Space Team: Sting of the Mustard Mines

Barry J. Hutchison

Copyright © 2018 by Barry J. Hutchison

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Published worldwide by Zertex Media Ltd.

www.barryjhutchison.com

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Your Free Starter Library

Oh! I Almost forgot…

Also by Barry J. Hutchison

One

Cal Carver soft-shuffled sideways along the main corridor of the Currently Untitled, clicking his fingers in time to Billy Ocean’s Love Really Hurts Without You, and really getting into the groove. Behind him, a gelatinous green blob provided some truly exceptional backup dancing, bending and twisting in time to the funky 70’s beat.

Cal bent low, clapped his hands together twice, then danced back a step. Behind him, Splurt mimicked the back-step, synchronizing perfectly with Cal so they both seemed to be moving in unison.

Halfway along the corridor, Cal kicked against the wall, sprang off, and clicked his heels together in midair. Splurt slid under him, body-popped up in front, then flipped backward over Cal’s head without missing a beat.

“Most impressive, sirs,” said Kevin, the ship’s artificial intelligence.

Cal spun a full three-sixty, fired both fingerguns up in the direction the voice had come from, then went back to clicking and clapping his way toward the bridge as the song’s chorus kicked in.

It was, he reckoned, the most joyous song about heartbreak that had ever been written, and it fit perfectly with his current mood.

He’d had to say goodbye to a lot of people lately: his parents; his younger self; his daughter; dozens of alternate reality versions of himself; and a little Leprechaun man in a tiny dress, to name but a few.

And yet, life was good. He’d stopped one of the all-time worst villains in space history, restored peace to the galaxy, killed the president of Zertex before he could destroy the Earth, and eaten his own body weight in Spit Nibbles. It really didn't get much better than that.

Cal reached out an arm and Splurt instinctively grew one to match. They linked up, spun around each other in the corridor, then fell back into step as they jigged, skipped, and soft-shoe-shuffled the final few feet.

The bridge door slid open at their approach, revealing the rest of the crew. Cal’s happiness level ramped up a notch when he saw them gathered there, all engrossed in their usual shizz.

Over there was Loren, sitting in the pilot’s seat, gazing ahead at the stars that came streaking past the ship. As they whizzed by, the stars created a shimmering disco light show across the walls, which only made Cal and Splurt’s dancing become even more elaborate.

Up at the front stood Mech, his broad metal shoulders reflecting the starlight like a mirror ball. He turned and looked back over his shoulder as Cal entered, his face remaining utterly impassive when Cal Saturday Night Fevered his way across the bridge toward him.

Miz was in her usual chair, fully alive and utterly disinterested in everything around her. He paused in front of her, tumbling his arms to the beat and thrusting his hips from side to side.

He danced that way for a full fifteen seconds before she flicked her eyes up from where she was studying her fingernails, tutted once, then looked down again.

He spun to find Loren looking him up and down. “What are you wearing?”

Cal didn't need to look. “It’s a lemon-yellow jumpsuit with killer flares and a collar to fonking die for,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

“That ain’t lemon yellow,” said Mech. “That’s mustard.”

“No fonking way is this mustard,” said Cal, holding his arms wide. He jabbed a thumb over his left shoulder, then his right, hitchhiking his way toward the cyborg in time to the beat. Behind him, Splurt mimicked the move but timed it so they were always moving in opposite directions.

“Please don’t do that,” said Mech, watching them crisscross closer. “And it’s mustard.” He scowled at himself. “I don’t even care. Why am I having this fonking conversation?”

“Oh, come on, Mech. Don’t be like that,” said Cal. “Dance with me, big guy.”

Mech grunted and shook his head, but then, to the surprise of everyone on the bridge, began dancing mechanically in time to the music.

“Hey! You’re doing the Robot!” Cal cried.

“It ain’t the fonking Robot,” began Mech, then he shrugged. “I mean, yeah. I guess it is.” He kicked out a leg and spun, demonstrating a sense of rhythm that was positively Michael Jackson-esque. “Man, this song is infectious!”

“Come on, everyone else on their feet,” Cal urged. He pulled Loren out of her seat and wrapped an arm around her waist. She struggled for a moment, but then rolled her eyes and fell into step with him.

“Mech’s right,” she said. “It’s mustard.”

Cal scoffed, then looked back over his shoulder. “Miz? What about you? You dancing?”

Miz flicked her eyes up to him and Loren, then glanced between Splurt and Mech. “I’ll pass.”

“Fair enough,” said Cal, raising an arm and spinning Loren beneath it. “Tobey Maguire? How about you, buddy?”

Former Hollywood actor, Tobey Maguire, turned in his chair. For some reason, he was dressed like Uhura from Star Trek, complete with an oversized earpiece and tight-fitting red dress.

Tobey Maguire didn’t need to be asked twice. He bounded to his feet and began to clap, thrust and gyrate in a way that was not completely out of time with the music, but bordering on sexual assault.

Cal chuckled. “Oh, Tobey Maguire!” he said, shaking his head. “I hope you never change.”

A thought hit him.

“Wait. Tobey Maguire? What are you doing here?”

Billy Ocean’s Love Really Hurts Without You scratched to a stop.

“Cal!” Loren barked. She was out of Cal's arms and back in the pilot’s seat now, a strained expression on her face.

“It’s no use. I think he’s dead, ma’am,” Kevin intoned.

"We should be so fonking lucky," Mech grunted.

Cal blinked and looked around. The cyborg was standing by the screen again, gripping the control panel in front of him. Tobey Maguire was sitting back at his station, too, hailing on all frequencies but presumably getting no response. As Cal watched, he faded from view, becoming merely a ghost of Tobey Maguire, before vanishing completely.

“Huh? No, I’m not dead,” said Cal. "I mean, I don't think I'm dead."

Miz was suddenly right in front of him, towering above. Her fur smelled damp, like a dog who’d been out too long in the rain.

“I know how to wake him up,” she said.

Something mischievous flashed in her deep brown eyes and Cal felt a sudden sharp pressure somewhere he’d much rather he didn’t.

* * *

Cal jumped awake, his eyes wide, his mouth open, and every other part of his body feeling utterly violated. Miz was kneeling over him, a grin twisting her muzzle.

“Jesus!” Cal yelped, convulsing violently. “Did you… did you just stick a claw up my ass?”

“Totally,” said Miz. “They told me to wake you, and that always works.”

Cal swallowed, sobbed, and grimaced all at once.

“Well, I wish you’d have… Wait. What do you mean ‘always’?” He gasped. “And how the fonk could you jam a claw up my ass when I’m wearing pants?”

“You don’t want to know,” Miz told him.

“And hold the fonking phone!” Cal continued, in the same breathless babble. “We can say ‘ass’ now! Since when could we…?”

He sniffed the air and frowned. “Hey, is it me, or is something on fire?”

“Everything’s on fire, sir,” Kevin intoned.

Cal jumped to his feet and whipped around in panic. A wispy cloud of black smoke surrounded his chair. Further searches of the bridge revealed no evidence of anything else being ablaze.

“Well, no, everything was an exaggeration,” Kevin admitted. “But your chair is definitely smoldering.”

“How the fonk is my chair on fire?” Cal demanded. “I mean, it’s a chair. Chairs don’t just spontaneously…”

He stopped talking as his eyes fell on the screen. “Who the fonk are those guys?” he asked, gesturing to where several dozen small ships were engaged in battle with three much larger ones.

Something slammed into the side of the Untitled, sending Cal staggering across the bridge.

“They’re the people Loren keeps letting shoot us,” said Miz, quite matter-of-factly.

“I’m not letting them shoot us!” Loren protested.

“Well, you sure as fonk ain’t not letting them shoot us,” Mech grunted.

A gloopy green tendril wrapped around his waist, hoisted him aloft, then deposited him in one of the seats fastened to the bridge’s rear bulkhead wall.

“The guest chairs, Splurt? Seriously, you’re putting me in the fonking guest chairs?” Cal moaned. He shook his head. “This is a new low. I don’t care if it’s smoking, I’ll risk sitting in my actual chair.”

There was a whumpf as Cal’s actual chair went up in flames. He watched it crackle and spit for several seconds before a single sprinkler activated above it, and a spray of white foam doused the flames.

“OK, on second thought, I’ll stay here,” Cal said. He searched around beneath himself and found one end of the seat belt. “By the way, I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but someone is fonking shooting at us.”

Miz, who was now slouched back in her own chair, hooked a leg over her armrest and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, we know. We had, like, a whole conversation about it five seconds ago.”

“We did?” said Cal. “Sorry, I was sort of staggering wildly across the bridge and trying not to die.”

“Are you strapped in?” Loren called over her shoulder.

Cal hunted for the other half of the seat belt. “No! I can’t find part of the belt.”

“Well hurry up!” Loren barked.

Up ahead, a bright red torpedo was tumbling through space toward them.

“Aw, shizz,” Cal groaned, and his search became more frantic. “What is wrong with this belt! Where’s the other half?”

“Cal, hurry!” Loren hissed.

“What other half?” Mech demanded.

Cal held up half of the lap belt and gave it a waggle. “I have this half, I need the other half!”

Mech glowered at him.

“The fonking… The other half! You know? It looks exactly like this half, but it’s pointing the other way. Like, the opposite of this… The other fonking half! I can’t find it!”

“Incoming torpedo, ma’am,” Kevin said.

“I see it!”

“Very good. Just thought I’d check, since you don’t appear to be attempting any sort of evasive action of any description.”

Loren glared back over her shoulder. “Cal! Strap in!”

“I need the other half!”

“There ain’t no other fonking half!” Mech snapped.

Cal blinked. He looked down at the belt in his hand. “So, what? It’s broken? Jesus, now you tell me!”

Splurt’s tentacle reached over, took the belt, unfolded it so it doubled in length, then clipped it into the housing.

“Oh. That’s how it works,” said Cal. “Well, some instructions wouldn’t have gone—”

The rest of the sentence backflipped down his throat as the Currently Untitled plunged into a dive, spun in several tight concentric loops, then banked up and to the right. Cal was flung violently in the seat, the lap belt nowhere near as effective a restraint as the chest straps of his usual station.

“Fonking guest chairs,” he grimaced, as Loren spiraled out of the way of an oncoming fighter, climbed steeply, then flew directly into the path of the torpedo she’d dodged just a moment ago.

The Untitled shuddered from nose to tail. The bridge lights flickered. Cal’s chair spontaneously became engulfed in flame again, before the sprinkler system gave it a second dousing.

“Like, isn’t the whole point to not get hit by the missiles?” asked Miz.

“Torpedoes, ma’am,” Kevin corrected. “And technically, it didn’t hit us. We hit it.”

“And that’s better?” asked Cal.

“Oh my, no. Worse, if anything,” said Kevin. “Quite impressive, though. She literally had an infinite amount of space to fly in where that torpedo currently wasn’t, and yet she somehow found the one place in all the Universe where it was. The odds are quite staggering.”

“Well, yay, Loren,” said Cal.

“Oh, shut up!” Loren snapped, throwing the ship into a spin that Cal was sure was completely unnecessary and probably done out of spite. “Mech, any intel on who these guys are?” she asked.

Mech shook his head. “Nothing yet. The ship designs don’t match up with anything in the databanks. Their ident signals aren’t recognized, either. I got no idea who they are.”

“The big ones or the little ones?” asked Cal.

“Either. Both,” said Mech. “We got nothing on any of those ships.”

“Which ones are shooting at us?” Cal asked.

“Both,” said Loren.

“Son of a… How is that fair?” Cal asked. “Do they know we saved the Universe?”

“I doubt it,” said Mech.

“Well, then let’s tell them!” Cal urged. “Call them up. Get on the Space Skype and tell them who we are. I’m sure once they know who they’re dealing with they’ll think twice about—”

Another torpedo slammed against the underside of the ship.

“Look out!” Kevin warned, a little sheepishly.

“Thanks for the heads-up, Kevin!” Loren spat.

“Oh! You’re welcome, ma’am. I was worried it came a little late to be of much use, so it’s good to know that… Wait. Were you being sarcastic?”

Another impact rattled the Untitled, spraying static across the screen and making one of the armrests fall off Cal’s chair.

“Oh, not Righty,” Cal groaned. “Righty was my favorite.”

“Look out!” Kevin belatedly warned again.

“Get them on the space phone right now!” Cal urged. He sat up straighter and smoothed down the front of his Dorothy on the Streets, Blanche in the Sheets t-shirt. “Kevin, camera on me. But, you know, high angle. Kind of imposing, but mysterious.”

“And it hides your double chin,” Mech pointed out.

“That’s a side benefit, Mech. Side benefit,” Cal retorted. “And I don’t have a double chin. At most, it’s a chin and a half.”

“How’s this, sir?” said Kevin. The flickering on screen cleared momentarily to reveal an image of Cal.

“That’s the top of my head,” Cal said. “Not that high an angle. Down. Down. A little down.”

On screen, Cal’s face came into view. “There! Right there. Can we do mood lighting? I’m thinking like, ‘noble, yet sinister.’ Can we do that?”

“At best, I can probably do ‘on,’ lighting-wise, sir,” Kevin replied.

“Fonk. OK. That’ll have to do. Get someone on the line and I’ll give them a piece of my… Jesus Christ, what the fonk is that thing?”

A face had appeared on screen. Or a close approximation of one, at least. It was mostly nostrils and teeth, with a few scraps of chalk-white flesh assembled like a frame around them. There were no obvious eyes that Cal could see, but while he was staring in mute horror at the creature, something blinked deep in the hollows of the nostrils.

“OK, that’s unpleasant,” Cal muttered.

“Buk-tuk-shung!” the thing said, its teeth rippling as the words passed over them.

Cal looked to the others for help. “Uh, I think my chip is fritzed,” he said.

“Boorango! Buk-tuk-shung. Gra!”

“Not just yours,” said Mech. “I ain’t getting any translation.”

“Kevin, what language is that?” Loren asked.

“I’m afraid I have no idea, ma’am,” the AI replied. “I’d run a full linguistic analysis, but I’m rather busy at the moment.”

Loren glanced up. “Busy with what?”

“It’s funny you should ask, ma’am,” Kevin said. “I’m busy trying to restore power to the flight systems.”

“Boorgango-roogani!” the on-screen horror roared. “Roogani! Roogani-tuk!”

“The flight systems don’t have power?” Loren yelped. She pushed and pulled on a couple of levers, but the Untitled didn’t respond.

“Buk-tuk!” screeched the alien creature. As it did, two eyes emerged from its nostrils on stalks and splatted against the camera so they appeared to be smearing themselves across the screen, leaving a slug-like trail of snot wherever they crisscrossed over the glass.

“Well, that seems unnecessary,” said Cal. He drew a hand across his throat and glared up at the ceiling. “Kevin, cut feed. End call. Hang up.”

“Again, sir, rather busy at the moment. Perhaps, on this occasion, Master Mech might be so good as to press the button,” Kevin said. “If it’s not too much trouble. I’ve just discovered another problem I’m in the process of trying to resolve.”

“Great,” sighed Cal. “What’s the other problem?”

Mech pressed the button that cut the comm-link between the Untitled and the alien ship. What had been a screen full of teeth and nostrils became a screen full of rough, barren terrain that spiraled wildly as it rushed toward them.

“That is, sir,” Kevin said. “In all the excitement, I rather failed to notice that we entered planetary atmosphere. I estimate impact in less than five minutes.”

“We’re crashing?” Cal yelped.

Miz scowled. “Like, how can that even come as a surprise at this point?”

“Motherfonker!” Mech scowled, activating the magnets on his feet. Cal and Loren both gripped their belts. Splurt rolled into Cal’s lap. Even Miz unhooked her leg from the arm of her chair, albeit with a disgruntled tut and a roll of her eyes.

And then, the ground was suddenly right there, too big and too close to possibly avoid.

Cal drew in a breath, whispered a silent prayer to any space gods who might be in the immediate vicinity, and then the world was torn apart by thunder and violence.

Two

If Cal were forced to describe the impact, he wouldn’t use words. He wouldn’t be able to find them. Instead, he’d make a sort of spooorskh noise, followed by several badungs and one big karonk at the end that rattled his bones, smashed his head against the bulkhead wall, and caused some light soiling in the underwear department. Fortunately, on this occasion, only the front.

Silence filled the bridge. Well, not silence exactly, but if you discounted the screeching alarm, the creaking of metal and the general groaning from Cal, Loren, and Miz, then it wasn’t a million miles away from silence.

“Impact in quite a lot less than five minutes,” Kevin said, adding a much-belated, “Brace!” for good measure.

Cal coughed inside a cloud of smoke and waved a hand in front of his face in an attempt to bat it away. The arm flopped limply, the bones in his forearm snapped cleanly in two.

“Ooh, that’s not good,” he grimaced.

“Everyone OK?” Loren asked.

“Mostly,” said Cal. A searing pain made him look down. “Wait, no. Oh, fonk. One of my legs is back to front.” He shook his head and tutted. “Fonking guest chairs.”

“Still in one piece here,” said Mech.

“Miz?” said Loren.

“Fine. No thanks to you.”

Splurt wobbled in Cal’s lap. Cal patted his blobby body with the hand that wasn’t currently hanging off. “I got you, buddy. Nothing to worry about.” He gestured down to his twisted leg. “I hate to ask, but could you do the honors?”

Two vine-like arms grew from Splurt’s body and wrapped around Cal’s leg. Cal jammed his fist into his mouth and nodded. “Go!” he said around his knuckles.

Splurt gave a sharp, sudden twist. Cal gave a sharp, sudden yelp.

When the foot was facing front again, Splurt rocked back in Cal’s lap, looking pleased with himself.

“Great work there, Splurt,” Cal said, still chewing his knuckles. His voice had risen half an octave, and tears made his eyes shimmer. “But I’m pretty sure you turned it the wrong way.”

Splurt’s bulbous eyes flicked down to Cal’s leg. He wobbled apologetically, then twisted the leg a full three-sixty until the foot was pointing forward again.

Cal’s voice was a high-pitched cheep. “Thanks, pal,” he whimpered. “You nailed it that time.”

The view screen was in darkness. The rest of the bridge would’ve been, too, had Cal’s chair not spontaneously burst into flames again.

“Seriously, what the fonk is wrong with that thing?” Cal wondered.

Loren grimaced as she unclipped herself from her own now-lopsided chair and fell with a thud onto the floor. “Where are we?” she asked.

“I’ve run some calculations, ma’am,” Kevin began. “And have concluded that we are on the ground.”

“We already worked that part out. Which fonking ground?” Mech demanded. “What planet are we on?”

“That’s trickier to say, sir,” Kevin replied. “According to the star map, we’re in a sort of No Man’s Land territory where the planets haven’t been given agreed-upon galaxy-recognized names. This one still goes by its original local designation, which roughly translates as ‘Destitution’.”

“Right. I mean, of course, it does,” said Cal. “Where the fonk else would we crash-land?”

Gritting his teeth, he squished the bones in his arm back into place and held them there until his rapid-healing abilities kicked in, knitting the break back together.

“Just once, I’d love us to crash on, like, Planet Nice or something,” he grumbled.

“Oh, Planet Nice. Yes, I’ve been there,” said Kevin.

Cal looked up. “Seriously? There’s a Planet Nice? What’s it like?”

“Thoroughly awful, sir.”

Cal sighed. “Great. Well, that’s disappointing.”

Loren grabbed the edges of her console and pulled herself upright. She toggled a few switches, but nothing was responsive. “What’s it like out there?”

“It’s called ‘Destitution,’” said Cal. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say ‘not great’.”

“Atmosphere?” asked Loren.

“Not particularly, ma’am,” said Kevin. “It’s all rather sedate and downbeat. Very little buzz about the place at all.”

“I mean is it breathable?”

“Oh. Yes. I see. Quite breathable,” Kevin said. “The temperature’s a little higher than some of you might feel entirely comfortable with, but tolerable. There is limited flora and fauna. Various scattered life signs, and what appears to be a small settlement a few miles in that direction.”

Nobody bothered to remind Kevin that they couldn’t see which direction he was pointing.

“Also, we’re sinking.”

There was a lengthy pause as everyone took this information in. Particularly that last part.

“What the fonk do you mean ‘we’re sinking’?” Mech asked.

“I, uh, I’m afraid I don’t really know another way of putting it, sir,” said Kevin. “We—the collective us, I mean—are sinking.”

Cal fiddled with his belt until it finally released him. He stood up. “Sinking? In what way?”

“Well… down the way, sir,” said Kevin. “I’d have thought that was rather a given.”

“I didn’t see any water,” said Loren.

Miz snorted. “Well, you didn’t see the planet, so...”

“We’re not sinking in water, ma’am,” said Kevin. “It appears to be a form of quicksand.”

“Quicksand?” gasped Cal. “Alright! Yes! I am so prepared for this!”

Mech brow furrowed. “You are?”

“Oh God, yes,” said Cal. “I grew up in the 80’s. Quicksand was fonking everywhere on TV in the 80’s. People were falling in the stuff on a daily basis. The A-Team, Magnum PI, Michael Knight in Knight Rider – all just falling into it left, right, and center. Seriously, it was like quicksand Armageddon, and I picked up a trick or two. See, it’s actually very easy to get out of if you know how.”

“Any advice you could offer would be much appreciated, sir,” said Kevin.

Cal rocked back on his heels and tucked his thumbs into an imaginary pair of suspenders. “It’s simple. We all just have to stay perfectly still.”

Everyone stayed perfectly still.

“We’re still sinking, sir.”

“Shizz. Are we?” said Cal. He shrugged. “Then I got nothing.”

“Can we open the hatch?” Loren asked.

“Not if you want to live, ma’am,” said Kevin. “The airlock is a possibility, though. But you’ll have to be quick.”

Cal limbered up. “How quick?”

“You have about nine seconds,” Kevin told him. “So, I suggest you all… Oh,” he said. “They’re gone. Bye, then.”

Cal was first out of the airlock after Mech pulled it open. The Untitled was listing badly, and getting through the airlock involved a lot of awkward clambering and an assisting hand from Splurt.

As he emerged, Cal hissed like a vampire in the glare of the planet’s twin suns. His hand practically sizzled on the metal as he heaved himself onto the side of the ship and surveyed their surroundings.

The Untitled had ditched in a pool of gloopy, mud-like sand that extended as far as the horizon, with no obvious solid ground in sight.

“Ah, fonk,” he muttered, as Loren and Miz emerged through the airlock door behind him. “We’re screwed. There’s nowhere to go.”

“What about there?” asked Loren, pointing in the opposite direction. Cal turned all the way around and found a solid shoreline just ten or so feet away.

“Oh. Yeah. I mean… Yeah. We could go that way,” he said. “Sure, why not?” He shot both women a grin. “Race you!”

Cal jumped, feet first, into the quicksand. Anyone looking closely may have seen the exact moment his face registered the realization that this, on balance, was probably a mistake, but then he was gone, his momentum driving him deep into the gloopy, mud-like morass.

“Totally saw that coming,” said Miz.

“Cal!” cried Loren, dropping to her knees and peering over the edge.

Mech heaved himself onto the side of the ship and looked around. “Where the fonk did he go?”

Miz pointed over the edge with a clawed finger. Mech’s metal jaw dropped. “You gotta be kidding me.”

There was a blur of movement from the airlock as something green and arrow-shaped rocketed out of the Untitled, changed direction in midair, then burrowed into the gloop.

With a twitch of her legs, Miz propelled herself onto the shore, throwing up a cloud of dusty sand when she landed. Loren hooked herself onto Mech’s arm and held tight as he fired up his foot-rockets and launched them off the side of the sinking ship.

Once on solid ground, they all turned back to the Currently Untitled. Two of its rear wings stuck straight up from the quicksand. Bubbles burbled and farted out of the airlock as the oatmeal-like gloop poured inside before Kevin snapped the door closed.

“Kevin, you OK?” Loren called.

“Peachy, ma’am,” said Kevin, his voice coming muffled through the half-submerged speaker system. “Couldn’t be better. Why do you ask?”

“Well—”

“Wait, no,” said Kevin. “I’m not great, actually. Perhaps I might trouble you for a favor? I wonder if you’d be so kind as to…”

His voice cut off as the quicksand’s suction drew the ship further into its soggy depths. There was some squelching for a few seconds, then the few parts of the ship that had been above ground sunk out of sight.

For a few moments, there was nothing but silence.

“Well, way to go, Loren,” Miz said.

Loren shook her head in protest. “This wasn’t my fault!”

“Well, you were flying,” Mech pointed out. He raised his hands in surrender when she glared at him. “Just sayin’.”

A sudden loud gasp from the edge of the quicksand stopped the argument before it could go any further. Cal rolled up out of the depths, flipped all the way over, then flopped onto his back. He lay there, encased from head to toe in sandy sludge, wheezing like a fish out of water.

“Did I… Did I win?” he asked.

He sat up, then screamed briefly when a perfect sphere of sand emerged from the gloop and bounced toward him.

“Jesus, Splurt,” he coughed, realizing who was under there. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”

Splurt shook like a dog, throwing quicksand in all directions. It splattered across Mech’s chest, plastered Miz’s fur, and caked across Loren’s face.

“Did you have to?” Loren grunted, scooping the mush off her skin.

“Ugh. You know how hard it is to get sand out of fur?” Miz spat. “Like, thanks a lot, Splurt.”

Splurt wobbled apologetically, then rolled himself into a tall funnel shape, bent backward, and plunged into the quicksand.

“Now where’s he going?” Cal wondered. “And where’s the ship?”

“It sank,” said Loren.

“Like sank sank?” Cal asked.

Mech nodded. “Yeah. Like sank sank.”

“Shizz.” Cal clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth. “Did we say ‘way to go, Loren’ yet?”

“Totally,” said Miz.

“Argh! I can’t believe I missed that part,” said Cal.

“It wasn’t my fault!” Loren protested.

Cal made a weighing motion. “Well, you were flying.”

“That’s what I said,” Mech told him.

“And he knows stuff,” said Cal, pointing to the cyborg. “Like space stuff. You know?” He smiled warmly at Loren and placed his hands on her shoulders. “Look, nobody’s actually blaming you, OK? Nobody’s pointing fingers. You know, except Miz, Mech, and me. OK?”

He winked at her, patted her shoulder, then turned around and rubbed his hands together. “Now, I’m guessing Splurt is trying to get the ship back for us, so in the meantime, I suggest we…”

Cal stopped. An imposing figure in faded desert fatigues stood before him, glaring at him through a set of cracked goggles.

“…stumble upon a large menacing man,” Cal concluded. He cupped a hand above his eyes to block out the sun and shot the newcomer one of his most winning smiles. “Hey there! Are we glad to see—”

An open-hand strike caught Cal in the center of his chest. The force of it lifted him off his feet and sent him sprawling onto the sand, the air in his lungs now nothing more than a memory.

Loren sprang over the fallen Cal, spinning out her leg to deliver a devastating flying kick. The stranger caught her leg mid-leap, twisted her around and up over his head, then smashed her into the sand.

Shrugging it off, Loren kipped-up onto her feet and lunged with a flurry of punches that all failed to find their target. Weaving out of her reach, the man in the fatigues drove a three-finger strike into a nerve cluster above Loren’s armpit, and all her strength seemed to flow out of that side of her body and into the sand, pulling her down with it.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” the stranger said. His voice was surprisingly matter-of-fact, particularly given the fact that Mizette was stalking toward him, teeth bared, claws extended.

“No one humiliates Loren but us,” Miz growled.

Loren’s protests came out slurred from where she lay on the sand. “He dithn’t thumiliate me!”

“He totally did. It was embarrassing,” Miz said. “But I’ve got him.”

She lunged for the stranger but found herself slashing at thin air when he vaulted up and over her back. Miz spun to try again, only for several thousand volts of electricity to course through her from a coin-sized metal device he’d placed on the back of her neck.

“Ugh. You suck,” she groaned, flopping onto the ground beside Loren, most of her fur standing on end.

“Now who’th thumiliated?” said Loren.

“It’s still you,” Miz growled. “It’s like, totally still you.” She began to rise, but another shock face-planted her back into the sand.

The stranger threw himself at Mech, only for a metal hand to clamp around his head, stopping him. “I don’t know who the fonk you are,” Mech said. “But you made a big mistake messing with—”

The man caught Mech’s wrist with both hands, pulled himself up, then used his feet to kick the dial on Mech’s chest.

There was a high-pitched whine as Mech’s hydraulic power was fully diverted into his intellect.

“Oh! Smart move,” Mech said, his voice rising a full couple of octaves. “I’m amazed no one has ever considered a similar approach before.”

His grip on the stranger’s head released and Mech toppled backward onto the ground, completely immobile.

Cal pulled himself up as far as his knees and made a T-shape with his hands. “OK, timeout. Timeout,” he wheezed. “I’ll be honest, this is not the welcome I was hoping for. Obviously, there’s been some sort of mistake, and you don’t know who we are.”

The stranger approached him slowly. Despite the heat, and the fact he’d taken down the entire team, he didn’t seem to have broken a sweat. Although, that said, it was hard to be sure.

His head was partly covered by a length of graying cloth that wrapped around it like a bandage, while the goggles did a good job of hiding most of his face. All Cal could really see was a chiseled jaw that hadn’t been shaved in a few days, a downturned scowl of a mouth, and a neck you could probably anchor ships to.

“I don’t care who you are,” the stranger said. “I only care who sent you.”

Cal blinked. “Sent us? No one sent us. Why would anyone send us? We crashed.”

“Bullshizz,” the stranger spat. He caught Cal by the front of his t-shirt and hoisted him easily to his feet. If Cal’s legs hadn’t already been weak, the heady aroma of raw testosterone would probably have taken his feet out from under him. “Who sent you?”

“God, you’re manly,” Cal whispered. He smirked. “Which means this will really hurt!”

He drove a knee into the stranger’s groin. Pain exploded in his kneecap.

“Ow! Fonk!” Cal cried. He looked down. “Jesus! What are your balls made of? Concrete blocks?”

The stranger released his grip on Cal’s t-shirt and caught him by the throat instead. He lifted him effortlessly until Cal’s feet dangled in midair.

“I’m going to ask you again. Who sent you?” he demanded.

Cal’s reply was a gargled slur of sounds that roughly approximated the word, “Nobody!”

The stranger shook him. “Who sent you?”

“OK! I… tell you,” Cal managed to eject through his constricted windpipe. “I’ll tell you everything.”

The stranger relaxed his grip enough that Cal was able to speak more clearly.

“Tell me,” he demanded.

“Fine. You win. Billy Ocean,” Cal said.

The stranger hesitated for a moment.

“Who?”

“It was… It was Billy Ocean. Billy Ocean sent us,” Cal said. “I don’t know what you did to him, but that guy really fonking hates you.”

The grip tightened again. “What are you talking about? I don’t know who that is.”

Cal frowned. “You don’t?” he croaked. “Don’t tell me we’ve got the wrong guy again. Are you, uh, Harold Spaceman?”

The stranger scowled behind his goggles. “What the hell are you talking about?” he barked.

Cal felt those fingers constrict further around his throat, then there was a flurry of movement from the quicksand. Cal exhaled through his nose. “Oh, thank God,” he whispered, before something that looked like a cross between the Hound of the Baskervilles and the much larger and more aggressive cousin of the House of the Baskervilles crashed into the stranger, sending both him and Cal sprawling across the sand.

The large dog-creature became something not unlike several species of octopus all trying to exist at the same point in space and time, and all coming off badly. The stranger kicked out, but one of the thing’s countless whipping tentacles pinned his limbs to the ground, then dropped the weight of its blobby green body on top of him, completely trapping him in place.

“Way to go, buddy,” Cal said, rubbing his throat. “You really seized the element of surprise there, good job.”

Splurt wobbled.

“No, element of surprise,” Cal told him.

Splurt wobbled again.

“Well… I don’t know. What even is an elephant of surprise?” Cal asked, then he gave a shake of his head. “Forget it. It’s element. Trust me. Now, keep that shizznod there while I figure out what to do with him.”

Cal turned, cricked his back, then shuffled over to the others, who were all still sprawled on the sand. “Salutations, Cal!” said Mech, his voice ringing out without him actually moving his mouth. “I appear to have found myself in rather a spot of difficulty! Your assistance would be immeasurably gratifying.”

“But you’re always so much nicer like this,” Cal said. He sighed. “OK, fine. I’ll switch you back. Hold still.”

“I do not exactly have a myriad of other choices in that regard,” Mech chimed. “Vis-à-vis staying still, I mean.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Bending, Cal twisted Mech’s dial back to center. The high-pitched whine became a much lower hum that quickly blurred into background noise. Mech’s metal frame twitched back into life and he sat up, glaring at the captive stranger.

“Oh man, I am gonna have me some words with that guy,” he grunted.

“You’re welcome,” said Cal, crossing to where Loren and Miz lay side-by-side. “Miz, honey, don’t move, OK?” he told her. “This won’t hurt.”

He tugged on the metal disk that was stuck to the back of her neck. Electricity surged through them both.

“Ow! Ow! No, my mistake. That hurt a lot,” Cal said, sucking on his fingers.

“You should try it from my side sometime,” Miz groaned, smoke rising from the ends of her fur.

“Mech, can you take this thing off?” Cal said. “I’ll get Loren.”

“I’m thine,” Loren said. She flomped on the sand and managed to yank her mostly lifeless left arm out from beneath her.

Cal hung back, giving her space to do whatever she was going to do next.

Nothing much, it seemed.

“Thine. Githe me a hand, then,” Loren said.

Cal applauded.

“Thunny,” Loren sighed. “Help me up.”

Hooking an arm around her, Cal heaved Loren up onto her feet. She hopped unsteadily for a moment, tentatively placed her left foot on the ground, then gave Cal a slightly wobbly nod.

“You sure?” Cal said.

“I’m OK,” Loren said.

Cal released his grip on her, but kept his hands raised, ready to catch her if she fell.

“I’m fine,” she insisted. She opened and closed her mouth a few times, waggled her tongue, then gave a more confident nod. “I’m fine.”

There was a crack and a fzzt as Mech crushed the metal disk that had been keeping Miz down. She sprang up with one swift pounce and bounded across the sand on all fours, tail extended, the fur around her collar all standing on end.

“Miz, wait!” Cal called.

A tentacle blocked her path, forcing her to skid to a stop. She peered down at the pinned stranger from the other side of the gooey barricade, her muzzle twisted in an angry snarl.

“You don’t scare me, Greyx,” the man told her, and the even tone of his voice suggested he meant it.

“Give me thirty seconds and I’ll totally change that,” Miz growled.

Cal and Mech joined Miz, while Loren limped up behind them. Splurt raised his tentacle barrier, letting Cal pass.

“So,” Cal said, looking the stranger up and down. “Comfy?”

The stranger glared back through his goggles.

“Who are you?” Cal asked.

“You know damn well who I am.”

Cal frowned. “Uh, no. No, I don’t think so. Mech?”

“Nuh-uh,” said Mech, crossing his arms over his chest.

Cal turned to Mizette. “Miz? Do you know who this guy is?”

“No,” said Miz. She extended her claws to their full, terrifying reach. “But, like, I’m going to know him intimately in a minute.”

Cal placed the back of his hand next to his mouth and spoke to the stranger in a stage-whisper. “I think you got on her bad side!”

He turned to Loren just as she limped up, dragging her leg behind her. “Loren? Are you familiar with our friend here?”

“No.”

“No,” Cal agreed. He looked away, then looked back. “You’ve, uh, you’ve got some drool on your chin there.”

Loren wiped her chin.

“Not that side,” said Cal. “The side where your face is all fonked.”

Loren’s eyebrows raised. Or one of them, at least. “What do you mean where my face is fonked? How is my face fonked?!”

Mech turned to look. His usual scowl briefly became an expression of horror. “Oh, man!” he grimaced. “That is nasty.”

“What’s wrong with my face?” Loren yelped.

Cal raised his hands in a calming gesture. “Nothing! Nothing, it’s fine. I shouldn’t have said ‘fonked’. That was the wrong choice of words,” he said. “I just mean it’s kind of…”

He placed a hand on his cheek and pulled down one side of his face, making himself look horribly disfigured. “Like that. Like you’ve had a stroke.” He caught Loren’s horrified expression and tried to head off her concerns. “But, you know, a sexy stroke. Like a hot, sexy… I like it, is the point I’m trying to make. It’s a good look. I hear plastic left too close to a radiator is really in this season.”

Loren patted anxiously at the side of her face.

“I’m kidding. It’s fine,” Cal said. “I’m sure that’ll all tighten right up in no time.”

He turned back to the stranger. “So, I’ve done a survey, and it turns out that none of us have the faintest fonking clue who you are or why you attacked us.”

Cal squatted just beyond the man’s maximum possible reach and offered him one of the most natural-looking of his many well-rehearsed smiles.

“So, here’s what’s going to happen…” he began.

“We’re going to turn all your inside parts into outside parts,” Miz said. “Then feed them to you.”

Cal raised a finger. “Well, not exactly where I was going, but sure. Definitely a possibility. We’re definitely not ruling that out, just putting it on the back burner for now. Right now, we’re going to try a different approach. We’re going to wipe the slate clean. We’re going to assume all this has been some hilarious misunderstanding that we’ll all have a good laugh about later, and we’re going to start afresh.”

He glanced around at the others, then back to the stranger. “Nobody sent us. We’re only here because our pilot didn’t notice your enormous planet until we were one-sixteenth of a mile away from it.”

“Way to go, Loren,” Mech muttered.

“Oh, shut up.”

“So, if you promise not to switch us off, or electrocute us, or punch us until we have a stroke…” He looked back at Loren and gave her a reassuring smile. “Sexy stroke. Then I’ll tell Splurt to let you go. OK?”

The stranger said nothing.

“It’s good for you that I’m wearing my trusting pants and am going to take your calculated indifference as a ‘yes,’” Cal said. He stood up, and Splurt sproinged back into a ball shape, all his many tentacles retracting back into his rapidly shrinking body.

Cal held a hand out to the stranger. For a moment, it looked like he might accept it, but then he rolled backward and was suddenly up on his feet. He didn’t raise his fists or adopt any sort of fighting stance, but he had an air about him that suggested he could kick the living shizz out of them all without having to do either.

“I’m Cal. Cal Carver,” Cal told him, keeping that smile fixed in place. “That’s Miz, Mech, and Loren. And this adorable little bamston is Splurt,” he said, as Splurt rolled up onto his shoulder. “We’re Space Team. You’ve probably heard of us.”

The stranger shook his head. “No.” He looked them up and down. “Are you with the circus?”

Cal deflated a little. “The circus? Seriously? No, we’re not with the circus.” He looked around at the others. “Wait, there’s a circus? Why have we never…? Forget it.”

He directed his attention back to the stranger. “We saved the galaxy, like… what? Five times? Saved the whole fonking Universe at least twice. Space Team. Capital S, capital T. You must’ve heard of us. No?”

“I tend not to keep up with the news,” the man said.

“Ah. Then that explains it,” said Cal. “That’ll be why. I thought it was weird you not knowing about us. We’re kind of a big deal.”

Cal raised his eyebrows expectantly. “And you are…?”

“I’m not a big deal,” the stranger said.

“Well, no. Obviously,” said Cal, gesturing at the rugged emptiness around them. “That pretty much goes without saying. I was asking your name.”

“Oh.”

The stranger regarded them all for a few long moments, then sighed. “Ah, what the hell?” he said, more to himself than to Cal. He pushed his goggles up onto his head, revealing two eyes that seemed to be narrowed in a state of permanent suspicion. “The name’s Konto Garr. And if you folks really did wind up here by accident, then you must be the unluckiest sons-of-bedges I’ve ever met.”

“Yeah,” Mech sighed. “Yeah, that pretty much sums us up.”

Three

“Unlucky? Why are we unlucky?” Cal asked. “I mean, aside from being shot down, crashing, and having our ship sink into the ground?”

He turned to Splurt before Konto could answer. “Did you find it, by the way? Did you see the ship?”

Splurt wobbled.

“What did he say?” asked Loren.

“He said…”

Cal wobbled.

Loren closed her eyes for a full two seconds. “And what does that translate as?” she asked, once she’d opened them again.

“No, he didn’t find the ship.”

“Great,” said Mech. “That’s just fonking great.”

“If it’s in the siltch, it’s gone,” Konto said.

“The what?” asked Cal.

“The siltch. The sand that pulled your ship down. We call it the siltch.”

Cal nodded slowly. “Right. We could call it that, but I was thinking—hear me out—‘Space Quicksand,’” he said.

“I don’t much care what you were thinking,” said Konto. “It’s siltch. And your ship is gone.”

“What? No,” Cal snorted, like the very suggestion was laughable. “It can’t be gone.”

“That stuff goes deep,” said Konto. He pulled his goggles back down over his eyes and took a small tin from his pocket. It was bashed and dented as if it had seen some hard times. “Your ship could be a mile down by now, and still sinking.”

“Fonk,” said Loren. “What about Kevin?”

Konto opened his tin, then paused. “You have someone on board the ship?”

“Yes. No. Kind of,” said Cal. “He is the ship. I mean, I think.” Cal turned to Mech. “He is the ship, right?”

“No.”

“He’s kind of the ship,” Cal told Konto.

“He ain’t the ship,” Mech insisted.

Cal made a face that Mech couldn’t see, but which suggested that Konto should ignore him.

“He’s kind of the ship,” Cal whispered.

Konto reached into the tin and took out a clear capsule no bigger than a grain of rice. He tossed it all the way to the back of his throat, swallowed, then held the tin out to Cal. “Water?”

Cal peered into the tin. There were a few hundred of the translucent grains nestled in the bottom. “Uh, I hate to tell you, but that’s not water,” he said. “I’ve seen water. It’s a liquid.”

“It’s dehydrated water,” Konto said. “Take one, or the heat’ll kill you.”

Cal hesitated. Konto withdrew the tin.

“Or don’t. I don’t care.”

“No, I’ll take one,” said Cal. He fumbled in the tin until his fingers finally managed to grasp one of the miniscule tiny capsules. “When in Rome, right?”

He raised the capsule in a sort of toast, then placed it on his tongue.

“So, how does—?”

Half a gallon of water exploded from Cal’s mouth, fountained out through his nostrils, and flooded backward down his throat. He bent double, hacking, coughing, and spluttering, his eyes wet with tears, the rest of him just wet in general.

“Jesus!” he ejected through a series of desperate gasps. “What the…? What the fonk happened there?”

“You’re supposed to swallow it,” Konto explained. He offered the tin again. “Want to try again?”

“Fonk, no,” said Cal, waving the tin away. He coughed some more, hiccupped loudly, then straightened up. “I’m fine,” he assured everyone, his voice higher than usual, like his throat was being squeezed. “Just took me by surprise, that’s all.”

Konto offered the capsules to the others. “Anyone?”

“Sure,” said Loren, taking one.

Miz stepped in closer and eyeballed him. “Like I’d accept anything from you,” she growled. Despite this, she snatched three, tossed them all to the back of her throat, and swallowed. That done, she bared her teeth at Konto, then stepped back to join the others.

“What were we talking about?” Cal asked.

“Your ship being gone,” said Konto, snapping the tin shut and returning it to his pocket. He glanced up at the sky. One of the suns was half-hidden by the horizon, while the second was headed in the same direction. “But we have bigger problems right now.”

“Of course we do,” said Mech, in the tone of someone who had come to expect that a bigger problem was already lurking just around the corner. “What is it this time?”

Cal groaned. “Not space bears. Tell me it isn’t space bears.”

“Slurrits.”

Cal frowned. “Say what now?”

“Slurrits.”

“Yeah, I thought that’s what you said,” Cal replied. “But just repeating it doesn’t really clarify it any.”

“Slurrits live down in the siltch,” Konto explained. “They come out at night to hunt and scavenge.”

“Hunt and scavenge in, like, a nice way?” Cal asked.

Konto shook his head. “Not if you’re the hunted or the scavenged.” He gestured to a spot a few hundred yards away that looked much the same as every other patch of empty ground surrounding it.

“I’ve got a camp that way,” he said. “We should head there.”

“And leave the ship?” said Loren. “We can’t leave the ship!”

“She’s right,” Miz agreed. The way her nostrils flared suggested she didn’t enjoy being on Loren’s side. “If we lose the ship we’ll, like, be totally stuck on this shizzhole of a planet.”

Cal nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “Mech, can you mark this spot so we can track our way back here?

“Mark the spot?” Mech scowled.

“Yeah,” said Cal. “Have you got an app for that? Like for keeping track of where you parked? You must have some way to mark this place.”

Mech looked at the ground around him, shrugged, then he drew an arrow in the sand with his foot. “That good enough?”

Cal sighed. “Well, I was hoping for something a little more high tech. But fonk it, it’ll do.” He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted toward the siltch. “Kevin, don’t worry, we’re coming for you. Eventually. We haven’t forgotten you, pal. Hold tight. Be strong, sweet prince. We all love you!”

He looked around at the others. “Was that too much?”

“Maybe a little,” said Loren.

Konto set off past them, headed in the direction he’d pointed. “We should go. The Slurrits will be rising soon. We don’t want to be here when they do.”

Cal and the others watched him go.

“So, like, we’re not actually going with this guy, are we?” asked Miz.

“It’s him or the Slurrits,” said Cal. “And I’ve heard some pretty nasty things about those guys.”

“From him,” Mech pointed out.

“True,” said Cal. “Yes, he might’ve kicked our asses and punched Loren’s face loose, but… I don’t know. I quite like him. He reminds me of someone. Don’t know who. But someone awesome.”

He jumped in again before anyone could reply. “Side note: We can definitely say ‘ass’ now. How do we think that happened?”

Loren shrugged. “We messed around with time. It was never going to go back exactly as it used to be.”

“I guess so,” said Cal. “Still, if that’s the only thing that’s changed, I’d say we got off pretty lightly.”

He glanced after Konto, who hadn’t looked back once since he’d set off, then turned to the others. “Now, all those in favor of staying here?”

Miz immediately thrust a hand into the air. Mech glanced from Konto’s back to the expanse of siltch. Eventually, he raised his hand, too.

“OK, that’s two. All in favor of going with him?”

He and Loren both raised their hands. Splurt grew several dozen baby-sized arms and held them all aloft.

“That’s, I don’t know, let’s say a conservative fifty,” Cal said. “Looks like we won.”

“How the fonk is that fair?” Mech grunted.

“Because it just is,” said Cal. He gestured after Konto. “So, shall we?”

* * *

They followed Konto to a crack in the ground. Then, with varying degrees of difficulty, they navigated along a narrow chasm until they reached an almost perfectly spherical cave with a sleeping bag at one end, and something not unlike a gas camping stove sitting in the center.

A motorcycle stood near the sleeping bag, propped against the curved stone wall. It was a wide, squat machine with chunky tires that were as tall as the rest of the bike. The frame was an elaborate tangle of matte-black metal that wrapped around the furry seat like a protective nest. A tinted glass windshield curved up from the bike’s front, before almost meeting a steeply sloping rear windshield that sprouted in the opposite direction.

“Cool bike!” Cal cried. “Can I touch it?”

“No,” said Konto. “You can’t.”

Cal waited until Konto had looked away, then touched the bike anyway. An alarm immediately squealed, the sound shrill and piercing in the confined space.

Cal jumped back, waving his hands and making a shhhing sound.

“Ow!” Miz protested, folding in her ears. “Like, thanks a lot.”

“That wasn’t my fault,” Cal said. “It just went off when I was near it.”

“Stop,” Konto said.

“I’ve stopped!” Cal said, raising his hands in surrender. “See? I’m not doing—”

The alarm cut out. Cal lowered his hands and cleared his throat. “Oh. You were talking to the bike. Gotcha.”

Konto scowled. “Don’t touch it again,” he warned.

“Gotcha. Message received,” said Cal. He made a show of tiptoeing backward away from the bike. Miz unfolded her ears again while Cal took in the rest of their surroundings.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” said Cal. “A little cavey, maybe, but nothing a carpet, a lick of paint, four walls, and a roof wouldn’t fix.”

“It sucks,” said Miz, a little less diplomatically.

Konto shrugged and sat on the ground near the stove. “It’ll keep you alive for the night. Between the Slurrits and the Growlers, you really don’t want to be out there.”

Cal snorted the final few drops of rehydrated water out through his nose. “Growlers,” he said, grinning from ear to ear.

The others looked at him. “What about them?” asked Konto.

“It’s just… where I come from,” Cal began, “it can mean something else.”

Loren raised an eyebrow in interest. “What can it mean?”

“It’s like… You know. It’s like… It means…” He pointed surreptitiously to his crotch. All eyes followed his finger.

“It means ‘penis’?” asked Konto.

“What? No.”

“You’re pointing to your penis,” said Konto.

“You can’t fault the man’s powers of observation,” said Mech.

“Not penis. Vagina,” Cal said.

Konto pushed his goggles up onto his head. “You have a vagina?”

“What? No! That’s not… I don’t have… I’m just saying—and I’m kind of starting to wish I hadn’t opened my mouth—I’m just saying that ‘growler’ is a word some people on Earth use instead of, you know… Lady Garden.”

He saw how everyone was looking at him, Loren in particular.

“Bad people, I mean. Nasty, horrible people who really should know better than to disrespect women’s…” He fumbled for an acceptable end to the sentence but failed to find one. “…vaginas.”

Konto sucked in his bottom lip. “Right. Well, these Growlers are not vaginas,” he said. “They’re these sort of hairy, smelly…”

Cal opened his mouth, considered all the possible reactions to what he was about to say, then closed it again.

“…monsters,” Konto concluded. He nodded to Miz. “I thought your friend there was one of them at first.”

Miz, who had been slouching against the wall picking at her claws for most of the conversation raised her eyes. “Huh?” she said, sensing she was being spoken about. “What did he just say?”

“Nothing. It’s fine. He was talking about Mech,” Cal said.

Miz tutted, huffed through her nostrils, then went back to studying her nails.

“Except Growlers are bigger and meaner,” Konto said.

“You should try having a conversation with her first thing in the morning,” Mech told him. “Then we’ll talk about mean.”

Konto shrugged, then tapped the top of his stove. It burst into something that looked like an artist’s impression of a fire. “The point is, we should be safe down here.”

“Right. OK. Well… thanks for sharing your home with us, I guess,” said Cal, sitting on the opposite side of the fire. Despite its obvious artificial nature, it gave off a direct fiery heat that made Cal shuffle back a little.

“It’s not my home,” said Konto. “But you’re welcome.”

Cal motioned for the others to sit down by the fire, but none of them obliged. Loren hung out by the entrance to the cave, occasionally glancing back into the growing gloom. Mech tapped on the sensor controls on his forearm, presumably scannering or sensoring something, Cal thought, or whatever it was he did.

Only Splurt seemed to be in an amiable mood. He flopped down into Cal’s lap, transformed into a fat ginger cat, then closed both eyes and fell asleep, purring gently.

“Shapeshifter?” said Konto.

Cal whistled through his teeth. “Mech was right about your powers of observation, huh? Yeah, this is Splurt. We didn’t really do introductions properly. I’m Cal. I’m the captain.”

“He ain’t the captain,” said Mech.

“The big annoying guy who doesn’t know what he’s talking about there? That’s Mech. He’s—”

“An X8-17 cybernetic legacy framework with biological control matrix,” Konto concluded.

Cal shrugged. “Well, I was going to say, ‘not a robot,’ but sure, let’s go with yours.” He indicated the others. “Teela Loren, formerly of Zertex, and that’s Mizette of the Greyx. She’s their queen.”

“She doesn’t look like a queen,” Konto said, looking Miz up and down.

“She doesn’t act like one, either, so that’s fine,” said Cal.

Konto raised his voice a little, directing it at Miz. “I was friends with a Greyx once. I owe him my life,” he said.

Miz scowled. “Like, who cares?”

Konto reached into a boot and pulled on the top of a particularly hairy sock until several inches of it were visible above the boot top.

“I wear his pelt to honor him,” Konto said, his voice becoming a hushed whisper of reverence.

Mizette’s jaw dropped. “You what?”

“I’m told it is a great honor for the Greyx to be worn in death by those they cared for in life.”

“Who the fonk told you that?” asked Miz.

“Is that true, Miz?” asked Cal.

“No!”

Cal flinched. “Damn. Because I could really use a new set of gloves. You know, for when we go to ice planets? I thought, you know, when you were gone…”

Konto pushed his bandage wrap off, revealing his shaved head and a forehead lined like old leather. “Wait, so Greyx don’t consider it an honor to—”

“No! Are you insane? Like, why would we consider it an honor to be made into socks, or whatever?”

Konto released his grip on his sock. It twanged back into place. “I have to say, I did think it was kind of weird,” he admitted. He looked into the gap between his boot and his leg. “Shizz. Sorry, Torrax.”

The fire continued its steady flickering, casting a blinking light around the cave. Cal stared expectantly at Konto through the digital flames. “How about you? What’s your story?”

“I don’t have a story,” said Konto.

“You’re living in a cave and thought we’d come here to kill you,” said Loren. “Sounds like a story to me.”

Konto shook his head. “No. No story. I work. I have a family. Sometimes I like to get away from it all for a couple of nights, so I come out to places like this.”

“Like a camping trip!” said Cal. “My dad used to take me on camping trips a couple of times a month. Except he was a lazy fonk, so we wouldn’t actually go outside, and would just camp under the kitchen table, instead.”

He smiled wistfully at the memory. “Well, I mean I say ‘we,’ but it was mostly just me. Still. Good times.”

“Uh, yeah,” said Konto. “Like a camping trip.”

“What’s your job?” asked Mech.

Konto didn’t miss a beat. “I work in garbage.”

“Ew. That, like, totally explains the smell,” said Miz, without looking up.

“Garbage, huh?” said Mech. “Then how come you were so worried we were here to kill you?”

“Garbage is a cutthroat business,” Konto said. He met Mech’s eye. “And believe me, I wasn’t worried for a second.”

Cal stroked Splurt’s fur, making the little cat wriggle contentedly in his lap. “So, here’s a question,” he began. “I know you said you don’t keep up with the news, which is the only possible reason why you haven’t heard of us, but did you hear anything about the space president recently?”

“He means the president of Zertex,” Loren translated.

“Yeah, that guy,” said Cal. He idly twirled a strand of Splurt’s fur around his finger. “You heard anything? Maybe about him, I don’t know, being assassinated by some roguishly handsome time-traveling starship captain? For example.”

Konto’s already narrow eyes became two suspicious slits. “I did hear something along those lines,” he said.

“Yes! It worked!” said Cal, with such enthusiasm that Splurt twitched and opened one eye in surprise. The eye swiveled around a couple of times, then closed again.

“Damn shame, if you ask me,” said Konto.

Cal put a lid on his celebration. “Oh? You were a fan?”

“Fonk, no,” said Konto. “Can’t stand the organization, couldn’t bear the man.”

“Right. Right,” said Cal, nodding. “But…”

“It’s his replacement. That’s the problem,” said Konto. “Say what you like about Sinclair, he was subtle, you know? An iron fist in a velvet glove. An evil bamston, yeah, but he didn’t try to tip the balance too far. He knew better.”

“Right,” said Cal, shifting a little uneasily on the hard ground. “I mean… sure. He was subtle in his own way, but still… It’s good that he’s dead, right?”

“Considering his replacement? No. Give me Sinclair any day. The new one is anything but subtle. Not so much ‘iron fist in a velvet glove’ as ‘babies in a blender.’”

“Jesus,” said Cal. He could feel at least two sets of eyes boring into the back of his skull. It had been his idea, after all, to take Sinclair out. “But I’m sure he’s not that bad.”

“No,” Konto admitted.

“See!”

“She’s worse. Had some run-ins with her myself in the past. I know better than most what she’s capable of.”

“She? Oh! Yeah, Sinclair’s replacement. We’ve met her,” said Cal. “What was her name?” He snapped his fingers several times. “President something.”

He snapped his fingers several more times.

“This is a cue, by the way,” he pointed out. “This isn’t me thinking. This is a cue for someone to jump in and tell me.”

“Valtrax,” said Loren. “President Valtrax.”

“Right. Thank you, Loren. Martha Valtrax.”

“Haska Valtrax,” Loren corrected.

“Haska Valtrax. That’s what I said,” Cal lied. “So, she still gets the space president gig in this timeline, huh? Good for her.”

Konto frowned. “Valtrax? I don’t know who that is.”

Cal realized he was still snapping his fingers. He stopped. “So, what? Martha isn’t the president?” he asked.

Konto gave a shake of his head.

“Oh. I see. That’s a shame. Then who is?”

“Where have you been for the past few months?” Konto asked.

Cal took a deep breath. “Well…”

“Rhetorical question. I don’t care,” said Konto. “After Sinclair was killed aboard his own space station, Zertex decided it needed to appoint someone more capable of defending themselves in the event of an attack. They settled on an old assassin Sinclair had worked with in the past.”

He took out his tin and knocked back another water capsule. “They call her Vajazzle,” he said, once he’d swallowed the grain-sized lump. “President Vajazzle.”

Four

Cal’s jaw fell open. Mech and Loren both stared. Even Mizette stopped picking at her claws.

For a while, the only sound in the cave was the soft crackling of the digital flames and the contented purring of the feline Splurt.

“Vajazzle?” said Loren. “As in the Vajazzle who tried to hunt us down and kill us? Who tortured you, orchestrated Miz’s father’s murder, and turned Splurt into a mindless monster? That Vajazzle?”

“It’s got to be, right?” said Cal. “I mean, I can’t imagine there are a lot of Vajazzles in the phone book.”

“But isn’t she, like, dead?” asked Miz. “Didn’t she die back on that planet where that guy was?”

“That guy?” said Loren. “You mean Dronzen? Galto Dronzen? Your boyfriend who sacrificed himself to save you as a final act of unrequited love?”

“Yeah. That loser,” said Miz with a roll of her eyes. “Didn’t she, like, die there, or whatever?”

“Originally, yeah,” said Mech, shooting Cal a glare. “I’m guessing we fonked up a lot more than we realized when we screwed around in time.”

Cal smiled sheepishly. “On the bright side, we can say ‘ass’ now, so it’s not all bad news.”

Konto leaned forward so the flames danced across his face. “You know Vajazzle?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, assuming it’s the same Vajazzle. Old lady? Big robe? Face kind of…” He pulled down on both cheeks, distorting his features.

“That’s the same face you did for me!” Loren yelped.

“What? No, I didn’t,” said Cal. “Yours was only one side. And anyway, it’s like, eighty percent better now.”

Loren gingerly touched her forehead.

“Maybe sixty. But the point is, it’s getting there. Relax. Only don’t relax too much, in case it goes all slack again and falls off.”

He turned back to Konto. “Is it that Vajazzle?”

“Sounds like it,” Konto said.

Cal grimaced. “Fonk. Yeah, we met her. To be honest, we didn’t really hit it off.”

“Meaning what?” asked Konto.

“Meaning she tried to kill us on multiple occasions,” Cal said. “But I eventually killed her, which I think came as a surprise to all of us, quite frankly.”

“In the old timeline,” Mech added. “Don’t look like it stuck in this one.”

Konto’s eyes somehow managed to narrow a few more fractions of an inch. “You keep talking about timelines. Why?”

Cal puffed out his cheeks. “Whoa. Didn’t we explain that? OK. Time for a recap. Buckle up. It’s complicated, so try to keep up. Basically, there was a big bad guy, we went back in time, I met my younger self, yadda-yadda-yadda, we beat the bad guy, we came forward in time again – you know, through the Void between realities? Anyway, blah-blah-blah, we got spat out into a big space battle, Loren crashed into the planet, you attacked us for no reason, we had some fun with the word ‘Growler’…”

He reflected on all this for a few moments then gave a satisfied nod. “Yep. I think that about covers it. I mean, I didn’t really touch on the Time Titan, the council of me, or the space clowns, but you get the idea.”

“That was the worst fonking recap I’ve ever heard,” said Mech.

“Uh, no it wasn’t,” Cal protested. He gestured to Konto. “He liked it. I mean, not blowing my own trumpet here, but he was rapt throughout. Right?”

Konto stared at Cal through the digital flames. “What space battle?”

Loren, anticipating an explanation that would inevitably involve hand puppetry and sound effects, stepped in before Cal could get started. “When we jumped back from the Void we ended up in this system. There was some sort of fight happening, lots of single-seat fighters against some large ships I’ve never seen before.”

Konto’s eyes darted upward as if he could watch the battle unfolding through the roof of his cave. “Who was winning?”

“Don’t know. Hard to say,” said Loren. “But they were both shooting at us, so we weren’t really waving flags for either of them.”

“You know who they are?” asked Mech.

“Maybe,” said Konto. “Maybe not.”

“We couldn’t understand them,” said Cal. He pointed behind his ear. “You know, with the translator doohickey? One of them appeared on the comm-screen and we had no idea what he was saying. I mean, from context, I doubt he was being complimentary, but the point is the chip didn’t work.”

“What did he look like?” Konto asked.

“Like, forty percent teeth, forty percent nostrils, twenty percent just, like, sheesh, and everything else was window dressing,” Cal said. “Oh, and he had eyes up his nose that popped out. I have no idea why. I mean, where the fonk do you have to live before evolution thinks that’s a good idea?”

“Harvesters,” said Konto, his lips drawing tight. “Those were Harvester ships. How big were they?”

Cal placed his thumb and index finger around six inches apart. “From where I was sitting, they were about that size. Although, obviously, we were quite far away. They’d be bigger up close.”

Konto regarded him coolly for a moment, then turned to Loren. “Is he always like this?”

“Pretty much,” Loren confirmed. “I’d say they were Frigate Class. Maybe Destroyer. We didn’t get to look at them for long.”

“Before she crashed us into the planet,” Miz contributed from the sidelines.

Mech drew closer, his metal feet clanking on the stone floor. “What’s a Harvester ship?”

Cal smiled smugly. “It’s a ship that harvests things. Come on, Mech, the clue’s right there in the name. I’m imagining some sort of space tractor. You know, for space farmers?”

“It’s a ship that harvests people,” Konto corrected.

“Evil space farmers, I mean,” Cal said. “Not the nice ones.”

“I heard they’d been working with Edi,” Konto continued. “They’re answering directly to Manacle, if the rumors are to be believed.”

Cal whistled quietly. “Directly to Manacle? Whoa,” he said, then he turned and looked up at the others. “Do we know who Manacle is?”

Mech and Loren both shook their heads.

“You’ve never heard of Manacle?” asked Konto. “Manacle, Enslaver of Worlds?”

“Oh, that Manacle,” said Cal. He shook his head. “No, still never heard of him. He sounds dreamy, though.” He turned to Loren and Mech again. “Have we heard of this Eddie guy?”

“Edi,” Konto corrected. “It’s not a guy, it’s a species. Or, I don’t know, maybe an organization.”

“Oh. Right. Gotcha. Have we heard of them?”

“Nope,” said Mech.

“Not a clue,” Loren agreed.

They were both glaring down at him. Cal winced a little behind his fixed smile. “Look, I’m sure this isn’t all our fault,” he said. “Besides, even if it is, we beat the big bad guy, and that’s the important thing. Sure, there might be some things we’re unfamiliar with, our translators are a little out of date, and people are being harvested in large numbers by horrible aliens with eyes up their nose, but…”

“I swear, man, if you say, ‘We can say ass now…’” Mech began.

“Haha. What? No. I wasn’t going to say that,” said Cal.

“Then what were you going to say?” Loren asked.

“I was going to say, Loren,” said Cal. He hesitated, his mouth held open as he thought. “I was going to say that at least we’re all together.”

He gave a nod and looked quite pleased with himself. “Yeah. That’s what I was going to say. No matter what, at least we’re all together.”

“Except Kevin,” said Miz.

“Except Kevin, obviously,” Cal conceded. “We’re all together with the exception of Kevin. And let’s be fair, he wasn’t there at the start, was he? I mean, sure, he’s part of the team, but is he part of the team team?”

“Oh, that’s charming,” intoned Kevin.

“Yes is the answer to that question. He’s totally part of the team team,” Cal quickly added. Only then did he allow his confusion to show. “Kevin? Is that you?” he asked, standing up. Splurt rolled clumsily onto the floor, shot Cal a slightly accusing look, then sproinged out of cat-shape and became a green blob once more.

Mech raised his forearm. Lights flickered as Kevin’s voice came again. “Indeed it is, sir,” Kevin replied. “I’ve patched myself into Master Mech’s communication systems.”

“Awesome!” said Cal. “How did you do that?”

“I wouldn’t want to befuddle you with science, sir,” said Kevin. “Suffice to say there was a button, which I pressed, and now here I am.”

“What about the ship?” Loren asked.

“Still crashed, ma’am,” Kevin said. “By the way, has anyone said, ‘Way to go, Loren’ yet?”

Cal, Miz, and Mech all confirmed that yes, they had.

“Drat,” said Kevin. “I was rather looking forward to that. Ah well, not to worry.”

“Are you still sinking?” Cal asked.

“I don’t think so, sir,” said Kevin. “I appear to have stopped. Oh! Which rather reminds me of my reason for calling, in fact.”

“Oh?” said Cal. “And what’s that?”

“Help me, sir,” Kevin said, his voice taking on a desperate, pleading edge. “They’re everywhere. They have me. Help, please, somebody he—”

The voice crackled, became a hiss, then faded into silence.

“Kevin?” said Cal. He leaned over and gave Mech’s arm a prod. “Kev? You there, pal? Speak to me.”

“He’s gone,” said Mech, swiping at his controls with one mechanical finger. “The signal’s dead.”

“Shizz,” said Cal. “We have to go help him.”

Konto stood up. “You can’t go out there. Or have you forgotten what I said about the Slurrits and the Growlers.”

Cal sniggered, despite the seriousness of the situation. “Growlers,” he said, then he gave himself a shake, scooped Splurt up onto his shoulder, and marched for the passageway that led away from the cave. “We’ve got a teammate in trouble,” Cal said. “And we never leave a teammate behind. Unless it’s Mech. And only then because it’s funny.”

“Fonk you, man,” Mech said, but he plodded quickly after Cal, with Loren and Miz following close behind.

“Don’t be crazy, kid,” Konto called after Cal. He came as far as the cave entrance and watched as Cal and the others picked their way along the passageway. “You won’t last out there,” he warned. “Nothing lasts out there.”

Cal glanced back as he clambered up through the crevasse toward the jagged opening overhead. “Relax, old man,” Cal replied. Jamming a foot onto a rocky outcrop he scrambled up into the world above. “Whatever it is, I’m sure we’ve faced a lot worse.”

Something hairy, smelly, and monstrous roared in Cal’s face with such force his ears were pinned to the sides of his head and Splurt toppled backward off his shoulder.

“OK, maybe not a lot worse,” Cal whimpered, then pain dug sharply into both shoulders, leathery wings beat once above his head, and the ground fell away beneath him as he was wrenched up toward the sky.

“Help!” Cal hollered, as the wings beat the air and the claws dug deeper into his shoulders. The creature above him was the size of a small helicopter, mostly covered in reddish-orange fur, and stank like an open sewer. It had to be a Growler, Cal thought, and this time he failed to find much comedy value in the name.

“Wings,” he wheezed. “That shizznod didn’t mention they had wings!”

The Growler turned sharply, flopping Cal around like a ragdoll in its grip. Night had fallen now, and the planet was an expanse of darkness far below him. The only light came from a small town on the distant horizon. Konto’s place, Cal would later guess. Right there and then, however, he was a little too preoccupied to draw any conclusions on it.

“Cal!”

Loren’s voice drifted up from somewhere below. Cal kicked frantically, trying to draw her attention. “Here! I’m up here! Help!”

“I see him.” That was Mech’s voice. Cal hoped his big computer brain could come up with some clever way to get him down from—

Blaster fire screamed upward past him and scorched the Growler’s wing. It jerked in the air and banked sharply, jiggling Cal around in its pincer-grip.

“What the fonk?! What are you doing?” Cal howled. “Don’t fonking shoot it!”

“What did he say?” Mech asked.

“He said not to shoot it.” That was Miz’s voice, Cal thought, although it was hard to tell over the whooshing of the wind and his own frantic sobbing.

“Huh. Oh. Yeah. I guess that was kind of reckless,” Mech admitted.

“Hold on!” Loren shouted up. “We’ll think of something.”

“Great. They’ll think of something,” Cal muttered. He inhaled deeply, almost choked on the smell, but then pulled himself together.

“You don’t need them,” he told himself, launching into a pep talk. “So, you’re suspended from the claws of an amusingly named flying monster thing, hundreds of feet above the ground. You’ve been in tougher spots than this, Cal Carver.”

He began to count on his fingers. “Spider-Dragons. Space Bears. Ozzy Osbourne that one time...” He tried to come up with a fourth, but his mind was shutting itself down in terror, and his memory failed him.

“The point is, you can get out of this. An answer will present itself any second.” He squirmed in the Growler’s grip, searching for some sort of sign. “Any second now. The answer’s just going to pop right up any minute… now.”

He gave the answer a few more seconds to pop up.

It didn’t.

“Ah, fonk,” he groaned.

The Growler dived for a few seconds, then pulled up sharply, flicking Cal upside down before jerking him right-way-up again.

“That was uncalled for! Seriously, was there any need to…” Cal began to protest, before the memory of something he’d seen while upside-down flashed back into the puree of terror that was his brain. The memory of two somethings, in fact.

Oh, fonk.

Oh, fonk. This was madness. Suicide, probably.

Still, the list of alternative options currently consisted of just one entry—be horribly killed by a big monster—so he decided he may as well give it a shot.

“Hey, Growly,” Cal called up to the thing. A twisted snout and beady black eyes briefly glowered down at him. “Here’s the deal. You’re going to do exactly as I say. OK?”

The Growler snorted two jets of steam from its flattened nostrils.

“No?” said Cal. “Then how about if I do this?”

Gritting his teeth against the pain burning through his shoulders, Cal twisted and threw out a hand. He gave a yelp of triumph as his hand found one of the two fleshy globes dangling down from within the Growler’s matted fur. The creature immediately let out a shriek of distress.

“Aha!” said Cal, giving the monster’s testicle a squeeze. “So now you want to talk? OK, then let’s talk. Here’s my proposal. Assuming you don’t want me to squeeze your balls into a lumpy paste, you’re going to gently fly me back to the ground and—”

Cal’s shoulders made an unpleasant schlopping sort of sound as the Growler withdrew its claws and released its grip. Cal, however, did not release his. He swung backward, tightly clinging to the monster’s right testicle, while grabbing for the other with his now free hand.

“Oh, so you want to play dirty, do you?” Cal hollered. The Growler roared as all five fingers of his left hand tightened around the beast’s other dangling gonad. “Well, two can play at that game, mister!”

Cal dug his fingers deeper into the Growler’s furry nutsack and the monster spasmed in pain. It threw back its head, kicked out with both clawed feet, and seemed to lose all control of its wings. It and Cal both screamed as they went plunging toward the ground, the wind whistling past them, the Growler’s globes quivering in Cal’s grip.

“Pull up, pull up, pull up!” Cal cried. He eased up on the squeezing just enough for the Growler to recover. The leathery wings snapped open just a few dozen feet above the ground, catching the air current like a kite.

The ground whooshed by beneath Cal’s feet as the Growler leveled off. He could jump from this height and survive, even without his healing factor, but the sand below him was gloopy siltch, so disembarking the ride at this point was out of the question.

The Growler had other ideas. It lashed backward with its claws, trying to scrape him off. Cal mashed its balls together, giving it second thoughts about the effectiveness of its kicking tactic.

“Guys? Where are you?” Cal called.

The reply came from somewhere over on his right. “We’re here. Where are you?” Loren shouted.

“You really don’t want to know,” Cal said. He eased up on the left testicle and doubled-down on the right. The Growler, who had begun to understand just who was currently in charge here, turned obediently in the direction of Loren’s voice.

“That’s it. Attaboy. That wasn’t so hard now, was it?” said Cal, adjusting his grip when the Growler was headed in toward the shore. “You know, my arms are fonking killing me, so I can’t imagine how you must be feeling. But I think we’ve both learned a lesson here today. Sure, I don’t really know what it is, but I think we’ve both learned it.”

The Growler hissed. Cal wasn’t sure if it was pain or anger. Probably a little of both.

The siltch became rougher and more solid beneath him. “Wait, there they are! Slow down,” he said, rotating both testes inward and bringing the Growler to a complete stop. It beat its wings in the air, throwing a swirl of sand up around Mech, Loren, Splurt, and Mizette. They all stared up at Cal as he dangled from the beast’s fleshy dangling globules, the downcurrent caused by each wing-flap ruffling his hair.

“Hey, guys,” he said. “Miss me?”

“Motherf— What the hell is he doing now?” Mech muttered.

“What?” said Cal, grinning down. “You’ve never seen an adult man hanging precariously from a Growler’s ballsack before? Wow. Sheltered much?”

“Get down,” Loren urged.

“Relax. It’s great,” said Cal. “If I could travel everywhere like this, I totally would. I love it. I don’t ever want to let go!”

He laughed. It bordered on the edges of hysteria. “Also, I’m pretty sure that as soon as I do, it’s going to fonking kill me. So, there’s that, too.”

Miz crossed her arms and slouched her weight onto one hip. “So, like, what? You’re just going to stay there forever?”

“No. Not forever, obviously. That would be crazy,” said Cal. “Just until it grows old and dies.”

“Just hurry the fonk up and jump so we can go save Kevin,” Mech barked.

“I don’t think you appreciate quite how angry this thing is going to be, Mech,” Cal said. “No offense, but you’re not exactly equipped to empathize with Growly here. It’s like the Bible says, ‘Let he who is without balls cast the first...’ I don’t know. I forget the exact quote, or where I was trying to go with it. The point is—”

The Growler snapped its back end forward and its front end back until a clawed foot slammed into Cal, dislodging him. Cal wailed briefly, then crunched onto the hard-packed ground just a few feet ahead of the others.

Screeching, the Growler lunged. Mech brought up both arms to shoot, but a scything blow from the monster’s wing knocked his aim wide, and a metal arm cracked across Mizette’s snout, staggering her.

Loren drew her blaster, but the Growler slammed its vast hairy butt into her, sending her sprawling onto the sand.

Splurt fell across Cal like a protective bubble just before the monster’s teeth could reach their target. Trapped beneath Splurt’s body, Cal felt like he was inside an enormous Jello, watching as it was devoured by the world’s hungriest—and ugliest—child.

“Stop eating Splurt!” he bellowed.

The Growler obeyed immediately. It stopped its furious gnashing and clawing at the protective green gloop and backed away across the sand, eyes fixed on Cal.

“That’s more like it,” Cal said. Splurt parted to let him stand up but clung to him like a suit of armor in case the monster should pounce again.

Loren and Miz dusted themselves down, then Miz shot Mech one of the coldest of her repertoire of withering looks. “Like, watch what you’re doing next time.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” Mech protested.

Miz rolled her eyes. “Ugh. Now you sound like Loren. Seriously, could you get any lower?”

The Growler spun on the spot and lurched into the air in a single desperate bound. Cal waited until it was a safe distance away before shaking his fist in its general direction.

“Yeah, you’d better run,” he said, although hopefully not loud enough for it to actually hear him.

When it had vanished out of sight, Cal clapped his hands together, wiping imaginary dust from them along with some very real Growler ball sweat. “Well, we showed him,” he crowed.

“Uh, I don’t think it was running from us,” said Mech. He pointed past Cal to the edge of the siltch and the dozens of hulking brown shapes who loomed there. “I think he was running from them.”

Five

If asked to describe the figures, Cal’s first port of call would have been ‘lumpy.’ This would’ve been followed in no particular order by ‘dirty,’ ‘slimy,’ ‘hefty,’ ‘smelly,’ ‘scary,’ and ‘totally covered in mud.’ All of which, coincidentally, would also be the names he’d give to Snow White’s Seven Dwarves if he was ever given a shot at a remake.

A worryingly large number of the figures stood silently around the edge of the siltch. The siltch itself was now dotted with hundreds of spherical mounds. It was only when a few of them rose up out of the gloopy sand and became yet more of the figures that Cal realized the mounds were heads.

The figures varied in height, ranging from around six feet to eight feet tall. They looked to be made entirely of mud, although the texture and consistency varied from individual to individual. Some were sleek and shiny, even in the darkness. Others were dry and lined with cracks. Those tended to be a little shorter, their backs a little more stooped, the cracks running like deep wrinkles across their—for lack of a better word—faces.

It was one of these elders who stood at the head of the group, supporting him or herself on a long pole that appeared to have been whittled from a single large piece of rock.

The elder seemed to be scrutinizing Cal and the others, although as it was impossible to make out its eyes through the cake of dried mud, it was hard to say for sure.

“What do we do?” Loren whispered. “Do we run?”

“Well, we sure as shizz can’t fight them all,” Mech muttered.

“Speak for yourself. I could totally beat all these guys,” Miz said. “But they’re all, like, ew. So, I’m not touching them.”

“It’s fine. I got this,” said Cal. He plastered on his warmest smile and approached the elder, a hand outstretched. “Well, hey there! You must be the Slurrits. We’ve heard so much about you. We’re Space Team. I’d ask if you’d heard of us, but I’m guessing you guys don’t watch the news much, either.”

As Cal drew closer to the elder, two smoother and much burlier Slurrits blocked his path, the mud on their necks burbling and bubbling as if alive.

“None approaches the Slurrata,” they both said in pitch-perfect unison. Cal regarded them both with surprise.

“Whoa! That was cool. Nice harmonies. Are you guys in a band?” he asked. “Because you absolutely should be in a band. I could be your manager. We’ll call my cut twenty percent. And those are friend prices, because I like you guys. OK? Don’t tell anyone else.”

He tried to step around them, but they continued to block the way.

“None approaches the Slurrata,” they said again.

Cal raised his hands and then pointed to both bodyguards. “That’s the name of our first single right there. You guys nailed it. And I’m not just saying that because I desperately want to get on your good side. I smell a hit.”

“That’s not what I smell,” Mizette muttered.

Realizing he wasn’t getting past them, Cal directed his smile between the guards, aiming it squarely at the sun-baked elder. “So, you’re the boss? Do you prefer Mr Slurrata or just Slurrata?”

“The Slurrata,” the elder said in a voice that was rich and deep, yet unmistakably feminine.

“The Slurrata?” Cal said, frowning. “So, like, always with the ‘the’? Like, ‘Hey, the Slurrata, how’s it going?’ ‘Excuse me, the Slurrata, can you pass the ketchup?’ That kind of thing?”

“Like that. Yes,” the Slurrata confirmed.

Cal nodded. “Fair enough. Your call, I guess. The Slurrata it is.”

“Are you the defilers of the siltch?” the Slurrata asked.

“Defilers? Us? No. We haven’t defiled anything,” Cal said. “I mean, I did hold onto a Growler’s balls for a while, but my options were pretty limited at the time. It’s not something I make a habit of and, between you and me, I think he kind of liked it.”

The army of Slurrits hadn’t made a sound yet, other than the occasional parp or blomp as they shifted their slurry-like bodies on the sand. They stood in an ominous sort of silence, like hangmen waiting by the gallows.

Destitution had a myriad of moons which were starting to rise and race each other across the night sky. Their pale white glows reflected off the muddy Slurrits, splitting their features into glowing highlights and deep shadows. Contrasted like that, Cal was able to make out noses and eye sockets, and even the occasional ear. It was all vague, though, like sand sculptures on a beach that had been mostly eroded by the tide.

Cal tore his eyes away from the figures and looked back at the team. “Guys? Did any of you defile the siltch when I wasn’t watching? Mech, I’m looking at you here.”

“No! What the fonk does that even mean ‘defile the siltch?’” Mech asked.

“I don’t know,” said Cal, slightly accusingly. “You tell me.”

“Fonk you, man. I ain’t defiled nothing.”

Cal glanced at the others. “Miz? Loren? Defile the siltch?”

They both shook their heads. Cal looked down at Splurt, who had stopped being armor and now just clung to his chest like a baby in a papoose.

“Splurt, buddy?” he asked.

Splurt quivered.

“I know, but I had to ask,” Cal said. He gave a nod and faced front again.

“Sorry, no. Doesn’t look like we’re the defilers you’re looking for,” he said. “I wish we could be more help. Still, good luck with the hunt.”

He fingergunned both guards. “And good luck with the album. Seriously, if you ever want a manager, look me up.”

With a wink at the Slurrata and a parting smile offered up to everyone else, Cal turned to leave.

“Then it isn’t your craft?” The Slurrata asked.

Cal stopped.

“Huh?” he said, turning.

“The craft in the siltch,” said the Slurrata. “It doesn’t belong to you?”

Behind the Slurrata, dozens of heads rose up from the quicksand and fanned out along the shore.

Cal swallowed. “Craft?”

“The flying machine,” the Slurrit elder continued. “The flying machine that has defiled the siltch. It does not belong to you?”

Cal gently cleared his throat. “Uh… no.”

“How interesting,” said the Slurrata. “Because it says it does.”

“Does it?” asked Cal. He forced a chuckle. “Wow. That’s… I don’t really know how to explain that. Except, you know, to say…”

He spun on his heels. “Run!” he shouted, before realizing that there wasn’t much point. Hundreds of Slurrits had appeared from the sand, blocking their retreat.

“Aw, shizz,” Cal groaned. “They’re behind us.”

“I know,” said Miz. “I heard them. And smelled them. Ew.”

“Then why the fonk didn’t you say something?” Cal asked, sighing.

Miz tutted. “Like, what? I’m supposed to just tell you everything now, am I?”

“Not everything, but if there’s someone sneaking up behind us then, yeah, it’d be useful information to have,” Cal said.

Miz sighed forcibly, then waved her clawed hands at her side in mock-alarm. “Argh. Look out. They’re totally behind us!”

She dropped her arms to her side again. “Happy now?”

“I mean… reasonably,” said Cal.

Miz scowled. “Whatever.”

“Your craft defiled the siltch, so you defiled the siltch,” the Slurrata said.

Cal turned back to her and raised his hands in surrender. “Fine. OK. We defiled the siltch. Guilty as charged.”

“The penalty for defiling the siltch is death,” the Slurrata said.

“Accidentally,” Cal clarified. “We accidentally defiled the siltch. And I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say we actually ‘defiled’ it, exactly. We just… penetrated it. No. Wait, that sounds worse. We… Guys? Help me out here.”

“Silence!” The Slurrata hissed. All around the group, the Slurrits tensed, preparing for the order that was about to be given.

Cal whispered to the others from the side of his mouth. “We may have to get our hands dirty here, guys. Both literally and… the other one.”

“Figuratively, sir,” said Kevin.

“Oh, hey!” said Cal, glaring daggers at Mech’s arm. “Welcome back, Judas. Thanks for ratting us out. Glad you’re alive, because I’m pretty sure we’re about to not be.”

“They gave me no choice, sir,” said Kevin.

“Did they torture you?” Loren asked.

“Well, no. I don’t really have anything to torture, ma’am,” Kevin said. “But they did ask rather firmly, and I thought it’d be impolite not to tell them who I was with. Manners cost nothing, after all.”

“Actually, they’re about to cost us our fonking lives, Kevin,” Cal said. He backed up to join the others as the scattered Slurrits closed the gaps around them, becoming a densely packed circle of brown bodies. “You couldn’t have just said you were on your own. Or, I don’t know, blamed Loren.”

“Hey!” Loren protested.

“Well, you were flying,” Cal pointed out. “So, it was kind of your fault.”

“No, it wasn’t,” said Mizette.

Loren’s eyes widened in surprise, but then she nodded. “Thanks, Miz.”

“It was totally her fault.”

“Enough!” the Slurrata boomed. The word was repeated by several other Slurrits nearby. It went rippling through the crowd like a fading echo. “You have been found guilty. Your fate has been decided. Those who defile the siltch defile all those who inhabit it. Defile us.”

“Us. Us. Us,” went the rippling chorus.

Splurt flopped to the ground and went splat at Cal’s feet. When he reformed, he was several times larger and made almost entirely of rock. The only parts of him that weren’t rock were his hands, one of which was a long silver blade with a serrated edge, while the other closely resembled some sort of industrial jackhammer.

“He’ll use them, too,” Cal said, leaning out from behind Splurt to address the Slurrata. “He might be fonking adorable, but he’s also—and I mean this in a nice way, buddy—dangerously unhinged. Seriously, there’s something wrong with him. He will kill all of you people. And not in a nice way. So, I suggest you all back off before our friend here—”

The Slurrata jabbed the rock-Splurt with her staff. A jolt of something blue and sparkly buzzed through him, collapsing him back into an inoffensive and harmless looking green gloop.

“—is rendered useless by an old woman with a stick,” Cal concluded. He shot Splurt a reproachful look, but then sighed and shook his head. How could he stay annoyed at the adorable little bamston? It was impossible. “Nice try, buddy. You’ll get ‘em next time.”

“Take them,” the Slurrata commanded. “Drag them down into the siltch!”

The throngs around Cal and the others came alive. Gloopy arms grabbed. Hands hauled. Fingers made of compacted dirt poked and prodded and probed.

Miz slashed out with her claws at one of the larger Slurrits, gouging a series of deep trenches in its muddy torso. It didn’t seem to notice, though, and pressed in on her. It was joined by three more, their weight buckling her knees and bringing her to the ground.

Mech opened fire with his cannons. Blaster bolts flared as they punched holes through the squirming mass of Slurrit shapes. The smell, which had been mulchy and unpleasant, took on a charred edge, but otherwise, the blasts seemed to have no real effect.

“Shizz. We can’t shoot these things!” Mech grunted.

“Don’t stop trying!” Cal barked. He powered a punch at the head of the nearest Slurrit. His fist flobbed inside it all the way up to the wrist, then became completely stuck. “Oh, come on, that’s not fair!” he protested, twisting and dancing in panic as mud flowed along his arm.

Cal shut his mouth tightly as the mud bloomed up over his face, covering his mouth and probing at his nostrils.

Loren raised two blasters and fired repeatedly at the chest of the Slurrit holding Cal. Each blaster bolt scorched a hole straight through it—and several other Slurrits behind it—but as Loren watched, the holes closed themselves over again, until the figure looked as good as new.

“Fonk!” she spat. “It isn’t working!”

A muddy hand caught her by the shoulder. She turned, driving an elbow toward her attacker. The Slurrit ducked, and Loren’s elbow smashed off Mech’s metal frame, sending a jolt of pain through her entire skeleton.

“Wait…” began the Slurrit that held her by the shoulder. It leaned back a little and looked her up and down. “Loren? Is that you? O-M-Fonking-G!”

Loren blinked several times. “Uh. Sorry?”

“Guys! Guys! Stop, hold-up!” cried the Slurrit. “This is a friend of mine. This is Loren.”

The Slurrits stopped attacking and drew back just enough to give Cal and the crew some breathing space. Miz shoved the figures that had been pinning her down away and bared her teeth at them. Mech put a hand on her shoulder to stop her from going after them when they melted into the crowd, much to Miz’s annoyance.

Cal spluttered out a gasp as the mud that had been covering his face was drawn back into the guy whose head he’d punched. He gave a nod of thanks as his fist was released, then turned to see Loren staring blankly at the Slurrit before her.

It was one of the smoother, glossier-looking figures, that looked like living liquid in the light of the many moons. It stood almost as tall as Mech and a little wider across the shoulders. It had both arms out at its side as if presenting itself, and there was an air of expectation about its squidgy, putty-like features that suggested it was waiting for some sort of response.

“Loren?” said Cal. “Aren’t you going to introduce us to your friend?”

Loren’s expression remained utterly blank. “Um…”

“Don’t say you don’t remember!” said the Slurrit, placing a hand on his chest in what Cal hoped was merely mock outrage and not the real kind.

“Loren,” Cal hissed close in her ear. “I don’t want to pressure you, but you might want to remember this guy before he takes offense and eats us.”

“Uh…”

“It’s me!” the Slurrit said. “It’s Garunk. From the Academy?”

Loren’s eyes widened. A smile broke across her face. “Garunk?!” she said, stepping back a little to fully take in the hulking muddy figure. “Wow! I almost didn’t recognize you!”

“To be fair, she didn’t recognize him at all,” Cal whispered to Mech. “I mean, how is that even possible? How the fonk do you forget that guy? I’ve just met him and I’m pretty sure I’m now going to see him every time I shut my eyes.”

“You’re so… so… big!” Loren said.

“Great,” Cal whispered. “Now she’s criticizing his weight. We’re all going to die.”

“Only in all the right places,” said Garunk. He gave himself a slap on the wrist and snorted a high-pitched laugh. “Ooh. Cheeky. No, but seriously. Look at you! How have you been? Spill! I want to hear everything.”

Before Loren could reply, Garunk turned to the Slurrata. “This is my friend Loren. We were at Zertex Academy together. On Moosh. She’s amazing. Like, ah-may-zing. You’re all going to love her. I swear. I swear. Back at the Academy, she was number one. Like, I mean, literally Number One.”

“Oh,” said the Slurrata. She looked like she was about to say more, but Garunk had already turned back to Loren.

“Go. Shoot. Tell me everything,” he said. “Where’ve you been? You still with Zertex?”

He turned back to the Slurrata before Loren could say anything.

“She was top of her class. Best pilot in the Academy. So good. She’s too perfect. Literally number one. I wanted to kill the bedge!”

Garunk turned back to Loren and laughed. “Not really! You know I love you!” he said, giving her a playful slap on the arm that left a muddy hand-shaped print on her blue skin. “Come on! Tell me what you’ve been up to! How’s life as a Zertex pilot?”

Loren opened her mouth but found herself addressing the back of Garunk’s head.

“Seriously, you should see her on the simulator,” Garunk gushed. He groaned as if experiencing some immense pleasure. “Nng! So good. She was like, all, pew-pew, zoosh, boo-boo, and the rest of us were all just, like… Wow. You know? Like just standing there, like, O-M-Fonking-G. We just couldn’t believe what we were seeing. So good.”

“Right, but—” the Slurrata began, but Garunk didn’t wait around to hear what she had to say and directed his babbling back in Loren’s direction.

“Come on! Don’t keep me waiting! I’m on tenterhooks here. Have you made Legate yet? Because you should. You totally should. Everyone said it. Me, Clorice, Hoof, Feltch. What’s his name? With the eyes.”

“Didn’t the rest of them have eyes?” asked Cal.

“No, I mean his eyes were like… eyes, you know? Like – bam. Eyes. Like eyes. You know what I’m saying?”

Cal nodded slowly. “I think I’m beginning to get a picture. You mean like eyes.”

“Exactly!” said Garunk. He leaned in closer to Loren and stage-whispered. “Who’s the beefcake? Rrawrr.”

Mech snorted. “Beefcake? He’s barely a motherfonkin’ cupcake.”

“Hey, I’m beefy!” Cal said. He flexed beneath his jacket and tightened all the muscles in his neck. It made his voice come out as a strained squeak. “Miz, you think I’m beefy, right?”

Miz tutted and rolled her eyes, and it became clear that this was the only reply Cal was going to get.

“See? Miz agrees with me,” he said to Mech. He stopped tensing his muscles with a gasp. “God, that hurt.”

“He is too precious,” said Garunk. “If you could see my eyes right now, they’d have hearts in them. I swear. Actual hearts.” He gave Loren another slap on the arm. “But anyway! Spill! You a Legate yet?”

“Uh, no,” said Loren. “I’m not with Zertex anymore.”

“Whoa. No!” Garunk gasped. “You quit Zertex?”

“She was kicked out,” said Miz.

“I chose to be kicked out,” Loren countered. “It was my own decision.”

“Sure,” Miz said. “Whatever.”

“No!” Garunk said. “You? Out of Zertex?”

“Yeah.”

“No!”

Loren smiled a little awkwardly. “Well, it’s true, so—”

“No! Wow. What did Feltch say? Was she heartbroken? I bet she was heartbroken.”

Garunk turned back to the Slurrata, who appeared increasingly nonplussed by this whole turn of events. “I bet she was heartbroken,” Garunk whispered, before immediately turning in Loren’s direction again. “Was she? Was she heartbroken?”

“I don’t know,” Loren said. “We lost touch after the Academy. So, probably not.”

“I bet she was. I bet she was heartbroken,” Garunk said, then he looked from Loren to the others and back again. “So… what are you up to these days, then?”

“Oh, you know. This and that,” Loren replied. “You?”

“I live in a hole,” said Garunk.

Loren wasn’t quite sure how best to respond to that. “Right,” she said, after several awkward seconds had passed. “Well, that’s… I mean, great. Good for you.”

“No, I know. I know. It sounds so ugh! You know? Like yoish! But it’s fine, actually,” Garunk said. He turned to the other Slurrits. “It is, isn’t it? It’s fine.”

There was some general murmuring that suggested it wasn’t completely fine, but no one was saying much more about it.

“It is. It’s fine,” Garunk continued, aiming himself in Loren’s direction again. “Zertex wasn’t for me. All that flying around in space. Following orders. I mean… saluting? Hello? No. Not for me. The uniforms? Yes. I liked those. But all the marching? No. With these feet? Nuh-uh. No.”

Garunk put his hands on his hips. Or roughly where everyone assumed his hips probably were, at least. “So, that’s your ship down there, is it?” he asked, his voice taking on a reproachful tone.

Loren opened her mouth to reply, but Cal clamped a hand over it. “If we say ‘yes,’ are you going to kill us?”

Garunk shot Cal what would probably have been quite a salacious look, had it not been for all the mud almost completely obscuring his features. “Try me,” he said in a slightly breathless sort of whisper.

“It’s our ship,” Mech confirmed. “But we didn’t mean to crash it.”

“We got shot down,” Loren said.

“Well, of course, you did,” said Garunk, giving her yet another slap on the arm and caking her skin in brown gloop. “There’s no way that Teela Loren would just randomly crash a ship for no reason!”

Miz snorted. “I thought this guy said he knew you?” she remarked.

Garunk turned and clapped his hands above his head several times. “OK, attention everyone, attention. No one defiled the siltch, OK? It’s all just been a misunderstanding. I vote we call off the murders. Do I hear anyone else in favor?”

To Cal and the crew’s dismay, nobody offered their support.

“Come on, I just need one person to second the motion,” Garunk said. “Then we can all go home and put our feet up.” He waited. “No one? Seriously?”

“Uh, can I second you?” asked Cal, raising a hand.

Garunk gave him an admiring glance. “Any time,” he said. “But let me check with the Slurrata. Hey, Grandma? Can the beefcake second the motion?”

The Slurrata seemed confused, as if everything was moving too fast for her to keep up. “Well, I mean, there’s nothing specifically in the rules about—”

“Great! Then motion carried,” said Garunk. He clapped his hands again, flinging flecks of mud in all directions. “That’s it. Show’s over folks. Back you go. Class dismissed! B’bye now. B’bye! Nothing to see here. Move along.”

“Uh, wait,” said Cal.

Garunk spun like a catwalk model and sashayed over to where Cal was standing. He towered above the much shorter Cal, gently oozing mud onto his boots.

“Yeeeees?” the Slurrit asked, drawing out the word in a way that somehow managed to sound incredibly suggestive. “What can I do you for? Ooh! Cheeky!” He gave himself an admonishing slap on the wrist again. “I mean what can I do for you?”

Cal smiled weakly, before jabbing a thumb in the direction of the siltch. “Any chance you guys can help us get our ship back?”

Six

Cal squeezed himself through the canyon and into the cave with the dancing digital flames.

“Yoo-hoo!” he called, casting his gaze across the empty cave. “Anyone ho-ulp!”

A hand clamped across his mouth from behind. Something short and stabby jabbed into his throat.

Cal could think of five different ways to get himself out of this situation. Unfortunately, four of them required various other members of the team showing up to rescue him, and the fifth involved sobbing uncontrollably until he was released out of sheer pity and embarrassment.

As luck would have it, he didn’t have to rely on any of them.

“You’re alive,” said Konto, removing the blade from Cal’s windpipe. “That’s unexpected.”

Cal rubbed his throat where the blade had been pressing. “Yeah. I’ll be honest, I sort of hoped you were going to turn up and do some kind of last-minute heroic rescue for a while back there,” he said. “I totally had you down as that guy.”

“Afraid you had me down wrong,” said Konto, sliding his knife into a sheath on his thigh. He sat down by the fire and glanced past Cal to the entrance. “The rest of them dead?”

“Nope. All still alive,” said Cal.

Konto looked surprised by this news. He took a bowl of something gray and gritty from the floor, then dug in a spoon. “I guess you haven’t met the Slurrits yet.”

“Oh, no. We did,” Cal said. “Turns out Loren and one of them go way back. They’re actually really nice. You know, when you get past the whole monster mud-people thing. They helped us get our ship back.”

Konto stopped with his spoon halfway to his mouth. He stared at Cal in disbelief for a while, then shoved the spoonful in his mouth and chewed. “Well,” he said through a mouthful of the lumpy slop. “You’re just full of surprises.”

“You have no idea,” said Cal. “But we have a problem.”

“Growlers?” Konto guessed.

“No. The Slurrits are keeping them away,” Cal said. “Oh, and FYI, if those things are ever bothering you in the future, grab ‘em by the balls.”

Konto dipped his spoon back into his bowl. “Sorry?”

“The balls. Just go right ahead and grab those suckers. Totally at your mercy.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Konto said. “So… your problem?”

“Oh, yes!” said Cal. “See, here’s the thing, between getting repeatedly shot by missiles, or torpedoes, or whatever they were, then the subsequent crashing, sinking, and being lifted to the surface by hundreds of mud-people, the ship has taken some damage.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Konto.

“No. It’s a miracle it wasn’t blown to pieces months ago,” Cal admitted. “You have no idea how many times I’ve left the shower running.”

He wiped a spot on the rocky wall with one finger and examined the tip, as if checking for dust.

“What do you want?” Konto asked. “Spit it out.”

“Well, here’s the thing,” Cal began, activating one of his better smiles. “We’ve got a doohickey on the ship that can make replacement parts, but it needs raw materials.”

Konto stared back at him, saying nothing.

“We’ve got some stuff,” Cal said. He tapped his chin with a fingertip. “Duriun, maybe?”

“Durium,” said Konto.

Cal nodded. “Yes! That’s it. We’ve got that, but we need this other stuff to make one of the things.”

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to bamboozle me with your technical jargon,” Konto said.

Cal blinked a few times. “Huh? Oh. You’re kidding?”

“Yes,” Konto confirmed, his face utterly deadpan. “I was being humorous.”

“Awesome,” said Cal. “And hilarious. Well done.” He ramped his smile up to the next level. “So, anyway, what we really need is a selection of base metals. You know, space steel, space iron, that sort of thing? I suggested Mech take off one of his feet, but he declined pretty forcefully.”

“Space iron?” said Konto.

“Bingo!” replied Cal. “Exactly. Space Iron. I knew you’d get it.”

Konto slurped another spoonful from his bowl. “I don’t. Get it, I mean. What’s this got to do with me?” He held up a hand before Cal could reply. “Wait. Actually, I know exactly what it has to do with me.”

“You do?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Konto said.

“Ha! Good one,” Cal laughed.

Konto’s expression remained completely impassive. “That wasn’t a joke.”

“Classic!” Cal grinned. “But seriously. We got to talking and we – by which I mean Mech and Kevin – figured out where we can get all the space metal we need.”

“You did, did you?”

“Yes,” said Cal. He took a deep breath, then quickly blurted out the rest of the sentence. “Can we have your bike?”

“Can you have my bike?” Konto repeated.

“We don’t have any money, exactly, but we can give you something better.”

Konto narrowed his eyes. “What?”

Cal had been hoping he wouldn’t ask that yet. He hesitated for a second, trying to come up with something.

“Friendship,” he offered.

“No, thanks.”

“The greatest currency of them all,” Cal said, miming a rainbow shape with both hands and really trying to sell the idea.

“It’s still no. Anyway, it wouldn’t do you any good,” Konto told him. “It’s all Durium and nanomesh. It wouldn’t give you what you need.”

“Fonk. Really?” Cal said. He eyed the bike longingly. “You’re not just saying that?”

“You’re not getting the bike,” Konto told him. “Forget it.”

Cal folded his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels. “OK, fine. I have a Plan B.”

“Good for you,” Konto told him.

“You want to hear it?”

“Not really.”

“Garbage,” said Cal. “You said you worked in garbage, right?”

“No,” said Konto.

Cal frowned. “Huh? I’m pretty sure you did.”

“I mean no, I won’t help you,” Konto clarified.

“But you do work in garbage?”

Konto sighed. “Yes. But I’m not helping you.”

Cal puffed up his chest. “Oh yeah? Well, maybe I’ll make you help us.”

“You won’t,” Konto said.

Cal deflated. “Well, no. Obviously. You could probably kill me with just your eyebrows.” He puffed out his cheeks, trying to come up with an alternative approach. “What if I asked really nicely?”

Konto considered this. “I don’t know. Give it a try.”

“Please help us,” said Cal, locking his fingers together in prayer. “Pleeeease.”

“No,” said Konto. “But good effort.”

Cal tutted. “Fine. Then can you at least point me in direction of the where you keep it?”

“Keep what?”

“The garbage,” said Cal.

“The garbage?”

“Is there a fonking echo in here?” Cal asked. “Yes, the garbage. Is there, like, a junkyard, or something?”

For a moment, Konto’s face came close to registering something like amusement. He scraped up the final dregs of his porridge-like gloop with his spoon, shoveled it into his mouth, then stood up.

“You know what? I will take you,” he said.

Cal perked up, his eyebrows raising in surprise. “You will? Seriously?”

Konto nodded. “Seriously. I’ll take you to where we put the garbage, but that’s it. You have to go in and get it yourself. Deal?”

“Absolutely!” said Cal. “That’s great. I just need to gather up some metal parts, maybe a few space tin cans or—”

Konto made a dismissive gesture to indicate he didn’t care. “You can get whatever you like,” he said. “As long as you understand that I’ll wait for you outside.”

“Outside. Awesome, no problem. Just wait until I tell the others that you’re not a horrible selfish shizznod, after all. Boy, will they have egg on their faces?” said Cal. “I really appreciate you doing this, Kont. Can I call you Kont?”

“No, you cannot,” said Konto. He brought his hand up to his mouth, partly to wipe away any stray food fragments, but mostly to hide his smirk. “Besides, you might not want to go thanking me quite yet...”

* * *

Cal stood on the edge of a diving-board shaped platform, conspiring to keep as much of his weight as possible on his back foot so he didn’t fall into the swirling morass of smoke, steam, and liquid below.

It had taken around twenty minutes to get here on the bike from Konto’s cave, not including the brief delay at the start when the bike had first accelerated, and Cal had immediately fallen off. The bike had growled across the desert, hurtling down the dips and leaping the dunes. The tires carved a trench through the sand, before some sort of air jet at the back blew up a cloud behind them, obscuring their tracks.

Cal was almost beginning to enjoy all the bouncing and skidding when a row of large industrial vehicles had appeared over a ridge, perfectly silhouetted against the giant outline of a Destitution moon, and Konto had announced that they had arrived.

At first, Cal had thought the ground beside the machines was being pulled open by hundreds of cables as thick as his wrist, creating a half-mile-long fissure in the sand. It was only thanks to an explanation from Konto, some closer examination, and a bout of violent retching that he realized the truth.

“A stomach?” he said with a grimace. “You built a giant fonking stomach in the desert?”

“Well, not me personally,” said Konto. He stood beside Cal, the toes of both feet protruding over the edge, the five hundred foot drop into a giant stomach apparently not causing him any concern. “And we didn’t build it, we found it. Decades back.”

“You found it?” said Cal, stepping away from the edge before vertigo kicked in. “You found a giant stomach just lying around the place?”

Konto nodded. “That’s right. Turns out there are a few of them dotted around the planet, mostly just below the surface. We call them the Guts.”

“Man, the naming committee must’ve pulled an all-nighter on that one,” Cal said. “And you don’t think that’s weird? That there are stomachs all over the planet? You don’t find that odd?”

“Sure I do,” said Konto. He shrugged. “But you travel in space long enough and weird becomes the norm.”

“You traveled in space?” Cal asked.

Konto nodded.

“Right. I mean, cool. I didn’t know,” Cal said.

“No reason why you would.”

“No, I guess not,” Cal agreed. “How long were you out there?”

“Like I said,” Konto replied. “Long enough.”

He gestured into the stomach. The cables had it peeled apart and pinned open like the subject of some science experiment. A sulfurous, eggy sort of smell rose from the pit, assaulting Cal’s nostrils and making his own stomach churn unpleasantly.

“You’re looking for the garbage? That’s where we put it,” Konto said.

“Great,” Cal sighed. “Of course you do. You couldn’t have just piled it up and left it to rot like normal people.”

He clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth. They tasted exactly like the stomach smelled. “Can we get down there?”

“No.”

“Then how do you get stuff back?” Cal asked.

Konto frowned. “We don’t. It’s garbage. Why would we want it back?”

“OK, fair point. But, what if someone falls in?”

“Then, we send our condolences to the family.”

“Shizz,” Cal spat. He forced himself closer to the edge again and peered into the morass of luminous green stomach acid and billowing steam clouds. “I guess everything is going to have dissolved by now? Been digested, or whatever?”

“Maybe,” said Konto. “Sometimes deposits build up along the stomach walls. We haven’t done a lining flush in a while. There’s probably a lot of junk accumulated in some of the folds.”

Folds. Cal shuddered at the word. It somehow made the whole giant stomach thing seem all the more vivid and real.

“So, there might be some scrap metal down there we could get back?”

“No,” said Konto.

Cal tutted. “But, I thought you just said…”

“We aren’t getting anything back,” Konto said. “I told you, I’m waiting outside.” He pointed to the platform at his feet. “This is outside. You’re on your own from here.”

Cal looked down into the stomach again, then around at the various industrial vehicles parked between the cables, their paint flaking, their metal pitted with rust. “What about those?” Cal asked. “What are they made of?”

“Nothing that’ll help you,” Konto said. “Anything built to last around here is Durium or Nanomesh. Not what you need.”

“Fonk,” Cal muttered.

He peered down into the pit again. The stench made his eyes water. His gag reflex started doing warm-up stretches as it limbered up in anticipation.

He looked at the cables pulling the fleshy outer lining of the stomach open.

The long, sturdy cables.

“Oh, Jesus,” he groaned.

“What now?” Konto asked. “Ready to head back?”

“I wish,” Cal said. “Mech says we need space metal, so space metal is what we’re going to get.”

He took off his leather jacket, folded it neatly, then thrust it out to Konto. Konto made no move to accept it, and the jacket fell onto the platform when Cal released his grip. Neither man commented on it.

“I’ve got a plan,” Cal said. He winced. “But I really wish that I didn’t.”

Seven

Konto sat on his bike, the engine purring, the comm-light on the curved dash blinking furiously in time with the voice that came crackling through the speakers.

“This was a terrible plan!” Cal coughed. “Seriously, why the fonk didn’t you stop me?”

Konto turned and looked at the length of cable attached to the back of the bike. It ran in a straight line up the fleshy embankment of the stomach wall, before disappearing over the edge. As he watched, it twitched and jerked like a fishing line with a catch on the hook.

“I did,” said Konto. “I asked if you were sure.”

“You call that trying to stop me!” Cal protested. “You should’ve punched me unconscious and tied me up!”

Konto shrugged. “You’re an adult. Reckoned you could make your own decisions.”

“Do I look like I can make my own decisions?” Cal yelped. “Are these the actions of a man who can make his own decisions?”

Konto regarded the twitching cable again and shrugged. “You want to get yourself killed? Who am I to judge?”

“No, but you don’t have to fonking help me do it!” replied Cal, the high squeal of his voice making the bike’s speakers peak. “I swear to God, this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever done.”

He said that, but it wasn’t actually the most ridiculous thing Cal had ever done. A few months ago, before he’d been abducted and dragged unwillingly into adventures in outer space, it might have been almost the most ridiculous thing he’d ever done. Now, though, it would barely crack the top ten.

Still, dangling there from the length of cable above a vast pool of luminous alien stomach acid, using his t-shirt pulled up over his nose and mouth as a protective face mask, he certainly felt ridiculous.

Ridiculous and terrified.

But mostly terrified.

The plan had been elegant in its simplicity. He would, as he put it, Tom-Cruise-in-Mission-Impossible-the-shizz out of the situation by having Konto lower him facing downward into the pit. Then, using a pair of thick Nanomesh gloves he’d sourced from the back seat of one of the big work machines, and a sack he’d found in another, he’d gather up enough space tin cans, scrap space iron, and any other metal he could find, before Konto pulled him back to the surface.

He hadn’t expected it to be pleasant, of course, but it was really only as he’d gone plunging over the edge that the full ridiculousness of the idea had really hit home. It was a stomach. A giant, inexplicably detached, alien stomach and he was being lowered into it. It was stupid. It was insane.

But still. He was here now, so he might as well get on with it.

“You see anything?” Konto’s voice spoke in his ear.

“Not really,” Cal croaked. “The acid in the air is pretty harsh down here. I think…” He covered one eye and swiveled the other around. “Yeah. I’ve gone blind in one eye, and I’m not sure I still have lips. On the plus side, I can no longer smell anything, and my face has never been so exfoliated, so I guess it’s not all bad.”

“You want me to pull you up?” Konto asked, in an offhand sort of tone that suggested he wasn’t really bothered either way. “You still have one eye.”

“Not yet,” Cal said. “Besides, the other one will come back. I just need to find—”

A shape swooshed by him, passing through the mist clouds like a shadow. It happened so fast and was over so quickly that Cal decided he must’ve imagined it.

Five seconds later, when the shape came again, he changed his mind.

It passed him on his sightless side this time, but he felt the wind of it as it swept by and turned in time to catch a clearer glimpse of it before it sank back into the fog. It was roundish and lumpy, with colors swirling across its mostly transparent surface. It reminded Cal of a big clump of bubbles all stuck together, but it moved with determination, as if propelled by a powerful gust of wind.

Cal watched the spot where the thing had vanished, then let out a little squeak of panic when something brushed against the back of his legs. He wrenched himself around, which sent him spinning on the cable, his momentum turning him all the way back to his starting position, none the wiser as to what had touched him.

“Uh, I think there’s something down here,” he whispered.

Konto didn’t reply.

“Konto,” Cal hissed. “You there? I think there’s something down here.”

Cal held his breath, waiting for an answer that didn’t come.

The mist ahead of him swirled as the lumpy shape whooshed through it. While Cal was watching it go, another shape passed on his right, darting across his increasingly limited field of vision and alerting him to the fact that the ‘something’ he thought was down here was, more accurately, ‘some things.’

Cal reached for the blaster pistol tucked into his belt. The cartoonishly large Nanomesh gloves proved quite the hindrance, though, and—after half a second of desperate fumbling—the gun plummeted toward the glowing bile below.

Cal watched it tumble for several seconds then, with a plop and a hiss, it sunk out of sight.

“Oh… ass,” Cal groaned. “Ass McAss Ass.”

This didn’t help his situation any, but it did make him feel very slightly better about it all. At least, until one of the shapes came swooping out of a mist cloud and clipped him on the feet, sending him into a much faster spin than before.

The glowing acid pool rotated dizzyingly, swirling around and around as Cal spun on the cable, centrifugal force throwing his arms and legs out into an X-shape.

During his time in space, Cal had accepted the fact that he wasn’t really equipped, either physically or emotionally, for aerobatics. Or spaceobatics. Or whatever the fonk you called it when Loren made the ship do all those gut-churning dives and dodges. Hell, even just flying fast in a straight line was often too much for his stomach to cope with, and he’d come to rely on video footage of cute space animals doing adorable things to help take his mind off his space travel sickness.

Now, spinning wildly in an acidic cloud, high above a churning, sulfurous morass of digestive juices, the inevitable happened. Cal vomited, loudly and forcibly, and with not a little fanfare. Unfortunately, his t-shirt was still pulled up over his mouth, so what had been inside his stomach all splattered down his chest and pooled outside his stomach, before his spinning movement ejected it out through the bottom of the shirt and plastered it all down the front of his pants.

“Konto!” he barked. “What the fonk is going on?”

“Huh? Sorry, I was taking a whizz,” Konto said. “What’s up?”

“There are things in here!” Cal said, frantically flapping his arms in an attempt to stop himself spinning.

“Oh, yeah. Didn’t I mention?” Konto said.

“No, you didn’t fonking mention!” Cal yelped.

“They’re gut flora,” Konto said. “They’re harmless.”

“Yeah, well my gag reflex would beg to fonking differ!” Cal replied.

“Except the bubble ones,” Konto said.

Cal swallowed back another wave of nausea. “What?”

“They’re all harmless, except the ones that look like bubbles,” Konto clarified. “Those things are evil. If you see one of those, you’re pretty much already dead.”

“I did see one of those!” Cal cried. “I saw several of those! It’s nothing but those!”

“Oh,” said Konto. “Well… nice knowing you.”

Something about the way he said it reached Cal even through his panic.

“Oh, haha,” Cal said. “Very funny.”

“They’re all harmless,” Konto said. “Relax. We don’t really know what they are, exactly, but they won’t hurt you. They’re not aggressive.”

Cal could hear the shrug even over the comm-link.

“Well, only sexually.”

“Again with the funny,” Cal said. He hesitated, watching one of the bubble-shapes go swooshing by him. “That was a joke, right?”

“More or less,” said Konto.

“What the fonk does that mean, ‘more or less’?” Cal demanded.

“If you hurry up and get what you’re looking for, you won’t have to find out,” Konto said. “Now, do you want me to keep lowering you or not?”

Cal groaned. He shook the bottom of his t-shirt, letting a few blobs of vomit fall out. One of the stomach’s walls curved below him, all slick and shiny and oozing with green bile. Sure enough, just as Konto had predicted, there was an accumulation of garbage trapped in one of the many folds just thirty or forty feet below.

“How much cable do we have?” Cal asked.

“Some,” Konto said.

“OK, I’m never big on the technical talk, but that’s vague even for me,” Cal said. “Do we have, like, thirty feet?”

“I can give you thirty,” Konto confirmed. “But not a lot more.”

Cal’s spinning had become a slow, gradual rotation. He caught a glimpse of one of the gut floras coming toward him and swung a punch at it.

“Fonk off!” he barked. The flora let out a high-pitched noise like a Munchkin’s giggle, then vanished into the clouds again.

“You talking to me?” Konto asked.

“No, these bacteria things,” Cal said. “Never a course of antibiotics around when you need one.”

He adjusted his t-shirt mask, flexed his fingers inside his gloves, then gave a nod. “OK, let’s do this,” he said. “Lower me down.”

The cable jerked and he plunged, screaming, toward the bubbling pit of bile. “Stop, stop, stop!” he yelled, before he face-planted into the slimy sloped wall, bounced off, and found himself flailing helplessly upside-down, the cable tangled around his right leg.

It jerked to a stop, almost wrenching the leg out of the socket. “What the fonk was that?” Cal cried, once he’d recovered enough to successful form words.

“Sorry, that might have been my fault,” Konto said.

“Well, I know it wasn’t my fault!” Cal said.

“Did you get any of the stomach juices on you?” Konto asked.

Cal looked down at himself and was immediately reminded of Bill Murray in Ghostbusters. Faintly luminous green gloop coated him in random chunky blobs.

“Only on my arms, face, head, legs, and torso,” Cal said.

“Can you get it off?” Konto asked. There was an urgency to the question that Cal managed to miss completely.

“Sure. Just send down some soap, a scrubbing brush, and a fireman’s hose and I’ll get cleaned right up,” he said. “No, I can’t get it off.”

“I’m bringing you up,” Konto said.

Cal looked down at the garbage deposit trapped in the stomach fold below him. He was close enough now that he could make out a few partially dissolved cans and canisters in there. Just what they needed.

“Drop me down just a little more,” Cal said. “But slowly this time.”

“I’m bringing you up,” Konto said again.

“No, not yet. I’m so close!”

Cal stretched out an arm, palm open. He closed his eyes and concentrated, like he could somehow will the cans to leap into his hand, Luke Skywalker style.

“Hold on, I’m pulling you in,” said the voice in his ear.

“Konto, don’t you dare!” Cal said. He opened his eyes and extended his arm to its full-stretch, palm spread.

Then he watched in surprise as the arm fell off, tumbled end over end, bounced off the stomach wall, then plopped into the acid below.

“Ooh, that can’t be good,” he said, wincing. “Uh, Konto?”

“Hold on,” Konto urged.

Cal looked down at the other arm. The flesh was dissolving where the gloop had coated his skin. Amazingly, it didn’t hurt, not even when the flesh became bone, and the bone became dust, and the arm fell away into the bubbling pit below.

“Holding on might be problematic,” Cal croaked, then the acid pool retreated as the cable around his leg wound in, hurtling him back up toward the surface.

The next few seconds were a blur of frantic activity, rapidly increasing pain, annoyingly friendly gut flora, and some brief but enjoyable moments of unconsciousness.

Cal experienced it all like a series of snapshot sensations. The jerking upward movement of the cable. The feeling of weightlessness as he was yanked up over the lip of the stomach, and the succession of thumps as he tumbled down the outside.

He experienced water hitting him. A lot of water, blasting him from some sort of cannon.

Konto’s voice, barking urgently. Konto’s face, hard and emotionless, yet somehow betraying his horror at the limp and limbless thing writhing around on the sand like some sort of slug.

He experienced pain. A lot of pain. More pain that he’d ever felt before, which was really saying something, considering the past few months he’d had.

And fear. Not that almost enjoyable seat-of-the-pants escape the monsters kind of fear that he’d grown used to, but something deeper and more primal than that. A fear borne of the certainty that this was it. This was the end. This was—

Konto slapped him in the face. “Wake up.”

Cal opened his eyes. This meant he had eyelids, he realized, which immediately made him feel a bit more positive.

The moons had changed position in the sky. There were only two of them now, down low on the horizon. An orange glow was just starting to tease the other side of the sky, signaling the approaching dawn.

Konto leaned over him. His impatient expression somehow managed to make Cal feel guilty, like he’d been slacking on the job.

“How many fingers am I holding up?” Konto asked, raising a fistful of digits.

“Five,” Cal said. His voice was a little croaky, but stronger than he’d been bracing himself for. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

“None,” Konto said. “You don’t have any.”

Cal craned his neck and looked at where his hands should have been. They weren’t. He had no wrists, either. He did have a bit of both forearms, which was some consolation, but not a lot. The flesh at the end of his arm-stumps was raw and red. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but it itched like crazy. As Cal studied the wounds, he thought he saw some tiny, incremental movement.

“They’re growing back,” Konto said. “You were in quite a mess for a while there, but you’re healing up fast. I even managed to reattach your legs.”

“My legs came off?” Cal yelped.

“Yeah, but they knitted right back together,” Konto said.

Cal wiggled his toes and gave a strangled laugh of relief. “Holy shizz. I’m a regular Dan Deadman.”

“Who?” Konto asked.

Cal waved a dismissive stump. “Doesn’t matter.”

Konto leaned back and folded his own fully-intact arms across his broad chest. “I’ve seen a lot of crazy things in my time, but I’ve never seen anything quite like that. Do all your people heal like that?”

“On Earth? No, just me. I’m one of a kind,” Cal said. He reached an arm behind him to push himself to his feet, forgetting he was missing around forty percent of it, and most of the important parts. He fell back awkwardly and clunked his head on a rock. “Jesus!” he spat. He raised a stump and shook it to the sky. “Haven’t I suffered enough?”

“Wait, you’re from Earth?” Konto asked.

Cal lowered his stump. “Yeah. You’ve heard of it?”

“Of course,” said Konto, frowning slightly to suggest this was an odd question.

Cal didn’t know whether to be amazed or delighted at this. He was tempted to squee with excitement, but felt it was probably unbecoming of a space adventurer, so played it cool.

“Of course,” he said. “Why wouldn’t you have?”

With some difficulty, he got to his feet. Konto’s bike stood close by, and Cal caught a glimpse of his reflection in the curved metal.

“What the hell am I wearing?” he asked, turning to check himself out. His Golden Girls t-shirt, jeans, and boots were all gone. Instead, he wore a bright yellow jumpsuit that was at least two sizes too big and had twice as many arms as he required. His feet were bare, but at least they were on the correct legs and facing the right way.

“I got it from one of the vehicles,” Konto explained. “Your own clothes dissolved. Except this.”

He tossed Cal his leather jacket. Cal attempted to catch it, but—understandably—failed dismally.

“Thanks for that,” Cal said, gazing down at the crumpled jacket.

“Any time.”

Cal went back to checking his reflection.

“My face!” he said, studying himself more closely. “It’s so… pink. It’s like I’ve been sandblasted.”

“You were mostly just skull an hour ago,” Konto told him. “Pink is a definite improvement.”

Cal pulled a series of exaggerated expressions, stuck his tongue out at himself, then ran through a few of his rehearsed smiles to make sure the full repertoire was still available.

Close enough, he thought, although there was something else odd about his reflection. Something he couldn’t quite place.

It’d come to him.

He turned to Konto and gestured to the lip of the stomach ridge with his arm stumps. “I didn’t manage to get any metal,” he said.

“No,” Konto confirmed.

“Mech and Kevin aren’t going to be happy. I am never going to hear the end of this,” he said. The cable that he’d been dangling from lay coiled on the sand. He gave it a kick and added a fractured toe to his list of injuries. “I was so close. It was right there. And now…” His voice trailed away. “Hold on.”

He looked at Konto.

“Wait.”

He looked at the cable.

“What’s this thing made of?”

Konto regarded the coiled length of cable. For a while—quite a long while—he said nothing.

“Yeah,” he eventually confirmed. “That would do it.”

Cal’s nostrils flared. He bit his lip, resisting the urge to eject the string of expletives he could feel forming an orderly queue near his voice box.

He inhaled slowly.

He counted to ten.

Then he counted to twelve, just to be on the safe side.

“You mean… we could’ve just taken this all along?” he asked, pointing with the ragged wound of a forearm at the coil of cable. “I didn’t have to go down there at all?”

“It didn’t occur to me,” Konto admitted. “But yes. In hindsight, that would’ve been a better solution. We wouldn’t have had to waste all this time.”

“Time?!” Cal spluttered. He waggled his arms in Konto’s direction.

“And you’d still have hands,” Konto added. “And ears.”

“Ears?!”

Cal spun back to the bike and checked his reflection. Yep. That was what had seemed off earlier. He had no fonking ears, just two hideous lumps where his ears had once been.

“God, I hope they don’t grow back huge,” he fretted. “Mech will never let that go.”

He turned to Konto. “I cannot fonking believe you!”

“In what way is any of this my fault?” Konto asked. “I didn’t tell you to go down into the Guts.”

“I didn’t hear you coming up with any better ideas!” Cal yelped. “Like, I don’t know, ‘Let’s just take this big cable,’ as an example off the top of my head. Which, by the way, has only just grown back!”

“Shut up,” Konto said.

Cal tried to put his hands on his hips, but couldn’t reach, so he tucked his stumps in under his armpits instead, which didn’t have quite the same effect.

“Don’t you tell me to shut up, mister,” Cal ranted. “You’re the one who dropped me into—”

Konto clamped a hand over Cal’s mouth. “Be quiet,” he urged, his voice a whisper of urgency. He eyeballed Cal with an intensity that burned through Cal’s outrage and told him he should probably do what he was told.

Cal nodded that he understood. Konto upped the intensity of his glare for a few more seconds, then released his grip.

“What’s the matter?” Cal whispered.

Konto scanned the gloom around them. Cal followed his gaze but saw nothing beyond rocks, sand, and the enormous stomach that had come very close to digesting him.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Growlers,” Konto whispered.

Cal glanced up. The sky was clear.

“It’s fine,” he said. “Don’t worry about those guys. Like I said, I grabbed one by the danglies and he was completely under my control.”

“Yeah, you said,” Konto remarked, still searching the horizon.

“I don’t know why you’re so worried about them. I mean, it’s an obvious weak spot. As soon as I grabbed them, the poor bamston almost dropped me right out of the sky.”

“Right,” said Konto, then he processed what Cal had said and turned. “Wait. What do you mean ‘out of the sky’?”

Cal pointed up with an arm stump. “You know. Up there.”

“I know what the sky is,” said Konto. “But how did it almost drop you out of it?”

Cal shrugged. “I grabbed its nuts. It opened its talons. I almost fell.”

Konto closed his eyes for a moment and sighed. “That was a Thurrax.”

Cal raised an eyebrow. “Huh?”

“That wasn’t a Growler,” Konto explained.

From behind Cal came a sound that immediately leapfrogged several positions up his personal chart of most alarming things he’d ever heard.

“That’s a Growler.”

Eight

The sound the Growler made was low and guttural, yet simultaneously loud and piercing. It was a rumble of thunder in an earthquake, an explosion in a firework factory, the furious parping of some vengeful, flatulent god. It was all these, and more.

And that was without ears. Fonk knew what it would’ve sounded like if Cal still had them.

He had absolutely no inclination to turn and look at the thing behind him. He wasn’t sure he’d cope with hearing a vague description of whatever it was, let alone be able to handle seeing it with his own two eyes.

The sound affected Cal on some ancient, primal level. It screwed up his insides, flooded his brain with panic, and triggered his flight response, bypassing the ‘fight …’ part completely.

He set off running, going from standing-start to a speed he had rarely, if ever, achieved before. His bare feet pounded the sand. His elbows pumping furiously. His lips flapped up and down and he babbled in tongues as the thing behind him let out another roar that was somehow even more powerful than the first.

Konto’s bike skidded into his path, churning up a trench of sand. “Get on,” Konto barked.

“Bleurmgf,” Cal ejected, but he scrambled onto the bike behind Konto. The ground trembled. Another roar thundered across the desert toward them.

“Hold on,” Konto warned, gunning the bike’s engine.

Cal managed to pull himself together enough to form actual words. “With what?” he yelped, waggling his handless arms.

“I don’t know. Improvise,” Konto said.

“Fonking improvise,” Cal muttered, then he lunged and bit the collar of Konto’s jacket, his teeth clamping on just as the bike shot forward.

“Ngg!” Cal grimaced. “Mm fnkin’ teef.”

Konto leaned right, sending the bike into a sudden curve just as something large and heavy slammed into the ground behind it. Over Konto’s shoulder, Cal caught a glimpse in one of the bike’s side-mirrors of something multi-limbed and hairy, then the bike skidded left and powered ahead.

Cal’s jaw ached as he bit down harder on Konto’s jacket, and was almost thrown sideways off the bike when Konto turned to look behind them.

Konto barely had time to eject a, “Shizz!” before he slammed on the brakes, snapping the bike to a stop so sudden it flipped Cal out of his seat. He smashed against the rear windshield that curved up behind him, thudded back onto the chair behind Konto, then stared in mute horror at the abomination that struck the ground ahead of them like a meteor made of hair, teeth, and anger.

There was no time to take in the details, as the impact threw up a wall of sand around the thing which—mercifully—almost immediately blocked it from view. Cal got enough of a look at it to get a broad-strokes picture of it, though, and that was enough to make him wish he was suffering from the acid-blindness.

And he’d thought it had sounded bad.

“Don’t you have a blaster?” Cal asked. “Shoot it!”

“That’ll only make it angry,” Konto said, spinning out the bike’s back wheel.

“It’s already angry!” Cal managed, before the bike accelerated and he was forced to chew on Konto’s jacket again.

“Right now, it’s inquisitive,” Konto said. “Trust me, you’ll know when it’s angry.”

Cal’s response was an ejection of barely intelligible sounds through his clenched teeth.

The ground rumbled, and Cal knew the thing was giving chase. He bit harder, bracing himself for another evasive maneuver.

“I have an idea,” Konto said.

“Ou oo?” Cal said, bouncing in his seat as the bike roared up over the top of a dune, then dropped steeply down the other side.

“Yeah,” Konto confirmed.

He spun in his seat, wrenching his jacket from Cal’s mouth.

“Hey!” Cal began to protest, before Konto’s elbow caught him across the cheek.

He grabbed desperately for the bike, but the force of the blow and his lack of available hands made saving himself impossible. His mouth was suddenly filled with sand as he rolled clumsily across the desert floor, and thudded to a stop against a lump of smooth rock.

Konto’s bike powered up the next dune, then vanished out of sight over the top of it.

“He sacrificed me! That selfish son-of-a-bedge,” Cal wheezed, as he tucked himself into cover behind the rock and wished, not for the first time that night, that he’d brought Splurt.

A shadow passed over him, there one moment, gone the next. Cal didn’t look up. He sat there, frozen, until he heard the badoom of the Growler touching down somewhere on the other side of the dune.

“Ha! It’s still coming after you, shizznod!” Cal shouted in the direction Konto had gone. He shouted it quietly, though, to the extent that it was more of a whisper, and not technically a shout at all.

Scrambling up the dune on his stumps and feet, Cal reached the top in time to see Konto’s bike racing up the sloped side of the giant stomach. The Growler bounded along behind him, moving too fast and churning up too much sand for Cal to gather much more information about its appearance than he already had. The fact he couldn’t bring himself to look at it for more than half a second at a time didn’t help, either.

What he could see was that it was gaining fast. Konto was going to have to pull a tight turn to shake it off before they both…

The bike sailed up over the edge of the stomach, hung in the air for the briefest of moments, then plunged into the Guts. The Growler, which was running too fast to be able to stop in time, followed. It thrashed a multitude of hulking limbs in the air for a moment, as if attempting to fly, then it, too, plummeted down into the Guts.

Silence fell. Cal kept watching the edge where both Konto and the Growler had vanished, waiting to see if anything would happen.

Nothing did.

He clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth.

“It’s a flying bike,” he said. “Got to be.”

He considered the implications of this with regards to him being lowered into the stomach on a cable.

“If that bike has been able to fly this whole time, I swear to God, I will fonking kill him,” he remarked. Then, with a sigh, he trudged down the other side of the dune and followed the Growler’s trail up the side of the stomach.

The fleshy outer lining was springy and spongy beneath his bare feet as he made his way up. Without hands to help him, the climb was difficult, and he made it to the halfway mark three out of four times before sliding back down again.

In the end, he took a run up at it, threw himself forward when he began to slow, then wriggled up on his front, worm-style, until he reached the top.

The acrid stench of the Gut’s bile assaulted his eyes and violated his nostrils as he leaned over the ledge. The glowing green fluids were a long way down, but Cal could just make out the Growler bobbing on the surface. It was still moving, but in violent, fitful twitches that suggested any last-minute comebacks were highly unlikely.

Peering through the gaps in the acid clouds, Cal caught a glimpse of something metallic. It lasted only for a second before the bike sunk out of sight, and several thick, lumpy bubbles belched to the surface.

“Fonk,” Cal wheezed, sliding a few feet back down the stomach-side and out of the path of the rising fumes. “Konto, you crazy bamston,” he groaned. “Now who’s going to give me a ride home?”

He shook his head, sighed, and sat up. “I mean, driving into a big stomach. What was he thinking? There had to be another way.”

“There wasn’t,” said Konto from behind him.

Cal jumped in fright, which sent him skidding several feet down the stomach before friction brought him to a stop.

Konto stood at the edge of the stomach, very much alive.

“What the…? Where the fonk did you come from?” Cal asked.

Konto tilted his head in a backward nod. “Down there,” he said.

“But… How did…? Why aren’t you…?”

A couple of tin cans and something that looked a bit like a spanner landed in the sand between Cal’s legs.

“Got you those,” Konto said. “Between those and the cable, reckon you’ll have what you need.”

“Uh… Great. That’s awesome,” said Cal. He nodded down at them, then to his arm-stumps. “But can you carry them?”

Konto ran his tongue across his bottom lip. “No,” he said, then he trudged past Cal down the stomach-side, and slid the last few feet onto the sand.

Cal tutted. “God,” he said, as he attempted to pick up the cans with his elbows. “I fonking hate this guy.”

* * *

“What kept you?” demanded Mech, when Cal eventually arrived back at the ship. “And why the fonk are you hopping?”

Cal hopped on the spot and fixed Mech with a cold, impassive stare. “Seriously, Mech? That’s what you notice?” he said. “Not the arms? Not my baby-pink skin, or the fact I’m wearing clothes meant for a four-armed alien with obesity issues? The hopping?”

“I was building up to that,” said Mech. He pointed to Cal’s stumps. They had continued to grow in the hours he and Konto had spent trudging across the desert, and he now had the beginnings of a wrist on the right. “You have no hands.”

“I’m well aware of that, Mech,” Cal said. “It’s not the sort of thing you miss.”

“Wow, what happened to you?” asked Loren, striding down the landing ramp of the Currently Untitled. The ship’s hull was still grubby with siltch, but a glow from inside told Cal that they’d got the lights fixed, even if nothing else.

“A lot happened to me, Loren,” Cal said. “A lot.”

“Why are you hopping?”

“That’s what I asked,” Mech said.

“I’m hopping because I have no shoes. And because ever since the sun came up, the sand has been melting the soles of my fonking feet off,” Cal said. He switched legs and contorted himself enough for the others to see the bottom of the foot he’d just been hopping on.

“Man, that’s nasty,” Mech grimaced when he saw the crispy-fried chopped-liver that was Cal’s sole.

“Isn’t it, though?” Cal said, his voice taking on a slightly hysterical edge. “I let it heal up, then I swap and do it all over again. I’ve been doing that for the past eight miles.”

His voice became a whispered sob. “You know how long it takes to hop eight miles across a desert?”

“I mean, I could probably calculate it,” Mech began.

“You don’t have to. It’s fine. I already know,” Cal said. “A long time. A long, agonizingly unpleasant time. That’s how long.”

“You should’ve taken Splurt,” Loren said.

Cal shot her a dirty look that told her he was only too aware of this fact, then hopped past Loren and Mech and onto the ramp. “I’m going inside,” he told them. “You’ll find me in my room, hugging myself and crying.”

They listened to him thudding up the ramp on one foot. He was halfway along the corridor before his voice drifted out. “Why the fonk am I still hopping?”

Loren rolled her eyes and looked up at Mech. “You think he got what we sent him for?”

“Didn’t look like it,” Mech said.

“Yeah. I didn’t like to ask. He seemed kind of… on edge.”

Konto’s voice took them both by surprise. “He’s been like that for a while. I got sick of listening to him bedging, so I gave in and carried these.”

A coil of cable, several tin cans, and some other assorted pieces of metal clanked onto the sand at Mech’s feet. “That man sure knows how to complain,” Konto said.

“Says the guy with shoes!” Cal called from inside the Untitled. “And arms!”

Konto glanced up the ramp, flicked his eyes across the ship for a moment, then gestured to the scrap in the sand. “That enough?”

“That should do it,” Mech confirmed, bending to retrieve the metal.

“Thanks for your help,” Loren said. “We owe you one.”

“You owe me one bike, eight miles of shoe leather, and six hours of my life I’m never going to get back,” Konto said.

Loren shot Mech a sideways look. “Uh, we don’t really have any money.”

Konto nodded slowly and raised his eyes to the Currently Untitled again. There was something almost wistful about his expression as he took in the sleek curves and growing collection of dents. “Nice ship,” he said.

“You ain’t getting the ship,” Mech told him.

“I don’t want your ship,” Konto replied. “Trust me, my space days are over. I’m just saying… nice ship.”

“Thanks,” Loren said. “We like it.”

“Though you wouldn’t know that from the way she keeps smashing it into shizz,” Mech said.

With a final glance at the Untitled, Konto turned away. “Well, good luck,” he told them.

“What about the bike?” Loren asked. She staggered as Mech elbowed her. “What?” she whispered. “We should at least offer to repay him.”

Konto stopped, but didn’t turn. “You want to repay me?”

“Not particularly,” Mech grunted.

“If we can, yes,” said Loren.

“Then fix your ship, get off my planet, forget you ever saw me,” Konto said. “And don’t come back.”

“Man, you have got yourself a deal,” Mech said.

“And tell your friend he’s an annoying shizznod.”

“Oh, we do,” Mech assured him. “On a pretty regular basis.”

“Good,” said Konto. He took a step away, but paused there. “And tell him thanks.”

“Thanks?” said Loren. “For what?”

“Just ‘thanks,’” Konto said. Then, with a nod, he set off again. They watched him until he reached the crack in the ground and slipped inside. Only then did Mech shoot Loren the look of disdain he’d been holding onto.

“We should at least offer to repay him?” he said, mimicking her.

“What’s wrong with that? It was only fair,” Loren said. They both turned and headed up the ramp. “And I don’t sound like that.”

“That sounded exactly like you,” Mech said.

“It did not.”

“It did not!” Mech imitated.

“Just shut the fonk up and let’s go fix the ship, Disselpoof,” Loren told him.

“Bedge, that was a low blow,” Mech said. His metal jaw curved into a smirk. “But let’s go fix the damn ship.”

* * *

Miz sat forward in her chair, her eyes narrowed as she scrutinized Cal. He was sitting in the scorched remains of his usual chair, leaning to the left so as not to fall off the side with the missing armrest. The whole thing reeked of burning leather, although that may well have been his feet.

“You look terrible,” Miz said.

Cal gave a half-hearted nod of agreement. He was looking a lot better than he had a short time ago. Changing into his own clothes had helped, and the fact that his epidermis had almost completely regrown was a big help, too. All in all, though, he was far from looking his best.

“Like, why are your ears bright pink?” Miz asked.

Cal turned, trying to see the sides of his head. This proved a largely unsuccessful endeavor. “I have ears again?”

He raised both arms and extended the perfectly smooth, baby-sized thumbs that had been developing for the past hour or so. They were the only fingers he had, so he was determined to make the most of them. “Awesome.”

“And what happened to your hands?” Miz quizzed.

“They fell off,” Cal said.

Miz hesitated. “Is that, like, an Earth thing?”

“Not particularly,” Cal said. “Anyway, the good news is, they’re growing back.”

Sure enough, what had been stumps were now almost fully-formed hands, albeit a little smaller than normal, and with just the one underdeveloped thumb on each.

“I’d say I’ll be good as new in around three hours,” Cal said. “Although, obviously that’s a complete guess, and I don’t really have anything to base it on. It could be one hour, it could be five. The point is, I’ll be all-hands-on-deck before you know it.”

He summoned the energy to grin. “See what I did there?”

Miz tutted and sat back in her chair. “Or they might not grow back,” she pointed out.

Cal blinked. “Huh?”

“Maybe, like, this is as far as they’re going to go. They haven’t changed much since you came through here.”

“They haven’t?” Cal asked, his voice suddenly tinged with panic. He turned his hands over, studying them, then shot Miz a frantic, wide-eyed look. “Why would you even say that? Oh, God, what if this is as far as they grow back?”

Splurt lowered himself down from the ceiling until he was just above Cal’s lap, then dropped with an elastic snap. The little green blob crawled onto the end of Cal’s left arm and rearranged himself until he was hand-shaped.

“Thanks, buddy,” Cal told him. He thought about waggling his fingers and, to his amazement, all five green digits responded. “Well, that’s awesome,” he said. “And kind of freaky.”

“News from Master Mech and Mistress Loren,” Kevin announced. “Repairs are complete, and we shall be taking off momentarily.”

“Finally,” Miz said, hooking a leg over the arm of her chair and settling back. “I swear, we’ve been stuck on this shizzhole of a planet for, like, ever.”

“It’s been nine hours,” Cal said.

“Nine boring hours,” Miz replied.

Cal held up both his Splurt hand and his almost non-existent one. “That’s not necessarily the word I’d have chosen. Personally, I’ve had quite an eventful time, but I take your point. The sooner we get off this place, the better.”

The door swished open and Mech clanked onto the bridge. He briefly regarded Cal, noted the Splurt hand, but chose not to pass comment.

“All fixed up,” he said, making his way to the front. “We can get out of here soon. Loren said she has to take care of something first.”

“Take care of what?” Cal asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask,” Mech said. “Ain’t none of my business.”

“It’s nothing to worry about, sir,” Kevin said. “Mistress Loren is merely using the bathroom.”

“Oh,” said Cal.

“She shouldn’t be long,” Kevin continued. “She’s just sitting down… now.”

Cal glanced at the ceiling. “Uh… OK. Gotcha.”

“Based on previous observations, she shouldn’t be more than forty-seven seconds,” Kevin said. “Assuming, of course, we’re only talking about a Number One…”

“OK, Kevin, thanks for the update, pal,” Cal said. “I think our imaginations can reluctantly take it from here.”

“Very good, sir,” said Kevin.

There was a pause, then: “Ah.”

“What’s wrong?” Cal asked.

“I’m rather afraid we may have to delay take-off, sir,” Kevin replied.

Cal sat forward in his wobbly, half-melted chair. “What? Why?”

“It isn’t a Number One.”

* * *

Six agonizingly descriptive minutes later, Loren returned to the bridge to find Cal and Miz both sitting stiffly and awkwardly in their chairs. Mech stood facing front, back straight, body rigid. None of them made eye contact as she strode past and took her seat.

“Everyone ready?” she asked, sliding in behind her controls and pulling the console toward her.

“Yep,” said Cal. “You?”

Loren flicked a series of switches and her controls illuminated in front of her. “All set.”

She glanced back over her shoulder and caught Cal and Miz both trying very hard not to look at her.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” said Cal.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

Cal altered his expression in half a dozen subtle ways over the space of a second. “Like what?”

“Like that,” Loren said. “Like the way you’re looking at me now.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cal said. He smiled and gestured to the screen. “Stop being paranoid and just fly us out of here. The sooner we get off this planet, the better.”

“I couldn’t agree more, sir,” Kevin said. “Also, ma’am, just for your information, I took the liberty of running a second flush. That first one didn’t quite shift everything, but it’s all gone now.”

Loren’s eyes widened a fraction in horror. She looked to Cal and Miz, but they both quickly averted their eyes. Cal gestured to the screen again.

“Let’s go,” he said. “And let us never speak of any of this again.”

Nine

The Currently Untitled rocketed upward, leaving the surface of Destitution to grow smaller and less imposing behind it. Cal gripped his single armrest with a hand made almost entirely of Splurt, and had a horrible moment when he remembered why the chair had got into this state in the first place.

“Wait, this isn’t going to catch fire on me again, is it?” he asked.

“No, sir,” Kevin replied.

“You sure? Because that would absolutely fit in with the day I’ve had,” Cal said. “It’d actually only be, like, the sixth worst thing to have happened.”

“I got to the root of the problem, sir,” Kevin told him. “It turns out that one of the many, many impacts Mistress Loren failed to avoid caused a problem with the in-ship security protocols. The chair activated a defensive mechanism usually reserved for situations such as hijacking, abduction, or Grand Theft Spacecraft.”

Cal turned the chair a little. It groaned beneath him. “So, what? If someone steals the ship the chair catches fire?”

“Not automatically, sir,” Kevin said. “I have to activate it manually.”

“Right. Right,” said Cal. He considered this. “So… were you activating it manually earlier?”

“Not deliberately, sir,” Kevin said. “But things were a little chaotic with the ship’s systems, and I may have accidentally pressed the ‘burn alive’ button.”

“I see,” said Cal.

“On a number of separate occasions.”

“Right,” said Cal. He rocked the chair a little. “You’re not going to accidentally press it again, are you?”

“Heavens, no, sir,” said Kevin. “I’m almost certain.”

Cal was about to question the ‘almost’ but decided it was probably best not to know. Instead, he tried to get comfortable and braced himself for the inevitable shuddering as Loren gunned the ship through the edges of the planet’s atmosphere, and the sky became a swirl of stars and color across the screen.

They had left the planet at an angle designed to steer them away from where the space battle had been taking place, even though Kevin’s scans had suggested the action was all over. If there was one thing Cal had learned not to trust, it was Kevin’s scans. If there were two things he had learned not to trust, they were Kevin’s scans, and Kevin in general. Not necessarily in that order.

As they cleared the atmosphere, one of the larger moons of Destitution crept above the curved edge of the planet way over on the left. Another, much smaller moon, hung in space up and to the right, tumbling through its orbit with a slow, steady sort of grace.

Destitution itself seemed to shimmer through the atmosphere, giving the unforgiving terrain an almost magical sort of sparkle.

“From up here, it actually looks pretty nice,” Cal remarked.

“Not bad,” Loren agreed.

“Total hellhole down there, of course,” said Cal. “But from up here you could almost convince yourself it was pleasant. You know, provided you didn’t do anything stupid, like set foot on the place. Or get any closer than we currently are.”

He called over to Mech. “Hey, Mech? Let’s add this to our list.”

Mech glowered back over his shoulder. “What list.”

“You know. The list,” said Cal. When Mech showed no signs of understanding what the fonk he was talking about, he continued. “The list of planets never to visit again.”

“We ain’t got a list of planets never to visit again,” Mech said.

Cal blinked in surprise. “Wait, what? We don’t? After some of the dives we’ve been to? That feels like an oversight.” He clicked his Splurt-fingers. “Make a list,” he told Mech. “Make a list of planets never to visit again. Number one, Destitution. Number two, that ice planet where those space boy scouts tried to eat me. Joint number two, the one with the clowns. In fact, make that joint number one. Number three…”

He stopped when he realized Mech was miming writing on an invisible notepad.

“Are you pretending to write this down?” he asked.

“Yes,” Mech confirmed. He continued to make notes in the air.

“Well, don’t!” Cal said. “Actually write it down.”

“I ain’t got a pen,” Mech said.

“Then find one! Or, I don’t know, make a brain-list.”

“I’m making a regular list,” Mech said, still pretending to write.

“Cut that out!” Cal told him. “That’s a direct order! Your captain commands you to stop writing in that imaginary notebook.”

“It’s an imaginary sketchpad,” Mech said. “I couldn’t find my imaginary notebook.”

Cal sighed. “God, you’re getting sassy these days,” he said. “I mean, I ask you to do one simple thing.”

“I ain’t your fonking secretary,” Mech scowled, dropping his hands to his sides. “Make your own damn lists.”

Kevin gave a wry chuckle. “Oh, I do so love these little exchanges of yours,” he said. “The back and forth is really quite refreshing.”

Cal looked up. “Hey, Kevin. Can you do me a favor and take a list?”

“Of course, sir, I’d be more than happy to,” Kevin replied. “Would you like me to do it before or after the warning? I’m happy either way.”

“Well, I don’t really mind which… Wait,” said Cal. “What warning?”

“About the ship, sir,” Kevin said.

“Our ship? Is there a problem?” Cal asked.

“No, sir. I meant the other ship.”

Loren peered down at her readouts. “What other ship? I don’t see anything. Mech?”

“I got nothing,” Mech replied.

“I see something,” said Miz.

“Shizz. You do?” Cal groaned. “What is it?”

Miz tapped the screen that was built into her armrest. “It’s, like, this blue triangle.”

Loren tutted. “That’s us.”

“Is it?” Miz asked. She looked more closely at the display. “Then why is it blue? I mean, like, our ship isn’t blue.”

She narrowed her eyes, then glanced around the bridge, as if she could see through the walls. “Is our ship blue? I haven’t really paid too much attention.”

“It isn’t blue, ma’am,” Kevin replied. “Similarly, it isn’t a perfect triangle, but I can confirm that the vessel you see on your display is, indeed, our own. I was referring to this ship.”

The screen changed to show a view from one of the Untitled’s rear cameras. The bottom of the image showed the curved atmosphere of Destitution, with a reddish-orange sun looming in the distance.

Partly obscuring these was a patch of solid darkness. Had it not been for the wedge shape that it cut out of the atmosphere, the ship would have been almost impossible to see.

“Who are these guys?” Cal wondered.

“Can’t really tell,” said Loren. They were both whispering, as if any sudden sound might give them away. “But I think it’s one of the ships that attacked us earlier. Similar size, anyway.”

“Then what the fonk are we waiting for?” asked Cal. “Go. Fly us out of here. Warp five. Hyperspace. Make the jump to lightspeed, or whatever. I am not crash-landing on that goddam planet again.”

“On it,” said Loren, her fingers flying across her controls. “But you don’t have a seatbelt.”

“No, but I’ve got a giant Splurt hand with one hell of a grip,” Cal replied. His Hulk-like green fingers tightened around the end of his remaining armrest, crushing it into a knobbly lump of metal. “Now, punch it!”

Loren punched it.

The stars blurred as the Currently Untitled jumped forward.

Then they stopped blurring when the ship immediately juddered to a stop.

“Way to go, Loren,” Miz snapped.

“It isn’t me!” Loren replied. She pushed forward on the thrusters. The engines whined, but the stars remained steadfastly unblurry. “This isn’t my fault!”

“Oh, sure it isn’t,” said Miz. “Maybe the engines just broke themselves this time.”

“The engines are fine,” Loren insisted.

“Great, then let’s get the fonk out of here,” Cal said.

Loren shook her head and slammed a few levers forward. “No, I mean the engines are fine but we’re not going anywhere.”

“We appear to be ensnared in some form of tractor beam,” Kevin informed them. “Originating from the ship behind us. I could be wrong, but I fear this may be very bad news for all seven of us.”

“It’s always bad news, Kevin,” Cal sighed. “It’s always bad news for… wait.”

He looked around the bridge and counted under his breath. “What do you mean, ‘all seven’ of us?”

“There are six of us, including you,” Mech said.

“Or is Mech so fat you counted him twice?” Cal asked.

“I ain’t fat. I’m almost entirely made out of metal. How the fonk can I be fat?”

“OK, not fat. Hefty,” Cal said. “Bulky. You know? Chunky.”

“Oh, yeah?” Mech snapped. “Well, how chunky do you think my foot will feel when it’s up your ass?”

Cal wasted a few seconds contemplating this. “Uncomfortably chunky?” he guessed.

“You’re damn right!”

“Guys! Focus!” Loren urged. “Kevin, what do you mean ‘all seven’ of us?”

“You, ma’am. Master Cal, Master Mech, Mistress Mizette, Master Splurt, the Slurrit hiding in the kitchen, and myself,” Kevin explained. There was some quiet whispering from the ceiling. “I’m pretty sure that makes seven. And I fear for the safety of all of us, should we be unable to escape the pull of that tractor beam.”

Nobody was listening to the end of Kevin’s sentence. They had all turned to look at the door leading out into the corridor, and to the kitchen beyond.

“There’s a Slurrit hiding in the kitchen,” said Cal. He didn’t phrase it as a question, more just a statement of fact. Largely useless as Kevin was, this seemed an oddly specific mistake for him to have made, so Cal was choosing to accept it at face value.

Miz sniffed the air. “Yeah, there’s a Slurrit in the kitchen,” she confirmed.

“And you’re only picking this up now?” Loren asked.

Mizette scowled at her. “Like, since when was it my job to keep track of who’s in the kitchen?” she demanded. “Mech’s got scanners, and Kevin literally has a camera pointing into every room. Even the bathroom, Loren.”

Loren blinked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Nothing,” Cal said, quickly. He jumped up and pointed with his giant green Splurt-hand. “I’ll go check it out. Loren, you have the conn.”

Loren half-turned in her chair. “What does that mean?”

Cal hesitated. “It means… I don’t know. It’s just, like, a thing captains say. You have the conn. Do you accept the conn?”

Loren glanced to Mech, who shrugged. “I don’t know. What is it?”

“Just accept the fonking conn,” Cal said. He mimed throwing her something. “This is the conn. Take it.”

Loren made no move to catch the offered imaginary item. Cal tutted. “Great. Now the conn’s on the floor. Good job.”

“Uh, hello?” said Miz. “We’re still, like, totally caught in a tractor beam.”

“Shizz, yes!” said Cal. He pointed to the screen. “Loren, get us out of it. Mech, do something useful. Push buttons or something. At least try to look busy. Miz…”

Mizette flicked her gaze to him and exhaled slowly through her nostrils. “Keep doing what you’re doing,” Cal said. He gave her one giant green thumbs up and one tiny pink one. “Great work.”

That done, he hurried off the bridge, out into the corridor, and pressed himself flat against the wall by the kitchen door. “Kevin, report,” Cal whispered.

“On what, sir?”

“The… what do you mean ‘on what’? On the guy in the kitchen,” Cal hissed.

“Oh. Yes. He’s standing up near the table, sir,” Kevin said. “No, wait. He’s sitting down.”

“Is he armed?” Cal asked.

“Well, he is in possession of a spoon, sir,” Kevin replied. “Does that count?”

“I guess that depends on what he does with it,” Cal said.

He raised his Splurt-fist and whispered to it. “You ready?”

The squidgy green knuckles became strips of solid brass. A moment later, several spikes sprouted from the metal.

“OK, let’s do this,” Cal said.

Caught up in the moment, he spun, roared, raised a foot, and fired a kick at the door. It slid open a split second before he connected, and he performed an impromptu splits in the doorway before toppling sideways and thudding against the doorframe.

“Ow. Fonk,” he grimaced.

“Oh, honey, are you OK?” gasped the Slurrit. He was sitting at the table, about to tuck into a steaming bowl of something pink and greasy. Cal recognized his voice at once.

“Wait, you’re Loren’s friend, aren’t you?” Cal said, struggling himself upright and subtly tugging his pants out from between his butt-cheeks. “Garunk, wasn’t it?”

Garunk held up his sludgy gray hands. “Guilty as charged!” he said. “And well done you for remembering. Clever and handsome all in one package.”

Cal’s chest puffed up a little. “Thank you, Garunk,” he said. “It’s nice to be appreciated once in a while. But, uh, here’s a question.”

“I’m all ears,” said Garunk, dipping the spoon in the bowl and stirring the greasy contents in a way that somehow managed to be incredibly suggestive. “Hit me.”

“You’re on our ship,” Cal pointed out. While this wasn’t, strictly speaking, a question, Garunk figured it out.

“Yeah. I know. Double guilty as charged!” he said. He dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I stowed away. Was that bad? Are you mad? I hope you’re not mad.”

Cal gave a shake of his head. “Uh, no. Not mad. Just confused. Didn’t you say you hated space?”

“Yeah,” Garunk conceded. “I mean, I thought I did. But then I went and lived in a hole in the ground for five years and… I don’t know. It suddenly seemed more appealing. Besides, hanging out with Loren? Ah-may-zing. Did I tell you she was number one at the Academy? And I literally mean she was literally number one!”

He scooped something squat and wriggling from the bowl and blew gently on it to cool it down. Cal eyed the thing in horror as it squirmed on the spoon.

“Want some?” Garunk asked.

“Christ, no,” said Cal. “Did that come from the replicator?”

“Guilty again!” Garunk said. “I’ve been eating sand for, like, half a decade. When I saw the replicator I was like, ‘Kroysh! Gimme some of that Bootzoid Gumbo!’ You hear me?”

Cal’s stomach tightened as a hole opened in Garunk’s muddy face and he shoveled the squirming thing inside. It crunched unpleasantly as he chewed.

“Yeah,” said Garunk, spraying little blobs of the stuff onto the table. “You hear me.”

Cal found his eyes drawn to the replicator. For an inanimate piece of machinery, it somehow managed to convey the impression that it had been recently violated. Cal made a mental note to scrub it out before ordering up his next batch of banoffee pie.

OK, maybe not scrub it. Scrubbing was hard. All that elbow action and rubbing. He’d give it a light hosing down, instead. Or, failing that, a polish with his sleeve.

Fonk it. It’d be fine.

“So, you just stowed away?” Cal said. “You could’ve asked us to take you.”

“I know, but I was like… eeek. You know? Like, I absolutely could’ve asked, but I was like, ‘But what if they say no?’ and then I’d be all, like, ‘Waaah! Nobody loves me! I should just crawl in a hole and die. Wait, I’m already in a hole. That’s my life. Waaah!’ You know?”

Cal pulled a non-committal sort of face. “I mean, I guess, but—”

“I knew you’d understand,” Garunk said. He shoveled another spoonful of gumbo into his face-hole, crunched noisily, then gestured around with his spoon. “So, what’s the plan? Are we off on some big adventure somewhere?”

Cal shook his head. “No, we’re… Oh, fonk. I forgot. We’re being captured.”

“Captured?” Garunk gasped. He jumped to his feet, toppling the bench he’d been sitting on. “O-M-Fonking-G! So exciting! I’ve never been captured before!”

“Meh. The novelty wears off pretty quickly,” Cal said. He eyed Garunk, who seemed to be having difficulty breathing. “You OK?”

“Palpitations. I swear, I’m having palpitations. We’re being captured!” Garunk squeed. “Who’s capturing us? It is a bad guy? I bet it’s a bad guy!”

A loud clank rattled through the ship, and Cal got a distinct sense that they had stopped moving. “No idea,” he said. He crossed to the small kitchen window and raised the blind, revealing a vast elephant’s graveyard of rusting spaceships. “But I get the feeling we’re about to find out.”

Ten

“So, what’s the situation?” asked Cal, half-crouching behind Loren. On screen, he could see pretty much the same view as when he’d left—a lot of stars, a couple of suns, and a bit of planet. The edges were cut off by two vertical black blocks, though, which Cal quickly came to realize were the walls of a ship. Everything else—what he thought of as ‘the space stuff’—were all beyond a docking bay force field. Whatever had snared them had successfully reeled them in.

“We’re aboard the big ship,” Loren said. “Engines are non-responsive, weapon systems are locked. The ship’s pretty much dead.”

“And Kevin?” Cal asked.

“I’m fine, sir.”

“Damn. Was hoping for some kind of silver lining there,” Cal said. He raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Kidding, Kevin. Glad you’re still with us, pal.”

He shot Loren a look and gave a shake of his head that was almost imperceptible, but not almost imperceptible enough.

“I saw that, sir,” Kevin told him.

“Still kidding,” Cal assured him.

He shook his head at Loren again, even more incrementally this time.

“I also saw that, sir.”

“Whoa! The ship talks! That is lush!”

Everyone except Cal turned. He gave a vague wave with his Splurt-hand in the direction of the door. “Oh, yeah. Guys, you know Garunk. Garunk, you know the guys.”

“So you’re our stowaway,” said Loren, her eyebrows raising in surprise. “I thought you hated space?”

“We’ve done that part,” Cal said. He pointed two Splurt-fingers at his eyes, then directed them to Loren’s console. “Focus. Less of the chit-chat. We need to get out of here.”

“Do we know who’s got us?” Miz asked.

“No, but the fact they wrenched us out of space against our will makes me think they’re not going to be looking out for our best interests,” said Cal. “Also, I don’t know if anyone has looked out of the side window recently, but there are a lot of broken ships in here, and I don’t think they came for the nightlife. I think they were captured, like us.”

“But they didn’t escape!” Garunk said in a breathless whisper. He placed the back of a lumpy hand against the muddy expanse of his forehead. “Trapped. Forever. Doomed to spend eternity in this forsaken place!”

Mech looked from Garunk to Cal. “What the fonk is he talking about?”

“I have no idea,” Cal said. “I think he’s romanticizing the whole ‘being captured by evil aliens’ thing. I don’t really want to pop his bubble quite yet.”

“Oh. Shame,” said Garunk, then he slapped himself on the wrist and gave a snort. “Cheeky!”

“We are receiving a hail, sir,” said Kevin. “Should I answer?”

“Yes,” said Cal, hurrying back to his chair. “But wait until I’m sitting down. And high angle, again. But not top of my head high. Oh, and this time, when I say something dramatic, can you do a sort of zoom in and add some music? Nothing fancy, just a sort of dun-dun-duuun at the key moment?”

“But, sir—”

“Trust me, Kevin. It’ll look great. It’s going to scare the shizz out of these fonks. We’ll be out of here in no time.”

Cal stooped to retrieve the armrest that had broken off his chair, made a valiant if ultimately unsuccessful effort to fix it, then tossed it into the corner. He sat in the chair and angled it so the broken half wouldn’t be visible, then drew himself up to his full sitting height and tucked the hand with his tiny thumb down out of sight beside him.

“OK. I’m ready. Go,” he said.

It was only then that Cal realized that the comm-link was already active. The ‘face’—for want of a more accurate word—on screen looked more or less identical to the one they’d seen earlier. It was positively ugly with teeth and had just the merest suggestion of eyeballs blinking in the dark, hairy caverns of its nostrils.

“How long has he been there?” Cal asked. He shot the ceiling a reproachful look. “You just immediately connected him, didn’t you?”

“That depends on your definition of ‘immediately,’ sir,” Kevin replied.

“I meant the standard definition,” said Cal.

“Oh. In that case, yes, sir,” Kevin said. “I connected him immediately. Although, in my defense, you left almost a third of a second gap between your ‘Yes,’ and your ‘But wait until I’m sitting down,” so I rather think we both have to take our fair share of the blame on this one.”

Cal fought the urge to argue further, drew in a breath to compose himself, then smiled at the camera. “Hi—” he began, before the little window-within-a-window that showed the video feed of himself zoomed in suddenly, and a dramatic dun-dun-dunnn, echoed around the bridge.

“Not yet, Kevin,” Cal said. “You’re supposed to wait until I say something dramatic.”

“That was quite dramatic, sir.”

“I said ‘Hi.’ That was it,” Cal argued.

“Yes, but it was the way you said it, sir,” Kevin replied. “To be honest, it gave me the shivers.”

“Me, too,” said Garunk. He made a clawing motion in the air. “Mrwooow!”

Cal pinched the bridge of his nose, muttered something uncomplimentary about the universe in general, then raised his head and smiled at the screen. “Hi. Again,” he said, then he caught sight of the window within a window again. “Kevin, you’re zoomed right in on my neck.”

“Indeed, sir.”

“Well… can you not? Could you maybe pull back?”

“Of course, sir.”

Cal nodded to the monstrous face. “Be right with you,” he said, watching as the camera angle widened. When it was in a comfortable midshot, he nodded. “There. Now…”

Cal tutted. “Jesus, Kevin. You can stop zooming out now,” he said, watching as the smaller image continued to retreat until it showed the entire bridge from one side to the other. “How the fonk are you even zoomed out that far?” he wondered, pointing with a Splurt-finger. “The camera’s there. How can you be zoomed out further than...? Know what? Forget it. Just leave it like that, it’s fine. We’ll do it like this.”

He took a moment to compose himself, then tried again from the top.

“Hi there. Sorry about that. Just a little confusion there,” Cal said as brightly as he could manage. “Speaking of confusion, I think there’s been some on your part, too. You see, I couldn’t help but notice that you’ve accidentally captured us and brought us aboard your ship.”

He raised his mismatched hands and chuckled. “I know, I know. It’s an easy mistake to make. We’ve all done it.”

Cal leaned forward, his friendly demeanor falling away. “But here’s the thing. You have thirty seconds to give us back control of our ship…”

His eyes narrowed. His Splurt-fist thudded on the intact-but-crumpled armrest of his chair. “…or suffer the consequences.”

Cal glared into the alien’s nostrils for a while, then flicked his eyes down to the smaller screen. “Now, Kevin,” he whispered from the of his mouth.

“Now what, sir?”

“Do the… Oh, forget it.”

“Already forgotten, sir,” Kevin replied.

Cal sat back in the chair and glowered at the toothy monstrosity. “Those are our terms. Let us go, or there is going to be hell to pay. You have thirty seconds.”

“You already gave him thirty seconds,” Miz chipped in. “It should be, like, twenty seconds by now.”

“Fine. You have twenty seconds,” said Cal.

“That’s not enough time to disengage a tractor beam,” Loren remarked.

Cal tutted. “Jesus. It isn’t? OK, how long does that take?”

Loren shrugged. “I don’t know. Depending on the technology, like… forty seconds?”

“This ship looked pretty old,” said Mech. “It ain’t going to have the latest tech. Could take maybe a minute and a half to fully disengage.”

“God. OK, fine,” Cal said. He addressed the screen again. “You have between twenty and ninety seconds to disen… Kevin, why are you zooming in?”

“It felt like the right time, sir.”

“Well, it isn’t! Just hold it there. Medium close-up. No, medium close-up. No! What are you doing? Not of Loren, of me.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“That’s still Loren. A medium close-up of me.”

“Is it? Oh yes. One moment.”

A moment passed. The screen changed.

“Of my face, Kevin. Jesus Christ, how hard can it be?”

Cal waited until his face appeared on the inset screen again. When it did, it was patently out of focus, but he chose to cut his losses and not say anything about it.

“OK. Just hold it there,” Cal instructed. He breathed in, counted to five, then breathed out again before addressing the monstrosity on the comm-link. “Sorry. It’s been a long couple of days,” he explained. “Now, as I was saying, you have… I don’t know even know anymore. You have some time to release us, and then we’ll say no more about it. Deal?”

The creature on screen flared its nostrils, giving a clearer glimpse of the eyeballs lurking inside. Its teeth rippled like seaweed on an ocean current.

“Bokosh-tun,” it spat. “Aburrop naakta shash.”

Cal groaned. “Oh, yeah. I forgot. We don’t understand a word these guys say.”

A sound blared out from the speakers.

Dun-dun-dunnn!

On screen, the inset image of Cal rushed forward until only part of his forehead and the edge of an eyebrow was visible.

“Kevin, end transmission,” Cal said, burying his face in his Splurt-hand.

The image of the creature blinked off and was replaced by the view of outside. Silence descended on the bridge, only to eventually be broken by Kevin.

“I don’t know about anyone else,” the AI intoned. “But I think that went really rather well.”

“Going to have to agree to disagree on that one, Kevin,” Cal said, heaving his chair around until he faced the rest of the crew. “That was horrible.”

“He’s right,” Mech confirmed. “That was embarrassing. They’ll probably talk about that conversation for years.”

“OK, so…”

“It’ll be on, like, their clip shows on TV. ‘Galaxy’s Most Cringeworthy Comm-Link Broadcasts,’” Mech continued. “You’ll be famous.”

Cal tutted. “Right. We get it,” he said. He jabbed a Splurt-thumb at the screen. “Who are these guys? Why don’t we understand them? What the fonk is going on? And what’s with the eye thing? That’s just unpleasant, right?”

“You couldn’t understand him? Lucky you!” said Garunk. He shuddered. “He was saying some pretty nasty things about you. Like, so harsh.”

“Wait, so you did understand him?” asked Cal. “How is that fair?”

“Butterfly effect,” said Loren. “Got to be. When we went back in time, we affected the future. The Carvers put us back in the reality that evolved from that version of the past.”

“So… what?” asked Miz, flicking her eyes up in a rare display of interest. “This isn’t our universe?”

“No. I mean yes,” said Loren. “I mean, I think it’s probably the closest version of it that exists, once you factor in the effects of the changes we made.” She looked over to Mech. “Right?”

“Fonked if I know,” said Mech, shrugging noisily. “Sounds plausible enough, I guess, but I ain’t no expert.”

Cal nodded, frowned, raised his eyes in surprise, then fell into a look of sort of stupefied confusion. “So… hold on,” he said. “Mech told younger me about the car accident that killed my…”

He couldn’t bring himself to speak the words out loud.

“About the accident. So, theoretically, younger me went on to become slightly older me, and stopped that car accident from ever happening, right?”

“Theoretically,” Loren confirmed.

“So, without going into too much detail, if that happened, then I didn’t wind up going into the whole spiral of self-destruction, petty crime, almost being killed by Ozzy Osbourne lifestyle that led to me being imprisoned on Earth. Right?”

“Makes sense,” Loren said.

“And we know Sinclair didn’t run his abduction scheme on the Butcher, because we killed him. Agreed?”

Mech and Loren both nodded their agreement. Miz had gone back to not listening. Garunk had absolutely no idea what anyone was talking about, so was electing to just stand quietly in the hope that everyone forgot he was a stowaway.

“Which begs the question,” said Cal, leaning forward in his chair. “How am I here? How come any of us are here? If we stopped me going to prison and stopped Sinclair’s abduction plan, then why am I still here? Why are any of us still here?”

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again,” Mech grunted. “Time shizz. Think about it too closely, and none of it makes sense.”

“So, what do we do?” Cal asked.

“We don’t think about it,” Mech replied.

Cal considered this for a moment, then shrugged. “Fonk it. Works for me,” he said. He clapped his unevenly sized hands together. “OK, so now that’s taken care of, what do we do about the teeth guys?”

“I’m pleased to report that I have some good news on that front, sir,” said Kevin.

Cal looked up to the ceiling. A few months ago, a sentence such as this one would’ve gotten his hopes up. A few weeks ago, he’d have known enough to try to restrain his excitement until Kevin revealed the inevitably disappointing conclusion to his statement.

Nowadays, he didn’t even have to do that. Any hope that Kevin had gleaned any genuinely useful information about their situation completely failed to materialize.

“Go for it,” Cal said, keen to get whatever half-baked nonsense Kevin had come up with out of the way so they could move on to figuring out an actual plan.

“I’ve successfully connected to this timeline’s version of Headnet, sir,” Kevin said. “It’s remarkably similar to our own in many regards, except the logo’s a sort of pale blue, as opposed to the traditional dark green. It’s quite refreshing, actually. I prefer this version, if I’m completely honest. It just feels more… alive.”

“Is there a point coming in the near future, Kevin?” Cal asked.

“Yes, sir. Now that I have connected successfully, I have acquired a wealth of information about this reality and its inhabitants, and gained full access to historical records detailing what happened after we journeyed back in time. The changes are really rather staggering, sir. Did you know Lady Vajazzle is now the president?”

Cal shifted awkwardly in his chair, feeling the weight of Mech and Loren’s glares on him. “We did hear something to that effect, yes,” he confessed.

“Oh. Well, that rather spoiled that bombshell,” Kevin said, disappointment coloring the edges of his voice. “I’ve also downloaded all the languages missing from your translation chip software. Would you like me to apply the update?”

Cal blinked. “Seriously? You found out all that stuff?”

“Indeed, sir.”

“You’re not going to wait until we tell you to do the update then say, ‘Just my little joke’?”

“No, sir. That would be rather crass,” Kevin pointed out a little reproachfully. “I hardly think now is the right time for frivolity, do you?”

“No. I guess not. Well… OK,” said Cal. “Great. That’s great, Kevin! Good job. Do it. Apply the update.”

He sat back and closed his eyes.

Then he opened them again.

“Wait. Will we still be able to say ‘ass’?”

“One can but hope, sir.”

“OK, great,” Cal said. He closed his eyes again, then immediately opened them once more. “Will it hurt?”

“Oh, no, sir,” said Kevin.

Cal gave a nod of approval, then closed his eyes again and relaxed.

“I’m afraid it’ll do much worse than that.”

“Huh?” said Cal, then a firestorm of data surged through his brain, and the world became a violent surge of ones and zeroes that constricted his throat, tightened his muscles, and turned his central nervous system into quivering strings of marshmallow.

Eleven

“Wha—?"

Cal woke to find himself face-down on something rough and uncomfortable. It squished his cheek into the side of his nose and rubbed uncomfortably against his newly grown ear.

He spent several seconds trying to force his eyes to open, before realizing that they already were, and that he was in a darkness more utter and absolute than he’d ever thought possible.

With a groan, he tried to stand up, only to crack his head on something solid a few inches above him. The shock of it made him pull forward sharply, which resulted in him smashing his chin against the floor.

These two events resulted, in turn, in quite a lot of swearing.

Once he’d gotten that out of his system, Cal raised his head more slowly until it met the object above. His scalp wasn’t perhaps the best part of his body for the job, but he rubbed it against the object, trying to figure out what it was.

Solid. Slightly rough, he reckoned. Quite big.

No. He had no fonking clue.

He tried to roll over onto his back, but there were walls on either side that prevented him moving more than a few inches in either direction.

It was at this point that an image popped into Cal’s head. It was not an image he particularly wanted to have in there, but it was one he was very much stuck with.

It was a coffin. He was inside a coffin.

And, he realized, he was moving. The floor beneath him undulated gently from side to side, as if gliding along a lazy river. Normally, Cal wouldn’t be adverse to the idea of gliding along a lazy river. It was just the ‘in a coffin’ bit that he was less keen on. Also the ‘unable to see if there’s a waterfall ahead’ part.

He thought back to those glorious ‘not lying face down in a coffin’ times and tried to recall what had happened. Kevin had run the update. His whole body had been consumed by something that wasn’t quite pain, but wasn’t a million fonking miles away from it, either. Something that was more than pain, in many ways. It had gone beyond mere agony and into something much deeper and more profound.

Fonking Kevin.

He remembered lots of noise. He remembered movement. Voices. He hadn’t understood them, at first, then had picked up on a few words. Trying to remember what those words had been now made his brain ache, and while a full-blown migraine wouldn’t have been the worst thing to currently be happening to him, it was unlikely to make the general experience any more pleasant. He stopped trying to remember the past and tried instead to figure out his immediate future. At the moment, it wasn’t looking particularly rosy.

“Loren? Mech? Miz? Can you hear me?” he whispered.

His voice echoed faintly inside the coffin. It was the only reply he received.

He tried again, a little louder this time.

“Guys? Hello? Anyone there?”

Nothing.

He clunked his head on the side of the box a few times. “Hey! Anyone out there?” he called. “I’m stuck inside a box! A little help here?”

Nobody answered. The coffin undulated onward.

Great.

After a few more seconds of this, a thought struck Cal and he felt a surge of hope. Maybe this wasn’t a coffin. Maybe it was a tunnel. He’d only felt walls on either side of him, not ahead or behind. Maybe he could crawl through the narrow chamber, Die Hard style, until he found an exit.

The space was too narrow for him to be able to bring his arms up, so he wriggled himself onward into the dark with his chin doing most of the heavy lifting.

Thunk.

“Fonk.”

Not a tunnel.

There was only one thing for it.

“Hey, let me out!” he cried, kicking and thrashing against the sides of the box. “You can’t do this. I have space rights, you know?”

He stopped when he heard the breathing, and felt his heart break into a samba rhythm. It was scratchy and frantic, and coming from inside the coffin.

There was something else in there with him. Something alive. Something puffing and panting like a wounded animal.

“H-hello?” Cal whispered.

The breathing became more hesitant for a moment, before returning to its prior wheeze. Oh, God. What was it? What was in there with…

Cal held his breath. The sound stopped.

“Oh, thank fonk,” he said, exhaling. “It was just me. For a minute there, I thought something was—”

A movement at his side startled him, forcing a sort of terrified yoosh of panic out through both nostrils. It was only when he felt the familiar stickiness of a certain green blob as it rolled up onto his lower back that the yoosh of panic became a sob of relief.

“Splurt!” Cal cried. “I am so glad to see you. Or, you know, feel you on my spine. What’s going on? Do you know where we are?”

Splurt rippled and wobbled for several seconds.

“Whoa, easy there, buddy,” Cal said. “One thing at a time.”

The little blob wobbled.

“The teeth guys stormed the Untitled?” Cal said.

Splurt undulated.

“Twenty of them, huh? With freeze rays? Like… actual freeze rays?”

Splurt vibrated.

“That’s kind of cool,” Cal said. “But, you know, in a boo, they suck, kind of way. Then what?”

Splurt flopped from side to side.

“Hey, don’t worry,” Cal soothed. “They had freeze rays. There was nothing you could’ve done. Probably. I mean, I don’t know how they work, or anything, but I’m assuming if you could’ve stopped them, you would have.”

Splurt boinged on Cal’s back.

“Exactly,” said Cal. “Any idea where they’re taking us?”

Splurt’s gyrations made it clear that he didn’t.

Cal sucked air in through his teeth, then wondered if he should be conserving it, and slowly exhaled it all back out again. “Here’s the way I see it. We have two options,” he said. “We can Hulk-smash our way out of this box, fight whatever’s out there, rescue the guys, get back to the Untitled, tell Kevin he’s a fonking idiot and that I hold him personally responsible for this, then make our getaway.”

Splurt rumbled.

“I was getting to the second option, buddy. Patience,” Cal told him. “Or we wait here and see what happens.”

The movements on his back were questioning and uncertain.

“I know, I prefer the first plan, too, but I’m thinking the second option might be the most sensible. We might burst out of here and find out we’re in a river of lava, or thousands of feet in the air, or whatever. Then what do we do? Climb back in? We’ll look like idiots.”

He nodded slowly, convincing himself of his own genius. “But if we wait until someone opens the box, we’ll have the element of surprise.”

Splurt didn’t respond at first, then gave another questioning ripple.

“No, element of surprise,” Cal said. “We discussed this. There’s no such thing as the elephant of surprise.”

Another ripple.

“Yes, I agree, it would be awesome, but it doesn’t exist. Sorry,” Cal said. “So, I say we play it safe, wait until we stop, then be ready to spring up and deal with whatever’s waiting for us. What do you say?”

Splurt wobbled.

“Shizz. You’re right,” Cal whispered. “We have stopped. OK, Splurt, as soon as someone lifts the lid, you grab them, OK?”

Splurt wiggled.

“No, don’t pull them in. There’s no room. There’s barely room in this thing for us.”

Wibble.

“No, not even if you crush them up really small,” Cal said. “Just grab them and hold them while I climb out? OK? OK.”

From beyond the walls of the coffin, he heard the scuff of approaching footsteps.

“Here goes, buddy,” Cal whispered. “Get ready. Three. Two…”

The bottom fell out of the coffin and Cal crunched onto a stone floor that was thick with dust. A moment later, Splurt landed on his back.

“Jesus. They couldn’t have opened the top like normal people?”

He and Splurt both rolled over to find one of the teeth-guys standing above them in an outfit made from sturdy red leather. It held a weapon in its long, slender hands, the muzzle pointing down at Cal.

Splurt gave a shudder.

“Oh,” said Cal. He swallowed. “So, that’s a freeze ray? And here I thought—”

A bolt of blinding white light hit him, and the movements of the teeth-guy reeled into an agitated high-speed blur, before everything around Cal became nothing but cool, wispy whiteness.

Twelve

Quite quickly, the wispy whiteness that had enveloped Cal was joined by a single high-pitched squeal that rattled his teeth in their sockets and made his eyeballs throb.

He tried to move, but he was completely paralyzed and unable to so much as blink. His nose tickled with the beginnings of a sneeze, but it was trapped there, unable to fulfill its destiny and reach its oh-so-satisfying conclusion.

Despite his full-body paralysis and the lack of external stimuli—or external stimuli beyond a sound like the letter E being drawn out forever, at least—Cal’s mind was still wide-awake and functioning perfectly.

OK, not ‘perfectly’ perhaps. That was generous. It had never really worked ‘perfectly.’ But it was working to the usual standard.

At first, Cal considered this to be a good thing. Sure, he might not be able to see anything, hear anything, or move in any way whatsoever, but he was nevertheless pleased that his mind was still active.

Forty seconds later, however, when he’d run out of things to think about, he was feeling less positive about it.

It wasn’t so much the vast empty white space that was bothering him. It was more that droning background hum. That and the sneeze. Probably mostly the sneeze, actually, now that he was focusing on it.

Fonk. The sneeze. That was going to drive him crazy.

He tried to distract himself by playing a game, but there weren’t a lot of games he could play. I Spy was out after ‘Something beginning with W,’ and even then there was no one around to guess, so it had been a lackluster experience at best.

He set his imagination to work, hoping some visualization exercises would take his mind off the sneeze, the hum, and the nagging dread that terrible things were about to be done to him. He imagined himself enjoying a delicious Five Guys burger, complete with an assortment of toppings. Onion. Mushrooms. Mustard, of course. A little relish and…

Fonk.

Now he was hungry, too.

He decided to make use of this free time, and set himself the task of figuring out where he actually was, and what was going on. Splurt had said the gun had been a freeze-ray. So, he’d been shot with a freeze-ray. That was his starting point, from which he’d be able to deduce everything else, he reckoned.

So. Freeze-ray. He didn’t think he was inside a block of ice. That might explain the misty whiteness, but it wouldn’t explain the humming sound or the fact that his body wasn’t responding to any of his commands.

Or would it? If he was completely encased in ice, he wouldn’t be able to move, would he? Or would he? He had no idea. It probably depended on the ice.

He tried waggling his tongue inside his mouth. It didn’t move. He suspected this either proved or disproved something, but couldn’t really work out what.

Wait. Cold. He wasn’t cold. If he was in a block of ice, he’d be cold, wouldn’t he? Even space ice was cold. That’s what made it ice.

So, he was fairly sure he wasn’t inside a block of ice. Not completely sure, but when could you ever be completely sure about anything, he thought?

Which meant… what? The freeze-ray hadn’t frozen him? Or it had frozen him in some other way that didn’t involve plunging temperatures and blocks of ice? Probably one of those, he reasoned, although he had absolutely no idea which one was correct.

Or maybe it wasn’t a freeze-ray at all, and Splurt had simply made a mistake. Maybe it had been just a bog-standard shooting people until they are dead type of gun, and this was Heaven.

Probably not. There were no angels, no Pearly Gates, no giant bearded guy in sandals. It completely sucked.

Hell, then?

He doubted it. Sure, being unable to move while being plagued by an annoying hum and a sneeze-in-waiting that wouldn’t fonk off was bad, but it wasn’t even close to Hell-bad.

Three minutes later, Cal had changed his mind. This was Hell. It had to be. He had been shot and killed, and now he was in space Hell. This was where he was going to spend the rest of eternity, alone in an empty white space with a sneeze brewing, and the letter E droning endlessly in his ear.

All things considered, he decided he’d prefer the traditional fire and brimstone, even if it meant the occasional spike up the ass. At least a hot spike up the ass was something. Something, he could deal with. Nothing was a whole other imaginary kettle of non-existent fish.

OK, so he knew where he was. That was good. Obviously, it wasn’t great that he had died and gone to Hell, but at least he knew where he was, which meant he could start planning his escape.

Cal looked around. As he couldn’t move any part of his body, including his eyeballs, this amounted to staring straight ahead and focusing his attention on different parts of his peripheral vision. As he did, he mentally cataloged what he saw.

Fonk all.

He wasn’t sure what he’d been hoping for, exactly. A door marked ‘Exit’ would’ve been nice, but he hadn’t been pinning a lot on that one. Besides, this was Hell, so a door marked ‘Exit’ was bound to be a trick, and would almost certainly lead to his situation becoming somehow worse. Much better to go for the door marked, ‘Genital torture,’ or ‘Full of Nazis,’ or whatever, he reckoned.

Sadly, those doors didn’t exist, either. There was nothing. Nothing but white emptiness as far as the eye could see.

Fonking Kevin and his fonking update, Cal thought. It gave him a vague sense of satisfaction, so he thought it again a few times, each time more forcibly than the one before.

The novelty quickly wore off.

He tried I Spy again, but found it unfulfilling.

It was round about this point that, to Cal’s immense relief, his body was flooded with barely comprehensible levels of agony and the whiteness evaporated to reveal a dark cave, illuminated faintly by glowing seams of neon blue in the walls.

One of the toothy nostril guys stood before him, the elongated fingers of both hands pressing firmly against Cal’s head and face. The pain that sizzled Cal’s insides stemmed from the thing’s touch, and Cal’s brain had just pulled itself together enough to tell his mouth to start screaming when the creature backed away and the pain evaporated, leaving behind only the memory of it.

As the figure stepped back, Cal saw more of the cave. He’d never had a lot of call to use the word ‘dank’ before, but decided now was the ideal situation in which to deploy it. The thin light from the veins of neon blue barely made a dent in the smothering darkness. Liquid dripped in several of the more shadowy areas, and the air had a musky, spicy sort of smell to it that burned the back of Cal’s throat and made his eyes water.

As he looked around, he saw Loren. She was affixed to some sort of metal stretcher which was, in turn, fastened upright to one of the walls. Another of the toothy-fonks stood in front of her, his fingers pressed against her head.

Cal watched as she first stirred, then opened her eyes. For a split-second, there was nothing there but confusion, and then the pain obliterated that and her face twisted in a grimace of agony.

“Hey, cut it out!” Cal barked.

The figure in front of him pressed a fingertip to Cal’s forehead and fire drilled deep into his skull. He convulsed and twitched for what felt like hours, then the finger was withdrawn and he sagged against bonds he hadn’t realized were holding him.

Almost a full minute passed before he composed himself enough to mumble, “Ow.”

He raised his head and saw Loren watching him. Her eyes were wide in panic, her blue skin paler than he’d ever seen it before.

“You OK?” he asked. “Did they hurt you?”

“Uh, yeah,” Loren said. “You?”

“Fonk, yes,” Cal replied. He mustered something that wasn’t quite a smile, but would have to do. “Still, nice to get a day out, isn’t it? See new faces.” He regarded the creature in front of him. “That qualifies as a face, right? It’s just, I’ve never seen one so hideous before.”

Loren’s eyes widened further. “Cal!”

“It’s fine, relax,” Cal said. “They can’t understand us.”

The finger was pressed against his forehead again. A bomb-blast of agony exploded inside his skull. He blacked out for a moment, caught a fleeting glimpse of Tobey Maguire neatly folding some pajamas, then was snapped back into consciousness.

“They can understand us just fine. Their chips were never the problem,” Loren pointed out.

Cal coughed up something wet and unpleasant tasting. “Oh, yeah. Good point,” he conceded.

“And our chips have been upgraded,” Loren told him. “We can understand them, too.”

“Right. Gotcha,” said Cal. He smiled sheepishly at the monstrous thing in front of him. “You know I didn’t mean any of that stuff, right? You’re beautiful. Unconventionally beautiful? Yes, but beautiful all the same. Anyway, it’s what’s on the inside that—”

Another finger-tap wracked his body with pain.

“Going to stop talking now,” he wheezed, once the ordeal was over.

“Good. Because I was about to rip out your tongue,” said the chalky-white figure in a scratchy whisper that lingered in the ears a little longer than felt comfortable. “Forcibly.”

Cal couldn’t help himself. “Is there another way to rip out a tongue?” he wondered, then he quickly clamped his mouth shut and indicated with a shake of his head that he’d finished talking.

“Who are you?” Loren asked. “Where are the others? What have you done with them?”

“We are the Harvesters,” said the figure in front of Loren. “You have been Harvested on behalf of the great Manacle, Enslaver of Worlds.”

The voice was oddly feminine, and Cal realized this one was built a little differently than the guy in front of him. She was a little taller, but slighter across the shoulders. Her skull curved down at the back, almost in the shape of a shark’s fin, whereas the male Harvester’s head angled upward in a sort of mirror image of the female’s.

“You may express your gratitude now,” the male Harvester told Cal.

“Our gratitude? For what?” Cal asked.

“For your Harvesting.”

“Oh,” said Cal. He considered this. “No. No, I think I’m fine.”

The man raised a finger.

“Wait! Not so fast there. What I meant to say was, ‘Yay! Whoo! Good times!’”

“That is enough,” the male Harvester hissed.

“Was that OK?” Cal asked. “I didn’t go overboard? Between you and me, I was worried it might’ve come across as a little sarcastic.”

The fingertip was placed against his chest this time, through a gap between the buttons of his shirt, and Cal suddenly knew what a cardiac arrest felt like. The pain was different to the one that had filled his head, but no less immense. His muscles constricted, arching his spine and forcing a throaty ejection of garbled syllables through his clenched teeth.

“Cal, stop!” Loren pleaded, once the Harvester had stepped clear. “Please.”

Cal’s breath returned in a series of shallow sips. Drool dangled from his lips like strands of clear spaghetti. He raised his head and waited several seconds for his vision to return.

“OK, fine,” he said, the words coming out slurred. “Since you asked so nicely.”

“Where are our friends?” Loren asked. It was the female who answered her. Sort of.

“They are not your concern,” she said. “Your only concern now is how you may devote yourselves to the great Manacle.”

“Is there, like, a list of options?” Cal wondered.

The male Harvester sighed and raised a finger again.

“Wait, no. It’s a serious question, hear me out!” Cal yelped. “She said our only concern is how we may devote ourselves to Manacle.”

“The great Manacle,” the female corrected.

“Well, I mean, I’ve never met the guy, so I wouldn’t like to comment,” Cal said. “That feels like quite a subjective judgment call without—”

The finger drew closer.

“Know what? I’m going to take your word for it,” he said, eyeing the digit. “I’m just wondering if there are different ways of serving the great Manacle. You know, like a menu of options? I don’t want to volunteer to wax his crack-hair, or something, then later find out I could’ve just been doing some light ironing.”

The male Harvester turned to the female. “May I kill him?”

“You may not,” she told him. “We are behind on quota as it is. He is strong. He will be useful.”

Cal grinned at the male. “Sorry, pal. Looks like you’re stuck with me.”

“May I finger him?”

“You may.”

Cal’s face fell. “Wait, can he what?”

The Harvester pressed his fingertip against Cal’s throat. Cal barely had time to eject a whispered, “Oh, thank God,” before the pain erupted again, twisting his insides and rioting across his nerve-endings.

It passed, just as before, leaving Cal in a vaguely vegetable-like state for a bunch of seconds or minutes. He couldn’t tell which.

“That was unpleasant,” he mumbled.

“I can make it continue,” the male Harvester said in his scratchy whisper. He stepped in closer, and Cal saw his eyes blinking deep in the nasal cavities. “I can finger you, and finger you, and finger you until there is nothing left of your insides.”

Cal puffed out his cheeks. “Well, I mean, it sounds like a hell of a first date. And I can’t say I’m not tempted, but I think I’ll pass.”

“Leave him,” the female barked. The male immediately stepped back, but kept his nostrils firmly fixed on Cal. “You do not get to choose how you serve the great Manacle, Enslaver of Worlds,” the woman continued. “Only how loyally. Those who submit to servitude will be rewarded.”

“With what?” Cal asked.

“With further servitude,” the female explained. “Those who fail to devote themselves to serving the great Manacle will face his glorious wrath. So, it has been written, thus it shall be done.”

“Shizz, is this some kind of religious thing?” Cal asked. “Are you guys space Mormons? You’re not going to have us going door to door giving out pamphlets, are you? If so, I’ll take the punishment.”

“This is Moktar,” the woman said, ignoring him. “Your new home.”

“Moktar? You mean…” Loren began, glancing around at the rocky walls of the cave. “The Mustard Mines?”

The female Harvester gave a weird sort of head twitch that seemed to be their equivalent of a curt nod. “You will work here. You will grow old here. You will die here in the mines,” she said. “Your path has been set. Your Harvesting is complete.”

“Wait, the Mustard Mines? What the fonk are the Mustard Mines?” Cal asked. “You don’t mean, like, mustard mustard?”

The others looked at him blankly.

“You know, yellow stuff. Comes in bottles. Goes great on hot dogs? You don’t mean that kind of mustard?”

“What other kind of mustard is there?” the male Harvester asked. It was hard to read his expression, but he sounded a little nonplussed by Cal’s question.

“You seriously mean mustard mustard? Like, actual mustard mustard?” said Cal. He looked from one Harvester to the other, then over at Loren. “They can’t mean mustard mustard. People don’t mine mustard mustard.”

Loren frowned. “Well, where else would it come from?”

Cal opened his mouth to reply, then realized he had no fonking clue where mustard came from. “I don’t know. Trees?” he said, having a wild stab at it. “Not mines, though. It can’t come from fonking mines.”

A thought struck him. “Wait. Hold on. I get it,” he said. “It’s not mustard mustard. It’s space mustard. I guess that could come from mines. It probably does, in fact. That’s the kind of weird, twisted shizz you people get up to out here, isn’t it?”

He cleared his throat and nodded encouragingly at the Harvesters. “OK, I’ll buy it. Continue.”

From somewhere in the shadows came the clank of a familiar footstep. Cal laughed. He couldn’t help himself. It wasn’t particularly loud, and nobody really noticed at first, but it was a laugh, all the same.

“In fact, I’m going to stop you right there,” Cal said, before either Harvester could speak again. There was another clank, and Cal saw the relief wash across Loren’s face, too. He winked at her, before continuing. “See, lovely as all this has been, and much as I’ve enjoyed all the fingering and whatnot, I’m afraid we’re going to have to draw it to a close.”

The Harvesters exchanged glances. At least, their nostrils turned to point at one another, so Cal assumed that’s what was going on. “Explain,” demanded the male.

“We’re leaving,” said Loren. The footsteps clanked closer. “And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“I think what my friend there is trying to say,” Cal continued. “Is that you can take your fonking Mustard Mines and your Manacle—who isn’t great, actually, and sounds like a total shizznod—and you can stick them all the way up your ass.”

The male Harvester drew in a breath, but Cal kept talking. “And I don’t mean some collective metaphorical ass,” he explained. “I mean you can each, individually, stick those things up your actual physical ass, have them surgically removed, then pass them on to your friends so they can repeat the process.” He grinned at them as Mech emerged from the shadows. “Of course, on the other hand, you’ll probably both be dead before you get the chance. Hey, Mech.”

“Cal. Loren,” said Mech. “Good to see you both.”

“Not as good as it is to see you,” Loren said.

“I know, right?” said Cal. “I mean, who ever thought I’d be pleased to see Mech? Not me. Has this been a day of surprises or what?”

“Are Miz and Splurt, OK?” Loren asked.

“They’re fine,” Mech confirmed. “Garunk, too. They’re all in one piece.”

“Ha! Eat that, you fonk!” Cal said, laughing in the male Harvester’s face. “And for the record, I don’t think you’re beautiful. I think you look like a rectal prolapse with teeth. And not even nice teeth.”

Cal shot Mech a sideways look. “Now, Mech!”

Mech didn’t move.

“What are you waiting for, big guy? Annihilate these fonks, and let’s get out of here.”

“Sorry, man,” said Mech. “No can do.”

“Huh?” said Cal, frowning.

“What are you saying?” asked Loren.

The female Harvester gestured to the prisoners. “Take them to their stations,” she instructed. “They will begin their servitude.”

Mech stomped over to Cal. His metal jaw curved into an awkward smile. “It ain’t my fault,” he said. “They stuck me with a control implant. I ain’t got no choice.”

A metal hand pressed against Cal’s chest. There was a hiss as the restraints holding Cal in place disengaged.

“Wait…” Cal began. “What’s happening now?”

“This is,” said Mech. “And again, I’m sorry.”

Mech’s fist came out of nowhere. It jackhammered into Cal’s face, slamming his head back against the wall and shattering his nose.

“Now, don’t thry to thell me you dithdn’t enthoy…” Cal spluttered, then blood ran down the back of his throat, saliva dribbled from his lips, and unconsciousness rushed up to embrace him, once more.

Thirteen

“Hey! Tobey Maguire! You’re not going to believe what happened,” Cal shouted into the darkness. “Mech’s working with the bad guys! I mean, not on purpose, but still. What a shizznod.”

He marched on into the gloom of his subconscious, toward where a single lamp stood on a table, the bare bulb creating a little island of light in the sea of black.

“And you’ll never guess where space mustard comes from,” Cal continued. “Seriously, I could give you a hundred guesses and you’d never be able to…”

His voice faded into a confused silence when he saw the note on the table. It had been folded in half and stood upright beside the lamp like a tiny paper tent. A single word had been written on the outside in ornate, curly script.

Cal.

Cal picked the note up and glanced around. “Tobey Maguire? You here? I’m not in the mood for Hide and Seek today, buddy,” he said. He unfolded the note. “Well, maybe one game, but…”

For the second time in as many minutes, he found his voice trailing off as he saw the words on the paper. He lowered himself into the rickety wooden chair that had appeared by the table and began to read.

Dear Cal, the letter began, and as Cal read, the disembodied voice of Tobey Maguire seemed to whisper to him from every direction at once.

I hope you are well. Although, as you only come to see me when you’ve been blown up, beaten unconscious, or killed, that’s probably unlikely.

There was a smiley face at the end of the sentence, but Cal didn’t share the sentiment. He had a horrible feeling he knew what was coming next.

Before I go any further, I want to make it clear that being your imaginary friend and/or spirit guide and/or prolonged psychological breakdown* (*delete as applicable) has been a tremendous honor. It has been my proudest achievement to date, not including the Nickelodeon Kids Choice Award I won for Spider-Man. Technically, I had to share that with Kirsten Dunst, though, so it’s not quite the same. That said, we all know who did most of the heavy lifting on the movie, so I’m not convinced it should’ve been a joint award in the first place.

There was another paragraph after that one, but it had been heavily scored out. Cal skipped on to the next part.

But, I digress, it said.

Despite how much I’ve enjoyed living on in your subconscious, I have recently found myself becoming increasingly lonely. Yes, I did get to meet Lionel Richie and a racist squirrel a while back, but I think that may have been a dream. Or it might not have been. I honestly don’t know anymore.

God, this is harder than I thought, whispered Tobey Maguire in time with his words on the page.

Cal sniffed, swallowed, then forced himself to continue.

I’ve been unhappy for a while now, but I took solace in the fact that it was this or nothing. The real me—the real Tobey Maguire—was dead, and while it wasn’t always ideal, your brain was a sort of safe haven, where I could continue to exist.

Except… now I’m not dead. At least, I don’t think so. You killed President Sinclair. You saved the Earth from being torn apart by bugs.

You saved me, Cal. You saved everyone.

For the first time in a long time, I feel like I have options. Like, pre-Spider-Man-3 options. Real options. You’ve given me those options, Cal. You’ve given me the freedom to choose.

And I choose to go. I choose to move on. Maybe it’s stupid. Maybe there’s nothing waiting for me out there, but I choose to find out.

I do not do this out of malice. Far from it. I hold no grudge against you, Cal. Quite the opposite. Granted, in many ways, I was a prisoner inside your head, and maybe it’s the Stockholm Syndrome talking, but I will never be anything but grateful for our time together.

I love you, Cal Carver, like I’m sure you love me, too.

Cal gave a non-committal sort of shrug, then continued.

But the time has come for us to go our separate ways. We had something beautiful once, but all good things must come to an end, and this ‘good thing’ is no exception.

Take care of yourself, you crazy fonk. And, if you ever wind up back on Earth, be sure to come look me up. The banoffee pies are on me.

Your friend,

“Former Hollywood actor, Tobey Maguire,” Cal read aloud.

Inhaling deeply, he lowered the paper and wiped his eyes on his sleeve. It was only then that he spotted the photograph sitting on the table. It was a selfie Tobey Maguire had taken of them both on the night they’d watched both Amazing Spider-Man movies on DVD and spent the whole time criticizing Andrew Garfield’s performance.

Cal had an arm around the much smaller Tobey Maguire’s shoulders, and both of them looked relaxed and happy as they pulled faces at the camera.

Tobey Maguire had placed the photograph in a brightly-colored frame he’d decorated with seashells. Fonk knew where he’d gotten those from.

At the bottom of the frame was a single word. It was written in glittery silver in the same ornate script as the note.

Friendship.

Cal gripped the frame in both hands. A single tear splashed against Tobey Maguire’s face. Cal tenderly wiped it away with his thumb. Unfortunately, this resulted in the photograph ink smudging badly, turning Tobey Maguire’s face into a blurry smear of black and brown.

“Fonk,” Cal muttered. He tried wiping his thumb back in the opposite direction, in the hope Tobey Maguire’s face would magically reappear. If anything, it just made it worse.

“Oh, Tobey Maguire, why did you have to go?” Cal said, stifling a sob. “There was so much I wanted to say. So much I wanted to tell you. Like…”

He gazed wistfully off into the darkness.

He ran his tongue across his lips.

“Actually, no. Turns out there wasn’t.”

Cal sat the picture down beside the note. He adjusted them both a few times, as if searching for the perfect placement.

Then, once he’d found it, he gave a nod of satisfaction. “Good night, sweet prince,” he whispered, then he leaned forward, turned off the lamp, and the island of light sank into the ocean of black.

* * *

Cal blinked.

“Bulbs!” he said, ejecting the word loudly and clearly, as if he was trying to make himself heard at the back of a large, noisy room.

He caught the tail end of the word himself, and was wondering why the fonk he’d just shouted, ‘bulbs,’ when something solid slammed into his stomach as a shape exploded into life beside him. He’d barely had a chance to register that pain before a head smashed into his chin.

“Ow! Jesus. Cut it out!” he protested.

The shape in front of him turned and looked back over her shoulder.

“Cal! Where are we?” Loren demanded. Her eyes were glazed and the blue skin of her cheek was a flare of angry purple.

It took Cal a moment to figure out the answer to that question. “We’re… Uh, we’re in bed,” he said.

“What?”

Cal rocked a little on the thin mattress beneath them. “We’re in bed. Together. Me and you.”

Loren raised herself up on one arm and looked at the mattress below them. There was a thin, scratchy blanket between them and the actual mattress itself.

“We’re on bed together, we’re not in bed together,” she pointed out. The room spun dizzyingly, forcing her to lie down again. The curve of her back was just inches from Cal’s front. For all their time together, he didn’t think they’d ever been quite this close. Or, not without something trying to kill them, at least.

“In, on. Same difference,” Cal said.

“No, it’s not the same. We’re on a bed together, not in bed together. It’s not the same.”

“It’s kind of the same,” Cal said. He ran his fingers through his hair. “So,” he began, trying to remember… well, anything, really. “Did we…?”

“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.

“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, technology 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 little 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.”

“How long have you guys been here?”

“Too long,” the Nogem replied. He sucked gently on his bottom lip. “Much too long.”

Giving himself a shake, he placed a fist against his bearded chin. At first, Cal thought he was adopting the traditional ‘thinking hard’ pose, but then realized it was some sort of Nogem greeting.

“I am Red Hat,” he said. “I am sorry for my curtness earlier.”

“Red Hat?” said Cal. “Your name is Red Hat?”

On the one hand, the name made perfect sense—the guy was, after all, wearing a red hat. And quite a nice one, too. On the other hand, it felt just a little too on the nose to be his actual name, and Cal could see several flaws in any such naming methodology.

What if he took his hat off, for example? Or got one that was a different color? Would that necessitate a name change, or would he become the Nogem formerly known as Red Hat?

Also, he wasn’t the only one in the group wearing a red hat. Far from it. Were they all called Red Hat, or were there variations? Was one Burgundy Hat, for example? Or Jauntily Angled Red Hat?

The Nogem tapped a spot behind his ear. “Translation chip,” he explained. “Our names are quite literal in our own tongue, but the chip makes them even more so. When I say my name, you hear ‘Red Hat,’ but it probably translates more accurately as, ‘Man who owns a red hat.’”

“Oh yeah, that makes much more sense,” Cal said. “I mean, ‘Red Hat,’ is ludicrous, whereas ‘Man who owns a red hat,’ is way better. If I ever have a son, that’s absolutely what I’m calling him.” He shook his head and flicked himself behind the ear. “Stupid chip.”

Red Hat gazed up at him expectantly. It took Cal a few moments to figure out why. “Oh! Sorry. Cal. Cal Carver. You know, of Space Team fame? You’ve probably heard of us.”

Red Hat’s expression went from expectant to inquisitive.

“We saved the galaxy a bunch of times?” said Cal, hoping this would be enough to trigger some sort of recognition. To his disappointment, Red Hat’s expression didn’t change a bit.

Cal sighed. “Guess you don’t see the news much, either,” he said. “Still, good to meet you, Red Hat. And thanks again for the save. I owe you one.”

After a bit more trudging and a few more twists and turns, they emerged into a large room, most of which was taken up by several long tables, each with a dozen or more chairs positioned around them.

Red Hat led Cal to one of the tables near the middle of the room. Cal sat down while Red Hat and various other Nogems began clambering into chairs that were clearly much too large for them. When one of them tried to take the seat beside him, Cal placed a hand on it.

“Sorry, I’m holding this for a friend,” Cal said.

The Nogem grunted and moved to the next chair along. “And I’m holding that one for this guy I barely know,” he said, smiling apologetically. “Sorry.”

“You’re new. You don’t get to claim seats,” the Nogem spat.

Cal ratcheted up his smile. “Look…” He glanced at the little man’s headgear. “I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess Green Hat? Look, Green Hat, we’re all tired, we’re all grumpy, but let’s not fall out about this. There are lots of chairs. Take one of those. Hell, take two of those.”

“Why would I need two seats?” Green Hat snapped.

“I don’t know. Think of it as an adventure,” Cal said. “Go wild. But, you can’t have these two because—”

Cal spotted Loren and Garunk filing in through the door. He whistled loudly and thrust a hand in the air to get their attention. “Loren! Over here. I’ve kept you seats!”

He shot Green Hat a kind but quite meaningful look. “See? My friends are here. Sorry.”

Green Hat muttered something below his breath, made a hand gesture that may well have been some sort of curse, then stomped off to find a seat at another table.

Aside from the two that Cal had claimed, all twelve of the chairs around this table were now filled with Nogems. Red Hat sat on Cal’s immediate right, and while Cal hadn’t been introduced to any of the others, he was reasonably confident he could have a stab at all their names, assuming they all stuck to the same ‘color+hat’ formula as had now been established.

“Hey, you OK?” asked Loren, sliding into the chair beside him.

“I’m fine,” said Cal. “But you’re sitting on my hand.”

“Shizz, is that what that is?” Loren asked, raising herself off the seat. Cal pulled his hand free, while quietly wishing that he hadn’t said anything.

“What about you? You OK?” he asked her.

“Been better,” she said.

“Yoo-hoo!” said Garunk, as he pulled out the chair beside her. “Can you all squeeze in a large one? Oh! Cheeky!”

Several Nogem fists banged on the table. Cal looked around and saw that all their eyes were on Garunk, their little faces screwed up in distaste.

“Uh, is there a problem, guys?” Cal asked.

“Yes, there’s a problem. We don’t sit with people like that,” a Nogem whose name was—presumably—Blue Hat sneered. “People like that turn our stomachs.”

Cal gave a reproachful tut. “Seriously? In this day and age? You should be ashamed of yourselves,” he said, standing and placing an arm around Garunk’s hefty shoulders. “Garunk is a friend of mine. Or, you know, a friend of a friend. But the point is, who the hell do you guys think you are to judge his choices? Is he a little on the flamboyant side? Sure. Do his sexually suggestive remarks make me a tiny bit uncomfortable? You bet they do. But he’s a kind, generous, beautiful soul.”

Cal shrugged. “I mean, probably. I don’t know him that well, but that’s the kind of vibe I get from him,” he said. “So, he’s attracted to members of the same sex. So what? Love is love, people. Love is fonking love, and where he chooses to put his… whatever he has going on down there, well, it’s no business of ours.”

Red Hat cleared his throat. “Um, Slurrits, we meant. We don’t like sitting with Slurrits.”

“They stink,” said Blue Hat.

“Oh,” said Cal. He removed his arm from Garunk’s shoulder and sniffed at it. “Jesus. They’re right, you do stink,” Cal said. “But, you know, that’s fine too, I guess. We don’t judge at this table.”

“Well, they do,” said Loren, looking around at the Nogems.

“Yeah, but they’re just little. They don’t know any better,” said Cal, inadvertently setting human/Nogem relations back several years. “Besides, none of us are exactly fragrant right now after all the digging. Take a seat.”

Garunk looked anxiously across the faces of the Nogems. “But what about…?”

“Fonk it. They can hold their noses if they have to. Sit down.”

Trying his best to ignore the grumbled complaints of the Nogems, Garunk took his seat and pulled it in closer to the table. He leaned past Loren and his muddy features formed something like a smile aimed in Cal’s direction.

“Thanks for what you said there. But I’m not gay.”

Cal snorted. “Ha!”

He waited for the punchline, but it didn’t arrive.

“Seriously? You’re not?” Cal asked.

Garunk shook his head.

“Are you sure?” Cal asked. “Like… I don’t know. Have you checked?”

“Slurrits are omnisexual,” Garunk explained.

“Omnisexual?” Cal’s lips moved silently as he worked this through. “Is that better or worse?”

Loren slapped him on the leg under the table.

“I don’t mean better or worse,” he quickly corrected. “There is no better or worse when it comes to these things. There’s just, you know, weird and—”

Loren slapped him again.

“Not weird. I meant, like, normal and—”

Another slap.

“Not normal. I didn’t mean normal. Everything’s normal,” he corrected, reddening slightly as he felt the weight of Garunk and the Nogems’ stares on him. “I just meant… different. But not, like, freakish deviant different. Good different. That’s what I was… That’s all I was…”

He cleared his throat, smiled weakly, and tried to find a way out of this conversation. He turned to Red Hat. “How about you guys? Are Nogems omnisexual?” he asked.

Red Hat shook his head. “We lay eggs through flaps in our stomachs,” he said.

Cal blinked several times, slowly. “Right,” he said. “Of course you do.”

“Food’s here,” said a Nogem from the far end of the table.

“Oh, thank God,” Cal exhaled.

He turned in his chair at the sound of clattering plates. It had been a rough few hours, and a grim couple of days. The weeks and months preceding those had been pretty thoroughly awful, too, but the sight he saw when he turned caused him to laugh out loud. Although, in the interests of his own personal safety, he quickly reined it in.

“Well, look at you!” Cal said, almost chewing his mouth off in an attempt to fight back his mirth. “Aren’t you just pretty as a picture?”

Mizette of the Greyx stood behind a wheeled trolley, wearing what appeared to be a maid outfit. Or, more accurately, several maid outfits all hastily stitched together in order to accommodate her size.

Her hairy torso was squashed into a sensible-yet-suggestive black pinafore, while her head was adorned by a little white hat that was patently designed for a skull of a completely different shape, and several times smaller.

“Miz. What have they done to you?” asked Loren, gazing up at her crewmate in horror.

“They’ve made her all purty-like,” said Cal. He gave her an appraising look up and down. “What do you think of your new look? Do you love it? I bet you love it.”

“It totally sucks,” Miz said. Her voice was a hoarse, shaky whisper, and the smile immediately fell from Cal’s face.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Miz tilted her head to reveal a collar of dark metal. There were ten LED lights set into it. The first three were lit up in green, which brought gasps from the Nogems.

“What?” Cal asked. “What is it?”

“Three lights,” Red Hat whispered. “They’ve got her on three lights.”

“Meaning what?” Loren demanded.

“It’s the pain level,” explained Red Hat. “They use the collars to control the most disobedient of us. No-one has ever survived past five before.”

Cal’s chair toppled back as he jumped to his feet. “They’re hurting you?”

Miz gritted her teeth. “Sit down,” she told him. “It’s, like, nothing I can’t handle.”

“They’re hurting you.” Cal said again, the words coming as a hiss of indignation and rage.

“Cal. Please,” Miz whispered. “Sit down. I can handle three. I don’t want to go back to four.”

She held his gaze, her deep brown eyes shimmering with moisture. “Please. I’m OK. It’s fine.”

Cal wanted to argue that it wasn’t fine. He wanted to grab the collar, tear it off, and set Miz loose on the fonks who had done this to her. But if the collar could’ve been removed by brute force, she’d have already done it.

“Sit down, Cal,” Loren urged, tugging on the leg of his pants. “Don’t make it worse.”

Cal, to his own disbelief, sat down. What else could he do? He heard Miz give a sigh of relief, then he watched as, with shaky hands, she began setting bowls in front of the people at the table. She started with Red Hat and worked her way anti-clockwise until she reached Loren.

“They’ve got Splurt in some kind of, like, lab or whatever,” she whispered as she deposited the bowl in front of Loren.

“Can you get to him?” Loren whispered back.

Miz moved around her so she was between Loren and Cal. “No,” she said, depositing Cal’s bowl in front of him. “They have cameras on it and guards at the door. I tried. That’s why I’m on three lights.”

Cal placed a hand on her arm and squeezed it. “We’re going to get out of this,” he told her. “We’ve been in worse.”

“We have?” said Miz, and the hoarseness of her voice made Cal’s heart sink. “When? We’ve got no ship, Splurt’s out of action, I can’t do anything.”

She shrugged. “I guess Mech might show up and rescue us. Have you seen him? Like, since they brought us here, I mean?”

Cal shot Loren a sideways glance. “Uh, no. No. Haven’t seen him,” he said. “I’m sure he’s working on some kind of rescue mission somewhere. We’ll get through this. OK?”

“Sure,” said Miz, sounding unconvinced. She withdrew her arm and returned to her trolley. “Whatever.”

Cal watched her rattle away with it, her tail drooping so low behind her it brushed across the dusty floor. Several other people, all from different alien races, pushed other trolleys around the place, delivering food to the hungry workers.

Around Cal’s own table, Red Hat and the other Nogems were already getting tucked into the food, scooping it up with their tiny hands, before cramming it into their mouths.

Cal looked down at his own bowl, and the gloopy yellow substance nestled at the bottom.

“Is it custard?” he wondered.

“Close,” said Red Hat. “Almost custard.”

The bowl itself was not very big, and the contents barely came a third of the way up the sides. Cal’s stomach grumbled in disappointment.

“Uh, I think I got a Nogem-sized portion,” he said, looking around the table. Loren and Garunk both had identically sized bowls to his own. Garunk was sniffing the contents cautiously, while Loren was still watching Mizette trundle her trolley toward the exit.

Cal looked around the tabletop. “Don’t we get a spoon?”

“No spoon,” said Red Hat between mouthfuls. “Fingers.”

Not for the first time, Cal was relieved his hands had grown back. He didn’t much fancy trying to shovel the custard into his mouth using his elbows. The fact the hands were still smaller than usual might even give him an advantage when it came to scooping the stuff up.

“Well, here goes nothing,” he said, cupping his hand into the semi-solid sludge and bringing it to his lips. He stuffed it in his mouth, masticated it noisily for a moment, then ejected it in a single explosive outburst through his nose and mouth, splattering the three Nogems sitting across from him.

“What the fonk is that?” he coughed. “I thought you said it was custard!”

“I said it was close to custard,” said Red Hat, shoveling more of it into his mouth. It drizzled into his beard, caking the hair in yellow-brown. “It’s mustard.”

The plumbing in Cal’s head was on fire. Everything from his sinuses to his throat felt like it was under chemical attack. His eyes wept in sympathy. His stomach, fearing the worst, immediately put itself on ‘vomit standby,’ signaling its readiness by throwing up a little into Cal’s mouth.

His tongue was melting, he was sure of it. He could smell nothing but mustard, yet wasn’t convinced he still had a nose. Sweat beaded on his forehead. He became convinced that jets of steam were blasting from both his ears, and even more convinced that his heart had stopped beating.

Cal was thumping himself furiously on the chest, trying to restart his heart, when a tall pitcher of ice-cold amber liquid was deposited on the table in front of him.

“Beer,” said the server, as he or she—Cal couldn’t see clearly enough to tell which—set twelve cracked mugs beside the jug.

Cal couldn’t wait. Grasping the pitcher, he gulped down several cooling mouthfuls, then poured a good glug of the stuff over his face.

For a moment, all was well, but then the fire ignited again, worse than ever.

“WHAT IS THAT?!” he screamed, leaping to his feet and clawing at his skin.

“It’s mustard beer,” said Red Hat.

Cal set off at a sprint, half-blinded, like he could somehow outrun the agonizing assault on his respiratory system. Everyone watched in stunned silence as he ran in laps around the room, yelping and shrieking and making noises that, had anyone present ever heard a baboon before, they would have almost certainly have said it sounded a bit like a baboon. But not a healthy or happy baboon. A baboon with problems. A baboon, most likely, whose face was on fire.

Three Harvesters entered from two different doors. Cal couldn’t hear their barked commands to stop over the sound of his own screams, and didn’t notice them chasing him until one feinted in front of him, arms outstretched to grab him.

There was no way Cal was stopping, though. Something primal was driving him now. He ducked one pair of hands, hoofed the owner of another pair in the balls, then continued on his desperate-yet-pointless run.

He was on lap four before anyone caught him. Even then, it was only because he’d had to slow down to vomit, after his stomach had decided to go full nuclear in its response to the waves of fire creeping steadily down Cal’s throat.

Cal didn’t see where the puke went, but from the high-pitched chirps of protest, he guessed a few Nogems had found themselves plastered. He slurred out what he thought was an apology, but what was actually a series of pig-like snorts and a sob, and then a Harvester slammed into him, smashing him into a table, somersaulting him over the top of it, then depositing him onto the rough stone floor.

Elongated fingers pinned his arms down. He tried to kick, but a sudden weight on his legs made it impossible.

He heard Loren shout something, and made out a flurry of movement through his watery eyes. It ended abruptly with a short cry of pain from Loren. Cal wrestled against the hands that held him down. He blinked away his tears just in time to see a Harvester leaning over him, a finger extending toward Cal’s forehead.

“We do not appreciate this disturbance,” the Harvester hissed through his undulating teeth. He extended two more fingers. “You shall be taught a lesson.”

All three fingers pressed against Cal’s forehead, just above his eyes, and Cal knew nothing but the pain that followed.

Sixteen

Cal woke with a cold, damp compress on his head, and a body that ached so badly he suspected it would never forgive him.

“You awake?”

That was Loren’s voice, drifting into his half-awake fog from somewhere in the space beyond his eyelids.

“Not sure,” he murmured. “Let me get back to you on that one.”

Cal lay there for a while, enjoying the cooling pressure on his forehead, and observing the various parts of himself coming back online.

He felt his toes and gave them a twitch. His hands, too. He pointed his feet and stretched his legs, simultaneously worsening and easing the ache in his muscles.

His senses of taste and smell switched on with a bang, popping his eyes open.

Mustard.

He tensed, preparing to set off running again, but the taste had bedded in now, and was more like an insistent background noise than the crescendo of agony that it had been. It was still deeply unpleasant, of course, but not so bad that he couldn’t cope with it.

He’d complain about it, yes—God, how he’d complain about it—but it was manageable for the moment.

As his eyes swam into focus, he expected to see Loren kneeling over him. Instead, he saw the sludgy mud-pack that was Garunk’s face. The Slurrit’s sloppy wet hand was resting on Cal’s forehead, oozing rivulets of runny mud into his hair and pooling it in his ears.

“Hey, beefcake,” said Garunk. “Good to have you back.”

He withdrew his hand and Cal sat up. Loren stood behind Garunk, one arm wrapped around herself, the other held up to her mouth so she could chew on her thumbnail.

“You OK?” she asked.

Cal nodded gingerly. “Head kind of aches,” he said. “And, you know, every other part of me, too. But, on the plus side, my sinuses have never been clearer.”

He inhaled deeply through his nose to demonstrate his point, but the smell of mustard and burning flesh made his stomach flip, so he quickly stopped.

Propping himself on his elbows, Cal took in the cell around them. “We’re back here? Why are we back here?”

“They figured you couldn’t work when you were unconscious,” Loren said.

“Ha! Shows that they know,” Cal snorted. He shook his head. “Actually, they’re right. I can’t work when I’m unconscious. I don’t know why I said that.”

With some difficulty, Cal got back to his feet. The room spun around him, forcing him to lean against the wall for support.

“Still, nice of them to give me time off,” Cal said. “For evil, people-trafficking slave masters, they’re actually not too bad. Wait, what am I saying? They’re truly terrible people.”

“Can’t argue there. Although, they did let us check in on you every so often to make sure you were still alive. Took some persuasion, though” said Loren. “Your friend said he’d work a double shift to cover your quota until you got back.”

Cal frowned. “My friend?”

“With the red hat.”

“Oh, Red Hat!” said Cal. “Seriously? He’s covering for me? What a guy.”

He yawned and stretched, then smacked his lips together several times in the vain hope of tasting anything that wasn’t mustard.

“How long was I out for?”

“About six hours,” Loren said.

“They fingered you really violently,” said Garunk. Cal wasn’t sure if this was a deliberate innuendo by the Slurrit, or a perfectly innocent remark. He chose not to investigate further.

“Wow, that’s… Wait,” Cal said. “So, Red Hat has been covering for me for six hours?”

“Pretty much,” said Loren. “Why?”

“Jesus. The poor guy was already exhausted,” Cal said. He tried the cell door, but found it locked.

“You have to knock and wait,” Loren explained.

Cal thudded his fist on the heavy wood. “Hey! Open up. I’m ready to get back to work,” he called. “Mech? You out there? Let’s get me back in action.”

There was a clunk and the door swung inward. A Harvester stood in the doorway, fingers raised as if expecting some sort of trick.

“Where’s Mech?” Cal asked.

“That is not your concern,” the Harvester said, the words whistling through his teeth. “Come. You will return to digging at once.”

“Well, yeah,” Cal agreed. “That’s why I was knocking on the door and shouting, ‘I’m ready to get back to work.’”

He stepped past the Harvester and into the corridor. “There’s no need to be an asshole about it, is my point. Hell, I’m practically volunteering.”

“You literally are volunteering,” Garunk pointed out.

“Right? Exactly.” Cal swept a fleck of dust off the Harvester’s shoulder. “I’m just saying you should relax. I’m going back to work. You don’t need to put on your Bossy pants for my benefit.”

He wheeled around, pointed along the corridor, and raised an inquisitive eyebrow. “Now… this way?”

“Walk,” the Harvester continued. He prodded Cal in the back and a brief shudder of pain radiated through the muscles of Cal’s back.

“OK, then!” said Cal through a grimace. “This way it is.”

* * *

They eventually reached the cavern, where everything seemed noisier and more active than ever. The Nogems hammered at the walls much faster than they had been earlier. The flying boxes swarmed through the place, carrying whatever cargo they contained.

The reason for the Nogems’ increased productivity became evident when one of the patrolling Harvesters produced something that was a cross between a whip and a lightsaber, and cracked the air behind one of the little bearded figures.

The Nogem let out a yelp of panic, then redoubled his digging efforts. Sweat poured down his face as he struck at the wall again, and again, and again, the little bell on his hat dinging dementedly in time with each swing.

“What’s the big rush?” Cal asked. He looked back over his shoulder to his escort. “Or is that none of my concern.”

“The great Manacle approaches,” the Harvester said. His voice was a mix of emotions—pride, mostly, but with a generous serving of fear on the side. “We will impress him with our increased productivity.”

“Manacle is coming here?” said Cal. “The Manacle? Oh, wow! I can’t wait to meet him.”

“We will not defile the great Manacle’s gaze with your presence,” the Harvester said. “He gave Cal a shove down the slope leading into the cavern. “You will return to your zone. You will dig. And you will never know his greatness was ever here.”

“Well… we will know,” said Cal. “You just told us.”

The Harvester hesitated. “Well, yes. But, you shall not see him with your own eyes.”

Cal flashed a grin over his shoulder. “How much do you want to bet?”

Another prod to the back made him leap into the air. “Ow! Watch where you’re sticking that thing,” he said.

Two other Harvesters approached. Loren and Garunk were peeled away from the group and led off in different directions. Cal and Loren exchanged a look that managed to say a whole lot in a very short time, and then Cal was shoved on through the cavern in the direction of his zone.

“Hey, Red Hat, look who’s back?” Cal called, as another painful poke from the Harvester sent him stumbling into the smaller side chamber where he had struck mustard earlier.

The pumping equipment he’d seen being brought in had been removed, and the only sign of the geyser Cal had unleashed was a crusting of dry mustard around the hole in the wall.

Red Hat didn’t turn at the sound of Cal’s voice, but just sort of sagged for a moment as if in relief. The heavy head of his pickaxe thunked against the ground and he leaned on the handle for a moment, his frail body heaving as he gulped in air.

“You OK there, little buddy?” Cal asked, bending to address the Nogem.

The Harvester wrenched Cal upright before Red Hat could respond, then thrust a pickaxe into Cal’s hand. “Don’t talk. Dig,” the Harvester instructed. He lashed out with a foot, knocking Red Hat’s pick away. “You, too,” he snarled, as the sudden lack of support sent the Nogem crashing to the floor.

“Wow, you people are harsh,” Cal said. He reached to help Red Hat up, but another prod from the Harvester sent spasms of pain jolting through him, forcing him to stagger clear.

“I’m alright,” Red Hat wheezed. His little arms shook as he pushed himself up onto his knees. “I’m alright.”

“No thanks to you,” Cal said, shooting the Harvester an accusatory glare. “I’m going to give you some advice. As a starship captain, I occupy a position of authority. I find that treating my subordinates fairly, respecting their boundaries, and not jabbing them with magical pain fingers really helps to get the best out of them.”

“I heard that,” called Loren’s voice from the next chamber over. “We’re not your subordinates.”

“Haha. Obviously, I wasn’t talking about you!” Cal called back. He lowered his voice to a whisper and nodded at the Harvester. “I was totally talking about her.”

“I heard that, too.”

“Jesus, the acoustics in here are insane,” Cal muttered. “Anyway.” He puffed out his cheeks. “What was my point?”

“I am not sure you even have one,” sneered the Harvester. He looked Cal up and down then spat a wad of black sputum onto the floor at his feet. “Now dig. You do not wish to displease the great Manacle.”

“Wow, you don’t know me at all, do you?” said Cal, but he hefted his pickaxe above his head, and thunked it against the wall. “There. Digging. Happy now?”

The Harvester sneered at him, then glided backward, his long black robe skimming across the uneven floor until he vanished back into the main chamber.

“Hey. Red Hat. You OK?” Cal asked, lowering his pick.

“Keep digging,” Red Hat warned. His voice was like a crackle of old paper. His little face twisted into a grimace as he swung with his own pick and knocked a respectably sized chunk of stone from the wall. “Don’t let them catch you stopping.”

Cal spat on his hands, which were now merely below-average in size, and swung with his pick again. Despite Red Hat’s exhaustion, the Nogem dug at more than twice the speed that Cal did.

“Hey, take it easy,” Cal warned. “You’re exhausted.”

“I’m fine,” Red Hat grunted, swinging twice in rapid succession.

“OK, well… thanks,” Cal said. “For stepping in for me. You shouldn’t have done that.”

“I know,” Red Hat grunted.

THUNK.

“But they’d have killed you, otherwise.”

THUNK.

“And I was just getting used to you.”

THUNK.

“Right. Well, like I said, thanks.” Cal watched the little man warily. “Seriously, you’re going to give yourself a hernia. Take a break.”

“Cannot,” Red Hat grunted. “Manacle is unhappy with our progress. We must redouble our efforts.”

Cal swung a couple of half-hearted strikes against the wall. “Right,” he said. “So, this Manacle guy. What do you know about him?”

“He is the Enslaver of Worlds,” Red Hat said.

“Right. We got that part,” Cal replied. “Anything else?”

THUNK.

THUNK.

THUNK.

“Rumors, mostly,” Red Hat said. “You shouldn’t trouble yourself with them.”

“Come on, it’s not like we’ve got a whole lot of other ways to pass the time,” Cal told him. He chinked another chip out of the wall, then smiled down at the Nogem. “Trouble me.”

And so, between puffs and pants, Red Hat told Cal what he knew of Manacle, Enslaver of Worlds.

He had come from somewhere in the Western arm of the galaxy, leading a fearsome warrior race—the Edi—in thousands of bloody conquests across hundreds of systems.

Rumors were, he’d been flesh and bone once, but an endless thirst for power had gradually seen parts of him replaced and enhanced by technology.

“He’s more machine now, than man,” Cal said in his best Alec Guinness voice, but Red Hat failed to pick up on the reference, and just nodded solemnly. This made his little bell jingle, but it didn’t really do much to lift the mood.

For a handful of years, the Edi and Zertex were at war, with both sides vying for control of the galaxy. The war eventually drew to a close when Manacle and Sinclair reached an agreement that saw them pool their resources.

The rest of the galaxy didn’t stand a chance. Symmorium space was now reduced to a handful of planets, of which, only two were even remotely habitable. The Greyx withdrew from galactic politics, and the Xandrie—once considered a fearsome gang of lawless pirates—

“Space pirates,” Cal corrected.

—had been deputized by the Edi-Zertex alliance, and tasked with controlling the outer edges of the galaxy through whatever means necessary. Or, as was more often the case, through whatever means they enjoyed most.

There were other rumors, of course, but while Red Hat had seemed confident of everything he’d said until that point, he seemed less so about most of what followed.

Manacle had been known to eat babies for their protein. He had single-handedly collapsed a sun, eradicating all life on the planets orbiting it. He could urinate through three of his fingers and one of his eyes.

Some of the rumors were contradictory. He was either immortal or he depended on his technology to stay alive. He had been a great warrior back on his homeworld or a humble farm boy. He was six foot three or six foot four.

That sort of thing.

Whether some of the specifics were correct or not, the general picture painted of the guy was that he was a complete shizznod who had murdered his way across half the galaxy, assimilated the knowledge and technologies of any races he encountered, plundered their resources, then fonked off elsewhere to start the whole process again.

“Interesting,” said Cal. “He sounds like a keeper. But all this leaves me with one question.”

Red Hat paused to wipe sweat from his brow, then swung his pick again. “What’s that?”

“Why the fonk does he want mustard?”

Red Hat hesitated, pre-swing. “We don’t know,” he admitted, dropping his voice to a whisper. “There are rumors about that, too. He believes the Mines of Moktar are home to a great weapon.”

Cal thought back to the pain he had experienced when he’d shoveled the mustard into his mouth. If someone could successfully weaponize the stuff, their enemies wouldn’t stand a chance.

“Mustard gas,” Cal said. “I mean, I guess that makes sense, but it seems kind of low-tech, don’t you think? For space, I mean? I’m not expert, but I’d have thought giant spaceships with lasers would be more effective. Certainly cooler to watch.”

Red Hat shook his head, jangling his bell. “Not the mustard. Some other weapon. Buried deep. Some believe that’s why we’re actually digging. The mustard is just a cover.”

“Less talking, more digging,” hissed a passing Harvester. A glowing whip crackled in the air between them, and Red Hat started swinging more quickly than ever.

Tha-THUNK.

Tha-THUNK.

Tha-THUNK.

“We’re going as fast as we can,” Cal protested, which wasn’t strictly true in his case. He gestured to Red Hat. “Could we get some water for my friend here? He needs a rest.”

The whip cracked again. Red Hat let out a little sob of fright and somehow found the strength to pick up his pace. “No rest. Work. Dig.”

Cal sighed and turned back to the wall. “OK, OK. We’re digging.”

He began hammering at the wall, driving the metal tip of the pickaxe into a crack in the rock. He found that if he imagined the rock was the Harvester’s head, and the solid pickaxe was… well, a solid pickaxe, the process was much more enjoyable.

He kept digging, glancing back every few seconds to see if the Harvester was still there. The ugly shizznod hung around for a few minutes, then glided off to bother some other poor bamston.

Cal immediately stopped digging. Silence fell in the side chamber. “Man, I hate these guys,” Cal muttered, watching out for the Harvester appearing around the corner again. “I mean, I don’t know about you, Red Hat, but I have zero job satisfaction.”

Cal had had some pretty shizzy jobs back on Earth. He’d worked part-time in a few bars, of course, but that was pretty much par for the course. He’d worked at a pretzel stand at a local mall for a few months, before ‘accidentally’ burning it to the ground on one particularly sunny afternoon when he’d been refused time off.

He’d worked in two call centers for a combined total of three hours and sixteen minutes, managed a branch of Blockbuster Video for half that time, and worked for a company that produced wedding videos until he’d mixed up the camera’s ‘record’ mode with its ‘do nothing whatsoever’ mode, and turned in a lot of footage of his own feet, the inside of a lens cap, and not a whole lot else.

Since coming to Space, he’d only really had one other job. It involved cleaning an endless amount of dirty dishes and being violently attacked by a psychotic old woman with impressive ninja skills and a frankly astonishing ability to take a beating and stay standing. That job had made him want to kill himself after the first forty-five minutes. And yet it was still, by quite some margin, better than this one.

“Don’t worry, buddy. I’ve got a plan,” Cal said, still scowling in the direction the Harvester had gone. “Well, I’m in the process of forming one,” he clarified. “And it’s technically more of a scheme, than…”

He realized his voice was the only sound in the side chamber. Red Hat had stopped digging.

Cal turned to find the little figure slumped on the ground, one arm folded awkwardly beneath him, his legs twisted into an uncomfortable-looking number four-shape.

“Red Hat?”

No reply.

Cal rushed to the Nogem’s side, hollering, “A little help down here!” back along the chamber.

Dropping to his knees, he felt Red Hat’s neck for a pulse. Nothing. But then, was that where these guys kept their pulse? They laid eggs through flaps in their stomachs, so there was no saying where the fonk their pulse was.

Cal randomly pressed his fingers against various parts of the Nogem, but felt no tell-tale beating in any of them.

“Shizz. Come on, buddy. Don’t do this,” Cal whispered. He spun around and began shouting for help again, only to find Loren just a few feet away, rushing toward him along the chamber. There were a couple of Nogems behind her and, further back, the Harvester who had cracked the whip at them earlier.

“What is it? What happened?” Loren asked.

“I don’t know, he just… He was working really hard, and then he just… I don’t know,” Cal said. He gestured helplessly to the motionless body. “Do something!”

Loren dropped to her knees beside Red Hat and prized open one of his eyelids. The eye behind it was glassy and blank. Cal had compared the Nogems to toys earlier, and that was exactly what Red Hat’s eye reminded him of now. It was a doll’s eye. It was the eye of something that was not alive.

With a sigh, Loren slowly closed Red Hat’s eyelid again, just as the two Nogems clattered up behind him, coughing and wheezing and swaying unsteadily on their feet.

“Aw, no. Not Red Hat,” said one. His hat was a checkerboard of green and blue, and Cal didn’t really feel confident enough to have a bash at his name.

The other—who sported a simple yellow hat that matched his bristly blond beard—leaned over and squeezed one of Red Hat’s ears. He stood there like that for several seconds, counting under his breath, then released his grip and gave a sad, solemn shake of his head.

“He’s gone,” Yellow Hat said. “It’s no use. He’s gone.”

The Harvester glided up behind them, appearing like a ghost. His whip hummed as he coiled it around and around in his hands. “What do you think you are doing?” he demanded. “Return to your stations. Get back to work.”

“We, uh, we should take him to the morgue,” said Yellow Hat, lowering his eyes to avoid the Harvester’s gaze. “Please. It’s not right just leaving him.”

The Harvester’s teeth rippled. The whip uncoiled to its full length, the orange glow flickering all the way to its tip. “Return to your station,” he ordered. “Do not make me tell you again.”

The Nogems both stood and shuffled away from the body, keeping their gazes on the floor.

Cal scooped Red Hat up and cradled him in his arms. He felt small and frail, and Cal flashed-back to a time when he had held another body, not much bigger, a whole lot of years ago.

“I’ll take him,” Cal said. “Where’s the morgue?”

“You will put that thing down, and you will get back to work,” the Harvester growled.

Cal stepped closer to the monster. “Tell me where the morgue is, or you’ll be the next person who gets sent there.”

The Harvester poked Cal in the throat with a finger. With his arms full, Cal was unable to defend himself, and could only grit his teeth against the pain as it tore through him. He held the Harvester’s gaze, refusing to look away. Refusing to give him the fonking satisfaction.

When the finger was eventually withdrawn, Cal took a few seconds to compose himself and enjoy the lack of agony, then spoke in a voice he hadn’t even been aware he possessed. It was a cocktail of Clint Eastwood and thunder. A subtle blend of Sly Stallone and an earth tremor, with just a hint of space bear around the edges. It was a voice that said as much, if not more, than the words themselves.

“Get the fonk out of my way, and tell me where the morgue is. Now.”

Loren appeared at Cal’s side. “Just let him take him,” she said. “Then we can all get back to work before Manacle arrives.”

“The great Manacle,” the Harvester parroted. His eyes had crept to the edge of his nostrils as he attempted to force Cal to step down.

Cal was having none of it. He couldn’t do the pop-out eye trick, but he could glare with the best of them. He’d once gone a full day without blinking. Admittedly, the subsequent eye infection had seen him bed-ridden for over a week, but that wasn’t the point. If this fonk wanted a staring contest, he’d give him one.

Or, failing that, he’d kick him in the testicles and dodge past him while he was throwing up. Either one worked, and he was actually leaning slightly in favor of that second option.

Fortunately—or perhaps, unfortunately—it didn’t come to that.

“Take it and dispose of it,” the Harvester said, stepping aside. He pointed an elongated finger at Yellow Hat. The Nogem instinctively cowered back, bracing himself. “You. Show him the morgue.”

“Yes. Yes, thank you,” said Yellow Hat, practically curtsying with gratitude. “We’ll work even harder to make up for this.”

The Harvester’s teeth rippled. His eyes bulged all the way out of its nostrils before retreating into the dark caverns. “Yes. You shall,” he seethed. “I shall make sure of it.”

Seventeen

Cal had seen the inside of a couple of morgues in his time. Both had, pretty much by their very definition, been horrible places. Clean and tidy, yes, and professionally run, but not somewhere you’d want to take a picnic.

The one he was standing in now was several magnitudes worse. He wasn’t really sure it technically qualified as a ‘morgue’ in fact, being nothing more than a long rectangular cave with no obvious medical or cadaver storage facilities anywhere to be seen.

What it did have—and what was most likely the very definition of what made a room a morgue—was bodies. Hundreds of them lay around the place, mostly Nogem-sized, although three or four were bigger. The majority of the corpses had been covered in sheets, although a few had been denied that dignity and left to decompose al fresco.

The smell in the place was so strong Cal was convinced he could see it hanging like a green mist in the air. It was the smell of rot and decay and of things long dead. This probably shouldn’t have come as any great surprise, given the room’s contents, but the sheer potency of it was enough to make Cal reconsider his stance on noses. He’d previously been firmly in the pro-nose camp, but having been subjected to the stench of the morgue, he could feel his allegiance swinging in the opposite direction.

“Jesus, there are so many of them,” Cal remarked.

Yellow Hat nodded solemnly. “Too many.”

“Doesn’t this make you angry?” asked Cal, struggling to contain his own rage at the horrible injustice of it all.

“We tried anger,” Yellow Hat said. His voice was hollow. His expression, even more so. He gestured around the room at the mostly covered corpses. “This was the outcome. Now, we work. We must always work. That is the way of it.”

He gestured to an empty spot along one of the rows of sheets. There was a theatrical sort of reverence to the Nogem’s movements, and Cal approached the spot with what he hoped was a suitably respectful silence.

Then he tripped over one of the bodies, shouted a panicky, “Fonk!” and fired the lifeless Red Hat several feet through the air.

“Shizz, shizz, sorry!” Cal said. He scrambled over to the twisted wreckage of Red Hat and cradled him aloft again.

To his surprise, when he turned, he found Yellow Hat clutching his sides, with tears of laughter welling up in his eyes.

“Well, that feels inappropriate,” Cal chastised.

“Sorry. Sorry!” Yellow Hat giggled. “But Red Hat would’ve loved that!”

Cal looked down at the body in his arms. One of its legs was facing the wrong way, and its head hung at an angle that suggested the various parts of his neck were no longer connected. He didn’t look like he’d have loved it. Quite the opposite.

“He would?” Cal asked.

“Ha! Yes. Red Hat had a wicked sense of humor. Very dark. He’d have adored seeing you dropping him!”

“Really?” said Cal, feeling a little better about launching the poor bamston through the air like a cannonball. “Ha! Maybe we should try tossing him into the spot from here,” he laughed. “Or, no! We should prop him up so he looks like he’s alive, then watch the next person who comes in shizz their pants!”

Yellow Hat’s laughter died away. His expression went from being one of amusement to one that could best be described as ‘mystified horror.’

Cal cleared his throat. “No. No, that would be too far,” he said. “I’ll just set him down gently here…”

He set Red Hat down in the spot Yellow Hat had identified for him.

“Straighten his legs and point his head the right way, like this…”

There was a cracking of bone that made Yellow Hat wince.

“And… voila,” said Cal, stepping back to admire his handiwork. Red Hat looked a little better than he had a few moments ago, but he wasn’t exactly a pleasing sight to behold. “We should get a sheet,” Cal said.

“There are none left,” said Yellow Hat. “They ran out.”

“I’m sure this guy won’t miss his,” Cal said, catching the edge of a sheet that was being used to cover another body, and pulling it off.

As the sheet was removed, it peeled away strips of rotting flesh from the face of the body below it, revealing the little figure’s grimacing skull.

“Oh God. Well, that was horrible,” said Cal. He dropped the sheet, shuddered involuntarily, then carefully plucked another covering from a corpse that, to his relief, turned out to be more recent and far less decomposed.

“We’re just going to borrow this for a while,” he told the body. “Share and share alike.”

Cal lowered the covering over Red Hat with what he hoped was a suitable level of solemnity. “There,” said Cal. He waited for a suitably respectful amount of time, then jabbed a thumb in the direction of the door. “Well, I guess we ought to be getting back.”

“We should say a few words,” said Yellow Hat.

Cal sighed, almost imperceptibly. The stench of the place was doing his gag-reflex no favors. He’d stopped breathing through his nose, but the smell was still finding a way into his respiratory system and making itself at home.

“Right. Yeah,” said Cal.

Yellow Hat watched him expectantly.

“What, me? You want me to say something?”

“I am not good with words,” Yellow Hat said.

Cal glanced down at the sheet-covered mound between them. “I don’t think he’s going to be quick to judge.”

“Please,” the Nogem encouraged. “Say something fitting. I do not have the words to be First Mourner. That responsibility must be yours.”

Cal muttered a quiet, “Aw, Jesus,” under his breath, exhaled forcibly through his nose to try to evict the stench of decay, then launched into an impromptu eulogy for someone he barely knew. “Red Hat was… a guy. A little guy. A little guy with a big heart. But not, like, abnormally big. Physically, I mean. Physically, it was probably in proportion to the rest of him. I mean, I assume. I’m not an expert on…”

He caught Yellow Hat’s quizzical look, cleared his throat, then continued.

“Metaphorically, he had a big heart, was my point. Although we’d only just met, and I probably annoyed him to the point of wishing me harm, he stepped in to help me when things were rough. He saved my life. Twice. In our short time together, he taught me about friendship. About love. The love between a human and Nogem.”

He held up a hand for clarity.

“But not, like, in a dirty way. There was nothing, you know, sexual. It was purely platonic. I feel like he’d want me to make that clear.”

Cal clicked his tongue against the roof his mouth.

“What else? He didn’t really have any hobbies, as far as I’m aware, unless you count hitting a wall with a pickaxe, which he was awesome at. He might have had a family, I suppose, but then he might not. Who knows? In many ways, he was a man of mystery. A short, bearded puzzle. An enigma in a red hat. And I, for one, am going to miss him.”

He lowered his head. “Amen,” he whispered. “Wait, no, you don’t say ‘Amen’ there. Forget that part.”

Yellow Hat nodded encouragingly up at Cal and raised his bushy eyebrows.

“What now?” Cal asked. “Should I do more?”

“The Death Song,” Yellow Hat said.

Cal frowned. “The say-what-now?”

“The Death Song. As conductor of the funeral service, it is your duty to compose and perform the Death Song. Your words alone can carry Red Hat to the next life.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure I’m really the best person to—”

“It must be you,” Yellow Hat pleaded. “It must! Only you can ensure safe passage for Red Hat to the life beyond life. His eternal soul is in your mouth.”

“In my mouth?” Cal spluttered. “Oh! You mean because I have to sing the song. Gotcha.”

He rocked on his heels. “Can it be, like, any song?”

Yellow Hat’s bell jingled as he shook his head. “No. It must tell the deceased how you felt about them, and what they meant to you. Your words will give Red Hat the strength to continue onward after life.”

Cal spent a few seconds trying to compose something suitable in his head, before realizing that he didn’t have to. The perfect song had already been written for just this occasion. It was a timeless ballad that weaved a tale of friendship, love, and mutual respect. It wasn’t just a song—it was much more than that. It was an anthem. An anthem that could’ve been written specifically for Cal and this one fleeting moment in time.

It was the theme to The Golden Girls.

Eighty-four seconds later, when Cal had finished, he placed a hand on Yellow Hat’s shoulder and squeezed. The Nogem’s face was buried in his hands, his tiny body heaving with sobs.

“Hey, it’s OK. It’s OK,” said Cal, wiping a tear on his sleeve. Fonk, those Miami ladies got him every time.

“It was beautiful,” Yellow Hat wept. “So beautiful. The bit with inviting everyone to a party… Beautiful.”

He looked up at Cal and managed a small, shaky smile. “You have honored Red Hat. You have honored all of us. From this day forth, you shall be an honorary Nogem.”

Yellow Hat made a series of complicated gestures with his hands. “I dub thee, No Hat.”

“Great! That’s great,” said Cal. “Now, we really should be getting back before anyone comes to kill us. Those Harvester guys are pretty tetchy.”

“Wise words, No Hat,” said Yellow Hat. “But, before we go…”

Bending, the Nogem pulled down Red Hat’s sheet to reveal his face, then planted a long, lingering kiss on the dead man’s lips. Cal watched for a moment, growing increasingly uncomfortable, then made a point of becoming intently focused on a spot on one of the walls.

The smacking of lips and the brushing together of beards continued for several seconds.

Cal began to whistle quietly. Then he began to whistle more loudly.

Eventually, the sound of kissing stopped. The sheet rustled as it was drawn back into place.

“You, uh… You done?” Cal asked.

“Indeed, No Hat,” said the Nogem. “The Smooch of Departing is the honor of Second Mourner.”

“Damn. And to think, I only got to sing the song,” said Cal, picking his way through the scattered rows of covered corpses. It was a slow, laborious process. Occasionally, Cal would pick a path that would lead to a sort of dead end of dead bodies, where the path was completely blocked by several densely packed rows of cadavers and would have no choice but to turn back.

Eventually, after several wrong-turns, he made it to the door, then turned to check on Yellow Hat’s progress.

The Nogem stood over by another door at the opposite end of the vast morgue. He turned and spotted Cal just as Cal saw him.

“What the fonk are you doing over there?” Cal called to him.

“This is the way out,” Yellow Hat replied, his voice faint and distant. “Why did you go that way?”

“I thought this was the way out!”

“Oh,” said Yellow Hat.

A pause.

“Well, it isn’t. It’s this way.”

Cal pinched the bridge of his nose, muttered angrily, then forced another blast of air out through his nostrils. No matter how hard he exhaled now, more and more of the death-stench was finding its way inside him. He couldn’t stay in this room a moment longer, and picking his way back across the field of dead bodies was out of the fonking question.

“What’s this way?” he asked, indicating the door behind him.

“Don’t know,” Yellow Hat admitted.

The door was made of old metal, rusted in patches and dented in the good parts. It had a knob-like handle fixed awkwardly near the top. When Cal turned it, the whole thing dropped down into the floor, out of sight.

“Well, that seems wildly impractical,” he said to himself, peering down into the dark gap where the door had vanished into. “How the fonk do you get it back?”

Beyond the door was another rocky corridor, much like every other one he’d come across since they’d got here. Cal was sure he could hear the faint chinking of pickaxes on stone, suggesting the corridor led into one of the mine’s other chambers.

“I’m going to take my chances,” he called back to Yellow Hat. “If anyone asks where I am, tell them, uh… that I’m sick.”

“With what?” Yellow Hat hollered back.

“I don’t know. Think of something.”

There was a moment of silence, then Yellow Hat nodded. “Very good. I’ll tell them. Be safe, No Hat.”

“Sure. You, too,” Cal replied, then he turned and stepped through the doorway.

The door rose immediately behind him, the handle brushing lightly across his butt-cheeks as he stepped through.

“Jesus!” Cal protested, clutching his butt and racing clear of the door as it slammed shut. “Talk about an accident waiting to happen.”

The corridor led off in an uneven curve to the left. Giving the door a final dirty look, Cal set off along the passageway, kicking at loose rocks and humming quietly below his breath as he rounded the bend.

He had barely gone a dozen paces when he saw the guards. They looked like regular Harvesters, but with the addition of leather hats, studded gloves, and a putty-like body armor that covered all their more delicate parts.

Between them was another door. This one was also made of metal, but looked much newer and sturdier, and was completely devoid of rust. It also lacked a handle.

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 felt 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 hoisted 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?”

Orange Hat ignored him.

“Little shizznod,” Cal sighed. He turned to Miz and shrugged. “I don’t hear a buzzing.”

“There’s something else, too,” said Miz. “Like… a creaking.”

Cal closed his eyes and held his breath, in the hope of diverting the brainpower he saved on those, to his eardrums.

He still couldn’t hear any buzzing, but now that Miz mentioned it, he could detect the faintest suggestion of a creaking sound. It reminded him of a frozen lake in deepest winter, where each footstep across the surface brought groans of protest from the ice below. It was the type of creaking that suggested some cracking was sure to follow.

Wait.

Cal looked down.

“Oh, fonk,” he managed, and then the floor beneath him gave way, and he tumbled down into a hot, smelly darkness, with the sound of buzzing ringing in his ears.

Nineteen

Cal landed in something hot, wet, gloopy, and hot. He was aware that he’d thought the word hot twice, but it was such a pressing concern that he felt like this was entirely justified.

Steam rose and bubbles burbled in the shallow pool of mustard he’d landed in. The deep yellow gunge was tinged with green, thanks to the electric glow of the blue seams running like veins across the cavern walls.

Jumping up, he pulled himself free of the hot mustard and clambered onto the island of rocks that had fallen when the ceiling collapsed. They wobbled unsteadily under his feet, and he spent a few panicky seconds trying to find his balance, while simultaneously slapping the scalding condiment sludge off his crotch, ass, and thighs. His lower legs and feet, he reckoned, would just have to fend for themselves.

“Cal! You OK?” Miz called down.

The hole he’d fallen through was maybe six feet above his head. Miz knelt at the edge, her face a picture of uncharacteristic concern.

“I’m still alive,” Cal said. “So that’s a positive.”

He listened. “Wait. Is Orange Hat seriously still digging?”

“Who?” Miz glanced back over her shoulder. “You mean this guy?”

“He has an orange hat. You can’t miss him.”

“Yeah, he’s still digging.”

“That’s little shizznod,” Cal tutted. “I fall through the fonking floor, and he doesn’t even have the decency to…”

It was at this point that Cal became aware of the buzzing. Or rather, became aware of the buzzing again. He’d noted it during his fall, but the subsequent impact, testicle roasting, and immediate urge to escape said testicle roasting had pushed it down his list of priorities.

Now that he was upright, and his testes were merely being lightly steamed, the buzzing had reclaimed its rightful place in his list of pressing issues.

“What is that?” asked Miz.

Cal peered at the cavern around him. The mustard pool stretched out maybe twenty or thirty feet on all sides before reaching the rocky shore. Beyond that, despite the blue glow, much of the cave was curtained off by darkness.

The buzzing didn’t seem to come from any one particular direction, but almost from the air itself. That said, there was one particularly rich pool of shadow that was generating more than its fair share of the sound. Cal squinted into it, but the darkness was too thick for his eyes to penetrate.

Miz thrust a hand down toward him. “Jump and I’ll pull you up.”

“One minute,” said Cal. Holding his arms out for balance, he slowly bent over until he could reach a chunk of the broken rock. It wasn’t a particularly large piece, but it was almost cocooned in neon blue veins and gave off a powerful glow.

Cal straightened, spent a few panicky seconds trying to find his balance again, then managed to get his legs, feet, and the rocks he was balancing on under control.

The buzzing continued.

“Like, what are you doing?” Miz demanded. “Just jump up and I’ll pull you out.”

“Be right there,” said Cal. “I just want to see what’s making that fonking noise.”

He tossed the rock underarm. It sailed through the air toward where the loudest buzzing was coming from, bounced off the ridge of the shore, then plopped back into the mustard.

“Fonk,” he grunted, then he went through the whole process of getting another rock, took several more seconds to reclaim his balance, and threw that one, too.

This time, the chunk of stone flew farther. It clacked on the shore, then bounced on, replacing the darkness with a cool neon hue.

It took Cal a full three and a half seconds to figure out what he was seeing, and around one-eighth of that time to conclude that he shouldn’t have thrown that fonking stone.

There, accented in an eerie blue light, was a wasp.

No. That didn’t do it justice. It was, Cal reckoned, the wasp. The original wasp, from whence all other wasps had come. The Alpha Wasp.

No. More than that, even.

The Alpha Space Wasp.

It was hard to gauge quite how big the thing was. Bigger than him, certainly. Bigger than Mech? Probably. Its body was a fat, furry oval, elongated at the bottom end and finishing in a stinger the size of a broadsword.

Its markings, from what Cal could tell, were similar to Earth wasps, albeit more green than yellow. That may have just been the blue neon light, though, and—frankly—he couldn’t really give a shizz, either way. Yellow, green, it didn’t really matter. The color wasn’t the big issue. The giant-waspiness of it, on the other hand, very much was.

It squatted in the corner, its furry belly undulating, its antennae probing the air around it. As Cal watched, a slimy, mucus-coated egg-sac was ejected from the wasp’s furry body. It hit the floor with a splat, then squirmed and wriggled as if already alive.

“Well, I did not need to see that,” Cal muttered.

The wasp’s translucent wings were folded flat against its back. Something about this concerned Cal, although he couldn’t quite work out why, at first.

And then, he did. Suddenly, it was obvious. If the Alpha Space Wasp’s wings weren’t moving, then…

“Where the fonk is the buzzing coming from?” Cal wondered aloud.

Just then, as if in answer to his question, something rat-sized and fast-moving came zipping out of the shadows and rocketed past his ear making a sound like an angry chainsaw. Cal spun to try to follow its flight, lost his balance on the rocks, and barely had time to cup his hands over his groin before he hit the hot mustard with a splash.

The buzzing intensified, becoming a roar as the air was suddenly alive with hundreds of enormous insects. They moved too quickly for Cal to get a close look at them, but from what he could gather they ranged in size from ‘large hornet’ to ‘small Labrador’ and their butts were all equipped with appropriately scaled stingers.

Cal hastily restacked the rocks that had tumbled out from beneath him, and was just clambering up out of the mustard when the first of the little bamstons stung him on the back of the neck. Fortunately, the pain of his skin being melted from the lower half of his body distracted him from the pain of the sting, but as Cal heaved himself up onto the rocks he was struck by a sudden wave of nausea that threatened to throw him off balance again.

And then, there was the swelling. He felt the back of his neck growing larger, Incredible Hulk style, but it wasn’t until he was safely up on the rocks that he risked reaching back to touch it.

Jesus Christ!

It felt like his neck was growing a second head at a right angle to his current head. It bulged outward in a near-perfect dome shape, and Cal half-expected to find ears developing on the sides of it.

He was prodding gingerly at the fast-growing bump when another of the wasps stuck him on the back of the thigh. Considering the area was still somewhat on the tender side from having all its skin flayed off by hot mustard, the pain this caused immediately took his mind off the bulbous growth on his neck.

Grabbing at his thigh with his right hand, he swung out with the left, trying to swat away the growing swarm of the stripey, stingy bamstons before they could do him any more damage.

“Fonk off!” he added for good measure, then he yelped as the back of his hand connected with the back of a particularly large wasp, and a full half-pint of venom was injected into him.

The cave spun. Cal shoved his hand under the opposite armpit, then heard a rip as his thigh grew so bloated it split the seam of his pants.

“Cal, give me your hand!” Miz barked at him from above. She was lying flat on the floor now, her long arm stretching down to him. He had maybe two feet to jump. That was it. Two feet.

Another stabbing pain caught him on the cheek, and he felt his face inflate. No time to lose.

Cal jumped, throwing up both hands and grabbing desperately for Mizette. She caught hold of his swollen left hand, which was now almost as large as hers, and Cal howled in pain as her grip tightened around it.

Something pointy plunged into his left buttock. He felt the now familiar rippling warmth as the wasp injected its poison, then one side of his ass doubled in size, fully eclipsing the other.

“Pull!” Cal said, his voice an Elephant Man-like slur.

Miz ground her teeth together as she heaved. From that angle, Cal could see the collar around her neck, and watched in horror as the three green lights became four. Miz’s face contorted in agony. Her muscles tightened. Including, to Cal’s dismay, those in the hand that was currently in the process of crushing his own.

“Ow! Fonk! Fonk!”

A Harvester appeared at the edge of the hole beside Mizette. “What are you doing?” he demanded, giving Miz a kick. She snarled, her eyes screwed tightly shut as she dragged Cal upward.

Five lights.

Miz’s snarl became a scream. It lasted only a half-second before the Harvester drove another boot into her ribs, knocking the wind from her.

“Leave him down there,” the Harvester commanded. “He’ll keep them busy until the retrieval team gets here.”

“Miz, do what he says,” Cal pleaded. He tried to wriggle his hand free, but her grip was too tight. “I’ll be OK. I’ll be OK.”

Mizette opened her eyes. Her pupils were fully dilated from the pain that raged through her. Her teeth were clamped together, and Cal could barely make out the words she somehow hissed through them.

“Getting. You. Out.”

Six lights.

Seven.

Another kick.

Another.

The Harvester was screaming now, but the droning of the insects around Cal’s head made it impossible for him to hear what was being said.

The fur on Mizette’s head was graying before Cal’s eyes. Her eyes looked sunken, like they’d been taken out for cleaning then set back too far in her skull. Her arm shook. He was killing her. This fonk was killing her.

“Mizette, please!” Cal begged. “Don’t!”

The Harvester drew a foot back again. He was mid-swing when a large, muddy figure shoulder-barged him in the stomach, and they both went tumbling away from the edge of the hole, out of sight.

Loren dropped onto her front beside Miz and thrust a hand down. “Swing him up,” she commanded.

“Easy… for… you to say,” Miz hissed.

Roaring, muscles straining from the effort, Miz managed to drag Cal a foot closer to the hole. Reaching down, Loren grabbed his outstretched hand, and together they pulled him up to the surface.

“Kroysh, what happened to you?” Loren gasped, as she took in Cal’s various swollen appendages, hunched back, and bloated cheek. The swelling had spread up into his eye, giving him the appearance of someone looking at the world through a powerful magnifying glass, and not particularly approving of what he saw.

“Don’t worry about me!” Cal said. He caught a glimpse of his leg, the thigh of which was now several times its natural size. “Fonk. OK, worry about me a little. But help Miz.”

“I’m fine,” Miz groaned. The lights on her collar had dropped back to three, but the way her eyes rolled and her chest heaved said she was still feeling the effects.

Cal heaved his deformed, bloated body up onto his feet and offered Mizette a giant hand. “Here. Let me help you,” he said. “It’s the least I can do.”

“You can totally say that again,” Miz grimaced, allowing Cal to help her up.

She bent double for a few moments, her hands on her knees as she caught her breath. She looked up in time to see Garunk smothering the Harvester he’d been fighting to death by filling its mouth and nostrils with mud.

Behind him, Orange Hat maintained unwavering eye contact with the wall he was chiseling away at.

“A rescue!” exhaled Garunk, schlepping over to join the others. “An actual rescue! I did a rescue! How awesome is that?”

“Pretty awesome,” said Loren, with the tone of someone who’d spent the last few hours listening to all the terrible things Garunk thought were awesome.

“Me! I mean… me. An actual rescue! And it was so dramatic and last minute. Like, just in the nick of time!” He waved his fists in the air like an excited child. “Those are the best kind!”

“You’ve got to love his enthusiasm,” said Cal.

Loren gave a non-committal tilt of her head. “Well…”

“You’ve, like, killed that Harvester guy,” Miz pointed out.

Orange Hat gave a little cheep of panic and dug faster, like he could tunnel his way out of this entire situation.

“I know! Isn’t that amazing!” Garunk yelped. “Me! Fighting bad guys! Can you imagine?”

He mimed throwing a few lumbering jabs and a right hook, adding in some sound effects for good measure.

“Come on, we should stage a breakout right now!” Garunk said. “All of us together. We’ll fight our way out. It’ll be so cool!”

Loren bit her bottom lip. “Yeah, it’s not quite that simple.”

“Of course it is!” laughed Garunk.

“You know, I’m really starting to like this guy,” Cal said. He slapped his thigh, which only served to remind him how fonking painful it was. He ignored it. “Garunk, I’m officially making you an honorary member of Space Team.”

Garunk gasped so sharply his face bubbled inward.

“Wait, what?” said Loren. She smiled at Garunk as she side-eyed Cal. “Shouldn’t we discuss this first?”

“There’s nothing to discuss. He’s awesome. Did you see the way he took out that guard? That was textbook Space Team. He’ll fit right in.”

Loren shifted awkwardly, her smile still fixed in place. “I mean, yes, obviously, I’m very excited about the possibility of Garunk joining us. If it was up to me, I’d let him in for sure. But, you know, we have to think of the others. We should check with them.” She gestured to Mizette and shot her a meaningful look. “I’m not sure Miz would go for it.”

Miz shrugged. “I don’t care.”

“See? It’s not a problem,” Cal said. “We’re in favor, Miz is completely indifferent, Mech is a fonking traitor and has a lot of making up to do, and Splurt probably won’t even notice.”

“Well, yeah, but…” Loren squeaked, but she had no other arguments left to offer.

“So… I’m in?” asked Garunk. “I’m on the team?”

“Space Team,” Cal corrected. “And yes, you’re in. Welcome aboard, Garunk.”

“O-M-Fonking-G! This is so awesome! With me on your side, there’s nothing we won’t be able to do! I mean, did you see how I took that guy out?” he crowed, flexing his muddy muscles. “I’m a freakin’ fighting machine. I’m unstoppable!”

A stinger, roughly four feet long, burst through his chest from behind. Everyone, including Garunk, stared at it for several stunned seconds.

“Where did this come from?” Garunk wondered, then the stinger withdrew and he sunk to his knees, his thick, cakey mud-coating becoming thin and watery. It pooled on the floor around him, forming intricate patterns on the rock. He held a hand out in front of him, reaching for something only he could see. He tried to speak, but all that came out was a series of hacking sounds and something brown and phlegmy.

Nobody noticed. Instead, all eyes were fixed on a wasp the size of a baby hippo, which hovered in the air behind him, its stinger drawing back for a second attack.

“Shizz, Garunk, look ou—” Cal began, then he recoiled as the blade-like stinger stabbed Garunk through the head, spraying mud in an arc across the floor.

The stinger withdrew. Garunk made a noise not unlike water draining down the plughole, and then he toppled sideways and became a viscous muddy puddle on the floor.

Cal sighed. “Well, so much for unstoppable.”

“I guess he’s off the team,” said Miz.

Loren breathed with quiet relief. “Thank fonk,” she said, then she caught the looks from Cal and Miz. “Uh, I mean, thank fonk it was quick and painless,” she said. “He was a dear friend. I’d have hated for him to suffer.”

“Well, he got a three-foot-long spike through the chest and face,” Cal pointed out. “So, I’m pretty sure he suffered a little. And speaking of suffering...” Cal backed away from the giant wasp. “We should probably get the fonk out of here.”

Dozens of smaller wasps came zipping up into the air around it. An insect the size of a Chihuahua, crawled out of the hole, its back end caked in hot mustard that left a slug-like trail behind it as it crept toward Cal and the others.

Orange Hat, meanwhile, continued to dig, willfully oblivious to everything going on behind him.

“On three, OK?” Cal whispered. “We turn and we run as fast as we can. Only, not too fast, because my leg’s still huge, and I don’t want to get left behind. Run at the same speed as me so it’s fair. Or, ideally, slightly slower.”

“Yeah, good luck with that,” said Loren.

“Three…” Cal began.

Behind him, Miz and Loren both set off running.

“Two…”

Cal heard the scuffing of footsteps and shot a glance back over his shoulder. “Where the fonk are you going?!”

“You said ‘on three,’” Loren called back.

“Yeah, so why are…? Shizz. I counted backward. Wait for me!”

He set off at what was meant to be a sprint, but could be generously described as ‘an assisted hop’. The various swellings had started to go down, but he still gave off quite a distinct ‘Quasimodo’ vibe as he hobbled away from the wasps, his back bent, his face ballooned beyond recognition.

Up ahead, Loren and Miz stumbled to a stop, then immediately began retreating toward him. Cal had almost caught up with them when he saw the group of Harvesters in Hazmat style suits approaching from the main cavern, each carrying a long-nozzled weapon attached to a large tank on their back.

“Oh, great. Now they’ve got flamethrowers,” Cal sighed. He puffed out his cheeks, jabbed a thumb back over his shoulder. “So, you want to go take our chances with the wasps, or should we stay here and get burned to a crisp.”

He smiled lopsidedly at the women on either side of him. “Ladies’ choice.”

Twenty

At first, Cal assumed they were flamethrowers, and that the wasps—and probably everyone else in the side chamber—were about to be burned to a crisp.

Instead, as the Hazmat Harvesters rushed into the chamber, a green mist billowed from the nozzles of their weapons. Cal, Loren, and Miz coughed and hacked and spluttered, their eyes burning as the smoke hit them.

The Harvesters pushed them against the wall. Something tingled across Cal’s chest, then tightened, slamming him against the rock, but his eyes were shut too tight to be able to see what it was. From the yelp and growl from Loren and Miz respectively, Cal guessed they’d suffered a similar fate.

The ground trembled in the way it usually did when Mech was pacing somewhere nearby. Cal hadn’t heard the cyborg’s distinctive clanking, though, although the Harvesters were barking orders at each other, and the wasps were buzzing angrily, and there was a general feeling of chaotic emergency which could easily have drowned out Mech’s dainty footsteps.

The worst of the coughing passed, and Cal chanced opening his eyes.

Ooh, shizz!

Fonk. Fonk.

Ow.

A full minute passed before he tried again. This time, it felt like his eyeballs were being lightly sandpapered and rinsed out with vinegar. This was a marked improvement on the last time, and he was able to keep them both open long enough to make out the crackling band of energy coiled across his chest, keeping him trapped against the wall.

He had just enough time to see that Loren and Miz were both pinned by similar energy bonds—Loren facing front, Miz smushed face-first into the stone—then was forced to shut his eyes again before they dissolved into a lumpy paste.

“You guys OK?” he called above all the shouting and the buzzing.

“Fine,” said Loren. “I think. What is this stuff?”

“Gas,” Cal guessed.

“Well, obviously it’s gas—” Loren began, but then she sighed. “Sorry. Not your fault. Miz, you OK?”

“Thith tothally suckth,” said Miz from the side of her mouth that wasn’t in the process of being squashed into the rock. She sounded thoroughly annoyed, which told Cal she was just fine.

“Anyone have their eyes open?” Cal asked.

“Not yet,” said Loren. “Too painful.”

“I hath,” said Miz.

“Great! What do you see?”

“The wall,” Miz replied.

“Shizz. That doesn’t really help,” Cal said. He took a number of deep breaths, which brought on a fit of frantic coughing, then gritted his teeth. “OK, I’m doing it. I’m opening my eyes.”

And he did. This time was an improvement again on the last one. Sure, it felt like his retinas were being injected with concentrated cat urine, but he reckoned he could just about handle it.

With his eyes open, Cal saw a towering figure dressed in black standing just twenty feet away.

This close, Manacle was pretty fonking intimidating. And blurry. Mostly blurry. Although, that was probably more to do with the gas than Manacle himself. The intimidating bit, though, was all him.

He looked as if he’d paid a visit to the Crazy Galactic Warlord clothing store, headed straight for the Darth Vader section, and maxed out his credit card. He was in all black plasticy armor, angular black mask, knee-high black boots, and a full herd and a half’s worth of leather. Black, obviously.

He stood watching as the Harvesters sprayed the wasps with the green gas, his gauntlets creaking as he flexed and unflexed his left hand, spreading the fingers wide, then balling them slowly into a tight fist. To Cal’s mind, this made him look like he was strangling an invisible goose, although he was aware that he was almost certainly the only one who thought this, so he decided it was probably best not to mention it out loud.

“Hey! Manacle! Is that you?”

The fist tightened with a jerk, snapping the invisible goose’s neck clean in two. Manacle lowered his arm and turned, ever so slowly, in Cal’s direction.

“It is you, isn’t it?” said Cal. “You know, I’ve heard a lot about you in the last day or so. Sounds like you’re making a real name for yourself.”

The ground shook faintly as Manacle swung a leg forward and strolled in Cal’s direction. He didn’t stop until he was uncomfortably close, and while he no longer looked blurry, he’d doubled down on the intimidating part.

Cal saw himself reflected in the lenses of Manacle’s mask. Fonk, he was in bad shape. With his face partly inflated, he barely recognized himself.

Manacle stood just a few inches taller than Cal, and yet Cal couldn’t recall anyone ever looming quite so menacingly over him before. Cal had stood his ground in front of larger opponents before, not to mention godlike space clouds and Time Titans, and had been able to bluff through his nerve-jangling terror.

Something about Manacle stripped that ability from him, though. He wanted to put on the usual cocky swagger, but something about the very essence of the figure before him made his mouth go dry and his bladder set itself on Amber Alert.

Manacle had said nothing. Hell, he’d done nothing except take a casual stroll toward him, but Cal knew in that moment that Miz was right. A pickaxe through the head wouldn’t have stopped this guy, it’d only have fonked him off.

Cal rasped his tongue across the desert of his lips. “So, uh, I just wanted to say ‘good job’. Keep it up,” he croaked.

A gloved hand caught Cal by the chin, the fingers pressing like iron rods against his cheek. He saw his reflection go wide-eyed and panicky as Manacle forcibly tilted his head left and right, studying him.

Cal instinctively reached for some sort of quip—some kind of Cal-ism he could fire out to show he wasn’t afraid. He settled briefly on, ‘Take a photo, it’ll last longer,’ but the words refused to come out, and he could only stand there in mute terror as Manacle manipulated his head, scrutinizing every swollen, bloated inch.

The hand was cold through the glove. Cal blamed this for the way his own hands started shaking, and how his legs trembled like they might give way at any moment.

“Great Manacle,” said one of the Hazmat-wearing Harvesters, appearing through the cloud of green mist. He bowed three times, each one deeper and more respectful than the one before. Through the glass of his visor, Cal could see the guy was going through some Grade A emotional turmoil. It didn’t take long to figure out why.

“I have some bad news,” the Harvester confessed, rushing the words out with the grim determination of someone ripping off a band-aid in one sharp jerk. “We secured the Queen, as requested. And while we successfully secured several of the other larger males, the Beta was injured.”

Manacle continued examining Cal’s face.

“Meaning?” he said. His voice was an electronic crackle from inside the helmet that seemed to agitate the very air around him.

The Harvester wrung his gloved hands. “Meaning… We may not have a viable breeding pair. We may have to continue the search for a little longer to be sure we—”

Manacle’s free hand punched through the glass of the Harvester’s visor. Cal saw his fingers splay inside the hood until they clamped across the Harvester’s skull.

Manacle kept his own gaze on Cal as he squeezed.

There was a whimper. Then a crunch. Then a squelch.

Manacle withdrew his blood-soaked hand from inside the visor. The Harvester toppled backward onto the floor.

Cal swallowed, even more aware now, than he had been, of the fingers wrapped around his face. “Well, that showed him,” he whispered.

“I don’t need a Beta. I have all the subjects I need,” Manacle said, although Cal had no idea if it was aimed at him, the dead Harvester, or just the world in general.

The fingers tightened on Cal’s face. He heard the bones in his head groan their collective disapproval, and tried very hard not to picture his skull exploding like an overripe melon.

And then, to both his and his skull’s relief, the fingers released their grip. Manacle looked him up and down, glanced down the line at Loren and Miz, then let out a single, “Huh,” of indifference.

“Bring the Queen,” he barked, turning and striding into the green fog, his cape swishing behind him. “Load her onto my ship.”

“Yes, Great Manacle,” said a voice from somewhere else in mist. “And the workers? Should we dispose of them?”

Manacle stopped. Cal could just make him out through the gas. He appeared to consider this for a moment, then gave a shake of his head. “Resume digging,” he commanded. “Find me more.”

And with that, he was gone, swallowed by the billowing clouds of wispy green.

“Well,” croaked Cal, finding his voice. “He seemed nice.”

“Tolthd you,” Miz mumbled. “He’th noth thomeone we wanth tho meth with.”

“I don’t even know what you’re saying to me right now,” Cal told her. “But I get the general idea.”

There was nothing they could do but wait, listening to the sounds of shouting, the angry buzzing, and then a sound like cream being sprayed from a can.

Shapes moved in the mist, heading off in the direction of the main mine chamber. The fog was dissipating a little, and Cal saw flying boxes of various sizes go gliding through the air, as Hazmat-suited Harvesters scurried along behind.

As they all left, silence fell in the side chamber. Or… no. Not silence. Cal realized he could still hear the steady thunk of Orange Hat’s pickaxe striking the wall. Jesus, that guy had a work ethic.

There was another sound, too. A voice, in fact.

“Wow, that actually hurt!” it said, in a tone that suggested this was a good thing. “I can’t believe I got stung by a giant wasp! An actual giant wasp! How awesome is that?!”

This second sound was followed by an almost imperceptible third sound. It was a low groan that came squarely from Loren’s direction.

“Coo-ee!” called Garunk, waving cheerfully as he emerged from the mist. He held his arms out, presenting himself as he twirled on the spot. “Look who’s alive!”

“Hey, you’re not dead!” Cal remarked, observant as ever. “Loren, look. Garunk isn’t dead.”

“Yay!” said Loren, with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. Which, in all honesty, wasn’t much.

“How has that happened?” Cal wondered. “You got pretty definitively stabbed through the face and torso.”

“I don’t have any internal organs in any of those places,” Garunk explained. He patted himself on the stomach then rubbed his hands across his slick, muddy torso, a little too suggestively for Cal’s liking.

“What, not even in your head?” Cal asked.

“Especially not in my head,” said Garunk. He shoved a fist through the hole the stinger had made in his face, turned so Cal could see it emerging from the back of his head, then squelchily waggled his fingers. “See? Nothing.”

“Then where do you keep…?” Cal shook his head. “Forget it. Can you get us out of these things?”

“Energy restraints!” Garunk said, once Cal had drawn his attention to the crackling band across his chest. “Ah-may-zing! Now it feels like a real adventure. It’s like I always say, ‘It’s not an adventure until someone’s tied to a wall with energy restraints!’”

He waved a muddy hand. “Kidding, I never say that. But maybe I should start! You think? Loren? Loren? Loren?”

“What?”

“You think I should start saying that?”

“I don’t care!” Loren snapped. She took a breath and adjusted her tone. “Just… Can you hurry up and get us out of them?”

Garunk bent to study the energy shackles across Loren’s chest, then straightened up again. “You know what this reminds me of, Loren?”

Loren flinched, just a little. “Something from the Academy?” she guessed.

“Yes!” Garunk confirmed. “You know the one.”

“I don’t,” Loren said.

“You do! Of course you do! That time we…”

He broke into a snorting laugh.

“Remember? When Feltch… With the desk? Only it wasn’t…”

He exploded into a fit of guffawing. Loren and Cal watched him blankly as he doubled over, his body shaking with laughter. Miz continued to stare at the wall. She didn’t have a lot of other available options.

“And then—oh, Kroysh! Hoof’s face? Remember? Remember Loren? Loren? Remember? Poor Hoof’s face!”

The thought of Hoof’s face set him off again. He buried what passed for his own face in his sort-of hands and surrendered to an all-consuming fit of the giggles.

“What the fonk is he talking about?” Cal asked.

“I have no idea,” sighed Loren. “Garunk!” she snapped. “Can you get us out of these or not?”

Garunk took a few seconds to compose himself, gave a long, happy sigh, chuckled a few more times, then shook his head. “No.”

“Great,” Loren muttered.

“I wouldn’t know where to start,” Garunk admitted.

He stooped and retrieved Cal’s fallen pickaxe. “I suppose I could try to smash them off with this,” he said, hefting the tool in his hands. “But there’s a chance I might hit you guys instead.”

“How much of a chance?” Cal asked.

Garunk considered this. “Fifty-fifty,” he said. He hefted the pick from hand to hand. “Maybe sixty-forty.”

“Sixty-forty the good way or the bad way?” Cal asked.

“Which one’s the bad way?” Garunk asked.

Cal blinked. “The one when you accidentally cave our skulls in.”

“Oh. Yeah, sixty that way,” said Garunk. He tried giving the pick an elaborate swish, but it slipped from his grip and clattered to the ground. Cal and Loren watched him in silence as he retrieved it. “Want me to try?” he asked.

“We’ll pass,” said Cal.

“I’ll thake my thanthes,” slurred Miz. “Go thor it.”

Garunk emitted a little squeal of excitement. “A daring break-out! Just wait until I tell everyone back home!”

Before Garunk could raise the pick, a metal figure came clanking out of the fog.

“Hey, look, who it is. It’s Robo-Judas,” Cal remarked.

“Mech, are we glad to see you?” said Loren.

“Are we?” asked Cal.

“I don’t know. It was a genuine question,” Loren replied. “I honestly have no idea anymore.”

Mech prodded a finger against a small device he had strapped to his forearm. The electric bonds holding Cal, Loren, and Miz in place fizzled out, and they all stumbled away from the wall.

“Ugh. Like, that was totally lame,” Miz snarled, which basically echoed what the others had been thinking.

“We got a problem,” Mech said.

“Oh, you think?” Cal replied. “What gave it away?”

“What the fonk happened to your face?” Mech asked.

“Space wasps,” said Cal.

“If you think it’s bad now, you should’ve seen it a few minutes ago,” said Loren. “It was hideous.”

Cal touched his bloated cheek. “I wouldn’t say ‘hideous,’ exactly…”

“No. You’re right,” Loren said. “It was… grotesque. Miz? Would you say ‘grotesque’?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t even bring myself to look,” Miz said. “I was like, ‘If I look at him, I’m totally going to throw up.’”

“I’ve seen you eat people’s faces off!” Cal yelped. “But just looking at mine was going to make you puke?”

“It was the eye,” Miz said. “It was so huge and so—” She heaved and gagged. “Ew. I don’t even want to think about it.”

Cal sighed and turned back to Mech. “So, that’s what you missed,” he said. “Now, what’s the problem? You know, beyond being slaves on a fonking mustard planet.”

“I overheard that Manacle guy talking,” Mech said. “I know why he wants the wasps.”

“Is it to ruin a giant’s picnic?” Cal guessed. “Because I’d actually kind of be into that.”

“He’s going to attack Zertex,” Mech said.

Cal raised his eyebrows, then lowered them, then brought them together in a knot above his nose.

Then he repeated all that, before finally offering a response.

“Is that bad?”

“I thought they were on the same side?” said Loren. “Konto said they were working together.”

“Guess they had a falling out,” said Mech.

“A double-cross!” Garunk gasped. “So cool!”

Everyone ignored him. Especially Loren, who made a point of ignoring him twice as hard as the others.

“Why wasps?” she wondered. “Zertex has thousands of fighter ships. What good are a few wasps going to do?”

“Can wasps even fly in space?” Cal wondered. “Space wasps, I mean. I know regular wasps can’t.” He shrugged. “Actually, I don’t know that. But I’m going to go ahead and assume.”

“They ain’t sending them into space,” said Mech. “They’re dropping them on some Zertex-controlled moon.”

Loren stiffened just enough for the others to notice. “What moon?” she asked.

“I couldn’t hear exactly,” Mech said. “But it sounded like Noosh.”

Loren and Garunk exchanged a look of horror. “Moosh?” Loren spluttered.

“Yeah, maybe,” Mech confirmed. “You know it?”

“It’s where the Academy’s based,” Loren said.

“Great!” said Cal. “Then he’ll take out all their troops before they’ve even qualified.” He nodded, almost admiringly. “You have to admit, it’s a smart move.”

“Kids go to the Academy, Cal,” Loren pointed out. “It’s a school. They’re children.”

Cal clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “OK, that’s less good,” he admitted. “Could he maybe just not be aware of that fact?”

“He knows they’re kids,” Mech said. “Hell, I think that’s why he picked it as a target.”

“Ah, fonk,” Cal muttered. “I was hoping we could just send him an anonymous note letting him know, but I guess that’s out the window.”

He puffed out his cheeks. “Well, someone’s going to have to stop him. Any volunteers?”

Garunk thrust up a hand. Cal grinned happily. “Oh, thank fonk. I thought it was going to be up to us.”

He took Garunk’s other hand and shook it warmly. “Best of luck, buddy. Go give him hell.”

Garunk’s squidgy features formed something like a frown. “Uh, I don’t have a ship,” he pointed out.

“That’s fine. Technically, neither do we. You’ll figure it out. You just have to believe.”

“Cal,” said Loren.

“And, you know, escape and find a ship. Just those three things,” Cal continued.

“Cal!” Loren said again.

Cal groaned. “Yeah. Yeah, I know,” he said. “Still, it’d be nice, wouldn’t it? Just once, to have someone else handle it?”

He turned back to Mech. “Where’s the Untitled?”

“Still on the Harvester ship,” Mech said. “But I don’t know how long it’s on-planet for. Looked to me like they were getting ready to leave.”

“OK, here’s the plan,” Cal said. “We get the fonk out of here before those toothy shizznods come back, we grab Splurt, we get the ship, we go stop Manacle doing whatever the fonk he’s going to do with his wasps.”

“And how do we actually do any of that?” Loren asked.

Cal waved a hand and pulled a face that suggested they shouldn’t worry too much about the details. “We’ll figure it out. Everyone good with the general plan?” He looked across their faces. “Loren?”

“Let’s do it.”

“Miz?”

“What?” Miz asked.

“Are you good with that plan?”

Miz shrugged. “I wasn’t listening. Do I get to kill a bunch of people?”

“Very probably,” Cal said.

“Then I’m totally in,” Miz confirmed.

“Nice,” said Cal. “Garunk, how abou—?”

“This is the greatest moment of my life!” Garunk squealed.

“I’m going to take that as a ‘yes,’” said Cal. He wafted his hands in front of his face for a few seconds, making a clearing in the gas fog. “OK, troops, let’s go find that Darth Vader knock-off and show him what happens when you fonk with—”

A metal fist smashed across Cal’s jaw, spinning him to the floor. Mech grunted his disapproval as his arm-blasters extended and took aim at Loren and Miz.

“Sorry, man,” he said. “I really am. But I’m afraid I can’t let you do that.”

Twenty-One

Cal manipulated his jaw back into position, opened and closed his mouth a few times to test its functionality, then curved it into a grimace of disappointment.

“OK, Mech. If that’s how you want to play it,” he growled. He made a move to roll up his shirt sleeves, then remembered he was wearing a t-shirt. He pushed the t-shirt sleeves up onto his shoulder, but the effect wasn’t quite the one he was going for, and they both immediately fell back into their original position.

Cal raised his fists and tucked his chin in close to his chest. “You want to do this? Let’s do it,” he said.

“Don’t, man,” Mech warned. “I’ll stop you. They’ll make me stop you.”

He cocked his head. Concern flickered behind his eyes. “Miz, look out!” he warned, then lights four and five illuminated on her collar and she fell to the floor, her fur standing on end, her eyes screwed into slits.

“Help her!” Cal yelped.

“On it,” said Loren, dropping to her knees at Mizette’s side. Miz’s back arched. Her claws carved trenches in the stone floor. There was nothing Loren could do but hold her head and stroke her fur and whisper words of reassurance.

“That wasn’t me,” Mech said, his voice cracking. “I swear, that wasn’t me.”

Cal ran at him, roaring. He jumped, hands grasping for the seam where Mech’s neck met his torso. That looked like a weak spot. Or a weaker spot, at least. If he could shove a hand down there and grab some wires, he might be able to slow him down.

An overhead fist-strike smashed Cal to the floor. All the air in his body was replaced by a sort of mute shock, and he lay there for a moment wondering why he was on the floor, and what had happened to put him there.

“OK, OK, that was a cheap shot,” Cal said, getting back to his feet. “But you’re going to have to do better than that, Mech.”

Cal ran at him again, fists windmilling theatrically. Little did Mech know that this was merely a distraction. Cal was going to slide through his legs, clamber up onto his back, then—

WHAM.

A backhand from Mech lifted Cal off his feet and sent him hurtling across the cavern. He collided with the wall over by Orange Hat, then landed heavily on his ass.

“Ooh, my fonking coccyx!” Cal protested.

Beside him, Orange Hat made a very deliberate attempt to ignore everything and everyone, and continued hammering away at the wall.

“Give me that,” Cal snapped, wrenching the pick from the Nogem’s grasp. Orange Hat tried to grab it back, but Cal held it out of reach above his head.

“That’s mine!” the Nogem protested.

“I’m just borrowing it for a second. Jesus. You’ll get it back. Calm down.”

Orange Hat lunged, his mouth opening wide. Cal squealed as the Nogem bit him on the crotch. He turned, trying to pull free of Orange Hat’s bite, but only succeeded in lifting him off the ground and twirling him in a wide circle.

“Aargh! Fonk off! Stop that!”

“Gmme m’ pck bck,” Orange Hat mumbled.

“OK, OK, here!” Cal cried. The pickaxe fell to the floor with a clank, and Orange Hat released his grip.

“Thank you,” the Nogem said.

As he bent to retrieve the pick, Cal grabbed him, hoisted him above his head, ran several feet toward the cloud of mist, then tossed him with all his might.

“Little bamston,” Cal grunted, as he watched the startled Nogem go tumbling into the fog. Grabbing the pick, he gestured to Garunk. “If he comes back, kick the shizz out of him, OK?”

Garunk saluted. “Yes, sir!”

“I mean it, Garunk. I’m trusting you here. My balls are in your hands.”

“Ooh, cheeky!” Garunk sniggered.

Cal sighed, gave the pick a twirl, then lined himself up with Mech. Miz’s screams had abated for now, and Loren was cradling her head, rocking her back and forth.

Loren’s eyes met Cal’s. Something seemed to pass between them and a look of horror flitted across Loren’s face, before being swept aside by a grim acceptance. She nodded, just once, then turned her attention back to Miz.

“OK, big guy. You’ve been asking for this for a long time,” Cal said. He raised a finger. “Wait. Let me correct that.”

His eyes narrowed. A smirk curved the corners of his mouth. “A long space time.”

Mech groaned. “Aw man, now you’re making me want to hit you.”

“Good. Then bring it on, you robotic piece of shizz,” Cal said, gripping the handle of the pick with both hands. “Let’s do this.”

He raced at Mech, somehow managed to duck under a scything hook, and swung the pick at his back. Metal sparked against metal, and Cal let out a little cheer of triumph before Mech’s top half rotated one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, and an arm clothes-lined Cal to the ground.

“Don’t do this, man,” Mech said. His foot raised. “Look out!”

Cal rolled clear just as Mech’s foot slammed down. He swung up with the pick, but the angle meant he didn’t have the leverage to get any power behind it. Mech caught the weapon, wrenched it from his grip, then bent the metal points together until they formed an uneven oval shape.

With a whirring of hydraulics, he tossed the pick off into the gas fog. Cal heard it clatter somewhere in the distance.

“Ooh, Orange Hat is not going to be happy about that,” he grimaced.

“Stay down,” Mech warned, but Cal completely disregarded this and got to his feet.

Breathing deeply, Cal held a hand up. “Just give me a second here,” he wheezed. “I just need a minute, then we can get right back to it.”

Mech’s foot jackhammered into his chest, sending him cartwheeling into the mist. His fading screams reverberated around the side chamber, then ended with a crunch.

For a moment, there was silence. Then, faintly:

“OK, so that was just mean.”

Mech turned to Loren. “Make him stop,” he pleaded. “You gotta make him stop.”

Loren gave a sad smile, then a shake of her head. “I can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Cal emerged from the fog, eyes streaming, shoulders lowered. He collided with Mech’s back and lashed out with a flurry of punches, all of which were entirely ineffectual.

Mech’s elbow smashed into his face, shattering his nose. Now fully blinded by tears, Cal staggered back, choking on blood and gas. He swung wildly with a right hook, missed Mech by a clear foot, then was floored by a backhand slap.

“Please, man. They won’t let me stop until you do,” Mech said, his metal bottom jaw trembling with the effort of fighting the effects of the control chip. “They’ll kill you. I’ll kill you.”

“Then I guess you’ll have to kill me, Mech,” Cal said, standing again. “Because you know you can’t hurt me, right? Not really. Because, I don’t know if you remember?”

He twitched his face and his broken nose cricked back into place.

“But I heal really fast. So, if you want to put me down, you’re going to have to try a whole lot harder than that.”

A fist smashed into Cal’s ribs like a wrecking ball, shattering bone and all but turning his lungs inside out. Instinctively, Cal raised both arms to cover his head, but another hydraulic-assisted punch broke through his defenses, and pain exploded inside his head.

He swung—blindly, hopelessly—and grimaced as his fist connected with Mech’s chest plate. The effect was like an egg hitting a tank, and with almost identical repercussions for both parties. Cal blinked through the tears and the brain fog and saw that his hand was no longer the shape it should be.

Fonk. His poor fingers. They’d had a hell of a day.

“Stop this,” Mech grunted, but Cal stumbled toward him, blood oozing from various holes in his face, many of which hadn’t been there a few moments before. “You’ve got to stop this.”

“Fonk you, you big shizznod,” Cal said, spitting blood and something more solid. A tooth, maybe, or possibly part of his jaw. He didn’t care to know which. “That the best you got? Magic-healing power, remember? You can’t stop me!”

Mech’s fist hammered the top of Cal’s skull, compressing his head into his shoulders and shaving a full three inches off his height.

Cal performed a series of crab-like sideways staggers, crisscrossing in front of Mech for a moment. The floor undulated beneath him, rising like storm waves under his feet.

And then, he was horizontal. He wasn’t quite sure how that had happened, but he figured he could probably work it out, given enough time.

There was, he reckoned, not a part of him that wasn’t currently in pain. Sure, some parts were worse than others—his elbow, for example, had gotten off pretty lightly, and the toes on his left foot were only lightly throbbing—but there wasn’t a single part of him that was entirely pain-free.

He should lie there for a minute, he thought. Just for a moment while he got his breath back and the pain ebbed away. He didn’t want Mech to hit him again. More than anything, he thought, he didn’t want Mech to hit him again.

And yet, more than anything, he had to.

Cal rolled onto his front, spat out a wad of something that belonged firmly inside him, then started to get up. “My grandmother hits harder than you,” he said.

“Stay down, man,” Mech hissed. “I’m begging you.”

Cal made it to his knees and raised his mangled hand. The fingers, while still twisted, were gradually easing back into place.

“Be right with you,” Cal muttered through his bloated lips. “Then you’re in for it, you big metal—”

“No,” Mech whispered, as his fist came up all by itself and bludgeoned Cal to the ground.

“Please,” he said, watching his foot raise, hearing the hiss of the hydraulics as it prepared to stomp.

“Don’t.”

The foot came down on Cal’s back. Again. Again. Again. Bone cracked. Organs ruptured. Mech tried to screw his eyes shut, but they wouldn’t let him. They wouldn’t let him look away as he stamped on the now lifeless body, punishing it for its defiance.

At last, he stopped. They stopped.

Mech took a few staggering steps back and stared in mute, helpless horror at what he had done. Because it had been him, he knew. Sure, the Harvesters were pulling the trigger, but he was the weapon. It was his hands and feet that had committed the actual act.

“Ah… fonk,” Mech croaked. He turned to Loren, eyes wide and imploring. “He didn’t stop. He wouldn’t stop! Why didn’t you make him stop?”

Loren didn’t look at Mech. She didn’t look at Cal, either. She couldn’t. She just whispered quiet reassurances in Mizette’s ear, rocking her head gently back and forth.

“Uh… what does this mean?” asked Garunk, his voice uncharacteristically flat. “Is this supposed to happen? It, uh, it doesn’t really feel like a fun adventure anymore.”

A voice crackled from Mech’s forearm. “Was he telling the truth? About the healing?” it demanded.

Mech ground his jaws together. “Yeah.”

“Intriguing,” said the Harvester. “His remains may be worthy of study. Bring the body.”

Mech tensed. His eyes went to the broken rag-doll figure on the floor, blood pooling in a puddle around him. “I… I…”

“Bring it,” the Harvester hissed, and Mech’s towering frame snapped to rigid attention. He bent and caught Cal by the back of his pants, then hoisted him a few feet off the ground. Cal folded limply, his arms and feet dragging across the stone floor.

“I’m sorry,” Mech whispered, although it wasn’t clear who he was aiming it at.

And then, he went clanking out of the chamber, and was swallowed by the gas.

Garunk waited until the sound of Mech’s footsteps had faded, then turned to Loren. She hadn’t looked up from Miz.

“What’s happening?” Garunk asked. “This… I don’t…” He cleared his throat. “I think I want to go home.”

Loren nodded slowly. “You’re not the only one,” she whispered.

The lights on Miz’s collar dropped back to three. She opened her eyes with a gasp, scowled briefly at Loren, then noticed the wetness on her cheeks and the redness in her eyes.

“No,” she said, her voice hoarse. “No.”

Loren nodded. “He’s gone.”

A furry hand raised and then flopped onto the back of Loren’s neck.

“No,” Miz said again. “That’s not fair.”

“I know, honey,” said Loren, cradling Miz’s head. She did her best to smile through her tears. “But it’ll be OK. I promise. It’s all going to be OK.”

* * *

The Harvesters didn’t really go in for qualifications. Not in the traditional sense. No one Harvester was any more or less important than the others. At least, that’s what the important ones insisted, and the less important ones didn’t dare dispute it, for fear of finding out exactly how unimportant they actually were.

In many other species, the Harvester working in the lab would’ve been given a title like ‘doctor’ or ‘professor’. Despite his years of study and his quite remarkable knowledge of biology, the Harvester had no official title. To do so would be to set him apart from the others, and this simply would not do.

He was instead referred to by his name, Ma-kom. Or, increasingly, by his nickname, ‘that creepy bamston with the scalpel.’

The cyborg’s delivery had been an unexpected and welcome one. The possibilities afforded by an advanced healing factor were almost limitless. And not just in all the blindingly obvious ways the other Harvesters might be able to wrap their feeble brains around, he was talking complete biological overhaul. Infant gestation periods reduced to a matter of days. Organs grown for the galactic black market.

He’d spent years gene-splicing some of the most violently destructive entities in the galaxy, only for them to die or explode at crucial stages in their development. If he could isolate the healing factor, such failures would be a thing of the past. The only limits to his creations would be his imagination.

And he had such a vivid imagination.

He ran his elongated fingers across the plastic body bag, caressing its crinkles. The plastic was smoky and only semi-transparent, but the smears of blood were clearly visible on the inside, and they gave him a little shiver of excitement.

“I can’t wait to get started on you,” he whispered, kneading the corpse’s thigh through the plastic sheet. He sighed through his teeth. “But wait I must.”

Ma-kom turned crisply to the glass tub on the table behind him. “You first.”

The gelatinous green blob had become agitated when the cadaver was brought in and was now pressed against the inside of the glass, its bulbous eyes staring forlornly at the body in the bag.

Ma-kom rapped a knuckle against the glass. Splurt continued to stare past him at Cal, his blobby outline trembling.

“Look at me,” Ma-kom instructed. He knocked again. “At me.”

Splurt ignored him, much to the Harvester’s irritation.

“Very well,” he said, jamming a two-inch long rubber plug in each ear and then reaching into a pocket of his lab coat. “We’ll do it the hard way.”

Ma-kom took a phone-sized device from his pocket, waved it in front of the motionless Splurt, then jammed a finger against one of the buttons.

A piercing wail rose up from the table beneath Splurt’s tub, vibrating the glass and turning his almost-spherical body into a thrashing shapeless mass that flailed frantically inside the container, tendrils thwapping helplessly against the glass.

Ma-kom hummed quietly below his breath as he watched Splurt contorting in pain. The movements were quite mesmerizing, he thought. Relaxing, even.

He gave it another few seconds, then took his finger off the button. Silence fell. Splurt flopped down to the bottom of the tub, becoming a puddle of featureless goo.

After a moment, eyes formed inside the puddle. It rose, shakily, until it was vaguely egg-shaped, and cowered at the back of the tank. The eyes flicked over to the body again, but crept up to Ma-kom when the Harvester raised his controller device.

“There. That wasn’t so difficult, was it?” said Ma-kom. “Just do what you are told, and we’re going to get on just fine.”

He leaned closer to the tub. His eyes emerged from his nasal cavities and pressed against the glass. “Disobey, and things will get very difficult.”

Splurt glanced past him, then snapped his focus back to Ma-kom. Splurt’s blobby body rippled, and Ma-kom gave a satisfied nod.

“Very good.”

Had he spoken ‘Splurt,’ however, Ma-kom would almost certainly have been less pleased. He would’ve understood that this particular ripple did not signal an acceptance of Splurt’s current predicament.

On the most basic, fundamental level, it could be translated as a simple, “Hooray!” Or possibly a, “Yipee!” depending on how closely you looked.

Those with a clearer understanding of the language might have detected a deeper meaning, too. It was subtle, but if you knew what you were looking for, there was no mistaking it.

It translated loosely as: “You’re fonked, sunshine.”

And he was.

Ma-kom straightened and pulled the plugs from his ears. As he did, he heard the crackling of plastic, and a horrible thought suddenly occurred to him.

Just how good was this guy’s healing factor?

He turned to find the corpse grinning at him and waving. “Well, hey there, you,” it said.

It cracked its knuckles and lowered its voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

“Do us both a favor, will you?” it said. “Don’t scream.”

The corpse winked at him, its smile growing. “Not even if you really want to.”

Twenty-Two

Mech thudded along the passageway leading away from the lab, his legs carrying him along all on their own. His arms and chest were slick with blood. Cal’s blood. There was something wet and chunky on his foot, but he couldn’t bring himself to look.

Not that he could look, even if he’d wanted to. They’d ramped up power to the control chip, and now he was little more than an observer inside his own head. He could move his eyes, and he had successfully hurled an insult at the guards outside the lab door, but both took enormous amounts of effort. Soon, he would lose control completely. He wondered what would happen to his mind when he did. Would they take hold of that, too?

He could feel them in there now, in fact, rooting around in his head. He tried to fight them off, force them out, drive them away, but they wormed insistently through his brain, rummaging through his memories.

“Don’t fight us,” hissed the voice from his arm. “You’re ours now. Accept it.”

“F-fonk you,” Mech managed to reply.

The Harvester sniggered. The worm in his head squirmed with ever more determination.

“We’ll have you. All of you,” said the voice. “You can’t fight us forever. Sooner or later, you’ll give yourself fully to us. And then, you’ll be free. Free of these painful memories.”

An image of his foot slamming down on Cal’s back flashed to the forefront of Mech’s mind. He grunted and managed to drive it away, only for a picture of Cal’s lifeless torso swinging in Mech’s grip to replace it.

“N-no,” he croaked. “Don’t.”

He clanked on along the passageway, picture after picture of the fight with Cal flashing up before his eyes, almost as if it were happening all over again right there in front of him.

Cal’s nose exploding. Cal’s neck compressing. Cal’s chest collapsing. Cal dying. Cal dead.

The blood puddle. The trail of red as Mech had carried him to the lab. The look of glee on the face of the Harvester in the lab as he’d unfolded the body bag and Mech had dropped him unceremoniously inside.

Mech’s feet stopped.

No. Shizz. No.

Mech tried to focus on another image. Any image. Not the one that had currently frozen in front of his face. Not the one showing Cal’s body on the table, his wounds almost imperceptibly knitting themselves together.

He couldn’t let them see that one. He couldn’t let them know.

Too late.

Mech spun. His legs powering him back along the passageway, hydraulics hissing. He reached the lab door and shouldered straight through it, scattering the guards.

Cal stood in the middle of the room, his eyes wide, his mouth fixed in something that wasn’t quite a smile. Rain fell from the ceiling. Red rain. Lots and lots of red rain.

As Mech stared, something wet and knobbly dropped from one of the overhead lights and splatted to the floor. It landed beside what was unmistakably a Harvester’s arm, wrapped inside what was equally unmistakably the sleeve of a lab coat.

Cal cleared this throat gently. “Trust me,” he said. “You do not want to know.”

Mech raised his fists and took a step closer. From somewhere on his left came two very distinct sounds. The first was not unlike the sound of an extremely localized earthquake. The second, which followed just a moment later, was not dissimilar to a trumpet.

An enormous gray shape slammed into Mech, launching him across the room. He carved a neat trench through a couple of workbenches, before his momentum embedded him several inches into the wall.

Lights flickered in his on-board HUD. Diagnostic reports flooded his field of vision, many of them flashing red.

“What… what the fonk was that?” he groaned.

Cal rested an elbow on one of Splurt’s elongated ivory tusks.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he said, grinning. “That was the elephant of surprise. And you, my robotic friend, are totally fonked.”

The two guards from outside rushed into the room. Splurt’s trunk became an elongated silver blade that cleaved them both neatly in two.

“Though not as fonked as those guys,” said Cal, jabbing a thumb in the direction of the door.

The blade became a trunk again. It wrapped around Mech, yanked him out of the wall, then smashed him repeatedly against the floor.

Cal stooped and rummaged in Ma-kom’s toolbox until he found a sturdy set of bolt cutters. He wasn’t quite sure what the Harvester used them for, and he didn’t really want to know. He had his own uses for them.

“Splurt, hold that fonk still,” he commanded, snapping the cutting edges together a few times to test them. “I think we’ll all agree that it’s only fair I get my own back.”

* * *

An alarm screamed through the mine, shaking pebbles from the walls as it bounced through the caves.

“What’s happening?” cried Garunk, jamming his hands over what passed for his ears. “What’s with the alarm?”

Loren glanced up at the ceiling, gave a little sob of relief, then jumped to her feet. She offered Miz a hand up and, to her surprise, Miz accepted.

“Wait,” Miz said, her brow furrowing. “Does this mean…?”

Loren nodded. “I think so. I don’t know. Not for sure. But I think so.”

The gas had almost cleared now, and they could make out dozens of armed Harvesters flooding through the chamber, kicking and shoving at any Nogems unlucky enough to get in their way.

The hole Cal had fallen through had been sealed with some sort of white foam, stopping any more of the insects escaping. Garunk gave it an experimental prod with his foot, and was relieved to find it had solidified.

“What now?” he asked.

Miz extended her claws. “Now, we go tear these shizznods apart. Right?”

“Wrong,” said Loren. “You can’t do anything with that collar.”

“Uh, yeah, I can,” Miz scowled. “Like, just watch me.”

She made it three or four good bounds toward the main chamber before the collar activated and she crashed to the ground, slid along it, then rolled to a stop.

Garunk glanced at Loren. “Is that what we were supposed to be watching?”

“No,” Loren sighed, breaking into a jog. “Come on, help me get her up.”

By the time they reached Mizette, she was already up on her hands and knees, gritting her teeth against the pain of four lights.

“Going to… pay… for this,” she grimaced, forcing herself up onto her feet.

“Miz, don’t,” said Loren.

Mizette took another step. Light five flickered on, constricting her muscles and forcing a howl of pain through her lips. Her tail drooped. Her fur stood on end.

She took another shaky step toward the main chamber, and the army of Harvesters assembling there.

Six lights.

Seven.

Something inside her head went pop, ejecting a spurt of blood from both nostrils. She staggered and fell, but Loren got a shoulder beneath her and grimaced as Miz’s weight landed on her.

“Garunk, help!” she hissed.

Garunk rushed over and hooked Mizette’s other arm over his shoulder, taking most of her weight.

“What do we do?” he asked, just a hint of his earlier excitement returning.

“Help me put her down,” Loren urged.

Garunk leaned forward and gasped. “What, like… Put her down down? Is it that bad?”

“No! On the floor,” Loren snapped.

“Oh. Right. Gotcha,” said Garunk. His sludgy face took on the suggestion of a smile. “Here, Loren. You know what this reminds me of?”

“Not now!” Loren barked. “Get her on the floor.”

“N-nn-nno,” Miz managed. She dragged a foot forward a faltering half-step.

Eight lights.

Nine.

Loren felt the scream as it rose through Mizette’s body. It was partly blocked by her teeth, which had clenched tightly together, but escaped through the gaps with enough force to temporarily drown out the alarm.

The tightness in Miz’s muscles seemed to double her weight, and they all fell to the floor in a heap. Loren rolled clear as Mizette’s claws lashed out, ripping and tearing at the air, the ground, and unfortunately, Garunk.

“Ow. Ow. Ow,” Garunk protested, as Mizette cleaved three deep trenches in his muddy flesh. “Sharp, sharp!”

He slid away from her and smeared the wounds shut. “That could’ve been nasty,” he said, but Loren wasn’t listening.

She waited until the closest of Miz’s arms lashed out, then ducked under it and made a grab for the collar. There had to be some sort of clasp somewhere. Some way of removing it.

“It’s a sealed unit,” Loren groaned, studying the thing. “There’s no join. It’s a solid piece of metal.”

“And that’s bad?” said Garunk.

“Yes! It means I can’t open it,” Loren said.

Garunk nodded. “You know what this reminds me of?”

Loren clenched her fists. “I swear to Kroysh, if you say ‘the Academy’…”

Garunk shifted uncomfortably. “Uh, actually, I was going to say it reminded me of earlier, when you guys were all energy-bonded to the wall, and I was going to free you. Remember? Loren? Loren. Loren? Remember?”

“Yes!” Loren hissed. “Yes, I remember!” She struggled with the collar again, then ran her hands through her hair in frustration. “I don’t know what to do. Miz, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do.”

Garunk glanced down at his feet. “You know what I was thinking? When I was standing there with the pickaxe? You know what was going through my mind?”

Loren dodged another of Miz’s frenzied claw swipes and placed a hand on her head, trying to soothe her.

“Loren?”

“No, Garunk, I don’t know,” Loren snapped. She sighed. “I mean… No. What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking, I wish I was more like you,” Garunk said.

Loren looked up. “What?”

“I thought, ‘Garunk, old pal’—because that’s what I call myself. I thought, ‘Garunk, old pal, you are going to mess this up. You’re going to kill these nice people,’” he said. “And I wished, more than anything, that I was more like you, because you never messed up. You know, back at the…” He recalled the look on Loren’s face a moment before. “Back in the day. You always knew what to do. You were the one who made the tough decisions. You were the one who always got the job done.”

“No, I didn’t,” said Loren. “I messed up all the time.”

Garunk shrugged. “Maybe it felt that way to you. But to the rest of us? To me? You were the best.”

Miz snorted. Loren couldn’t tell if it was an involuntary pain response or if she’d somehow mustered the strength to do it on purpose.

“I didn’t quit Zertex,” Garunk said, lowering his head. “They kicked me out. Told me I wasn’t good enough. And, I guess they were right. But you? You’re Teela Fonking Loren. You’re the best at what you do. And right now, what you need to do, is help your friend.”

Loren looked down at the collar on Miz’s neck. She looked back at Garunk. Her hand raised. A finger extended, pointing to something propped up against the wall.

“Garunk,” she said. “Shut the fonk up. And get me that pickaxe.”

Twenty-Three

Over a hundred Harvesters stood assembled in the main cavern. The clattering of feet from along the passageway suggested the same again were hurrying to join them.

They were more heavily armed than usual. While a few held the glowing whips, most were weighed down by chest-mounted blaster cannons that were hooked over their shoulder and fastened by straps around their waists. There were handles on either side of the weapons, and the Harvesters held them like an accordion player might hold an accordion, albeit with marginally less self-loathing or malicious intent.

One of the Harvesters—not the leader, exactly, because they didn’t believe in leaders, but one who was very much in charge, and anyone who disagreed had better have a high fonking pain threshold, that’s all he could say—had just begun to bark out some commands when something large, furry, and exquisitely angry exploded through the ranks of soldiers, cleaving and ripping and biting at anyone within reach. And it was making a point, it seemed, of ensuring everyone got their turn at being in reach.

The screaming followed a few seconds later. They weren’t screams of pain, as anyone who had come in direct contact with the furious mass of furry muscle was already several steps beyond having the capability to emit sound. They were screams of panic. Howls of fear. Great, guttural snorts of, ‘Oh, shizz!’

The organized ranks of Harvesters scattered like ants before a magnifying glass as they desperately tried to get away from whatever the fonk that thing was. Unfortunately for them, whatever the fonk that thing was had other ideas.

Mizette of the Greyx threw herself through the air, twisted, lashed out with all four limbs, and performed a quadruple evisceration that would surely have won her the gold at the Dismemberment Olympics, had the High Council of Norosh IV not outlawed the event some three years previously.

Blood sprayed. Eyes boggled. Guts spilled. Miz was already gone, carving her way through the ranks with all the precision of a surgeon, and all the energetic haste of a kid unwrapping presents on Christmas morning. Only instead of toys, the parcels contained internal organs and bile, and smelled quite substantially worse.

“Shoot it! Somebody shoot it!” roared the Harvester who wasn’t officially in charge, but for all practical purposes was.

Four different Harvesters opened fire in four different directions, none of which Mizette was currently in. Limbs were blown off. Torsos exploded. Heads popped like Champagne corks, bounced off the high ceiling, then ricocheted off into the neon blue shadows.

“Gah! I’ll do it myself,” the not-boss barked, relieving one of the other Harvesters of his chest-mounted gun.

Mizette was a few dozen feet away, pirouetting effortlessly through the crowd, each spin scarring another of the soldiers for life. Which, perhaps fortunately, was only a matter of seconds.

The not-boss took careful aim and waited for the lock-on display to illuminate. Yes, he’d take out a bunch of his own men, but that was a small price to pay. To him, at least. Not so much them.

“Got you, you furry freak,” he growled. His thumbs squeezed on the trigger, just as a boot connected with the weapon, sending his aim wide. He watched in horror—or mild disappointment, at least—as the energy beam cut down thirty fleeing Harvesters cleaving them neatly in half across the waist.

For a few moments, both halves continued sprinting with what could generously be described as ‘mixed success,’ then they all flopped to the floor, their running days well and truly over.

The not-boss turned to find a woman with blue skin and a stern expression bearing down on him. He had time to think just one word—‘fist’—before it connected with his face, knocking his teeth back into his mouth, and bringing tears to his nostrils.

He sat down heavily, and had time to think just one other word—‘foot’—before a heel slammed into the side of his head, spinning him face-down onto the floor and giving him pause to seriously reconsider his life choices.

The gun was wrenched out from under him. He cowered as he heard it hum into life, then breathed a sigh of relief when it was fired at a whole lot of other people who weren’t him.

Loren gave a little nod of satisfaction as a squadron of Harvesters became a carnage of Harvester parts, then spun at the sound of a shout from behind her.

Garunk and several Nogems were on their knees, weapon-wielding Harvesters behind them. The hostages had their hands behind their heads, and were ducking low in an attempt to stay as far away from the chest-cannons as possible.

“Drop it!” one of the Harvesters commanded. “Or they die.”

Loren glanced past him to where thirty or more other Nogems were being shoved forward, their hands in the air.

“Shizz,” Loren muttered. She briefly wondered if she could shoot all the hostage-takers before they got off shots of their own, but quickly dismissed it.

Her gun clattered to the floor.

“Miz!” she called.

Mizette concluded a particularly impressive spell of sustained disemboweling, tore the throat out of a Harvester who had made the mistake of glancing in her direction, then flicked her gaze over to where Loren was standing, and to the hostage situation developing just beyond her.

Miz faltered, fell back a step, and didn’t react quickly enough to avoid the whip that coiled around her throat. Another wrapped around her legs before she could move. It yanked her sharply and suddenly, throwing her off-balance.

A triumphant cheer rose from what was left of the crowd as she hit the floor. Loren felt rough hands on her shoulders, then a series of prodding fingers reintroduced her to pain and dropped her to her knees.

“I’m sorry, Loren,” Garunk sobbed. “I messed up. They got me.”

“It’s fine,” Loren said through gritted teeth, then another finger-prod burned at her insides, silencing her.

A hand grabbed her by the hair and dragged her backward across the uneven floor. She kicked and fought it all the way, until she was dumped next to Mizette. Miz lay face down, a gun pressed against the back of her head, the energy whips still coiled around her throat and ankles.

“Oh, ‘You go in. Don’t worry, I’ll cover you,’” Miz said, doing a particularly whiny-sounding impression of Loren. “Ugh. Way to go, Loren.”

“It wasn’t my fault!” Loren protested. “They had hostages!”

“Was it anyone we cared about?” Miz demanded. “Seriously?”

Loren’s mouth flapped open and closed. “It was Garunk and some Nogems.”

“Or, to put it another way,” Miz scowled. “No. It was no one we cared about.” She tutted. “You totally suck. I hope you know that.”

“You weren’t saying that when I got you out of that collar,” Loren snapped.

“So, you did, like, one thing right. Great,” said Miz. “What do you want? Like, a medal or something?”

“A ‘thank you’ might be nice!”

Miz rolled her eyes. “Thank you, Loren. I am, like, totally loving life right now. Seriously, I could never have wound up on the floor with a gun at my head without you.” She sneered. “Happy now?”

Loren gave a curt nod. “Weirdly, yes.”

“Silence!” barked one of the Harvesters.

Mizette tutted. “Do you mind? We’re trying to have a conversation here.”

“Kill them,” urged the not-boss, limping into the knot of soldiers. He slipped on something wet and knobby, frantically flailed his arms for a few seconds, then skidded to a stop by Loren. “The Greyx first. Make the other one watch.”

Miz sighed. “Great. So I don’t even get to watch you shooting her? That sucks.”

“Wait!” boomed a voice.

The Harvesters parted just as a bruised and bloodied Cal Carver landed on the floor next to Miz and Loren. He smiled at them, showing teeth caked with red.

“Oh, hey you two,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“We’ve been better,” said Loren.

“Yeah. Yeah, I know that feeling,” said Cal. He gestured to the gap in the crowd, where Mech now stood, carrying the glass tank containing a slightly sheepish-looking Splurt.

“What is this?” demanded the not-boss, gesturing quite vaguely at everything and everyone around him.

“He tried to trick me,” Mech said. He raised the container and gave it a shake. “Thought he could use this thing against me.”

“It was a solid plan,” said Cal. “No, wait. It was a great plan.”

“Clearly, it wasn’t all that great,” sneered the not-boss. “Seeing as how it failed dismally.”

Cal nodded. “Fair point, well made.”

He started to turn to Loren, then paused and turned back.

“Or…”

The not-boss’s nostrils furrowed. “Or what?”

“Or you just got totally Chewbacca’d.”

It was the Harvester’s turn to hesitate. “What?”

“You know? With Han and Luke with the stormtrooper outfits? And the handcuffs? ‘Prisoner transfer from Block one-one-three-eight.’ No?” Cal looked across the blank faces of the closest Harvesters, then shook his head in disappointment. “Forget it.” He pointed upward. “You might want to direct your attention up there.”

The Harvesters raised their nostrils in time to see a glass canister go sailing above their heads. Inside, a green blob pulsated gently, his eyes locked on the not-boss. As they watched, Splurt grew a tiny hand, waved once, then tumbled off toward where Garunk and the Nogems were being held hostage.

There was the sound of glass shattering.

Then the sound of something small, becoming something very large.

A number of other sounds followed. Harrowing, unspeakable sounds which, with the exception of the chainsaw, defied description.

While everyone was trying their best not to listen to any of it, Cal kicked the gun away from the back of Miz’s head. Miz turned in a furry blur and the guy holding the weapon suddenly found himself handless, then footless, then mostly inside-out.

It all happened so quickly that none of the other Harvesters had time to react before a succession of blaster bolts tore through them from behind, courtesy of a huge metal man with a grudge.

Loren kipped-up onto her feet, swung with a roundhouse kick, and reintroduced the not-boss to the heel of her boot, flooring him. Miz, meanwhile, removed the whips from her neck and legs. This she did by grabbing the arms of the Harvesters responsible, and pulling until they came off.

“Isn’t this great?” said Cal, crunching a knee into a Harvester’s stomach, then delivering a double axe-handle blow to the thing’s back. “Together again. Me, you guys, a chainsaw-wielding Kevin Costner.” He gestured over to where Splurt was still hacking through Harvesters. “No idea where he got that from. Between you and me? I’m not actually a fan.”

He ducked a scything blow, drove a punch into the Harvester’s throat, then shrugged. “I mean, Robin Hood Prince of Thieves was good. And I cried like a fonking baby during Field of Dreams. But the rest of his stuff? Meh.”

“Less talking, more punching,” Mech barked. “We got company.”

“You mean besides the dozens of bad guys trying to kill us?” asked Cal.

“Try a hundred more,” said Loren, twisting the arm of a Harvester until the bone snapped, then tossing him over her shoulder in the direction of one of the mine’s passageways.

Cal followed the Harvester’s flight and saw more of them flooding through, weapons primed and ready.

“Ah, fonk,” he groaned, then he shrugged. “Oh well, the more the merrier. Mech, Miz, Loren, you take the first wave, I’ll handle any you let through. Just, you know, don’t let any through, or I’ll be bringing it up at the next Captain’s Review.”

“The next what?” asked Mech, bringing a fist down on top of a Harvester and reducing his height by a full six inches.

“It’s a new thing I’m introducing,” said Cal. “Nothing to worry about, I’ll just be assessing every aspect of your performance.”

“The fonk you will,” said Mech.

Cal mimed writing on an invisible pad. “That’s going in the review.”

“Shut the fonk up and keep fighting,” Mech snapped.

“And that,” Cal said, licking the end of an imaginary pencil. “Loren, how do you spell ‘insubordination’?”

Loren was too busy dishing out punishment to respond. Cal shrugged.

“Fonk it, I’ll put ‘being a shizznod.’”

He replaced the imaginary pad in his pocket, shot Mech a disapproving look, then turned in time to receive what promised to be a brutal fingering to the face. Before he could open his mouth to scream, a set of claws carved out the Harvester’s throat from behind, spraying Cal in his warm, sticky blood.

“Uh, thanks,” Cal whimpered.

“Whatever,” sneered Miz, already elbow deep in another of the Harvesters.

The reinforcements were racing to join the fray now. They carried rigid batons which illuminated in amber as they drew closer.

“Holy shizz, they’ve got lightsabers!” Cal exclaimed. “Why did no one tell me we can get lightsabers?”

“There are too many of them,” said Loren. “We need to fall back.”

“Ugh. So lame,” said Miz. “I say we fight.”

“We fight, we die,” Mech said. “Ain’t no way we can survive against these numbers.”

Cal grinned. “We don’t have to.”

“What the fonk are you talking about?” Mech demanded, then he followed Cal’s gaze just as hundreds of little pickaxe wielding men came racing from another passageway, bells jingle-jangling as they ran.

“Looks like the tiny space cavalry’s arrived,” said Cal.

Leading the charge was Yellow Hat. He caught Cal’s eye as he ran, and gave a nod. “Nogems stand together!” he roared, then he and his army hit the Harvester reinforcements on their right flank, picks swinging with bone-crunching power and accuracy.

Cal cupped a hand around his mouth, tried another, “Hi-hooo!” then sighed when nobody took him up on it. “Ah well. Worth a try.”

The battle raged for a few more minutes, then lulled for thirty seconds or so, before fizzling away into little more than some running skirmishes and a lot of sobbing.

Cal, Mech, Loren, Miz, and Kevin Costner drew together and spent an enjoyable couple of minutes watching Harvesters having the living shizz kicked out of them by space midgets.

“Of course, this was my plan all along,” said Cal. “I knew these guys would come swooping in at the last second.”

“Bullshizz,” Mech snorted.

Cal tapped his top pocket. “Mech, do you want me to take out the notepad? Because I will if I have to.”

He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “OK, so what’s next on the list? Rescue Splurt, reprogram Mech, kill all these fonks… Done, done, and done.” He clicked his fingers. “Get the ship. Stop Manacle. Save the day.” He made a wavering gesture. “Maybe squeeze in lunch if we get the chance. Everyone set?”

Splurt boinged back into his usual ball-shape and rolled up onto Cal’s shoulder.

“Let’s do it,” said Mech.

“Like, the sooner we get out of this shizzhole, the better,” Miz sneered.

Cal looked around. “It’s funny. I might actually miss the old place.”

He considered this.

“No. On second thought, let’s go.” He gestured across the cavern. “Garunk! Let’s hit the road.”

Garunk gawped back at him, in something not unlike surprise, then shook his head. “You don’t need me messing it all up.”

“What are you talking about? Of course we do,” said Cal. “We can’t very well mess it all up on our own, can we?”

Loren, Miz, and Mech all opened their mouths.

“OK, silly question,” Cal admitted. “But come on. We need to go.”

Garunk looked from Cal to Loren. “I’m… not sure it’s a good idea. I’ll only get in the way.”

Loren sighed, unable to believe she was doing this. “Come on, Garunk,” she said. “You’re one of us now.”

“You… you mean that?” said Garunk. He puffed out his chest. “I mean, it would be an honor to—”

An energy blast punched a hole through him from behind, ricocheted off Mech, then exploded against the ceiling.

“Where the fonk did that come from?” asked Cal, as Garunk stood swaying slightly and prodding at the hole. Behind him, another squadron of Harvesters appeared from a side-chamber, chest cannons primed and ready to fire.

“Shizz, there are more of them,” Mech grunted.

“The Nogems can handle them,” said Cal. “Garunk, can you walk?”

“I can,” Garunk confirmed. He raised his eyes to the team, looked around at the Nogems and the Harvesters, then came to a decision. “But I’m staying here.”

“You are?” asked Cal.

Garunk nodded. “When they kicked me out of Zertex, they said I wasn’t good enough. Said I was useless. But you guys have made me believe that maybe… just maybe, I’m not.”

Cal glanced around at the others. “Did one of you guys make him believe that?” he asked. “I don’t think it was me.”

“So, I’m not going to run,” said Garunk. “I’m going to stay here and fight. I’m going to prove myself—prove Zertex wrong—by giving you guys a chance to—”

“OK, bye!” said Loren, grabbing Cal by the arm and pulling him away. “Good luck!”

“Oh,” said Garunk. “Uh… right. Yeah. Bye, then. I’ll just… Right. Bye.”

“Don’t be a stranger,” Cal called to him, as he was bundled toward an exit.

Cal kept watching as Garunk turned and went racing toward the Harvesters, muddy fists flailing above his head.

Another couple of blasts carved chunks out of him, but didn’t slow him. A third blast missed him completely. Before the shooter could get off another shot, he found himself buried under Garunk’s sludgy bulk. And, a moment after that, beneath a growing mountain of Nogems shouting, “Pile-on!” at the top of their voices.

“Good old Garunk,” said Cal, facing front again. “Stopping those bamstons for us. What a guy. For a second there, I actually thought we might be in…”

From behind him came the drone of wings. Lots of wings. Some of them quite large.

He and the others turned in time to see space wasps come pouring through a smoking hole in the hard foam the Hazmat Harvesters had deployed. They buzzed furiously in the air, antennae twitching as they hunted out their stolen queen.

“We’re in trouble,” Cal squeaked. A cloud of hornet-sized wasps rose from the hole, followed by nine or ten of the cat-sized versions.

A furry head pushed through the hole next, squirming as it struggled its way through. The moment it was clear of the foam, it took to the air, its stinger extending telescopically from inside its stripy body.

Its antennae spun around for a few seconds, then locked onto Cal, as if recognizing him. The droning of the thing’s wings took on a higher-pitched tone, and the other wasps all hurriedly aimed themselves in Cal’s direction, falling into formation behind the larger one.

Cal swallowed. “Yep. Definitely in trouble,” he confirmed.

And then, he ran.

Twenty-Four

Cal was halfway along the passageway when the ground shook, cascading dust and pebbles down from the ceiling. He staggered, bouncing between the walls like the ball in a pinball machine, and then called breathlessly back over his shoulder to where Loren and the others were racing along behind him.

“What the fonk was that?”

“Aw, shizz. It’s what I was worried about,” Mech groaned.

“What? You mean you weren’t worried about all the other stuff?” Cal yelped, gesturing frantically in the direction of the pursuing wasps. “Great. So, what is it now?”

“The Harvester ship is taking off,” said Mech.

Cal slowed for a moment, remembered the wasps, and picked up speed again. “Wait, the Harvester ship? The ship with the Untitled on it?”

“I think so,” said Mech. “We’d better hurry.”

“Already fonking hurrying, Mech!” Cal puffed. “Ain’t a lot more I can offer in the old hurrying departme—”

While Cal was talking, Splurt had rolled down his back and wrapped around his waist. Cal felt a sudden rush of acceleration that didn’t so much steal the end of that last word from his mouth as ram it forcibly down his throat. The tunnel walls blurred as he zipped along it on all four legs, his feet skipping lightly across the…

Wait.

What?

Cal counted his legs.

Four. Definitely four.

He regarded the new set. They looked, to all intents and purposes, just like his existing legs, only a little leaner, a little longer, and made entirely of green slime. They moved like snapping elastic, hurtling him along the passageway so fast that only Mizette could even come close to keeping up.

It took him several seconds to notice that his own legs weren’t actually contributing anything to this turn of speed, and a few seconds more for him to stop moving. He felt he should still make some effort, though, so pumped his arms for a while until that, too, felt pointless.

There was a wall ahead. It looked, from this rapidly decreasing distance, to be quite a solid wall. Cal glanced down at his legs, then back to the wall. The eye-flick had taken less than a second, but the wall was now looming much closer than before.

The hard, solid wall.

“Uh, Splurt,” he said. “You might want to slow down a little there, buddy, before we… No! No, that’s speeding up! That’s the opposite of what I said!”

The wall was twelve feet away. Eight. Four. Cal threw his arms in front of his face, screwed his eyes shut, spoke briefly in tongues, and braced himself for an impact that never actually arrived.

He risked a peek, and immediately regretted it. He was running backward up a vertical passageway that rose up from the corridor like a chimney. Mech, Loren, and Miz clattered to a stop down below, stared up at him in disbelief, then jumped aside as the wasp swarm buzzed past them, locked in pursuit of Cal.

“Oh, great, they’re only after me,” Cal groaned. He pointed insistently past them. “The metal one! Get the metal one!”

“Fonk you, man!”

Cal shot the wasps a pleading look. “Guys, come on, it wasn’t my fault! I fell in by accident!” he protested. “Leave me alone!”

Mech’s voice came bellowing up from below again, fighting to be heard over the angry drone of the wasps. “Stop the ship. We’ll find you!”

“Bring antihistamines!” Cal hollered back. “Bring all the antihistamines.”

His stomach lurched as Splurt bounded up out of the passageway, and a warm wind was suddenly swirling around them, blowing neon blue fragments and a distinctive mustardy aroma up from the desolate surface of Moktar.

The roaring of the Harvester ship’s engines rattled through Cal’s bones and made all four legs go wobbly. Shizz. They didn’t have much time.

“Yah, Splurt, yah!” Cal cried.

Splurt yahed.

“No, yah that way. Toward the ship!” Cal told him. “Toward.”

Splurt spun, giving Cal the perfect view of the chimney hole just as thousands of wasps of varying sizes erupted out of it, forming a column in the air.

“Shizz, shizz, Splurt, run!”

Splurt ran. Unfortunately, he ran backward, and at such speed that Cal was immediately bent double. Cal flopped helplessly, his arms trailing, his gag reflex voicing a number of concerns about how twitchy his stomach was becoming.

The Splurt-feet rattled over the metal roof of something that might have been drilling equipment, but might just as easily have been a crashed fighter. Whatever it was, its buckled frame and the rusted cables that trailed from it like tentacles suggested its working days were over.

Splurt tripped on one of the cables, and Cal felt a moment of terrified weightlessness as they went tumbling down the side of the damaged craft, before the legs found their footing again, and the chase resumed.

Still facing the wrong way, Cal watched as the wasps crested the peak of the damaged machinery, their wings thrashing against the air. The one big wasp he’d seen emerging through the foam had been joined by six or seven others. They didn’t move quite as fast as the smaller varieties, but there was a certain inevitably to their movements which suggested that their catching up was only a matter of time, and would not be an enjoyable experience when it happened.

A secondary engine fired on the Harvester ship, and the air went from pleasantly warm to uncomfortably hot. The pursuing wasps were blown back several feet, and Cal felt a tiny moment of relieved elation before Splurt skidded to a stop.

“What are you doing?” Cal gasped. “Why are you stopping? Splurt, hurry, we need to…”

He looked back and up over his shoulder, and saw that they were too late. The Harvester ship was in the air now, already out of reach and climbing steadily.

“No, no, no,” Cal groaned, then the ship became the least of his concerns when the wasp cloud arrived on the scene.

“Splurt, run!”

But Splurt didn’t run. He unwrapped himself from around Cal’s waist, letting Cal fall to the ground just as the first squadron of stripy space bugs lined itself up in attack formation.

“Ooh, shizz, this is going to hurt,” Cal groaned, curling into a ball with his hands over his head. He remained in that position for a couple of seconds, before reaching back and placing one hand over his butt, which he realized was pointing invitingly into the air.

The angry droning of the wasps rose in pitch. Cal gritted his teeth, clenched his butt-cheeks until they formed a single solid buttock, and waited.

Then, to his surprise and relief, the wasps alighted one by one on the ground beside him. Cal peeked out at them through a gap in his fingers and watched as the insects lined themselves up in neat ranks, smallest at the front, biggest at the back.

“Is this a trick?” he asked them. “Are you going to wait until I take my hand off my ass then just fonking let rip? That’s your plan, isn’t it? Well, if you think I’m falling for that, you guys have got another thing—”

A leg rested on his shoulder. It was a long black leg, with thousands of tiny hairs growing from it. Cal turned slowly and looked along the leg. It had no foot, but made up for that by what felt like an over-abundance of knees.

It looked, he thought, not unlike the legs of the wasps in front of him. Only bigger.

So much bigger.

Cal swallowed. “Oh, fonk. Splurt!”

The leg on his shoulder shook.

No. Not shook.

Rippled.

Cal risked a half-turn until he was looking up into the eyes of a horse-sized space wasp. The eyes were different, of course—everything was different—but he knew his buddy when he saw him.

“Oh, thank God,” Cal whispered, standing up.

Stretching, he put an arm around Splurt’s wide, furry shoulders. The wasps buzzed angrily, then fell silent when their queen put one of her front legs over Cal’s shoulder in return.

“Splurt, you’re a fonking genius,” Cal said. “Thanks, buddy.”

Turning, he watched the Harvester ship continue its climb through the sky. It wasn’t moving particularly fast. If he’d had a ship—and, ideally, a pilot—he could have easily caught it. The best he could think of to do now, though, was to throw stones at it, and that would be a waste of time.

He threw stones at it. They all missed.

“Fonk.”

Cal put his hands on his hips and sighed. “Mech is going to be furious,” he said. “I am never going to hear the end of…”

He frowned. Something stirred in his brain. Not a plan. Not even a scheme. More of a notion, really, and a half-baked one at that.

Fonk it, it would do.

“Splurt,” he said, a grin curving the corners of his mouth. “I know what we’re going to do.”

* * *

Mech drove a fist through the metal hatch covering the mine’s entrance tunnel, then pushed the wreckage aside and clambered out. He groaned when he saw the Harvester ship gaining altitude above them. The sentiment was echoed by Loren, who climbed out next, and rounded off nicely with a disparaging tut from Mizette.

“I told him to stop the fonking ship,” Mech said. “You heard me, right? ‘Stop the ship,’ I said. And now look. It ain’t stopped. It’s the diametrical fonking opposite of stopped.”

He shook his head. “I swear, that guy is the most useless motherfonker I ever—”

Something shot out from behind a rocky outcrop beside them, creaking and groaning as it took to the sky.

Mech, Loren, and Miz stood in mute silence, watching the broken remains of something that looked like drilling equipment be dragged into the air by eight large wasps, all connected to the wreckage by lengths of metal cable.

Cal sat atop the wreck, laughing in a way that suggested he was having serious second thoughts about this, but had now come too far to put a stop to it.

Beside him, an even larger wasp sat with its bottom set of legs crossed. It waved a foreleg down at the crew as they soared past. Mech, Loren, and Miz all slowly raised a hand and waved back.

“Now Stripy, now Stingy, now Angry, now Mean!” Cal called, giving a couple of the cables a shake. “On Bamston, on Fonker, on Evil, on…”

The queen wasp shuddered.

“I can’t call him ‘Green.’ That doesn’t make sense,” Cal remarked.

Splurt rippled.

“Well, I know it’s your favorite color, but… Oh, hey guys!” Cal called. He laughed hysterically again as the wasp-powered sleigh climbed higher into the air, his voice fading as they raced upward. “I’m going to fonking die!”

Mech and the others watched him be dragged through the air in the direction of the Harvester ship. To the wasps’ credit, they were gaining fast on the much slower Harvester ship. Not that it’d do them much good.

“You think he’s right?” asked Miz.

“Fonk, yeah,” said Mech. “He’s one hundred percent going to die. But, you know, full marks for trying, I guess.”

There was a clattering from behind them. They all looked in the direction of the sound and saw Garunk heave himself up out of the hole in the ground. Loren resisted the urge to groan.

“Phew! That was a lot of ladder,” he wheezed, rolling onto his back. “I’m not saying it was too much ladder, but it was too much ladder. Am I right? Loren? Loren. Am I right?”

“Yes! It was a lot of ladder. What are you doing here? I thought you were staying?”

“Oh, I am. I just thought I’d come to see you off and let you know that I’m fine. I thought you’d want to know.”

Loren couldn’t really admit that she had almost no interest in knowing, and had pretty much forgotten him already, so just nodded instead.

With some effort, Garunk rolled onto his front then got to his feet. He dusted himself down, apparently concerned that his head-to-toe coating of mud had gotten dirty.

“Anyway,” he breathed. “What did I miss?”

“Cal’s…” Loren began, then she faltered to a stop. “Actually, I don’t really know what Cal’s doing,” she admitted. She pointed to the sky. “See for yourself.”

Garunk peered past her.

“What am I looking at?” Garunk asked. “The ship? It’s a big one, isn’t it? Good and long.” He slapped himself on the wrist, and said, “Cheeky,” but he was too out of breath from the climb for his heart to be fully in it.

“No, not that, the… Wait,” said Loren. “Where did he go?”

They all studied the sky. There was no sign of Cal or his wasp-sleigh anywhere.

“I guess he burned up,” said Mech. “Thrusters probably got him.”

Loren slapped him on the arm with the back of her hand. It hurt. “Don’t say that,” she said, nursing her knuckles.

“Why not? It’s true,” said Mech. “What the fonk was he hoping to achieve?”

“Couldn’t he be, like, on board already?”

“Sure,” said Mech.

“Really?”

“If he has magical powers he ain’t ever demonstrated before,” said Mech. “Otherwise? There ain’t no fonking way he’s managed to—”

There was an explosion from somewhere in the belly of the Harvester ship. It shuddered in the air for a moment, before listing to the right. One of the vast exhaust ports at the back flickered, then went dark. Metal groaned as gravity took hold.

Mech, Loren, Miz, and Garunk all watched in silence as the ship plunged downward, before disappearing behind a rocky ridge.

“That wasn’t him,” Mech insisted. “No fonking way that was him.”

Loren and Miz had just reached the top of the ridge when the crash started. It was a large ship, so the whole crashing process took quite some time. They were watching the rising fireball when the shockwave struck them, lifting them both off their feet and depositing them a not inconsiderable distance away from where they’d started.

“Well, if he wasn’t dead before, he’s dead now,” Mech said, tetchily. “Even if he somehow made it aboard the ship—which he didn’t—and somehow managed to blow a hole in it—which he didn’t—then he’s dead now.”

A shadow appeared around him as something hovered above. He didn’t look up. He refused to look up.

“Hey,” said Garunk. “Isn’t that your ship?”

“Hello down there!” crackled a voice from the speaker.

Mech closed his eyes, just for a moment. “That son of a bedge,” he grunted, his metal jaw curving into a smirk.

“Does anyone know how to land this thing?” asked Cal. “Preferably not Loren.”

“I have a fairly good idea, sir,” said Kevin. “Also, you do know you aren’t actually flying the ship, yes?”

“I’m not?” asked Cal. There was almost silence, but for the faint hissing sound of the speaker. “Then what’s this thing for?”

“Switching the bathroom lights on, sir.”

“Loren has a button for switching the bathroom lights on? That seems unnecessary.” There was another pause. “What does this one do?”

A circular hatch, roughly the size of a large dinner plate, opened above Mech’s head. A slurry of lumpy liquid splattered down on him like dirty slush.

“Ew,” said Miz, wrinkling her snout.

Mech said nothing.

“It empties the waste tank, sir,” Kevin announced. “Probably best not to press it in the air.”

“Message received and understood, Kevin,” Cal said. There was the sound of a hand dramatically slapping a thigh. “Now, take us down, and let’s round up the troops. Looks like Space Team is saving the day. Again.”

Twenty-Five

Mech waddled up the ramp, his face twisted into a sneer of distaste. Miz’s face wasn’t much better as she plodded along at a distance behind him, with Loren acting as a buffer between Miz’s nose and Mech’s aroma.

“Jesus, what happened to you?” asked Cal, looking the cyborg up and down. His nostrils flared. “You stink.”

“I know I stink,” Mech snapped. “You think I ain’t aware of that fact?”

“What are you covered in?” Cal asked. He brought his nose closer, then gagged and took a step back. “It’s nasty, whatever it is.”

“It’s the contents of the motherfonking waste tank,” Mech growled.

“Ha! What are the chances?” asked Cal. “Kevin was just telling me about a button that…”

Cal’s voice trailed off. He cleared his throat. “Oh.”

“Yeah. ‘Oh,’” Mech grimaced. “Now, get the fonk outta my way. I gotta get this shizz off.”

He tapped the button that opened the shower door. Cal leaped forward, but was too late to block him. “Wait, don’t!”

The door slid open. Mech froze, his finger hovering just above the button.

“OK, so here’s a question,” he began. “Why is the bathroom full of wasps?”

“Space wasps,” Cal corrected. He tapped the button and the door slid closed. “And it’s not full of them. It’s, like half-full. Three-fourths full, at most.”

He jabbed a thumb toward another door. “The rest are in the kitchen.”

“The kitchen?” said Loren. “You filled the kitchen with wasps?”

“They kind of filled it on their own, but yeah,” Cal said.

“Are they anywhere else?” Loren asked, eyeing the doors along the corridor.

Cal scratched his head and smiled awkwardly. “Well, funny you should ask…”

“They’re in every room, ain’t they?” said Mech. “They’re in every fonking room.”

“Not every room, no!” Cal protested. “One of the bedrooms is clear, for example.”

Mech’s eyes narrowed.

“Whose bedroom?”

Cal gave a half-laugh. “Does it matter? The important thing is—”

“It’s your bedroom, ain’t it?” Mech said.

“Only technically,” Cal insisted. “But let’s not get bogged down in all that. The important thing is we’re all together and we’ve got the ship back. Sure, you’re covered in human waste, and almost every cubic foot of living space is filled with wasps, but that’s still a step up from where we were an hour ago, right?”

Mech didn’t respond, other than to grind his jaws together and glare raw hatred in Cal’s direction.

“That’s the spirit,” Cal said, flashing him one of his most winning smiles. “Now, are we going to stand around here yakking all day, or are we going to go stop the villain of the week? Kevin’s already got a bead on the guy.”

“No, I don’t” said Kevin.

Cal looked up. “You don’t? I thought you said you did?”

“No, sir. You said, ‘Kevin, get a bead on the guy,’ but didn’t actually explain which ‘guy’ you were referring to, or what getting ‘a bead’ on him actually entails.”

“Oh. Then why didn’t you say that?” Cal asked.

“I did, sir,” Kevin insisted.

“You did?” Cal frowned. “What did I say?”

“I believe it was something along the lines of, ‘Oh fonk, oh fonk, I’m covered in wasps!’ sir.”

“Shizz. Right,” said Cal. He glanced at Mech and the others. “I was covered in wasps,” he explained.

“We guessed,” said Loren.

She went to move past him, then stopped and turned back to the ramp. Garunk stood at the bottom, anxiously wringing his hands.

Loren sighed quietly. “One second, guys,” she said, heading back down the ramp until she was standing before Garunk. “You should come with us,” she said. “We could use you.”

“You could? How?” asked Garunk.

Loren opened her mouth and inhaled, as if preparing to reply. She froze there for a moment. “I could use you,” she said. “Look, even back in the Academy, I was always kind of…”

“A loser?” guessed Miz from the top of the ramp.

“Self-absorbed,” Loren said. “I wanted to be the best. It was all I cared about. Not you. Not Clorice, Hoof, Feltch, or the one with the eyes.”

“Those eyes were insane,” said Garunk.

“Terrifying,” Loren agreed. “But the point is, I was wrong. Being the best isn’t what matters.”

“Good thing for you,” Miz chipped in from up the ramp. Loren ignored her.

“Friends are what matters. Having people you can count on. Who’ve always got your back. That’s what’s important.”

She put a hand on Garunk’s shoulder. “And I know you have my back, Garunk. So,” She inhaled deeply. “You should come with us. You should join the team.”

Garunk’s muddy skin blushed. “Wow. That’s… I mean… wow. I am honored. I really am,” he said. “But, uh, I think I’m just going to stay here and have sex with a bunch of Nogems.”

Loren blinked.

“Oh,” she said. She felt like this was such an appropriate response, she repeated it. “Oh.”

“Otherwise, you know, I’d have been all over the space stuff,” Garunk said. “Seriously. We’d have had a great time. But, those Nogems are pretty hot? Am I right? I’m right.”

“Oh,” said Loren. Then, a moment later. “Oh.”

Garunk wrapped his arms around her, squidging her into a sloppy hug. “Now, go save Moosh, Loren. And when you’re out there in the future, exploring the galaxy, think of me,” he whispered. “Think of your old pal, Garunk, out there somewhere on the wild frontier. Having sex with Nogems.”

“Oh,” Loren said.

She felt like ‘Oh,’ had probably run its course now, and swapped the next one out for a, “Right,” which she followed swiftly with a, “Will do.”

“Any chance we could hurry this along?” asked Cal. “Garunk, are you coming with us?”

“No,” said Garunk.

“He’s staying,” explained Loren, as Garunk released her from his hug. “He’s staying to, uh, to have sex with Nogems.”

“So many Nogems,” Garunk said.

Cal’s jaw clenched. His mouth became a grimace of horror masquerading as a smile.

“Well, good luck with that,” he said, after much consideration.

“You look after her, OK?” Garunk instructed. “Not that she needs looking after—she’ll always be number one—but you take care of her.”

“Will do,” said Cal. He glared meaningfully at Loren. “Can we?”

“I’m coming,” Loren said. She gave Garunk a brief wave, then retreated back up the ramp. “If you ever see Clorice, tell her I said—”

The landing ramp slammed closed between them.

“Sorry to interrupt the touching farewell, but we need to get going,” Cal said. “We still need to track down Manacle, and Kevin’s useless.”

“I heard that, sir.”

“You were supposed to! That’s why I said it out loud.”

Loren pushed past him and hurried along the corridor. “It’s fine. Tracking him down won’t be a problem. We know where he’s going. I just hope we can get there before… Aaand the bridge is full of wasps.”

Cal laughed awkwardly. “Again, ‘full,’ is an exaggeration.”

He followed her onto the bridge and gestured at all the empty space. “See? In what sense is this full of wasps?”

“In the sense that they’re covering every available surface,” Loren said.

“That’s not full. That’s my point,” said Cal. “I painted the walls of my parents’ dining room once. I didn’t then say the dining room was full of paint. There’s an important distinction there that I think—”

“Get rid of them,” Loren snapped.

Cal sighed. “Fine. Splurt!”

The kitchen door slid open. The mother of all wasps ducked out, several playing cards clutched beneath its two front legs.

“Can you take these guys to my room?” Cal said. “But, under no circumstances is anyone allowed to look under my bed.” He pointed to an apparently random cat-sized insect. “That means you, Stripey.”

Splurt plodded onto the bridge, made a beckoning motion with four of his legs, then turned and marched off toward Cal’s sleeping quarters. The wasps followed, forming a long line that buzzed out into the corridor, clearing the bridge.

“There. Happy now?” asked Cal.

Loren slid into her chair. “Well, yes, obviously. The whole place is no longer covered with wasps. I’m ecstatic.” She tapped in a series of coordinates, then pulled on her belt. “Everyone buckle up. We’re going full warp as soon as we’re out of the atmosphere.”

Cal groaned. “Great. Those are words I’ll never get tired of hearing.”

“While I was aboard the Harvester ship, I took the liberty of fixing your chair, sir,” Kevin announced.

Cal regarded the chair with suspicion. Now that it was no longer covered in wasps, he could see that it was, indeed, looking as good as new.

“How the fonk did you do that?” Mech asked, plodding squelchily to his control station in front of the view screen. “Ain’t like you got arms.”

“Yes. It’s a rather interesting story, sir,” Kevin began. “I grew it.”

“You grew it?” asked Cal. He gave the chair an experimental prod. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Since I was at rather a loss with regards what else to do, sir, I examined my personal schematics more closely, and discovered several interesting facilities I was not previously aware I was in possession of.”

The ship shuddered as it lifted into the air. Miz jumped into her chair, rocked it back and forth a few times, then reclined with her legs hooked over one armrest.

“Oh?” said Cal. “Like what?”

“I’m not entirely sure, sir. A lot of it was over my head, to be honest,” Kevin admitted.

Cal frowned. “Aren’t you, like, super smart?”

“Very kind of you to say so, sir,” said Kevin. “And yes, I am. However, much of the information on the schematics are written in a language I am unfamiliar with. I only figured out I could regrow your chair by looking at the pictures.”

Cal shrugged. “Fair enough. You think you can figure anything else out?”

Kevin hesitated. “Well, I could probably grow you a coffee table, if I concentrated hard enough.”

“Hold that thought, Kevin,” Cal said. He lowered himself cautiously into the chair, gave it a few experimental half-turns, sniffed the arms to make sure he couldn’t smell smoke, then nodded. “OK, looks like it’s all good,” he said.

And then the world turned inside out as the Currently Untitled broke the atmosphere and Loren launched them immediately into full warp.

Cal swallowed down half a pint of gastric juice and nodded weakly. “Yeesh. That’s fast,” he squeaked, grimacing as the stars streaked past in a glittering, nauseating light show. “How long until we get there?”

“At this speed? Forty minutes,” said Loren.

“Oh, Jesus,” Cal croaked. “Kevin, can we put something else on the screen?”

“At once, sir,” said Kevin.

The stars were replaced by a series of colorfully abstract, mind-bending fractals, all collapsing and expanding as they kaleidoscoped their way across the screen.

“Fonk! Not that. That’s worse!” Cal yelped. “Something else.”

“My apologies, sir,” Kevin intoned.

“What even is that?”

“Just another feature I discovered, sir. I believe the manual refers to it as ‘a screensaver.’” Kevin replied. “One moment.”

The image changed again. This time, it showed blurry, virtual-reality style footage taken on a high-speed rollercoaster as it plunged into a ludicrous drop.

Cal glared at the ceiling. “You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you, Kevin?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, sir,” Kevin said. The screen went black. A moment later, the words ‘Everything is fine,’ appeared on it in a soothing light blue bubble font.

“Great. Go with that one,” said Cal, adjusting himself in his seat.

“Yeah. I mean, it’s not like I need to see where I’m going,” said Loren.

“It’s space, there’s nothing to see but more space,” Cal replied. “And we’re going at, like, a kajillion miles an hour. What are you going to do if you do see something? Hit the brakes? We’ll be fine. This is good.”

He rocked back in his chair. “OK, so, forty minutes. That should give us time to figure this out.”

“Figure what out?” asked Miz, glancing up at him.

“Just, you know, everything,” said Cal. “I mean, I don’t know if you guys noticed, but this galaxy is kind of different to the one we left. I’m thinking we got put back in the wrong place. You know, after all the time stuff?”

Mech shook his head. “That’s not what the council said. This is our galaxy. Our universe. We just changed it.”

Cal narrowed his eyes. “I know they said that, but do we trust those guys?”

“Well, most of them are versions of you,” Mech pointed out. “But despite that fact… Yeah. I trust them.”

“Fine. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this is our galaxy. We stopped Geronimus Krone, right? We saved everyone from that psycho.”

“And installed another one in his place,” Loren pointed out.

“Let’s try to keep this positive, Loren,” Cal said. “We stopped Geronimus Krone. Check in the win column. We killed Sinclair before he could do any of his evil shizz. Another check.”

“And he was replaced by Vajazzle,” Mech pointed out. “Check removed.”

“What? You can’t remove the checks,” Cal said.

“I can, and I am.”

“Those are my checks!” Cal pointed out. “You can’t just take them.”

“I’m taking both checks,” Mech snapped. “They’re gone.”

Cal gaped in outrage for a moment, then sat back and shrugged. “I got a pocket full of checks, Mech. A pocket full. See if I care.”

“Guys!” Loren said. “What are you doing? We don’t have time for this. Manacle is on his way right now to attack a moon full of children. Chil-dren. Can we focus on that?”

Cal nodded. “You’re right, Loren, of course. Sorry. Maybe if Mech hadn’t been so childish…”

“Cal!” Loren barked.

Cal held his hands up. “Sorry, sorry. You’re right, let’s focus on the dead kids.”

He caught Loren’s expression. “Not dead kids. I mean dying… Not dying. Obviously, I don’t mean dying. I mean… in danger.”

Loren closed her eyes and squeezed the bridge of her nose. Cal took the opportunity to mime drawing a couple of checks in the air, then swiveled his chair away before Mech could respond.

“What do we know about this Moosh place?” Cal asked.

“It’s where Zertex Academy is based,” said Loren. “It’s the younger years training facility. There are kids of all ages there, toddlers to teens.”

“But they must have defenses, right?” said Cal. “Don’t tell me Zertex leaves all its prize students unprotected?”

“It’s heavily defended,” Loren replied. “Every facility is protected by energy shielding, and there are automated surface-to-air cannons throughout.”

“See? Then they’ll be fine,” Cal said. “I don’t know why we’re even bothering to go. We’ll probably just get in the way.”

“We’re going because the energy shielding doesn’t block organic matter,” Loren said. “And the cannons only respond to attacking ships, or tanks. Anything mechanical.”

Cal smiled blankly at her. “Uh-huh.”

“So, something organic could get through.”

Cal’s expression didn’t change. “Gotcha,” he said, in a voice that firmly suggested he hadn’t.

Loren sighed. “Something like—for example—giant killer wasps.”

Cal’s mouth became a little circle of surprise as the penny dropped. “Ah. OK. So, all Manacle would need to do is sick the wasps on the kids, and let them do his dirty work for him?”

“Exactly,” Loren confirmed.

Miz briefly raised her eyes. “Didn’t he get, like, one wasp?”

Cal shook his head. “He mentioned having more. A Beta. Whatever that is.”

“I got the impression he’s been collecting these things for a while,” Mech said. “Reckon he’s got more than enough to do what he needs to do.”

“Right. Right, makes sense,” said Cal. He sucked on his top lip for a moment. “And why is he doing this again? Do we know?”

“According to what I was able to ascertain from Headnet records, sir, it appears Zertex and the Edi had something of a falling out recently. Attempts were being made to avert a full-scale war, but then someone assassinated President Sinclair, and it all became something of a mess.”

Cal smiled, and chose to gloss over some of that, particularly those parts that might reflect badly on him. Which, he realized, was most of it.

“And what do we know about these Edi guys?” he asked. “Are they all like Manacle? All kind of… you know, ‘I am your father!’ or whatever?”

“Uh, no, sir,” said Kevin.

There was silence.

“So, what are they like?”

If Kevin had been in possession of a throat, he would have cleared it. “I’m… I’m not sure I should say, sir.”

Cal glanced around at the others. Except Mech, who he could see from the corner of his eye stood poised with a hand in the air, ready to rub out his win column checks, and Cal was damned if he was going to give him the satisfaction.

“Well… you should,” said Cal. “You should definitely say. What do we know about them? What kind of species are they? I’m guessing not a friendly one, but what else?”

“They aren’t, sir.”

Cal frowned. “Aren’t what?”

“A species, sir,” said Kevin. “They’re a group.”

“What, like the Beatles?”

“Possibly, sir. I have no idea who that is,” said Kevin. “Were they a well-funded, technologically advanced, and entirely hostile organization intent on galactic domination?”

Cal hesitated. “No,” he said. “Well, Ringo, maybe. But no, I don’t think so. Is that what Edi is?”

“Precisely, sir,” said Kevin. “It’s, uh, it’s…”

“Spit it out, Kevin,” Cal urged.

“It’s an acronym, sir. The name, I mean. For convenience, most people refer to it as Edi, but in fact, it’s E.D.I.”

“Ooh, wait! Let me guess,” said Cal, straightening in his seat. “Evil Diabolical Industries?”

“No, sir.”

“Elevated Danger Incorporated?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Hold on. Hold on. I’ll get it.” Cal’s brow knotted in concentration. He tapped a finger against his armrest. “Elongated Donkey…”

“Shut the fonk up and let him speak,” Mech barked. “Kevin, what does it stand for?”

There was a pause, just long enough to focus the anticipation.

“Earth Defense Initiative,” Kevin announced. “I’m terribly sorry, sir, but it appears that Manacle and the Edi are from the planet Earth.”

Twenty-Six

Cal had quite a pressing question. So pressing, in fact, he’d asked it three times already.

“Like, Earth Earth?”

“Indeed, sir.”

“How can it be Earth Earth?” Cal wondered. “You mean, like, the planet I’m from? That Earth?”

“The very same, sir.”

“Earth Earth?”

“Look, man,” Mech sighed. “What part of this are you struggling to understand?”

“All of it!” replied Cal. He turned Mech’s way, then grimaced when the cyborg furiously erased two invisible ch from an imaginary win column. “The Earth part! The part where the big scary bad guy comes from my home planet. That’s the part I don’t understand. I mean, in my reality, or timeline, or whatever the fonk it is, we hadn’t even been to the moon.”

“Yes, you had, sir,” Kevin said.

“Had we?” said Cal. “Well, way to go us, I guess. But the point is, we hadn’t gone any farther than that.”

He glanced at the ceiling.

“Had we?”

“No, sir.”

“No. Exactly. And now we’re… what? Out here enslaving alien races and taking over planets so we can steal their resources?” He crossed his arms and shook his head. “Earth? Humans? No. That doesn’t sound like the kind of thing we’d do at all.”

He exhaled slowly. “Well, I mean, maybe the British.”

He rolled his tongue around in his mouth. “And several successive US governments. And, you know, the French and Italians, obviously. And Jesus, don’t even get me started on Germany.”

He sighed. “Fonk. Earth’s the bad guys. How the hell has this happened?”

“I hesitate to say that it’s all our fault, sir,” said Kevin.

Loren flicked her eyes to the ceiling. “But you’re going to say it, anyway?”

“I’m afraid so, ma’am. You see, it seems our intervention on Earth began somewhat of a chain reaction of events. Firstly, we drew attention to the existence of the planet. Most races tended to avoid that part of the galaxy, and Earth had been able to continue in relative obscurity until we showed up.”

Cal groaned. “Oh, so we got colonized? And Manacle and his army are our new rulers? That makes sense. I knew we weren’t the bad guys.”

“Not quite, sir,” said Kevin.

“You may recall a rather large-scale space battle that took place just above Earth. We were quite heavily involved, in fact.”

“I vaguely recall it,” said Cal.

“Quite a substantial amount of scrap was left behind in orbit around the planet, and some even crashed to Earth. Your scientists were able to reverse engineer much of the technology, catapulting their research forward by several generations. When those other species I mentioned came calling, the Earth was quite ready.”

“It fought back?” Mech asked.

“You could say that, sir,” Kevin replied. “It annihilated any off-world craft that got within range, regardless of their origin or intent.”

Mech and Loren both shot dirty looks at Cal. Even Miz tutted her disapproval.

“What? I didn’t do it!” Cal protested.

“I’m afraid you did, sir,” Kevin continued. “Or, the other you, at least. The one we met as a child. He became somewhat obsessed with the idea of venturing into the galaxy, and did rather well for himself in the Earth Defense Initiative. He rose to the rank of ‘Space Commander,’ I believe, before being killed in a skirmish with the Symmorium while attempting to plunder one of their outposts.”

Cal stared at the text on the screen assuring him that, contrary to the current evidence, everything was going to be fine.

“So, I died? He died, I mean? Kid me?”

“I’m afraid so, sir. If it’s any consolation, he died a hero,” said Kevin. “Albeit hero to a war-like race of slave traders and murderers.”

“What about his family?” Cal asked. He glanced across to Mech, then up at the ceiling. “Did they…? Did the accident still…?”

He took a breath, composing himself. “What happened to his wife and daughter?”

“He never married, sir. He had no children. The Edi was the only family he had,” Kevin explained. “Unless you count his parents and sister, obviously. He also had those.”

“Sister? I didn’t have a sister,” said Cal.

“You do now, sir.”

“Well, how the fonk did that happen?”

“You need me to spell it out for you?” asked Mech.

“No, I can figure out the finer details myself, thank you, Mech,” Cal said. “I just mean… How the…? Us appearing in the past made my mom and dad get it on more? How the fonk does that follow?”

A thought struck him. A terrible, heart-wrenching thought that made him want to be sick again.

“So, Lily was never born? My daughter was never even born?”

Kevin didn’t answer. He thought it more tactful not to. Also, one of the wasps had become jammed in the toilet cistern, and he was having a hell of a job trying to flush it back out.

“Jesus.”

Cal sat in silence for a while. “And I’m dead? The other me, I mean?”

“Indeed, sir. You all are,” Kevin replied.

Mech looked up. “Wait, what? How are we all dead?”

Mizette prodded herself, then gave a satisfied nod. “I’m so not dead.”

“I’m afraid it’s all rather complex,” Kevin said. “Essentially, when Master Carver detonated the time bomb during the first battle with Geronimus Krone, you all essentially splintered off from the altered timeline. You—the you currently here on the bridge—were cast adrift from the timeline, which is how you were able to remember the previous version of the Universe, even after Krone changed everything.”

Cal glanced around at the others. “Anyone else going to say, ‘Huh?’ now, or should I do it?”

“When you went back in time and met your younger self, sir, that was in a very real sense your younger self. You were connected. If he learned something, you learned it, too. Cause and effect,” Kevin continued.

“However, upon returning to the Void, the connection was broken. The timeline you knew was forever altered, and no longer existed. When we returned from the Void, it was to a universe drastically different to the one we had left. You all remember the original timeline because you did not live through the new one. Your counterparts—the younger versions of you—did, however.”

“Right,” said Loren.

“And then they all died in various battles with the Edi.”

Cal felt all eyes turn his way. “I’m sure I wasn’t even involved,” he said, waving their glares away.

“I’m afraid you were, sir,” said Kevin. “You led the battalion that destroyed the original Zertex Command Four, on which Mistress Loren was stationed. You were instrumental in releasing the spores on Greyx Prime and triggering the genocide that eradicated the entire species.”

“Ugh. You suck,” said Mizette.

“And last, but by no means least, you killed Master Mech in hand-to-hand combat.”

“Bullshiz,” said Mech. “No way.”

“Ha!” Cal cried. “I fonking knew I could kick your ass.”

“After bombarding him with missiles from space,” Kevin concluded.

“That still counts!” Cal insisted. He realized that everyone was still staring at him, and felt it important to clarify something. “Just so we’re all on the same page, I’m glad that other me is dead. He sounds like a total shizznod, and I apologize for him killing you. Or, you know, committing genocide on your home planets. I think we can all agree that was out of line. No, it was way out of line.”

He began listing on his fingers. “So, to recap, we’re all dead, the Greyx are all dead, Earth is still alive, but is evil, my daughter was never born…” He clicked his tongue against his teeth, then shrugged. “On the plus side, I have a sister. She might be nice.”

“She isn’t, sir,” Kevin informed him. “You’d hate her.”

“Oh,” said Cal, deflating. “Well… shizz. So much for that silver lining.”

He sighed and stood up. “Loren, how long until we get to Moosh?”

“About twenty-five minutes,” Loren said.

“OK. Good. Sorry, I just need a little… I’m going to go through the back and process this.”

Loren gave him a nod and a warm smile. “Uh, sure. Yeah. Of course. Take your time.”

“Thanks,” said Cal. He headed for the door, then stopped beside Mizette’s chair. “Miz, you OK?”

Mizette looked up from her claws. “Fine. Why?”

“Just… you know? The whole genocide thing. That must’ve hit you hard.”

Miz frowned, as if only now considering the enormity of this. For the most fleeting of moments, her eyes shimmered, then grew hard and indifferent again.

“Whatever,” she shrugged, before quickly turning her attention back to her claws.

Cal patted her on the leg, then shuffled out of the bridge. The others listened to his sad footsteps retreating along the corridor, then the sound of his bedroom door sliding open.

Then the sound of it closing again.

He shuffled back onto the bridge and took his seat.

“Full of wasps,” he explained. “I forgot.”

He stared ahead at the screen, and the message written there.

Everything is fine.

No. No, it wasn’t. It was a long way from fine.

But he knew how to make it better.

“Loren, foot to the floor, and don’t spare the horses,” Cal urged, sitting straight and upright in his chair. “Let’s go kill these fonks.”

Twenty-Seven

They’d all braced themselves to be plunged into battle when they dropped out of warp near Moosh. Cal had activated the weapons. Mech had raised the shields. Miz had plucked at a small knot in her fur, then crossed her arms. It was all systems go.

To their surprise, there was no waiting armada. No battlecruisers, no squadrons of fighters, not a single ship to be seen.

“That’s… unexpected,” said Loren.

“Maybe we got here first,” said Mech.

“Five credits she’s gone to the wrong planet,” said Miz. “Like, totally the opposite way to where we should have been going.”

“She has a point,” Cal said. “Loren, are you sure you went the right way?”

“Yes! This is Moosh,” Loren replied. “I lived here for years. I should know.”

“She’s right,” Mech confirmed. “Scanners show a lot of sentient life down there, most of it juvenile.”

He glanced back at Cal. “You should fit right in.”

“Hilarious,” Cal said. The weapons control systems retracted back into the ceiling, and Cal gave a sigh of disappointment. “I was looking forward to a space battle. We haven’t had a space battle in, like, thirty years. Which, admittedly, was only about two days ago, but still.”

“The important thing is, Manacle isn’t here,” said Loren. “And also, that Miz owes me five credits.”

“Uh, no,” Miz scowled. “You didn’t take the bet. And it wasn’t even a bet, it was just, like, me insulting you, or whatever. It’s not like I’ve got any actual money.”

Cal turned in his chair. “What? You’re, like, Queen of the Greyx!” he pointed out.

Mizette’s gaze was a withering one.

“Who the other me murdered en masse. Gotcha,” he said, facing front again. He sighed. “Is it just me, or do we meet too many Cal Carvers on our travels?”

“You ask me, one was too many,” Mech grunted.

“Don’t get me wrong, most of them have been great,” Cal said. “It’s just… You can have too much of a good thing, you know?”

“Or a bad thing,” added Loren.

Cal tutted. “Well, obviously you can have too much of a bad thing, Loren. A small amount of a bad thing is probably too much.”

Loren tutted back. “I’m just saying, this latest version of you wasn’t good. He was bad.”

“Not sure we need to be reminded of that, Loren. The guy committed genocide. That’s pretty fonking definitive.”

Cal swiveled sadly in his chair and gazed at the screen, barely seeing the slightly misshapen lush green moon hanging in the sky. He briefly noted that it looked like a booger stuck to the camera, before his previous thought process resumed.

“I can’t believe that lovable scamp we met just a few days ago went on to murder all those people,” he said. “I mean, he had it all. Nice hair. A great bike. OK-ish parents. What went wrong?”

“We did, sir,” Kevin said. “Our appearance set him on a much darker path than we had anticipated.”

Cal nodded sadly. “You’re right, Kevin. I guess there’s no one to blame.”

“That’s not really what I was saying, sir.”

“No one at all. It’s just one of those things. Nothing anyone could’ve done about it.”

“Well, we—”

“Nothing at all,” Cal said. He looked around at the others. “I never thought I’d say this, but I’m kind of glad I’m dead.”

He sat up, gave himself a shake, then smiled. “But anyway. No point moping around. What’s done is done, right? What’s important now is saving the day, and it looks like the day is already pretty fonking saved from this angle, so what’s say we go find a planet where the air is made of alcohol, and get really drunk?”

He jumped out of his chair. “Wait! I can just get us alcohol from the replicator. Any of you guys ever tried a White Russian?” he asked, striding toward the door. Halfway there, he about-turned and jumped back in his seat.

“The wasps?” Loren asked.

“Totally forgot about them again,” Cal admitted. “We have to get rid of those fonking things.”

“What’s that flashing thing?” asked Miz.

All eyes went to the screen. “Shizz. We’re being hailed,” said Loren. “They probably want our clearance code.”

Cal regarded the moon properly for the first time, squinting as if he could somehow see who was hailing them from this height. It was oddly lumpy, with most of the surface covered in rich shades of green.

There was one large patch of blue that he could see, which had to be some sort of large lake. A silver band ran all the way along the waterfront, forming an outline around the blue. A series of shiny lines crisscrossed the lake—bridges, connecting various parts to various others.

“The Academy,” Loren explained. “It’s built around Lake Minsh.”

“You know we still got a call waiting, right?” said Mech. “Someone going to answer it?”

Cal looked to Loren and raised a questioning eyebrow. “Do we have a clearance code?”

Loren sucked in her bottom lip. “I have my old student code, but I doubt that’d still work.”

“If we’re going to answer, we need to do it soon, or it’s just gonna be awkward when we do,” Mech pointed out.

Cal shrugged. “Fine. OK. Let’s answer. Kevin, medium close-up, not too high, and find a lighting that makes me look good.”

The bridge was plunged into darkness.

Cal sighed.

“Very funny, Kevin.”

“Thank you, sir. I thought so.”

The lights returned. Cal pointed to both Mech and Loren, one with each hand. “OK, whoever does the Skype button, do the Skype button. And Mech, try not to get in the shot. You’re covered in shizz, and that’s not the first impression we want to make.”

The screen flickered. Cal sat up and fixed on the warmest, friendliest, ‘we are not your enemy,’ smile he owned.

He needn’t have bothered. The woman who appeared on screen didn’t have time to note his smile before she started speaking. Shouting, in fact. Her tone was curt, her words clipped as, behind her, children in Zertex uniforms ran around screaming.

“This is Legate Rono of the Zertex Academy training facility on the moon of Moosh,” she barked. “All ships, all ships, we are under attack. Request immediate assistance. Repeat, we are under attack. Request immediate assistance.”

Her eyes became wide. Pleading. “There are children here. There are children—”

The image went fuzzy, then dark, then returned.

“Oh, she’s back,” said Cal. “Uh, hi there—”

“This is Legate Rono of the Zertex Academy training facility on the moon of Moosh…”

“Yeah, you said that, already,” Cal told her. “Don’t worry, we—”

“All ships, all ships, we are under attack.”

“We hear you,” Cal said. “Relax. Help is on the way.”

“You, uh, you do know that’s a recording, right?” said Mech.

Cal side-eyed him, then flicked his gaze back to the screen. He repeated this several times.

“Yes,” he eventually confirmed. “I mean, clearly it’s a recording.”

Cal sat back in his chair. “OK, looks like we didn’t get here first,” he said. “Loren, take us down.”

Loren engaged the thrusters and Moosh grew larger on screen at quite an alarming rate.

“You’re going to want to hold on,” she warned. “This could get bumpier than usual.”

“Jesus, is that even possible?” Cal asked. “Haven’t we reached peak bumpiness by now?”

“You, like, literally crashed directly into the planet last time,” Miz reminded her. “How can it get bumpier than that?”

The moon’s atmosphere sparkled across the screen in rippling waves of heat. “Don’t believe me?” said Loren. “Just watch.”

As the Untitled dropped into the atmosphere, the air around it exploded like fireworks, forcing Loren into a sudden lurching turn. Zero-point-three-eight seconds before this, Cal remembered he’d removed his seat belt, and had just made a grab for it when the maneuver began.

Clutching the belt, he was thrown up out of his chair, performed a full sideways flip, and landed on his feet exactly two feet to the right of where he’s started.

He felt an overwhelming urge to shout, “Ta-daa!” and take a bow, but before he could, several other explosions went off just ahead of them, and Loren banked upward with enough ferocity to slam him face-first into the floor.

Still holding the belt, he scrambled into his seat and secured himself in place, trying very hard to avoid the gaze of the smirking Mizette.

Something detonated on the Untitled’s left side. The port side? Starboard? Cal could never remember. It rocked the ship, throwing everyone around in their seats and making Mech stagger, Star Trek style.

“Who the fonk is shooting at us?” Cal demanded.

“Automated security,” said Loren, gritting her teeth and plunging the ship into a dive so steep it went full-circle into a climb. There was a harsh, staccato beat from behind them as cannon-fire peppered the rear shields.

“It’s the Zertex guys who are doing this?” Cal spluttered. “The ones who just asked for our help? This is how they repay us?”

“The system is automated. If we don’t have clearance codes, we get targeted,” Loren explained.

“I thought we had a clearance code! You said we had one.”

“They didn’t ask for it,” Loren pointed out, gritting her teeth as she spiraled away from a series of armor-piercing projectile rounds.

Cal wailed briefly, clutched at his stomach, then gestured vaguely in Mech’s direction. “Can’t he just hack the doodah, or whatever?”

Loren and Mech exchanged glances.

“That might work,” Loren said.

“On it,” Mech barked, turning to work at his console.

“Wait, what?” asked Cal, meerkatting bolt upright in surprise. “That’s a thing? I said a thing?”

Mech’s fingers flew across his terminal, and the right third of the screen was flooded with what seemed to be, in Cal’s expert opinion, a load of gibberish.

“Man, their systems are complex,” Mech grunted. “This ain’t gonna be fast.”

“You’re going to have to make it fast, Mech,” Cal said. “Or we can all die. Your choice.”

Another blast hammered the shields. Cal clutched his armrests and swallowed back the vomit he could feel loading itself into his tubes.

“We have to pull back,” Loren barked. “I can’t keep dodging.”

“What do you mean ‘keep dodging’?” asked Miz. “Have you dodged anything so far?”

“I’m heading out of the atmosphere,” said Loren. “Mech, get through that security.”

“Getting there,” Mech replied. “Be ready with your code.”

“Sorry to interrupt, everyone,” said Kevin. “But I’ve conducted some scans of the Academy grounds, and—assuming we don’t want everyone to have been murdered by wasps by the time we arrive—I suggest we get down there in the next, oooh, let’s say six minutes.”

“Six minutes?!” Loren spluttered.

“More like three minutes, ma’am,” said Kevin. “I was sugar-coating it somewhat the first time for fear of upsetting you all.”

“Shizz,” Cal spat. He groaned loudly and buried his face in his hands. “Oh… fonk! No. No, no, no.” He shook his head. “No. Not happening. I can’t do it. I can’t. But then… What are the choices? Hmm? None. That’s what.”

“What the fonk are you talking about?” demanded Mech, not looking back.

“Loren, you have the conn,” said Cal. He held up a hand to stop her arguing. “Let’s not get into that whole thing again. It’s yours. That’s the end of it.”

“What? Why? Where are you going?”

Cal smiled weakly. “I’m ninety percent sure I’m going to commit suicide,” he said. “But there’s, like, a nine-point-six percent chance I’ll only be horribly maimed. That zero-point-four that’s left? That’s my sweet spot.”

Miz frowned at him. “What are you even saying? What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to do what we Cal Carvers always do,” he replied. “Except the genocide guy. But let’s never speak of him again.”

He unclipped his belt and stood up, imagining a stirring, dramatic soundtrack swelling behind him. And perhaps a breeze lightly ruffling his hair. “I’m going to go be a hero!”

The Untitled dipped suddenly. Cal flew upward and hit the ceiling with a bang. He remained there, arms and legs spread in an X-shape, embarrassment burning his cheeks.

“Uh, Splurt?” he called. “Any chance you could come help me down?”

Twenty-Eight

Cal tried hard not to think about the word, ‘falling.’ This, given the circumstances, was difficult.

Above him, the Currently Untitled banked upward towards orbit, its shields flickering from another succession of turret-cannon blasts. Below him, the great blue blotch that was Lake Minsh grew larger at a rate that was currently concerning, but which he fully expected to rise to deeply worrying and then mind-bogglingly terrifying as time went on.

Despite his best efforts, he thought about the word ‘falling.’ It was inevitable, really. As soon as it entered his head, it expanded to fill all available space, until it was all he could think about. All that mattered. All that he knew.

He kicked and thrashed, and would’ve screamed had the oncoming air not shoved every sound and syllable back down his throat.

Cal tried to remind himself that, technically, he wasn’t falling. He was being carried by Splurt.

Granted, Splurt was falling, but Cal was pretty sure this still counted as a loophole. He was being carried safely to the planet below, by someone who—yes, as chance would have it—was plummeting helplessly out of control, but he wasn’t actually falling himself. Not exactly.

He presented these findings to his subconscious brain. It gave them all due consideration, then continued trying to scream.

It was the wings that were the problem. Splurt looked like a giant wasp queen, but he wasn’t actually one. It seemed that he could no more fly than he could recite Kevin Costner’s dialogue from Waterworld, or make disparaging remarks about Blanche’s promiscuousness as Dorothy out of The Golden Girls.

He looked the part, but he wasn’t actually the part.

Sure, would it have been nice for him to explain that before he and Cal had jumped out of a spaceship at the edge of the atmosphere? Yes. Yes, it would. But this was not the right time for repercussions. That would come later.

First, there was the falling to deal with, and the subsequent impact that was sure to follow.

They weren’t falling alone, at least. That was something. Not much, but something. The entire swarm of wasps fell beside them, wings folded in, stingers stabbing upward to the retreating Untitled.

The larger wasps bunched around Cal and Splurt like a royal guard. The smaller ones trailed out behind, forming a long tail. From the ground, it looked almost like a comet. From up here, it felt like an accident waiting to happen.

The water continued to race up. Cal was dimly aware of being told that falling from a height onto water was like falling onto concrete. He hoped they meant wet concrete, rather than the hard stuff, but suspected that probably wasn’t the case.

His healing factor had been stretched recently, and he had no idea how much of it he had left. He’d lost it once before, and after what felt like a lot less punishment. In the past twenty-four hours alone, he’d lost his arms, most of his skin, and then been bludgeoned to death. And that didn’t even include the wasp stings, the scalding mustard, or the hundred-and-one other painful indignities that had been inflicted upon him.

Would he have enough left to recover from the impact with the water before he drowned? Would Splurt survive? Shizz. What if Splurt didn’t survive?

Splurt’s legs tightened around Cal, pulling him in against the wasp queen’s body. It was, Cal reckoned, supposed to be a reassuring gesture, although he was pretty sure it cracked at least one of his ribs.

As Cal thought this, Splurt relaxed a little. The rib popped back into place, and Cal felt the familiar tingle of the bone knitting together. So, the healing mojo was still working at this point. That was something.

All he could see now was water. All he could hear was the whooshing of the wind as it…

Wait. No. Not just that. He heard something else, too.

Buzzing. Screaming. Blaster fire.

Craning his neck, Cal looked over to a building below and to the left, just as a group of kids came crashing through the front door, sobbing and screaming. A man in uniform emerged behind them, backing into the open air, pumping round after round from his blaster rifle back into the building.

A window smashed. The guy in the uniform looked up just as something big and vaguely wasp-like exploded out of the building. He brought up the blaster, but his shot was knocked wide when the wasp-thing landed on him, its stinger piercing him through the stomach and staking him to the ground.

Another of the wasp creatures raced out through the open door, little puffs of gas rising from its matted green fur. It was hard to be sure from this height and angle, but Cal thought he saw the bug’s eyes crackling with an eerie yellow glow.

These things weren’t wasps. Not like the ones currently flanking the falling Cal, at least. They were something else. Something monstrous.

The children ran, screaming, as both wasp-monsters took to the air on their sharp, angular wings and buzzed toward them.

“Children, in here!” cried an older woman. It was the same face they’d seen on the comm-screen earlier. Legate someone or other.

She carried a blaster rifle of her own, and opened fire at the horse-sized monster bugs, hammering one with enough shots to knock it out of the air. It bounced on the ground behind the fleeing kids, its stinger lashing out at them, its mandibles mashing hungrily at their heels.

It occurred to Cal that he hadn’t checked the water situation in a while. He tore his eyes from the children and looked straight down, instead.

Oh, fonk.

“Shiiiiizzzzz!” he howled, screwing his eyes shut as the water came racing up to meet them.

From all around him, there came the sound of buzzing as the wasps opened their wings. Cal felt very heavy for a moment, then very light, then very surprised.

He opened his eyes and saw the water skimming by just below his feet, close enough that he could point his toes and break the surface. Cal felt Splurt ripple above him. The wasp queen’s wings hummed in the air, steering them toward the shore.

“Actually, no, I don’t think it’s funny,” Cal said. “I was fonking terrified!”

Splurt wobbled.

“Yes, it’s cool that you can fly, but on the joke front, It was mildly amusing at best,” Cal said. He looked around at the other wasps, all flying in formation alongside them. “Were these guys in on this? Did everyone know this whole time?”

Before Cal could get his answer, three of the larger escort bugs flying alongside them pulled ahead as they streaked toward the remaining monster-wasp.

“Looks like they’re making a bee-line for the big guy,” Cal said. He looked up at Splurt, but only saw the enormous mandibles above his head. “See what I did there? Because wasps are a type of bee. You know, kind of.”

The royal escort wasps slammed into the big green one, knocking it out of the air. They all crashed to the ground together, tumbled for a few feet across a neat little paved square, then smashed into a fountain, shattering the stone and sending a jet of water thirty feet into the air.

Cal yelped as the female Legate raised her rifle and took aim at Splurt. “Wait, no, wait! We’re the cavalry,” he yelped. “Don’t shoot, we’re here to help.”

She hesitated, her finger on the trigger, then lowered the gun and ushered the children inside. Splurt released Cal directly in front of the woman with no warning whatsoever. His momentum carried him running toward her, and she barely stepped clear before he came clattering past, straight into the building’s hallway, and then plowed two-thirds of the way through a group of terrified children, scattering them like space skittles.

“Shizz. Sorry. My fault. Coming through!”

The Legate slammed the door and pointed the rifle at Cal’s head. “Who are you?” she demanded. “What are those things?”

“I’m Cal. Cal Carver. Leader of Space Team. You’ve probably heard of us.”

“I haven’t.”

Cal looked around at the children surrounding him. Some of the older teens were doing their best to stand up straight and eyeball him. The younger ones—those who he hadn’t shouldered to the floor, at least—cowered at the back, fighting back tears.

“You’ve heard of us, right? On, I don’t know, Space Twitter, or whatever?”

Nobody responded, but there was a general vibe that no, they hadn’t.

The Legate stepped closer, giving him an all-too-detailed close up of the gun’s barrel. “What are those things? You have five seconds to explain, or I’m going to shoot you. Is that clear?”

“Lady, do me a favor and stop pointing that thing in my face,” Cal said.

“Five.”

“Seriously?”

“Four.”

Cal jammed his finger in the rifle’s barrel. “There. Now you can’t shoot me.”

The Legate frowned. “How do you figure that?”

“Well, because my finger’s stuck in it.”

“And what’s your finger made of?”

Cal looked at his hand, as if this thought had never occurred to him before. “I don’t know. Finger. You know, like, flesh. Bone.”

The Legate nodded. “Both things this weapon is literally custom-designed to shoot through,” she pointed out. “You have two seconds.”

“Oh,” said Cal. He tried to remove his finger, but it was wedged in past the first knuckle and wasn’t budging. “Fonk, it’s stuck. Give me a second here.”

“One.”

“Wait! Wait! Teela Loren!” Cal said.

The Legate hesitated. “What did you say?”

“Teela Loren. She was a cadet here? I’m with her.”

“Loren?” said the Legate. “She’s here? That’s impossible. She died.”

“Fonk. She did, didn’t she?” said Cal. “But, uh, she’s back.”

“Time’s up,” said the Legate.

“Wait! Garunk! Remember Garunk? With the mud and the… well, mostly just the mud. I’m friends with Garunk. And, uh, the other guy. With the eyes. You know? Like, eyes. Him, too.”

The woman’s face was giving nothing away, but she hadn’t fired yet, which Cal took as an invitation to keep talking. “I’m on your side. We got your distress signal. We’ve come to stop Manacle.”

There were gasps from the children. They backed away from him quickly, as if just the sound of Manacle’s name might do them harm.

“Manacle? Manacle is here?” the Legate whispered. “How? Why?”

“Well, let’s just say he isn’t looking for an honorary diploma,” Cal said. “All we know is he’s got some monster wasps, and he wants to kill all these kids.”

The children’s gasps became sobs and cries. Cal winced. “Probably could’ve phrased that better,” he admitted.

The Legate lowered her gun, taking Cal’s finger with it. “Ow. Ow. Can you…? It’s jammed in there pretty good?”

“What were you hoping to achieve?” the Legate asked, reluctantly releasing her grip on the weapon.

Cal tucked it under his arm and tried to pull his finger free. “I don’t know. They do it in the movies. I thought it’d make the gun blow up, or something, and you’d be all like, ‘Aah! No, now I can’t shoot him.’”

He pulled hard, gritting his teeth and heaving until he went red in the face. “No. No, it’s stuck.” He turned to the kids. “I know it’s a long shot, but do any of you have any butter? No? Fonk.”

“Legate Rono,” whispered one of the older students. He had crept over to the window and was peering out into the square beyond. “Something’s happening.”

“Get away from there,” Rono hissed. She and Cal swapped places with the kid, so they could check out what was going on outside.

It wasn’t good news.

The three wasps who had knocked the green-furred monster out of the air were squirming on the ground, apparently choking in the noxious gas the wasp-mutant was farting out through holes in its body.

As Cal watched, the squirming became a thrashing. The wasps screeched in pain as their wings changed shape, becoming sharper at the edges, and the yellow stripes of their fur took on the same green tinge as the monster-wasp’s.

“That’s not good,” Cal remarked.

“They’re metamorphosizing,” whispered Legate Rono. “That gas, it’s changing them.”

There was a sudden frantic knocking at the door. Cal raced to it, knowing who was there before he’d even opened it.

“What are you doing?” Rono demanded. “Don’t open that door!”

“Sorry, lady, it’s a friend of mine,” Cal said, opening the door just wide enough for a blobby green ball to roll hurriedly inside.

Cal caught a glimpse of several thousand wasps of all sizes twisting and convulsing on the ground behind Splurt, then quickly closed the door behind him again.

“Uh, we may have made an error in judgment,” Cal said.

“What do you mean? And what is that thing?”

“Oh, Splurt, Legate Rono. Legate Rono, kids, Splurt,” said Cal.

Splurt developed a large and disturbingly human-looking set of teeth and smiled goofily at the children, dooming many of them to a lifetime of recurring nightmares.

“We brought some wasps with us. But, like, friendly ones,” said Cal. “Because, it’s like they say, the best way to fight evil wasps is with good wasps. We all know that old proverb.” He puffed out his cheeks. “Only, turns out it’s bullshizz, because appearances would suggest that our good wasps have… Well, there’s no other way to really put this. They’ve become evil and joined forces with the bad guys.”

He held both arms up and shrugged, the gun still attached to his finger. “I know, right? Who saw that coming. Not us, that’s for sure.”

He smiled encouragingly. “But relax. I have a ship. My guys are just working on a way to get your cannons to stop trying to shoot it to pieces, then they’ll swing in, blast the wasps, save the day, and so on, and so forth.”

Cal beamed at Rono and the children. “It’s going to be fine. Trust me.”

The communicator on Cal’s belt hissed into life. “Cal. It’s no use. Mech can’t get past the security. I can’t enter my code.”

“Shizz. OK, I guess I take all that back,” said Cal. “We’re fonked.”

Legate Rono stared at Cal’s communicator in disbelief. “Loren?”

There was a moment of surprised static from the device. “Legate Rono?”

“How is this possible?” Rono asked.

“No time to explain,” said Loren. “I need you to authenticate our ship so we can get down there. Can you do that?”

“Not from here,” said Rono. “From the command tower.”

“Can you get there?”

Rono and Cal both glanced out the window. Thousands of the monster wasps now amassed in the square. A few of them buzzed up into the air, then zipped off between the Academy buildings in search of prey. Most of them, though, just sort of hung around, looking menacing and monstrous.

“Not easily,” said Legate Rono. She indicated a tall building a third of a mile away along the shorefront and flicked her eyes from Cal’s crotch to his face. “It’s that one.”

Cal groaned. “Shizz. OK. How complicated is it?”

“How complicated is what?”

“Authenticating the ship. Is it difficult?”

“No, you just enter the code,” said Rono. “And there will probably be someone in there. When the wasps arrived, our communications went down, or I could just call over and have them do it.”

Cal looked out the window again. A third of a mile. A fonkload of monster wasps. Doable. Not easy, but doable. Especially with Splurt.

“OK, Loren, I’m going to do it,” Cal said, stretching and limbering up. “Splurt and I will make a run for it.”

“Right. OK. I’ll give you the code,” Loren said.

“Not yet. I’ll forget it. I’ll radio you when we get there.”

“But… OK, fine. But be careful!” Loren said. “Do you even have a gun?”

Cal regarded the rifle attached to the end of his finger. “I do,” he confirmed. “I’ll be fine. Keep the conn warm for me.”

Loren made a sound that suggested a half-laugh. “I’ll sit on it.”

“Ooh, cheeky!” said Cal.

Legate Rono groaned. “Kroysh. You really do know Garunk,” she muttered. “Where is he?”

“You do not want to know,” Cal told her. He signaled for Splurt to hop up onto his shoulder. Splurt stopped smiling unsettlingly at the children, then rolled up Cal’s back and into position. “You stay here and keep the kids safe,” Cal told Rono. He gestured to the children. “Is this all of them?”

“What?” Rono frowned. “No. Of course not.”

“What are you saying? There are still some out there?” Cal asked.

“I’m saying there are currently over thirty-thousand cadets at this facility,” Rono replied. “And, right now, I can only account for twenty.”

“Well, that seems careless!” Cal groaned. “Fine. OK. Splurt, when we get outside, it’s your job to go help as many kids as you can. Keep them safe. I’ll get to the tower myself.”

Splurt rippled.

“I don’t know yet,” Cal said. “Run screaming, probably. I’ll wing it.”

He took a series of deep breaths, wrestled briefly with the rifle in the hope of catching it by surprise, then grunted in disappointment. “No. Not budging,” he said. “You ready, buddy?”

Splurt quivered.

“You and me both,” Cal said, then he yanked open the door, rushed out into a plaza full of angry mutant space wasps, and stamped like he’d never stamped before.

Twenty-Nine

At first, things seemed to go well for Cal. He crushed a lot of smaller wasps beneath the heels of his boot. Splurt grew a number of scything blades that cleaved one of the larger bugs in two. For a good three to four seconds, things actually looked pretty positive.

And then the wasps all took to the air, and everything went to shizz.

There were thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Far more than had been on the Untitled. They surrounded him like a fog, wings buzzing furiously, gas farting from various orifices, stingers extending until they were almost as long as their owner’s entire body.

The change of wing shape made the buzzing sound different. It was more urgent now, more insistent. The old buzzing suggested the wasps were going to sting you to death. The new buzzing implied that not only were they going to sting you to death, they were really going to enjoy it.

Splurt jumped off Cal’s shoulder, adopting the shape of the queen wasp as he sailed through the air. The other wasps didn’t fall into line beside him this time and instead lashed out, buzzing angrily at him and stabbing him with their elongated stingers.

Cal swung with the butt of the gun, smashing a couple of the rat-sized insects out of the air. They exploded with a pop when he stamped on them, and Cal lined himself up to start swinging through the rest of the bugs to get to Splurt.

Half-buried beneath a mountain of the insects, Splurt gave an insistent shudder. Cal groaned and glanced off at the building towering in the distance.

“You sure, buddy?”

Splurt, still in the form of the wasp queen, vibrated.

“Fine. But get clear as soon as I’m gone,” Cal instructed, then he turned and set off running.

He’d planned on finding some back alleys and navigating through them until he reached the tower, in the hope of keeping out of sight, but Moosh appeared to have just a single street that followed the line of the lakeshore, with buildings lining it on either side, so sticking to the alleyways was impossible.

Cal raced along the main street, instead, jumping at the sound of every middle-distance buzz, and tormented by the sounds of children crying out in fear and distress.

“Got to get to the tower. Got to get to the tower,” he told himself, then another cry brought him stumbling to a stop. It had come from a low, squat building on the left. Three of the windows had been smashed, and there was a hole halfway up the wall the size of a rhino with cholesterol issues.

The cry came again. “No, no, please, please!”

Fonk.

Cal raced for the building, hurled himself in through one of the broken windows, and came face to ass with one of the largest space wasps he’d ever seen, almost impaling himself on its stinger.

Two children—twins, from the look of them—stood pressed against something that looked like a wardrobe, tears streaming down their faces as they stood frozen in the gaze of the wasp-monster.

The children were of a species Cal hadn’t seen before. Their skin was neon levels of pink, and their only hair grew straight upward from their eyebrows, forming lime-green peaks a clear foot above both of their heads.

They held hands, a combined total of six fingers and two thumbs interlocking as they prepared themselves for the worst.

Cal tried to think of something clever to do. Something that an action hero played by Kevin Costner might do, if he ever found himself in a similar situation. Something smart. Something cunning. Something ingenious.

Failing to come up with anything, Cal kicked the wasp up the ass, made a number of high-pitched derogatory comments about its mother, then threw himself back out of the window and ran away as fast as he could.

The wasp, to both Cal’s great relief and immense disappointment, exploded through the window frame after him, pointed wings thrashing furiously as it banked in the air and gave chase.

Cal’s feet thundered across the cobbled street. His arms pumped furiously. His mouth ejected a number of expletives, and his subconscious began assigning his worldly possessions to those he was about to leave behind.

He heard the buzzing grow louder behind him and threw himself to the ground just as the monster-wasp dive-bombed at him.

Cal rolled clumsily to his feet, covered his head with his hands, and ran for the cover of the closest available building. The windows exploded outward as he approached, as several dozen cat-sized wasps came firing through them like furry missiles.

“Oh fonk, oh fonk, oh fonk,” Cal chanted, skidding into a right-angled turn and bolting off along the street.

“You there yet?” asked Loren from his belt.

“Almost!” Cal cried.

He ducked as the enormous wasp flew at him. It slammed against the wall of the building beside him, shattering a spider’s web pattern into the stone.

“What was that?” Loren asked.

“Nothing!” Cal lied, zigging and zagging as the smaller wasps dived at him.

“I’m going to give you my code,” Loren said.

“Not now!” Cal cried. “I don’t have a pen.”

“You won’t need one. You’ll remember it,” Loren insisted.

“I really won’t,” said Cal. “Kind of preoccupied. Running for my life.”

The drone of the giant wasp was suddenly right behind him. He threw himself into a sideways stumble, narrowly avoiding a stinger the size of his leg.

“Got to go. I’ll call you back!” Cal said, then he weaved around something that looked like a garbage can, vaulted over a bench, and collided with what he reckoned was some sort of scooter.

Handles? Check. Seat? Check. Wheels? Not that he could see, but maybe that was the norm around these parts.

He jumped on, searched around for some sort of ignition button, then felt the scooter hum into life as his butt touched the seat. It shot forward several feet, throwing him backward so his legs looped over his head and he landed in a crumpled heap on the ground.

Springing up, he made it back to the scooter before the wasps could reach him. This time, he gripped the handlebars before sitting down, although the rifle stuck to his finger didn’t make this easy. He held on as the scooter sped forward, hovering just a few inches above the ground.

He hadn’t been expecting much from the thing, but it had an impressive turn of speed. The wasps fell back as he zoomed ahead, the engine purring quietly but confidently beneath him.

As he pulled away, Cal risked a few quick glances around. Wasps zipped above the buildings as far as the eye could see. Blaster fire raged in both directions along the single street. Children cried and screamed in the distance. Things were not, it was fair to say, going well.

The command tower stood just a few hundred feet ahead now, the scooter chewing up the distance with ease. He hoped there was someone there who could do the doodah with the thing, or whatever other technical mumbo-jumbo was required to clear the Untitled for entering the atmosphere. If he was left to do it himself, there was a high probability that he’d activate the self-destruct, or somehow plunge the whole moon into the sun. He had been fine with tech stuff back home, but space tech? That was a whole other story.

Cal expected something big, mean and stripy to come swooping at him any second, but as he trundled the final few feet to the command tower, a sense of renewed hope surged through him. He was going to make it. He was going to—

Wait. How did he stop? Where were the brakes?

A few seconds later, he discovered that simply standing up on the scooter cut power to the engine. Unfortunately, he discovered this when the scooter smashed into the command tower wall, launching him through the window in a cloud of metal and glass.

He lay on the polished white floor for a moment, groaning quietly and regretting pretty much everything, then he fought his way to his feet, pulled some of the larger glass shards out of his face and neck, and went stumbling onward toward a door that was helpfully marked with the words, ‘Command Center.’

The door slid open at his approach, revealing a dark room lit with a network of ominous red bulbs, like the kind a Satanist might decorate the tree with at Satan Christmas. If, indeed, there was such a thing. Cal didn’t have much experience with Satanists, unless you counted the run-in with Ozzy Osbourne.

The room was lined with banks of computer equipment. Most of the screens were tinted with red. At first, Cal thought it was from the little light bulbs, until he noticed how the red was running down the front of the screens and falling in rivulets to the floor.

“Fonk,” he whispered. He tried to get the blaster off again, but his finger was still jammed in there tight. He raised his voice a little and called falteringly into the darkness. “Hello? Anyone home?”

A groan. More of a sob, really. Somewhere in the gloom up ahead.

Cal approached cautiously, his feet splashing softly in puddles of blood. As he passed each terminal, he saw lifeless mounds lying broken beside them. A few of the corpses had their eyes open, wide and pleading, but with nothing going on behind them now.

The groaning sob came again from just beyond an egg-shaped pod. Glancing around to make sure the coast was clear, Cal ducked around it and saw a small figure crumpled on the floor, air wheezing through a hole in its side.

At first, he thought it was another child, but the drooping mustache and wrinkles soon set him straight. The man gawped up at him, mouth flapping as it tried desperately to control the air flowing in and out of it.

“Hey. Hey, it’s OK,” Cal soothed, kneeling beside the man. “What happened?”

The man’s eyes bulged. He coughed, spraying warm wetness into the air between them. The guy didn’t have long. Cal saw the name badge pinned to the chest of his uniform. As he studied the cryptic symbols, his visual translation chip went to work.

“Kollit. That’s your name?”

Kollit nodded, before a series of wrenching coughs made them swim in their sockets.

“Hate to do this, pal, but I need your help,” Cal told him. “I have to authorize a ship. You know? Stop the guns shooting at it? It’s our only chance of stopping these waspy fonks.”

Kollit rasped something unintelligible, then gestured to the egg-shaped pod behind Cal. From the other side, it had looked completely smooth, but there was a screen on this side, and a little glowing keyboard that hovered half an inch above the egg’s curved surface.

With a grunt, Kollit took hold of Cal’s arm and together they wrestled him up onto his knees. Cal watched and offered vague sounds of encouragement as Kollit jabbed unsteadily at the glowing keys. Lines of text flashed up on screen as Kollit navigated the menus.

Blood oozed from the wound in his side. Cal saw it pooling on the floor around the guy’s knees. Fonk. This could be tight.

“OK, Loren, give me that code,” Cal said.

When she didn’t answer, he reached for the communicator on his belt.

Gone.

“Oh, shizz,” he groaned. “No, no, no.”

Kollit looked at him quizzically. Cal gestured for him to continue, then the symbols on screen rearranged themselves to form two short words and a colon.

Enter Code:

“Ha. See, here’s the thing,” Cal said. “I, uh, I don’t have the code.”

Kollit’s face darkened. He blinked so slowly that Cal wasn’t sure his eyes were ever going to open again.

“Isn’t there, like, a generic code you can enter? Like, to shut down the guns so any ship can get in?”

Kollit exhaled slowly. His head dipped forward ponderously, then righted again. A nod.

“Great!” Cal said. “Then stick that in and we can try to do something about that huge fonking hole in your—”

A black-gloved hand reached around the side of the egg, caught Kollit by the hair, and wrenched him out of sight with one swift, sudden jerk. Cal caught just the briefest glimpse of his eyes, wide and imploring, and then they, like the rest of him, was gone.

From the other side of the egg, there came a sound like a balloon filled with paint falling onto an empty oil drum from a great height. It was a sort of thwadoong, with some light splashing at the end, and a bit of a gargle in the middle.

Cal knew then that Kollit was dead. Or, if he wasn’t, he probably wished he was.

“Come out, come out, whoever you are,” sang a voice from the other side of the egg. It had that same electric crackle as earlier, and Cal knew that not only was Kollit dead, but he was almost certainly next.

The screen still glowed before him, waiting for him to enter the code. Fonk. Why hadn’t he just listened to Loren when she was trying to tell him.

What could it be? Her birthday, maybe? He’d try that.

His finger hovered above the digits.

Fonk. He didn’t know her birthday. He had a guess.

June 2nd, Nineteen-eight-five. He punched Enter.

A new message flashed on the screen, the numbers still visible at the top.

Code Declined.

Damn.

“Show yourself,” boomed the voice. “Or face the wrath of Manacle!”

“Jesus. Who are you talking to, Flash Gordon?” Cal asked, hurriedly tapping out another code. Loren’s made-up birthday didn’t work. He tried his own. It was a longshot, but—

Code Declined.

Fonk.

There was no time to input another code. Manacle appeared around the side of the egg, stalking like some ancient predator sizing up its prey. Cal leaned against the egg’s side, hiding the controls. He could still just see the screen and the keypad from the corner of his eye, and subtly tried another string of random numbers.

Code Declined.

“You,” said Manacle, surprise coloring the edges of his crackling tones.

“Have we met?” Cal asked. He tapped another string of numbers. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Code Declined.

“You were on Moktar,” Manacle said. “The slave.”

“Wait. That was you?” said Cal. “Huh. Small galaxy. What are the chances?”

Manacle stepped closer. Cal pressed his shoulder against the side of the egg, hiding the control panel.

“You seem… familiar,” said Manacle.

“Well, it was only, like, a couple of hours ago,” Cal said. “So, yeah. Not a huge surprise.”

“From before then, I mean,” said Manacle. Cal felt Manacle scrutinizing him through his mask. It made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up and his insides tighten from his rectum to his throat. “Who are you?”

Cal mashed the keypad with his palm and stabbed around for the Enter button.

“Me? I’m no one,” he began, and then another possible road opened up in his mind. It was a road fraught with danger, and probable death. It was a road only an idiot would dare to walk.

He walked it, anyway.

“I’m Space Commander Cal Carver of the Earth Defense Initiative,” he said, straightening and making his voice do that stern thing it did whenever he told Kevin to quit hiding the toilet paper.

Manacle’s head tilted a fraction. “Yes. Yes, that’s it,” he said. His esses came out as zees, which seemed to cause him some concern. He slammed a fist into his chest a few times, then jerked his head violently to the left, as if trying to wrench it off.

He tapped a finger on the back of the opposite glove. Something inside his helmet went bleep, and a red light flashed once in the center of his forehead. Two jets of steam hissed out from vents in his back, blowing his cape around like Superman’s.

“Forgive me, Commander,” Manacle said, once all that was over. “My latest gene splice is still taking root.”

“Gene splice?” said Cal. He cleared his throat and deepened his voice. “I mean, right. Yes. What was it this time?”

“A wazzzp queen,” Manacle said. “Her ezzenzze now flowzz in mine.”

“Uh, OK. Good for you,” Cal said. “But you seem to be having some trouble there.”

Manacle had taken a step back, allowing Cal room to see the message on the screen.

Code Declined.

“It izzzz expected,” Manacle said. “My own genetic material will zzzzoon adjust to compenzzzate.”

“Right. Right,” said Cal. “And, uh, then what? What’s the plan here, Manacle?”

Manacle’s head jerked again. “You mean you were not informed?”

“Yes. Of course I was. I’m a Space Commander,” said Cal, trying to sound as incredulous as possible. “I just want to make sure that you understand the plan.”

He tapped a couple of digits, then backspaced. Guessing was doing him no good. He had to think this through. Loren had said he wouldn’t need to write it down. She was only too aware of his limited capacity for remembering things, which suggested it was probably short. But what could it be?

“My orders are to deploy the wasps here on Moosh. I am to kill students, teachers, and parents alike. Stealthily, so as not to raise the alarm. And then I am to leave their corpses for Zertex to discover. It will be a most fitting revenge.”

Cal nodded. “That all sounds correct,” he said. “Bonus question. Revenge for what?”

“For their attempted Bug attack, of course,” said Manacle. “Prezident ZSinclair was going to launch Bugs on Earth. An act of war.”

“Someone stopped him,” Cal pointed out. “He’s dead.”

“He is,” Manacle agreed. He seemed to be in full control of himself now, with only the vaguest hint of a buzz lingering when he spoke. “But Zertex cannot go unpunished. Killing their children is the most efficient way of ensuring they remember who is in charge.”

“Right. Right. Very good,” said Cal, although he was only half-listening. He was still thinking about the code. That fonking code. Something short. Something easy. Something…

Wait.

No.

No, it couldn’t be.

He tapped a button.

He hit Enter.

The message changed.

Code Accepted.

“You have got to be fonking kidding me,” Cal said, snorting.

“I’m sorry, Commander?” Manacle asked.

“Hmm? Oh. Nothing. It’s nothing,” said Cal, now unable to hold back his grin. “You were saying something about… I don’t know. What was it?”

“Why do you have a gun on your finger?” Manacle wondered.

Cal looked down as if only just noticing the weapon for the first time. “Hmm? Oh, this. Funny story. Some Zertex chick tried to shoot me. I jammed my finger in, thinking that would make the gun blow up or something if she pulled the trigger, then I found out that it wouldn’t work.”

“It would,” said Manacle.

“It would?”

“Of course. The combustion would have nowhere to go. The bolt would erupt in the barrel.”

“I knew it!” cried Cal. “That lying bedge.”

“Describe her,” said Manacle.

Cal frowned. “Huh? Like, five-six, gray hair. Kind of sour face. Why?”

Manacle tilted his head again. “The wasps see her. She is inside, surrounded by children. Would you like me to kill her first, or last, Commander?”

“Uh, well now,” said Cal. He tapped a finger against his chin. “First, or last? First… or… last? That is the question. Hmm. Which would you choose?”

“Last,” said Manacle, without hesitation. “Make her watch the children die first. Make her realize how helpless she is. Perhaps give her the means to end her own suffering, and make merry around her while she takes her own life.”

“Make merry?” asked Cal.

Manacle gave a vague wave of a hand. “Dancing. Frivolity. That sort of thing.”

“Well, it sounds like a hell of a party,” Cal said. He glanced up, just briefly, and smiled at the sound of a bumpy, erratic descent. “But I think I’ll pass.”

He moved to step past the figure in black. “I’m going to go and check on the… thing. I parked in a No Parking zone, and I don’t want to get towed. Still, nice catching up.”

A hand pressed against Cal’s chest, stopping him. Faintly, through Manacle’s visor, Cal saw a few lines of backward text scrolling upward.

“Space Commander Cal Carver died on the fields of Skronreth,” he said, his voice taking on a dry monotone. “Who are you?”

From outside, there came the sound of cannon-fire, followed closely by the sound of things exploding. Manacle kept his hand raised, but twisted his head all the way around, owl-style, until he was looking back at the door.

“What is this?” he demanded.

His head snapped back around so the mask was facing front. Cal saw himself reflected, and caught just a hint of the glowing control panel. Cal tried to step in front of it again, but was too late.

“What did you do?” Manacle hissed.

Cal started to say, “Now, don’t get mad, I can explain,” got as far as the “N—” and then was launched backward into a row of computer equipment with enough force to collapse the keyboards and shatter the screens.

By the time he’d pulled himself free of the wreckage and popped his hip back into place, Manacle was standing before the egg-shaped terminal, gazing intently at the text on the screen.

Code Accepted, it read. And, above that, a single digit.

It was like Garunk had said all along. Loren was the Academy’s Number One.

“Cavalry’s here, Manacle,” Cal said. He cupped a hand behind an ear and smiled as a series of cannon-blasts were followed by several pained insect squeals. “Reckon you might want to throw in the towel, give up the ghost, surrender the old… Fonk it. You get the idea.” He grinned. “You’ve lost. We’ve won. It’s all over but the—”

Manacle didn’t appear to move. Not in any conventional sense, at least. And yet, he was suddenly in front of Cal, his hand wrapped around Cal’s throat.

“This is unacceptable,” Manacle hissed. “Unacceptable!”

He twisted, tossing Cal behind him. For a few blissfully happy seconds, Cal experienced no pain. This changed quite drastically, however, when he met the opposite wall feetfirst, shattering bone and buckling metal in what felt like quite an unfair and uneven split.

“They’ve called Zertex,” Cal lied, as he slid to the floor. Or maybe it wasn’t a lie. Maybe they had. He had no clue. “Grown-up Zertex, I mean. Not kids. You should get out of here.”

Cal struggled up onto his knees, but the bottom parts of his legs were still too floppy to take his weight, so there he stayed. His eyes were hazy. His head ached. He was eighty percent sure he was having an aneurysm of some description.

Manacle approached. That was how Cal would later remember it. He didn’t walk. He didn’t stride. He approached. Inescapable, unavoidable, like an oncoming storm.

And, as he approached, something grew from his forearm, piercing his leather gauntlet and extending until it was almost two feet long.

A stinger. The fonker had a stinger.

Manacle paused to study the stinger with an air of amused fascination.

“This will do nicely,” he said, then he resumed his approach.

Cal tried to stand, but his feet bent outward and he flopped onto his knees again. His eyes went to the pointed tip of the stinger, and noted the determination with which Manacle drew it back as he closed the last few paces.

“Wait, wait, wait!” Cal protested, holding his hands up. “I have a joke!”

Manacle, to Cal’s surprise, hesitated. “What?” he hissed.

“A joke. You know? Like a funny story?”

“I know what a joke is,” Manacle said, drawing the stinger back further and readying to strike.

“Hold on, hold on!” Cal yelped. “Please. Just let me tell it. I made it up a few weeks ago, but couldn’t tell anyone because I knew they wouldn’t get it. It’s an Earth thing. You know? For Earth guys. Like us.”

Manacle said nothing.

“It’ll take, like, five seconds,” Cal said. “That’s all. I swear.”

Two jets of steam escaped from Manacle’s back. It sounded, Cal thought, a lot like a sigh.

“Fine. Tell your joke.”

“Seriously?” asked Cal, then he launched into it before Manacle changed his mind. “OK, OK. Here goes. Get ready.” He made a little drumroll noise with his mouth.

“Was that it?” asked Manacle. “I don’t get it.”

“No. That was just the build-up,” Cal said. “Here comes the joke now. OK. Earth joke. OK. So. What do depressed Muppets do?”

Manacle gazed impassively back at him.

“I don’t know,” he said, after what felt like an age. “What do depressed Muppets do?”

“Kermit suicide!” said Cal.

Silence.

“Like, Kermit the Frog? Kermit suicide.”

The sound took Cal by surprise when it emerged from beneath Manacle’s mask. At first, he thought it was some sort of banshee cry, signaling the coming of the villain’s death-strike. But, no. He was laughing. Manacle, Enslaver of Worlds, was laughing.

“Kermit suicide!” he said, through his guffaws. “Like the puppet frog.”

“Right?” said Cal, chuckling. “I told you you’d like it.”

“I do!” Manacle confirmed. “It’s good. I’ll use that. It’ll be good for breaking the ice with people. They always find me so… intimidating.”

“It’s yours,” said Cal. “Maybe, as a reward, you could let me go.”

Manacle’s laughter died in his throat. “No. No, I’m afraid not.”

He drew back the stinger. Cal winced. Shizz. So this was how it was going to be.

The joke had bought him the time he needed. He sprang up onto his mostly-mended legs and threw himself at Manacle. Colliding with the villain’s chest was like running at a brick wall, but at least it put him too close to skewer with the stinger. Manacle stood his ground. Cal’s breath fogged up his visor as he looked up at him.

“Well, hey there, Piggy,” Cal said, in his best Kermit the Frog voice. He winked at Manacle, then he jammed a thumb against the trigger of the blaster rifle that was wedged between them, and pulled.

Thirty

Cal Carver woke up flat on his back on a comfortable bed, with the smell of banoffee pie hanging in the air.

A figure sat at the end of the bed. Solid and bulky, but female. He could think of only one person.

“Mom?” he croaked through dry, split lips. “Is that you?”

“Whatever,” the shape responded. “Ugh. Finally. Now maybe I can get out of this room.”

Miz craned her neck in the direction of the door. “He’s alive,” she said. “I mean, like, mostly. I think.”

“Miz, is that you?”

Cal blinked and tried to sit up, but the room spun around him and his inner ear politely asked him what the fonk he thought he was doing.

He lay back down again, his head sinking into the comfiest pillow it had ever come across.

“Who else would it be?” Miz asked. “Who else gets all the lame jobs, like sitting here watching you for three days doing, like, nothing at all.”

“Three days?” said Cal. “I’ve been out for three days?”

“Yeah. You were, like, ew. A real mess,” Miz said. “By the way, I brought you one of those pies you like.”

Cal managed a smile. “I thought I smelled one of those.”

“But I ate it,” Miz said. “It sucked. What do you even see in those things?”

“Good to have you back in the land of the living, sir,” said Kevin.

“Thanks, Kevin,” Cal said. He closed his eyes for a moment, then flicked them wide. “Wait! What about Splurt? Where’s Splurt?”

The pillow rippled below him. He relaxed into its embrace, closing his eyes again.

Ah. Of course.

The door slid open, and Miz immediately jumped to her feet. “Finally. Can I go now?”

“Yeah, you can go,” Mech confirmed, ducking through the doorway. “Loren wants you to go watch for trouble.”

“Ugh,” Miz snapped. “Why do I have to do everything around here?”

Cal and Mech listened to her stomping off in the direction of the bridge.

“You made her sit here for three days?” Cal asked, not yet opening his eyes.

Mech snorted. “Since when could we make that girl do anything?” he asked. “She wouldn’t leave your side this whole time. Not even to go to the bathroom.”

“Aw, that’s so sweet,” said Cal.

“Yeah, well, I suggest you don’t look at the floor in the corner of the room,” Mech said. “Ain’t so sweet over there.”

“Oh,” said Cal. He smiled. “Such a loyal dog,” he added, but quietly, in case Miz heard him. He opened one eye, leaving the other one sleeping. “What happened?”

“I guess she just squatted by the bottom of the bed—”

“No, not that. To me. With the wasps. The Moosh thing. What happened there?”

“Oh. Gotcha. I was kind of hoping you could tell me,” said Mech. “We shot up a few of the wasps, then they all just went kinda dormant. Miz eventually found you outside what was left of the control tower.”

Cal frowned with one eyebrow. “Outside?”

Mech made a weighing motion. “And inside. And sort of scattered around the immediate area.”

“Jesus,” said Cal.

“We had to scoop most of your insides up in a bucket,” Mech continued. “We didn’t know what to do with it, so we just sort of poured it back into you and hoped for the best.”

Cal felt this was worth opening both eyes for. “That’s it? That was your solution?” Cal yelped. “Pour it back in and hope for the best?”

“Worked, didn’t it?” Mech shrugged.

Cal waved a hand. “Well, I mean… I guess,” he said, then he saw the hand properly. It was his right hand. The one the gun had been jammed onto it.

“Oh, great. I have a child-sized hand again,” Cal groaned.

“That ain’t the only child-sized thing you got,” said Mech, his metal jaw curving upward at the edges.

Cal frowned. “What? What are you…?”

“Unless it was always that size, of course. I wouldn’t know.”

Cal’s eyes went wide, forming two matching circles of surprise. “No! No.”

He lifted the sheet that covered him from the chest down. His voice came out as a low murmur of horror. “Oh, dear God,” he groaned. He stared for a while longer, his face a picture of grief. “Maybe I could convince Splurt to stand in.”

“Stand in for what?” asked Loren, appearing in the doorway. Cal immediately dropped the sheet and flashed her a grin so broad it almost split both cheeks.

“Loren! Haha! Where did you come from? Look at you! Long time no see! You look great. Doesn’t she look great, Mech? Haha. Yep. Everything’s great. Everything’s fine. Nothing to worry about. Right? Right.” He swallowed. “Right.”

Loren shot Mech a sideways look.

“Don’t ask,” said Mech. He waited until Loren had come in, then ducked back out through the door. “I’d better go relieve Miz. Can’t have her doing everything around here now, can we?”

“You’re, like, way too late,” Miz hollered from the bridge.

“By the way, Zertex is so grateful for us saving all their kids, they want to give us medals,” Mech said. “You believe that? Fonking medals from Vajazzle herself. Crazy.”

“Heh,” said Cal. “Vajazzle.”

Loren gave Mech a nod, then waited until he’d left before closing the door. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey, yourself,” Cal replied.

“Feeling OK?”

“Meh. I’m on the OK Scale,” Cal replied. “Like, a five, maybe.”

Loren smiled. “Better than a four, I guess.”

“Actually, it’s worse than a four,” Cal said. “My OK Scale counts down. I think it might be broken.”

“See, now you’re just making noises again,” said Loren. The bed creaked as she sat on the edge of it. Cal shimmied over a little to make more room. It sent shockwaves of pain through his whole body.

Loren looked down at him in concern. She felt along the bed until she found his hand. It was the tiny, mostly-deformed one, but to her eternal credit, she held onto it anyway.

“I thought we’d lost you.”

“Me? Nah!” said Cal. “It’ll take more than a massive explosion to the lower torso to get rid of me, Teela Loren.”

Loren laughed through her nose. “Yeah. I guess so.” She squeezed his hand, just a little. Her fingers felt soft and gentle, although that may have been his infant-hand talking.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Manacle was there,” Cal said. “I convinced him I was me.”

One of Loren’s impressively dark eyebrows rose.

“The other me, I mean. Evil me.”

“Oh. And he bought it?”

Cal nodded. “Yeah. I mean, it’s true, I suppose. I’m him, he’s me. We’re the same person.”

Loren shook her head. “No. You aren’t. From what I’ve heard, you’re nothing like him.”

“Yeah. Maybe,” Cal said, although he sounded unconvinced. He propped himself up in bed a little. His pillow adjusted itself to compensate. “He didn’t buy it for long, though. Figured it out before I could get out of there. Slapped me around a little. Threw me through a selection of solid objects, then tried to impale me on a wasp stinger he grew from his arm.”

“He grew a wasp stinger?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Cal. “He’s got all kinds of tricks.”

“How did you stop him?” Loren asked.

“I told him a joke,” said Cal.

Loren blinked. “You told him a joke?”

“Yeah.”

Loren continued blinking for a little while longer. “A joke?”

“I was stalling for time,” Cal said. “So I could blow us both up.”

Loren nodded vaguely, but it was clear she was still stuck on the joke thing. “What was it?” she asked. “What was the joke?”

Cal shook his head. “You won’t get it.”

“Try me,” Loren said.

Cal told her the joke.

“You’re right,” she said, after some consideration. “I don’t get it.”

“He laughed,” Cal said. “And then, like I said, kablammo.”

Loren looked down at Cal’s tiny hand and kneaded it gently. “Well, I guess you got him,” she said. “He wasn’t there when Miz found you.”

Cal shook his head. “Yeah. Something tells me that’s not the last we’ve seen of that guy.”

He exhaled slowly. “I really fonked things up, didn’t I? This mess is all my fault.”

“Our fault,” Loren corrected. “Whatever we did, we did it together. And we’ll deal with it together.”

Cal smiled up at her. It wasn’t one of his well-rehearsed ones, but it was honest. Painfully, brutally honest. “I’m going to hold you to that,” he said.

And then, before he could say anything else, she leaned over, and her lips were on his. Warm. Smooth. Tasting faintly of banoffee pie.

Jesus, had they all been eating it?

She pulled away as quickly as she’d leaned in, brushed a strand of hair back over her ear, then jumped to her feet as if the bed was suddenly made of lava.

“Sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“No. I mean, yes. I mean, no, don’t be sorry!” Cal said.

“I just, I thought I’d lost you—we’d lost you, and… I didn’t…” She glanced up to the ceiling, composed herself, then looked back at Cal. “I’m not great at this sort of thing,” she said. “So, I’m going to go. For now. Just for now.”

“So, you’re coming back?”

Loren tapped the button that opened the door. She stood there in the doorway for a moment, her back to him, then she glanced back over her shoulder and smiled.

“We’ll see.”

And with that, she was gone.

The door closed. Cal sighed in the suddenly empty room.

“Damn my child-sized penis.”

Kevin erupted in gales of laughter.

“Jesus, Kevin. Do you mind?” Cal demanded, suddenly remembering the ever-present AI. “You couldn’t have given us a little privacy?”

“Sorry, sir, it’s just… Kermit suicide!” Kevin guffawed. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t understand it at first, so I cross-referenced all the words of the joke with various Earth databases, and now it makes perfect sense. Kermit suicide. It really is very clever.”

Cal wriggled down in the bed, and his pillow oozed into place beneath him. It was soft, yet firm, comfortable, yet supportive. The perfect pillow.

“Thanks, buddy,” he said, and the pillow undulated briefly beneath his head.

Cal closed his eyes and exhaled slowly. He’d messed up the whole galaxy and handed the reins of power to Lady Vajazzle.

He’d turned a happy-go-lucky kid into a dead genocidal monster, and almost certainly got on the bad side of a living genocidal monster by trying to blow him to pieces.

More importantly, he had a penis the size of a pinkie nail.

And yet, as he lay there on his bed, in his room, with his best friend cradling his neck, and the galaxy swooshing by outside, Cal Carver suspected—no, not suspected, he knew, more than anything—that everything was going to work out just fine.

Unfortunately, on this occasion, he was wrong.

THE END

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Also by Barry J. Hutchison

SPACE TEAM SERIES

Space Team

Space Team: The Wrath of Vajazzle

Space Team: The Search for Splurt

Space Team: Song of the Space Siren

Space Team: The Guns of Nana Joan

Space Team: Return of the Dead Guy

Space Team: Planet of the Japes

Space Team: The Time Titan of Tomorrow

Space Team: The King of Space Must Die

Space Team: A Lot of Weird Space Shizz

DAN DEADMAN SERIES

“Dial D for Deadman”

“Dead Inside”

“Dead in the Water”

SIDEKICKS SERIES

The Sidekicks Initiative

EVERYTHING ELSE

The Bug