Miz brushed the hand aside. She hugged him, which involved her full weight flopping down on top of him. Cal wheezed beneath her as most of the air in his body was forced out through his nose.
“That’s it,” he said, patting her hairy back. “Two friends sharing a hug. Breaking some ribs. Causing lasting internal injuries…”
Miz straightened. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Cal squeaked.
A loud clang shook the ship. It was followed a moment later by a long, drawn-out screeeeech like a chorus of cutlery scraping across plates. Miz grimaced, her sensitive ears taking the brunt of it. Cal gritted his teeth until the ship shuddered abruptly to a stop.
“Kevin!” he groaned.
“I did try to take over, sir,” Kevin chimed. “But she insisted on landing us herself. She can be really rather stubborn when she wants to be.”
“So, I guess we’ve arrived?”
“Not yet, sir. We’re still making our descent. Ms Loren merely hit an orbiting satellite.”
Clung!
“Make that two,” Kevin continued. “You may want to join the others on the bridge, sir. It really is quite a sight.”
Cal stretched, and looked over at Miz. “I’d better get dressed.”
Miz nodded. “Want me to help?”
“I’m fine,” said Cal.
“Want me to watch?”
“Again, I’m fine, but thanks for the offer,” said Cal. “You head to the bridge. I’ll see you in a couple of minutes.”
He stopped Miz before she reached the door. “Oh, and can you be really sarcastic about Loren’s flying on my behalf until I get there?”
Miz’s snout pulled into a smirk. “That, I can totally do.”
* * *
The sky of Parloo shimmered and danced in the sunshine, and Cal immediately understood how all those billions of people could live on just four per cent of the planet’s surface – by not living on the surface at all.
Thousands of city-sized platforms floated high above the world. Through the gaps, Cal caught glimpses of cloud and snatches of ocean, but they were few and far between, as the hovering metropolises (or possibly metropolii, Cal wasn’t quite sure) stretched all the way around the planet’s curve in every direction.
The cities themselves varied in design. Most of them stood tall and proud, with oblong towers and oddly-shaped domes. Twisting spires stretched elegantly towards space. Small, flying vehicles flitted like fleas above the streets. Holographic billboards flickered and danced in the air.
During other planetary stops, Cal had been disappointed by how… mundane most alien cities were. The ones he’d been to had been mostly drab, often violent, and could have passed as pretty much any decent-sized urban area on Earth.
Oh sure, the people living in there had more arms, or were eleven feet tall, or made of thousands of slugs all piled atop one another, but the buildings and streets all had a dull sort of ‘samey’ feel to them.
This place, though, was different. Each of the floating areas looked like it had come straight out of The Jetsons. There were long clear tubes zig-zagging across one, through which Cal could see people zooming around. On another, pedestrians were ferried around by a series of conveyor belt sidewalks, never having to take a step to get to their destination.
And it was all so clean! The buildings shone and gleamed, like recently polished family silver. Within each city was an expanse of pleasant-looking greenery, with a lake, river or other water feature taking pride of place in most.
And there were thousands of the platforms, all similar, but all different. There were smaller, more suburban-looking areas, platforms that appeared to be made up exclusively of shopping malls, and even some that carried nothing but carefully tended farmland.
“Oh, man, how come you never took me here before?” Cal asked. “This place is awesome!” He pointed to a particularly impressive-looking platform, with a spiraling tower that stretched miles into the air. “Let’s go to that one.”
“We can’t,” said Loren. “We don’t have the landing fee.”
Cal frowned. “What are you talking about? We have two million credits.”
Mech gestured to some text on the screen. It was whizzing past far too quickly for Cal to read it, even if it had been in English. “Docking on any of these is gonna cost us six million,” Mech said. “And that’s if we pick the cheapest one.”
“Jesus,” Cal said. “So, this is like, for the ultra-rich? What if we just land anyway? What can they do?”
“Take all our money,” Mech said. “Except, all these places are shielded, so we’d have to get through them first, which would mean shooting the shizz outta the whole thing.”
“Which is going to bring us some unwanted attention,” Loren added.
“Oh. Yeah. Makes sense,” said Cal. “So… what? This was a total waste of time?”
Loren shook her head. “Not quite. The docking fee on the surface costs less.”
“How much less?”
“About five-point-nine-nine-five million less,” Loren said.
Cal’s lips moved as he tried to figure out what that equated to. It took him several seconds, but then – finally – he decided just to give up.
“Cool. Let’s go there, then,” Cal said.
“That’s the plan,” said Loren. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat, and Cal noticed the knuckles of the hand on her control stick were white. “We just have to find a way through.”
“Through what?” asked Cal. He pointed to the screen. “Through there? There’s got to be an entrance, surely?”
Loren shook her head. Cal heard himself gasp. “So, what? You just fly through one of the gaps? They’re all, like, six inches wide!”
“Yeah, what you’re looking at ain’t to scale,” Mech said. “It’s called ‘perspective’. Big things, when viewed from far away—”
“I know what perspective is,” said Cal. “You know. More or less. But those gaps still look tiny.”
He gestured to Loren with his eyes, reminding Mech who was piloting the ship.
“I know what you’re doing,” Loren said. “But trust me, I got this.”
“You did hit a number of orbiting satellites on approach, ma’am,” Kevin reminded her. “And those were spread out really quite far indeed.”
“Kevin, shut up,” said Loren. “Mech, patch me through the landing co-ordinates. I’m taking us down.”
The ship, which had already been descending, went into a steeper dive. Despite the artificial gravity, Cal felt himself falling forwards, and grabbed for his chair as he stumbled past. Heaving himself into it, he fastened the straps across his chest, gripped his arm rests, and braced himself for what was probably quite a high likelihood of death.
Loren lined the Untitled up with a gap between two of the platforms. The city on the right was the one with all the transparent tubes linking up its buildings. As they curved downwards past it, Cal saw hundreds of people shooting through the little tunnels at high speed, their arms pinned to their sides. He found himself wondering what happened when they reached the end, or met someone else coming the other way.
The platform on the left looked like some kind of business district, as most of the buildings had names emblazoned on them. The translation chip in his eye set to work deciphering the words as they streaked by, but by the time it had got its act together, the words were no longer available for him to look at.
Despite the Untitled flying within a decent-length stone’s throw of each platform, no-one on either one paid the ship the slightest bit of attention. Presumably, ships zooming straight down past the platforms was a regular occurrence. Cal was heartened by that, although none of the other ships had Loren at the controls, so he didn’t relax quite yet.
The gap loomed right ahead of them now. It was wider than Cal had thought, but – again – Loren was flying, so it was far from a sure thing. He could see nothing but gray cloud through the opening, in stark contrast to the sunny blue skies up
here.
“OK, here goes,” Loren announced.
“Bye, everyone,” said Miz. “Nice knowing you.”
“It’s fine. I got this,” said Loren, then she hissed as another ship emerged through the clouds and rocketed straight towards them. “Fonk it!” Loren cried, swinging the stick to the right and twisting a big twisty thing as far to the left as it would go.
The Untitled corkscrewed violently. Its wingtips came within spitting distance of the other ship, then just lightly clipped the edge of the city platform as the Untitled plunged through the gap and dropped through the ship-shaped hole in the clouds.
“OK, that totally wasn’t my fault!” Loren protested. “We almost crashed.”
“Technically, we did crash,” Cal pointed out.
“No, we gently scraped against the platform, that’s all,” Loren said. “If it hadn’t been for me, we’d have hit that—”
The Untitled dropped out of the cloud layer and directly into the path of another oncoming ship.
“Aah! Pull up!” Cal yelped, but Loren threw them into an even faster dive, instead, skimming below the other ship with just inches to spare.
“Relax, I got this,” she said, glancing back at Cal as they ploughed through another cloud bank. “Nothing to worry about. It’s all under control.”
They hit the water with a sound like crashing thunder. Immediately, the lights of the Untitled all went out, to be replaced a moment later by the gloomy red glow of the emergency back-ups.
“All under control, huh?” said Cal.
“I did not think the surface was that close,” said Loren. She tapped her console as if it was somehow to blame, then chewed on her bottom lip. “Yes, that did come as a surprise.”
“We’d have been safer just jumping out when we were still up there,” Miz said. “Like, if we’d just fallen out of the ship as soon as we entered the atmosphere, we’d probably be better off right now.”
“Kevin, what’s the situation?” Cal asked.
“We’re underwater, sir.”
Cal sighed. “Yes. Yes, I know that, but I meant, you know, more specifically. Do we have power? Is there a way we can make it that we’re not underwater?”
“What the fonk is that?” asked Mech, taking a clanking step closer to the viewscreen.
“What the fonk is what?” Cal began, and then he saw it, too. A large shape was cutting through the dark ocean towards them. From the way it was moving, Cal could tell it wasn’t a ship or anything mechanical. This thing – whatever it was – was alive, moving quickly, and headed straight for them.
“I’m afraid I don’t know, sir,” Kevin admitted. “Although, if I may be so bold, I suggest we don’t wait around to find out.”
In the darkness of the ocean, a set of vast, powerful jaws opened.
“Oh. Too late,” said Kevin, and then the teeth snapped closed with a crunch.
CHAPTER FOUR
Cal sat in his chair, gently twisting it from side to side, as a row of house-sized teeth tried to gnaw through the Currently Untitled’s viewscreen.
“Seriously,” he said. “At this point, is anyone even surprised by this? We try to land on a planet, almost crash twice, then plunge into the sea, only to be eaten by Godzilla, or whatever the fonk this thing is. How did this become just an average day in my life? If this is what space is like, how have any of you lived this long?”
“No, man, this ain’t normal,” Mech said. “This sort of shizz never happened to me before I met you. This is your fault.”
“How is it my fault? I wasn’t the one flying!”
“Oh, so it’s my fault?” Loren spat.
“Well, like, duh,” said Miz. “Of course it’s your fault. You literally plunged us into the ocean.”
“I thought the fog was another cloud layer!” Loren protested.
“Oh, well that’s OK, then,” said Mech. “I mean, it’s not like we got a hundred different instruments designed to tell you how far away the ground is or nothin’.”
“I didn’t hit the ground,” Loren pointed out. “I hit the water.”
“That don’t make no difference,” Mech said. “Those instruments tell you where the water is, too.”
“Guys, guys!” Cal said, holding up his hands for calm. “Let’s not go pointing fingers at anyone here, OK? Even if it totally is her fault. We need to figure out what’s got us. Kevin, analysis?”
“It’s a sort of fishy-thing, sir,” the AI reported. “A rather big one.”
“I mean, I was hoping for a little more detail,” said Cal. “But that’s a start. Any suggestions?”
“Well, we could simply warp out of its grasp,” Kevin suggested.
“Great! Let’s do that.”
“Were we not currently underwater.”
“Oh,” said Cal. “OK. Can we shoot our way out?”
“Yes, sir,” said Kevin. “Were we not currently—”
“Underwater. OK, I get it.” Cal sighed. “Is there anything we can do?”
“We could allow it to eat us,” Kevin suggested. “And then wait for nature to take its course. Although we would, unfortunately, be in a number of different pieces by that point.”
“Not fond of that plan,” Cal said. “Mech, how are the shields looking?”
Mech shook his head. “We ain’t got any. I mean, none that’ll stop this thing. They reflect energy weapons, not organics. This ugly bamston’s chewing down right on the motherfonking hull.” He tapped his screen. “And it is exerting a whole heap of pressure. We’re not going to hold up for long before something goes ‘pop’.”
Cal rubbed his forehead. “OK. Jesus. So we’re underwater. We can’t warp or fire weapons. A – and I quote – ‘big fishy thing’ is trying to chew through us and, from what you say, Mech, it’s doing a pretty stand-up job of it. Does that about sum it up?”
“There’s also an explosive attached to the outside of the ship, sir,” Kevin reminded him.
Cal brightened. “So what are you saying? That we can use that to fight this thing?”
“Oh my, no, sir,” said Kevin. “I was simply pointing out that it might explode and kill you all at any moment. Probably shouldn’t have even mentioned it, really.”
“What about impulse thrust?” Mech asked. “Can’t we just reverse out of this thing’s mouth?”
“Been trying,” said Loren. “It’s got us held too tightly. Reverse thrusters don’t have enough power.”
Miz frowned. “So, like, if reverse isn’t strong enough, or whatever, why don’t we go forward?”
Cal pointed to the screen. “Miz, honey, it’s great that you’re getting involved, but there’s a big fishy thing right in front of us. If we go forward we’ll…”
His voice tailed off. “Uh, what would happen, exactly, if we went forward? But, you know, really fast?”
Everyone thought about this, picturing the possible outcomes. Some of the possibilities didn’t end well for them, but none of them did the fish any favors, at all.
Loren shrugged. “Well, since the only other plan we have involves being eaten alive, much as it pains me to do so, I say we give Miz’s plan a try.”
“Full steam ahead?” said Cal. “Everyone OK with this?”
“I’m pretty fonking far from OK with it,” said Mech. “But we ain’t got a whole lot of choice.” He gripped the console in front of him. “So sure, let’s all fly inside a fonking fish and see what happens. Why not?”
“That’s the spirit!” said Cal. “OK, Loren, do it!”
Loren shoved the thrust lever forwards. The Untitled juddered violently, then lurched to a stop. With an embarrassed cough, Loren restarted the engines.
“Did you… did you just stall our state-of-the-art experimental spaceship?” Cal asked.
“Yes, yes, shut up,” said Loren, then she hit the thrusters again. The Untitled whined. The teeth holding it in place bent, then shattered, and suddenly the viewscreen was filled by a gaping black throat.
Then a slim
y red stomach.
Then several hundred feet of fish intestines and a knobbly bit.
And then, following a loud, schlopping squelch, by the dark depths of the ocean.
A bloom of blood swooshed around the Currently Untitled as it burst free. Chunks of ruined fish anus bobbed and knocked against the hull. Cal cheered and punched the air as the now rectum-less corpse of the sea creature sank slowly towards its watery grave.
“Alright! Great work, everyone. Miz, excellent plan, Loren, fine flying. Mech, well done on just standing there, and way to go me for moral support.” He raised his voice. “Splurt, I’m not sure where you are, but well done, buddy!”
A green arm stretched down from the ceiling and gave a thumbs up, then retreated again.
Cal dropped his voice to a whisper. “He likes to feel included.”
“We got three bogeys, coming up fast,” said Mech, studying his screen. “Big ones.”
“Let me guess. Fishy things?”
“It would appear so, sir,” said Kevin.
“OK, Loren, get us out of here,” said Cal, but Loren was already propelling the ship through the water, the currents buffeting it around as it powered upwards. A gloomy haze danced on the surface as they drew closer, with just the occasional shaft of sunlight stabbing through the darkness.
The Untitled rose through the waves and banked steeply upwards. Below it, the surface erupted as something very big and very fishy made a desperate lunge for the ship. Cal barely glimpsed it, but got the impression of copious amounts of eyes and teeth, and then the thing crashed back into the ocean again and, with a flick of its mighty tail, was gone.
“I kind of want to make some sort of witty quip at this point,” Cal said. “But I’m busy trying to block out the memory of whatever the fonk that thing was, so if you could just think up a funny line of your own and attribute it to me, that would be awesome.”
Wisps of fog hung over the ocean. It was shades of black and gray, like cotton candy that had been twisted to the Dark Side.
The clouds overhead weren’t much better. They were brooding and ominous, with the occasional break where a thin shaft of sunlight managed to squeeze through. If Cal squinted hard enough, he could make out a faint blue glow from the city-sized platforms far above. Engines, presumably, keeping everything afloat.
Space Team: The Guns of Nana Joan Page 4