep breath. Another vine drew across the screen, completely obscuring their view.
“It can’t get in, can it?”
“Let’s hope not, sir,” said Kevin.
“This is all your fault!” Cal told him.
“My fault, sir? I don’t follow.”
“I was bringing it back for you!” Cal said. “That’s the only reason I went looking for the stupid plant.”
“For me, sir?” said Kevin. “What a kind gesture.”
The ship shuddered and let out a series of worrying-sounding cracks.
“Although, for future reference, next time gift vouchers will be fine.”
There was a swish as the door to the bridge opened. “You know that, like, plant thing’s wrapping around the ship?” Miz said as she entered. Tyrra followed at her heels, and Cal visibly flinched when he saw her.
“We noticed,” said Loren. “Everyone buckle up, I’m going to go to impulse power and try to shake it off.”
“You’d better do what she says,” Miz told Tyrra. “It’s bad enough when she can see what she’s doing.”
“You sure flying blind is the best idea, honey?” asked Cal, frantically scrabbling to pull on his belt. “Shouldn’t we wait for Mech to do the thing with the thing?”
“Mech, how long?” Loren asked.
“Twenty minutes,” came the reply through the console.
“Wait, you said fifteen minutes five minutes ago!” Loren pointed out.
“The warp disk’s the wrong size,” Mech explained. “It don’t fit in the housing. I’m gonna have to patch it together with relays and hope it don’t explode.”
“Don’t you dare blow us up, Mech!” Cal hollered. “That’s an order.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
There was a faint click and a high-pitched hum from the console. “Now, if you’ll excuse me,” said Mech, his voice a little faster and higher-pitched. “I must devote as much of my intellect as possible to the matter at hand.”
Loren flicked a series of switches, swiped a finger across a swipey thing, then gripped the yoke. “Looks like we don’t have a choice. Going to full impulse reverse… now.”
There was a sudden lurching movement that threw everyone back in their seats.
“OK, engine holding up,” said Loren, checking the readouts.
Cal glanced at Mizette. She rolled her eyes, gave a little shake of her head, then made a gesture that indicated Cal should say something.
“Uh, honey?” Cal ventured.
“Kind of busy here,” Loren replied.
“Sure. I can see that. It’s just… are you sure this is reverse?”
“What are you talking about, of course it’s…”
Loren studied the screen.
She eased off on the throttle, bringing the ship to a stop.
A few switch clicks later, everyone was jerked forward in their seats.
They were all kind enough not to pass comment on any of this.
Except Miz.
“So, what are the odds that we’re now going sideways?” she asked.
“We’re going backward,” Loren insisted.
There was another sudden jerk. It was accompanied by a series of creaks and groans and a worrying sort of bang from somewhere under the ship.
“Uh, looks like we’re not going anywhere,” Cal whispered. He wasn’t sure why he whispered, exactly, it just felt like a whispering sort of moment.
“Shizz,” Loren groaned. “I thought the vines would break off, but they’re holding. It’s trying to pull us back.”
“Slight problem, everyone,” Kevin announced.
Cal looked up. “What, you mean beyond…” he gestured extensively to the screen and the ship at large. “Everything?”
“Yes, a new one to add to the list, I’m afraid. You see, Physics is rather a funny thing.”
Cal, Loren, and—to a much lesser extent—Miz waited for more.
“Is it?” asked Cal eventually.
“What are you talking about, Kevin?” Loren demanded.
“Well, see, the thing is, ma’am, your attempts to break us free may have backfired somewhat,” Kevin continued.
They waited. Again, nothing.
“How, Kevin?” Cal asked. “How did it backfire?”
“I’d rather hoped you’d have worked it out by now, and I wouldn’t have to be the one to break it to you,” said Kevin. “Not to worry.”
He took a deep breath. Or made the sound of one, anyway.
“I won’t bore you with the science, sir. It’s all mass and weight and gravity and friction and what have you. Not your kind of thing at all,” Kevin said. “But the long and the short of it is, the vines attempted to pull us back.”
“Yes. We know,” said Loren.
“But they have nothing to pull against,” Kevin continued. “No anchor point, so to speak.”
“The ship,” Cal reminded him. “They’re coming from the other ship.”
“Oh, shizz,” Loren spat, her eyes suddenly wide and alert, her movements frantic across her controls.
“Yes, quite, ma’am. You see, while the plant may be in the ship, the ship is not attached to anything, per se. And so, as a result of Mistress Loren’s attempts at evasion, said ship is now hurtling toward our own.”
“It’s what?” Cal yelped.
“As I say, sir, Physics is a funny old thing.”
Cal ducked his head, trying to peer through any gaps in the vines, but the screen was wrapped too tight for him to see anything but foliage. “It’s going to hit us?”
“I’m rather afraid so, sir.”
“When?”
“I can’t be one hundred percent accurate, sir,” said Kevin. “Will an approximate estimate do?”
“Yes! Whatever!
When is it going to hit us?”
“Now, sir,” said Kevin, and the Untitled was rocked by a powerful impact that tried very hard to eject Cal’s insides onto the floor.
His head snapped forward. His arms and legs flew out in front of him, fingers and toes briefly meeting somewhere in the middle.
His eyes bulged. His heart momentarily stopped. For a terrifying half-second, he was sure he could see his own tongue extending out of his head like toffee, but then everything spun, the lights flickered, and he could see nothing but darkness.
Despite all that, the noise had been the worst part, he thought. All that other stuff had been thoroughly unpleasant, but there was something about the spaceship you were on making noises it wasn’t supposed to make while trillions of miles out into the endless void of space that really cut to the core, terror-wise.
The ear-splitting bang had been bad enough, but the weird squeaking noise, like two balloons being slowly rubbed together, had been worse. The succession of violent whipcrack sounds that had followed had been enough to turn Cal’s stomach, but it was the silence that came next that had turned nausea into a lingering sense of dread.
Still, panicking was going to get him nowhere.
“Is everyone OK?” he asked. “Loren? Miz? Splurt?” He hesitated. “Tyrra?”
“I’m fine,” Loren said, but there was just a whisper of pain in the words that told Cal this wasn’t entirely true. “Splurt’s OK, too.”
“How do you know?” Cal asked, trying but failing to see her through the darkness.
“He’s sitting on my head.”
“OK, good. Everyone else?”
“She is a bad pilot,” remarked Tyrra from the back.
“Ugh. I know, right? Didn’t I tell you?” Miz replied. “Like, way to go, Loren. I totally knew you were going to crash.”
“I didn’t crash,” Loren objected. “The other ship hit us.”
“But only because you made it,” Miz pointed out. “What, you’re not satisfied just crashing us into stuff, now you have to crash other stuff into us, too? Are you, like, trying to kill us all?”
A voice hollered through from somewhere out back. “Excuse me, might I enquire as to…?” it began, then: “One moment, it is probably best that I readjust for this.”
There was a pause, then a click, then another similar but different voice took over.
“What the fonk are you doing up there?” Mech demanded. “Are you trying to kill us all?”
“That’s what I said,” Miz called back.
“OK, OK, we need to get over it. It’s in the past,” Cal said. “We got hit. Not a lot we can do about that now. What’s the status, Kevin?”
The only reply was a faint buzzing from the ceiling. “Kevin, pal? You there?”
It soon became apparent that no, Kevin was not there.
“That’s worrying,” Cal said.
“Controls aren’t responding,” said Loren, toggling a few switches and jabbing forlornly at a screen. “It’s dead.”
“Mech, you’re our last hope here, pal,” Cal hollered, turning in his chair. The revolving motion was jerky and filled the bridge with the nerve-jangling screech of metal grinding against metal. “Jesus, that was horrible,” Cal muttered, then he went back to shouting in panic. “Mech? Can you fix it?”
“The whole damn ship is broken!” Mech spat.
“We know! The question was can you fix it?” Cal shouted back.
They all heard Mech muttering a string of what were probably obscenities.
“I’m gonna need Loren and Splurt,” he eventually said. “And a whole lot of motherfonking luck.”
The sound of Loren’s seat belt unclipping followed. She jumped to her feet, let out the tiniest whimper of pain, then called back to Mech.
“We’re coming.”
“Think you can manage to not crash into anything on the way?” Miz sneered.
“I’m sure I’ll be fine,” said Loren, navigating her way across the bridge in the dark.
There was a thud from the bulkhead wall beside the door as Loren walked into it.
“Way to go,” said Miz.
“Oh, shut up,” Loren told her, then she stumbled blindly into the corridor with Splurt, presumably, still perched on her head.
Once Loren had left, the bridge fell into an awkward, uneasy sort of silence, broken only by the creaking of the ship and the faint electronic buzz that may or may not have been Kevin.
“So,” said Cal, after the awkwardness of it all got too much for him to bear. “How’s everyone been?”
“We will die here,” said Tyrra. “We will all die here today.”
“Well somebody’s a real Negative Nancy,” said Cal. “And, might I say, has quite a lot to learn. We’re Space Team, kid. We don’t die.”
Cal thought about this.
“Well, I did once,” he said. “Maybe twice, I forget.”
“Like…” Miz began.
“And Miz died also. Yes. We die occasionally,” he said. “But we come back, so it works out fine.”
“Not this time,” said Tyrra. She sniffed the air. “Don’t you smell that?”
Cal held his hands up. “I was hoping you wouldn’t, but fine. I have to take responsibility for that,” he said. “That was some pretty intense stuff back there, and—”
“She’s right,” said Miz. “I smell it, too.”
“Again,” said Cal. “I apologize wholeheartedly for any distress—”
“Not that,” Miz barked. “The air. It’s different. Oxygen levels are, like, dropping or whatever. Life support systems must have failed.”
“Told you,” whispered Tyrra through the darkness. “We all die here today.”
Cal unclipped his belt and stood up. “No, we don’t,” he said. “I’ll go talk to Mech and see if we can hurry up the—”
He floated lazily into the air.
“Hey, who turned off the gravity?” he asked. “How am I supposed to get to the engine room if there’s no—”
He stopped talking and looked down. Something was touching his ankle. At first, he had a horrible suspicion that it was Tyrra about to stab him again, but then it snaked up his leg and tightened around his shin.
“What the fonk is this now?” he muttered, and then his leg was jerked, his body slammed into the floor, and he was dragged screaming across the bridge.
Eight
For more years than anyone could remember, the name Lyra Sherush had brought terror to all those who heard it. Her band of pirates had terrorized the sector, robbing those with things worth robbing, slave-trading those without.
Rumors whispered in back alleys and shady bars said she was a first cousin of King Anderle himself, feared high ruler of all the pirate clans. Whether this was true or not, nobody knew for sure—they certainly had no intentions of asking her—but Lyra’s temperament and her knack for mass-murder were enough to make most folks believe it.
According to legend, it had been Lyra Sherush who had led the attack on the Empress of Ko’theen, taking out a dozen escort ships, three hundred armed guards, and a number of small but aggressively protective pets before claiming the head of the Empress herself. One of the heads, anyway. The important one. The other, non-royal head she left alone, doomed forever to remember the events of that day, but now powerless to do anything about them but mourn.
The Great Siege of Karkaktoom, where four rival pirate clans had united under one flag in order to take down a benevolent god-like entity with golden flesh? That was Lyra, they said. And, while the siege had ultimately been unsuccessful, the relentless twelve-day onslaught had made Karkaktoom feel pretty damn unwelcome. As a result, she’d quickly fonked off elsewhere in the galaxy, causing an entire system that had grown dependent on her generous offerings to descend into chaos and civil war.
There were many other examples of a life badly lived. The Poktish Massacre. The Endless Fires of Flomus. The Creeping Stench of Hootus VI. Lyra Sherush was behind them all.
Sure, there wasn’t necessarily any evidence for any of it, but the dedicated news channels and daily update bulletins said she was behind it all, and that was proof enough for most.
And there was talk, of course. Hearsay. People passed things on, albeit quietly, and only after checking no one else was listening in. Especially anyone with an eyepatch.
The whispers on the wind said Lyra had killed a thousand men in her time, many while she was unarmed, and three using just the pinkie finger on her left hand.
Some said she was a flesh-eater. Others claimed she ate nothing at all, but instead drank the blood of her victims through a straw she carried at all times in the inside pocket of her pirate coat.
A few people thought she was vegan, and that all her aggression issues could be resolved if she’d only treat herself to a couple of sausages and a steak every once in a while.
They all agreed, though, that Lyra Sherush was bad news. Lyra Sherush was not to be messed with. Lyra Sherush was a monster.
Which was why everyone watched their screens so intently when the Eviscerator rammed both blade-like arms through her stomach and hoisted her into the air.
The cheers rang out across the system, from Logus Prime to Pallton Minor. Glasses were raised, hugs were given, joy abounded. Through all this, nobody took their eyes off the screen.
Their mouths frothing with excitement, they watched as the camera slowly zoomed in on Lyra’s face, savoring the way her eyes lolled emptily in her head.
They cheered again when the image changed to show the blood-spattered Eviscerator, his flawlessly white teeth gritted in a grimace of delight.
Back on Lyra again. She was gagging now, ejecting bile down her chin.
Good enough for her, they cheered. Well deserved!
Two icons blinked up on screen. Thumbs up, thumbs down. Mercy or condemnation. Spare or slay.
All across the system they made their choices with a look, a button press, a voice command. All across the system, by the will of the people, Lyra Sherush’s fate was sealed.
The icons vanished. An entire star system held its breath as it awaited the result.
“The Hunt will be back,” a smooth voice announced, and an entire star system groaned in frustration. “After these important messages.”
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