“Get back in your room and stay there,” barked one of the largest pirates, his hand gripping the hilt of the curved blade he had tucked into his belt. “This ain’t your concern.”
Cal looked across the faces of the pirates. Some of them genuinely wanted him to go back inside. The others looked like they’d prefer him to try something stupid.
He didn’t meet the woman’s gaze again. He couldn’t bring himself to.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, then he quietly closed the door.
He leaned his forehead against it, listening to the woman pleading for her life, and the life of her unborn child. He listened to the footsteps turn and begin to move off along the corridor.
He picked up the lamp.
He opened the door.
WHANG! He brought the lamp’s metal base down on the back of the closest pirate’s head, then drove a bare-footed kick into the leg of another, right behind the knee. Both men went down, falling forwards and stumbling into the other men in front.
Cal swung again with the lamp, catching another pirate across the forehead as he turned. Blood fountained from a split that appeared above the man’s left eye, and the corridor erupted into bellowing chaos.
Swinging the lamp by the power cord, Cal clipped another of the pirates across the jaw, but his straggly brown beard cushioned him from the impact. Swinging upwards with his sword, the pirate sliced through the cord, and the lamp thudded to the floor.
Despite the loss of his only weapon, Cal wasn’t done for yet. The narrow corridor was working to his advantage, as it stopped all the remaining pirates all jumping on him at once. Still, it wouldn’t take all of them to beat him, just one of them would probably do the trick.
He thought about running. Running was definitely an option. Sure, it would mean leaving this nice alien lady and her baby to whatever the pirates had planned for her, but was that really his problem?
Yeah, he thought. Annoyingly, it was.
But why? asked that little devil on his shoulder. They’re not going to hurt the baby, just take it. That’s what she said.
The voice was right. That was what the woman had said. Maybe they had good reason for taking the baby. Maybe they were from some sort of space social services unit and were going to ensure it got the best possible start in life.
He looked across the scarred, misshapen faces of the pirates. None of them exactly screamed ‘child’s best interests.’
All of the above took place in the space of around half a second, fear and adrenaline having kicked Cal’s hangover-ravaged brain into overdrive. By the end of it, he’d had an idea.
He grabbed for the sword of the pirate he’d KO’d with the lamp and whipped it free of its leather scabbard. His experience of swords was limited to being able to make them from modeling balloons, and he wasn’t even very good at that. Fighting a band of experienced pirate-types was out of the question, but then hopefully he wouldn’t have to.
Cal thrust the tip of the sword towards the pregnant woman’s belly. The woman and several of the pirates all gasped at the same time. Cal almost grinned. Just as he’d hoped.
He brought the sword to a stop just inches from the woman’s stomach. “Anyone moves and I run her through,” he warned. “Then it’s bye-bye baby. That’s what you want, isn’t it? The baby?”
There was a moment’s silence, then one of the pirates offered an unconvincing, “No.”
“Nice try, fatty,” Cal said, which caused the man to briefly glance down at himself in a moment of acute self-consciousness.
“Let the girl go, or I kill the baby!” Cal said.
The pirate who had sliced the lamp’s power cord narrowed his dark eyes. They were ringed with lumpy black mascara, like he’d partly based his look on Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean.
“But if you take her, we won’t have the baby,” he intoned.
“And if you don’t let me take her, the baby is a gonner,” Cal said, twisting the sword for emphasis.
“Yeah. But that’s my point, innit?” said the pirate. “Either way, we won’t have the baby.”
“Right,” said Cal, somewhat less certainly. “But at least the baby would still be alive.”
“But what good does that do us, is what I’m saying?” said the pirate. “King Anderle wants the baby, right?”
“Right,” said Cal, despite this being completely new information, and despite the fact he had no idea who King Anderle was.
“So, if you take the girl, we ain’t got the baby, has we? And he ain’t going to like that.”
Behind him, the other pirates mumbled their agreement. “No, he ain’t going to like that one bit, is King Anderle.”
“Will he like it if the baby’s dead?” Cal asked, giving the sword a quick upwards flick which made the woman sob in fright. Cal instinctively opened his mouth to apologize, but stopped himself just in time.
“No, he won’t like that, neither,” said the pirate. “But, well, the thing is, he’ll be just as angry either way. So, way I see it, is we got two choices. Either we let you take the girl, and King Anderle is angry, or you kill the baby, and King Anderle is angry.”
“So you might as well let me take the girl, then?” said Cal, hopefully.
“Well, I mean, yeah, that’s one option, certainly,” said the pirate. “But that way we don’t get to kill you or nuffing. If we let you go ahead and kill the baby, then we get to cut you up into little bits.”
“Or take him upstairs and feed him to the Oznark,” suggested one of the other pirates.
A smile split the lead pirate’s beard, revealing two rows of golden teeth. “Oh, yeah, that is a most excellent suggestion, Brian. If he kills the baby, we can feed him to the Oznark.”
The sword was getting heavier in Cal’s hand. His mind raced, frantically trying to process these latest developments. He wasn’t sure what an Oznark was, but he was reasonably sure he didn’t want to be fed to it. He was also a little taken aback that one of the pirates was named Brian, but that felt a little less pressing than the whole Oznark situation.
“OK, third option,” Cal announced. “How about I take the girl, you guys count to sixty, then come after us.”
The pirates considered this.
“Ten,” said the lead pirate.
“Fifty,” said Cal. “Final offer.”
“Five,” growled the pirate.
“OK, Jesus, ten then!” said Cal. “But I keep the sword and you have to--”
“One,” began the pirate.
“Oh, you’re just mean,” Cal yelped. He grabbed the woman by an arm and pulled her free of the piratey-throng. “Come on, lady, move!”
They stumbled along the corridor, past the open doors to their rooms, the woman trying desperately to pull her arm free of Cal’s grip.
“Two!” The pirate’s shout was accompanied by jeering and laughter from the others.
“Stop fonking pulling your arm, we need to run!” Cal said.
“You were going to kill my baby, let go!” the woman cried.
“Three!” More jeering. More laughter.
“Lady, I just saved you and your kid,” Cal pointed out, pulling her around a corner and onto a long straight corridor that stretched out ahead for a dishearteningly long distance. “If you want me to continue saving you and your kid, you have to trust me.”
“Four!”
Cal powered on, his bare feet slapping against the vinyl floor. The woman struggled for a few more seconds, then seemed to accept that it was getting her nowhere, and picked up the pace.
“Thank you,” said Cal. “Now, we need to find a way to get to my ship. I think there’s an elevator or something around here somewhere. If we can just--”
“Fivesixseveneightnineten,” bellowed the pirate all in one breath. His friends all cheered and there was a sudden thunder of footsteps as they all raced towards the corner.
“Those cheating fonkers,” Cal hissed. There was a door on the left that looked different to the others. It had a
frosted-glass pane, a bar handle and an illuminated sign above it bearing a series of cryptic symbols. Cal didn’t wait for the letters to translate, and instead just threw himself at the door, pushed down the bar, and dragged the woman inside.
6.
Beyond the door were two sets of stairs, one going up, the other down. Cal knew his room was deep in the bowels of the North Star station, so he raced for the stairs leading upwards and took them two at a time.
Three paces – six steps – up, he felt his head throb and darkness start to close in, and decided to take them one at a time, instead. His hangover may have gone, but it hadn’t gone very far.
After a dozen or so steps, the stairway reached a narrow landing, before another set of steps led up in the opposite direction. They turned the corner and hurried on, the woman waddling awkwardly up the stairs, holding onto Cal with one hand and the handrail with the other.
They reached the next landing just the pirates came barreling through the door on the floor below. There was another door here, leading out into an equally grim-looking corridor. Cal hesitated, hoping to hear the pirates go charging down the stairs, but their footsteps grew louder, and he realized they’d made the correct choice.
“Shizz,” he whispered. He shoved the woman towards the next set of steps. “Go, go,” he urged. She hesitated, panic flaring behind her wide eyes for a moment, then waddled upwards as fast as she could.
Cal pulled open the door leading out into the corridor, then darted up the steps behind the woman, catching up with her at the next landing. Taking her by the arm again, he pulled her up the next flight, then stopped and listened as the pirates arrived on the previous floor, spotted the door slowly closing, then barreled out into the corridor.
Head swimming from the effort, Cal climbed another few flights of steps, helping the woman along behind him. Three stories up, they heard the pirates pile angrily back into the stairwell again, and Cal decided that was his cue to leave.
Easing open the next door they came to, he guided the woman through, then quietly clicked it closed. They pressed themselves against the wall on either side of the door as the thunder of pirate footsteps clattered past, and held their breath until the din had continued past them and upwards to the floors above.
“Thank fonk for that,” said Cal, sliding the sword into the belt of his cargo pants. He looked over at the woman. She was breathing heavily, her hands slung below her belly like support scaffolding. “Shizz. You OK?”
The woman nodded. “Fine,” she said, between two long, drawn-out breaths. “I’ll be fine.”
“I’m Cal. Cal Carver. What’s your name?”
The woman studied him for a moment, as if unsure whether she should be parting with the information. “Morana,” she said, at last.
“Well, nice to meet you, Morana,” Cal said, offering her the best smile he could muster in the circumstances. “Mind telling me why a gang of pirates want your baby?”
Her arms tightened around the bump. “They don’t,” she said. “King Anderle does. He’s offered a reward for anyone who brings him my son.”
“King fonking Anderle,” said Cal, shaking his head. “What a jerk.” He shrugged. “Who’s King Anderle?”
Morana looked taken aback. “Pardon?”
“Who is he? King Anderle?”
“You don’t know who King Anderle is? How can you not know who King Anderle is? Everyone knows who King Anderle is.”
“I’m pretty new around here,” Cal explained. “So he’s, like… what? The King of Space?”
Morana shook her head. “No, he’s not an actual king. Not really. That’s just what people call him. He runs a few systems in the Remnants.”
“Oh, I know someone from the Remnants!” said Cal. “Korvack. Stone guy? Got a butler. Or did have, anyway. Know him?”
Morana shook her head. “You don’t know who Korvack is? How can you not know who Korvack is?” said Cal, mimicking her. “Everyone knows who Korvack is!”
“Wait, do you mean Kornack?” Morana asked. “The Igneon? The K’Tubboth lord? Shornack’s brother?”
Cal thought about lying, but then sighed. “Yes. That guy.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Morana. “Everyone knows him.”
Cal tutted quietly, then tried to peer through the frosted glass of the door that led back to the stairs. “I think the pirates are gone. You should be safe now.”
“Safe?” said Morana, the word coming out as a snort. “I’m not safe. I’ll never be safe. You think King Anderle just sent those guys to get me? There are hundreds of people on this station looking for me. Pirates, bounty hunters… any idiot with a lack of funds and a lack of conscience. They’re all looking for me.”
“Jesus,” said Cal. “How come he wants the baby so bad?”
Morana’s grip tightened still further on her bump. She shook her head, as if refusing to say the words out loud. Eventually, they found their way out.
“He wants to eat him.”
“The baby?” said Cal. “He wants to eat the baby?”
“Yes.”
“King Anderle? King Anderle wants to eat the baby?”
“Please stop saying it,” Morana pleaded. Her wide eyes shimmered. “You’ll help me, won’t you? You’ll help keep my baby safe?”
Cal held her gaze for a moment, then looked down at his bare feet. “Man, I totally should have grabbed my shoes,” he muttered.
He turned his attention back to the stairs. If Morana was telling the truth - and he had no reason to believe she wasn’t - the floors between here and the Shatner would be swarming with pirates and bounty hunters, all searching for the girl and her unborn child.
Dozens of stories. Hundreds of heavily-armed bad guys. And all Cal had were his wits, a sword, and a hangover sent from the bowels of Hell itself.
“Fonk it,” he decided. “Let’s just take the elevator.”
* * *
Finding the elevator proved to be more difficult than Cal had expected. He’d stood for several long seconds staring at the spot on the wall he’d expected to see it, his brain refusing to accept it wasn’t there.
“But this is where it is downstairs,” he insisted. “On our floor, this is where the elevator is, so it should be here. It goes up and down. That’s just science.”
“What do you mean?” Morana asked, her eyes darting anxiously along the corridor. “Why would it just go up and down? That’s pointless.”
“No it isn’t!” Cal insisted. “It’s a fonking elevator. It elevates. It goes up! And, you know, down. I don’t know what the word is for that. Descendevator, maybe?”
“What are you talking about?” Morana demanded. “We can’t hang around here. Someone might see us.”
Cal tapped the wall, just in case the elevator door actually was there, but hiding from them. It wasn’t.
Somewhere far back along the corridor, a door opened. It was hidden by the corridor’s slight curve, but the footsteps they heard emerging sounded like they belonged to some pretty serious feet.
“In here,” said Cal, throwing open a door and pulling Morana through. They emerged into a vast cargo area, stacked high with rusted containers, oozing barrels and several hundred wooden crates. Cal didn’t actually notice any of those details at first, his attention being grabbed by the much more eye-catching monster that took up a full third of the cage directly in front of him.
“Jesus, what is that?” he gasped, closing the door at his back just as the beast turned its dark, soulless eyes towards him. “It looks like Godzilla humped a lion.”
The creature hurled itself at the bars, a thrashing fury of fur and scales and claws and teeth. It hit the thick metal rods with such force that the whole cage leapt forward a full inch and a half.
“I don’t know,” Morana whispered. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one before.”
“I’m pretty sure you’d have remembered,” said Cal. He took Morana by the hand and they sidled along the wall, keeping their distance as the c
reature thrust a powerful front limb through a gap between two bars and slashed furiously at the air. Its face was twisted up in rage, showing teeth that were almost the length of Cal’s entire hand. “Nice Godzilla-lion,” he soothed. “Good Godzilla-lion.”
The thing roared with rage and smashed its head against the cage bars. They rattled in quite a worrying way, and Cal made the executive decision that now would probably be a good time to run. They skirted around a stack of crates and out of the monster’s line of sight. It kept roaring at them, regardless.
Something whirred past Cal’s head and he instinctively ducked. When it was apparent that whatever it was wasn’t trying to kill him, he risked a glance up. The thing that had buzzed him looked like a cross between a drone and a forklift truck. Cal watched it swoop down and slide its prongs beneath a crate, then heard the pitch of its engines change as it raised the box into the air and carried it towards another stack on the other side of the deck.
A few more of the flying forklifts zipped around the place, lifting and depositing cargo for reasons best known to themselves. They didn’t really seem to be achieving all that much, but they were keeping busy, and seemed happy enough.
“Here,” said Morana, tugging on Cal’s arm. Two sets of elevator doors were set into the wall just ahead and to the right. They hurried towards them, then Cal jabbed at the call button several more times than was strictly necessary, and impatiently tapped a bare foot.
“Come on, come on,” he muttered. The Godzilla-lion had stopped making any noise now, but Cal was too scared to turn around in case it was standing right behind him, licking its lips. “We’ll get on this, head to the landing decks, find my ship and…”
His voice trailed off. “Shizz. No, wait! We can’t.”
“Why not?” asked Morana, suddenly panicked.
“Because I need the rest of them.”
“The rest of what?”
“The rest of the crew. My… friends, I guess, although that’s quite a strong word to describe them at this point in time.”
Morana took her turn at frantically pressing the elevator’s call button. “Well, where are they?”
Space Team: A Lot of Weird Space Shizz: Collected Short Stories Page 17