“At least you didn’t die,” Cal said.
Loren shook her head. “True. You have me beat there.” Her eyes went to Cal’s chest, which not too long ago had been reduced to a scorched and gaping hole. It was back now, as good as new.
“I still don’t understand how that was even possible,” she said.
Cal shrugged. “The life force thing, I think. What’s his name – witch doctor, village elder guy, or whatever – gave me all the life force he had left. I don’t know, but I’m choosing to believe I won’t be able to die until it runs out.”
“And when will it run out?” Loren asked.
Cal shrugged. “No idea. But it’ll be interesting to find out.”
He drained his glass, hissed quietly, let out a series of toothpaste-flavored belches, then indicated Loren’s glass. “Come on, get that down you. I won’t have you holding me back.”
Loren swirled the contents of the glass around, then tipped the whole lot down her throat. She grimaced, shuddered, then placed the glass on the table, upside-down.
“Your round.”
Cal didn’t respond. She picked the glass up and waved it at him. “Cal? Hello? More drinks.”
“Loren.”
Something about the tone of his voice made her take notice. She’d thought he was looking at her, but he was looking above her head, his gaze fixed on the little screen mounted above her chair.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, but Cal just nodded at the screen.
Loren turned in her seat and saw her own face gazing back at her from the display. A moment later, the image changed to show Mech, then Miz, and finally Splurt. Splurt pulsed excitedly when he saw himself on the TV, but Loren knew it was nothing to celebrate.
“What about you? They didn’t show you.”
“I was on first,” Cal told her, glancing around and lowering his voice to a whisper. “Probably because, you know, I’m the most important.”
They sat in silence, watching the news report together.
“They’re upping the reward,” Loren said. “Twenty million credits to anyone who brings you in.”
“I thought this was, like, neutral territory?” said Cal. “Why are they showing this?”
“Because there are bounty hunters all over this sector,” Loren said. “Sinclair doesn’t know where we are, so he’s going to get the whole galaxy looking for us, and make finding us very worth their while.”
“Did I ever tell you how much I hate that guy?” Cal muttered.
“Once or twice,” Loren said. “We should get going before anyone recognizes us.”
“And miss out on the Fauff? Are you kidding me?” Cal said. “It’s fine. We’re tucked away out of sight. Trust me, no-one is going to recognize us.”
“Well, well, well,” growled a voice. Cal and Loren both looked past where Splurt was sitting. Something monstrous stood there, a baton in its hands and murder in its eyes. “It appears we’ve got some celebrities among us.”
The thing placed a hand on Cal’s arm. Cal looked down at it, slowly and deliberately, then raised his gaze.
“You’re going to want to take your hand off me, pal,” said Cal. “Or I’m afraid I’ll have to do something we’ll both regret. But mostly you.”
The alien’s bat-like nostrils flared. “Oh? Is that a fact?” it said, revealing dozens of pin-sharp teeth. “Well, then, how about you show me just what you think you’re going to do?”
CHAPTER SIX
The bar’s front window exploded as a flailing shape crashed through it, showering the crowded street in fragments of glass.
Pedestrians screamed and ducked and ran. The flying figure slammed backwards against the pole of a street light, spun around it, then landed heavily in the road.
Tires screeeeeched. Something that looked like a drug-fueled concept design for a new type of Hummer skidded to a halt just inches from the fallen man’s head.
“Fonk me,” Cal wheezed. “That was close.”
Huffing and groaning, he pulled himself back to his feet. Horns blared at him. The passers-by who hadn’t run for their lives scowled and shouted at him. Cal gestured to the broken window.
“What? What are you angry at me for? It’s not like I did it on purpose!” he protested.
There was a large sliver of glass wedged into his forearm. From the variety of stabbing sensations in his face, he guessed there were a few buried there, too.
“Ooh. Ow. This is going to hurt,” he whimpered, taking hold of the piece in his arm. It pulled free with a nauseating plok that made his legs go weak. Cal watched the wound shrink, then vanish, and quickly plucked the sharpest and most painful pieces from his face.
“OK,” he muttered, rolling his shoulders and cricking his neck. “Round two.”
Roaring, Cal launched himself through the broken window and into a full-scale bar fight. Almost immediately, an elbow crunched into his face, stunning him into silence. A fist like a Test Your Strength machine hammer whummed towards him. He ducked and fired half a dozen jabs into the ribs of someone large and bull-like, then yelped as someone else caught him from behind and flipped him onto the bar.
Glasses shattered. Pain flared. Half a packet of dry-roasted space peanuts scattered onto the floor. Cal kicked, hit nothing, then doubled up until his head and knees nearly met when the hammer-sized fist pounded down on his stomach.
He made a noise that he’d never be able to replicate again, no matter how hard he tried. Some of the burny-minty alcohol he’d recently consumed shout out through his nostrils, making his eyes water, then he unfolded again and his head hit the bar with a thonk.
The fight had started well enough. He’d managed to get in a fairly solid right hook before the ugly guy with all the teeth could react.
From there, though, it quickly went downhill, as it became apparent that the ugly guy with all the teeth was not working alone.
Almost the whole bar was in a state of violent upheaval now, with just two notable exceptions. The first of these sat on a tall stool just a few feet along from where Cal currently lay. He was a large guy with the worst skin Cal had ever seen on a living creature before. It was dry and parchment-like in some places, positively gangrenous in others. He wore a hat, not unlike a Fedora, pulled low on his head, and an overcoat with the collar turned up to the ears. He looked like an old gumshoe detective brought back from the dead, Cal thought.
And, as it happened, Cal was right.
The man sat sipping his drink and gazing blankly ahead as the chaos and violence exploded behind him.
“Hey. Little help here?” Cal wheezed.
“Sorry, pal. Ain’t my problem,” the guy replied, in a voice like gargling gravel. He raised his glass in a toast to Cal, then leaned back as powerful hands sent Cal sliding along the bar top, and crunching into the wall at the far end.
The other notable exception to the violence was also perched on a stool with a drink in front of him. Unlike the gumshoe, however, this one was blowing bubbles into his. Splurt gazed into the glass, marveling at how the liquid rolled and popped with each puff. It was, he thought – or not ‘thought’, perhaps, at least not in the conventional sense – the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
A few feet away, Loren blocked a punch, dodged a kick, then shattered an arm before it could reach for a blaster. Something with long metal dreadlocks and shorter-but-still-long-enough metal fingers slashed at her. She spun into a twirling kick, driving the heel of her boot into the thing’s bottom jaw and snapping its head to the right.
“Raaaaargh!” A dome-headed neckless brute charged at her, bent double. Loren leapfrogged him, then fired a kick out behind her, driving the guy head first into – and partially through – the wall.
Something large and crab-like dived at Loren from behind, his pincers preparing to snap shut around her head. A split-second before they could, a slimy green tendril swatted him to the floor, cracking the chest plate of his shell.
Splurt blew into his drink, and watc
hed the bubbles dance and play.
Across the bar, Cal dragged himself upwards in time for a long-haired dwarf to headbutt him in the groin. Pain, nausea, and a vague regret for ever having been born bloomed upwards from Cal’s testicles, but he held himself together enough to grab his tiny attacker by the hair.
“C’mere, you little shizz,” Cal muttered. With a grunt of effort, he swung the guy around. The dwarf roared in a surprisingly deep voice as he flailed around in a wide semi-circle, knocking back an oncoming tide of attackers.
With a rrrip, the hair Cal was holding tore free and the little guy soared over the bar, crashed through a number of expensive-looking bottles, then rolled to the floor.
“Smooth,” said the gumshoe.
“Thanks,” Cal wheezed, and then a fist caught him across the cheek, spinning him around.
An arm wrapped around Cal’s neck from behind. A hand clamped down on his head, the fingers squeezing his skull as if testing it for ripeness. Cal heaved at the arm, but it was like an iron bar across his throat.
An iron bar that began, very deliberately, to squeeze.
“That reward didn’t specify dead or alive,” a voice hissed in Cal’s ear. “So guess what one I’m going for.”
The voice became a hissing giggle. Cal drove an elbow backwards. Once. Twice. The giggling continued. “That the best you got?”
The floor turned to quicksand. Cal ran through his list of options, realized it contained only two, half of which involved dying, and went for the other one. His thumbs found his attacker’s eyes, and he pushed.
The grip on Cal’s neck tightened for a moment, then went loose as the alien holding him pulled away, temporarily blinded. Cal turned and threw a few limp punches. There was very little power behind them, but his attacker was already off-balance, and the blows were enough to put him down.
Something gruff and orc-like in appearance marched purposefully in Cal’s direction. Cal made a letter T shape with his hands.
“Wait. Time out, time out,” he wheezed, then the orc’s foot hit him in the chest like a speeding car, launching Cal backwards across the bar. He hit a table and his momentum flipped him clumsily over it, before bringing it crashing down on top of him.
From his position on the floor, he saw Loren kick someone in the throat, then drop into a sweeping kick that knocked over two other mean-looking alien dudes. She made it look… poetic, almost, and were it not for the throng of violent bamstons closing in around him, Cal could have watched it all day long.
Groaning, he pulled himself out from under the toppled table. Five guys (but not those five guys) advanced menacingly on Cal. Any one of them could have torn him in half with their bare hands, and he suspected they’d very much enjoy doing so, reward or no reward. They just looked like the type.
He quickly calculated the odds of him beating them all in a fair fight – none whatsoever – and switched to Plan B.
“OK, fine,” Cal said. “I’ll order you something off the menu. Happy now?”
Five green tentacles whipped past him. Five hulking aliens were lifted off their feet and repeatedly slammed against the walls, floor and ceiling until they first stopped screaming, and then stopped moving.
Dropping the mostly unconscious, partly dead mob, two of the tentacles hoisted Cal to his feet, while the others fixed his collar, smoothed his hair, and pulled up his pants. The rest of Splurt, meanwhile, continued with the bubble blowing.
All fixed up, Cal turned to see Loren knocking out another of her attackers. The guy slumped to the floor, joining the piles of whimpering flesh already sprawled there. Cal nodded his approval and rubbed his hands together, as if wiping off dust. “And let that be a lesson to you,” he said, pointing to the fallen thugs.
Sirens blared in the distance. Cal groaned. “Looks like we won’t be getting dinner,” he said. Splurt pulsed unhappily, blew one final big bubble, then dropped from the stool and rolled across the floor to Cal’s side. Loren joined them, a little out of breath. Her pale blue skin glistened, just lightly, with sweat.
“So much for our date,” Cal said.
“Wasn’t a date,” Loren told him. “But if it had been…” She gestured to the unconscious figures on the floor. “Then best date ever. That was actually a lot of fun.”
“Ha. Yeah,” said Cal. His shoulder clunked as he relocated it back into its socket. “Fun!”
They made for the door, but were stopped by the gumshoe with the skin complaint. “So, you three got a sizeable bounty on your heads.”
Loren reacted first. She lunged with pointed fingers for the man’s throat. He caught her wrist without blinking, and pushed her hand away.
“I got no interest in collecting,” he said. “Your business ain’t my business.”
“Then why stop us?” asked Cal. “And sweet Jesus, what happened to your face? You do know you’re, like, decaying before our eyes, right?”
The gumshoe flicked out a business card. “You ever need new identities, I might be able to help.”
Cal took the card, looked at it, then snorted. “‘Dan Deadman’?” he said. “Seriously? That’s your name? I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s perfect, but… Seriously?”
“Think about it,” said the gumshoe. He touched the brim of his hat, then stepped over a lifeless torso and returned to his stool.
“Uh, OK, then. We’ll keep that in mind,” said Cal. He gestured towards the front door and offered Loren his arm. “Shall we?”
To Cal’s surprise, Loren hooked her own arm through his. “Aye aye, captain,” she said. “Lead the way.” She burped, covered her mouth with her hand, then erupted into giggles.
“Wow,” said Cal, shooting Splurt a sideways glance. “What the fonk was in that drink?”
* * *
By the time Cal, Loren and Splurt made it back to the Untitled, Mech and Miz were already waiting for them.
“You’re back early,” Cal remarked. He looked at them both, expectantly. “Well? How did it go? Should I be in the market for a new hat?”
“Some shizznods totally attacked us for no reason,” said Miz. “Like, twenty of them, all with blasters and stuff.”
Cal winced. “Ooh. Those poor people.”
“Yeah, it was totally awesome,” Miz grinned.
“We got in a fight, too,” said Cal. “I dealt with most of them. But, you know, Loren and Splurt helped. Then we met a weird, very possibly dead guy who offered us new identities. So that was nice.”
“Cool,” said Miz. “We were going to go somewhere else, but then we heard cops, so came back here, and… uh…”
Her voice tailed off. She looked across to Mech, who stood in front of the viewscreen, his back to it. He seemed unusually somber which, for someone who had built an entire persona around being a miserable, glum-faced bamston, said a lot.
“Everything OK?” Cal asked, looking between Miz and Mech. “What’s up?”
“Y’all might want to sit down,” said Mech. He turned his gaze towards Loren. “Especially you.”
“What? Why?” Loren asked, her giggly, light-headed air solidifying into something much more rigid. “What’s happened?”
Mech gestured towards her chair. “I’ll stand,” she said, although she didn’t quite know why. “What is it?”
“When we got back, we got word of an attack against the Symmorium,” Mech said. “They lost eighteen ships.”
“Jesus,” said Cal. He let out a long breath. “Still, I mean, that’s war, I guess. Right? We knew this sort of thing was going to happen.”
“They weren’t military ships,” said Mech.
His words hung there in the air for a while, like no-one wanted to take them in.
“Not civilian?” said Loren.
Mech nodded. “Refugee transporters. Women and children, mostly. Clearly marked, couldn’t have been a mistake.”
“So, wait. What?” said Cal. “Zertex deliberately blew up eighteen ships filled with women and kids? How many were on board?”
<
br /> It was Loren who answered the question. “Must have been thousands,” she said.
“Pretty much,” Mech said. “Fighters intercepted. They took out most of the attacking fleet. Even managed to capture the Legate in charge alive.”
“Well… good,” said Loren. “It’s a war crime. He needs to pay.”
Miz raised a hand. “Wait, can I tell her?” she asked.
“Tell me what?” said Loren.
“The Legate they captured,” said Mech. “The one who ordered all those civilian deaths. It was your brother.”
Loren stared blankly back at him, like she was still waiting for him to speak. She blinked several times, frowned for a while, then raised her eyebrows. “Hmm?”
“Your brother,” said Miz. “And, like, I thought you had to be the worst person in your family. Shows what I know.”
“Miz,” said Cal. He said it so sharply that Mizette didn’t so much as tut or sigh or cross her arms in response. He put a hand on Loren’s shoulder. “Hey, you OK?”
Loren shrugged the arm away. “Get off me,” she said. She took a step towards Mech. “Which one? Which brother? I have two.”
Mech shrugged. “Didn’t say.”
Loren slid into her seat. “Then get them on screen. Hail the Symmorium. I want to know.”
“You think that’s the best idea right now?” asked Cal. “Maybe we should take a break, think this through, then—”
“Get them on the fonking screen!” Loren spat, pointing angrily at Mech. “Now.”
Mech looked to Cal, who shrugged. With a clanking and whirring of robotic parts, the cyborg turned and tapped his controls. Several seconds passed, and then the Megalodon-esque face of Subsent Takta filled the screen.
“I am surprised to hear from you,” the Symmorium growled, before anyone aboard the Untitled could open their mouths. “I thought you had made your position clear.”
“And yet you stuck a tracking device to our ship that could blow us up,” said Cal.
“A precaution, nothing more,” said Takta.
Space Team: The Guns of Nana Joan Page 7