Fortunately, Splurt had discovered the maintenance tunnels that ran through most of the Binto Odyssey. They were narrow, dark and uncomfortable, and Cal had spent much of those early days convinced he was about to recreate one of the more memorable chase-and-death sequences from the movie, ‘Alien’, but none of the Mongrels ever tried to come in.
Well, no. That wasn’t strictly true. A couple of them had tried to come in, but they were too large to fit through the hatches. Those who tried to force their way through were met by some pretty stubborn resistance in the form of Splurt, and quickly came to realize their mistake.
Splurt oozed along the darkened tunnel now, carrying Cal along with him. The warm air of the ship’s fonk-knew-what exhaled towards them like the breath of a sleeping giant, and Cal felt himself relax. Those welcoming gusts meant they were almost home. Or what now passed for it, at least.
With a quick upwards scamper, Splurt brought them into a taller circular space from which eighteen different tunnels ran off. It was the Section 8 (Lower) Maintenance Network Hub, Cal reckoned – mostly because this was printed on the walls in large blue letters – and unlike the tunnels themselves, its ceiling was high enough that Cal could fully stand.
“Thanks, buddy,” Cal said, giving Splurt a pat as the large green slug became a small green blob. “Great job, as always.”
Cal reached for the axe on his back, before remembering he’d left it behind. He felt a pang of loss and grief, like he’d just been told an old friend had died, then he unhooked his bag, dropped it on the floor, and took a seat next to the makeshift stove. He enjoyed the sensation of warmth that crept through his fingers and toes, but did nothing to outwardly show it.
It wasn’t a real stove, of course. He didn’t really know what it was. Part of the engine, he assumed. It was big, metal and hot, which was all the information he had any real desire to know about it. He’d developed a nagging superstition that, should he ever find out what the thing was or why it was hot, it would immediately cool down, stealing away his only heat source and means of cooking or boiling water.
Not that he cooked much these days. It wasn’t like he had anything to cook.
Cal fished in his satchel until he found the wash bag. Unzipping it, he took out two red pills and two blue-and-yellow capsules. He’d found a packet of each of them on the floor of one of the few cabins he was able to get access to, and then had been relying on the food replicator to produce more ever since. It was quicker than ordering a balanced meal, and since the only replicators he knew of were all guarded by big scary things that wanted to eat him, speed was usually of the essence.
He tossed the pills into his mouth and snapped his head back, swallowing them down with some difficulty. His stomach rumbled with disappointment. Cal prodded at it. “Yeah, yeah, shut up,” he told it. “Next time, OK?”
He rolled up his sleeve. There was a gash on his arm just above his wrist. It wasn’t deep – just a raw, bloody scrape, really – but it was enough to make Splurt wobble in distress.
“Hey, relax,” Cal soothed. “It’s fine. I’m fine. Just a scratch.”
Splurt rippled again.
“No, OK, I’ll give you that, but I mean it this time,” Cal said. “Besides, you can barely even see that scar these days.”
Splurt shuddered.
“No, you cannot look, you little weirdo,” Cal said. He laughed drily. He had no idea what Splurt was saying. Not really. He had no idea if the little guy was really saying anything at all, but it was comforting to imagine he was. “Just take my word for it, OK, buddy? I’m fine. I’m not going anywhere.”
Cal bent forward. Splurt raised up until he was pressing against Cal’s forehead. Their eyes locked.
“We’re in this together. Right?”
Splurt made a gesture that could have been construed as a nod.
“Attaboy,” said Cal. “You and me against the world.”
He straightened, then reclined until his back rested against the stove. He held himself there for as long as he could stand the heat, then flopped sideways onto the mattress they’d found on a supply run a few weeks back, and which Splurt had painstakingly dragged all the way up here through six levels, three Mongrels, and a gang of Jumped-Ups.
It was a good mattress, Cal reckoned, although he suspected it was built for a much heavier species, and he found it a little on the firm side as a result. Still, it was better than the floor, and meant Splurt no longer felt obliged to turn himself into a four-poster vibrating waterbed whenever Cal so much as yawned.
“Tomorrow, we’ll figure out what’s going on,” Cal said, his voice becoming slurred as sleep sidled up to him. He’d said those same words, or slight variations of them, every night since that first night, and Splurt could only ripple encouragingly in reply.
Splurt watched Cal’s eyes close. He listened for the soft rattling of his breathing that signaled he had fallen asleep.
Then, when he was certain Cal was no longer awake, Splurt stretched out until he formed a thick woolen blanket, spread himself over the sleeping human, and then tucked himself in around him.
CAL HAD SPENT the first few weeks etching little notches in the wall of the maintenance hub to help him keep track of time. Unfortunately, he had no idea what time it actually was at any given point, since all the ship’s clocks displayed different numbers or, in the case of those on the lower spa deck, a series of question marks and a face with a squiggly mouth.
Some of the walls couldn’t be written on. Throughout the whole ship, there were things he could physically interact with, but many more things that he couldn’t. Those doors that wouldn’t open. The food replicators that seemed to be undamaged but refused to acknowledge his requests.
The big-eared guy kneeling in the theatre aisle up on deck sixty-seven, who Cal had spent an enjoyable afternoon sitting astride and pretending he was a motorbike several months back.
No matter what he did to those things, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t move them or mark them in any way. They were locked in place. Frozen. Completely immobile, and utterly impervious to damage.
The walls in the maintenance hub were plagued by the same problem. Some of it he could scratch into – and, later, draw on – just fine, but other areas repelled any attempts to make a mark on them, as if they’d been coated with a molecule-thin invisible forcefield.
Still, he’d found a spot he could interact with, and he’d started counting off the approximately-day-length periods of time on it. He made it his personal mission. His quest. Every approximately-day-length period of time, he’d make another line. This would be his life’s work, he decided. This would be his reason to be.
He etched six lines before he got bored. He’d coasted through the first couple on auto-pilot, become utterly fed-up by the third, but then been excited at the prospect of drawing the fifth line diagonally through the other four, which had helped to keep his enthusiasm up.
Once he’d crested that dizzy high, though, it all sort of felt a bit flat. While he managed to stick it out until the seventh approximately-day-length period of time, after that things became substantially less regular.
He switched to marking off weeks, because he felt like that was less of a commitment. It was tricky to estimate how long a week was with any degree of accuracy, though, so he based it on how often he slept.
He slept a lot, although never for long periods of time. Sometimes he’d deliberately settle down on his Splurt-bed. Other times, he’d grab some shuteye while barricaded inside a room, or propped up in a wardrobe somewhere, waiting for a wandering Mongrel to pass.
Back at the start, he spent several nights sleeping near Loren, Mech and Miz, with Splurt keeping watch to make sure nothing snatched him away. But, as the days had passed, he’d taken less comfort in being near them, and had begun to feel guilt at being unable to free them from whatever weird space shizz held them trapped.
He’d retreated to the maintenance tunnels after that, and had never slept down
in the dining area since.
As a result of his irregular sleeping pattern, Cal completely lost track of days, which meant he completely lost track of weeks, which meant his whole time-recording strategy went right out the window. Nowadays, if he remembered, he’d carve thirty or forty notches in the wall at once, with no idea what sort of relation any of it bore on reality.
Still, it passed the time.
Somewhere between two and eight months after Cal’s fight in the staff kitchen, he and Splurt were back in the Odyssey’s main food court, watching Mech, Miz and Loren do absolutely nothing at all.
Or almost nothing at all. If someone had a lot of time on their hands and was paying very close attention, they’d notice some slight differences. Miz’s tongue was now practically touching the liquid she’d been attempting to lick for over half a year now, and the glass Loren had dropped was almost a full inch and a half closer to the floor. It wasn’t much – it was barely anything, in fact – but it gave Cal hope that they were still in there somewhere, and if they were still in there, then maybe they could hear him.
“Splurt, watch the doors,” he instructed.
Splurt flobbed his eyes in opposite directions. When it was clear he couldn’t watch all the exits from there, he grew six more eyes and raised them up on gooey stalks.
“That’s… neat,” said Cal. He shuddered slightly, but said no more about it. Instead, he turned to Loren and the others and scraped together the broadest smile he could muster, given the circumstances.
“Hey, guys! How you doing?” he asked. “Good? That’s great. Mech, what you been up to, buddy?”
Cal listened, nodding. “Nothing whatsoever. Well, good for you. We all need a little R&R once in a while, am I right? Granted, you’ve done sweet fonk all for months now, and some might argue that it’s time you got moving but hey, who am I to…?”
His voice lost all energy and stumbled into silence. He looked from Mech to Miz, then lingered a little longer on Loren. Finally, he sighed. “Come on, guys. Where are you?”
CAL SAT on the one table he could interact with, and which he’d dragged over in front of the rest of the crew some weeks – or maybe months - previously. He tossed one of his few remaining vitamin pills towards his mouth, missed, then spent a full minute trying to find the thing in his beard.
Once he had, he placed it carefully on his tongue, and grimaced as he swallowed it down. His throat had been swollen and sore ever since one of the smaller Mongrels had spat in his face some time back. How much time, he couldn’t say, but no longer than a week, he reckoned.
Coming here to the food court had become a comforting routine. Seeing Mech, Miz and Loren helped remind him of who he was. During those times when he awoke in a cold sweat, panicking that he’d gone crazy and all this was just some detailed delusion, he’d return here and just sit watching them for a while. He didn’t feel the need to speak to them much these days – just being near them was enough. Today, though, he had something important to tell them.
“I think I’ve figured it out.”
Part of him – the part that still clung onto such childishness – had hoped he might see a glimmer of something in Loren’s eye at that, or some flickering of lights on Mech’s arm. Miz was now fully licking the mid-air liquid, so she was unlikely to give much of a response, but all the way here he had fantasized about… something. Some suggestion that he was talking to his friends, and not just three statues.
But no. There was nothing.
The glass was another inch closer to the ground now. Oddly, though, the other occupants of the dining hall hadn’t moved in the slightest. The guy toppling back in his chair was no nearer the ground, for example, and his glass – unlike the one Loren had dropped – was still exactly where it had always been.
Cal had wondered about that for a few weeks, but as it was just one of a number of things on his ‘Things I Don’t Understand’ list, he eventually just shrugged and stopped thinking about it.
“It came to me last night,” Cal said, jumping down from the table. One of Splurt’s many eyes turned to check he was OK, then went back to guard duty. “I couldn’t sleep, so thought I’d do something useful. I decided I’d try to figure out what the problem is here. You know, with you guys not moving, and everything?”
He twitched. It was something he was doing quite regularly these days. He’d noticed it almost as an outside observer would, and seemed to have just as much control over it.
“OK, cards on the table, I actually spent about twenty minutes trying to remember the names of all the Fraggles, but then I decided I’d try to figure out this situation. And, well, I think I did it.”
Cal glanced back at Splurt for a moment, then drew in a deep breath. “Space magic,” he announced. He grinned. “I know, right? Makes sense.”
He began to pace back and forth in front of them. “See, thinking about it, this sort of shizz used to happen all the time in old fairy tales. People would get frozen, or I don’t know, pushed into an oven made of baked goods. Or whatever.”
Another twitch.
“My point is…”
And another.
“My point is…”
He stopped talking. Stopped walking. Just stopped.
“I guess I don’t know what my point is,” he admitted, his voice dropping into a monotone as the realization of that fact crept up on him. “That doesn’t really help at all, does it? I mean, how do you fight Space Magic?”
Cal clicked his fingers, his eyes widening. “With a Space Wizard!”
His face fell.
He twitched again.
He didn’t know any Space Wizards. He didn’t know any normal wizards either, for that matter. Even if he did, none of the landing bays were accessible, so he couldn’t go out and pick them up.
A screech echoed through one of the doorways somewhere over on the left. Splurt rippled in warning, and grew several appendages, each of which ended in something heavy and blunt, or pointy and sharp.
Cal raised a hand, indicating he’d heard, then beckoned for the little guy to follow him. “I gotta split, guys, OK?” he whispered. “You all just hang out here. Make yourselves at home, or whatever. I’ll be back soon, and we’ll get this figured out.”
Pausing only to briefly cup Loren’s rock-solid face in one hand, Cal ducked low and headed for one of the room’s many exits.
It would be three years before he returned.
EIGHT
CAL FOUND the wedding cake in a mini kitchen near the ballroom on the eighty-fifth floor. It didn’t look much like a traditional Earth wedding cake – it was a near perfect pyramid with the point removed to leave a flat area at the top – but the little plastic figures of two people with their arms hooked together that were buried up to their knees in the light pink frosting gave it a certain weddingy vibe.
He had approached it cautiously, like a hunter might approach a flighty prey. He’d existed on vitamin pills and unprocessed Mush for months by this point, and the mere sight of the cake had first made him cheer, then made him dance, then made him weep hot salty tears of joy for forty-eight solid minutes.
In hindsight, he knew why he’d done this. It was a delaying tactic. He wanted to cling to that taste a little longer. Not the taste of the cake – he knew that wasn’t going to happen – but the taste of hope. The feeling that maybe, just maybe, this was going to be his first lucky day in… how long? Years? He couldn’t remember.
Still, maybe today. Maybe today.
He touched the cake. Solid.
Completely, wholly, totally solid.
He licked it, anyway. He licked it quite a lot, in fact. Splurt watched him, impassively, while Cal tongued and slobbered over ever nook and cranny of the frosting. Even the bride and groom didn’t escape his tongue’s attentions.
Eventually, Cal sunk back onto his haunches and smacked his lips together a few times.
“Nothing,” he grunted, and he said no more.
Three months later, while Cal wa
s being chased from one of the engine rooms by a gang of Jumped-Ups all chittering in their strange alien language, he was almost knocked off his feet by the taste of… not strawberries, but close enough. Space Strawberries.
No, Space Strawberry frosting.
He laughed. He kept laughing, in fact, right up to the point where one of the Jumped-Ups’ spears tore through his calf muscle. He stopped seeing the funny side at that point, although even as he fell his tongue was working the roof of his mouth, trying to eke every last drop of flavor that had exploded in there from nowhere.
The Jumped-Ups weren’t like the Mongrels. They roamed in gangs sometimes dozens strong, scavenging through the ship, claiming any food and resources they came across. They reminded Cal of cavemen – primitive and brutal, but still significantly smarter than anything else roaming the decks, himself arguably excluded.
They’d eat him, he knew. He’d hidden in the maintenance tunnels and watched from above as they’d turned on members of their groups and devoured them. Often, there didn’t seem to be any real motivation for it. One would simply lunge at another, then the rest of the gang would pile on and tuck in.
Cal lay on the floor, the end of the spear sticking cleanly through his flesh, his blood pouring through the gaps in the walkway beneath him and onto one of the big sticky-up engine parts thirty feet below.
This was how he’d die, he reckoned. Eaten alive by a pack of savages. Still, there were worse ways to go.
Granted, he couldn’t think of any, but surely there had to be worse. It would be pretty unfair if, after everything he’d already been put through, he was then subjected to the single worst death in the whole of the fonking galaxy.
Mind you, the way his luck had been going of late…
He’d made himself another axe. This one was better than the first, with a longer handle and a much sharper blade. It was weighted perfectly so he could swing it with ease, and even throw it should the need arise. It had become almost an extension of himself in the past year or so.
Space Team: The Time Titan of Tomorrow Page 8