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 against 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 bent 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.”
He shrugged. “Still, what can we do? If it ain’t here, it ain’t here,” he conceded. He was about to head for the door when a thought struck him. “Unless…”
A similar thought struck Mech at almost the exact same moment. They locked eyes for just a second, then both leaned back and looked up to the ceiling.
For a while, the only sound was the faint moist click of Cal swallowing.
After a while, he quietly cleared his throat.
“That does not look like its picture,” he whispered.
“No,” Mech agreed.
“We are not getting that back to the ship.”
“No,” Mech agreed.
“We should probably go.”
“Yeah,” Mech agreed. “We should probably go.”
They backed toward the door, eyes locked on the enormous mass of dark green foliage that covered the ceiling, its leaves shifting and trembling as if alive.
At the heart of the greenery was a bright yellow flower. Its petals were splayed out in a bell-shape, each one as long as Mech was tall and ragged along the edges like the teeth of a saw.
Concerning as this was, though, the most troubling thing was unquestionably the tongue. It looked not unlike a human tongue, but stretched out so it was much longer than it was wide. The way it was curled up made it hard to guess the length, but Cal estimated its size to be more than long enough to reach him, and that was the main thing.
“Just wait until I talk to Kevin,” Cal said. “That guy is going to get a piece of my—”
The plant swallowed him.
One moment, he was backing toward the door, the next his visor was full of tongue, his feet were lifting off the floor, and Cal was completely cocooned in a big man-eating flower.
Six
Loren sat straight in her chair, peering across the gulf of space between the Untitled and the other ship. Cal and Mech had been gone for a while now. She’d watched them drift across the gap—Mech propelled by his foot rockets, Cal dragged along behind him by one leg—and then make their way inside via one of the ship’s airlocks.
That had been twenty minutes ago. Since then, there had been no developments. Well, none beyond Miz making some disparaging remarks about Loren’s flying, then leaving the bridge with Tyrra in tow.
“Kevin, can you try contacting Cal and Mech?” Loren asked.
“I have attempted to make contact a number of times now, ma’am,” said Kevin. “As I’ve explained on several occasions over the course of the last few minutes, there is a significant amount of interference blocking our signals. Were we to have a functioning warp disk, then we may be able to raise the masters, but as it stands they can’t hear us and we can’t hear them. Scans, however, suggest they’re both still alive. Probably.”
Loren looked to the ceiling. “What do you mean ‘probably’?” she demanded.
“The same subspace interference that is disrupting communications is making it difficult to get an exact pinpoint on their whereabouts and condition, ma’am,” Kevin said. “But, if it’s any consolation, I’m almost eighty percent sure that they’re still on the ship, and seventy percent certain that neither of them are dead yet.”
“Yet? What do you mean not dead yet?”
“Well, ma’am. It comes to us all,” said Kevin. “There’s no point denying it. But, I’m quietly confident that it won’t come to any of us today.”
“Great,” Loren sighed. “That’s encouraging. Can you try contacting them again? Just in case?”
“And how do you propose I do that, ma’am?” asked Kevin, his voice suggesting he was coming dangerously close to getting a bit snippy. This was unlike him, but Mistress Loren was really starting to wear his patience thin. “We’ve already established that standard communications channels are disrupted. What would you like me to do? Shout, perhaps? Wave a flag?”
“Just try, Kevin,” Loren ordered.
“Very good, ma’am,” Kevin replied. “I shall resume my attempts to contact them.”
“Thank you.”
“Utterly futile as they may be.”
Loren shot the ceiling a warning look, then went back to studying the ship. Back at the Academy, she’d been an expert on the Zertex fleet, able to answer any question that anyone might ask about its various vessels, no matter how pointless and mundane.
She could tell you how many crew manned the B-MUS science exploration ships (four thousand three hundred and eighty), how many torpedoes were carried by a T-18 Hammerhead as standard (originally sixteen, eighteen after the upgrade), and how long it took to run halfway across the observation deck of an HR50 Sunchaser when on fire (twenty-seven-point-four seconds. No one had ever made it more than halfway).
She could list all the weapons, braking distances, manual override codes, and shield phase rates of every ship in the Zertex fleet, and plenty more besides. But the bloated bathtub gradually rotating ahead of them was a new one on her.
As she watched it, Loren began to have doubts about the relocation plan. What if everything was different out here? What if they couldn’t find a way to fit in?
She snorted quietly.
Yeah. Since when had they ever fit in?
“No response, ma’am,” Kevin said. “As expected.”
“Thanks for trying, Kevin,” said Loren. She puffed out her cheeks and lowered her gaze a fraction until it met Splurt’s. He was sitting on her co
nsole, staring back at her. “What do you think, Splurt? Cal OK?”
Splurt rippled faintly. Loren had no idea what the movement represented, but she didn’t get the impression the little guy was overly concerned.
“Yeah. I’m sure they’ll both be fine,” she said. “It’s an empty ship. Surely even Cal couldn’t get into trouble on an empty ship?”
Splurt gave a shudder. Loren didn’t need to be fluent in his wobbly movements to understand what he meant.
“Yeah, you’re right,” she sighed. “That was a stupid thing to say.”
Mech stood in the center of the room, surrounded by bodies and gazing up at the quivering yellow flower suspended from the ceiling above him. His arms—both raised, cannons primed—suggested he was ready for action. His face, on the other hand, said he was trying hard not to laugh.
“Mech! Mech, are you out there?” called Cal. His voice was doubly muffled by the helmet and the petals, and the shrill desperation of it brought great heaves of merriment that shook Mech’s shoulders.
“Yeah, I’m out here,” Mech replied, composing himself as best he could.
There was a moment of silence. Mech had just started to wonder if Cal was OK when his voice came again.
“I’m in a big plant!”
“I can see that you’re in a big plant,” said Mech. “I watched you go inside the big plant.”
“Well… can you make it so I’m not in a big plant?” Cal asked.
“I guess I could shoot it,” Mech suggested.
“What? No! You might shoot me!” Cal yelped. “You have to—Oh God! Oh God! It’s trying to tongue its way inside my suit!”
Mech’s whole body clanked with laughter.
“Fonk off! Get out of there, you slimy bamston!” Cal warned, as the flower head shook and the petals bulged. “Mech! A little help here.”
“I can’t reach,” Mech said, half-heartedly stretching toward the plant. If he put some effort in, he almost certainly could’ve reached, but this was too entertaining an opportunity to just bring to an end like that.
The Hunt for Reduk Topa Page 5