Unfortunately, he’d left it back at one of the hubs which, in hindsight, had probably been a mistake.
He was defenseless, then. Defenseless, injured, about to be eaten and alone.
Not a great combination.
The Jumped-Ups were almost on him. Cal turned his head away, having absolutely no desire to see them closing in on him, their eyes blazing with hunger and glee.
“Totally should’ve helped out the eye-shizzers,” he muttered, voicing out loud one of the biggest regrets of his life thus far.
And that was when he saw her. She bounded along the walkway with a gracefulness that her tight leather pants should have made impossible. Her blaster was at her hip, but she made no attempt to reach for it. Instead, she just winked at Cal as she leaped over him, wrenched the spear from his leg in one smooth and miraculously painless jerk, then twirled it above her head like a ninja with a Bo staff.
Cal didn’t realize he was crying until he felt the tears on his arm. He watched, eyes blurred, as Loren smashed the butt of the spear into a Jumped-Up’s nose, shattering it. He marveled as she dodged blows, deflected weapons, and used the spear’s tip to hack through throats and stomachs and – in the case of at least one poor bamston – groins.
She’d always been a fighter, but she was more than that now. She was a warrior. She was a vengeful goddess, laying her wrath down upon the unjust.
She was back. That was all that mattered. She was back.
It took Loren less than a minute to dispose of the Jumped-Ups. She turned then, face slick with their blood, and she smiled. Oh, God. She smiled. Cal felt his heart soar. She was back. She was alive, and everything was going to be OK.
Loren’s smile, then her face, collapsed like melting rubber.
“N-no,” Cal whispered, his guts twisting as he watched everything that had been Loren collapse into a pulsating ball of green goo. “Splurt, what did you do? You idiot!”
Splurt rolled backwards a little and rippled uncertainly. He grew an arm and stretched it out as Cal struggled to his feet, but Cal batted it away. “Get off me! I can do it! Don’t touch me!”
Pain exploded through his leg and Cal collapsed in an undignified heap of blood, snot and tears. This time, he didn’t resist when Splurt wrapped a supportive arm around him. Splurt didn’t know what he’d done wrong, but he assumed a form he knew to be acceptable, and Cal found himself gazing deep into the eyes of Dorothy out of The Golden Girls.
“Not her, OK, buddy? Not Loren,” Cal whispered. “Not… not them.”
Dorothy out of The Golden Girls gazed loving at him through sad old eyes, nodded her understanding, then kissed him lightly on the forehead.
“Thanks, pal,” Cal said. He caught the walkway’s handrail and began to pull himself up. “Now let’s go home.”
CAL STEPPED BACK to admire Mech’s hat. It had fallen out of a closet while Cal had been exploring one of the lower decks, and he’d spent a frantic few seconds punching the shizz out of it, fearing he was under attack.
It had come as a source of some relief, then, when he discovered it was just a hat, and then a source of great joy when he realized that it wasn’t merely a hat at all. It was a ridiculous hat. And he knew just where to put it.
“Oh man, all that purple and orange totally sets off your eyes,” Cal said, placing a finger on his chin and nodding like an art critic at a gallery opening. “And the way those fake pigtails hang down over your shoulders… It’s breathtaking, Mech, breathtaking.”
He limped over to the falling glass. His leg had long-since healed up, but despite his and Splurt’s best efforts, the muscle hadn’t knitted together neatly, and he still got the occasional shooting pain if he put his weight on it the wrong way. Limping helped. Hopping helped even more, but simultaneously stripped him of anything resembling dignity, so he stuck to limping.
Besides, his hips were giving him problems these days, and he wasn’t sure if hopping was in their best interests.
“I give it six months,” Cal announced, sizing up the distance between the glass and the floor. “Splurt? You think? Six months?”
Splurt rippled.
“A year? You think?” Cal straightened up. Doing so involved him making a sort of, “Ung,” noise and pressing both hands against his lower spine. He ran his fingers through his beard, then up over the thinning hair on his head. “Well, we’ll see, I guess.”
He hobbled over to the table he always sat on and leaned against it, catching his breath. “We should have a party. When it smashes, I mean. We should make a big deal of it, you know? We’ll call it Smashdown Day. Or maybe just Smashdown. Yeah, that sounds better. Smashdown.”
Splurt wobbled.
“No, we can’t have little sausages on sticks.”
Splurt trembled.
“Yes, I know you like them, but we’ve got no replicators, have we? Where are we supposed to find little sausages?”
Splurt did nothing but stare up with his wide, perfectly-round eyes.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Cal said. He sighed, then a thought occurred to him. “I could do us little carrots on sticks. Well, I probably can’t do the ‘on sticks’ part, but we could do the little carrots part. We should have another crop coming right around Smashdown. How would that be, huh?”
Splurt vibrated.
“There’s my little guy!” Cal cheered. “Little carrots not on sticks it is!”
The garden had been a gamechanger. They had discovered it on the third-from-topmost deck, a vast expanse of soil basking in the rays of an artificial sunlight generator.
That entire deck had been accessible to him. This meant it was also accessible to the Mongrels and the Jumped-Ups, and the whole floor had been teeming with them. Realizing that this deck was the difference between life and death, Cal had proceeded to systematically clear out the monsters, aided only by his wits, his axe and a certain adorable green ball of violent psychotic tendencies.
Everything useful in the garden was long-dead, and several thousand weeds had risen to dominance. Even with Splurt’s help, it took Cal a week to clear an area about half the size of a basketball court. Once he had, he’d haphazardly scattered a few of the seed tubes Splurt had found stashed in an overhead locker, and hoped for the best.
That was four harvests ago. He’d learned a thing or two since then, and while the majority of it had been about how to eat space vegetables without immediately throwing them back up, some of it had been about the actual process of farming.
Cal spent another few moments admiring Mech’s new hat, then turned to Splurt. “Uh, could you give me a moment here, buddy? There’s something I need to say.”
Splurt formed himself into a perfect sphere and rolled off across the food court. Now that they’d wiped out most of the Mongrels, he didn’t have to be on high-alert all the time, and spent most of their visits here weaving in and out of the table legs, playing a game whose rules Cal could never quite figure out.
Cal walked around the rest of the crew, looking them up and down. He stopped beside Miz. Her tongue was no longer touching the solid liquid, and her head had turned just a fraction to look in the same direction as the others. He estimated she’d be facing front in… what? Fifty years? A hundred? Long after his time had passed, anyway.
“Fonking Space Magic,” he mumbled, then he continued past Miz, banked around Mech, and stopped in front of Loren. “Hey, you,” he said, tapping her lightly on the end of her nose. “Fancy seeing you here.”
He twitched. It was something he did less often now, but something about being here with them brought it out in him. He didn’t know why, but assumed it was for the same reason that he never thought about his advancing years or physical appearance when he was anywhere else on the ship, but always felt self-conscious when around Loren and the others.
“You’re looking good,” he told her. He smiled, showing the gap he’d been awarded for getting too close to a Mongrel’s tail. “Holding up better than me, anyway. Though that’s not
exactly saying much.”
He tried to brush a strand of hair from her face, but it was as unmovable as it always ways. “Anyway, listen, I’ve been thinking. Space Magic. You know what I said before, about fairy tales and curses and all that stuff? Well, here’s the thing. There’s a way to break the spell. From what I can remember, it’s pretty reliable – a prince comes swooping in, spots the sleeping princess and… well.”
Cal looked down, his face flushing red with embarrassment for reasons he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He looked up again, and his gaze met Loren’s distant not-quite-there stare that was focused on a spot several feet behind him.
“They kiss,” he said, the words choking him. “He kisses her, I mean. And the spell is broken. She wakes up.”
Cal twitched. He was wringing his hands together, and only now noticed how weathered and calloused they looked. After studying them for a while, he raised his eyes again. “I’m going to kiss you now, Loren. I hope that’s OK.”
He leaned in, but the angle of her head made things difficult. In the end, he had to sort of squat down a little and lean back, then shuffle forwards until he was within lip-locking range.
It was unlikely to go down as one of the great kisses of history.
“Please work,” Cal whispered, then he craned his neck, clenched his buttocks to raise him half an inch higher, and he kissed her.
Her lips were warm, but solid, and he felt like he was kissing a radiator.
Cal held the kiss until his back ached and his hips threatened to go on strike, then extracted himself. He watched her face for much longer than was necessary to know it hadn’t worked. His grand plan – the culmination of a decade or more of applied thinking – had failed.
He smiled sadly, showing his gap again. “Still,” he whispered. “Totally worth it.”
AS THE DAY of the Smashdown drew nearer, Cal found himself becoming more and more excited. Other than the harvests; Charades Night, which Splurt always made far too easy; and the promise of the occasional satisfying bowel movement, there wasn’t much left for him to look forward to.
Smashdown, then, became the highlight of his immediate future, and Cal became like a kid counting down the days until Christmas. He checked in at the food court regularly, using Splurt to measure how far the glass still had to fall.
Between the time he brought in the Space Onion crop and the time he sowed some of those purple potato-things he’d recently discovered a packet of, the glass had plunged almost a full inch.
By the time the potato-things were ready to dig up, Cal could just barely fit a hand between the container’s base and the floor.
After he’d eaten the potato-things, and dealt with the days of terrifying hallucinations about being made entirely out of bubbles that followed, there was less than a pinkie finger width remaining.
One full lifecycle of little Space Carrots later, Cal could barely slide a sheet of paper into that same gap. This meant just one thing. The day was upon them. Smashdown was finally here.
CAL HAD MADE T-SHIRTS. Technically, they weren’t t-shirts, and technically he hadn’t made them, either. He’d really just written “SMASHDOWN” on an old maintenance boiler suit and cut the arms and legs off it, but it was close enough.
He’d spent a few hours making Splurt a shirt from the scraps, but then Splurt had simply grown one out of his own blobby body, which had kind of put Cal’s efforts to shame.
Cal could barely contain his excitement. That glass had been falling for a stupidly long time, and now – at last – it was going to smash. The smash wouldn’t happen all at once, of course, but gradually over a period of months. Still, today would be the initial impact that would kick-start the chain of events that followed. Today would be a day long remembered.
“There. Perfect!” said Cal, after he’d finished adding another hat to the growing collection on Mech’s head. This one was a wide-brimmed floppy thing with a band of luminous sequins. It was up there with the most hideous hats Cal had ever seen. “And yet, somehow you carry it off,” he told Mech. He turned to Splurt and, in an exaggerated stage whisper, said, “He totally doesn’t.”
Cal took his seat by the table. Not on the table this time, because it had been turned over to several bowls of little carrots and a pile of home-made confetti. Splurt, on the other hand, did sit atop it, pulsating gently as he eyed up the vegetables and presumably tried to convince himself they were sausages.
“I can’t believe it’s finally here,” Cal said, gesturing to the glass. From here, it looked like it was sitting on the ground, but there was still the tiniest of tiny gaps beneath it. Smashdown could be just moments away. “You excited, buddy?”
Splurt rippled in a way that suggested he was quite excited, but possibly not to the same extent that Cal was.
“You have no idea how long I’ve been looking forward to this,” Cal said.
Splurt had a pretty good idea, actually. Cal hadn’t stopped talking about it for the past eight-to-twelve months, and had spent eight weeks making all the little flags that now decorated the food court.
Still, if it kept him happy.
Cal sat up suddenly and licked his lips. “Yes! It worked. Perfect timing.” He pointed to his mouth. “The cake. I can taste the cake. I started licking it every day a few weeks back so I could taste it.”
He let his head sink back so it lolled around on his shoulders. His mouth fell open. “Aw, man, that tastes good. That tastes great.”
With a bit of effort and some creaking bones, Cal slid himself off the chair and onto the floor. He lay down, affording himself the best possible view of the glass at the precise moment of impact. The smash itself should be instantaneous, he thought, taking place over only a few hours or a couple of days, at most. The first crack, though, should be visible more or less as soon as the glass touched down.
“Any minute now,” Cal whispered.
He waited. There was no gap between the base of the glass and the floor now.
“Any minute… now. Wait… now.”
He held his breath for as long as he could.
“Nnnnow.”
EIGHT HOURS LATER, Splurt helped Cal up from the floor. He’d fallen asleep after five or six hours, but Splurt had decided to leave him there. He needed more rest these days, and while he was asleep Splurt wasn’t being bombarded by the psychic waves of disappointment and grief that had started to come rolling off him when it became clear the glass was going to remain in one piece.
“It didn’t break,” Cal wheezed. The glass was now standing upright on the floor, still completely intact. “Fonking thing didn’t break.”
Shaking his head, Cal turned to leave, then he stopped beside the chair he’d been sitting on earlier. Grabbing it, he swung it above his head, then brought it down hard on the glass. The chair shattered. The glass did not.
Cal glared hatred down at it, his eyes blurred by tears. “Fonking thing didn’t break.”
POST-SMASHDOWN, Cal became increasingly subdued. He was less chatty than usual in the weeks that followed, then barely spoke much at all over the next few months. By the time a year had gone by, his vocabulary consisted of little more than tuts, sighs and the occasional dissatisfied grunt.
Time passed in a sort of slow, lingering silence. The Mongrels and the Jumped-Ups were long gone, even the memories of them now decades old, and there were no more threats or dangers to break up the days.
Cal had been back to the food court just once in the years since Smashdown, after he’d lost his way and found himself there quite by chance. He lost his way more and more often these days, and had come to rely on Splurt to act as his guide.
Splurt tended the garden, too. Cal had guarded this role fiercely for as long as he was able, but his back was too buckled now, and his arms no longer had the strength. Splurt had taken to it as if he had green fingers – which, admittedly, he often did – and was soon producing food far faster and more effectively than Cal had ever been able to.
Too mu
ch food, in fact, especially now that Cal had stopped eating. It hurt too much to swallow and, well, he didn’t really see the point. Eating kept him alive, and the million and one aches and pains in his muscles and bones told him that time should’ve long-since passed.
It took some effort to raise his head from the pillow. He watched Splurt enter, and saw the panic in the little guy’s eyes. Cal rippled his fingers in a calming gesture, then beckoned his oldest friend closer.
Time had taken its toll on Splurt, too. The once-gelatinous blob was now dark and crusty in spots. He could still shapeshift, but it seemed to be proving more difficult of late, the shapes becoming vaguer and less convincing.
Cal’s hand shook as he held it out to Splurt, and the ache in his arm made him flop it down onto the bed. Splurt’s crusty exterior bulged as he extended a stumpy, child-sized hand of his own. It slipped into Cal’s and their fingers interlocked.
The breath rattled in Cal’s chest now. It came in shallow sips, his lungs unable to handle any more. He’d like to say it had been a good life, but that would’ve been a stretch. Bits of it had been good. Great even. The past forty years or so had been pretty fonking tedious, though, and there had been enough bad stuff even before this damn ship to make him consider himself pretty hard done by.
Still, it was over now. Or would be, soon enough.
Cal closed his eyes. Or rather, his eyes closed all on their own. He felt the bed slide away beneath him, and he was carried along as if on a rolling ocean. This was it, then. This was what dying felt like. This peaceful transition between—
His head thonked against a door frame.
“Ow! Jesus!”
Cal opened his eyes and saw the ceiling passing above him. Beneath him, Splurt had become something not unlike a hospital bed, and wheeled him along through the Binto Odyssey’s network of corridors.
Space Team: The Time Titan of Tomorrow Page 9