Dash shook his head. “No. No, you’re lying.”
Loren looked away briefly, then met his eye again. “I’m sorry you think that,” she said. “I’ll talk to the Symmorium. I’ll try to convince them not to… I’ll talk to them. OK?”
Dash shrugged, but then nodded. “OK.” He rocked awkwardly from foot to foot, chewing his lip. His bloodshot eyes were suddenly blurred by tears. “Teela,” he said, his throat tight.
“What?”
“I could… I could kinda use a hug right now.”
He looked down at his feet, tears spotting his mattress like raindrops. The last of Loren’s resolve evaporated at the sight of her older baby brother standing there, his shoulders heaving.
“Oh, Dashy,” she said, crossing to him and putting her arms around his shoulders. He buried his head into her neck and sobbed. She pulled him in closer, and felt his arms slip around her as he returned the hug.
“I’m sorry, Teela,” he whispered.
“It’s OK,” she said, smoothing the barely stubble-length hair on the back of his head. “It’s OK. I’ll talk to them. I’ll sort it out.”
“No, not about that,” Dash said. Loren felt his arms move at the back of her neck.
Wait.
Her eyes went to the mattress. Dash’s shackles lay there, open. Loren tried to pull back, but a sharp pain, like a bee sting, plunged into the soft area at the base of her skull.
Dash pulled away, his tears replaced by a grim smile that was already starting to blur before Loren’s eyes.
“About this,” Dash said. He caught Loren before she dropped, then dragged her towards the door.
He knocked on the door three times and waited. Just a few seconds passed before it slid open, revealing two heavily armed Symmorium guards waiting outside. Loren tried to say something – anything – but her tongue was dead and her lips wouldn’t move, and all she could do was watch as Dash stepped between the guards and out into the corridor.
“Everything ready?”
“As you requested,” the Symmorium said. “We have a ship on standby. It has full authorization to leave. You will not be questioned.”
“Good work,” Dash said. “Then let’s go. And let the president know we have her.”
“As you wish,” said the other guard. He reached across to take Loren, but Dash pulled her closer.
“No! I’ll take her,” he said.
Hoisting the increasingly lifeless Loren onto his shoulder, he gestured along the corridor. “You two lead the way, and if anyone gets in our way… Kill them.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Cal stood at a large sink, elbow deep in what was now some pretty grubby water. He’d been given a pair of rubber gloves, but as they barely covered his wrists, they’d filled up the moment he’d stuck his hands in the near supernova-hot liquid.
As he scrubbed another plate – the hundredth? The two hundredth? – he muttered below his breath. He’d been muttering non-stop for an hour or so now, pretty much just the same phrase repeated over and over again.
“Advanced alien race, and they couldn’t come up with a fonking dishwasher.”
There was an old, square (space) television sitting on top of something Cal assumed was a big freezer. He hadn’t looked inside to check, though, just in case it contained more dirty dishes for him to clean.
The TV had presumably been provided to make the time pass more quickly, but it was having the opposite effect on Cal, who could feel the programming slowly driving him insane.
The morning schedule had been a tedious parade of terrible gameshows that appeared to have been produced with no budget whatsoever, and ranged from the confusingly complicated to the infuriatingly flashy. One involved some kind of slow-moving chess-like game, played between a team of utterly unlovable losers and a ruthlessly efficient brain floating in a glass tank.
Another combined general knowledge and fast reactions with moments of agonizing electrocution, while yet another just seemed to be a variant on ‘tag,’ but with the addition of swans. Or something like swans, at least.
Cal turned away from the screen just as the galley doors opened and Higgsy waddled in. He was much wider now than he had been earlier. Lumpier, too. Cal groaned at the sight of him.
“Seriously, more?”
“Sorry, Cal,” said Higgsy. He jiggled up and down and several dozen dishes, plates, mugs, and stuff Cal was assuming to be cutlery flopped out through his gelatinous orange skin and bounced on the soft, spongy floor.
Cal found himself watching the procedure in a sort of horrified fascination, just like he’d done each of the other five times Higgsy had done it. Higgsy’s internal workings dissolved any organic matter from the plates, from paper napkins to bones, making them much easier to clean. Sure, the thin layer of viscous orange fluid sticking to each dish wasn’t particularly pleasant, but it still saved Cal a whole lot of work.
“Is that the last of it?” Cal asked.
Higgsy nodded, shook his head, then nodded again, as if he couldn’t figure out the correct answer. “Maybe one more load,” he said, then he winked and lowered his voice to a whisper. “But I’ll try to break a few for you.”
Cal looked down at the pile on the floor. Thirty or so more dishes, not counting the cutlery, which he’d just swirl around in the sink for a few seconds, anyway. Another load, even accounting for breakages, would have roughly the same.
“So just sixty more to go.” He said it out loud, as if this made it more true, somehow. “Just sixty more.”
“That’s all,” Higgsy agreed. “Although doors will open in about twenty minutes, so it’ll start mounting up again.”
“What?” Cal spluttered. “No way. How long are we on shift for?”
“Until closing,” Higgsy. “About ten hours from now.”
“Ten fonking hours?! Well… I mean… What about breaks? Do we get breaks?”
Alan’s head emerged from behind a stack of clean plates he was loading back into a dispenser. “Oh, sure. Breaks,” he scoffed. “We also get a foot rub and our own weight in spizzcuits.”
Cal blinked. “What the Hell’s a spizzcuit?”
“Nothing for you to worry your pretty little head about,” said Alan. “Because you don’t get any. Ever. Same with the foot rub, in case you were wondering. And the breaks. We do our jobs, we clock off, we go home. That’s it.”
“Jesus,” said Cal. “And when do we get paid?”
Alan and Higgsy exchanged a look. “Paid?” said Higgsy.
“What the fonk you talking about, ‘paid’?” Alan snorted. “We get room and board, what more do you want?”
Cal dropped a plate into the sink. It splashed down hard, spraying him with dirty water. He didn’t notice.
“Well how about money? You know, credits, or whatever? We must get some, surely?”
Higgsy shook his head. “No. We get somewhere to live and three meals a day. That’s it.”
“What? No! Seriously?” said Cal. He looked from Higgsy and Alan, then smiled. “Wait. Wait. Aaah, I get it. I see what’s going on here. Make fun of the new guy. Tell him crazy shizz and try to make him believe it. Good one.”
Cal wagged a reproachful finger at them, then plunged his hands back into the water. “Nice try, but I’m not going to fall for it. And before you even try, no, I won’t go and ask someone for ‘a long stand’ or ‘tartan paint’ or whatever other shizz you’re going to try to pull.” His grin widened. “I’m afraid you’ll have to get up pretty early in the morning to get one over on Cal Carver.” He checked himself. “And by ‘Cal Carver’ I obviously mean ‘Nob Muntch’.”
“We’re serious,” said Alan. “We don’t get paid.”
“OK, then I quit,” said Cal, removing his gloves and tossing them into the sink. Higgsy glanced at the door, then blocked Cal’s path, even though his face suggested it was absolutely the last thing he wanted to do.
“N-no, wait, you can’t,” Higgsy whispered. “Stay. Don’t go.”
&nb
sp; “Why would I stay?” Cal asked. “So I can live in a cave and shizz in a bucket? What possible benefit could there be to staying here?”
Alan cleared his throat. “Know why there was an opening here? Why you got that job you’re bedging so vocally about right now?” he asked. “Because the last guy – Cramlin, nice guy, funny, excellent comedy timing – he died.”
“Oh,” said Cal, slightly irritated his dramatic exit had been halted, and that he now had to fake sympathy for someone he’d never heard of. “That’s a shame.”
“Real shame,” Alan agreed. “It was. Real shame.” He raised himself onto his tiptoes and fixed Cal with a cool look. “Ask me how he died.”
“How did he die?”
“Screaming. And slowly,” Alan said. He shrugged. “You see, those people who recruited you here? White outfit, white room, little stack of cards, unless the set-up has changed in recent years.”
Cal confirmed that it hadn’t.
“They’re the Tribunal. One part of it, at least. They exist to ensure everyone is working. ‘Doing their bit.’ Their job is to make sure everyone else has a job,” Alan explained. He picked up a small crate and carried it over to one of the kitchen’s heavy industrial refrigerators.
“Except, see, Cramlin didn’t want to do his bit,” said Alan, placing the box on the floor and stepping onto it so he could reach the refrigerator door handle. “He didn’t want to do anyone’s bit. He wanted to just coast along, doing whatever he wanted, whenever he liked.”
“I like him already,” said Cal.
“Good, then why don’t you say hello to him?” said Alan, pulling open the refrigerator door. It was dark in there, but then a light blinked on. Cal recoiled when he spotted the figure propped up inside.
It was dead. Very dead. It was easily in the top ten deadest things Cal had ever seen, and given that list included an entire gang turned into a meat-smelling mist, that was really saying something.
Compared to Higgsy, Alan and Jork, Cramlin had clearly been the looker of the bunch. He wasn’t exactly an oil painting any more, obviously, but his bone structure – which Cal was currently being afforded a particularly good view of – was exquisite, and his...
Actually, that was pretty much the only good thing Cal could think of to say.
“Holy shizz,” he said, whistling through his teeth. “That has got to be in violation of, like, every hygiene code ever written. Did Nana do this?”
“No. The Tribunal,” whispered Higgsy. “They did it.”
“Right,” said Cal, nodding slowly. “And you’re keeping him in the fridge because…?”
“They ordered us to,” Higgsy said, close to tears now. “As a warning to the rest of us.”
“Jesus. And why? Because he quit?”
“Because he talked about quitting,” said Alan. “When the wrong folks was listening.”
Cal clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth a few times, then reached for another dirty plate. “Oh. I see. Well, then I guess it’s back to work we go!”
Cramlin’s skeleton chose that moment to topple forwards out of the refrigerator. His skull rolled across the floor and stopped between Cal’s feet.
“What did I tell you?” said Alan in a respectful whisper. “Excellent comedy timing.”
* * *
Splurt sat in Cal’s chair, pulsing gently and rolling himself from side to side. Cal was still not there. The other three – the Not-Cals, who Splurt still cared about, albeit to a lesser extent – weren’t there, either. He was alone, aside from a nagging voice that seemed to come from nowhere.
“Rather boring this, isn’t it?” said Kevin. “Ms Loren is taking rather a long time.”
Splurt, as ever, said nothing. His eyes flicked left to right as he tried to determine the source of the voice.
Kevin pom-pom-pommed tunelessly below his breath. Not that he actually had breath, of course, but it was the thought that counted. Splurt looked for that sound, too, but couldn’t find it, either.
“Oh! We could play a game,” Kevin suggested. “Froody Hoops, perhaps. Or… what’s the one with the little hologram monsters fighting? That one looks fun.”
He sighed – which was impressive, given the whole having no breath thing.
“Then again, we don’t have a board, do we? Or little hologram monsters. Or, for that matter, any Froody Hoops.” He went quiet for a moment. “Although, now that I think about it, that last one might actually be a breakfast cereal.”
He clicked his non-existent tongue against his equally imaginary teeth.
“Oh! Oh! Here’s one! We could play a guessing game,” he suggested. “How about you turn into things, and I’ll try to guess what they are?”
Splurt considered this.
He turned into a brick.
“Is it a brick?” asked Kevin.
Splurt changed back.
Some time passed.
“Well, I’ll be honest, that wasn’t quite as much fun as I had hoped,” Kevin admitted. “My turn, I suppose.”
Silence fell. Splurt’s eyes continued to scan the bridge.
It was almost three full minutes later when Kevin spoke again.
“Well, go on, then,” he urged. “Are you going to have a guess or not? I can’t keep this up all day.”
* * *
Cal clattered the last plate onto the drying stack and let out a strangled sob of relief. He’d done it. He’d worked his way through every fonking dish, every fonking cup, and every fonking piece of cutlery in the place.
It was only then that a question occurred to him.
“Wait a minute, since when did Five Guys use plates?” he asked. “I saw the trash, it was all cardboard and paper.”
He gaped at the stack of sparkling dishes. “Wait, is this… Was this the new guy prank? Holy shizzing Christ, I swear I will kill everyone in this room if—”
“What? No, of course it isn’t a prank,” said Jork. He’d spent most of the morning gathering up trash and feeding it into some sort of miniature recycling facility. The trash went in one end, there was a lot of clunking and flashing lights, and then pristine stacks of paper bags and cardboard trays emerged from a little slot on the front.
At the same time, a secondary opening around the back of the machine shizzed out a condensed pellet of foul-smelling food waste, which was promptly swallowed by a hole in the floor.
“Remember, this place can be whatever you want it to be,” added Higgsy. He was tucking his now even more baggy-looking orange skin back inside his regulation Nana Joan’s jumpsuit. Cal had been given one of Cramlin’s old uniforms to wear. It fit perfectly, if you ignored the holes on the back where Cramlin’s spinal plates had apparently once emerged through.
“So, you can get your burgers on plates and drink soda out of…” Cal held up an odd piece of crockery that looked like a cross between a teapot and a sex toy. “…whatever this is?”
“You ain’t getting it,” snapped Alan. “It ain’t just ‘burgers’ – whatever the fonk that is – it’s anything you want. Anything you can think of, you can order it.”
“OK, yeah, got it,” said Cal. It made sense, of course. The replicator on the Untitled could make anything, as long as you fed it the data – or, more accurately, as long as it could extract the data from your head, tongue and nostrils – but he’d been so caught up in the whole ‘Five Guys’ thing, it hadn’t occurred to him that not everyone would be eating fast food.
His stomach rumbled. God, he could really go a banoffee pie about now.
Cal jabbed a thumb towards the door. “I’m going to go get something to eat. Anyone want anything?”
Higgsy, Jork and Alan exchanged worried glances. “Where from?” Jork asked.
“From the thing. From the replicator.” Cal watched their faces. “What?”
“We don’t get to use the replicators,” Higgsy explained. He’d finished tucking his excess skin into his uniform, and now looked several months pregnant. “They’re for customer u
se only.”
“Oh. So what do we eat?”
Alan opened a hatch in the floor, lay down, and stretched inside. He grunted and grimaced as he tried to get a hand to whatever he was reaching for, then let out a little cheer of triumph. He stood up and held out one of the food waste pellets the recycling machine had produced.
Cal stared at the thing, his nostrils pulling up as if trying to make a quick getaway. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“They’re actually very good,” said Higgsy. His enthusiasm waned a little. “You know, from a nutritional point of view.” His enthusiasm fell away completely. “Not so much from a taste point of view, but nutritionally, you can’t fault them at all.”
Cal took the pellet and tentatively turned it over in his hand, like it might explode at any moment. He wasn’t sure if it had been deliberately designed to look exactly like human excrement, or if it was just an unhappy coincidence.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” said Jork. “Well, no, it is. But it’s not as bad as it smells.”
Cal brought the pellet higher and sniffed it. If his nose could have slapped him across the face, it would have. This thing smelled way worse than he’d been expecting, and he had literally been expecting it to smell like shizz.
Shaking his head, he tossed it back into the open floor hatch. He looked at the pile of drying dishes, then at the few fragments of Cramlin they’d missed while sweeping the poor guy up.
“Fonk this shizz,” Cal said, wiping his hands on his uniform. “We don’t have to put up with this.”
“Uh, yes,” said Jork. “We do.”
“Is this seriously how you want to live your life? Cleaning up after people? Eating…” He gestured vaguely at the trapdoor. “…that stuff. You can’t seriously be happy?”
Higgsy wrung his hands. Jork glanced nervously at the refrigerator which, along with the trash can, the floor, and a gap under the plate rack they couldn’t reach far enough into, represented the final resting place of Cramlin. Even Alan just sort of shrugged and pretended he was very interested in a spot on the ceiling.
“I mean… This is terrible. I used to be the captain of a spaceship,” Cal said. “Sort of. I had a crew. A team.”
Space Team: The Guns of Nana Joan Page 13