The Hunt for Reduk Topa

by Barry J. Hutchison

  “It’s not broken, we just can’t afford to power it,” Loren explained.

  “Can’t we cut something else? Like gravity? We’ve got seatbelts! We can cope without gravity, can’t we?” he pleaded. “We could all fly around. It’ll be fun!”

  “We ain’t cutting the fonking gravity,” said Mech, stomping onto the bridge.

  Cal groaned, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “What about Kevin? Can we turn off Kevin?”

  “I heard that, sir,” Kevin remarked.

  “You were supposed to!” Cal snapped, looking up. “And FYI, you can’t spy ‘the exuberance of youth,’ Kevin. You just can’t!”

  Mech side-eyed Loren. “What’s his problem?”

  “We told him about the replicator,” Loren explained.

  Cal choked on another sob.

  “Gotcha,” said Mech. “We need to find the nearest habitable system so we can land, get a new disk, and make some proper repairs.”

  Loren’s fingers tapped on her console. The viewscreen switched from showing some plant vines drifting inertly through space to showing a starmap.

  “We’re actually pretty close to one,” she announced.

  “Must be our lucky day,” Cal said. He caught the looks from the others. “You know, I mean aside from all the other stuff that already happened.”

  “The Viarox system,” Loren read. “Twelve planets, nine habitable. We could be there in an hour.”

  “Man, that is close,” said Mech, looking over her shoulder at the screen. “Technology?”

  “Varies, but they’re all spacefaring,” Loren replied. “We should be able to get a warp disk on pretty much any one of them.”

  She pointed to one planet on screen. “That’s our best bet. Logus Prime. Seems to be the most advanced.”

  Mech nodded. “OK. Let’s go there.”

  “Hey, hey, hold up,” Cal said, straightening in his chair. “I give the orders around here, buddy.”

  He held Mech’s impassive gaze for a moment, then without breaking the stare, said, “Loren? Let’s go there.”

  “Yes, Carver,” Loren muttered. “Right away, Carver.”

  Cal blinked in surprise, then grabbed for his seatbelt as the Currently Untitled’s engines whined and all the lights dipped a fraction.

  Miz waited until Tyrra was safely strapped into one of the guest chairs, then flopped into her own. She turned so her legs were draped across one armrest and her back was resting against the other, then fastened her belt around herself sideways.

  “You OK?” Cal asked her.

  “Uh, like, yeah,” said Miz. “Why wouldn’t I be OK?”

  “No reason,” said Cal, smiling.

  Miz rolled her eyes, glanced around to make sure Loren and Mech weren’t paying attention, then lowered her voice to a soft murmur. “Thank you.”

  Cal gave a wave of his hand. “I didn’t do anything. She saved me.”

  “Correct,” said Tyrra from the back.

  “And grateful I am, too,” said Cal, squeaking around in his damaged chair.

  “Good. Because you owe me a life debt,” Tyrra said.

  Cal frowned. “Huh?”

  “Your life now belongs to me,” Tyrra explained.

  “What? No, it doesn’t!”

  Tyrra nodded. There was something quite menacing about the way she held his gaze as she tilted her head back and forth. “Yes. It does. You are now my property.”

  Before Cal could protest further, Kevin’s voice chimed from the ceiling.

  “Might I interrupt, everyone?” he asked. “Before we set off, I thought I should tell you that I have successfully unscrambled those subspace transmissions that were causing us problems earlier. It appears there are multiple transmissions broadcasting on a wide range of communications channels.”

  Cal screeched his chair back around to face front. “We’re being hailed?”

  “Not us specifically, sir. They’re more general call-outs, I believe.”

  “Oh. OK. Then… put them on screen, I guess.”

  “One at a time, or all at once, sir?” Kevin asked.

  Cal puffed out his cheeks. “I don’t know. How many are there?”

  “Eight trillion, sir.”

  “Jesus. Then not one at a time. That would take hours.”

  “All at once then, sir?”

  Cal shook his head. “It’s been a long day. Not sure I can handle eight trillion simultaneous conversations. What if we did them in batches? Like, say, ten at a time? Would that get through them quicker?”

  “Indeed it would. If you were able to keep each conversation to under a minute, sir, we would get through them in…”

  There was a pause as Kevin did some calculations.

  “…a shade over fifteen thousand years.”

  “Shizz. No. That’s way too long.”

  “You think so?” Mech grunted.

  “Pick a few,” Cal said, ignoring the cyborg’s remark. “Pick ten and cycle through them, just in case there’s anything important.”

  “Very good, sir,” said Kevin.

  “Everyone else sit up straight,” Cal urged, adjusting himself in his chair and running a hand through his hair. “We’re in a new sector, let’s try to make a good impression. Miz, Mech, try to look friendly.”

  “I always look friendly,” Mech protested.

  Cal looked the hulking cyborg up and down for a moment. “OK, we’ll talk about that later,” he said, looking around at the others. “For now, warm, open faces. Big smiles. Not that big, Tyrra, you look terrifying. There. That’s better. Miz, are you just going to lie there picking at your toes like that?”

  Miz flicked him a look that made her answer to that question very clear.

  “Good. That’s fine. You just do you,” Cal said, grinding the chair back to the front. “OK, Kevin, we’re as ready as we’ll ever be. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  “Would you like me to run a language update, sir?” asked Kevin.

  Cal’s eyes went to the ceiling. “Huh?”

  “Your Zertex translation chips are not currently compatible with many of the languages in this sector, sir,” Kevin explained. “However, they have a similar system of their own, and I can cross-pollinate both databases with the respective stored languages of—”

  “Meaning?” asked Cal, who wanted the short version.

  “I can copy their translation system’s database to our own, and vice versa, sir.”

  Cal kept watching the ceiling.

  “Meaning…?”

  “Meaning we’ll be able to understand what the fonk they’re saying,” Mech snapped.

  “Oh. Oh, OK. Then yes, do that,” said Cal, sitting back. He leaned forward again a fraction. “Wait, will it hurt?”

  “I will merely be updating the chip’s database records with some new content, sir,” said Kevin.

  “Right. OK,” said Cal, sitting back again.

  “So yes. It will hurt immensely.”

  “Huh?” said Cal, but before he could voice any further objections the inside of his head became a howling vortex of sound. He thrashed in his chair. He gritted his teeth. A bubble of snot sprouted from one nostril, then popped.

  The sound became words. So many words. All the words, in fact, all speaking themselves at the same time directly into his brain. He wanted to cry out, to scream, to make it all stop, but his mouth was clamped shut, his muscles were rigid, and he had a pretty firm suspicion that his skull was in the process of exploding.

  And then, as quickly as it had started, it stopped.

  Cal wheezed, whimpered, and swore all at the same time. He had slid almost all the way out of his chair, and his legs were buckled on the floor. The seatbelt had snagged on his t-shirt and dragged it up so it was around his throat, exposing everything from his waist to his nipples. He had also been lightly sick in his mouth.

  Loren and Mech both regarded him with slightly bewildered expressions on their faces. Loren was rubbing a spot just behind her ear, as
if she had the beginnings of a tension headache. Mech seemed none the worse for the update.

  “Drama queen, much?” asked Mizette. She was kneading her temples with her fingertips and smirking in Cal’s direction.

  “Again, again!” urged Tyrra from the back of the room. “His convulsions are hilarious.”

  It was at this point that Cal noticed the woman on screen. She was blonde, skinny, and—were it not for the extra eye dangling from the end of her nose—flawless.

  Cal briefly contemplated his current position and mostly naked torso, decided it wasn’t really the first impression he’d hoped to convey, and squirmed his way back into his seat.

  “You couldn’t have waited five fonking seconds, Kevin?” he muttered, wriggling his t-shirt down. He took a breath, plastered on one of his best grins, and addressed the screen.

  “Well, hey there! This is Captain Cal—”

  “Are you troubled by trapped gas, bloating, and constipation?” asked the woman.

  Cal hesitated. His eyes flicked down to his stomach. “It’s travel weight,” he said. “It’ll fall right out—”

  “I know I was,” the woman said, placing a hand at the side of her mouth as if letting Cal and the crew in on a big secret. “But then I discovered Shiteofast—”

  Click. The image changed to show a muscly young man with shiny green skin go gliding through a park on some kind of hovering rollerblades, laughing to himself as he twirled around, his pristine white shirt billowing open to show off an impressive...

  Cal counted.

  …sixteen pack.

  The guy gave a final twirl and stopped, then produced a bottle of orange liquid from a pocket in his pants and drank deeply from it, the sunlight reflecting off his sculpted chest.

  “Sunjizz,” announced a voiceover, as a music sting played. “Impregnate your thirst.”

  “What the fonk does that mean?” Cal asked, but the image changed again.

  A broad figure with a face that was mostly nostrils and hair shouted aggressively into the camera. “Parboil! Eight minutes! No more, or you ruin it! DON’T RUIN IT, OR I KILL YOU!”

  Click. The screen changed again. Two news anchors sat side by side in a studio, huddled close together. It was only when they started speaking, alternating each word, that Cal realized they weren’t two people, but a single two-headed entity. On the bridge, everyone’s eyes ping-ponged between the heads as they took it in turns to speak.

  “Feared.”

  “Pirate.”

  “Reduk.”

  “Topa.”

  “Was.”

  “Arrested.”

  “Today.”

  “By.”

  “Christ,” said Cal. “This is giving me vertigo.”

  Mercifully, the image then cut away to some sort of ball game, where a dozen child-sized competitors in matching shirts were being kicked around by a much larger opponent who laughed as he held an oblong ball above his head, well out of their reach.

  “Now this looks like it might be fun,” Cal began, but the image changed immediately to show a colorful studio set that Cal recognized. “Wait, wait. Hold on this one,” he said.

  On screen, two mostly human-looking children were playing something like pat-a-cake—space pat-a-cake, probably—while two puppets attempted to copy them with very little success.

  “This was on the ship,” Cal murmured, as the puppets misjudged the timing of a cross-pat and slapped each other in the face. Cal chuckled. “Classic.”

  “No!” giggled one of the kids. “Do it like this!”

  The children went twice as fast as before. The mouths of both puppets fell open as they watched, then they slowly turned to face each other and began flailing wildly with their hands, screwing their eyes shut as they slapped at each other.

  “Now this is entertainment,” Cal remarked. “Couple of cute kids. Couple of puppets. What more could you want?”

  “Hmm-mm,” agreed Loren, her eyes fixed on the screen.

  “It’s pretty great,” Mech said.

  Cal was a little surprised that Mech was in agreement, but didn’t dare look over at the cyborg in case he missed something good. It was all good, of course—this was classic television—but something truly amazing might happen and he didn’t want to miss it.

  “This is awesome,” said Miz.

  Splurt, who had been exclusively staring at Loren, rotated one eye to look at the screen. After a moment, the other eye turned, too. He rippled gently.

  “Isn’t it, though?” said Cal without looking at him. “Who doesn’t love a puppet?”

  “Normally, I ain’t a fan,” said Mech. “But these two? They got it. Those motherfonkers speak to me.”

  At the back of the bridge, Tyrra watched the screen, the deepening lines of a frown creasing her forehead. “What are you talking about? This is terrible,” she remarked.

  “Hush your mouth!” Cal gasped, still not turning.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Loren murmured. “This is great.”

  “It is lowest common denominator puerile nonsense,” said Tyrra.

  “You’re lowest common denominator puerile nonsense,” Miz told her, her brown eyes locked firmly on the screen. She wagged her tail and sighed happily. “I totally fonking love these guys.”

  “Agreed,” said Cal. “Which is your favorite? Both, right? It’s both.”

  “Both,” said Loren, Mech, and Miz at the same time. Splurt said it, too, albeit in the form of a gelatinous wobble.

  “I’m afraid I must side with Mistress Tyrra on this one,” said Kevin. “I don’t see the appeal. There’s no narrative, no real driving conflict, and if it’s supposed to be funny, it’s missing one very important element.”

  “And what element is that?” Cal asked.

  Kevin said nothing for quite a long time. Quite how long, Cal couldn’t tell, because the antics of the puppets were keeping him so entertained that time had lost all meaning.

  “Voice, switch it off,” said Tyrra. “Change it to something else.”

  Kevin said nothing.

  “Voice!” Tyrra barked.

  The screen changed to show the star system map again. Everyone who had been watching the screen leaned forward, as if they could somehow follow the puppets to wherever they had gone.

  “Wait, no! Put it back,” Cal said.

  “Yeah, man, not cool,” Mech barked. “Get that shizz back on.”

  “Please, I need to know what happened,” Loren pleaded.

  “It was just getting good!” said Miz, adding her voice to the choir.

  Splurt trembled.

  “You tell him, buddy!” said Cal. “Kevin, get the puppets back. That’s an order.”

  “Timing,” said Kevin.

  The protestations became a confused silence.

  “What? What the fonk are you talking about?” Cal asked.

  “Doesn’t matter, sir,” said Kevin. “Either you’ve got it, or you don’t. I do, they very much didn’t. And, alas, the signal has been lost. I’m afraid I’m unable to bring it back.”

  Everyone who was seated sank back into their chairs like they’d just completed a marathon. Splurt sagged down, appearing to partially melt into a puddle. Even Mech’s metal frame drooped for a moment, but he was the first to recover.

  “What’s the big deal?” he asked. “It was a damn puppet show.”

  “And, like, it wasn’t even a good one,” scowled Miz.

  “They were just slapping each other,” said Loren. “What’s so funny about that?”

  “Uh, everything. It was hilarious,” said Cal, although, even he was starting to wonder if it really had been. “Kind of. I think.”

  He blinked a few times, then shook his head which suddenly felt like it was full of cotton candy.

  “I think… I think I hated it,” Mech announced. “Looking back, I mean. Yeah. I fonking hated it.”

  “It totally sucked,” said Miz.

  “Awful,” Loren agreed.
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  Splurt pulled himself together, rotated both eyes in different directions, and went back to watching Loren.

  “It had its moments,” said Cal, still not quite ready to shizz all over what had, until it stopped, been the best thing he’d ever seen. “Anyway, looks like this system is big into TV,” he said. “Eight trillion channels. That’s a lot of choices.”

  “Not if they are all as terrible as that one, sir,” said Kevin.

  Cal closed his eyes for a moment. The puppets looked back at him from the darkness, their mouths slack, their plastic eyes staring blankly.

  “Yeah, maybe,” he said, snapping his eyelids open again.

  “You are all very strange,” observed Tyrra, leaning back in her chair.

  Miz winced as she remembered what she’d said. “Uh, yeah. Sometimes. But, like, I don’t really think you’re lowest common denominator puerile nonsense. I don’t know why I said that, exactly.” She sighed. “So, you know, sorry or whatever.”

  “Apology accepted,” said Tyrra, after some consideration. “But you’re all still very strange.”

  Cal straightened himself in his chair, still shaking off the foggy feeling in his brain. “We have our moments,” he admitted. “Lore—Uh, honey? Set a course for… whatever it’s called. The planets,” he said. “The planets we saw.”

  “The Viarox system,” said Loren.

  “There. Right. That’s it. The Viarox system. Let’s go there,” he said. He tightened his belt across his chest, ignoring the empty faces of the puppets that flashed up whenever he blinked. “And don’t spare the space-horses!”

  Eleven

  Cal and Loren stood at a mostly opaque wall at the far end of the docking bay, waiting for a security scan to complete. A cheerful animated face made up of a series of lights smiled back at them from the wall’s surface as a scanner beam gave them what was, by Cal’s count, a thrice-over.

  “How long is this going to take?” he asked, once the scan had head-to-toed them both another few times.

  “Results coming up in just a jiffy, pardner!” said the face, its animated mouth starting to move a full second after the voice began, and stopping a little too soon. “I’m Perko, your friendly animated assistant!”

  “Yeah, you said that already,” Cal told it.

  “Twice,” Loren added.