Junta and his crew were powerfully-built, but just a little taller than Cal. Takta, on the other hand, stood a full head taller than Mech - and what a head it was. He had the same pointed snub-nose as the others, but his was a history lesson of old scar tissue detailing every conflict he’d ever been involved in.
A chunk of flesh had been removed – presumably not on purpose, although Cal wasn’t ruling it out – from the right side of his mouth. The result was that several dozen teeth were always on display, as if he had a sneer permanently etched on his face.
While all Symmorium had dark, glassy eyes, his were somehow darker still, like two tiny black holes on either side of his head that might suck you in at any moment, and never let you go.
His uniform was both splendid and immaculate. It was a carefully tailored fit, and he wore it well, badges and all. Despite that, he still looked utterly ridiculous, like a grizzly bear in a three-piece suit. This was not a creature designed to wear clothing. This was not a creature designed to do anything but fight and kill and… Well, probably just those two, actually.
The underside of his terrifyingly huge bottom jaw was ridged with hundreds of black cone-like spikes. Cal couldn’t imagine what purpose they possibly served, beyond to make him look even more intimidating than he already was. A few of the spikes were missing, their places taken by some tooth-shaped scarring that suggested something had tried unsuccessfully to bite Takta’s throat out. Cal imagined the cost for failing in that particular endeavor would have been a pretty steep one, and if that was the damage Takta was left with, he’d hate to see the other guy. Or, more likely, the bits of him that were left.
The stoic and reserved Junta was a shark-thing of few words, but Takta made him seem positively bubbly by comparison. He sat at the head of… the dining room, Cal assumed, although it felt more like a school classroom. Takta sat behind a table at the front of the room, while everyone else sat behind smaller individual tables, facing him. Cal had to fight the urge to raise his hand whenever he wanted to speak.
The ‘feast’ wasn’t quite what Cal had been expecting. He’d imagined a table groaning with food – probably fish of some kind, although he didn’t say that out loud in case it was racist. Instead, a single plate of something grim and gray was deposited unceremoniously on the tables in front of everyone, along with something that was either some kind of cutlery, or a bricklayer’s trowel.
He suspected it was probably the latter, because the stuff on the plate more closely resembled some sort of grouting than it did actual food.
“Please. Eat,” said Takta, eyeballing them all in turn.
Cal looked around at the others. Miz was giving the plate an inquisitive sniff, while Loren just stared blankly at it, as if waiting for it to do something interesting. Mech had raised a trowel full of the stuff to his mouth and was tentatively tasting it. He briefly recoiled in horror, smacked his fleshy top lip against his metal bottom one, then shrugged and carried on eating.
Splurt’s plate was already empty. Cal could see the entire gray lump just sitting inside the little blob’s semi-transparent body, right below his eyes. It did not make the heaped helping on his own plate look any more appetizing.
Junta and the two other soldiers stood at the back of the room. None of them were eating. They were, Cal couldn’t help but notice, standing in front of the door, but he tried not to read too much into that.
“What do you call this?” Cal asked, scooping up some of the mush. It quivered slightly on the trowel as he raised it to his mouth.
“Plok,” said Takta. There was a rasping quality to his voice, as if someone were rubbing gravel against Cal’s eardrums whenever he spoke. “It is dense in nutrients.”
“Which is what you want from a feast, isn’t it?” said Cal. “All this messing around with, you know, roast pigs and apples in the mouth, or whatever. Forget the decadence, I say. Give me density of nutrients.”
He deposited the slop into his mouth, coughed twice, exclaimed, “Jesus!” quite loudly, then chewed as fast as he could. Technically, it wasn’t really chewing, because that implied some sort of resistance. Instead, it basically involved rolling the stuff around inside his mouth until such times as he could work up the courage to swallow it.
Once he had, he coughed again and forced a smile. “Yum,” he said, his voice coming out as a wheeze. “That is good Plok. You really must give me the recipe.”
“The Symmorium is grateful for your assistance against the Zertex forces,” Takta said, cutting right to the chase. “Many lives would have been lost had you not intervened.”
“No problem,” said Cal. “Right, guys?”
Loren tore her eyes away from the Plok. “Uh, yes. Yes, it was our pleasure.”
Takta’s hollow-eyed gaze shifted across to Loren. “It must have been difficult for you. You are of Zertex stock, yes?”
Loren frowned, but countered the effect with a grim smile. “If you mean did I used to work for Zertex, then yes,” said Loren. “But I saw them for what they are, and there’s no love lost between us now.”
“But you have kin with them,” Takta said.
Loren shifted in her seat. “Brothers. Yes.”
Takta said nothing, but held his gaze on her until she felt compelled to continue talking.
“Two of them. So what? I mean, why? I mean, what’s that got to do with anything?”
Takta’s stare continued to bore into her for several seconds, but Loren resisted the urge to try to fill the conversational void. Eventually, the Symmorium nodded, as if the silence itself had answered some unasked question.
He turned his attention back to Cal. “We would appreciate your assistance in the conflict. I believe your ship would be of use to us.”
Cal shot Mech a sideways glance. There was that shake of the head again.
“Yeah, we get that, we really do,” Cal said. “It’s just, well, we don’t want to get any more involved than we already are. You know?”
He jabbed a thumb back towards Junta. “I mean, if we see some of you guys in trouble? You know, like, being blown up, or whatever? We’ll absolutely try to help out. It’s just the whole getting caught up in a full-scale war thing? It’s not really something we’re into.”
He smiled broadly. “But, you know, thanks for the offer, and everything.”
The temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees as Takta leaned forwards in his chair. “Zertex is claiming we destroyed Pikkish. It was your vessel that caused the destruction of the moon, and the death of all those on it.”
“But we didn’t pull the trigger,” Mech said. “Zertex did.”
“Then you should help us fight them,” Takta said. “They betrayed you. They used you to strike at us.”
“Oh, we know. And, believe me, those guys are off our Christmas card list forever,” said Cal. “But we won’t get involved in your war. I’m sorry, that’s just the way it is.”
Cal did his best to hold the giant Symmorium’s stare. He found himself gripping the table, as if it was the only way to resist being dragged into that black-hole gaze.
“We could make you help us. Through force,” said Takta.
“You are welcome to try,” Cal said. He smiled with utter sincerity.
For a long time, nobody moved or said a word. Finally, there was a low scraping sound as Takta pushed back his chair and raised himself up to his full towering height. His teeth ground together as he chewed over his next few words.
“The Symmorium thanks you for your assistance today,” he said. “Now kindly leave. Some of us have a war to fight.”
“One, you’re welcome,” said Cal. “Two, good luck with that, we’re all rooting for you guys all the way, and three…” He pointed down to the sloppy gray mush on his plate. “I don’t suppose you have a doggy bag for this? I think I broke a bathroom tile earlier, and this would be perfect for sticking it back together.”
CHAPTER THREE
Cal sat in his chair back aboard the Untitled,
watching the Symmorium destroyer grow smaller on the viewscreen. Due to its sheer, mind-bending size, it was taking quite a while. They’d been flying on impulse power for a good twenty minutes, and the thing still filled most of the rear view camera feed.
“That is needlessly large,” Cal said, whistling through his teeth. “I mean, that thing has to be the size of Alaska, right?”
“Depends,” said Loren. “How big are laskas?”
“No, I mean… Doesn’t matter.”
“Anyone else think it was weird?” asked Miz. It was rare she voluntarily made a contribution like this, so everyone gave her their attention.
“What, their ship?” said Cal. He shrugged. “Seemed like pretty standard space workmanship to me, but then I’m not exactly an expert.”
“No, I mean them letting us go like that,” Miz continued. “I totally thought they were going to try to fight us, or whatever.”
“Like everyone else does, you mean?” said Cal. He shrugged again. “I guess even we have to get lucky sometimes. Besides, Takta isn’t a bad guy. Huge and terrifying, yes. But he’s got a heart of gold.”
“You literally met him for six minutes,” Loren pointed out.
“During which time he threatened to force us to fight in a full-scale galactic war,” Mech added.
“Yeah, but I get a feel for people, you know?” said Cal. “I have this, like, sixth sense that lets me see through all the outer stuff and shows me what they’re really like. It’s foolproof.”
“Sorry to interrupt, sir,” said Kevin. “I thought you might like to be aware that the Symmorium appear to have fitted a tracking device to the ship’s outer hull.”
Cal felt himself wilt under the gazes of the rest of the crew. “OK, it’s almost foolproof,” he said. “Can you get rid of it?”
“Sadly not, sir,” Kevin said. “We would have to land somewhere first, and then someone – I suggest Master Mech – would have to remove it manually.”
“Why Mech?” Loren asked.
“In case it should detonate,” Kevin said. “As well as a tracking device, it is also an explosive. Did I not mention that?”
“No,” said Cal.
“Are you sure, sir?”
“Trust me, Kevin, if you’d told us there’s a bomb stuck to the outside of the ship, we’d have remembered,” Cal said. “Well, maybe not me or Miz, but the others, definitely.” He shook his head. “Of all the ungrateful… I mean, why would they do that? That’s just mean.”
“Maybe they wanted to make sure Zertex didn’t get their hands on the ship,” Mech said. “It’s one thing us not helping them, but another if we turned against them.”
“Well, you know what? If you want us to stay on your side, maybe don’t stick bombs to our ship,” Cal said. He gave the slowly receding Symmorium destroyer the finger. “Any suggestions for where to land? Anything close by? You know, relatively speaking, I mean?”
Mech tapped and swiped at the display in front of him, and the rear view feed on the main screen was replaced by a star chart. It zoomed through varying levels, skipped past several large planets, then settled on a small blue dot orbiting a reddish-orange sun. “That’s the closest planet,” Mech announced.
“What about those other ones before it?” Cal asked.
Mech tutted. “OK, that’s the closest planet where we won’t be instantly vaporized or eaten.”
“OK, let’s do that one, then,” said Cal. “Is it inhabited?”
Mech nodded. “Says here it has a population of sixty billion.”
“How is that possible?” Loren asked, studying a smaller version of the map on her own screen. “It’s ninety-six per cent water. How can all those people fit on four per cent of the surface?”
Cal puffed out his cheeks. “Maybe they’re all really tall and skinny?” he guessed.
“They could be tiny, I guess,” said Loren, slightly annoyed at herself for not thinking of that. “Or incorporeal.”
Cal sat up in his seat. “You mean like ghosts? Are we going to the planet of the ghosts?” He drew in a sharp breath. “Space ghosts!”
Mech muttered below his breath, then tapped his screen a few more times. A picture of something with the face of a disillusioned sloth appeared on the main display. It was roughly humanoid in shape, but with curved, downward sloping shoulders and a stooped back that suggested it was carrying the weight of the world. It looked like it spent its life with painfully low expectations, yet was somehow still constantly disappointed. Since this picture was taken, Cal would be prepared to bet the poor bamston had killed itself. Or, more likely, failed to.
“That’s one of the natives,” Mech said. “A Parlooq, apparently. Ain’t seen one before.”
“Me neither,” said Loren. “Space-faring?”
“They got the capability,” said Mech, as reams of data scrolled past the slowly rotating image. “Just not the inclination. Seems they spend their lives in servitude to whatever else decides to set up home on their planet.”
“So they’re what? Like, slaves?” asked Miz. “They’re a slave race?”
“Look, we can’t swoop down there and liberate them all, if that’s what you’re going to ask,” said Cal.
“What?” Miz scowled. “No. I mean, can we get one?”
“Oh,” said Cal. “Right. I thought you were going to be all altruistic and…” He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. No, we can’t. Anyway, we don’t need one. We have Mech.”
“Fonk you, man.”
“How long until we get there?” Cal asked.
Loren checked her display. “At full warp, two hours.”
“Right,” said Cal. “And at a level of warp that won’t force both my eyes out through my ears?”
“Six hours,” said Loren. “Assuming no problems.”
Cal stood up. “Problems? Us? I find that very hard to believe.” He jabbed a thumb towards the door. “I’m going to go get some shuteye. Some of us have been awake for… I have no idea. A long time. What day is this? Tuesday?” He looked around. “It feels like a Tuesday.”
He headed for the door. “OK, you all behave yourselves, try not to get us into any shenanigans, and wake me if you need me.”
“We won’t need you,” said Mech.
“Fingers crossed,” said Cal. He reached the door, then stumbled through it as Loren engaged the warp drive. There was a thud from out in the corridor, then Cal’s voice drifted through.
“You totally did that on purpose.”
Loren smirked, but didn’t reply. She eased forwards on the thruster controls and the pinpricks of stars became long, flowing streams of light.
* * *
Cal’s brain woke before his body. He tried to open his eyes, but the signal didn’t reach them, so he just lay there, biding his time as he waited for the message to filter through.
He thought he could maybe feel the faint humming of the ship’s engines, which would suggest they were still moving, but physical sensation was really his body’s department, so it was speculation, at best.
He wondered how long he’d been asleep for. Not long enough was the immediately obvious answer, but then he’d been awake so long prior to coming to bed that anything less than a full day’s sleep would meet that description.
He had an itch at the end of his nose. This was good because it meant his body was starting to send him signals, but bad because his arms were refusing all his suggestions to scratch. There was another sensation, too. It was a pain – or possibly a weight – on his chest, right in the center.
His first thought was, ‘Oh shizz, I’m having a heart attack,’ but he soon dismissed that as paranoia. He wasn’t aware of any tingling in his left arm, or any shortness of breath, so it almost certainly wasn’t a heart attack.
Cancer, then.
Or worse. Space cancer.
“Cal!”
The cancer shook him all the way awake, and when he opened his eyes quickly revealed itself to be Miz’s hand. She sat on the edge of his bed, star
ing down at him. Cal quickly looked her up and down, then glanced around his untidy bedroom, before coming to the conclusion that nothing was currently about to kill him. It was pretty much how he always woke up these days, although it was rare – but certainly not unheard of – for Miz to be sitting on his bed.
“What’s up? What time is it?” Cal asked, before remembering it was a pointless question, because of space time zones or something. Mech had explained it, but he hadn’t really been listening all that closely. “Everything OK?”
Miz nodded. She looked anxious and uncertain, and not her usual brash self at all. Cal sat up, remembered he was naked, then partially slid back down under the sheets again, in case she got any ideas.
“I just wanted to talk to you about something,” said Miz. She took a deep breath. “You might not have, like, noticed or whatever, but for a while there, I was kinda into you.”
“Oh,” said Cal. He cleared his throat. “You know, I may have picked up on something along those lines.”
“Right. I mean, when I thought you were a cannibal, that was pretty hot, then when you turned out to be all, you know, butt-kicking and in charge and stuff, that was pretty hot, too.”
“I do try,” said Cal.
“And it totally works,” said Miz. Her eyes blazed lustfully for a moment, but then she shook her head, as if pushing the thoughts away. “It’s just, well, I like someone else now. Like, like like, you know what I mean?”
Cal replayed the sentence in his head. “I think so?”
“But I didn’t want you to be, you know, like upset or whatever,” said Miz. “It’s not you, it’s me.”
Cal blinked. “Wait… are you breaking up with me?”
“It’s for the best,” said Miz.
“But… We were never…” Cal caught the confused look on the wolf-woman’s face, and nodded. “Uh, yeah. OK. Well, I can’t say I’m not disappointed, but them’s the breaks, I guess.”
Miz’s expression became one of relief. “We can still be friends, though, right?”
“Absolutely,” said Cal. “Always.”
He held out a hand for her to shake. “Put it there, pal.”
Space Team: The Guns of Nana Joan Page 3