Space Team: Planet of the Japes

by Barry J. Hutchison

  Despite that – despite the years of early morning runs, the endless months of squats, cardio and stretching – her legs were fonking killing her.

  “How many steps are in this thing?” she asked, trying to hide the wheeze that rattled in her lungs with every word. “I mean, we must be almost back into space.”

  “What’s the matter? Tired?” Miz asked, the words punctuated by several short, gasping breaths. She was walking behind, with Loren in front and Splurt between them. Splurt, for his part, didn’t look bothered by the climb, and was as perky and full of energy as ever. “I could… do this… all day.”

  Loren shrugged. “Oh, yeah. I mean, me too. I’m not tired, I’m just bored,” she managed to say, before the tightness in her lungs became too much. She pretended to yawn, using it as an excuse to draw in as much air as possible. “In fact, I was going to suggest a race.”

  “Oh yeah?” Miz asked.

  “Yeah,” said Loren, while silently chastising herself. A race. What was she thinking?

  “A race, huh?”

  “Yep.”

  They all plodded on around the curving staircase.

  “You and me? Racing?”

  “That’s the idea,” Loren said, adding, please say no, please say no, in her head.

  “OK. Fine. Let’s do it,” Miz said. There was a slightly hysterical edge to her voice, but Loren was too exhausted to pick up on it.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Loren nodded and swallowed. “Well… Good. Alright, then.”

  “We’re totally going to do this,” Miz agreed.

  Splurt looked between them, his little head-flag fluttering from side to side each time he turned.

  “All the way to the top?” Miz asked.

  “Unless you’d prefer something else?” Loren asked. “Like, I don’t know, a ten second dash, say?”

  Miz considered this. “Or, what if we went, like, totally flat out for five seconds? Like, top speed, that whole time? That’d decide the winner.”

  “It would,” Loren agreed. She nodded. “OK, five second sprint, going in… ten seconds. Nine. Eight.”

  Just before she got to “three” they reached the top, and Loren almost sobbed with relief.

  “We’re here. I won.”

  “What? No way!” Miz snarled. “You didn’t win. We hadn’t started.”

  “Yes, we had,” Loren said, as they stepped onto the top level, where a dark round hole in the wall marked the start of the slide. “We hadn’t started the sprint part, but it was still a race.”

  “No way!” Miz said. “You never said that.”

  She shoved Loren on the shoulder, forcing her to take a step back. Loren rallied quickly and puffed her chest up, standing her ground. “Don’t push me,” she said.

  “Why?” asked Miz, pushing her again. “What are you going to do about it?” She pushed her a third time, slightly harder than before.

  “Look, what is your problem?” Loren demanded, her hands balling into fists.

  “Uh, maybe that I totally hate you?” Miz retorted.

  “You’ve been a real bedge to me ever since the whole multi-verse stuff,” Loren pointed out. “More than usual, I mean. Did I do something to offend you?”

  “Besides exist, you mean?”

  “Oh, grow up, Miz!” Loren spat. “OK? Just grow up.”

  “You grow up,” Mizette retorted. She raised both hands and tried to shove Loren again, but Loren was ready for it. She ducked, twisted, and used Miz’s momentum to flip the wolf-woman over her shoulder.

  Miz hit the floor in front of the entrance to the slide. She sprung to her feet immediately, claws and teeth both out and ready for action. “Oh, now you’ve totally done it,” Miz growled.

  And then the black hole of the slide entrance seemed to open wider behind her. Miz vanished as she was violently dragged off her feet, and swallowed by the yawning aperture.

  Silence fell. Loren glanced down at Splurt. He met her eye and gave a sort of rubbery shrug. “Oh, shizz,” Loren muttered. She approached the hole cautiously, bending low as she peered into the gloom. “Miz? Miz, are you OK?”

  Nothing.

  “Mizette? Hello?”

  The echo of her own voice was the only sound from the tunnel of darkness.

  Loren sighed. “I guess we’re going to have to—”

  An in-rush of air yanked her through the opening to the slide. Loren found herself tumbling helplessly along the pitch-black tunnel, bouncing and thumping and squeaking along the steeply curved walls.

  Slapping her hands against the sides, she tried to slow her descent, but the friction burned her palms as the suction pulled her on faster and faster.

  Several rotations down, she hit something big, hairy and angry.

  “Ow! What are you doing?” Miz snarled, as Loren’s boots thudded into her face. There was a screech of claws slipping on metal, and then they were both falling together, each collision against the sides sending a rumble of thunder off along the inside of the enormous curved pipe.

  Less than a minute later, they were both launched out of the tunnel mouth at the bottom of the ride. They rolled and tumbled across a smoothly polished surface, then Miz slammed hard into a padded barricade, and Loren slammed even harder into Miz.

  They rolled apart, and both lay there on the ground, not moving beyond the heaving of their chests as they tried to catch their breath.

  “OK,” said Miz, her tongue flopping out as she panted. “Well that was totally awesome.”

  Loren sat up. Everything ached. She smiled, shakily.

  “That actually was kind of fun,” she said, then a giant Jelly Baby in a Funworld ensemble was launched from the slide and splatted against the wall between them.

  Splurt was back on his feet before they were. He thrust his pudgy hands above his head and jumped into the air, looking more excited than either of the women had ever seen him. He raced back to the bottom of the Helter Skelter steps, beckoned for the others to follow, then shot on ahead.

  Groaning, Loren began up the steps after him. Miz plodded along behind, her head down.

  “You got married,” Miz muttered.

  Loren looked back over her shoulder. “What? Who?”

  “You. The other you. An other you. From, like, one of those other dimensions, or whatever. You got married. To Cal.”

  “Oh,” said Loren, then, “Oh.”

  She shook her head and snorted out a sort-of laugh. “But that’s not… There’s no way that he’d… That we’d… I mean, that’s there. That’s not here. I’m not… We’re not…”

  She stopped talking until she’d managed to pull together a coherent thought. The one she finally settled on wasn’t one she was expecting, and took her by surprise as it slipped out of her mouth.

  “Were we happy?”

  Miz shrugged. “How should I know? I guess so. He was the president.”

  “The president?” Loren stopped walking. “Of what?”

  “Zertex. And, like, all Zertex space.”

  Loren stared at Miz blankly for a few seconds, then her laughter echoed up the staircase. “President? Cal? Our Cal? Of Zertex? Seriously?”

  “Seriously,” Miz said, sounding a little annoyed.

  “Come on,” said Loren. “Do you really think our Cal is ever going to be president of Zertex?”

  Miz shifted on her hairy feet. “Well, I mean… No. I doubt it.”

  Loren smiled. “Well, then. That’s their universe, this is ours. Obviously, we’re all very different people.” She began walking again. “Cal is never going to be president, and he and I are never going to be married. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Who said I was worried?” Miz asked. “I don’t care.”

  They plodded on for a while. When it came, Miz’s voice was much quieter than usual.

  “You promise?”

  “Uh, yeah. Yeah, I promise,” said Loren, smiling too broadly. She took a deep breath. “Right, then,” she said
, changing the subject as she began the long, slow climb back to the top. “Here we go again.”

  * * *

  Cal sat in a window booth in a dilapidated restaurant, gazing out through the grease-filmed glass at the park beyond.

  “So, like, anything?” he asked.

  Dave shrugged, and helped himself to another of Cal’s fries. They weren’t fries in the strict Earth definition of the word – they were tapered to a point for one thing, a vaguely luminous green, for another – but they tasted similar enough for Cal not to really notice the difference.

  “No, not anything,” Dave conceded. “It’s not magic.”

  “Then what is it?” Cal asked.

  “It’s…” Dave moved the food around his mouth thoughtfully. “Prepared. It’s prepared. It runs a sort of low level mind scan, and figures out what you want.”

  Cal pointed through the window, back towards where he’d been attacked by the slorg. “And it thought I wanted to be pinned to the ground and drooled on by Little Sally Six-Tits? Uh-uh. It was way off.”

  “Was it?” Dave asked.

  Cal began to reply, then stopped. Compared to falling out of the sky in a metal ball or – God forbid – hurtling down a Helter Skelter the size of the Empire State Building, fighting with the slorg had been… not ‘fun’ exactly, but not ‘not fun’, either. Exciting? Yes. A welcome change of pace? Certainly.

  And the way it had exploded was pretty cool, even if he’d be smelling and tasting the yellow sludge for weeks.

  “You said you wanted something exciting,” Dave reminded him. “So, it gave you that.”

  “And it seriously wasn’t real?” Cal said. “The slorg, I mean?”

  “Genetically engineered bio-bots,” said Dave. “Some are generic – you know, monsters, sex squids, whatever. Others are custom-built from the molecular level up, just for you, to service some need or desire you might not even be fully aware you have.”

  “Right,” said Cal. He frowned, then sat up straight. “Wait, sex squids? What are…?”

  He stopped.

  “I mean, do I even want to…?”

  He stopped.

  “No. No, I don’t think I do,” Cal decided. “Go on.”

  “You sure seem to know a lot about this place,” said Mech. He was standing beside the booth, his weight too much for the aging seats to bear. “Especially for someone who’s supposed to be from Earth.”

  Dave shrugged. “Yeah, well. I come here a lot. Every year, actually. I met my wife here.”

  It occurred to Cal that the events of the past half hour had overtaken him, and he hadn’t yet had a chance to ask what was, perhaps, the most pressing question of all.

  “How come you’re out here, anyway?” he asked. “You know, in space, I mean? How did you get here?”

  “Abduction,” said Dave, matter-of-factly. “Back in… ooh, what? Ninety-eight? Nine? Before the Millennium, anyway. How did that Y2K thing work out, by the way?” He chuckled. “The way they were talking about it, it was like everyone on Earth was going to end up dead!”

  “What? Oh, that. Yeah, it was fine. Nothing happened,” Cal said. “Like, literally not a thing.”

  “That’s good to know. So, everyone’s OK?”

  “Um…” Cal made a weighing motion with his hands. “That depends on how you define ‘OK’.”

  “Well, I guess… alive?” said Dave.

  “Oh. Well, in that case, no. They’re definitely not OK,” Cal said. “Killer bugs. Zertex. Genocide. It’s a whole thing.”

  Dave blinked. “Jesus Christ.”

  “That’s pretty much what I said.” Cal leaned his elbows on the crumb-strewn table. “So… abducted?”

  “Oh. Yeah. Right,” said Dave, still a little dumbstruck by the whole genocide situation. He shook himself out of his stupor, then took another of the space fries and blew on it to cool it down a little. He bit the end off and chewed slowly. “It’s kind of a long story,” he warned.

  “Kind of a Long Story is my middle name,” said Cal.

  “What, seriously?” Mech asked.

  “Oh Mech,” said Cal, smiling benevolently up at him. “You beautiful idiot.” He nodded to Dave. “Let’s hear it.”

  “OK. You asked for it,” said Dave. And then, waving the uneaten half of the fry like a tiny conductor’s baton, he began to explain.

  CHAPTER NINE

  There had been probing involved. A substantial amount of probing.

  The first two to three minutes of the story featured very little else but probing, in fact, and Cal was starting to wonder if the level of detail was really necessary for the purposes of the explanation.

  As it turned out, though, all that probing was key to what came next.

  “Four, maybe five days in, I demanded to see a supervisor,” Dave explained.

  “Five days,” Cal spluttered. “Jesus. What did they think they’d find up there, the Lost Kingdom of Atlantis?”

  “I know, right?” said Dave, shifting uncomfortably at the memory. “You’d think after you’d probed once, you’d have pretty much all the information you needed. I could maybe understand twice, if you forgot something the first time.”

  “Or, like, if someone left their watch up there,” Cal added.

  “Exactly. But five days?” Dave shook his head. “No. That was too much.”

  Cal agreed, and shot Mech a dirty look. “Five days,” he said, a little accusingly.

  “Why you looking at me?” Mech asked. “I didn’t do it.”

  “Well, not personally,” said Cal. “But, you know. Space people.” He raised his eyebrows in quite a smug way, suggesting his point – whatever it was – had somehow been proven, then turned back to Dave.

  “Wait, you asked to see a supervisor? No way. What did they say?”

  “Fonked if I know,” Dave said. “I didn’t have a chip. Not back then. But I eventually kicked up enough of a fuss that they took me to see the captain of the ship, and I logged an official complaint.”

  “Too much butt-stuff,” said Cal.

  Dave nodded and ate the other piece of his fry. “Too much butt-stuff. I mean, those weren’t the exact words I used, but close enough.”

  He leaned forwards. “And that’s when it got interesting.”

  Dave explained that he had been abducted by a race known as the Oovil. The Oovil were renowned for two things, one of which was their fascination with anal probing. Dave’s complaint about his first-hand experiences of this then drew to his attention the second thing the Oovil were known for – their outstanding customer service, and their eagerness to compensate those who felt the Oovil had slighted them.

  “They gave you their ship?” Cal gasped. “Seriously?”

  Dave nodded. “Ship, crew, cargo, an extensive amount of anal probe related paraphernalia – they signed it all over to me there and then. Oh, and a chip, of course, so I could understand them.”

  “Holy shizz,” said Cal. “What did you do?”

  Dave shrugged. “I knew I had a choice. I could get them to take me back home. I was single, working in a job I hated, going nowhere, and still – for reasons I have yet to figure out – living in Belgium. I could go back to all that, or I could just head out, you know? Just get them to fly me somewhere, and see what the galaxy had to offer.”

  “In my experience, motion sickness and scary shizz trying to kill you,” said Cal.

  “At first, yeah,” Dave agreed. “But then, with the Oovil’s help, I started building something.”

  “A bigger spaceship?” Cal guessed. He slapped a hand on the table. “The Starship Enterprise!” He gasped. “The Millennium Falcon!”

  Dave smiled. “I wish. A business. Cargo haulage. You’ll have heard of Transol.”

  “Definitely,” Cal lied.

  “Well, that’s me,” said Dave. “Me and a few hundred thousand staff, anyway. We’ve got two thousand depots in this sector alone. A trillion deliveries every year – every Earth year, I mean, I can’t shake that c
alendar. And that’s growing. We’re already ten per cent up on last year.”

  “That is interesting,” Cal said, lying again. “And you met your wife here? So, she’s… what? An alien?”

  “She… yeah.” Dave puffed out his cheeks. “I guess you stop thinking in those terms, eventually. We met… God, I don’t know. You lose track of time out here. Maybe a couple of years after I left Earth.”

  “Where is she?” Mech asked.

  Dave picked up one of the fries, turned it over a couple of times, then set it back down. “She, uh, she died,” he said. “The Xandrie hijacked one of our depots a while back. She got caught in the crossfire. I only found out when she didn’t come home that night.”

  “Oh, man. Dave. I’m sorry,” said Cal. “Those Xandrie fonks. You know, they killed me, too?”

  Dave nodded, accepting the sympathy. Eventually, the rest of the sentence filtered through. “They what?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I got better, you wouldn’t know it to look at me,” said Cal. “There was this, like, tunnel of light, and Tobey Maguire – you know, the actor?”

  Dave’s expression was completely blank.

  “Maybe after your time. Spider-Man? No? Forget it. Pleasantville? They did a whole black and white… forget it, doesn’t matter. Anyway…” Cal drummed his fingers on the table. “What were we talking about?”

  “The man’s dead wife,” Mech said.

  “Right! Yes.” Cal reached across the table and squeezed Dave’s hand. “You have our condolences.”

  “Uh, right. Thanks,” Dave said. He gazed out of the grimy window for a while, then visibly forced himself to perk up. “So, anyway, I threw myself into work, and tried to get on with things. But I come back here every year, on the day we met. Or, you know, probably. Like I say, time’s pretty much meaningless up here.”

  “Why the fonk do you do that?” Mech asked, looking around at the run-down restaurant. “This place is a shizzhole.”

  “Jesus, Mech. Show some respect,” said Cal. “First you people probe him for five days, and now you’re questioning his grieving process.”