“P-please, I don’t know where he is.”
Cal’s scream was so loud it made the speaker crackle and pop. Unable to so much as lift a finger, Mech focused all his brainpower on analyzing the shape of the distortion’s waves until the sound of torture faded into the background.
* * *
Loren’s arms were beginning to ache. Or, to be more accurate, they were continuing to ache, but she was finally beginning to notice.
She was attached by a series of cuffs and chains to the ceiling, her arms raised so her body formed a Y-shape. Had she known of the singer, Michael Jackson, she might have likened her position to the one he adopted on the cover of his posthumous two-disc album, This Is It, but as she was in no way aware of him, she didn’t. And, even if she had heard of him, she probably wasn’t in the right frame of mind to draw any such comparison.
The speaker that had been mounted high on the wall on her right now lay in pieces on the floor. She’d tried listening to the screams at first. She felt she owed it to Cal, somehow, like it was her duty to listen.
She’d listened as Vajazzle had asked him about Splurt, and she’d listened to his replies. It was soon after that she decided she couldn’t listen any longer, and she’d managed to bring her legs up high enough to kick the speaker from the wall.
As the speaker fell, so too did the silence. Loren regretted it almost immediately. Now that she had no idea what was happening, her imagination rushed to fill in the blanks.
She tugged on the cuffs that were locked around both wrists, rattling the chains attaching her to the ceiling. “Stop it!” she bellowed, thrashing the chains around. “Let him go! Let him go!”
Her voice echoed back off the featureless walls and thick metal door as, inside her head, Cal screamed and screamed and screamed.
* * *
Time passed.
Quite how much time, Cal couldn’t really say. He remembered very little except the pain. It had filled him from top to bottom, flooding his lungs and drowning him in its fire.
So yeah, that hadn’t been much fun.
And then… what?
He blinked and looked around him. He was still upside-down – of course, the fact his head felt like a balloon filled with wet sand had already told him that – and still in his cell. The protective sheeting below him was no longer clean. Far from it, in fact. A variety of bodily fluids painted the blue plastic in a rich palette of reds and… well, mostly just reds, actually, with a hint of brown that he vaguely recalled was vomit.
At least, he hoped it was vomit.
He was alone in the cell. That was nice, although it was almost certainly a deliberate attempt by the assassin to let him ponder his fate. By leaving him alone, she no doubt hoped his imagination would fill his head with terrifying notions of what fresh Hell awaited him when she returned, and in doing so make her job that much easier.
Leaving him alone, though, was a mistake. It was a mistake that would be Vajazzle’s undoing. She might have him tied up, but there wasn’t a trap in existence that could hold Cal Carver for long!
Gritting his teeth against the pain in his… well, everywhere, really, Cal squeezed his knees together and twisted his ankles where the bonds that held him to the ceiling were tightly tied. At the same time, he pressed the backs of his hands together and pushed his elbows outwards. The cuffs binding his wrists were tight, but escaping them would be child’s play.
He wriggled his arms.
He twisted his legs.
He let out a sigh.
“Nope,” he said. “I’m completely fonking stuck.”
He dangled for a while, doing nothing, then launched into a frenzied fit of squirming and struggling, as if trying to take the handcuffs by surprise. If they were surprised, they didn’t show it, and when Cal eventually stopped struggling, he was exactly as trapped as he had been moments before.
He was just building up to having another go when the door opened. Lady Vajazzle strode in, her face partly obscured by the hood she had pulled back into place.
“Finally!” said Cal. “I was about to send out a search party.” He tried to smile, but his face had forgotten how to, and he pulled a weird sort of upside-down grimace, instead. “Honestly, I’m not sure you’re taking this whole torture thing seriously at all.”
A long tendril snaked from beneath Vajazzle’s robe and wrapped around Cal’s waist. It tightened sharply and he hissed, more with the anticipation of the pain to come than with actual pain itself. “Well, this is new,” he said, trying to hide the tremble in his voice.
Vajazzle’s withered hands took hold of the chain around Cal’s legs. The fastenings rattled as she unclipped him, then a second tentacle-like appendage tangled around him and hoisted him onto the assassin’s shoulder.
That done, Vajazzle about-turned and marched towards the door. “Yay, field trip!” said Cal, watching the ceiling roll by above him. He was closer to being the right way up now, and his legs prickled as all the blood that hadn’t been evicted from his body rushed to be reunited with his feet.
“So… where are we going?” he asked, but Vajazzle didn’t reply.
Cal twisted his neck, trying to get a better view. They were in what was surely a contender for the world’s most boring corridor. It was long and straight with a number of doors on either side. In that regard, it was much like any other corridor, but it was the almost-gray walls that gave it its tedious edge.
He thought of them as ‘almost-gray’ because while they were gray, they were the wrong gray. They were a shade of gray so boring, so utterly bland and monotonous, that Cal had to assume the decorator had been aiming for a different, more interesting shade, but missed. No-one would pick that exact shade of gray through choice. No-one who wasn’t utterly filled with bitterness and self-loathing, anyway.
The corridor was empty, although it was too soon to say if that was because of the paint color. Vajazzle continued along it past a few other doors, then stopped outside the next one.
“Are we here?” asked Cal, craning around to see where they were. “What’s this room? Is it the spa? Tell me it’s the spa.”
A frail arm extended from within Vajazzle’s robe, and her thumb brushed against a sensor pad on the wall. A small light blinked from red to green, and the door slid open. The assassin stepped through, and Cal had to turn his head to stop his nose being smashed against the top of the door frame.
“Hey careful, you almost hurt me there, and I know how much that would upset you,” he said, then he yelped as Vajazzle’s tendrils hoisted him off her shoulder and stood him in the corner of a room that was not unlike the one he’d just come from.
His legs gave out beneath him and Cal slumped down against the wall. When he hit the floor he discovered he wasn’t the only one to have done so.
“Mech?” His head snapped up to Vajazzle. “What have you done to him?”
“I assure you, I am quite functional,” chimed Mech’s voice. It was higher-pitched than usual, and even though he was speaking, his lips didn’t move. “She merely used my chest-mounted dial to assign all my battery power to my intellectual capacity, rendering me temporarily immobile.”
“Oh,” said Cal. “OK. So… she didn’t torture you until you vomited and-or shizzed yourself? Well aren’t you the fonking teacher’s pet?”
One of Vajazzle’s tendrils snaked out and tangled around the dial on Mech’s chest. It gave a twist, and Mech’s hydraulics let out a series of short hissing sounds as the power returned to them.
Moving surprisingly quickly for someone made almost entirely of metal, Mech tore the tendril off his dial, while simultaneously pointing his other arm at Vajazzle’s face. Cal shrunk back against the wall, keen to avoid being splattered by Vajazzle’s exploding face and torso, but before Mech could fire, the assassin’s head folded in on itself like a collapsing soufflé.
Two large, ominous eyeballs stared impassively down at Mech from a squidgy green mound. Beneath
it, Vajazzle’s body broke down, until only the goo-ball remained.
“Splurt!” Cal cried, then he lowered his voice to a whisper. “Buddy! Man, are you a sight for sore eyes. I could kiss you!”
He forced his trembling legs to push him into a standing position against the wall. “In fact, hold that thought – I totally am going to kiss you, but at a more appropriate time.” He jumped around on the spot until he was facing the wall. “Mech?” he said, waving his cuffed hands in the cyborg’s direction. “Would you do the honors?”
Mech got to his feet, being careful not to trample on Splurt. “With pleasure,” he said.
“Hey! What is… What is the meaning of this?” demanded a voice from just inside the doorway. A heavy-set, mostly human-looking man in a Zertex uniform glared at them, his hand moving swiftly to the blaster on his belt.
Mech’s elbow snapped back. It smashed into the guard’s cheek, spinning his head around to the left. The man pirouetted on the spot, then collapsed like a puppet whose strings had all been cut.
Cal looked back over his shoulder at him. “Did… did you just snap that guy’s neck?”
“Uh… maybe,” Mech admitted.
Cal shrugged. “Huh. Oh well,” he said. “Cut me free. You just gave me an idea.”
* * *
When the door to Loren’s cell opened, she was ready. She had spent the last several minutes at full stretch, her feet flat against the room’s back wall. As the door slid aside, she kicked forward with all her might. Her shoulders screamed at her, demanding to know what the Hell she thought she was playing at, as she swung on her chains, flicked her feet up, then wrapped them around the neck of the guard who stepped into the cell.
The guard gagged and choked as she tightened her scissor lock around his throat. “You’ve got five seconds to get me down, or I swear I will pop your skull like a spot.”
Frantically, the guard pointed to his face. The first thing Loren noticed was that it was turning a pleasing shade of purple. The second thing she noticed, was who it belonged to.
“Cal?” she asked. “Is that really you?”
Cal let out a sort of gaak sound and pointed quite emphatically towards his throat.
“Oh, yeah, sorry. Oops,” said Loren. She released her grip and swung back to the floor just as Mech entered and closed the door behind him. Splurt was nestled in one of Mech’s robotic hands, quivering gently, but somehow managing to look quite pleased with himself.
Cal coughed and rubbed his throat. “That’s not how I pictured your legs ending up around my neck,” he said. He stopped rubbing and quickly shook his head. “Not that I have ever pictured such a thing.”
“You’re alive. How are you alive?” Loren asked, as Mech snapped the chains that attached her to the ceiling. “I mean, it’s great, obviously, but… how are you alive?”
“Splurt,” said Cal. He thought about explaining more, but realized that he’d pretty much summed it up. “Yeah. Splurt.”
“Then way to go, Splurt,” said Loren. She nodded, and the little goo-ball rippled in response.
Slipping her wrists from what was left of her shackles, Loren looked Cal up and down. “So, you joined Zertex?”
“Well, you know, I hear they have a great dental plan,” he said.
“The uniform’s a little big.”
Cal held up an arm. Only the tips of his fingers emerged through the end of the sleeve. “Yeah, I took it from a larger gentleman.”
“Still, good idea,” said Loren. “It should help us move around unnoticed.”
“Hmm?” said Cal. “Oh yeah. Actually, I only took it because my own clothes were covered in blood and I’d repeatedly soiled myself, but the sneaking around thing is a nice bonus, too, I guess.”
“Yeah, ‘cept where we supposed to go?” asked Mech. “We’re on their ship. Ain’t nowhere to sneak to.”
“They’ve got the Shatner,” said Cal. “I heard Vajazzle tell Sinclair they’d brought it aboard.”
“Then it’ll be in impound,” said Loren. “The AX11 has a whole level for storing captured enemy ships. One of its original primary purposes was as an anti-piracy vessel, so it was fitted with tractor-beam technology that would allow it to--”
“OK, OK, we don’t need its Wikipedia entry,” said Cal. “Do you know how we get there?”
Loren snorted. “Are you kidding? I spent pretty much every single day during my teenage years studying the schematics of this thing!”
Cal and Mech exchanged a glance. “Damn, girl,” said Mech.
“What?” said Loren. “They were very interesting schematics.”
Cal rested a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll talk about this at a later date,” he promised. “But for now…”
He turned to the door and hoisted up his oversized pants. “…let’s go get our ship back.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Thanks to Loren’s quite tragically detailed knowledge of the ship’s layout, the first nine-tenths of the journey to the impound deck went without a hitch.
They’d navigated the prison deck, ducking out of sight when a couple of guards had emerged from a staff room on their way to the canteen. They’d made their way to one of the ship’s elevators, where Mech had quickly and efficiently overridden the security system by punching a big hole in it and sparking a couple of wires together.
They’d got out of the elevator one deck early and taken the stairs from there. Halfway down, the narrow stairwell opened onto a viewing platform, giving them their first look at the ship’s impound level.”
When the Zertex ship had first appeared in the sky, Cal had been struck by the size of it. To call it ‘fonking enormous’ was to do it an injustice. It was city-sized, and nowhere was this more apparent than on the impound deck.
Hangar after hangar stretched off for ten miles or more in each direction. There was room for hundreds of ships. Thousands, maybe. And yet…
“Empty,” Cal whispered. “They’re all empty. Where’s the Shatner?”
“It’s here somewhere,” said Loren, peering in both directions. “It’s got to be.”
“Mech? Any sign?”
Mech first tapped, then jabbed at the controls on his arm. He shrugged. “Either too much interference or this thing’s still on the fritz,” he said. “I got nothing.”
Loren pointed to a computer terminal that stood outside the airlock of one of the hangars. “We can find it with that,” she said.
Cal leaned over the balcony and looked in both directions at the deck below. There were a couple of Zertex types working at other terminals, but the closest was a good quarter of a mile away, and seemed pretty engrossed in whatever he was working on.
“How long will it take?”
“Not long. Couple of minutes to get in, another few seconds to run the search.”
Cal nodded. “OK, then. Let’s do it. Space Team assemble!”
Mech rolled his eyes. “And to think, for a minute there I was actually happy to see you.”
“I love you too, Mech,” said Cal. He blew the cyborg a kiss, then followed Loren over to a second set of stairs that led down onto the deck.
Cal ducked low and began darting across the deck in a zig-zag pattern. Mech and Loren walked beside him. “What are you doing?” Loren asked. “You know that makes you look more suspicious, right?”
“Does it?”
“Of course it fonking does!” said Mech. “You look like you’re dodging sniper fire.”
Cal stopped zigging and zagging. He straightened up. “In a way, aren’t we all dodging sniper fire?”
“What does that mean?” asked Loren.
Call puffed out his cheeks. “No idea. Just thought it sounded good. You know, like wise or whatever.”
They stopped at the terminal and Loren immediately set to work. Her fingers tapped and swiped across the touch screen. “OK, this is good, they haven’t changed from the stock software. One of the really interestin
g things about the AX11 is that it’s only partly designed by Zertex. Almost a full third of the security protocols were actually devised and supplied by an independent…”
She glanced up and caught the look that passed between Cal and Mech. “I know what you’re thinking, but knowing this stuff isn’t actually that sad.”
“It’s a bit sad,” said Cal.
“And disturbing,” added Mech.
“Sad and disturbing,” agreed Cal.
Loren tutted. “I hate you guys, sometimes,” she said, then she turned her attention back to the screen. “Argh! How can I have been so stupid?”
“In your defense, you were young, you couldn’t get a date - there’s no shame in studying ship schematics every night for--”
“Not that!” said Loren. “I forgot the hangars are double-decker to create more storage space.”
“Right, because if there’s one thing they’re running short of…” said Cal, gesturing at the miles and miles of deck stretching away from them. It was only then that he spotted the Zertex officer striding towards them. “Oh, shizz,” Cal whispered. “We got company.”
“You there!” barked the man. He was tall and skinny, with legs that seemed to bend backwards at the knee. His skin was a queasy shade of green, but he could probably pass for human, assuming the lights were low enough and he was sitting behind a large desk. “What are you doing?”
“Maintenance detail,” Loren whispered, her fingers still flying across the screen.
“Uh, we’re on maintenance detail,” said Cal.
The officer snapped to a full halt just a pace or two away. “Maintenance detail?” he echoed.
“Yes, uh, sir. This computer thing needs… maintained. In a detailed way,” said Cal. “And so that’s what we’re doing.”
The officer’s eyes went from Cal to Loren and Mech. “I see,” he said. He raised a watch-like device on his wrist until it was level with his mouth.
“Communicator,” said Loren.
“Oh, sir, one thing,” said Cal. He pointed to the front of the man’s immaculately neat uniform. “You’ve got something there.”
Instinctively, the officer looked down. “Haha. Made you look,” said Cal. His uppercut caught the officer on the chin, snapping his head back and sending him crumpling to the floor. The officer’s backwards-pointing legs stuck up in the air at two different, yet equally awkward-looking angles.
Space Team: The Wrath of Vajazzle Page 19