“It’s about the Mush, sir,” Kevin replied. “You’ll get a wry chuckle out of this, but I’ve just discovered we do have more aboard. It was in the Mush locker or all places.”
Cal’s lips thinned.
“What?”
“The Mush, sir. The substance for the replicators? We’ve got some. Too much of it, if anything. I just thought you’d like to know.”
“I know what it is. You’re telling me we have a Mush locker?” said Cal. “That’s just, what? Full of Mush?”
“Jammed to the gunnels with it, sir,” Kevin confirmed. “We probably should’ve looked in there, in hindsight.”
“We didn’t know it existed,” said Loren.
“Didn’t you, ma’am?” Kevin’s tone became slightly accusing. “Perhaps you should’ve asked.”
Loren opened her mouth to reply, but Cal waved her into silence. “OK, good job, Kevin. Load it up for us and we’ll have a feast when we get back.”
“If you get back, sir,” Kevin corrected.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, pal,” Cal said. “Now shut the fonk up before anyone hears us.”
The next corridor had just two or three corpses in it. It was hard to be any more accurate without close forensic examination, and none of them had either the time nor inclination to do that.
The next room was a dining hall. There was no point trying to figure out how many bodies were in there, since the only way of picking most of them up would be with a wet-vac and mop.
“Still got a bad feeling about this, Mech?” Cal whispered.
“Yes! Of course I do. I’ve got a worse motherfonking feeling than I had when I said it.”
“It does seem kind of excessive,” Cal said, skirting around the edges of a quivering flesh blancmange. “Like whoever killed these people didn’t just kill them, they fonking killed them.”
“Krone,” said Tim from the back of the group. “This was Krone’s doing.”
Cal whistled quietly between his teeth. “OK, in that case I say Mech takes on Krone, the rest of you deal with Dave and anyone else he has hanging around, and I’ll shout words of encouragement from the sidelines. You know, like, ‘Woo! Go guys! Give him Hell!’ Everyone cool with that?”
He stopped.
“Wait.”
“What is it?” asked Loren, her eyes darting around for signs of trouble. “What’s wrong?”
“Why is Krone here?”
“Cause they’re breaking out his army,” Mech said. “We know this.”
“No, but why is he here?” Cal asked. “If I’m going to detonate a bomb, I’m going to make sure I’m not standing in the blast radius first.”
“Aw, fonk,” Mech grunted. “So you’re saying…”
“It’s a trap.”
The voice that emerged from the speaker on Mech’s arm was not Kevin’s.
“And he finally figures it out! I’ll be honest, Cal, I was starting to think you’d never get there. Congratulations. You’re not as dumb as you look. Although, that’s hardly an achievement.”
“Dave,” Cal said.
“Well, no. As I think I explained, that’s not my real name,” the voice continued. “It’s Ethan.”
“I’m going to call you Dave,” Cal said. “We’re all going to call you Dave.”
“Fine. I mean, it’ll be you who looks stupid, but… do what you like.”
“OK, Dave,” Cal said. “Now, are you going to show yourself, or are you going to keep hiding like a big Davey-Dave?”
“Who said I was hiding?” the voice drawled. “Nice ship you have here, by the way. You must tell me where you got it.”
Cal broke into a run. “Mech, shut that shizznod off. Get me Kevin.”
“I can’t,” Mech said, jabbing furiously at his arm as he tried to silence the sound of fake-Dave’s laughter. “He’s overriding the comms control. I can’t shut him up.”
“This is fun, isn’t it?” Dave sniggered. “I can keep talking and talking and talking at you and there’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing you can do about it at—”
Mech shot himself in the forearm and Dave’s voice died in a screech of feedback. “Laugh now, shizznod,” he grunted.
“That was, like, totally insane,” Miz said, gesturing to the blackened screen on Mech’s arm. She raised her eyebrows salaciously. “I love it.”
“Splurt, Tim’s struggling,” Cal said as they skidded through a puddle of prisoner guts. “Help him keep up.”
Dropping off Cal’s back, Splurt rolled into a ball, waited for the Time Titan to draw near, then wrapped around the old man’s legs like an exo-skeleton.
“Oh, I say!” Tim gasped, as the robotic limbs pistoned beneath him, powering him after Cal and the others as they raced up the ramp that led to the open hatch.
Cal raised his blaster, ignoring the ache in his shoulders. “What do we think? All guns blazing?” he whispered.
“Play it cool,” Loren urged. “We don’t know what we’re running into.”
“Uh, no. We should totally go up there and rip them apart,” Miz replied.
“We can hear you, you know?” called Dave or Ethan or whatever he was called. “We can hear you quite clearly, and if you want to survive the next few seconds, I’d advise you all to listen to Ms Loren. Just saying. Fact of it is, it doesn’t bother me either way.”
Cal sighed. “God damn it,” he said, then he lowered his gun and led the way up onto the landing platform.
Dave stood in front of the Currently Untitled, flanked on both sides by parallel lines of black-visored stormtrooper types. A short, unassuming looking older man stood a little behind him, his hands folded behind his back. He wore a coat with long tails, an equal parts hilarious and adorable miniature top-hat, and had the shiniest shoes Cal had ever seen. He looked quite dapper. Totally fonking ludicrous, but dapper with it.
Unlike last time they’d met, Dave was also dressed to impress in a sharp dark blue suit with paler blue shirt below. He wore a tie, but casually, the top button of the shirt undone. It rode up a little when he held out his arms and smiled.
“Hey there, fellow Earthman! Fancy seeing you here.”
Cal ignored him. “Kevin, you OK?”
“My apologies sir, I didn’t notice them coming,” Kevin replied through the ship’s speaker system. “I had my head stuck in the Mush locker. Metaphorically speaking.”
Splurt deposited Tim on the landing pad beside the rest of the team, then returned to blob-form and rolled to Cal’s side.
“Nice bomb you’ve got there,” said Cal, gesturing to the metal sphere standing roughly halfway between him and Dave, and a little over on Cal’s left. “I have to admit, I’m impressed. Switching ships, making us think we were handing over old Geronimo. You played us good.”
“Geronimus,” Dave corrected.
“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Where is the evil shizznod, anyway?”
Dave bowed, just a little, and stepped aside. The dapper little gent behind him took a step forward. He regarded Cal with a mix of curiosity and apathy. It was not an even mix, and the curiosity evaporated almost at once, leaving behind just a cold, dead-eyed stare.
“Wait, that’s the most dangerous man in the universe? That’s Geronimus Krone?” Cal snorted. “I thought he was your accountant.”
Cal gestured with his gun to Krone’s head. “I like your hat. What did you do, mug a leprechaun?” he asked, then Krone waved a finger and a scream burst on Cal’s lips as his leg snapped across the shin bone, dropping him to one knee.
Miz’s legs twitched. Her claws extended, her teeth baring.
“Don’t!” Dave warned. He gestured to the assembled henchmen on either side of the group. They all had weapons, and they all had them trained on Cal. “Move and they shoot him. And I assure you, everyone who works for my organization is an excellent shot. They will not miss.”
Mech slowly raised a hand, gesturing for Miz to stay where she was. Loren moved to Cal’s side, but a blaster bolt explode
d on the ground at her feet, forcing her back.
“Don’t help him!” Dave warned. “Stay back. That goes for the blob, too. Any of you try to attack us, he dies. Any of you try to help him, he dies. Anyone gets on my nerves, he dies. Is that clear?”
“Hey man, you OK?” Mech asked.
“Meh,” Cal said. He hissed as another jolt of pain tore through his broken leg. “How does it look? Does it look bad?”
The others made a series of non-committal noises.
“Shizz. OK, how bad, exactly? Out of eight?”
“Shut up!” Dave said, stepping forward and drawing a blaster of his own. He and Krone kept walking until they stood beside the metal sphere, bringing them to within a few feet of Cal. Dave raised the blaster and took aim between Cal’s eyes.
“I’d like to shoot you now,” he said. “That would give me immense pleasure. You have no idea.”
He lowered the weapon. “But I also want you to see what happens. What you helped make happen. You see, none of this would’ve been possible without you, Cal. Without all of you.”
He took another step closer and squatted down in front of Cal. “Did you figure it out yet?” he asked. “I know it must’ve been niggling at you. That feeling that something was missing. That there was something you hadn’t quite figured out. Did you get there? Did you work it out?”
“Of course I did,” Cal said. “But how about you explain it to the others for me, and I’ll occasionally chip in with intelligent comments?”
Dave snorted. “Imbecile,” he said, then he ruffled Cal’s hair and stood up. “It was obvious. The Binto Odyssey. The Time Bomb. How could it have been a test?” He jabbed a thumb in the direction of the ball. “We’d already built the bomb. It was already in place. Sort of late to be messing around with prototypes, don’t you think? What would we have been testing?”
Tim gasped. “Not a test. A lure.”
“Ding! Congratulations, Mr Time Titan! That is the correct answer!” Dave cried, pointing to Tim as if he’d just won a top gameshow prize. “We weren’t testing anything, we were getting you guys’ attention! This whole thing, right from when I first stole your money, this whole thing has been leading you to here. To now. With us.”
“Why?” Cal wheezed. “Why did you want us here?”
Dave stepped closer until he stood over Cal. His voice, which had been becoming increasingly hysterical, now dropped to a matter-of-fact monotone. “Because I wanted you to see. Because I knew your pathetic hero complex would make it impossible for you to resist.”
He shrugged. “But mostly because I knew you’d bring him.”
Tim yelped in fright as some invisible force caught him by the smock and dragged him across the landing pad towards Geronimus Krone. Mech moved to intercept, but the clattering of blaster rifles being aimed more emphatically at Cal’s head stopped him.
“Yes, I wouldn’t,” Dave told him. “Unless you want his death on your conscience. And his brains on your shoes.”
“I don’t wear shoes, shizznod,” Mech said.
Dave looked momentarily confused, then raised one eyebrow. “Well… touché.”
Down on the ground, Cal was experiencing something interesting. Not the searing pain in his leg, or feeling or utter helplessness and rage – although he was definitely experiencing those, too. This was something else. Something different. A tingling across the break in his shin that made the pain feel better and worse at the same time.
It was almost like…
Oh.
Oh Tim, you beautiful old bamston.
Cal kept his head down and his mouth shut, and tried his best not to let on.
Tim, meanwhile, was having an experience of his own, although his was less ‘interesting’ and more ‘underwear-wettingly terrifying’.
He had stopped just ahead of Geronimus Krone, his arms held firmly at his sides like he was bound with invisible ropes. Krone’s dull, dark eyes gazed up at him from beneath the brim of his little hat.
Krone raised a hand and extended an index finger as if pointing to Tim’s shoulder. The Time Titan tried to look to see if something was there, but his head was held firmly by the same supernatural force as his arms.
“What? What is it?” he whimpered, then he shrieked in pain as Krone’s finger became an elongated sliver of steel and stabbed cleanly through his upper arm.
“Hey, leave him alone!” Loren said, but all those guns aimed at Cal’s head made a point of aiming more accurately.
“You see… the bomb?” said Dave, gesturing to the ball. “The bomb was a MacGuffin. You know about MacGuffins, right Cal? An object with no real purpose designed just to service the plot? Hitchcock? No? Doesn’t matter. The point is, the bomb isn’t important. The bomb, spectacular as it is, was never going to go off. What would be the point? It’d destroy everything, and no-one wants that, right? The bomb was just to get you all here. I mean, we had to make it, because we didn’t know whether or not your Time Titan friend could sense it. But there’s no detonator. It was never going to blow up.”
He clicked his fingers and one of his armored henchmen broke ranks. This one didn’t carry a gun, and instead held a goldfish-bowl sized glass ball with a speck of light no bigger than a Peanut M&M floating in the center.
God, Cal wanted some M&Ms.
“Do you know what this is?” Dave asked.
“Is it all the charm and charisma you had surgically removed?” Cal guessed. “Because it’s bigger than I’d have expected.”
“It’s the Four. Horsemen to us, but they have all kinds of names. Geronimus’s generals, trapped in a little nugget of time,” Dave explained. “And more than that, even. It’s his armies. Vast legions of warriors. A thousand thousand battleships, all condensed into that one tiny dot.”
“A thousand thousand ships?” Cal said. “That’s, like… how many? Wait, don’t tell me, don’t tell me.”
He narrowed his eyes and calculated. “So, ten ten ships would be… what? A hundred ships?”
Dave rolled his eyes. “It’s—”
“Wait! Pssht! I’m getting it,” Cal said. “So… OK. A thousand thousands would be…” His lips moved as he whispered his working out. “Ten, then take the zeroes…” He looked up. “Ten hundred thousand ships? Is that right?”
Dave didn’t appear impressed. “And what’s another way of saying ten hundred thousand?”
It took Cal a moment. “A hundred ten thousand?”
“A million!” Dave snapped. “A million. Jesus Christ! It’s a million ships.”
“Are you sure?” Cal asked. “That seems a lot. A thousand times a thousand…”
“Shut up! It’s a million!”
“You could’ve just said, like, ‘We’ve got a million battleships,’” Miz pointed out. “That would’ve avoided any confusion. To be honest, I’d have found it way more impressive. Say you’ve got a million ships and I’m like, ‘No way, that’s so awesome.’ Say it’s a thousand thousand and I’m like, ‘Huh? How come this guy’s counting like such a total tool?’ You know what I mean?”
Mech and Loren both mumbled their agreement.
“She has a point,” Cal said. “You did sound like a total tool.”
“All of you shut the fonk up!” Dave barked. “My point is—”
“Yeah, what’s your point, Dave?” Cal asked.
“Shut up! My point is, we were never going to use the bomb.”
“You said that part,” Cal told him. He looked back over his shoulders at the others. “He said that part, right?”
“Yeah, he said that part,” Loren confirmed.
“I thought so.”
Cal turned back to Dave to find the blaster pistol aiming at his head. “Say another word. Go on. I dare you,” Dave growled.
Moving slowly, so as not to gets his brains blown out, Cal mimed zipping his lips shut.
“We wanted the Time Titan,” Dave said, keeping the gun up. “We’ve always wanted the Time Titan. That’s all we needed.”
He shuffled aside a little, giving Cal an uninterrupted view of Tim’s back. The Time Titan was held several inches above the ground, hanging from the metal finger-spike through his shoulder. From the limp way he dangled, Cal guessed he’d passed out. Probably for the best.
Krone’s finger retracted slowly, pulling Tim towards him. Cal couldn’t see exactly what ol’ Geronimo was doing, but it involved him clamping his hand over the Time Titan’s face, and then a lot of sparkly stuff shimmering in the air around them.
“What’s he doing?” Cal asked.
“I don’t know the details of how it works, exactly,” Dave admitted. “But I do know it won’t be something your friend enjoys, and I also know what the end result will be.”
He pointed in the direction of the glowing time nugget in the goldfish bowl and grinned. “Pretty cool, huh? The Four Horsemen and all their armies born anew.”
“Oh God. What is it with you people and your evil schemes? Can’t everyone just get along?” Cal asked. He puffed out his cheeks. “You know what happened to me today?”
“You had your leg broken?” Dave said, smirking.
“Fifty years. That’s what happened to be today. Fifty fonking years.”
For a moment, Dave seemed confused, but then the realization dawned. “The Odyssey? Tell me you fell into a crack!”
“Yep.”
Dave erupted with laughter. “Oh… Oh, wow. That’s too perfect. Fifty years? Seriously?”
“Fifty years,” Cal confirmed. “With just Splurt and a whole lot of monsters for company.”
“Oh. Oh, that’s made my day,” said Dave, wiping his tears of mirth on the sleeve of his suit. “That is too funny.”
Cal shrugged. “Meh. Joke kind of wore thin after the first decade and a half,” he said. “There was a while there – maybe twenty years or so – when I didn’t even speak.”
“You?” Dave snorted. “Didn’t speak? I find that very hard to believe.”
“Man, I would have liked to have seen that,” Mech muttered.
“It was interesting,” Cal said. “And I learned a lot about communicating with Splurt. You know, non-verbally?”
Dave’s eyes flicked to the green blob pulsating beside Mech.
“I also learned about patience, you know? I was never patient before. Always rushing in. But now? Now I know how to wait for just the right moment.”
Space Team: The Time Titan of Tomorrow Page 23