Space Team: Sting of the Mustard Mines

by Barry J. Hutchison

  “Did we what?” Loren asked.

  “You know? Me and you. Did we…?”

  “No!” Loren said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes!” said Loren. “I mean… Yes, I’m pretty sure.”

  “Right. Right.” Cal nodded. He puffed out his cheeks. “Would you like to?”

  “What?” Loren spluttered. “No! You’re not serious?”

  “Who’s not serious about what?” asked a voice from somewhere close behind Cal. He jumped in fright, spat out a “Fonk!” of alarm, then rolled over to find Garunk lying on the mattress beside him.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Cal demanded.

  Garunk waved a muddy hand. “Oh, hey! It’s the beefcake,” the Slurrit said. “Look at us, in bed together.”

  “On bed together,” Cal was quick to point out. “With Loren. Not just the two of us.”

  Garunk sat up. “Oh, hey, Loren,” he said. “There’s my number one! Didn’t see you for the beefcake. What’s happening?”

  “Nothing good,” said Loren.

  “How long have you been there?” Cal asked.

  Garunk shrugged messily. “No idea. I just woke up.” He lowered his voice to a thrilled whisper. It made little bubbles of excitement pop around his muddy mouth. “But this is great, isn’t it? We’ve actually been captured! How amazing is that?”

  “Actually, not that amazing,” Cal said. “We’ve been captured… what? A dozen times in the past month? Seriously, we spend more of our time captured than not captured. The novelty quickly wears off.”

  He stood up, but was forced to crouch to avoid smashing his head on the low ceiling. Had he been six inches shorter, he’d have had room to spare, but as it was things were a little cramped, height-wise.

  They weren’t exactly in abundance width or length-wise, either. The cell they were in was barely the size of the bathroom aboard the Currently Untitled, and the décor was nowhere near to the same standard.

  The walls were the same dark rock they’d seen in the last chamber, with those same veins of glowing blue permeating them like little avenues. Every surface reminded Cal of a street map, in fact, although not of any place he had any real interest in visiting.

  An old but heavy-looking wooden door barricaded the cell’s only entrance. There was a small hatch around a third of the way down from the top, which appeared to be fastened shut from the other side. Cal gave the door an experimental kick, spent several seconds nursing the subsequent pain in his ankle, knee, and hip, then decided he probably wouldn’t bother trying again.

  The same spiced muskiness as before bothered his nose and throat, and nipped insistently at his eyes. He realized, to his disappointment, that he no longer needed to sneeze. He’d have enjoyed a good sneeze at this point. Hell, the way his day had gone so far, a good sneeze would probably be the highlight.

  While he had lost the sneeze, he was delighted to discover that he had gained something else.

  “I have hands!” he cried. He held both of them up and wiggled the fingers for emphasis. “Hands! See?”

  “You have hands,” Loren confirmed. “Congratulations.”

  “They’re a little small, aren’t they?” asked Garunk, peering more closely at them. “I mean, I know size isn’t everything…” He slapped himself on the wrist and winked salaciously at Cal. “But those are some small hands.”

  Cal regarded his hands. They were, he supposed, still a little on the small side. They weren’t child-sized, exactly, but they were pretty fonking close.

  “They’re not fully developed yet,” he hoped aloud. “That’s it. They’ve still got a little bit to grow.”

  “A little bit?” Loren snorted, rising to her feet. She held her own hand up and placed it against Cal’s. His fingers barely stretched to the top of her palms. “You have infant hands.”

  “They’re not infant hands!” Cal protested. “They’re teenager hands.”

  Loren raised an eyebrow.

  “OK, a small teenager. But naturally small, not like growth hormone deficiency small. Just smaller than… Fonk.” He sighed and dropped his arms to his side. “I have infant hands.”

  “That’s not so bad,” said Garunk. He was standing now, too, crouching low to avoid the ceiling.

  “It isn’t?” asked Cal.

  “No!” Garunk said. “You know what they say. The smaller the hand, the tighter the—”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Cal raised his infant hands. “Going to stop you there, Garunk,” he said. “It is my firm wish not to hear the end of that sentence. And if people do say that, I suggest you immediately report them to the authorities.”

  He turned to Loren. Because of the crouching thing, this involved some side-stepping and several tilts of his head.

  “OK, what do we know?” he asked.

  “Not much,” said Loren.

  “Well, we know that Mech is working with the bad guys,” Cal said. “We know we’re in the Mustard Mines, which I’m still having trouble believing is a thing, but I’m going with it. What else?”

  “We’ve been captured!” Garunk gushed, practically giggling at the thought of it. “So exciting.”

  “OK, yes. And that,” said Cal. A memory reared up. “Shizz. And Tobey Maguire’s gone.”

  Loren frowned. “Who?”

  “Tobey Maguire,” said Cal. He waited for a flicker of recognition that never came. “The actor? Didn’t I ever mention Tobey Maguire?”

  Loren thought back for a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t think so. I mean, you say a lot of things, and not all of it necessarily feels like vital information.”

  Cal gasped, offended. “You mean you ignore some of the stuff I say?”

  “Like I said, it’s not always apparent what’s important and what’s just, you know, noises.”

  “Noises?!” Cal spluttered. “You think my conversation is just ‘noises’?”

  Loren smiled soothingly. “Only, like, thirty to forty percent of it.”

  “Thirty to forty—?”

  Cal took a deep breath. “We’re going to put a pin in this and come back to it at a later date,” he told her. He mimed pinning something in place. “There. Boop. Space pin.”

  He raised a child-sized finger at her. “But don’t think this is over, Loren.” He tutted and shook his head. “Fonking noises.”

  “Aaanyway, getting back on topic,” said Loren, crossing her arms. Because of the way she was stooping and the angle of her head, this looked unnatural and uncomfortable, and she decided to switch to hands-on-hips instead, which wasn’t much better. “Here’s what we don’t know. We don’t know where the ship is. We don’t know where Miz or Splurt are.”

  “You don’t know who Tobey Maguire is,” Cal said, clinging to that particular grudge.

  Loren ignored the barb and continued. “We don’t know what we’re going to be made to do, how to fix Mech, or how to get out of here. Anything else we don’t know?”

  Cal puffed out his cheeks. “Trigonometry?” he said.

  “Be serious!” Loren said.

  “I am being serious,” Cal told her. “I totally flunked Math.”

  “Wait, which one’s Splurt?” asked Garunk.

  “Have a guess which one’s Splurt,” Cal said. “His name is Splurt.”

  Garunk took a moment to reach a decision. “Is it the green one?”

  “Yes,” Cal sighed. “It’s the green one.”

  “Why?” Loren asked.

  Garunk shrugged his sloppy shoulders. “It’s just I saw him earlier, before I got knocked out.”

  “You did?” said Cal, his eyes blazing. “Where?”

  Garunk turned his featureless face in the direction of the door, then shrugged again. “I don’t know. Out there, I guess. They had him in this, like, glass tank thing. Two of the Harvesters were carrying it between them.”

  “Those sons of bedges,” Cal spat. “If they’ve hurt him, I’ll…”

  “They ain’t hurt him,” said
a voice from just beyond the door. The hatch opened, revealing a face that was part flesh, part metal, and all Mech.

  “Splurt’s fine,” Mech said. “They’ve got him in the glass case Zertex gave him to us in.”

  “My vomit catcher?” said Cal. “They put him in my vomit catcher?”

  “Technically, I did,” said Mech. “But I cleaned it out first. Man, you eat some crazy-colored shizz.”

  “You fonking Judas,” Cal spat.

  Mech stared impassively back at him through the hatch. “I don’t know who that is.”

  “You don’t have to. All you have to know is that, for the purposes of this metaphor, I’m Jesus.”

  “I don’t know who that is, either,” Mech pointed out.

  “You’re fonking with Jesus, Mech,” Cal warned, choosing not to get bogged down in the explanation. “You’re fonking with Jesus. And you know what happens to people who fonk with Jesus?”

  Mech glanced past him to Loren. “Uh, no.”

  “Well… They…” Cal said, fumbling through his memories of Sunday School. He’d gone twice, back when he was a kid. On the first day, he’d been expelled. The return visit was to collect his jacket, which he’d left in the hall the previous week. “I don’t know,” Cal admitted. “But it’s something very unpleasant. And you know why, Mech? Because Jesus is kind of a wizard. And that’s who you’re fonking with right now.”

  Mech’s brow furrowed, just a little. “Uh, OK.” He glanced at Loren again. She shrugged, so he turned his attention back to Cal. “What does that mean?”

  “Oh,” said Cal in a threatening whisper. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  Loren leaned in closer to Cal. “Remember what I said earlier? About the thirty to forty percent? This is it,” she whispered. “Just so you know.”

  Cal sighed. “Fine. What do you want, Mech? Are you here to punch our faces again? Because you can punch our faces all fonking day long, and we won’t help your new friends with… whatever they want us to do. I wasn’t really listening. You can punch us, you can torture us, you can break our bones, but it doesn’t matter. Because we heal, Mech. Whatever you do to us, we’ll heal.”

  Loren raised a hand, then indicated the painful bruise on the side of her face. “Uh, hello? I don’t heal.”

  “Well, you do,” Cal said. “Maybe not as quickly as I do, but you still heal. You’re kind of ruining my dramatic moment here.”

  Mech let out a low groan. “Look, man. I don’t like this any more than you do, but there ain’t a damn thing I can do about it. I’m as much a prisoner as you are. Hell, I’m more of a prisoner than you are. At least you have control of your own hands and feet.”

  As he said the words, Mech found himself glancing down at the appendages in question. “Holy shizz, you have baby hands,” he snorted.

  “They’re not baby hands!” Cal snapped.

  “They’re infant hands,” Loren explained.

  “They’re small teenager hands,” Cal protested. “Come on, Loren, we established this. Right before Garunk made it creepy and weird.”

  Mech glanced at the Slurrit lurking in the cell behind Cal and Loren. “How did he make it—?”

  “You don’t want to know. I can’t bring myself to say it,” Cal replied. He squeezed the bridge of his nose. It felt enormous in his tiny fingers. “Fine. It’s not your fault. But I still hate you.”

  “Fair enough,” Mech agreed. “Ain’t exactly my own biggest fan right now, either.”

  “Where are Miz and Splurt?” Loren asked. “Are they safe?”

  “As safe as any of us,” Mech confirmed. “Which ain’t really safe, at all. I’ll tell you more on the way.”

  “On the way where?” Cal asked.

  “On the way to work,” said Mech. The hatch closed, then the door swung inward, forcing Cal to step back. He collided with Garunk, who firmly stood his ground.

  “Oops! Room for a small one!” Garunk said with a giggle. “All aboard! Ooh, cheeky!”

  With some difficulty, Cal looked around at him. “I don’t even know what that one’s supposed to mean.”

  Garunk thought for a moment, then wrinkled up the lump of mud that Cal took to be a nose. “Nah, nor me,” he admitted.

  “Come on, get moving,” Mech urged, beckoning them out into the corridor outside the cell. “We don’t want to keep them waiting.”

  Loren moved to go through the door, but Cal caught her by the arm and stopped her. “One sec, Loren, I’ve got this,” he said, squaring up to Mech as best he could, given the height difference, and the fact that the ceiling in the corridor was high enough that Mech could stand fully upright.

  “I guess you think you’re pretty tough,” Cal said. He narrowed his eyes in contempt. “You don’t look so tough to me.”

  “What the fonk are you talking about, man?” Mech demanded. “Quit fooling around and come with me.”

  “We could do that, Mech. We could do that,” said Cal. “Or, I could just do this!”

  Lunging, he grabbed Mech’s dial and twisted it all the way to the right, diverting all Mech’s hydraulic power to his intellect.

  At least, that was the theory. What actually happened was… nothing at all.

  “Yeah, they disabled that,” Mech said. “They realized it was a weak point.”

  “Oh. Right. Damn,” Cal said. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “I mean, it makes sense. When that Konto guy did it earlier, I was like, ‘Holy shizz. How has no one ever thought of that before?’”

  “Me too,” Loren agreed. “I mean, it’s like a big off-switch just right there on your chest.”

  “Crazy, right?” said Cal.

  They all laughed for a moment. Even Garunk, who didn’t really have any idea what they were talking about but didn’t want to be left out.

  It was Mech who stopped laughing first. “Yeah. So, anyway,” he grunted. “Are you going to follow me, or am I going to have to tear your legs off?”

  Cal drew himself up to his full height, smacked his head on the ceiling, and reduced himself back down again. “Do your worst,” he sneered. “We’ll heal.”

  Loren shoved him out into the corridor. “Just stop talking and start walking,” she said. “And let’s go find out what the fonk is going on.”

  Fourteen

  Cal stood at the mouth of a tunnel, gazing down onto a vast cavern filled with heaving bodies, flying boxes and the unmistakable tang of mustard. The smell reminded Cal not of American mustard, but of one of those insanely hot French mustards that could only be applied to sandwiches in the most minute of smears, and only then at arm’s length. It burned the lining of his throat, permeated his lungs, and instantly made his nose run.

  Still, it wasn’t the smell that held his attention. Nor was it the glowing veins of neon blue running across the cave walls, the treasure chest-sized flying boxes that crisscrossed the cavern, or the half-dozen Harvester guards who paced around the place threatening the workers with the fingering of their miserable lives.

  No. What had really caught Cal’s attention were the workers themselves. He stared at them in wonder for a while, watching the swinging of their pickaxes and listening to the solid clinks of metal striking stone. Each time they swung, little brass bells on the end of their floppy hats jingled merrily. Between that and the rhythm of the axe-strikes, the whole place rang as if with music.

  “Holy shizz, they’ve got dwarves,” Cal said. “Actual real dwarves. With beards, and everything!”

  “They ain’t ‘dwarves,’” Mech corrected, but Cal shushed him.

  “Wait, wait, wait. I have to try something,” he said. He cupped a hand around his mouth, took a deep breath, then let out a loud, “Hi-hoooo!”

  The sound echoed around the cavern. One by one, the little bearded figures stopped what they were doing, then turned to look up in Cal’s direction. He grinned down and waved, oblivious to the way the little people were glaring at him from beneath their hats.

  “Anyone?” he
said, looking hopefully from tiny face to tiny face. “’It’s off to work you go?’ No?”

  He shook his head sadly. “And you call yourselves dwarves.”

  “No, we don’t,” chirped a voice from down near the front. It had a thin, high-pitched timbre, with just a whiff of Helium-enhancement around the edges.

  Cal leaned over the outcrop of rock he and the others were standing on and saw a diminutive figure in a red hat glowering up at him.

  “You don’t?” Cal said. “What are you then? Elves?”

  “Fonk off! ‘Elves,’” barked the little figure. “Do we look like elves?”

  “Well, yeah,” Cal confirmed. “You absolutely do.” He glanced around at the multitude of watching faces. The Harvesters were moving through the throngs toward him now, apparently gliding across the rough ground.

  “Are you Munchkins, then?” he guessed. “I mean, you’re not Oompa Loompas. Or are you? Fonk, that’d be awesome.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” demanded another of the little people. This one wore a yellow hat and a pair of green dungarees that were stained with blobs of yellow. He had a voice that was a fraction more high-pitched and piercing than the first guy. “You never seen a Nogem before?”

  “Not to the best of my knowledge,” Cal admitted. He turned to the others. “Have you ever seen a Nogem before?”

  “Yes,” Loren confirmed. “Of course.”

  “All the time,” Mech added.

  “What do you mean all the time?” Cal asked him. “We’ve been together for months and in all that time you’ve never once said, ‘Look at the funny little dwarf person.’”

  “Because I ain’t a fonking shizznod,” said Mech.

  “Oh, I beg to differ, space Judas,” Cal retorted.

  “I don’t get it. What’s funny about them?” Loren asked.

  “What are you talking about? Everything!” said Cal. “They’re tiny, they’ve got jolly little hats with bells on. Some of them have big shoes… I could go on. They’re hilarious.”

  Garunk peered over the ledge. “I’m not seeing it,” he said.