Space Team: Sting of the Mustard Mines

by Barry J. Hutchison

  “How can you not be seeing it? They’re fonking hysterical. Look at them!”

  “They’re slaves,” Mech pointed out. “They’re slaves being forced to work for monsters until they die.”

  Cal tutted. “Well, obviously that part isn’t a barrel of laughs. I’m not saying I don’t feel for the poor guys, I’m just saying that they’re, you know, fun. They’re hilarious. To look at, I mean.”

  He noticed the glares from the Nogems and raised his little hands in what he hoped was a magnanimous sort of way. “I don’t mean you’re freaks, or anything like that. I mean it in a kind of heartwarming, ‘Aren’t they just the cutest?’ kind of a way. You know? You all remind me of a favorite toy. Like a toy you just want to pick up and cuddle forever, and never put down. That’s what I mean by ‘hilarious.’ You’re adorable hilarious. Adoralario—No, that doesn’t work. That’s just awkward. But you get the point.” He gave them a double thumbs up. “So, are we good? Yeah, we’re good.”

  He leaned closer to Loren and whispered from the side of his mouth. “That was close. I think I almost made them angry.”

  “Well, I’m sure that last speech calmed them right down,” Loren sighed.

  “Walk,” Mech urged. He shoved Cal in the back, forcing him to stumble ahead down the slope that led to the cavern below.

  “Hey, watch it, you big hunk of junk,” Cal protested. “Friends don’t push friends. I get the feeling you’re enjoying this a little too much.”

  “I ain’t enjoying it,” Mech said, clanking down the incline behind Cal. He quickly amended that statement. “OK, maybe I’m enjoying it a little bit, but I don’t want to be doing this shizz. It ain’t my fault. I got no choice but to follow orders.”

  “You know who else used that exact same excuse, Mech? The Nazis,” said Cal.

  “Again, I don’t know who that is,” Mech said.

  “Well, let’s just say that if you’re the Nazis—and you are—then, for the purposes of this metaphor, that makes me Anne Frank,” Cal said. “And you know what happens to people who fonk with Anne Frank?”

  “No.”

  “No,” said Cal, who didn’t know, either. He sniffed. “Well, there’s something for you to find out. Have a report on my desk by Monday.”

  “What is he talking about?” Mech asked Loren. She rolled her eyes and shrugged in response.

  “I don’t know. I stopped listening,” she said.

  “The Nazis lost, is my point. I mean, I think that was my point. I kind of lost the thread somewhere back there, but I’m pretty sure that’s what I was aiming for.” He shoved a finger up close to Mech’s face. “So, just you think on that, buddy.”

  “On which part?” asked Mech.

  “Huh?” Cal shrugged and lowered his tiny finger. “God, I don’t know. All of it. Or just the important parts. Yeah. Think on the important parts.”

  Mech considered this for a moment, then decided he didn’t want to get any deeper into the conversation than he already was.

  “OK,” he said, and hoped that would be the end of it.

  By the time they reached the bottom of the slope, the Harvesters had formed a knot around them. The Nogems had returned to work, but they were keeping their beady little eyes on the new arrivals, as if aware that the show was far from being over.

  “The prisoners, as requested,” said Mech.

  “We do not ‘request,’” hissed one of the Harvesters. He wasn’t one they’d met before, as far as Cal could tell, although at first glance they all pretty much looked the same, and he didn’t really relish the idea of taking a second glance to confirm. “We command.”

  “Fine,” said Mech, spitting the word out in contempt. “Prisoners as commanded. Happy?”

  “Insolence,” hissed the Harvester.

  Mech’s whole body went rigid. His eyes rolled back in his skull and sparks flickered across the skin of his face as his jaw clamped shut, almost devouring his fleshy top lip.

  “What are you doing?” Loren demanded. “Cut that out.”

  “You heard her,” said Cal. “Leave him alone.”

  He stepped forward, swinging with a punch that he realized, with a sense of dawning inevitability, was going to connect with the Harvester’s hundreds of needle-like teeth.

  Fonk. This was going to hurt.

  Just before the fist found its target, a metal hand caught his arm, yanked him into the air by it, then slammed him against the ground with enough force to knock the nearest Nogem’s hat off.

  Cal lay spread-eagled on the rough stone floor, wheezing through his nose and trying to recall how his lungs worked. He was aware that something was supposed to follow ‘breathe out,’ but appeared to have temporarily forgotten. He lay there for a while, gazing up into Mech’s apologetic eyes.

  “Well, that’s the last time I stand up for you,” he coughed, taking Loren’s hand and letting her pull him to his feet.

  “Sorry, man,” Mech said. “It ain’t me, it’s these fonks.”

  “We get it, Mech,” Loren assured him. “We don’t blame you.”

  “I kind of blame him,” Cal said, cricking his lower vertebrae back into alignment. He waggled his tiny fingers, checking to see if he could still move everything. When he concluded that he wasn’t paralyzed, he gestured to the cavern that extended for half a mile or so behind the Harvesters. “So, what’s all this about?”

  “It is not your concern,” hissed the Harvester who had spoken before. He seemed to be the leader of the group, or maybe just their official spokesperson. Either way, the others lurked around him, doing nothing but blinking in their nostrils and making their teeth do that weird undulating thing.

  “Well, you brought us here,” said Loren. “So, I’d argue that it is our concern.”

  “She has a point,” Cal said. “If this genuinely isn’t our concern, like you say, then we’ll just get going. If you could just point us in the direction of our friends, we’ll round them up and—”

  “Strike him,” the Harvester commanded.

  Metal knuckles thwacked across the back of Cal’s head.

  “Ow. Jesus,” Cal protested. He rubbed his head as he glared back over his shoulder at Mech. “Did you have to do it with quite so much relish?”

  “Sorry, man,” Mech said. “Like I say—”

  “Not your fault. So you keep telling me,” Cal said. He shot him one of his dirtiest looks, then turned back to the Harvester.

  “Look, pal, are you going to explain why you’ve brought us here?” he asked. “If not, could you just kill me? Because I’ve had a rough day, and I don’t really want to prolong it any longer than absolutely necessary.”

  “We brought you here to serve the glory of the great Manacle, Enslaver of Worlds,” the Harvester said.

  “See, that doesn’t actually help us in any way,” Cal said with a sigh. “You’re still being too vague. What specifically are we supposed to be doing?”

  “This Nogem will tell you everything you need to know,” said the Harvester, extending a spindly chalk-white finger toward the closest Nogem. The little man suddenly looked very afraid. The bean-sized bell on his forest green hat jingled anxiously as he spoke. “Uh. Dig,” he said.

  “Dig,” the Harvester echoed.

  Cal frowned. “Dig? That’s it? That’s all we need to know? Just ‘dig’?”

  “Just dig,” the Harvester confirmed. He leaned closer, until Cal could feel the heat of the thing’s breath on his face. “And try not to die until we tell you to.”

  Cal did not dig digging. He had come to this conclusion approximately thirty seconds after Mech had shoved a pickaxe in his hand and pointed him at an expanse of solid wall.

  That was an hour ago, and his opinion on the matter had only worsened as the minutes had passed. He definitely did not dig digging. In fact, he’d go so far as to say that he actively despised digging. Digging, as far as he was concerned, could go fonk itself.

  He’d hoped that, given they were in outer space, techno
logy would’ve advanced beyond the humble pickaxe. Sure, the little dwarf guys were using them, but he’d been hoping that this was a personal choice. Tradition, or something.

  But, no.

  The wooden handle of the pick was rough and uneven, and felt enormous in his tiny, unfinished hands. His fingers barely reached all the way around it, and the tool kept slipping from his grip on the backswing. He’d almost decapitated two Nogems already, and come dangerously close to maiming Loren. It was only some fast footwork from her that meant she still had two functioning eyes.

  When he did manage to swing the pick, the jarring impact of the metal on rock sent shockwaves through his skeleton and rattled his teeth in their sockets. This had happened so often now that his spine had contracted by an inch-and-a-half, and his dental records were almost certainly obsolete.

  In some ways, it hadn’t been too bad, to start with. He, Loren, and Garunk had been kept together as a group, before one of the Harvesters had decided they were talking too much—Cal in particular—and had split them off into different areas.

  Cal now worked alone, aside from a single Nogem who hammered away at the wall a couple of dozen feet away on the left. He’d attempted to strike up a conversation a few times, but the little man had thus far failed to respond.

  Taking a breath, Cal swung at the wall again with the pickaxe.

  KACHINK.

  The vibrations passed through his infant-sized hands, traveled up his arms, then rattled onward down his spine and into the rest of him. His teeth rattled so violently he was sure a couple of them actually switched places.

  “Fonk,” he grimaced. “This is hard work.”

  He leaned on the pick for a few moments, watching the Nogem. He swung with mechanical regularity, fitting three full strikes into the time it usually took Cal to adjust his grip.

  “How do you do that?” Cal wondered. “Don’t you get tired?”

  “Always tired,” the Nogem muttered through his beard. He struck the wall again.

  KACHINK.

  KACHINK.

  KACHINK.

  “But must work. Must always work.”

  Cal wasn’t sure if the little guy spoke in this slightly clipped way all the time, or if he was just conserving breath. Considering that Cal was getting exhausted just watching him, he imagined it was probably the latter.

  “What are we actually digging for?” Cal asked.

  The KACHINKs missed a beat. “Mustard, they say,” said the Nogem, finding his rhythm again. “Manacle requires mustard.”

  “He does, huh? Why, is he making the world’s biggest hoagie?”

  “Not our place to ask,” said the Nogem.

  KACHINK.

  KACHINK.

  KACHINK.

  “Only our place to serve.”

  “You heard the man,” said Mech, thudding along the cavern in Cal’s direction. “You need to get back to work.”

  The Nogem redoubled his efforts. Cal, on the other hand, made a point of doing nothing whatsoever.

  “Oh, hey, Mech,” he said. “Just catching my breath. By the way, do you know when our scheduled breaks are? And is it an hour or forty-five minutes for lunch? HR hasn’t sent through my contract yet, so I’m not clear on a lot of the details.”

  “Strike him,” said a voice from Mech’s forearm.

  Mech winced as he backhanded Cal across the cheek, sending him staggering. “Sorry, man!”

  Cal straightened and clicked his jaw into place. “It’s fine. It didn’t even hurt.” He bent lower and shouted at Mech’s arm. “You hear that? It didn’t even hurt.”

  “Strike him harder.”

  The impact of the next blow lifted Cal off his feet, fired him through the air, then smashed him into a rocky wall. He hung there against it for a moment, before peeling off and falling to the floor.

  “OK, that one hurt in a number of places,” he conceded.

  “Stop annoying them,” said Mech, his voice pleading. “They’ll make me kill you if they have to.”

  Cal sighed and retrieved his pickaxe from where it had fallen. “Fine. You want me to dig? I’ll dig. But you’re paying the bill for my orthodontist.”

  Swinging the pickaxe up and over his head, Cal buried the tip in the stone wall.

  “There,” he said, swinging again.

  “You happy…”

  The metal tip sparked against the rock.

  “…now, you big…”

  He swung again. This time, when the pickaxe made contact, the whole wall began to rumble. It was a light shuddering at first, but rose quickly to a full-scale groaning of rock rending against rock. Pebbles tumbled down the surface like a miniature landslide. The neon blue veins seeped out of their cracks and oozed toward the floor like running paint.

  Cal stepped back. “Uh… What’s happening now?” he asked. “Did I break something?”

  The sharp, sudden cry of the Nogem made him jump in fright.

  “MUUUUSTAAAAAARD!” the little guy bellowed, throwing himself at Cal and shouldering him on the back of the legs. They both tumbled clear in a ball of arms, legs, and beard just as a torrent of hot gloopy yellow liquid erupted from the wall.

  The mustard jet blasted Mech in the chest with enough force to knock him back several steps. He threw his arms up in front of his face, shielding himself from the worst of the blast, but spraying the steaming hot liquid in all directions.

  “Hey, thanks,” said Cal, as the Nogem untangled himself. “That could’ve been nasty.”

  “Don’t mention it,” the Nogem said. He smiled awkwardly. “We look out for each other down here.”

  By the time Cal was on his feet, Mech had reached the wall and had thrust his arm deep into the hole, blocking it up and preventing any more of the spicy condiment from flooding the cavern.

  “Cal, come here, quick,” he barked.

  Cal raised an eyebrow. “If you think you’re getting me to stick my arm in there, you’ve got another thing coming,” he said.

  “Just shut the fonk up and get over here,” Mech hissed. “We ain’t got long. They can’t hear us with my arm in here, but they got a crew on the way.”

  Cal hurried over to Mech’s side. Mech got straight down to business before Cal could pass comment on the cyborg’s current situation.

  “The ship that got the Untitled is on the surface,” he said. “Kevin’s still on the planet. If we can get to him, we can get away.”

  “Great!” said Cal. “How do we do that?”

  “I have no idea,” Mech admitted. “They got this control chip wired into my chest. Short of someone detonating a bomb in my ribcage, there ain’t a whole lot I can do about it.”

  A thin jet of mustard escaped through a gap where Mech’s arm didn’t quite meet the edge of the hole. Cal yelped as it hit him in the face.

  “Christ! My eyes!” he said, covering them with his little hands.

  Mech adjusted his arm, blocking the spray. “Sorry, man. That one was my bad,” he said.

  “It’s fine. It’s fine,” Cal lied, fumbling blindly. “What about Miz and Splurt? Where are they?”

  “They got Miz in some sort of collar,” Mech said.

  Cal blinked through the pain until he could open his eyes. “A collar? Fonk, she won’t like that,” he said. “Did they at least give her one of those tags with her name and phone number on the back?”

  “It’s a control collar,” Mech said. “Plugs straight into her nervous system. She doesn’t do what they tell her, they bring the pain. She’s under their control, just like I am.”

  “Shizz. That’s not good,” Cal said, wiping away the tears that were streaming down his cheeks. His eyeballs felt as if someone had given them a going over with an industrial sander, then rinsed them off in bleach. “What about Splurt?”

  “They don’t know what to do with Splurt,” Cal said. “But they got him isolated. Whatever Zertex built into that container, he can’t get out of it, but he keeps trying.”

  “That’s my littl
e buddy,” Cal said. He spent a few seconds processing everything Mech had told him. Further along the cavern, he could hear the sound of running footsteps. “Do you have a plan?” he asked.

  Mech shook his head. “No. You?”

  “Since when did I ever have a plan?” asked Cal. “A workable plan, I mean.”

  “You come up with plans sometimes,” Mech said.

  Cal waved a hand dismissively. “Those are schemes. There’s a big difference. Schemes, I can do. Plans? Not so much.”

  Mech sighed. “Fine. Then do you have a fonking scheme?”

  Cal ran his tongue across his teeth, then made a popping sound by smacking his lips together. “Not yet,” he said. “But I’m working on it.”

  And then the conversation was over. Four Harvesters rushed into the chamber, all wearing identical Hazmat type suits and carrying what looked like the pieces of some sort of giant pump.

  “Clear the caverns,” one of the Harvesters bellowed.

  The Nogem caught Cal by the pocket of his pants and tugged. “Come on, we need to go,” he said.

  Cal puffed up his chest. “Well, maybe I don’t want to go,” he said, raising his voice to ensure the Harvesters heard him. “Maybe I’m going to stay right here and find out what these ugly fonks are—”

  “It’s break time,” said the Nogem.

  Cal brightened. “Oh! Seriously? Oh, well in that case, what the hell are we waiting for? Lead the way.”

  Fifteen

  The walk to the break room was made mostly in darkness. Cal saw Loren and Garunk in amongst the crowd of Nogems and tried to wait for them, but the building pressure of the little guys behind him eventually swept him into a side-tunnel and from there to a network of roughly-hewn corridors where the only light came from a series of unevenly spaced vents in the ceiling and the glow of the neon seams.

  The Nogems didn’t say much as they trudged through the passageways. Several of them staggered, leaning on the walls for support. Others were held up by friends, their oversized shoes dragging on the ground as they struggled to keep moving.

  “They look exhausted,” Cal observed.

  “We are,” confirmed the Nogem who had saved him from the mustard blast. “We were strong, once. But that strength has all but left us.”