“Wait, are you, like, copying me?”
“Cut it out!”
“Cut it out!”
Miz extended her claws. Her Echo did the same. “OK, fonk this,” they both said, just seconds apart, then they leaped at each other, teeth and claws and fur flying.
* * *
Mech caught his Echo’s fist, just before it could make a smooth pâté of Gluk Disselpoof’s head. His fingers twitched, crushing the duplicate’s hand.
A powerful blow from the Echo’s other fist caught Mech on the side of the head. He ignored it, punched a hole deep into the duplicate’s stomach, then hoisted its entire frame above his head.
With a faint hissing of his super-charged hydraulics, Mech tore the double in half. He spun on the spot, tossing first one half, then the other, into the oncoming hordes of Ikumordo’s army. Both pieces cut down ten or more of the Echoes, before embedding themselves several inches into the surface of the street.
Gluk Disselpoof gawped up at Mech. Sparks danced like briefly-brilliant fairies in the cyborg’s chest cavity. His voice, when it came out, was higher-pitched than before, and sounded more machine than man. The words were comforting, all the same.
“I am most grateful for your assistance,” Mech said. “However, in the interests of your personal safety, I advise you to leave the remainder of this conflict to me.”
* * *
Cal Carver’s body sat aboard the Currently Untitled. His consciousness, on the other hand, wasn’t home. Instead, it had been dragged out into space, and now floated in the midst of a fonking huge battle between lots of vaguely similar-looking ships, and what appeared to be several identical versions of Cal’s old ship, the Shatner.
It was cold out here, but as he had no physical presence whatsoever, he reckoned that was probably psychological.
He flicked his eyes downwards, then upwards, then left to right. He was, it seemed, a giant head in space. While he had never been a giant head in space before, for some reason it didn’t feel all that unexpected.
He tried to imagine himself a very big hat to help keep out the cold, and was slightly disappointed when one failed to appear.
The battle eased off around him as more and more of the ships spotted his enormous face. Even Ikumordo’s fighters slowed in their attacks. Especially Ikumordo’s fighters, in fact. They began to drift, floating aimlessly off into the emptiness of space, like forgotten toys.
Cal could feel hundreds of pairs of eyes watching him, waiting for him to say something. He tried to think of something suitably profound, but the weight of all that expectation made his mind go blank. He was also still coming to terms with being a giant space head, which wasn’t helping, either.
“Howdy,” he said.
The sound somehow traveled through the vacuum of space. As it did, the Echo ships dissipated into mist, before being absorbed back into the flickering orange cloud of the All Death.
Ikumordo’s rhythmic rippling became faster, and more erratic. Cal fixed the cloud with a cold, hard glare. Or maybe his eyes did it by themselves. Either way, the effect was much the same. Ikumordo, devourer of worlds, swallower of galaxies, drew back, as if in fear.
“You,” said Cal, in a voice born of the Void itself, “have been a very naughty boy.”
He said a name. Not Ikumordo, nor All-Death, but something older, from back before there were words, or people to speak them. It resonated through space, making the stars themselves tremble.
And then, despite an evident lack of chest, lungs, or basically anything from the chin down, Cal began to inhale. He drew the airless vacuum inside himself in a long, slow gulp. Ikumordo thrashed around as its wispy edges were drawn into a point, which was in turn sucked down towards the giant Cal head’s waiting mouth.
A few hundred miles away, President Carver’s mouth was also open, although his was open in surprise, and not so he could inhale a galaxy-devouring space monster.
“Somebody tell me they brought a camera,” he muttered.
There was a flash and a click from his right. “Got it.”
“Thanks, Tobey Maguire,” said the president.
The first lady whistled softly through her teeth. “I always knew you had a big head,” she remarked. “But this is fonking ridiculous.”
* * *
Miz stood over her fallen Echo, threw back her head, and let out a howl of triumph that rolled across the city in all directions.
Once that was out of the way, she launched herself towards an oncoming Echo…
…only for it to become a puff of wispy white smoke.
The columns of light stuttered, then cut off, as all across the plaza, the duplicates deteriorated into vapor.
Splurt stopped spinning. He looked around, sagged slightly as he lowered his tentacles, then plopped back into his usual ball shape, making no attempt whatsoever to hide his disappointment.
Mech swung with a punch that didn’t connect. “Oh, I say,” he said, as his processors set about processing several thousand potential scenarios that could have led to the disappearance of the Echoes. Most of them, happily, were positive.
“Well, that was fun, wasn’t it?” he said to Gluk.
And then black smoke began to billow from his chest, his hulking metal frame shuddered violently, and he toppled backwards with a thud.
* * *
Back aboard the Untitled, Cal was turning blue in the face. He wasn’t aware of that fact yet, what with his mind currently being out in space, but as his lungs were on the brink of exploding, he was almost certainly going to find out, soon enough.
Loren tapped her controls, but a flickering orange energy had cocooned them, and nothing she did elicited any kind of response. She sat back and puffed out her cheeks. “This is… This is…” She turned to Lily. “What? What is this?”
Lily tore her eyes away from Cal’s giant space head. “Huh?” she said, which wasn’t very helpful. “Oh. Sorry. What is this? Was that what you asked?”
Loren nodded. “Yes.”
“As in…” Lily gestured from the almost inert, gently inhaling Cal, to his floating head. “This? All this?”
“Yes!”
It was Lily’s turn to puff out her cheeks. “Your guess is as good as mine. Has he done anything like this before?”
Loren watched as the colossal Cal-head sucked down more of Ikumordo. She raised her eyebrows. “Not that I’ve ever noticed, no.”
“No,” said Lily, a little absent-mindedly. “No, thought not.”
Loren chewed her lip. “Will Cal be OK?”
“Well, considering he somehow transported us out of the Void and across dimensions using, from what I can gather, just his mind, and is now, you know, that.” She gestured to the viewscreen. “I’m not even sure that is Cal, anymore.”
Outside, Cal – if, indeed, he was Cal anymore - felt like a hole was being filled. Although not in that way. The aching he had felt since he had witnessed the second orange mass vanishing from the Void was easing, healing, his broken heart knitting itself together as the space cloud found its way deep inside him.
Again, not in that way.
And yet… Ikumordo wasn’t giving up without a fight. It thrashed and clawed at his insides, wrenching and heaving around in his throat and in his guts, despite the fact he currently had neither of those things.
A sharp, scything pain cut through his head from top to bottom, and he felt both of the giant space clouds lock each other in battle inside his mind.
No, not battle. Not quite. But conflict, certainly. The sensations became feelings, the feelings unraveling themselves into words.
“Ugh. Why do you always do this? You never let me do what I want to do!”
“Well, maybe when you start acting like a grown-up, I’ll start treating you like a grown-up!”
“Argh! It’s not fair! I hate you! I wish I’d never been conceptualized!”
The raging continued, and Cal felt an infinity of regret, reproach and revenge begin to play out inside
him. The two entities fought bitterly, each thunderous collision deforming his floating face.
The space head exploded. Cal sat forwards in his chair, rediscovered the effects of gravity, and almost headbutted his own knees.
“Wha—?” he uttered. “Nng. Fmk.”
Loren jumped up from her seat and hurried to him. She had almost reached his chair when a wave of heat radiated from Cal’s skin, pushing her backwards and forcing Lily to spin her own chair around for cover.
Cal looked down at his hands. He had some again, so that was good. They appeared to be on fire, though, so that was less promising. Still, at least it didn’t hurt.
Well, maybe a little.
Sweat poured from him, slicking his forehead and trickling into his eyes. Somewhere behind his eyeballs, he could feel both big weird space things thrashing around, throwing things at each other, and generally behaving like a couple of shizznods.
“D-did I get it?” Cal grimaced.
Loren glanced at the screen and nodded. “It’s gone.”
“That one is,” said Lily. “But the other dimensions…”
Cal shook his head. “N-nope. Got it all.” He patted his stomach and pointed to his head. Up close, he realized the orange light flickering across his hands wasn’t fire. Energy and heat, yes, but not fire, exactly.
Still, getting pretty painful now.
Lily frowned. “Got it all? What do you mean, you’ve got it all?”
“Both,” said Cal. He hoped that answered any and all questions, because speaking was proving quite difficult. Judging by Lily’s face, though, it didn’t. “Big weird s-space things. Two of,” he said. He tapped the side of his head. “In h-here.”
Pain tore through him as a battle even older than the multi-verse raged inside him. He hissed as the skin on the back of his hands blistered and split, cracks shooting up his arms, pulling the skin apart. Orange energy seeped from each fresh wound, and Cal felt himself being pulled apart, not just metaphorically, this time, but literally, too.
More than that, though, he felt rage. Fury. Jealousy. Scorn. He felt hatred and anger and fear and wrath. The two entities were wrestling inside him, resuming a battle that had raged from before time itself.
And it fonking hurt.
“He’s burning up,” said Loren. “Cal? Cal?”
It wasn’t that Cal couldn’t hear her, exactly, but a good ninety-nine per cent of his brain was focused on him not exploding into tiny bits.
“Ooh,” said Kevin. “He doesn’t look well, does he? You should probably stand back, ma’am. And possibly fetch a mop.”
A storm raged inside Cal’s head. His eyes rolled back as his chest constricted and his left arm went tight.
Heart attack, he thought. Great.
He opened his mouth to scream, but all that emerged was the heat and the light, as his body burned up from the inside, and his organs began to evaporate one by one.
This was it, then. He was dying, in a literal blaze of glory.
Still, if you’ve got to go… he thought, trying his hardest to force a smile.
But no.
No.
That was bravado talking.
As usual.
The truth was… Well, the truth was…
Cal coughed out a sob and a whisper.
“I don’t want to die.”
He felt a hand slip into his, small, but bigger than he remembered. Her skin was cool against his palm, soothing his burns and easing the pain.
“Ninety-nine?” she said.
Then: “Cal? Cal, can you hear me?”
Then, more quietly: “Dad?”
Time stopped.
Cal was on a beach. At a school concert. Pushing a bike. Changing a diaper.
He was putting a sock on his nose and pretending to be an elephant.
He was sitting on the sofa, a book in his hands, a head snuggled up against his chest.
He was laughing, singing, dancing, clapping, celebrating this gift that had been given to him. This child.
He was, just for that moment, home.
And the ancient cosmic entities raging against one another inside his head?
Well, they could pretty much go fonk themselves.
Cal gripped Lily’s hand and opened his eyes. From the way she pulled back in fear, he knew it wasn’t his eyes she was seeing, but the things behind there.
“Hey, relax,” he said, smiling despite the effort it took. “It’s me. I h-have a plan.”
“Does it involve blowing up, sir?” asked Kevin.
“Ideally not,” said Cal. He met Lily’s gaze. “Need to get back to the V-Void.”
Lily nodded slowly, but then shook her head. “No, but, we can’t just jump into the Void. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Can’t you do it?” asked Loren. “You brought us here.”
Cal shook his head. “N-no. This thing’s kind of busy.” He grimaced. “OK. What about an empty u-universe? I saw s-some of those.”
“Yes, that I can do!” said Lily. She turned away, pulling her hand with her, and Cal roared as a fresh wave of pain arched his back. Lily quickly grasped for his hand again. “Sorry, sorry, sorry!”
“S-should fonking think s-so,” stuttered Cal, but the pain eased and he calmed quickly.
Lily operated her doohickey with one hand, punching in a complex series of equations using a tiny touch screen. “What are you going to do?” she asked.
“J-just get us there,” Cal whispered. “Please.”
He squeezed Lily’s hand, much harder than he intended. She held on, despite the pain, and jabbed the button that activated the jump.
“You know what you’re doing, right?” she asked him.
With great difficulty, Cal winked. “Of course. It’s a Cal Carver g-guarantee.”
Outside, the other ships watched as the clamps attached to the Currently Untitled crackled with white and blue lights. The ship shimmered faintly, wobbled gently, then disappeared like a bubble going pop.
Aboard the Shatner, President Carver looked over at first his wife, then his advisor. “So, is this a good thing? Did we… Did we just win?”
Tobey Maguire wrinkled his nose and shrugged. He had no idea if they’d won. He basically had no idea what was going on, in general, and was finding it increasingly difficult to keep up even the vaguest pretense that he did.
“Hard to say,” he said, at last.
The president tutted. “Shizz or get off the pot, Tobey Maguire,” he said. “Did we just win, or didn’t we?”
An incoming transmission icon blinked on screen. Loren tapped the button, and the view of space was replaced by images of Earth. Hundreds of people had gathered outside the president’s castle. They whooped and cheered, hugging each other and dancing together in joy.
“OK, I’m going to go out on a limb,” said Tobey Maguire. “Yes, Mr President. We won.”
“Way to go us!” the president said. He leaned back in his chair and rocked it from side to side, enjoying the squeak it made.
Gradually, his smile faded. He looked around the flight deck. “Well, I guess we should head back home.”
First Lady Loren nodded. “I guess so,” she said, but she made no move towards the controls.
The president nodded, also. “Boy, I am glad these days are behind us. Space battles, surviving by the skin of our teeth, that sort of thing.”
“Yup,” agreed the First Lady. “So glad.”
“So totally glad,” the president confirmed.
There was silence.
President Carver drummed his fingers on his arm rests.
It was Tobey Maguire who broke the silence. “We’re not going back yet, are we?”
Cal and Loren made eye contact. They smiled, and both seemed to come alive. “Maybe once around the galaxy, for old time’s sake,” said the president.
The first lady’s hands went to her controls, over her bump. “Aye aye, Captain,” she said, then the Shatner streaked into warp, and Cal Carver, president
of the galaxy, quietly threw up in his mouth.
* * *
A barren, lifeless Earth orbited slowly around its dim parent star, its polar ice caps forever in darkness. Had there been anyone on the planet, they might have looked up and been the only witness to the sudden appearance of the Currently Untitled in the sky.
However, they’d almost certainly have died of asphyxiation and frostbite within milliseconds of their arrival – and then imploded - so it was probably just as well that there wasn’t.
In many ways, it was a shame the event passed unnoticed, though. Had anyone been watching, not only would they have seen the ship appear, but they’d have seen everything that happened next, too.
If they’d had very good ears (and had sound suddenly decided to start traveling in a vacuum), they might have heard the noise of a man retching violently – so violently, in fact, it was almost as if he was exorcising himself of everything that had been inside him. They might then have heard the booming of cosmic thunder.
They’d have seen the dark, starless sky filled with a sudden ejection of orange, and witnessed two similar but separate clouds attempt to kick the living shizz out of each other.
And that still wouldn’t have been as exciting as what happened next.
Inside the Untitled, Cal coughed and wheezed, his eyes wide and bloodshot as he slapped repeatedly at his chest with his free hand. He hadn’t been sure if the old ‘fingers down the throat’ technique would be an effective way to cleanse himself of cosmic-entity-possession, but it worked even better than he’d hoped.
He’d half expected to end up with a few gallons of wispy orange gloop on his legs, and sloshing around on the floor, but the entities had exploded out of him like novelty snakes from a can, briefly filling every square inch of the Untitled, before seeping out into space.
“Ooh, shizz. That was unpleasant,” Cal said, swallowing back a mouthful of something he worried might be leftover Ikumordo, but which was, on reflection, probably just regular sick.
The fiery orange energy that had been crackling over his body was gone now. His head was completely devoid of cosmic entities, his skin was knitting back together, and either his internal organs had come back, or he’d learned to live without them.
Space Team: Return of the Dead Guy Page 22