Space Team: Sting of the Mustard Mines

by Barry J. Hutchison

  The guards looked at Cal as he stopped just along the corridor from them.

  Cal looked at the guards.

  Very slowly and deliberately, one of them unhooked a whip from his belt. The leather creaked as he unwound it, and the beginning of an orange glow crackled along its length.

  “Hey there, you two!” said Cal, beaming broadly. “The guys in the main mining chamber sent me to pass on a message.”

  This caught the guards by surprise. They exchanged subtle glances.

  “They did?” said one.

  “What kind of message?” demanded the other.

  “They wanted me to let you know that they think you’re doing a terrific job. Just a stellar effort all around. They couldn’t be prouder of you. Hell, we couldn’t be prouder of you.”

  He placed a hand to the back of his mouth and whispered conspiratorially, “I don’t want to give too much away, but let’s just say I heard talk of cake and a pay rise. Not necessarily in that order. But you didn’t hear that from me, OK?”

  Cal straightened and grinned at them. “OK. You guys get it. Of course you do. That’s what makes you the best.”

  He frowned and looked around. “Now, uh, I seem to have gotten a little lost along the way. Any chance you gentlemen could point me back in the direction of—”

  The opening of the door cut him off. A Harvester in a white paper suit appeared in the doorway, blinked his nostrils in surprise, then hurriedly began to close the door again.

  But not before Cal saw him. He was trapped inside his glass container, his whole body twisting and thrashing as if in pain.

  “Splurt?” Cal yelped, stumbling toward the door. “Splurt? Buddy? What the fonk are they doing to—?”

  The guards blocked his path. Cal shouldered into them, desperately trying to squeeze himself into the narrowing gap before the door slammed closed again.

  “Get the fonk out of my way! Splurt! Splurt, I’m here, buddy, I’m—”

  Two fingers jammed against the underside of his jaw, and Cal felt like his head was exploding in slow motion. He pushed into it, ignoring the agony, and managed to jam a foot in the door before it closed.

  He tried to call out to Splurt again, but the fingers on his jaw made speech almost as impossible as bladder control. Still, he pushed on, and he was able to wrestle the door open a whole agonizing inch before more fingers prodded him elsewhere in his body, and something cracked him on the back of the head.

  Later, he recalled feet. A lot of feet. Too many feet for the number of people present, it felt like. He couldn’t remember any one specific blow, but rather the cumulative effect of them all hammering into the available parts of his body. Which, unfortunately, was all of them.

  The one thing he did remember vividly was the door, and the final, definitive clang it made when it closed.

  And then there came more feet, more fingers, more fire burning him from the inside out.

  And then, after all that, came the darkness.

  Loren swung with all her might, trying to make the sound of the pickaxe’s impact as loud as she possibly could, in the hope of drowning out the endless stream of enthusiasm coming from over on her right. She’d been trying this for the past few hours now, with very little success.

  “This is like that time at the Academy, isn’t it? You remember? When Hoof put the Ovark fish in the heating system in Legate Rono’s office? Remember? The smell? Pew! That smell! And poor Legate Rono. Her face! She was like…”

  Garunk contorted his indistinct features into something presumably meant to represent a face. “And everyone else was like, whoa! You remember?”

  “Yes!” Loren barked. Her voice echoed around the cavern, making several Nogems pause in their digging and look her way. She forced a smile and lowered her voice. “Yes. I remember.”

  “And we all got the blame, and had to scrub the whole office from top to bottom. Remember that?”

  “I remember,” said Loren through clenched teeth. She swung again, chipping a chunk out of the wall.

  “This is like that, isn’t it?”

  Loren said nothing. She wasn’t sure how this was like that, exactly. That had been a fitting punishment for a prank she’d been entirely opposed to from the start. They were lucky Rono hadn’t put it on their permanent records.

  “Isn’t it, Loren?” Garunk said.

  “Yes. Kind of, I suppose,” Loren conceded.

  “What’s your favorite swing?” Garunk asked, segueing effortlessly on to a completely unrelated topic.

  Loren frowned. “What?”

  “With the pickaxe. What your favorite swing?”

  Loren glanced down at the tool in her hand. “I don’t have one.”

  “Oh. Cool,” said Garunk, apparently not listening. “Want to see mine? I like this one…”

  He swung with the pick. It chinked against the wall.

  “But I also quite like this one. Watch.”

  He swung again. It looked pretty much identical to the previous swing, as far as Loren could tell.

  “Which do you prefer?” Garunk asked.

  Loren opened her mouth to reply.

  “I’ll show you again. This one…”

  CHINNK.

  “Or this one.”

  CHINNK.

  “Second one,” said Loren, turning back to the wall.

  “Oh.” Garunk sounded disappointed. “Not the first one? I think the first one. Look again. I’ll show you. Look, Loren. Loren. Loren.”

  “What?” Loren snapped, spinning to face him.

  “This one…?” Garunk began, raising the pick again.

  “Yes! That one. I like that one,” Loren said.

  Garunk nodded, satisfied. “That’s what I thought. That’s my favorite, too.”

  They resumed digging, and for a few blissful moments, Garunk was silent.

  It didn’t last.

  “This is great, isn’t it?” he said. “Me and you, side by side, just like the old days.”

  “I wouldn’t say it’s ‘great,’ exactly. We’re slaves,” Loren pointed out.

  “I know, isn’t it exciting?” Garunk squeed. “Is this what it’s always like? Space adventures, I mean?”

  Loren started to say that no, it wasn’t always like this, but then corrected herself. “Pretty much,” she said. “We aren’t always slaves digging mines, but we’re usually being shot at, or imprisoned by gangsters, or chased by something.”

  “That sounds like so much fun!” Garunk gushed.

  “It gets old pretty fast,” said Loren.

  “Try living in a hole in the ground with your grandmother,” Garunk countered. He shook his head and gave a wistful little sigh. “Sometimes, I wish I could go back to those days at the Academy. Don’t you?”

  Loren didn’t want to answer truthfully, so said nothing at all.

  “Those were the days. Me, you, Clorice, Hoof, Feltch. The guys. The Crazy Crew!”

  “No one ever called us that,” Loren said.

  “They should have. We were mad, weren’t we? Always up to some crazy antics or another.”

  Loren tried to recall any ‘crazy antics’. Other than the fish-in-the-heating-system incident, and a fancy dress party one of the instructors had thrown for Loren’s ninth birthday, she pretty much drew a blank.

  “Ooh! Ooh! I know!” said Garunk. “Let’s say our top five memories from the Academy days.”

  “I’m not sure—” Loren began, but Garunk had already built up a head of steam and wasn’t to be dissuaded.

  “I’ll go first,” he announced. “Here’s mine…”

  Loren gritted her teeth, swung with the pickaxe and drove it into the wall as hard as she possibly could.

  It was going to be a very long night.

  Eighteen

  The next thing Cal knew, he was in a heap on the ground beside his pickaxe, back in the side chamber he’d shared with Red Hat.

  Another Nogem had taken Red Hat’s place. Each time his pick struck the wall, Cal fel
t as if the metal point was hammering into his skull.

  “Fonk,” Cal wheezed, dragging himself up onto his knees. Another thunk from the pickaxe almost made him fall over again in sympathy with the rock. “Hey, hey. Uh, Orange Hat, is it? You think you could keep it down?”

  “No,” hissed Orange Hat. He was surlier than Red Hat had been, and Cal immediately disliked him. “I’m working. Like you should be.”

  “Look, pal, I’m not having the best of days,” Cal groaned. “So, how about you do me a favor and cut me some—”

  A rock bounced off Cal’s head.

  “Ow!” he protested, clamping his hands over the point of impact. “What the fonk was that for?”

  “Shh!” Orange Hat hissed. “And don’t look!”

  Cal’s eyes searched the side chamber. “Don’t look at what?”

  “At him,” Orange Hat said, his gaze fixed resolutely on the wall as he powered the tip of his pick into the rock.

  “Him? Who the fonk is…?”

  Cal turned and looked back over his shoulder in time to see a figure in black go striding through the main chamber, a long cape swishing behind him. A knot of Harvesters scurried along after him, bowing and scraping like worshippers before a vengeful god.

  “Who is…? Wait,” said Cal. “Is that Manacle?”

  “I said not to look!” Orange Hat whimpered.

  Cal got all the way to his feet, prodded gingerly at the spot on his forehead where the rock had clunked him, then grabbed his pickaxe. He crept toward the main chamber, keeping one hand on the wall for support, the memory of his recent beating still aching through his bones.

  He had a plan. Not just the beginnings of a scheme, this time. A plan. An actual workable plan. It went thus:

  Take pickaxe. Insert pickaxe into Manacle’s skull. Repeat as required.

  Sure, you could argue that Manacle hadn’t done anything to Cal directly, per se, but he’d done more than enough indirectly to make the upcoming pickaxe-through-skull situation entirely justified. If it wasn’t for Manacle, for example, Cal wouldn’t be trapped here, Splurt wouldn’t be trapped in a lab, Miz wouldn’t be stuck in a shock collar, and Mech wouldn’t be a complete fonking Judas.

  And then there was Red Hat. The poor little bamston had worked himself to death because of this guy.

  And none of that even took into account the whole mass-murdering genocidal maniac thing. Cal wasn’t even about to get started on that can of worms.

  It was rare that bashing someone’s brains in with a pointy metal implement was ever the morally correct thing to do, but Cal was confident that this was one such occasion. He’d sneak up there, pummel Manacle’s head into a paste, and all would be right with the galaxy. The Harvesters would let everyone go. All those unsuspecting planets Manacle was scheduled to invade would continue as they were just fine. Peace would be restored to the galaxy.

  As plans went, it was flawless.

  No, it was fonking genius.

  There was just one problem. It was quite a big problem. Hairy, too, and with a terrible attitude problem.

  “Like, what are you doing?” hissed Miz, shoving Cal backward. She had appeared around the corner carrying a tray of mustard beer, most of which had spilled out of the glasses and now sloshed around on the tray itself.

  Cal tried to dodge past her, but even at his best, his reactions weren’t a match for Mizette’s. She blocked him with a foot, then half-pushed, half-kicked him further into the shadowy recesses of the side chamber.

  “Get out of my way, Miz. You don’t know who that is.”

  “It’s that Manacle guy,” Miz said. “Enslaver of whatever.”

  A frown flickered across Cal’s brow. “OK, so you do know who that is,” he said. “So, you should also know to get the fonk out of my way so I can introduce his head to Mr Pointypick, and get us out of this fonking place.”

  Miz rolled her eyes. “Seriously? You think you can take him out? Have you seen the guy? He’s, like, all cyborg parts and, I don’t know, alien transplants, or whatever. He’s totally built for killing.”

  “Yeah, well so am I!” Cal growled.

  Miz snorted.

  “No, OK, obviously I’m not built for killing, but I’m surprisingly adept at it,” Cal said. “Kind of. I mean, I’m above average. For my height and weight.”

  “You can barely stand,” Miz pointed out. “Have a drink.”

  “Christ, no!” Cal spluttered. “That stuff almost killed me. And the reason I can’t stand is because I was beaten by those guards outside the lab where Splurt is.” He sighed. “I saw him, Miz. I almost got to him. I was this close.”

  He held up a finger and thumb an inch or so apart.

  “You were?”

  “Well, more or less,” Cal conceded. “More like twenty to thirty feet, on the other side of a metal door, but relatively speaking, that’s still close.”

  “You got beaten up by a couple of guards, and you think you can take out that guy?” said Miz, gesturing back in the direction of the main cavern.

  “They were big guards,” Cal protested. “Really mean. And they caught me by surprise.”

  “Right.”

  “Also, I wasn’t really trying,” Cal said. He hefted the pickaxe and moved to step past Mizette. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Mr Pointypick and I have an appointment with a bad guy.”

  Miz blocked his path. Her snout rolled up into a snarl. “Seriously, Cal, like back off.”

  “What’s the matter? You like this guy? Is that it?” Cal demanded. “You enjoying being used like a slave? Knowing Splurt’s out there somewhere being fonking tortured?”

  “Back off,” Miz warned again. “I mean it, I’m not letting you do this.”

  Cal’s eyes widened in surprise. “Wait… you actually do like this guy?”

  “Ugh! No,” Miz barked. “You’re not seriously going to make me say it?”

  “Say what?”

  “I like you, you idiot,” Miz told him. “I mean, not like like you. That ship has totally sailed, but…”

  She sighed, rolled her eyes and shrugged, spilling more of the mustard beer onto the tray. It ran over the edges and steamed faintly when it hit the ground.

  “You’re, like, my family now. All of you guys.”

  Cal raised an eyebrow. “Even Loren?”

  “She’s the ugly old aunt that no one really likes, but who we all force ourselves to put up with.”

  “She’ll be touched,” Cal said.

  “No, because you won’t repeat this to anyone,” said Miz. “Like, ever.”

  Cal gripped the handle of the pickaxe. Behind him, he could hear Orange Hat chipping away at the wall. “We can take him out, Miz. Me and you,” Cal whispered. “You go low, I’ll go high.”

  He considered this.

  “Wait, you’re taller. You go high, I’ll go low,” he said. “Between us, we’ll fonk this guy’s shizz all the way up. Then we free the slaves, get Splurt, do a soft reboot on Mech, or whatever we have to do, round up Loren, and get the hell out of here.”

  He shot her a smile. It was one of his good ones, but his heart wasn’t really in it.

  “What do you say?”

  Miz shook her head. “We can’t.” She tilted her head, indicating her collar. “I can’t.”

  Cal stood on his tiptoes and stretched to see past her. Manacle and the fawning Harvesters were heading into one of the many tunnels leading away from the main chamber. It was now or never.

  “Miz, we might not get this chance again!” Cal said. “He’s the bad guy. We’re the good guys. You know, most of the time. We have to do this.”

  Mizette stood her ground. “They’ll kill you. He’ll kill you.” She sighed. “You should, like, get back to work, or whatever, until we figure something out.”

  She held up her tray. The glasses now all had around half an inch of liquid at the bottom. “Want a drink?”

  “No, I don’t want a fonking drink!” Cal snapped. He retreated a few paces and hois
ted his pickaxe above his head, his face knotted up in frustration and rage. “Fine, you want me to get back to work? I’ll get back to work. How’s this?”

  He brought the pick down hard on the floor. The rattle of the impact shuddered his skeleton. “This working hard enough, Miz?”

  He raised the pick, then brought it down again and again and again, throwing all his impotent anger into each blow.

  Miz raised an eyebrow. “Are you, like, even supposed to be digging there?”

  “I don’t know! You tell me!” said Cal.

  “Well… like, how the fonk would I know?” Miz replied. “I just bring the drinks, or whatever.”

  “Oh do you?” Cal sneered, chiseling away at the ground between them again.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, I bet you do!”

  Miz frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well!” Cal exhaled in outrage. “If you don’t know, then I’m not going to be the one to… to…”

  He let the pick fall to his side and shrugged. “Actually, I have no idea what I was getting at, either, he admitted. He sighed and scraped together some semblance of an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry, Miz. None of this is your fault. I shouldn’t be taking it out on you.”

  “You took it out on the floor,” Miz said, nodding to the cracks in the rock at Cal’s feet.

  Cal looked down. “Ha! Yeah, I guess I did. It’s just… I don’t know what to do, you know? We’re stuck here, and I don’t know what to—”

  “Shh,” said Miz. “Did you hear that?”

  “Well, yeah,” said Cal. “You did it pretty loud.”

  “No, not me going, ‘Shh,’” Miz tutted. “The other noise.”

  “What other noise?”

  “Like, shut up, already. I’m trying to listen,” Miz hissed. Her ears twitched. “You seriously don’t hear that?”

  Cal tried twitching his own ears, but managed only a slight waggling of the eyebrows. “No. What is it?”

  “It’s like, I don’t know. Like a saw. Like a buzzing saw,” Miz said.

  Cal strained to hear. “No. I just hear Orange Hat hammering shizz out of the wall.” He looked back over his shoulder. “Orange Hat! Can you shut the fonk up for two seconds?”