Space Team: Planet of the Japes

by Barry J. Hutchison

  He cackled as he flicked some of the goo in Cal’s direction, then spun on his heels until he was facing Mech. “Now it’s your turn, big guy,” he said, shuffling towards him in a series of dance steps that somehow managed to convey something like sarcasm.

  “C-caaan’t l-lift meeee,” Mech warbled.

  “We’ll see about that,” said Dave. He flicked both the metal disks he’d taken from his shoes, one in each hand, then caught them. “Ptchow, ptchow!” he said, tossing them both at Mech’s chest. They clamped on like magnets, and Dave waved his hands above the currently horizontal cyborg. “Abracadabra… Machinus risum…”

  Nothing happened.

  “Oh well, worth a try,” said Dave, then he reached down and found a couple of handholds in Mech’s frame. The disks pulsed with a faint blue light and Dave hoisted Mech off the ground as if he were lighter than air.

  “Wh-aaaat th-e-e f-fonnk?” said Mech, as he was carried over to the second scanning stalk.

  “I know. Cool, isn’t it?” Dave said. “Technology. Where would we be without it?”

  He hummed under his breath as he turned Mech towards the scanner. “Argh,” he said, when he recognized the tune. He shot Cal a look of amused irritation. “I’ve got the fonking Addams Family theme stuck in my head, thanks to you.”

  Dave shrugged. “Still, small price to pay to get my hands on this, I suppose.”

  He forced Mech’s face in front of the scanner. The red light swooshed, bleeped, then the whole thing retreated into the floor. The energy walls flickered ominously, before shutting down one by one.

  “Yes!” Dave roared, gazing up at the now exposed Indestructium sphere. It still hung in the middle of the room, showing no signs of moving. “I’ve got it. I’ve actually got it!”

  He pulled the disks from Mech’s chest and jumped aside as Mech dropped like a stone – or, more accurately, like an enormous metal man – to the floor.

  “I mean, I never really doubted it, but… Wow. I’ve done it!”

  He turned the metal disks over in his hands, then tossed them both at the sphere. They clanged against the side, lighting up in an urgent shade of red as they attached. Dave stepped back as the ball fell. The impact of it shook the building, and quite possibly the planet itself.

  Reaching a tentative hand towards the metal, Dave gave it a poke. He studied the end of his finger, presumably to make sure nothing terrible had happened to it, then pressed his whole hand against the sphere’s side. “It’s cold,” he said. “It’s freezing. I mean, I guess that makes sense.”

  He rapped his knuckles against the metal. “Yoo-hoo! Anyone home?” Turning, he winked at Cal. “Just kidding. I know he’s in there. But he won’t be for long.”

  Reaching into his pocket, Dave withdrew another gadget. This one was a small rectangle, slightly larger and thicker than a credit card. Cal wondered how he was going to open the sphere with that, but then Dave raised the thing to his mouth and spoke into it. Lights flickered across its surface in time with each syllable.

  “Got it. Lock on and prime for extraction,” he commanded, then he yelped and was sent staggering when something small, green and slimy crashed into his chest, its stubby arms thrashing and flailing.

  “What the fonk is…? Weird fat kid?” Dave laughed, shielding himself from Splurt’s frenzied flurry of punches. “You know, I wondered if the Fritzer would work on you. Guess I got my answer.”

  “S-Spluuuurt, n-n-no!” Cal stammered.

  Grabbing Splurt by the front of his Funworld t-shirt, Dave wrenched him away. His fist left an indent in the little guy’s head, and Splurt rippled in distress.

  “God damn, you smell like Silly Putty,” Dave told him, then he spun around and tossed Splurt across the room. Splurt hit the wall with a damp, painful-sounding splat and rolled down it until he found the floor. He lay there, his back curved towards the rest of the room, unmoving.

  “Y-youu m-mooonster,” Loren wheezed. Her arm twitched, but her body otherwise refused to respond.

  “Haha! Yeah,” said Dave, slightly dreamily. He shrugged, then returned to the sphere. “Under normal circumstances, I’d kill you all now, but… I don’t know. Where would be the fun in that?”

  He aimed the next part directly at Cal. “Fact is, I like knowing you’re out there. I want you to come after me. I urge you to. I really do. You think you’re some cool action hero, flying around, having adventures, and I want to show you the truth.”

  Dave bit his bottom lip, wanting to delay this moment so he could truly savor it. “I want to show you that you’re nothing, Cal Carver. That you’re a little boy playing big boy games. I want to show you the strength of my organization, and how truly, utterly, completely insignificant you are.”

  “F-f-onk—”

  “Yes! Backchat! I love it,” said Dave. “Keep that up. Don’t ever change. It’ll make breaking you all the more entertaining.”

  A halo of light encircled Dave and the Indestructium sphere. He looked up, just briefly, and couldn’t quite manage to hide his disappointment.

  “Ah, shizz. Looks like my ride’s here,” he said. “This has been a blast. Truly. We’ll definitely do it again sometime, OK? Probably when you least expect it. You kids be good in the meantime, you hear?”

  He put his arms down at his side and looked upwards, then remembered something. “Oh, and Cal?” he said. “I fonking hate The Big Lebowski.”

  “S-s-son offff a—” Cal began, but then the light became brilliant and blinding, and the spot where Dave and the sphere had been became empty and silent.

  Several stunned seconds passed without comment. It was Cal who finally chipped in.

  “Buttth-hole.”

  Over by the wall, Splurt rolled over, his bloodshot eyes scanning for trouble. Having made certain the coast was clear, he jumped to his feet and scampered over to Cal, something clutched in his stubby fist. Something that looked awfully like a pen.

  No, not a pen. A space pen.

  “W-way to g-ggoo, buuuddy.”

  “Seeeee if-f it haaas a r-r-r-r-r—” Mech stammered.

  “R-reverssse,” Loren finished for him.

  Splurt held the device above his head, like He-Man with his magic sword, then lowered it and studied the controls. With his one tiny finger, he prodded a button on the side. A light flashed, and Cal felt himself lose what little bladder control he’d been able to retain the first time.

  “W-wronnnng o-n-n-nne,” he said, his voice now a barely intelligible series of slurred consonants and vowels. “Trrryyy ag-g-gain.”

  Splurt pushed another button. Pain tore through everyone, thrashing them around in violent convulsions. The little blob watched them for a while, wide-eyed, then pushed the button again. The thrashing stopped.

  “J-Jeeeeesush,” Cal sobbed. “N-neeeever t-touch thaaaaaaat ag-g-ain.”

  Splurt prodded another button. Everyone braced themselves, which was tricky with zero muscle control. There was… no, not a flash. An absence of flash, like all the light was temporarily sucked out of the room and into the device.

  When the light returned, Cal blinked. It was the first time he’d blinked in a few minutes, and he’d forgotten how enjoyable it was.

  He blinked a second time, swore to himself he’d never take his eyelids for granted again, then scrambled to his feet. Loren and Miz were already up, and Mech was whirring himself into position.

  “That fonking fonking… fonk!” Cal hissed. “I’m going to kill him. Seriously. I am totally going to kill that butthole-faced ballsack.”

  “Join the queue,” said Miz, rubbing her cheek where Dave’s foot had smashed into it.

  “First, we need to get out of here,” Cal said. He spun to find Mech standing over the mound of yellow mush. Cal put an arm as far around the cyborg’s shoulders as he could reach. “Hey, you big lug. You OK?”

  “What? Yeah, man,” Mech said. “It’s just… He had the answers, you know? If what he said is true, then it turns out my whole damn li
fe has been a lie, and he might be the only one who knows the truth. Knew the truth.”

  “I know. I know,” said Cal, patting Mech’s back. “Want me to say a few words?”

  “Not really.”

  Cal nodded. “Well, I’m going to anyway.”

  He set his jaw and stared solemnly down at the mush pile. “We didn’t know each other long, but based on what little we knew about you, I think you were a good… man? Is that racist? I don’t know. Let’s just say space clown. You were a good space clown. I mean, truly fonking horrifying to look at, but your heart was in the right place. If, I don’t know, if you had a heart. I’m not an expert on… whatever you were.”

  He sniffed, as if fighting back tears. “For a while there, you were one of us. You were one of the team. One of Space Team. And now you’re custard. But we’ll always remember you, and I swear now, over your dead body, we will avenge you, Coco.”

  Mech sighed. “Bobo.”

  Cal looked at him blankly.

  “Bobo. His name’s Bobo,” said Mech.

  “Oh,” Cal replied. He frowned. “What did I call him?”

  “Coco.”

  Cal continued with the blank look.

  “And that’s wrong,” said Mech. “It ain’t Coco. It’s Bobo.”

  “Seriously? Have I had his name wrong this whole time?” Cal wondered. “Did I say it out loud to him at any point? God, that’s embarrassing.”

  “I’d imagine it’s low on his list of concerns,” Loren chipped in.

  Cal shrugged. “Anyway, my point is, we’ll avenge your death, Bobo. Even if it takes all day.”

  “And if it takes longer than a day?” Mech asked.

  Cal puffed out his cheeks. “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. But for now, we need to get out of here and find that lying, two-faced, treacherous fonk.”

  “And the most dangerous man in the universe,” Loren reminded him.

  “One thing at a time,” Cal told her. “Mech, I officially promote you to Fred. Dave, if that’s even his real name, Dave is now Scrappy-Doo.”

  Mech shrugged. “Whatever, man.”

  “Well at least try to show a bit of enthusiasm,” Cal said.

  Mech forced a smile that was more like a grimace.

  “Fonk it, that’ll have to do,” said Cal. “Now, can we do the beam-up thing that he did?”

  Loren shook her head. “No.”

  Cal tutted. “Vajazzle could do it. Dave can do it. Why can’t we do it? Is this, like, exclusively bad guy technology, or something? Jesus,” Cal said. He took a breath composing himself. “Fine. We can’t beam up, that’s fine. We can still do this. Space Team…”

  He pointed dramatically towards the open door behind them. “To the elevators!”

  * * *

  Cal followed Mech, Loren and Miz into one of what seemed to be dozens of elevators, none of them marked with anything that indicated where they led to.

  “I have a good feeling about this one,” Cal said. “I think this one will take us to the Hub, then we can jump on the drop pod thing and—”

  “Just press the button, already,” Miz snapped. “That guy is so not getting away.”

  “Right, right, yeah,” said Cal. The control panel had two buttons, one near the top, and one near the bottom. Cal pushed the top one. They waited for the doors to close.

  The doors didn’t close.

  Cal pressed it again. “Is it on? Maybe it’s broken,” he said.

  “I think it might have to scan me,” Mech said, indicating the eye-scanner at head height.

  There was a small scuffle as everyone shuffled aside so Mech could get to the front. The red light flashed in his face and he pressed the ‘up’ button.

  “Goodbye, Commander Disselpoof,” the elevator chimed as the doors swished closed.

  Just before they did, Splurt hopped backwards into the hallway. Cal grabbed for him.

  “Splurt, no!”

  But then the doors thoomed closed and G-Force pushed down on them all as the elevator car rocketed up towards the surface.

  “We have to go back!” Cal yelped. “Splurt’s still down there.”

  Loren put a hand on his arm. “We will. Don’t worry. We’ll get him. He’ll be OK.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, he’ll be OK,” said Cal, bracing himself against the wall as the elevator somehow picked up speed, hurtling them faster and faster towards the surface.

  In just a few seconds – although it felt like significantly longer to Cal – it began to slow. The car jerked a little as it came to a complete stop, then the doors opened, revealing a wide-open plain that was fringed in the distance with alien-looking trees.

  There was a Tyrannosaurus Rex looking back at them. Or something that bore more than a passing resemblance to one, anyway.

  It was around the size of a T-Rex, with a long tail that ended in a spiky club. Its snout was a scarred, deformed lump of a thing, the mouth twisted upwards into a clown-like rictus grin. Its eyes were two baseball-sized dots, set deep in a head that on its own was larger than Mech’s entire body, and sturdier-looking, too.

  Jets of hot white steam billowed from its nostrils as it stared down at the door that had opened in the side of a gnarled old tree, and at the occupants lurking inside it.

  “I don’t think this is the Hub,” Loren whispered. The monster cocked its head, its eyes narrowing to slits. “We came too far east.”

  “We hope,” Cal murmured. “The alternative is, we’ve come too far west, in which case this thing won’t just want to eat us.”

  “Aw, man. You are never getting to choose the elevator again,” said Mech.

  “Just press the button, try not to make it angry,” Cal urged. “We’ll go back down and—”

  The clown-rex’s tail smashed into the tree, crumpling the side of the elevator and sending everyone but Mech staggering. It drew back and swung again, and this time Mech shoved the others through the door, then stumbled out behind them. The second impact obliterated most of the tree, and sent the elevator car plummeting downwards, out of control.

  The monster lowered its head and screeched at them. Its breath hit Cal like a hurricane force wind, flipping him over into a sort of tumbling somersault that ended when he hit something large and solid.

  Groaning, he looked up into the dark, hungry eyes of a huge bird-like creature. A car-sized beak opened, then snapped down. Cal ducked, dived and rolled clear. The thing wailed furiously as it pecked nothing but ground.

  Far off below, they heard the elevator car hit the bottom. Several seconds later, they felt the rumble of it beneath their feet.

  “Anyone have any ideas?” Cal asked, bunching together with the others. Several more enormous creatures had emerged from behind rocks, crawled out of a murky lake, or burrowed up from below ground. There seemed to be no rhyme nor reason to their design, like a box full of assorted horrifying animal parts had been tossed in the air then assembled in whatever order the pieces landed.

  Most of them wore the same face-stretching smile as the T-Rex-thing, but there any similarities between them ended.

  Except their interest in killing Cal and the others, of course. They seemed to be fully in agreement on that particular matter.

  “I can take care of them,” Miz reckoned.

  “I don’t know,” said Cal, as diplomatically as he could. “They look kind of mean.”

  “Cal’s right,” Loren agreed. “You could probably take out some of them, but we should stick together.”

  “We’re not together,” Cal said, looking back at the carnage of the elevator.

  “We’ll get him,” Loren promised. “But for now, we need to– Look out!”

  Something big, scaly and stupid-looking pounced. Shoving Cal out of its path, Mech drove his fist hard against the side of its head, right below one of its four eye sockets. The thing staggered and squealed, but – much to everyone’s annoyance – didn’t fall. An arm unfolded from within its chest, scything into Mech’s metal ribcage.
The impact lifted him, depositing him again several feet away, with two grinning brutes growling down at him.

  “Aw… fonk,” he grunted, then he caught a set of slavering jaws that chomped at him, his arms shaking as he tried to force the ugly big bamston away.

  A rock clacked off the side of the thing’s head. A saucer-sized eyeball swiveled and found Cal waving at it. “Hey, gorgeous,” he said. He gestured down at himself. “Want some of this?”

  Cal was so occupied with trying to draw the attention of the beast that he failed to notice quite how effectively he was drawing the attention of several others. Loren shoulder-barged him aside as a whip-like appendage snapped at the air where he’d been standing. Miz bounded onto it, claws slashing, teeth biting, her whole body a furry frenzy of fury.

  Something clipped Loren’s legs, knocking them from beneath her and spinning her into a full sideways flip. Her boots caught Cal on the chin, and they both hit the ground more or less simultaneously.

  Mech, meanwhile, was still wrestling with those enormous jaws. Something else was gnawing on at least one of his legs. He pulled up a system status report and watched as the damage readout scrolled upwards past his field of view. Nothing major so far, but the pressure the thing’s teeth were exerting meant it was only a matter of time before…

  Something in the status report changed color. At first, Mech feared the worst, until he realized the text had changed from red to green, indicating something coming back online.

  “How the fonk…?” he wondered as he read the display, then he decided not to question it any further. Instead, he twisted his wrist, turned his face away, and fired a bolt of concentrated energy through the head of the thing he was fighting with.

  The skull erupted into yellow goo, the rest of the body following soon after. It washed over Mech, burying him from head to toe. As he wriggled free, he felt the ground beneath him begin to tremble and shake.

  Cal and the others felt it, too. Miz glanced down, just for a moment, but it was a moment too long. The creature she’d been tearing into seized its chance, hammering her with an overhead strike from its one giant fist.

  The monsters began to draw in around them. Mech raised both arms and took aim. “Hey, you ugly pieces of shizz!” he bellowed, drawing their attention. “Eat this.”