Loren thumbed back over her shoulder towards the kitchen. “You thirsty?”
* * *
Cal stood in front of a wall-mounted device, shaking his head in disbelief.
“No. Uh-uh. No way.”
“It can!” Loren insisted.
“I don’t believe you. You’re a filthy liar, Ms Loren.”
Loren laughed – properly laughed – and Cal felt his heart flutter in his chest on thousands of tiny wings. “I’m telling the truth,” she said. “Try it, if you don’t believe me.”
Cal chewed his lip in thought. “Anything?”
“Anything,” Loren confirmed. “Although, if it’s the first time it’s ever been asked for it, it’ll have to do some tests.”
Cal shrugged. “OK. But, just for the record, I’m going along with this to keep you happy, and don’t for a second think it’s actually going to work. I want that noted.”
“Done,” said Loren. She nodded towards the machine. “Now go.”
“Right, then,” said Cal. He rubbed his hands together. “Gimme a steak.”
The machine did nothing. Cal was both overjoyed and disappointed at the same time. “See! I was right. Doesn’t work.”
“You have to be more specific,” Loren told him. “What kind of steak? How do you want it cooked? It needs the info.”
Cal tried again. “Fine. Fillet steak, twenty-one-day aged Aberdeen Angus prime beef, medium-rare. Easy on the steak sauce.” He turned to Loren. “There. That specific enough?”
With a ping the machine exploded into life, dozens of lights illuminating across its surface.
“Looks like it,” said Loren, stepping aside.
A blast of hot air hit Cal in the face, forcing his eyes closed. Two padded metal clamps fastened around his temples and something jolted through his skull, making his hair stand on end.
“What the fon—?” he began, before something small and pointy forced its way inside his mouth and stabbed into his tongue. “Nng! Nyaaah! ‘op ‘at! ‘ut it out!”
Two finger-length prongs probed deep inside his nostrils. He coughed and spluttered as they sprayed something fizzy and unpleasant deep into his nasal canal, and then the prongs, the clamps and the spiky-thing all withdrew.
Cal stumbled back, clutching as much of his face and head as he could possibly clutch. “What the Hell was that?” he yelped.
“Those were the tests I mentioned,” Loren said, her face lit up by a beaming grin.
“I feel violated,” Cal told her. He extended his arms to her. “Hold me.”
PING.
A door in the front of the machine snapped open, accompanied by a little blast of fanfare music. The smell hit Cal right away, even through the popping and fizzing that still clogged both his nostrils.
“No way,” he whispered. He leaned down and peered in through the little hatch, half expecting something to spring out and poke him in the eyes.
There, laid out on a large white plate, was a twenty-one-day aged Aberdeen Angus prime beef fillet steak, cooked medium-rare. Cal’s mouth instinctively began to water. His stomach grumbled in anticipation.
“Tell me this isn’t some kind of sick joke,” he whispered. Loren reached in and took out the plate, then wafted it under his nose.
“Nope,” she said. “Just your bog-standard food replicator. I can’t believe you don’t have them on Earth.”
Cal greedily took the plate from her and slid onto the padded bench running along a narrow table in the center of the room. Loren sat side-on across from him, straddling the bench as if riding a horse.
There was no cutlery – at least, there was no cutlery right there on the table, and Cal’s stomach wasn’t going to let him waste time going to look for any. The soup at Dorid’s had been pleasant enough, but this was a whole other level.
He picked up the slab of meat and chomped down on one end. He groaned in pleasure as the taste and the juices and the tenderness of the steak fell apart in his mouth. “Oh Jesus,” he whispered, swallowing the meat and moving in for another bite. “This is good. This is… this is amazing.”
“Told you,” said Loren.
“No, but this is good,” Cal insisted, in case she’d somehow misunderstood. “I mean, it’s literally the greatest steak that has ever existed. Meaty, tender, just enough steak sauce.”
He swallowed, and glanced across to the replicator. “And you’re saying I can have this anytime I want?!”
Loren nodded. “You can have anything you want.”
Cal looked to the ceiling, as if in prayer. “I fonking love outer space.” He took another bite and spoke while he chewed. “But how does it work? What’s it made of?”
“Same thing it’s usually made of.”
Cal stopped chewing for a moment and frowned. “Cows?”
“Atoms,” said Loren. “It gets the information it needs from your brain, taste buds, whatever, then builds the food from the atomic level up.”
“And it can make anything?”
Loren nodded. “Yes.”
Cal swallowed. “OK. OK, I’m going to try something. If this works…”
He jumped up from the bench and practically skipped across to the machine. “Banoffee Pie. Extra cream,” he said. The hot air blasted him in the face and he ducked to avoid the head clamp. “Wait!” he said, holding up a hand. The machine fell silent and Cal straightened up. “Like my mom used to make.”
The replicator came to life again. Cal endured the head-shock, the tongue-prick and the nose-spray, then bent at the waist and gazed hopefully into the hatch, just as it slid open with a ping.
The smell of cream and caramel and sugar-dusted banana reached out to him, and he was eight years old again, standing in the kitchen, just waiting for his mom to cut him a slice.
“Shizz,” he said, and his voice shook.
Loren looked up from the table. “Cal? You OK?”
“What? Yeah! Yeah. I’ve got pie, how could I not be OK?” he said, reaching into the machine and pulling out the plate. A single piece of pie sat atop it, a blob of thick white cream melting slowly on the gently warmed caramel and banana topping.
He slid back onto the bench and set the plate in front of him. He just looked at it at first, admiring it for the work of art it was. It looked just like the pie his mom used to make. Smelled like it, too.
Cal reached for the pie, hesitated, then drew his arm back. What if it didn’t taste right? After the sight and the smell of it, what if it fell at the final hurdle?
And why did he care? It was a pie. That was all. Just a pie. Just the pie his mom had made him whenever he’d hurt himself, done well at school, or gone above and beyond on the chores front.
She’d even given him a whole one to himself that time he’d intervened to stop some bigger kids beating up the boy next door. The fight had ended with him suffering from a black eye, a bloodied lip and, after he’d eaten the entire pie in one sitting, twenty-seven minutes of explosive diarrhea.
But man, it had been worth it.
“I can’t,” he said, pushing the plate away.
Loren looked down at the plate. “You don’t want it?”
“No, I mean, I do. I do, it’s just… what if it’s not right?”
“It’ll be what you expect it to be,” said Loren. “It took it right out of your head.”
“Yeah, but what if I’m remembering it wrong?” said Cal. “You know? What if, like, I’ve made a mistake? What if… I’ve forgotten?”
Loren picked up the triangle of pie and examined it like a scientist studying some previously undiscovered small mammal. She brought it close to her nose and gave it a tentative sniff. Then, with a shrug, she took a bite.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh. Holy shizz. What is this?”
“Banoffee Pie,” said Cal. “Is it good?”
“Good? Fonk. I mean… I’ve never tasted anything like it.”
“Yeah? Seriously?”
Loren nodded and held the pie towards his mouth. “Here. Try it,” she said.
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Cal eyed the pie suspiciously.
“You better hurry up, or I am eating all of this thing,” Loren warned him.
With a resigned sigh, Cal leaned across the table and took a bite.
And suddenly there she was. His mom, her fingers sticky with caramel, her apron dusty with flour, her smile for him and him alone. He chewed the pie, but didn’t taste the sweetness. He tasted home. He tasted safety and warmth and love. He tasted every time his parents had held him, or hugged him, or read him a story and tucked him in.
Cal’s eyes filled with tears and he quickly closed them before Loren could see. “Mmm,” he said, chewing. “Yep. That’s pretty good. That is pretty accurate.”
He chewed until the pie and the tears were gone, then opened his eyes to find Loren licking the plate. She froze when she realized she’d been caught, and quickly placed the spotless plate down on the table. A blob of white cream was stuck to the end of her nose, looking even whiter against her pale blue skin.
“Uh, yeah. Not bad at all,” she said.
Cal pointed to his own nose. “You’ve, uh…”
“What?”
“Here.” He reached across the table and cupped her face with one hand. She tensed, but didn’t pull away, then went cross-eyed when he swept his thumb across her nose, wiping away the cream. “Missed a spot,” he said, and Loren grinned awkwardly.
“Whoops.”
Cal let his hand linger for a moment, his thumb brushing lightly across Loren’s highly-defined cheekbone. “You don’t smile enough,” he told her.
“What? I smile,” she said, her face falling into rigid straightness again. “Whenever the situation demands it.”
“What the Hell does that mean?” Cal snorted. He shook his head. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. We’re going to make you smile more often,” he said. Her eyes flitted across his face for a moment, then locked onto his. She swallowed.
Cal leaned slowly across the table. “I’m going to make you smile more often.”
“Pardon me, sir,” said Kevin.
Loren jerked back quickly, then stood up. Cal sighed. “I thought I told you to leave,” he said.
“Ah. Sorry, I thought that only applied to the corridor, sir,” Kevin said.
“Great. So, you’ve been here the whole time?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” said Kevin. “Are you feeling better now, sir? You appeared to be crying for a moment back there.”
“I’m fine! What do you want?”
“Mr Mech would like to see you on the bridge at once,” Kevin said. “Our scanners have detected… well, we’re not entirely sure, sir.”
Cal spun around on the bench and jumped to his feet. “I guess we’ll have to continue this later,” he said, turning to Loren. Or rather, to the spot where Loren had been, which was now empty, the kitchen door standing open just a few feet away.
“Well, that’s just great,” Cal muttered. He made for the door, then stopped at the replicator. “Another banoffee pie, same as last one,” he instructed. “Only this time, make it bigger.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Miz glared at Loren as she hurried back onto the bridge. “What kept you? Where’s Cal?”
Loren swept a strand of hair back over her ear, and pointedly avoided Miz’s gaze. “Uh, he’s just coming, I think,” she said, sliding into her seat. “What’s up?”
Mech gestured to a rectangular overlay down at the bottom of the viewscreen. The main screen was a shimmering lightshow of streaking stars. The smaller screen showed hundreds – thousands, maybe – of red dots, all different sized.
“We’re coming up on something. Ain’t on the maps,” Mech said.
Loren swiped her fingers across some controls, enlarging the scanner window. The dots all doubled in size, but no further information about them became immediately obvious. “Asteroid field, maybe?”
“Not unless it’s recent,” said Mech. “And whatever it is, some of those things are fifty miles across.”
“It’d have to be planetary debris,” Loren reasoned. “Anything nearby?”
“Nothing. Ain’t near any solar systems. Ain’t near anything, far as I can tell.”
“Check out the size of this pie!” cried Cal, darting onto the bridge. He held a plate above his head like a trophy. “I asked for it bigger and thought it would make a whole pie, but it’s just made one slice and scaled it up. Look at it! It’s fonking huge!”
He thrust it towards Soonsho, forcing her to back up flat against the wall behind her in fright. “Look at my giant pie!” He nodded encouragingly. “Want some?”
Soonsho shook her head quite emphatically. “Suit yourself,” Cal shrugged. “Miz? Giant pie?”
Miz raised her head, sniffed, then her face crumpled into a scowl. “Is that fruit?”
“Uh, just barely,” said Cal, but Miz waved him away in disgust.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” he said, jumping into his seat and scooping a handful of the pie into his mouth. “Hey,” he mumbled, spraying crumbs all down his front. “What’s with all the red dots?”
“We don’t know,” Loren admitted. “I’m going to change course and go around it.”
“Shouldn’t we check it out? It could be something exciting.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Loren. “I don’t know if I’m in the market for ‘exciting’ right now.”
“Oh?” said Cal. “What are you in the market for, out of interest?”
Loren stammered the first few vowels of several potential sentences, then decide it was best to just close her mouth and say nothing. This did not go unnoticed by Mizette. She looked from Loren to Cal and back again, her clawed fingers tip-tapping on her arm rest.
“We’re gonna pass it,” said Mech. “If we’re stopping, it’s now or never.”
“Let’s check it out,” said Cal, shoveling more of the pie in his mouth. “I like it when you guys don’t know what something is. It’s usually just me. This way, we can all learn something new together. It’ll be a beautiful thing.”
“Well… OK,” said Loren. “Dropping from warp.”
The Untitled went from ‘full warp’ to ‘almost stationary’ in the space between breaths. Cal’s plate was whipped from his hand. It shot across the bridge like a Frisbee, then the enormous slice of pie exploded with a splat across the back of Mech’s head.
Cal braced himself for the cyborg’s wrath, but Mech was too transfixed by what was happening on the viewscreen. Zertex ships filled space as far as the eye could see. There were thousands of them, all shapes and sizes, from one-man fighters to vast battleships, flying close together with no obvious structure or formation.
“Hol-eee shizz,” Cal whispered.
“Should I engage the cloaking system, sir?” Kevin asked.
Loren tore her eyes from the screen long enough to look up. “We have a cloaking system?”
“Well, we have a button with ‘cloaking system’ written below it, so one can only presume so,” said Kevin. “Should I engage it?”
“Yes!” said Loren.
Cal held up a hand. “Wait. It doesn’t have ‘self-destruct’ or anything written above it, does it?”
“No, sir.”
“OK, just checking,” said Cal. “Because that would be unfortunate. Yeah, cloak us, Kev.”
Space shimmered like rising heat, then steadied itself. “Done, sir.”
Even Mizette was leaning forward in her chair, gazing out at the armada. “That is, like, a lot of ships,” she said.
“Observant as ever,” Loren muttered.
“I heard that,” Miz growled.
“What are they doing?” Loren wondered. “Zertex ships usually travel in formation. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Miz leaned back and crossed her arms. “They’re your friends. You tell us.”
“That’s the whole point,” said Mech. His voice was flat and low, and almost devoid of anything that made it his. “Fly in formation, scanners
will immediately pick you up, let everyone know what you are.”
He gestured to the viewscreen. “Travel like this, bunched together, all mixed up, flying nice and slow, chances are most folks will think you’re debris or an asteroid field.” He leaned on the railing in front of the screen. It was a quick, jerking movement, like his legs were suddenly unable to hold him up. “This is a sneak attack. Those ships are heading to Symmorium space.”
Loren shook her head. “No. Not that many. They can’t be. It’d be the single largest assault in… well, ever. I mean, look at them.”
“I see them,” said Mech. “But I’m telling you, this is an attack. And the Symmorium won’t know what hit them.”
Silence fell across the bridge. Outside, the ships continued to glide silently past in their hundreds. They stretched for hundreds of miles ahead, and were stacked up from beyond the bottom of the screen to somewhere above the top. They reminded Cal of fish swimming up a river, only with wings and guns, and a To Do list that focused heavily on domination and genocide.
So not exactly like fish.
“What do we do?” asked Cal. “Do we intervene?”
“What the fonk are you talking about?” said Mech, not turning. “Even with this ship, we wouldn’t last five seconds against all that.”
“I don’t mean fight them,” said Cal. “I’m not suicidal. I meant, should we warn the Symmorium or something? That’s the right thing to do, right?”
He looked around the bridge. No-one looked back. “Guys?”
“I thought we weren’t getting involved?” said Mech. “That’s what you said. We get the reward, and we get going. That’s the only way we survive.”
“But it’s not getting involved,” Cal insisted. “It’s just making a phone call.”
“It’s choosing a side,” said Mech. “Worse. It’s declaring a side. Once we do that, they got us. We’re involved, and we don’t get uninvolved until it ends. And it won’t end well.”
Cal scratched his chin. He looked across to Miz, but her eyes were fixed on the screen. She wore an expression he didn’t think he’d ever seen on her before. It took him a few seconds to recognize it.
Fear. Mizette of the Greyx, the most fearsome warrior Cal had ever met, was afraid.
Space Team: Song of the Space Siren Page 13