Space Team: The Time Titan of Tomorrow

by Barry J. Hutchison

  Dave’s eyes flicked back to Cal. His finger tensed on the trigger of his blaster. “Do you?”

  “You’ll also notice, that I’m young again,” Cal said. “See, Timbo there – the Time Titan – he restored me. Brought me back to my prime.”

  Dave shot a withering look along the barrel of his gun. “This is you in your prime?”

  “I know, it’s not much to look at,” Cal admitted. “I can’t run very fast, I’m not all that strong, I have mild incontinence issues when traveling at warp speed. But there’s one thing about my prime that will impress you.”

  “Oh?” said Dave, raising an eyebrow. “And what’s that?”

  “I heal crazy fast,” Cal said, then he launched himself upwards, knocked aside the blaster, and exploded Dave’s nose with the top of his head.

  TWENTY-TWO

  SPLURT LASHED OUT, his blobby body becoming two elongated plant-like tendrils that scythed the legs out from under the gunmen on either side. Mech raised both arms in opposite directions and let rip with his wrist cannons, obliterating most of the men in mid-air.

  Half-blinded by blood, snot and tears, Dave swung the butt of his gun at Cal’s head, but Cal had been expecting that. He ducked, drove three rapid punches into Dave’s stomach – bam-bam-bam – and finished with a thunderous knee to the balls.

  “God, I’ve missed fighting Earth guys,” said Cal as he watched Dave fold like a broken puppet to the ground. “You always know where their nuts are.”

  A sudden wind whipped up from where Krone stood with the Time Titan. Tim’s head was bent back, and Cal could see Krone’s fingers had become thin tubes that entered Tim’s head via his nostrils and mouth. Krone’s eyes had changed, too. Where before they had been dark and glassy, they now swam with the same sparkling colors that filled the air around both men.

  Time slowed. At least, it felt that way. Whether it actually slowed or not, Cal couldn’t say, but a lot of major events seemed to occur before his eyes, and there was very little he could do to stop any of them.

  The glass container with the glowing M&M inside exploded. Cal saw the ripple pass through the transparent walls, then watched each individual piece fall lazily to the ground – with the exception of all the pieces that embedded themselves in the armor of the guy who had been holding the thing. And, judging by his screams, through the armor in places, too.

  He watched the little ball of light become a slightly bigger ball of light.

  By the time he’d processed that it was growing, it was already the size of a tennis ball, its edges fizzing and crackling like a sparkler on 4th of July.

  It became a soccer ball.

  Then a basketball.

  Then a howling vortex filled with mind-bending shapes and colors and sounds.

  It was only when the first figure appeared inside it that everyone snapped out of their daze. He, she – or possibly it – was dressed in an outfit comprised almost entirely of spikey bits. Its mask was a grimacing skull with two curved metal horns forcibly inserted through the temples. Orange eyes glowed behind the mask. Cal swore he could feel them boring deep into his soul.

  “You’re too late,” Dave coughed. “They’re coming. They’re coming!”

  “We need to shut this shizz down!” Cal said. “We need to get Tim away from that fonk.”

  He felt the wind of Loren running past him, her blaster raised.

  “On it. Cover me,” she urged, spraying fire towards the spikey-armored newcomer as she ran. The bolts seemed to accelerate as they raced towards the hole, then froze in the air just beyond its edges.

  “Loren, wait, don’t!” Cal yelped, setting off in a run after her.

  Time slowed.

  He saw Krone’s eyes flick towards Loren.

  He saw the villain’s free hand fold into a point, becoming a long metal blade.

  “No!”

  A fast-moving shape charged past him from behind, sending him spinning to the ground.

  Cal heard the sound as he landed. He knew, in that moment, it was the worst sound he would ever hear.

  It was the sound of metal tearing through flesh and shattering bone.

  Time stopped.

  Cal couldn’t move. Couldn’t turn. Couldn’t look to see what had happened.

  He heard Mech. The cyborg’s voice was different. More hollow, somehow.

  “No. Aw, no.”

  Time resumed.

  Cal turned. Cal looked. And all the air left his body as if he’d been kicked in the stomach.

  Loren was on the ground halfway between Cal and Krone, half-sitting up, her blaster raised.

  Beyond her, an inert shape lay in an expanding puddle of blood.

  An inert hairy shape.

  Mizette.

  “No. No, no, no, no,” Cal whimpered, the word tumbling out of his mouth on a loop he couldn’t stop.

  Geronimus Krone raised his blood-soaked blade and met Cal’s eye. “Down, doggy,” he said, and his mouth twisted into a harlequin smile.

  Krone tossed Tim aside, the Time Titan’s purpose now served. The hole was widening now, and three other figures had appeared behind the first, each one more terrifying than the one before. If Hell ever staged a thrash metal festival, these guys would be top of the bill.

  “Splurt! Get Miz and Tim back to the ship!” Cal cried.

  A many-tentacled thing rolled across the ground, snapped its arms around Mizette and the Time Titan, and hurriedly yanked them clear.

  Cal couldn’t bring himself to look at the way Mizette’s body hung down so limply in Splurt’s grip. Instead, he reached for his blaster, took aim at the most dangerous man in the universe, and fired over and over and over again.

  Mech and Loren fired, too, until the air was filled with the scorching screams of blaster fire. They fired like that for a full minute, hammering Krone with concentrated bolts of fire.

  He was still smiling when they stopped. They hadn’t killed him, hadn’t hurt him. They hadn’t even knocked off his hat, and Cal had aimed several shots at it specifically for that purpose. They had achieved nothing, and the hole in time was getting bigger.

  “There’s nothing you can do to stop this, you know?” said Dave, limping past Loren as she kicked backwards and got to her feet. He stopped just in front of Krone. “My organization has spent a long time planning this. I personally have invested years making sure everything worked out just the way we wanted it to. Then, all we had to do was wait for a predictable hot-head to come along, and here we are.”

  Dave chuckled. “Of course, I had no idea you’d be from Earth. That’s just a bonus.” He looked Cal up and down. “We’re the last of our kind, Cal Carver. It’s going to be such a shame when I—”

  The blade severed his head with one clean strike, slicing through his neck like it was a stick of warm butter. Blood fountained upwards from the stump, then fell like drizzle on Geronimus Krone, who was revealed when Dave’s body slumped sideways.

  Four seconds later, his head thumped down beside the rest of him.

  “He talked too much,” Krone said. His voice had an odd sing-song tone to it, like he was always midway through telling a joke that her personally found hilarious.

  The hole was not a hole now. Cal wasn’t sure what it was, exactly, but ‘hole’ didn’t really do it justice. It was more like a painting of a hole layered on the fabric of space itself. Inside it, Cal could see those four terrifying figures, but there was a moving sky behind them now, too, filled with ships. A thousand ten hundred ships, to be exact.

  “Your universe is mine,” Krone told them. “Your choice is how you die. On your knees, like cowards. Or in some pointless act of heroism, like your dog.”

  Cal felt rage twist him from the gut upwards, but it was met by a sinking feeling of helplessness coming the other way.

  There had to be something he could do. Some way to stop this. But what? He had no idea. He wasn’t smart enough. If he was, he could’ve done something clever. Something that could snatch victory from
the jaws of defeat, save the galaxy, and wipe the fonking smirk off this shizznod’s face.

  But he couldn’t think of anything clever.

  So, he did something dumb.

  “Kevin! Open fire!” he commanded.

  Geronimus Krone sighed. It was an amused, patronizing sort of sigh that somehow managed to make Cal hate the man all the more.

  “Your ship’s blaster fire won’t hurt me,” Krone said.

  “Yeah, don’t aim at him, Kevin,” Cal said. He pointed to the enormous metal ball right beside the villain. “Aim at that.”

  “Very good, sir,” Kevin chimed, then the Untitled’s cannons erupted.

  Krone made it to the first letter of the word, “No,” before the ball burst open in an eruption of fire and metal and time. The hole that had been painted on space fragmented like shattering glass. The figures inside it became deformed, their limbs contracting and elongating even as the ships behind them dripped like liquid down the sky.

  “Ooh, this may have been a mistake,” Cal said, and his words alternated between lengthy drawn out-drones and high-speed chipmunk chirps that sparkled as they spiraled from his mouth.

  Geronimus Krone was frozen down his right side, while his left arm and leg jerked furiously around like they’d been stuck on fast forward.

  Loren was a statue at Cal’s side. Mech was a blur. And time continued to unravel around them.

  Cal felt himself speed up and slow down simultaneously. His heart thrummed in his chest like one constant tone. His feet were lead, and fixed to the metal roof of the prison, which ebbed with blooms of expanding and contracting rust patterns.

  Color and noise and some bastard offspring of the two crashed down on Cal and the others like a tidal wave. Cal felt his bones shatter, his flesh decay, his atoms scatter on the wind.

  And then he felt something wrap around him, holding him, pulling him back together. The colors became a blinding white that filled the whole world and all the worlds beyond it.

  When it cleared, an elderly man in a blood-stained smock stood before him, his hands twisting as if wrestling with thin air. Tim’s eyes spun with all the shades and colors of time.

  “That was stupid,” he said, and his voice boomed like it had when they’d first met him. Cal couldn’t see them, but he got the impression of another figure towering over the Time Titan. A giant space baby, weaving its arms in time with the much smaller figure before it.

  The wind rushed in, howling towards the collapsing time hole with a hurricane’s fury. Geronimus Krone, still half-frozen and half-flailing, was sent tumbling into the abyss. Cal enjoyed a fleeting moment of triumph, then his feet were pulled out from under him and the wind carried him towards the point of no return.

  A green tendril wrapped around his wrist, jerking him to a stop. Cal managed to raise his head enough to see Splurt hooked around the front landing leg of the Untitled, holding him and Loren in place. Cal could no longer see Mech anywhere, but he could feel him like a buzzing at the base of his skull.

  He twisted around until he could see Tim. “Where’s Krone?” he hollered. “Where did he go?”

  “Lost in time,” Tim replied. “Exactly where and when, let us hope we never find out.”

  “You can stop all this, right?” Cal cried.

  “What? No! Of course I can’t stop it,” Tim replied. “It’s… it’s too much. The damage is too great. I’m too old.”

  “Bullshizz!” Cal shouted back. “I watched you stop time across the whole universe. You’ve totally got this, Timbo.”

  Tim glanced up and around them at the damage. The splinters were invisible, yet Cal could see them clearly. Dust motes swirled in some, hung motionless in others. Smoke formed solid jagged blocks where it passed through some time lines, but evaporated into nothing in those directly adjoining them.

  “There’s nothing I can do from out here,” Tim said. He pointed to the rapidly closing time hole. “But perhaps from in there.”

  “OK, great! And then you can come back out?”

  Tim smiled sadly at Cal, and in that look Cal found his answer.

  “Then that’s a bad plan!” Cal said. “There’s got to be another way.”

  “It’s the only way. My time was always going to run out. Sooner or later,” Tim said. “I can think of no better way to go.”

  His feet lifted off the ground, his smock whipping and snapping as it was pulled by the wind.

  He stopped in the air beside Cal. “It has been interesting. I’ll give you that much,” he said, then he raised his arms to his side and surrendered to the pull of the time schism.

  Cal watched the Time Titan tumble inside, his hands weaving furiously in the air, spots of color swarming around him like flies. For a moment, the old man’s face was knotted up in concern, but then he smiled beneath his beard, and whooped loud enough to be heard over the roaring gale.

  The hole closed. The wind dropped. And the fractured fragments of time were once again made whole.

  “What the…? What happened?” Loren gasped, jumping back to life.

  “A lot!” Mech said. He staggered to a stop between Loren and Cal, his eyes wide and staring. “A lot fonking happened.”

  “He stopped it,” Cal realized. “He fixed the break.”

  “I been standing here for eight months,” Mech continued, “watching you slow-moving motherfonkers try to get your—”

  “Miz!” Cal said, stumbling to his feet and racing for the Untitled’s landing ramp. He was inside in a heartbeat, frantically searching through the ship’s rooms. “Miz? Miz? Kevin, where is she?”

  Kevin’s voice was uncharacteristically somber. “Master Splurt laid her to rest on the bridge, sir.”

  “Laid her to rest? What do you mean, ‘laid her to rest?’”

  “I’m so terribly sorry, sir.”

  “No. What? No.”

  Cal slapped a hand against the wall, fingers splayed, supporting himself as his legs staggered him along the corridor.

  She lay on the floor in front of her usual spot, arms by her sides, eyes open but seeing nothing. Cal wasn’t sure why, exactly, but he noticed her tail, and the way the hairs splayed out against the floor, making it look much larger than it actually was.

  The rest of her, though, looked smaller somehow. Like what was in there – what was Miz – had already vacated the premises.

  “No, no, not happening,” Cal said, dropping to his knees beside her. He interlocked his fingers and placed them in the center of her chest, but as he pumped more blood seeped out from behind her, running into the valleys and indents in the metal floor.

  “Loren! Mech! Help me!” he cried. “Somebody help me here!”

  He shook her. He didn’t know what else to do. “Miz! Miz! Come on, sexy Chewbacca! Don’t you do this. Don’t you fonking do this! Please don’t do this!”

  “Cal.”

  Loren’s hand was on his shoulder. He shrugged it away.

  “No! She’s going to be OK! She’s going to be OK! You hear me, Miz?” His voice became a series of angry sobs. “You’d better be OK, young lady, or you are in so much trouble! You said it yourself, no-one dies on this team. No-one dies.”

  “It’s too late, man,” Mech said. “She’s gone.”

  “No! N-n—”

  The rest of the word choked him. Cal rocked forward on his knees, burying his face in Mizette’s damp fur, his shoulders shaking in big silent sobs.

  Splurt rolled to his side and nuzzled up against his leg. Mech and Loren stood behind him, both wanting to say so much, but neither one knowing just the right words to use.

  Loren wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “She saved me. I thought she hated me, but she saved me.”

  “She did hate you, ma’am,” Kevin said. “Emphatically.”

  Loren sniffed, closed her eyes tightly, then looked up at Mech. What she saw there took her by surprise.

  “Hey, I didn’t know you could cry,” she said.

  Mech brushed his metal fingertips agai
nst his flesh cheek. “Huh. Me neither,” he said.

  They waited in silence until Cal finally straightened.

  “You OK?” Loren asked.

  “I told her mom I’d protect her. I told her she’d be safe with us,” he said. “Now what do I tell her?”

  “That’s she dead, sir?” Kevin suggested.

  “Rhetorical question, Kevin!” Mech barked.

  “I wasn’t finished,” Kevin said. “Tell her that she’s dead, but that she died saving everyone. The Greyx. The Symmorium. Those weird ones with the fish heads. She gave her life that others may live. She died as she lived: Like, totally fonking awesome.”

  Cal snorted out a bubble of snot. “Totally fonking awesome,” he agreed. He made no attempt to wipe away his tears. There were too many for that now.

  “We should get her off the bridge,” Loren said. “Put her in her bedroom.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Mech, but Cal stopped him.

  “No. I’ll do it,” he said.

  He scooped an arm beneath her shoulders, cradling her head, and slipped his other arm beneath the small of her back. “I got you, kiddo,” he whispered, then he tried to stand up. Something in his lower back went twang. “Fonk. No, she’s way too heavy. Jesus, what was I thinking? Mech, you do it.”

  “I got her,” said Mech, crouching.

  “But gently.”

  “You got it,” Mech said, then he slipped his metal arms beneath the lifeless body of Mizette of the Greyx and carried her – gently – through to her room.

  CAL SAT IN THE KITCHEN, idly pricking his fingertip with a space fork and watching the wound immediately close over again. Outside, the stars streaked past as the Currently Untitled hurtled towards Greyx Prime, bringing Mizette home.

  “You know the food replicator’s working again, sir?” Kevin said.

  “Hmm?” Cal looked up. “Oh. Yeah. I know. I’m not hungry.”

  “Are you thinking about Ms Miz, sir?”

  “I am, Kevin, yes.”

  “Would you like me to call her mother and let her know we’re coming?” Kevin asked. “I could drop a few hints as to why. You know, so it doesn’t come as a complete shock.”