Sentienced to Death
Date: 2018-12-03 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Humour; Fantasy
Description: Accidental space adventurer Cal Carver has had a rough few months. He's fought spider-dragons, battled space clowns, and been repeatedly tortured by the galaxy's oldest assassin. And don't even get him started on the squirrel-tits. Now all that's behind him, Cal just wants to kick back and relax. The universe, however, has other ideas. He and his crew find themselves in possession of the Symmorium Sentience, a once god-like entity now stripped of its power. The Sentience needs help to return home and restore the Symmorium species, which recently found itself the subject of an unfortunate genoc
Publisher: Zertex Books

Space Team: Sentienced to Death

Barry J Hutchison

For Neil Dennison

1977-2018

“He’s really not dead, as long as we remember him.”

-Dr. Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy

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

Thanks to Hannah Elizabeth for editing.

Cover design by Andrew Dobell, Creative Edge Studios

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

Epilogue

A Note from the Author

Also by Barry J Hutchison

One

The last few months hadn’t been easy for Cal Carver. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say they had been bordering on difficult.

This tricky period had started with him being sent to prison, and ended with him being blown to bits and having his guts poured back into him by a robot with a bucket. In between, he’d been tortured, shot, repeatedly stung in the face by mutant wasps, and had almost choked to death on a squirrel’s tits.

Add in all the running, violent travel sickness, the giant spider-dragon, and a liberal sprinkling of semi-naked cannibals, and Cal felt comfortable describing the last dozen or so weeks as ‘trying’.

And that didn’t even include the time travel, dimension-hopping, or that time he spent fifty years trapped in a single second on a cruise ship surrounded by monsters.

Fonking Smashdown Day .

Still, challenging as all that had been, it was nothing compared to the situation he found himself in now. Give him the spider-dragon, any day.

Not so much the squirrel’s tits.

“So…” said Loren, the candlelight flickering across her pale blue skin. She left the word hanging in the air, not quite a question but something close to one.

Cal smiled across the compact table. He had selected one of his most suave and charming smiles, but for some reason, it came across as a little boggle-eyed and manic. He could feel it, too. He knew it wasn’t right, and yet he couldn’t for the life of him work out which parts were wrong.

His hands were sweaty. He started to rub them on his thighs to dry them off, and it wasn’t until Loren’s eyes flicked down that he realized quite how vigorous the rubbing motion was.

He stopped, looked briefly frightened, then clasped both hands on the table in front of him between the slim metal implements he was going to go ahead and assume were a type of space cutlery he’d never encountered before.

“It’s hot in here,” he said, by way of explanation for the thigh thing. He said it quite loudly to compensate for the background noise of the restaurant, but the other diners had elected unanimously to fall into a conversational lull at that very moment, meaning ‘quite loudly’ became ‘too loudly,’ and he essentially shouted the words into Loren’s startled face.

Her brow furrowed a fraction and she bit one side of her bottom lip.

Fonk, she was beautiful. This was not news, exactly—he’d known it since the first time he’d clapped eyes on her—and yet the realization hit him like a sucker-punch from Mech. Considering that Mech was an enormous angry cyborg built almost exclusively for punching things, this was really saying something.

“Are you OK?” she asked. “You seem kind of… weird.”

“How weird !” said Cal, then he visibly flinched. He had meant it as a question, but it had come out as an exclamation. It had also come out sounding a little bit camp, now that he replayed it in his head, and the words were supposed to be in completely the opposite order.

Fonk.

This was all her fault. She’d kissed him. That was what had done it.

Before the kiss, everything had been fine. He’d been able to talk to her without any problem. He’d been able to look at her without thinking about her lips on his, been able to touch her without imagining some fantasy far-off future together where they owned a space ice-cream parlor, and pretended to grudge the freebies they handed out to their space grandchildren, Mikey, Mouth, Data, Chunk, and good old cousin Sloth.

Yes, it was quite a specific fantasy.

And yes, he’d make sure their grandchildren were named after the principal characters in The Goonies, even if it was the last thing he ever did.

She raised her dark eyebrows. Cal’s stomach twisted in anxious knots. Yes, the spluttering, stuttering buffoon he had become was definitely all her fault.

He pulled himself together and tried the response again.

“Weird how?”

That was better. With any luck, she wouldn’t even notice.

He smiled.

At least, he hoped that was what he was doing. It was becoming hard to tell.

He realized he was rubbing his hands on his thighs again, let out a little, “Blurm!” sound in surprise, and returned them to the tabletop with enough of a thump to rattle the empty wine glasses.

Loren reached over, crossing the divide between them. Her hand felt simultaneously warm and cool when she placed it on his. He wasn’t sure how that was even possible, but he went with it.

“Should we not do this?” she asked. “Was this a bad idea?”

“No!” Cal ejected. He yanked his hands away, accidentally elbowed the head of a little green man at the table behind him, then spent several seconds offering his sincere apologies.

When he turned back, Loren continued to lean forward, her hand still on the table but just starting to withdraw. Cal pounced on it like a tiger on a luckless gazelle, pinning it to the tabletop.

“Wait!”

Loren eyed him warily. It was the sort of look you gave someone during the early stages of a nervous breakdown. It was a look that said, ‘I should probably get them help,’ while simultaneously acknowledging that to do so would involve quite a lot of work and general upheaval, and maybe all they needed was a strong cup of coffee and a nice sit-down.

Cal relaxed his grip so that he was holding Loren’s hand, as opposed to smushing it firmly into the wood of the table. She looked back at him, eyes wide and worried, head cocked just a fraction to one side.

Fonk. She was beautiful.

“Cal, what’s wrong?” she asked him.

Cal took a deep breath. He’d had the whole speech worked out. He’d gone over it twice—once in front of the mirror, and once in front of Splurt. He’d killed it both times, and that was despite the ongoing commentary from Kevin, the ship’s AI, and the fact that Splurt had inexplicably taken it upon himself to turn into a child’s shoe somewhere near the middle part.

He took another deep breath, because the first one hadn’t really helped. She gave his hand a squeeze. He could do this. He could do it.

“Well,” he began.

“Drinks?”

Cal blinked. Something orange and multi-limbed stood by the table, all six hands clasped lightly in front of a spotless white apron. He—Cal was confident it was a he—smiled expectantly at them both in turn, two little gills opening and closing on the sides of his neck.

The question had been simple enough, but it had caught Cal off-guard, and he had no idea what the man was asking.

“Huh?” he said.

“Drinks,” the waiter repeated. “Would-you like-a something to-a drink?”

His voice had an odd sing-song quality to it, with the words all huddling together in little groups, and an accent that immediately made Cal think of the chef from The Muppets .

Drinks. Yes. He very much did want something to drink. Sure, the interruption hadn’t come at the best possible time, but a couple of shots of alcohol would help him relax.

“Uh, yeah,” he said. “Do you have, like, a beer?”

“A bear?” asked the waiter, his smile faltering just a fraction.

“What? No,” said Cal. “Beer.”

“Bear.”

Cal glanced across to Loren. She was studying the weirdly transparent menu that Cal felt was trying a bit too hard to be ‘spacey,’ and so offered him no help.

“No, not bear. Beer. B-E-E.”

“Bees?” said the waiter, his smile falling even further. “You-wish to drink-a bees?”

“No. Not bees . Why the fonk would…?” Cal sighed. “R . B-E-E-R . You know, like…”

He mimed sipping from a large glass.

“Drinks. Yes. Would-you like-a something to-a drink?” asked the waiter. He was back on more comfortable territory now, and his smile returned to its former glory.

“We’ll take a bottle of the Acclusian Noribenger,” said Loren, raising her eyes from the menu.

The waiter nodded his approval. “An-a excellent-choice,” he said. Two of his hands produced a notebook and pencil and scribbled briefly. “Large or-small?”

Loren glanced across the table to Cal. “Better make it the large.”

The pencil scribbled.

“Red or green?”

“Cal?”

Cal stared back at her like a rabbit caught in headlights. “Hmm?”

“Red or green?”

Cal knew what those words meant, of course. He just couldn’t quite fathom out what was being asked of him, or what they meant in this particular context. He decided to play it safe and just pick one, assuming there was no wrong answer.

He opened his mouth. No words came out.

Fonk. He couldn’t pick. Red or green? Red or green what ? What did ‘Acclusian Noribenger’ mean? What did anything mean?

Loren and the waiter both watched him, expectantly. Fonk it. He was going bold.

“Can we get a mixture of the two?” he asked.

Loren and the waiter exchanged slightly troubled glances.

“Well, that-would be-a brown , sir,” said the waiter. “Also, it-would get us-a shut down by-the authorities.”

Cal winced, feeling stupid. “Oh.”

“And-the vapors would-a kill everybody in-the room,” the waiter finished.

“Fonk. OK. Let’s not go for the brown,” said Cal.

This was stupid. He could choose. There were only two options. How hard could it be? He made a decision.

Then he changed his mind mid-way through saying it.

“Gred.”

Fonk.

“We’ll take the green,” said Loren, saving him from further embarrassment.

Cal clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth and nodded knowledgeably. “Yes. Excellent choice. Green. Perfect.”

The pencil scribbled on the pad again. The waiter gave a nod. “I will-go and a-get that for-you.”

He glided off. Cal glanced around the restaurant for a moment, not yet able to meet Loren’s eye. The place was decently sized, but completely packed, with tables all crammed closely together. The flickering candlelight lent it a romantic atmosphere, aided enormously by the vista of stars and moons visible through the space station’s huge porthole windows.

At last, Cal looked at Loren. She was smiling quizzically at him. He sucked in his third deep breath of the hour, and launched into it.

“So—”

“Foaming or-a putrid?”

Cal looked up into the smiling face of the waiter.

“What?”

“I forgot-to ask. The Acclusian Noribenger. Foaming or-a putrid?”

Cal pulled a face. “Putrid ?”

The waiter looked a little taken aback. Perhaps even slightly impressed. The pencil scribbled briefly. “As-you wish, sir.”

“Wait, no! That wasn’t my choice,” said Cal. “I don’t want putrid.”

“You don’t?”

“No! Of course I don’t.”

“But-you said ‘putrid.’”

“Well yes, I said ‘putrid,’ but I meant it like, ‘Holy shizz, putrid ?!’ You know? Not like, ‘I think we’ll have the putrid.’ Obviously, we’re not having the putrid.”

He glanced across the table to Loren. “We’re not having the putrid, are we?”

Loren shook her head. Cal exhaled.

“Thank fonk for that.” He looked back at the waiter. “We’ll have the foamy.”

“Foaming ,” the waiter corrected.

“Now you’re just splitting hairs,” Cal replied. He gestured to the notepad. “Just do me a favor and scribble the thing in the thing, then fonk off. Thank you.”

The pencil drew a couple of firm lines in the book, then added a note. “Very-good,” said the waiter through slightly gritted teeth. He nodded as he retreated.

Cal steeled himself. He scraped together a smile that he hoped didn’t look all the way demented and aimed it in Loren’s direction.

“Anyway—”

“By the-way, my name is-a Hubert,” said the waiter. “And I-will be-a serving you this-evening.”

Cal sighed. “Jesus, Hubert, do you mind? We’re trying to have a conversation here.”

Hubert’s face betrayed no emotion, but his gills jammed all the way open for several awkward seconds.

At last, he bowed and backed away, steering himself backward through the maze of narrow tables with the effortlessness of someone who has done it too many times before.

Cal started to draw in another deep breath, decided he was on the brink of coming across as some sort of heavy-breathing sex pest, and stopped. He was just going to say it. He was just going to speak aloud the words that were in his head. He’d probably play down the bit about the space grandkids and cousin Sloth, but the rest of it he would just tell her. He’d say it aloud, they’d fall into one another’s arms, and they’d live happily ever after. Easy.

In fact, he’d been planning on building up to the big finale, but he was going to go ahead and lead with it. That’d make up for the past few minutes of humiliation and bumbling indecision. He was just going to hit her with those three little words.

His chair creaked faintly as he leaned forward.

Fonk! Yes! This was it! He was doing it. This was happening. He took a deep breath, to hell with the consequences.

“Loren, I lov—"

“I’m shouldn’t have kissed you,” Loren told him.

Cal snapped his teeth on the rest of his sentence before it could escape. He swallowed a couple of times before speaking. “Hm?” he said.

Shizz. That came out far too high. And through his nose. He switched to damage limitation mode.

“I mean, yeah. That’s what I was going to say,” he lied, his voice becoming so low it resonated inside the glasses on the table as a droning hum.

“You were?” Loren asked.

“God, yes,” said Cal, settling his voice to a pitch that wasn’t quite his usual one, but would have to do for now. “That’s exactly what I was going to say.”

“It was?” asked Loren. “Why?”

“Why?” Cal snorted. “Why !”

Why ? Shizz. He had no idea why. The truth was, he fundamentally disagreed on every level with what Loren was saying. She one-hundred percent should have kissed him. Hell, he should’ve kissed her months ago. It was right. It was perfect.

“It just felt wrong,” Cal said.

No, no, no, no! What was he saying? This wasn’t the plan.

Loren seemed to shrink, just a fraction. “It did?” she said, then she straightened. “I mean, yes. It did. Just wrong.”

“So wrong,” Cal agreed.

He tapped his finger on the tabletop a few times. “So very wrong.”

Loren nodded in that efficient way of hers. It was a military nod, Cal thought—a curt snapping forward of the head that signified that she concurred. It was a nod that wasted nothing.

Fonk. She was beautiful.

“You and me… like that…” she said, waving vaguely with one perfect hand. “It would just be…”

“Weird,” Cal said, his own head bobbing inefficiently in agreement. “I mean, weird can be good, but… No.” He shuddered in revulsion. “Eugh.”

Eugh ?! Why the fonk had he said eugh ?! He didn’t mean eugh . He meant the opposite of eugh . And as for the shudder of disgust…

“Exactly,” Loren agreed. “Plus, you know, Miz might be upset.”

“Right. Right,” said Cal. He was still nodding, he realized, but he couldn’t quite work out how to stop. “I mean, I’m sure she’d be fine with it, I’m pretty sure she doesn’t like me in that way anymore, but… Yeah. Exactly. Poor Miz.”

“We couldn’t do that to her,” said Loren.

“It’d just be cruel,” said Cal. “If she cared. Which I don’t think she does. But if she did… It’d just be cruel.”

Silence fell in the gulf between them. Elsewhere, diners chatted and laughed, glasses clinked, cutlery clacked, and some sultry space jazz filled in all the remaining gaps.

Cal knew he should say something, but no matter how desperately he grasped for a conversation starter, he came back empty. This was unusual for him. He’d always considered his ability to just talk as one of his core skills. No matter the company, no matter the situation, he’d always been able to find something to say.

Granted, much of it was nonsense, and the actual words that came out of his mouth often resulted in him being beaten or chased, but it had always been one of his defining qualities.

Now, though, words deserted him.

That, however, was all about to change.

“Jesus!” he gasped, recoiling. “What the fonk is that smell?”

Loren sniffed. “What smell?”

“That smell!” Cal yelped, covering his mouth and nose with one hand. “Can’t you smell that?”

The look on Loren’s face told him that yes, she could, while also telling him that he should shut the fonk up right now. Unfortunately, he failed to pick up on that second part.

“It smells like Irritable Bowel Syndrome just shizzed out a sewer system,” Cal continued. He gagged into his hand a few times, before swallowing something down. “I mean… Christ. It’s like a skunk had a rectal prolapse then died.”

Loren’s eyes flicked very deliberately to something behind Cal. Something quite large, judging by her gaze’s upward trajectory. Cal’s own eyes were watering so badly, though, that he didn’t pick up on it.

“It’s like Detroit farted and followed through,” he continued.

“Cal,” said Loren.

“It’s like someone tried to put out a dumpster fire with cat vomit.”

Loren tried again, more firmly this time. “Cal.”

Cal gagged again, blinked away his tears, and finally met Loren’s gaze. It took him a moment, but then he understood the significance of the way her eyes kept flicking up somewhere above his head.

Waaaaaay above his head.

“And yet,” he said, wafting a hand in front of his face and pretending to inhale. “It is not without a certain robust charm.”

A hand was placed on his shoulder. It was a big hand, and so heavy that it almost toppled him out of his chair. The smell that emanated from the bristly black fur assaulted him, easily violating the nostrils he had been attempting to clench tightly shut.

It was fish heads in the sun. Month-old garbage. The hotdog he’d eaten in Mumbai which, upon closer inspection some twenty minutes later, turned out not to have been a hot dog at all, except perhaps in the most literal sense.

“You say something?” grunted a voice from up high.

“It’s fine,” said Loren. “He didn’t mean anything by it.”

“I’ll decide if it’s fine,” the voice retorted. The weight on Cal’s shoulder increased as the unseen person leaned down until his face was close to Cal’s ear. “And it ain’t fine.”

Cal retched. He tried to do it as subtly and as quietly as possible, but successfully achieved neither of these objectives.

“Cal, this is a Narlup,” Loren explained, not taking her eyes off the thing behind him. “Their odors are of great personal importance to them. They take pride in their… scent.”

“Right. Right. It’s just… It’s so musky ,” Cal coughed. “It took me by surprise, that’s all.”

Steeling himself, he turned to face the foul-smelling creature. The voice was male, but the face was decidedly ambiguous. It was flat and wide, with leathery patches on the cheeks and chin, eyes that slanted up at forty-five degree angles, and a nose so small and insignificant that it needn’t really have bothered showing up.

The rest of the head was a blend of short black and gray fur, with a couple of fleshy ears flopping outward like overripe bananas at the sides, all sickly-yellow and patches of brown.

And it was big, as heads went. Bigger than Mech’s, Cal calculated, and that guy had a sizeable fonking head.

Cal’s initial reaction was to punch the face as hard as he could and then run away screaming, but he forced himself to remain seated and rustled up an expression that he hoped came across as suitably friendly.

“Look, how about I buy you a drink as way of an apology?” he suggested. “I hear this place does a great putrid…” He snapped his fingers a few times. “Loren?”

“Acclusian Noribenger.”

“That. Yes. Thank you,” said Cal. “We could buy you one of those, put all this unpleasantness behind us, and go about our business happier, wiser, and—I’m going to go right ahead and say what we’re all thinking—better people than we were before. What do you say?”

The Narlup said nothing. Instead, a dozen or so little holes opened like tiny anuses in his fur. A smell hit Cal like a bomb-blast to the olfactory centers of his brain. He didn’t so much recoil as physically shrink, every part of him tightening and constricting as his lungs and airways went into lock-down, and the rest of his body joined in to show its moral support.

The smell wasn’t just bad, it was somehow insulting . It was an affront to all other smells that Cal had ever smelled. Even Paris.

OK, maybe not Paris, but every other smell.

Cal tried to wheeze an, “Oh well, another time, maybe,” but his mouth remained firmly shut and his breathing apparatus was still firmly opting out. Despite this, the smell was still finding its way through. He could feel it filling him up, permeating all his permeable parts, and almost certainly riddling him with cancer.

“Let him go. Now.”

Cal looked across at the blurry shape that he guessed was Loren. It was hard to make her out properly, thanks to the way his eyes were watering. He was also fairly certain that the left eye was in the process of melting, which wasn’t exactly helping matters.

He tried to tell Loren that he was fine, and that he was more than capable of standing up for himself, but only made it as far as, “I’m f—” before projectile vomiting into the Narlup’s face.

Cal gurgled, coughed, and gasped all at the same time. He covered his mouth with a hand. “Oh, God! I am so sorr—” he began, before another eruption of barf blasted through the gaps between his fingers, applying a glossy topcoat to the already well-covered face of the Narlup.

The Narlup blinked several times, each time more slowly than the one before. Vomit clagged in his fur and dribbled down his chin.

Cal took a moment to compose himself and make sure he wasn’t going to throw-up a third time, then quietly cleared his throat.

“So,” he said. His voice was a whisper, but silence had fallen across the restaurant now, and it seemed to echo around the room. “What happens now?”

“Now?” said the Narlup.

His grip tightened on Cal’s shoulder. There was a moment of pain, a sensation of weightlessness, and then there was a table. It was not his and Loren’s table, but another table that was much larger and farther away.

He hit it with quite considerable force, smiled apologetically as he skidded through several delicious-looking dinners, then his face got acquainted with the lap of an elderly woman who winked salaciously at him when he looked up.

The Narlup’s voice boomed in the hush that followed.

“Now, I kill you.”

Two

Cal wasn’t a fan of fighting. Which was ironic, really, considering how often he found himself involved in one.

It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy being punched in the face. He didn’t, obviously, but that wasn’t the main reason for his dislike of violence. Similarly, while he wasn’t the world’s biggest fan of being kicked in the nuts, elbowed in the kidneys, or thrown ass-first through a wall, none of these were the main issue he had with violence.

The main reason he wasn’t a fan of fighting was that he didn’t actually like hitting people. Yes, he accepted that it was often a necessary evil, and that some people occasionally needed to find themselves on the receiving end of a solid punch to the face, but enjoy it? No.

He especially didn’t enjoy hitting people who smelled like a corpse’s diarrhea and were dripping vomit all over the floor. He’d go so far as to say he actively disliked that, in fact.

And yet, here they were.

The Narlup was, to Cal’s relief, not quite as solid as he looked. Punching him still felt like driving a fist into a bag of cement, granted, but it wasn’t the brick wall Cal had been bracing himself for. In fact, the Narlup’s torso was soft and pliable enough that Cal decided he might even punch him again, just as soon as the bones in his hands had knitted back together and he’d stopped crying.

Before either of these things could happen, the Narlup hit him back. The force of it flipped Cal two-thirds of the way through what would’ve been a textbook backflip, before the top of his skull found the edge of a table and the whole maneuver just sort of folded to an untidy end.

As he lay there, Cal reconsidered the reasons he didn’t enjoy fighting, and moved the ‘getting hit’ part up into the number one position. He also inserted it into positions two through nine, with the ‘hitting people back’ bit just hanging on in there and rounding out the top ten.

His head hurt. His back hurt. His fist hurt. The room swam in giddy circles around him, and he wasn’t entirely convinced that he still had a face. Not a functioning one, at least. Not one that wouldn’t make women scream and small boys gawp in mute, horrified wonder, at any rate.

Fortunately, he healed quickly.

Unfortunately, not quickly enough.

The Narlup’s grip tightened around his ankle. Cal screamed as he cartwheeled through the air like the throwing star of some giant ninja. He briefly locked eyes with Loren as he passed her, upside-down, then whanged against one of the ornate marble columns that stood spaced out around the restaurant.

The restaurant itself was pretty much empty now, most sensible people having made a break for it when the fighting kicked off.

The even more sensible ones had taken a moment to grab their dinner plates and whatever alcohol they could carry before fleeing the scene, safe in the knowledge that no one could possibly blame them for getting out of there without paying, given all the violence and wanton destruction that had been going on around them at the time.

Only a few stragglers remained. They lurked near the exits, watching the battle with a growing sense of fascination. Both combatants had things going for them. The Narlup was bigger, faster, and much stronger, but the human had a real talent for taking a punch. He could also scream in a surprisingly high register, and the sheer range of facial expressions he was demonstrating were, they all agreed, a genuine joy to behold.

No one was saying they were evenly balanced, of course, just that they both had their strengths.

Cal slid down the column, leaving a slug-trail of blood, snot, and tears on its otherwise pristine white stone. He sat down heavily on the floor, flopped backward, and spent a few seconds admiring some impressive ceiling cornicing before a foot stamped into his stomach, folding him up at the middle and ejecting the last remnants of air out of him at both ends.

WHUMF .

It was one indignity too far. His lungs declared themselves out. They’d had enough. He tried to stand, but his spine was refusing to carry the message to his legs, and it was all he could do to twitch.

His eyes were working, although he dearly wished that they weren’t, as they only served to afford him a clear, uninterrupted view of the Narlup’s foot raising again.

“Aw, Jesus,” he managed to mutter, then the Narlup hissed as Loren fired a kick into the knee of his supporting leg, and he was sent stumbling through a table.

“Stand down!” she warned, positioning herself between Cal and the Narlup. Her hands weren’t raised, but instead hung loosely by her sides. Cal knew this meant nothing. Unlike him, Loren enjoyed fighting. Probably because she was so damned good at it.

“Out of my way, you malodorous pair of teats,” the Narlup spat.

Loren’s eyebrows raised. “I’m sorry?”

Cal wheezed out a half-chuckle. “Teats,” he said.

The Narlup scowled. His face anuses—or fanuses , as Cal was choosing to call them, albeit only inside his head—opened and closed, parping out a chorus of toxic guffs.

Loren coughed once, but held her ground. Cal was impressed. He was farther away than she was, and it was all he could do not to cave in his own nose in a desperate attempt at self-preservation.

“You heard me, teats ,” the Narlup said.

Loren’s arms no longer looked quite as relaxed as they had a moment ago. That was the first thing Cal noticed. The next thing he noticed was the leaping spinning kick, and the way the heel of Loren’s boot so firmly introduced itself to the side of the Narlup’s head.

After that, Cal mostly noticed the way the creature’s eye swelled up, and the expression of shocked outrage written all over its vomit-stained face.

Loren wasn’t really one for overt celebration, so she settled for a firm nod of triumph. “Now who’s a pair of—” she started to say, then a scything backhand from the Narlup caught her off guard. It lifted her off her feet, whistled her through the air, then wrapped her around another of the marble columns.

OK.

OK, that did it.

Groaning, Cal heaved himself into a standing position. This took quite a lot of effort, and he was forced to lean against the column for a few moments while he got his breath back. The Narlup, to his credit, waited.

“Thanks,” Cal said, once he had finally summoned both the strength and the oxygen to speak. “Listen, pal, no one hits my…”

He jabbed a thumb in Loren’s direction as she flipped up onto her feet.

“…friend. Or, you know, whatever.”

Bending, Cal retrieved his jacket from where it lay on the floor. He had refused the restaurant’s offer to hang it up for him and had insisted on keeping it close at hand. Now, everyone would find out why.

He smiled as he bunched the brown leather into a ball. “You asked for this, you big smelly fonk,” he said, then he tossed the jacket in the Narlup’s direction. “Go get him, Splurt!”

The jacket hit the Narlup, bounced off, and landed in a heap on the floor. Cal eyed it eagerly. “Get him, buddy. Show this fonk who’s boss.”

The Narlup looked down at the jacket. He was about to step over it when Cal raised a hand. “Wait. Hold on,” Cal told him. He squinted down at the jacket, then prodded it with his foot. “Splurt? Is that you?”

The jacket offered nothing in response.

“Ah, shizz,” Cal groaned. He looked down at himself, then raised a foot and hopped on the spot as he undid the laces of his right boot. “Maybe he’s one of these.”

“You told him not to come,” Loren pointed out, hobbling up to stand at Cal’s side.

“I know I told him not to come, I always tell him not to come, but he comes anyway,” said Cal. “That’s, like, his thing. You say, ‘Please don’t come, Splurt,’ and he just ignores you and comes, regardless. If there’s one thing I can count on is for Splurt to come places I don’t want him to come. He just comes everywhere.”

“Children present,” called an indignant voice from over by the door.

Cal replayed his last few sentences in his head, then wheeled around to face the woman who had spoken. “Jesus, I didn’t mean it like that ,” he said. He gestured to the two young children standing wide-eyed beside her. “And why are you even letting your kids watch this, anyway? Are you trying to desensitize them to violence or something? Because, if so—”

The Narlup punched him so hard on the back of the head he had to shut his eyes to prevent them from popping out. Because he had his eyes closed, the floor took him by surprise when he pendulumed onto it, his feet remaining mostly fixed to the spot while the rest of him swung around them like a hinge.

Anger flooded through him. This had gone far enough.

Rolling onto his back, Cal attempted one of Loren’s martial arts-style ‘kip up’ moves. He’d always admired the way she could flip to a standing position from flat on her back, and reckoned he’d seen her do it enough times to have a pretty good idea how it was done.

He kicked his legs, made a, “Hrwaoaw!” noise he felt was positively Bruce Lee-esque, and managed to raise his shoulders a full three inches off the floor before thudding back onto it. Seen from above, he resembled a fish on the deck of a boat, frantically flailing and flopping around as it tried to figure out what the fonk just happened to the world, and why its eyeballs were drying out.

“Fonk, that’s harder than it looks,” Cal muttered.

The Narlup stood over him, watching in amusement. His arms were crossed across his broad chest, which Cal was pleased about. If his arms were crossed it meant he wasn’t using them to pummel Cal’s face into the floor.

Right now, he had to take the positives where he could find them.

“Looks like we’re pretty evenly matched, friend,” Cal ventured.

“No, it doesn’t,” the Narlup replied.

Cal nodded. “No. It doesn’t. Fine. You win. How about we call a truce?”

The Narlup raised an eyebrow, although you had to look very closely to see it, since most of him was basically eyebrow. He pursed his lips and sucked in air, then a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

“Fine,” he said, unfolding his arms and reaching out a hand. “You can buy me that drink.”

“And you can call me an ambulance,” Cal said, returning the smile.

It was at this point that the edge of a flying metal drink tray whanged across the Narlup’s stubby nose, shattering the bone and ejecting a fountain of blood onto the floor. He staggered back, both huge hands covering his face, an involuntary wail of pain bursting from his lips.

Cal sighed. “Ah… fonk.”

He sat up and twisted. “Loren, wait!”

But it was too late. He watched from below as Loren sailed over him, leg outstretched, foot aimed squarely at the Narlup’s chest. She hit him with the force of a small, yet efficient battering ram, the kick driving the air out of him in one big huff and turning his stagger into a stumble, then a fall, then a splintering of wood and shattering of crockery as he crashed through a table.

Cutlery rattled against the floor. Glasses smashed. Food splatted . All this was eclipsed by the thud of the Narlup himself as he landed amongst it all in a gasping and bloodied heap.

Loren stood before the chaos, dusting off her hands and looking pretty darned pleased with herself. With a groan, Cal got to his feet beside her. She smiled at him, a little smugly, and was somewhat taken aback when he sighed and said, “Well, way to go, Loren,” in the same tone he used when she accidentally piloted their ship into an asteroid field, or inadvertently smashed it into the surface of a planet.

“What? I got him,” Loren said, gesturing to the fallen Narlup.

“He was surrendering,” said Cal, exaggerating just enough to still be within spitting distance of the truth. “I’d talked him into giving up.”

Loren regarded the Narlup, then turned her attention back to Cal. “You did?”

Cal nodded slowly.

“Oh.”

Loren chewed her lip. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Cal confirmed.

“Oh.”

She considered this some more, then shrugged. “If you ask me, he had this coming. He was out of line. It was only right that I taught him a lesson and took him down.”

Only, Cal realized, the Narlup wasn’t down. Not any longer, at any rate. He rose up beside them, eyes blazing, teeth bared, fanuses puckered.

While the Narlup had been violently pummeling him, Cal had been under the impression that the guy was angry. Now, though, he was reconsidering that opinion. Back then, he reckoned, the Narlup had been irritated. Peeved, at worst.

Now, though—now he was angry. You could tell by the way his face was all twisted, his muscles were all tensed, and the manner in which he was bellowing, “I’m going to fonking kill you both!” at the top of his impressively loud voice.

“Not sure he learned that lesson, Loren,” Cal squeaked.

He and Loren threw themselves in opposite directions as the Narlup charged, his fists spinning like windmills, driving his foul stench ahead of him. His feet thundered across the floor, scattering debris.

On the Narlup’s right, Loren rolled expertly into a fighting stance. On its left, Cal got his ass wedged between the legs of an upturned space chair, and spent several seconds muttering to himself as he tried to get free.

The Narlup stopped. The Narlup turned. The Narlup roared.

And then, to everyone’s surprise, the Narlup exploded.

Or rather, bits of him did. Unfortunately for him, they were quite important bits.

His chest went first, erupting outward as if he was a giant birthday cake, and his heart was the stripper lurking inside.

His face registered his own feelings of surprise at this, and then it exploded, too, showering the room with fragments of skull, lumps of brain, and what Cal now considered to be the worst smell he had ever had the misfortune of inhaling.

Or second-worst, if you counted Paris.

Cal and Loren watched as the headless, chestless corpse crumpled itself into a pile on the floor between them. Thick, viscous blood pumped from the wounds, forming a slowly expanding pool. Floating atop it, a lightly scorched fanus parped for the final time.

All this had happened in a sort of slow-motion haze. Cal had watched the exploding Narlup with a sense of dream-like wonder, like a child watching a particularly impressive magic trick.

And now, like a child in the seconds immediately after a particularly impressive magic trick, he tried to figure out how it had been done.

The answer didn’t take long to present itself.

“Zertex,” whispered Loren, side-stepping through the blood and gore until she was closer to Cal. He had successfully extracted his ass from the upturned chair, but hadn’t yet made it as far as standing. The threatening manner in which one of the two uniformed men in the doorway was pointing a blaster rifle in his direction told him that now probably wasn’t the time to get up.

From the corner of his eye, he saw the woman and her children watching on.

“Seriously, lady? You’re still looking?” he called over. “Well, don’t come crying to me when those kids start having night terrors and then murder you in your sleep. That’s all on you.”

“Silence. Stop talking,” barked one of the armed men. His uniform was a series of maroons and grays, reinforced in most of the vital areas by a thin, flexible armor that looked like it wouldn’t stop a well-aimed snowball, let alone a blaster round.

Of course, it wasn’t just armor, Cal knew. It was space armor, and the rules were almost certainly different. You could probably drop the fonker into a volcano and he’d come out unscathed.

Well, except his head, which appeared to be completely unprotected. The rest of him would almost certainly be fine, though.

The man beside him was dressed identically, but with the addition of a shiny metal stripe along the top of his chest-plate, which Cal guessed signified some sort of officer ranking. Either that, or the store had neglected to remove the security tag when he’d bought it.

Cal went for the ‘charming-but-confused-tourist’ play. It had served him well many times in the past, and he was confident he could make it work here.

“Oh, officers! Thank goodness you’re here!” he half-sobbed, widening his eyes and smiling in a way that managed to be friendly, concerned, and yet entirely deferential, all at the same time.

Both Zertex guards glanced around at the ruined restaurant. Their guns remained trained—one on Loren, the other on Cal—as they advanced in formation, picking their way through the discarded crockery, upturned torso, and crispy-fried body parts.

“There we were, minding our own business, enjoying the hospitality of this lovely restaurant,” Cal explained. “When this gentleman began…”

He wiped an imaginary tear from his eye and looked up at Loren. “Well, he went crazy, didn’t he, darling?”

Loren’s brow furrowed for a moment, then she nodded. “Uh, yeah. He went crazy.”

The Zertex guards stopped in front of them, their faces fixed in some sort of regulation sneer. Now that they were closer up, Cal could see that their heads were protected, after all. A ninety-nine percent transparent bubble sprouted from the necks of their armor, completely encasing their skulls. As they breathed, tiny patches of fog appeared on the inside, before evaporating away again.

“Who are you?” the guard with the shiny stripe demanded. His gun lowered, but only by a fraction. “Show me your ID.”

Cal raised his hands by his head and raised himself up onto his knees. Once he was sure no one was about to blast his face off, he began to pat his pockets. “Yes, of course. ID. ID. Now, where did I put that blasted—?”

Cal didn’t like fighting. But then, he didn’t like Zertex, either. And he liked having a gun pointed at him, even less.

That was why he took a little pleasure—not much, but a little—when he twisted suddenly, putting as much of his weight as possible behind an uppercut that rose quickly, then stopped when it found the testicles of the man before him.

There was some reinforcement in the guard’s crotch area, but clearly, whoever had designed the armor hadn’t been prepared for a strike from that particular angle. The force of it lifted him a full inch-and-a-half off the floor, and by the time his partner had figured out what was happening, Loren had driven a palm-strike into his solar plexus. He fumbled with his gun, but Loren kicked one of his knees outward, hammered a flurry of punches into his stomach, then twisted his wrist until the weapon fell from his grip.

Meanwhile, Cal’s guy clutched at his abdomen, groaned loudly, and threw up against the inside of his barely-visible visor.

His view partly blocked, the guard fired wildly, obliterating one of the decorative stone columns and filling the air with plaster dust. Cal tackled the guard by both legs, knocking him over. As the guard went down, Cal jumped up. He turned to Loren, his face all sparkling eyes and beaming grin.

“What do you say?” He held a hand out to her. “Run?”

Loren nodded. Her hand slipped into his. So cool. So warm. So Loren. “Yeah”, she agreed. “Let’s run.”

They raced past the guards, bounded over the headless body of the Narlup, and skidded through his blood as they charged toward the exit. As they passed, the woman by the doorway placed her webbed hands over the eyes of the children beside her, so all Cal could see was the little circles of mute horror that were their mouths.

“Oh sure, now they look away,” Cal said as he and Loren hurried past. “Seriously, lady—worst mother ever!”

If she answered, he didn’t hear it. He and Loren stumbled out through the restaurant door, skidded into the corridor, and then stopped when they saw the squadron of six Zertex Shock-Troopers sprinting toward them, electric shock-rods at the ready.

“That’s not good,” Loren hissed.

Cal looked down at his shirt, pants, and both boots, one of which was still untied. “Splurt?” he hollered. “You there, buddy?”

His clothes steadfastly remained just clothes.

“Ah, fonk,” Cal groaned.

And then, they ran.

Three

Word had gotten around that the Shock-Troops were on the warpath. The corridors on this floor had been reasonably quiet on the way to the restaurant, but now they were all-but-deserted, with only the distant ka-thunk of slamming doors signaling that anyone else was here.

Cal and Loren skidded around a bend, ducking as an electro-blast scorched the window behind them. The window stretched from ceiling to floor and ran ahead for hundreds of feet, fully replacing one entire wall. Outside, space was hanging around in that way that space so often did. Stars. Planets. A sun.

That sort of thing.

Once upon a time, the view would’ve blown Cal’s mind. Nowadays, though, he barely even noticed it other than in a general, ‘Ooh, space,’ sort of way.

Besides, he was too concerned about his mind being blown in a much more literal sense right now to take time out to admire the scenery.

A shock-stick whined as it reached full charge. Loren grabbed Cal by the wrist and pulled him into a lurching stagger a split-second before the air popped and fizzled beside them. They both watched the electro-blast streak ahead, and winced as it detonated against the smooth curved glass.

Fonk. That was close.

“Shoot them!” Cal urged. “Why aren’t you shooting them?”

“I don’t have my gun,” said Loren, dragging him around another bend.

“Why don’t you have your gun? ”

“Because I didn’t expect you to punch a station security guy in the balls!” Loren spat back.

“Always be prepared for me to do that, Loren!” Cal yelped. “Seriously, have you learned nothing?”

Loren pulled ahead, almost wrenching his arm from its socket. He was usually pretty talented when it came to running away from dangerous things. A crazed gunman normally made him impressively fleet of foot. An angry space bear granted him near Olympian levels of swiftness.

And that time with Ozzy Osbourne, he’d practically become superhuman.

Now, though, he lumbered clumsily along, hindered by his flapping boot, which he hadn’t had a chance to tie again. He’d still been harboring a nugget of hope that the boot would reveal itself to be a certain adorable little shapeshifting bamston, but this had eventually been replaced by the dull, disappointing acceptance that, no, it was just a boot.

A boot that came very close to tripping him when it fell off.

Cal hobbled a few paces, hopped a few more, then stopped, pulling his arm from Loren’s grip. “My boot!”

“Leave it!” Loren barked. “Come on.”

“But it’s my favorite boot!” Cal protested, doubling back.

He was halfway back to the boot when an electro-blast slammed into the floor beside it, scorching the tiles with a fiery red glow.

“Fonk it, I’ve got another one just like it,” Cal decided, pulling a U-turn and sprinting lopsidedly after Loren. Unburdened by the loose boot, and urged on by the threat of imminent death, he quickly closed the gap.

By the time Loren was skidding around the next bend, Cal was just nine or ten feet behind her. Covering his head with his hands, he chanted, “Oh shizz, oh shizz, oh shizz,” below his breath. He usually found this made him run even faster, and this time proved to be no exception.

Two shock-rods whined somewhere behind him.

“Ohshizzohshizzohshizz! ”

Cal’s legs catapulted him around the bend as both blasts ricocheted off the window behind him. He ducked and felt the static charge of the bolts careening past above his head, then looked up, half-expecting to see them slam into Loren’s back.

But Loren was gone.

Behind him, Cal could hear the thudding of approaching footsteps. Ahead, the corridor stood empty and silent.

“What the fonk?” he muttered, then a hand clamped across his mouth and he was dragged through a narrow doorway that appeared in the wall beside him.

The door slid closed at his back, and Cal was swallowed by the darkness. The air in the room was heavily perfumed with hints of lemon and suggestions of assorted spring breezes. Either he’d somehow found himself in the south of Italy on a fine mid-April morning, or he was in a cleaner’s closet.

His foot clanked against a mop bucket.

Cleaner’s closet it was.

“Shh.”

The voice was low and urgent in his ear. It was Loren’s, to his relief, and not the deranged sexual predator he’d momentarily imagined it to be when the hand had first grabbed him.

Outside, the footsteps of the Shock-Troops hurried past, accompanied by the whines of their weapons charging.

Experience had taught Loren to wait until the sounds had faded into the distance before removing her hand from Cal’s mouth. He exhaled noisily the moment her hand was away. When he spoke, his voice echoed in the confined space.

“Loren, is that you?” he asked, just to be on the safe side.

“Yes, it’s me. Of course it’s me,” she replied, her voice low.

“Oh, thank God,” Cal whispered. “I was worried you might be a rapist.”

Loren didn’t really know how to respond to that, so the inside of the closet lapsed into an awkward silence. Cal rushed to fill it.

“Do you have those in space?” he asked. “Space rap—?”

“Just stop talking,” Loren told him.

Cal concluded that this was probably for the best. He stopped talking.

It occurred to him for the first time just how close Loren was to him. He could feel her breathing in the darkness, her chest heaving against his arm. The smell of her mingled with the lemony freshness of the closet.

Was she wearing perfume? That was new. Had she worn that for him?

He crinkled his nose and sniffed in her general direction.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

“Hm? Oh, nothing,” he said. He sniffed again, less obviously this time, and decided it was probably just bleach.

“We should get out of here,” she said. “Shock-Troops aren’t the smartest, but they’ll figure out they’re no longer chasing us soon.”

Cal nodded, although given how dark it was, this was largely pointless, so he said, “Agreed,” instead. He didn’t remember ever saying, “Agreed,” before, and found that he quite liked it. It made him sound efficient and in charge, he thought. It was the sort of thing Captain Kirk probably said all the time. Or maybe the bald one who came later. What was his name? Professor X.

Whatever. They’d be all over agreed , those two. Cal made a mental note to use it again in the future. He might even nod knowingly next time, assuming the lighting situation permitted.

“Cal,” Loren hissed. “Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes. Absolutely,” Cal lied. He was dimly aware of Loren having spoken, but he’d been too busy with the whole Captain Kirk thing to pay attention.

He decided to press on.

“What level are we on?” he asked.

“Five-five-seven,” Loren replied.

“Agreed,” said Cal, even though it wasn’t a particularly appropriate response, given what had come before it. He glossed over that fact and continued. “And what level is the ship on?”

“Eight.”

“Fonk, that’s a long way.”

“It is.”

“Agreed,” said Cal.

Loren hesitated. “I was agreeing with you.”

“I know. And I was agreeing with you agreeing with me,” Cal said.

Loren’s tone took on an edge of concern. “Do you have some kind of head injury?”

“Let’s worry about that later,” Cal said. “Right now, let’s figure out how the fonk we’re going to get down…”

He began to count quietly below his breath.

“Five-five-seven minus eight… Or plus eight? No. Minus. It’s minus.” He took a breath. “OK. Five-five-seven. Five-five-six. Five-five—”

“Five-hundred-and-forty-nine levels,” Loren told him. “It’s five-hundred-and-forty-nine levels.”

“Jesus, seriously?” said Cal. “That’s a lot of stairs.”

“OK, good luck with that,” said Loren. The door opened a crack, letting light come flooding in. “I’ll take the turbolift and meet you there.”

“Can we take the lift?” Cal asked.

Loren peered out into the corridor, then glanced back over her shoulder at him. “Why wouldn’t we?”

“Won’t they have it on lockdown or something? They’re hunting us.”

“It’s a big station,” Loren shrugged. “They can’t lock it all down.”

Cal groaned inwardly. He hadn’t had a huge amount of experience of turbolifts, and what little he did have had been far from enjoyable. There was a technique to traveling by turbolift, everyone told him. Once you’d mastered it, it was easy. You barely even noticed it moving, once you’d mastered it.

Cal hadn’t mastered it. Not by a long shot.

Loren opened the door and shot furtive looks in both directions along the corridor. When she saw the coast was clear, she stepped out and beckoned to Cal.

“You coming?”

Cal winced. Turbolifts. He fonking hated turbolifts.

Then again, the thought of five hundred floors didn’t exactly have him dancing with joy, either.

Bathed in the light from the corridor, he nodded knowingly and gave his best Captain Kirk smirk.

“Agreed.”

Loren frowned back at him. Cal felt himself blush, just a little. “By which I mean, ‘yes,’” he explained, then he smiled sheepishly and scurried out of the cleaner’s closet and into the corridor beyond.

* * *

The lifts were situated close to the restaurant they’d recently left, and which had now become the scene of quite a lot of commotion. Cleaning droids and repair bots swarmed in and out through the open doors, fixing the damage and mopping up the brain matter inside.

A few Zertex guards were stationed near the doorway, idly diverting the few stragglers still roaming around this floor. There were sixteen other restaurants in this sector of the level, their names projected in bright colors in the air so they could be read from any angle.

The place Cal had taken Loren had been called Le Moops , which Cal had assumed meant it was French. It wasn’t. Le Moops , it transpired, was the name of the restaurant owner—an elderly disheveled gentleman who, judging by the painting of him on the restaurant wall, had eaten ninety-percent of lifetime profits, and three-hundred-percent of the dessert menu.

Le Moops was one of the higher-classed establishments in this sector. Or it had been, at least. Not so much now. Cal had assumed the numbers next to the menu items had been some sort of code. Telephone numbers, or stardates, perhaps. When he’d found out that they were prices, he’d almost choked on the complimentary bread, and been forced to wheeze, “Heimlich! Heimlich!” until Loren punched him in the chest.

On reflection, he was glad the place had been smashed up.

Hanging a right at Le Moops introduced eager food-lovers to a succession of other culinary hotspots. Boak served a hot, soupy stew in apparently limitless qualities. Gromworts was a fish restaurant, judging by the animated logo of a four-armed man shooting what appeared to be a dolphin through the face.

The logo of the next place suggested it sold spaghetti, although the name—Yumworm!— made Cal suspect he’d gotten the wrong end of the stick.

He was staring at the sign of the next building, waiting for the translation chip in his eye to convert the symbols into letters, when the turbolift doors opened and Loren pulled him inside.

The lift was the size of the bridge on Cal and Loren’s ship, the Currently Untitled , and easily large enough to accommodate fifty people, or ten of Mr Le Moops.

There were four other people already in the elevator car. All of them wore various uniforms that suggested they worked at one of the station’s many food establishments and entertainment centers.

A burly man at the back of the lift wore the matching shirt and helmet of one of the station’s shopping arenas. They’d passed the largest of these coliseum-style arenas on the way to the restaurant, and Loren had explained that visitors flocked from all over the system to battle it out for a limited number of lightly discounted goods. Shoes, mostly, and the occasional space TV.

Cal smiled and nodded at the other occupants, then faced front and braced himself as Loren gave the instruction.

“Eight.”

The floor fell out from below him, sucking his stomach down with it. He grabbed for the overhead handrail and held on until his knuckles went white.

The elevator stopped abruptly and shunted backward, throwing him off-balance and forcing him to grab the rail with his other hand.

Around him, Loren and the others stood their ground, apparently unperturbed by the speed or the sudden jerking movements. One of them was even standing on one foot while she picked something off the sole of her shoe. The bedge!

Cal was so busy watching her that he failed to anticipate the rapid deceleration and sudden plunge as the turbolift switched to another track and changed direction. His feet flew out from under him and he swung from the bar like a monkey, legs bicycling until the elevator car diverted onto another track and his heels slammed against the floor.

“Ow, fonk!” he grimaced, the impact serving as a painful reminder that he only had one boot on.

Loren raised an eyebrow and looked him up and down. “What’s the matter?”

“What the fonk do you mean, ‘What’s the—?’” Cal began to ask, but then the lift went one way and he went the other.

He clung on, completely horizontal against the ceiling, G-Forces flattening his cheeks against his ears.

Over in one corner, the woman stopped examining her shoe and put her foot down. In the corner opposite, the man from the shopping arena fiddled idly with a set of brass knuckles, then gave a barely interested glance in Cal’s direction.

The lift slammed to a stop then climbed suddenly. Cal had been bracing himself for pretty much every possible direction except up , and immediately lost his grip. He managed to yelp, “How are you all still standing?” in one big gulp, then walloped into the rapidly rising floor.

He wondered, momentarily, why this sort of thing always seemed to happen to him, and then the elevator stopped sharply and his back met the ceiling. Then, a moment later, his front met the floor again.

The door opened.

“Level One-Three-Eight,” chimed an electronic voice. Cal watched two of the elevator’s occupants leave, then came to a decision.

“Fonk it,” he groaned, grabbing Loren by the wrist and hobbling her toward the door. “Close enough.”

Four

In many respects, the rest of the journey was far more enjoyable. Once they’d struggled their way through the lines of combatants in home-made armor waiting impatiently outside a store proclaiming, ‘30% Off All Rugs – Today Only!’ they’d found a staircase and began the long climb down.

Generally speaking, nobody ever used the stairs on a space station. There was no need, thanks to those extensive turbolift networks which transported passengers around the place in a fraction of the time it took to walk.

That was all well and good if you’d mastered the knack of being able to balance on the fonking things, of course. Which, had Cal not seen it with his own eyes, he’d have said was physically impossible.

So, the upside of taking the stairs was that Cal and Loren were all alone, away from the chaos of the rest of the station. Also, Cal wasn’t being hurtled around the place, and/or smashed into things at tremendous speed. Both were definitely a positive, he thought.

On the downside, it was a very long way to the ship, and stairs were—not to put too fine a point on it—shizzing dull .

The thrill of being chased, coupled with the sheer indignation of being tossed around a lift like a ragdoll, had taken Cal’s mind off the whole situation with Loren. Now that the immediate drama had passed, he could feel his hands becoming clammy and his brain running out of things to say again. Loren trudged just ahead of him, her ponytail swishing behind her like… Well, like a pony’s tail, he thought.

“Holy shizz, I just got that,” he said aloud. His voice reverberated up and down the stairs, and Loren looked back at him over her shoulder.

“Just got what?”

“Ponytail,” said Cal, pointing to her hair. “It’s like a pony’s tail. Like an actual pony’s tail.”

Loren regarded him blankly.

“You know? Pony.” He made a clip-clop sort of sound out of the side of his mouth, but this didn’t seem to help clarify things. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, and they continued downward.

Cal limped on his mismatched feet, desperately trying to think of something to say, but coming up blank. Once again, he found this very perplexing. He’d never had any problems speaking to Loren before. If anything, he’d said too much to her over the past few months. Now, though, nothing was coming. His usual stream of verbal diarrhea had all dried up.

They arrived at a small landing, turned at a right angle, then continued down the next flight.

Cal’s mind raced. He had her alone. No Mech, no Miz, no Kevin or Splurt. No one was actively trying to kill them, and he wasn’t vomiting himself inside-out through travel sickness. It was a rare opportunity to have a proper, honest-to-god conversation. To really get to know each other. Who knew when he’d get another chance like this? And yet, his mind was empty.

And then, it came to him. The perfect conversation starter. The ideal thing to say. He’d have her eating out of his hand in no time.

“Are we nearly there yet?”

Bingo!

“Nearly,” Loren told him.

She continued down the stairs. He followed behind.

“Good,” he said.

And that was that.

He tried again.

“Which level is this?”

Loren tapped the wall beside her and a symbol illuminated. The chip in Cal’s eyeball quickly translated it.

“Eleven!” he cheered. “Holy shizz, we’re on eleven? We’re almost there.”

“Not long now,” Loren confirmed.

Cal felt elated for a full ten seconds, before the realization crept in. They were almost back at the ship. Their date—if that was even what it was—was over. In a few minutes, they’d be back on the ship, surrounded by the others. Everything would go back to normal.

And that was… what? Good, he guessed. Normal was OK. Fine, actually. He liked normal. You knew where you were with normal. You could get comfortable in it.

But she’d kissed him, and he hadn’t stopped thinking about it since.

“Hey, Loren,” Cal said, shuffling to a stop.

Loren trudged down the last couple of steps and turned when she reached the landing. “What’s up?” she asked.

Cal’s lips were dry. He sucked them in and ran his tongue across them, buying himself a moment before he had to speak.

“So, see, the thing is,” he said, and then a loud, panicky shout shook the door beside her, and something heavy thumped against the other side.

Loren moved to tap the button that would make the door slide open, but Cal stopped her.

“Wait, wait! Just let me say this first,” he said.

There was another thump , more solid-sounding this time.

“Where is it?” demanded a voice from beyond the door.

Another thump .

“We know you’ve got it!”

“See, the thing is, Loren,” Cal began, trying his best to ignore whatever the fonk was happening outside.

The sound that followed, he couldn’t ignore. It was somewhere between a scream and a sob—a short, sudden wail of despair. It was heartbreakingly raw-sounding, the sort of noise a terrified child might make when they realized their parents weren’t coming to save the day.

Cal groaned. Loren jabbed a thumb in the direction of the door.

“We should do something.”

Cal nodded grimly. “Go.”

Loren tapped the button to open the door, and a short, squat shape tumbled backward into the stairwell. It landed on the floor at Loren’s feet, its round black eyes wide and staring, its mouth open revealing rows of razor-sharp teeth.

“It’s a Symmorium,” Cal said, quietly pleased with himself for recognizing an alien species by name. Normally, he relied on physical characteristics—the pointy-head ones; those guys with the four asses—and someone else filled in the blanks.

As he looked at the fallen figure, he became acutely aware that this wasn’t just any Symmorium, either.

Before he could dwell on this, though, two Zertex guards stepped through, batons clutched low and ready at their sides. One of them was so tall she had to duck to get under the doorframe. Her skin was wrinkled and leathery, but Cal guessed this was a species thing, rather than an age-related one.

The second figure was smaller than the first, but taller than Cal. He seemed thin and wiry beneath his armor, and gripped his baton with more relish than seemed strictly necessary. The guy could’ve passed for human, were it not for his slightly elongated face, and the fact he had a neatly groomed and freshly waxed mustache on each cheek, half an inch or so below his bulbous eyes.

“Is there a problem, orifices?” Cal asked. He snapped his fingers. “Sorry. Officers . I’m always making that mistake.”

“No problem,” said Cheek-Mustaches. His voice was exactly the sort of officious nasal whine that Cal had been expecting. “Just Zertex business. Move along.”

“What are you doing in here?” asked Leathery-She-Hulk.

“We were taking the stairs,” Loren explained.

The Zertex guards exchanged glances. “The stairs?” said the man. “Why would you take the stairs? What’s wrong with the turbolifts?”

“We just thought we’d get some…” Cal gestured vaguely around them, failed to come up with a satisfactory conclusion to the sentence, so said, “…fresh air,” and smiled.

The guards looked up at the enclosed stairway.

“Right,” said Cheek-Mustaches. “I see. Well, go about your business. This one is coming with us.”

He stepped aside, gesturing for his larger companion to step forward. Her ill-fitting uniform creaked in protest as she bent down, a comically large hand grasping for the fallen Symmorium. Judging by the Symmorium’s reaction, she didn’t see the inherent comedy in the giant hand. She squealed, babbled out a series of distressed animal sounds, and then sobbed when the hand caught her by the front of her torn and dirty uniform.

Loren’s own hand clamped over Leathery-She-Hulk’s wrist. Over. Not around. Nowhere even close to around.

“I can’t let you do that,” Loren said. With the female guard bent over, she and Loren were face to face. Loren held her gaze, not glaring, exactly, but making it very clear that the next few moments could be very difficult for everyone involved.

Cal sighed, dreamily.

Fonk, she was beautiful.

Cheek-Mustaches gave his baton a flick. Energy crackled along its length. “You have placed your hand on an officer of Zertex. This is punishable by pain. You have three seconds to unhand my colleague before—”

Cal jumped on him from four steps up, bellowing, “Geronimo!” as he landed knees-first on the guy’s chest. They hit the floor like a startled octopus, all eight limbs waving and thrashing as they both raced to be first to scrabble upright.

Grabbing the little mustaches, Cal tugged. The man’s skin stretched like old elastic, then snapped back into place when Cal let go. His cheeks twanged into his eyeballs, temporarily blinding him. Cal let out a little cheer of triumph, then spasmed violently when the baton was jammed against his ribcage.

“Fnk!” he hissed, ejecting foam through his teeth. He tried to knock the baton away, but his arms were curling up against his chest, his internal organs were blending into a soup, and his testicles where nowhere to be found.

Leathery-She-Hulk crashed to the floor beside them, snoring lightly. Cheek-Mustaches’ vision cleared just in time for him to see Loren looming above, and just in time to feel the bone-shattering crack of her boot stamping on his arm.

The baton clattered onto the floor. Cal gasped in relief. The pain had passed. The ordeal was over. For once, he hadn’t soiled himself.

Well, perhaps lightly.

Cheek-Mustaches regarded his mangled, misshapen arm with a sort of morbid fascination for a while. Cal clambered backward off him, smoothed himself down, then gave Loren a nod.

“Thanks,” he said. “I mean, I totally had him right where I wanted him, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Loren agreed.

“But thanks.”

Down on the floor, Cheek-Mustaches concluded his examinations of his injury, and decided on the best course of action. He screamed. It was a loud, piercing sort of scream, almost as if someone had implanted a car alarm in the back of his throat. Unlike every car alarm in history, though, Cal had a feeling that this one wouldn’t go ignored.

“We should go,” Loren urged, coming to the same conclusion as he had. She squatted by the sobbing Symmorium and took an arm. “Help me.”

Cal took the other arm. The girl’s dark eyes screwed tightly shut and she thrashed around on the floor until they were both forced to let her go.

“Hey, hey, it’s OK,” Cal said soothingly. “I know you. I know who you are. You’re Tyrra, right? You’re Junta’s daughter.”

Loren’s eyes widened. “That’s her? You sure?”

“The girl headbutted me in the balls,” Cal said. “That’s not someone you forget in a hurry.”

He looked down again to find Tyrra squinting at him through one barely open eye. “That’s right. It’s OK. We’re friends of your dad’s. We’re going to help you. You just have to trust us, OK?”

Behind him, Cheek-Mustaches fumbled at something attached to the side of his armor. Loren noticed and sprang to her feet.

“Shizz! He’s got—”

The stairwell was filled by the rapid chirping of a security alarm. It spat from hidden speakers, so piercingly loud that it forced Cal to clamp his hands over his ears.

“Jesus, what is that?” he bellowed. “A fonking migraine ray?”

“Full station emergency alert,” Loren shouted back. “He’s called for full reinforcements. This place is going to be swarming with Zertex.”

Cal turned to see Cheek-Mustaches sneering at him. Something about that twisted, smug little smirk made him temporarily forget his dislike of violence. He took a momentary pleasure from the way his fist met the guard’s face, and nodded with satisfaction when the jumped-up little fonker fell unconscious.

That done, he looked up at Loren. “Is there a way to switch it off?” he shouted over the din.

Loren nodded. “Yes!” she barked back. She pointed to the guard Cal had just KO’d. “With his voice print.”

Cal shifted awkwardly, then shrugged. “Meh. It was still worth it,” he decided, squatting again. He took Tyrra by the arm. “We need to go. Now,” he shouted at her, and this time she didn’t resist as he and Loren helped her to her feet.

From beyond the stairwell door came the sound of shouting. It wasn’t angry shouting. It was a much more organized and efficient sort of shouting—the type of shouting done by competent, well-drilled people all working together toward some common goal.

Cal suspected he and Loren were that common goal, so wasted no time in steering Tyrra toward the next set of stairs, and hurrying her down through the next few floors.

“Don’t worry,” he told her, leaning in close so he wouldn’t have to shout too loudly. “We’ll have you out of here in no time. Our friends will be primed and ready to fly us out of here.”

He glanced back up the stairs behind them.

“Hopefully.”

* * *

Mizette of the Greyx, the once warrior queen of her people, before all the time-travel stuff had fonked everything up, sighed heavily and flicked her eyes to the figure standing in front of her.

“What ?” she snapped in a way that suggested she had been fully immersed in some project of utmost importance and resented the interruption. In fact, she’d been looking at the claws on her left hand, comparing each one with its counterpart on her right hand, then lightly chewing them until they were the perfect match.

In Miz’s defense, this was, as far as she was concerned, a project of utmost importance.

“I said, what do you think?” said Mech.

The cyborg had something tucked under his left arm that defied easy description. It looked as if a selection of antiquated diving equipment was trying to exist in the same place and time as both a vacuum cleaner and a car engine. Specifically, the engine of a 1981 Mercury Capri RS Turbo, although Miz wouldn’t have known that, even if she’d been paying close attention.

Which she wasn’t.

“About what?”

Mech’s eyes crept to the contraption under his arm. Various tubes and hoses sprouted from a partially inflated central housing. One of the narrower tubes was taped to the big dial on his chest, the end pointing upward so it was held in place just in front of his mouth.

“About this.”

Miz sighed again. She was good at sighing. If you spent enough time around her, you’d come to realize that sighing was almost a second language to the wolf-woman, each grudged exhale was so subtle and nuanced that it could convey whole conversations worth of meaning in just a single breath.

To those with a cursory understanding, her most recent sigh, for example, said, ‘Why the fonk is he still talking to me? Can’t he see I’m busy?’

Those who’d studied Miz’s sighing more closely, however, would detect the follow-up, ‘Maybe if I ignore him he’ll go away,’ while only those truly fluent in the language would pick up on her closing, ‘What the fonk even is that thing, anyway? He looks so lame. Ugh.’

“It’s a musical instrument,” said Mech, who had something of a gift for languages, breath-based or otherwise. “I made it. I call it a Blufflebag.”

Miz tutted. “Why?”

“Why what?” asked Mech. “Why did I make it, or why did I call it a Blufflebag?”

Miz looked him up and down. “Just, like, why ? Why is this happening right now? Shouldn’t you wait to, like, show someone who cares? You know, like…”

She vaguely waved a hand, then sighed again.

“No, no one is going to care,” she concluded. “Fine. I guess you’ll have to show me. Ugh, this is so not fair.”

Mech shuffled excitedly, his feet clanking on the metal floor of the ship’s bridge. “OK, OK. So, I’ve been thinking for a while now that I should maybe find myself a hobby. You know? We’re out here in space, we got a lot of time to kill, I thought maybe I should… Miz?”

Mizette’s eyes snapped up from where they had drifted back to her fingernails. “What? I’m listening,” she insisted.

Mech’s eyes narrowed a fraction in suspicion, but he continued. “So, anyway, I thought, why not take up a musical instrument?”

Miz extended a thumb and took a deep breath, as if to count off the reasons.

“Rhetorical question,” Mech said, cutting her off. “We didn’t have any musical instruments, so I thought I’d go ahead and invent one. The Blufflebag.”

He grinned proudly, his lower metal jaw curving to match the outline of his fleshy top lip. “Want to know how it works?”

This, too, was a rhetorical question. Of course Miz didn’t want to know how it worked. In all the galaxy, there were probably only a handful of things she cared about less, Mech knew. But fonk it, he was going to tell her anyway.

Miz gave another sigh. This one said, ‘Fine, show me your stupid music thing,’ before adding that, under no circumstances, was she ever going to forgive him for this.

“See this part?” Mech said, waggling a metal stem with a series of varyingly sized holes drilled along its length, and four thumb-sized levers attached. It was attached to the body by a length of rubber hose that looped up over his shoulder before re-emerging below his armpit. “I call it the control tube. This is where you play the notes. You know? Like, A, C, F, E, B—”

“You’re literally just saying letters at me,” Miz pointed out.

“Right, right,” said Mech. “Sorry, I’m just… Well, I’m excited. I ain’t gonna lie. I had the idea for this thing for years, but never found the time to put it together until now.”

Miz didn’t sigh. She’d gone beyond sighing now. She tutted instead and rolled her eyes.

Picking up on her dwindling interest, Mech pressed on. “So, you play the notes there, you squeeze these three parts under your arm…”

He squeezed those three parts to demonstrate.

“It’s not making any noise,” Mizette pointed out.

“Right, right. Because I gotta blow into this part first,” Mech said, indicating the tube taped in front of his mouth. “That’s what makes it all work.”

Mizette’s nose wrinkled. She looked the contraption over, paying particular attention to the tubes and pipes. “So… what? It works on air?”

“Exactly!” said Mech, positively beaming with pride.

“You blow into it?”

“You got it!”

“Into that thing?”

“Bingo.”

Miz’s furry brow creased. She gave Mech a moment, thinking it might sink in. When he continued to grin back at her, she decided to spell it out.

“But, like, do you even have lungs?”

Mech opened his mouth to respond.

Then he closed it again.

“What?” he said, after what felt like quite some time.

“Like, to blow with? I thought you didn’t have lungs.”

Mech’s fingers tightened around the control tube, crumpling the metal.

“Motherfonker,” he groaned. He shot the Blufflebag a look that bordered on contempt, then let out a sigh of his own. It wasn’t as elegant or as nuanced as one of Miz’s, but it translated roughly as, ‘Back to the drawing board,’ only with a lot of creative swearing thrown in at random.

“Might now be a good time to interrupt, sir?” asked a voice from up near the ceiling. Mech didn’t bother to look up.

“What is it, Kevin?”

“It’s Master Cal and Mistress Loren, sir.”

“What about them?”

“I think they may want in.”

Mech did look up then. Miz flicked her gaze briefly in the direction of the voice, but then turned her attention back to more pressing matters and nibbled a millionth of an inch off the tip of her right thumbnail.

“What do you mean?”

“See for yourself, sir,” said Kevin.

The screen, which had been showing a view of the docking bay the Currently Untitled was parked in, changed to show a view from the rear of the ship. Cal and Loren stood just a few feet away from the camera and were both jumping up and down, waving their arms, and shouting, “Open the fonking door!” in panicky squeals.

Standing between them, a glassy-eyed Symmorium gazed limply ahead, its mouth hanging slightly open to show a frankly bewildering number of teeth.

“And you haven’t let them in because…?” Mech asked.

“Well,” said Kevin. “Because…”

He reflected on this for a moment.

“Actually, I have no idea,” he admitted. “I’ll go ahead and let them in.”

On screen, Cal and Loren both jumped back as the rear hatch opened. Cal hung back just long enough to shoot the camera a dirty look, then he followed Loren up the ramp, pushing and pulling the Symmorium between them.

They clattered along the corridor and onto the bridge. Once there, Loren hurried to the pilot’s seat while Cal gently lowered Tyrra into one of the chairs along the bridge’s rear bulkhead. The guest chairs as he liked to think of them.

“You just sit here, OK?” he told her, fastening her seatbelt. He placed a hand on her shoulder and smiled at her, but she gazed emptily past him, seeing nothing. “That’s the spirit,” he said, then he turned, clapped his hands, and addressed the others.

“Kevin, a little quicker on the door next time. Loren, get us the fonk out of here. Mech, nice space bagpipes.”

“They ain’t—”

“Not really the time, big guy,” Cal told him, cutting him short. He smiled in a way that he hoped would pre-emptively absolve him of any and all blame for what he was about to say. “There’s a chance that we might have a problem…”

Five

The Currently Untitled roared across the landing bay, thrusters blasting, feet throwing out sparks as they scraped across the ground. All around the ship, the other occupants of the dock hurled themselves out of its path, scrambling for cover behind crates, barrels, and stacks of cargo.

Up ahead, the shield gate shimmered. It wasn’t designed to stop ships coming and going, but was instead there to stop all the people, equipment, and oxygen being sucked out into space. The Currently Untitled rocketed toward it, metal feet screeching on the metal floor, a volley of blaster-fire following close behind.

Inside, Cal clung to the arms of his chair, eyes screwed up and face contorted. “Jesus Christ, can no one else hear that noise? Pull up!”

“I can’t pull up,” Loren spat back from the pilot’s seat. “I’ll hit the ceiling.”

Cal leaned forward and looked up. “There’s like, sixty feet to the ceiling! What are you flying, a jumbo jet?”

“Is this even technically flying?” Miz wondered. “Isn’t it, like, skiing?”

“Fine!” Loren barked. “You want me to take off? Fine.”

She pulled back on the stick and the Untitled banked upward. The screeching was replaced by sweet, sweet silence, and then the silence was replaced by the bang of the ship colliding with the ceiling.

“See?”

“You didn’t have to go that far up!” Cal began to protest. He pointed. “See that three-story high area between the ceiling and the floor? That’s the part to aim for. Fly there.”

“Shizz. We got a problem,” said Mech.

“God, I wish we had a problem, Mech. I really do,” said Cal, sitting back in his chair. “As usual, we’ve got multiple problems. People are shooting at us, we’re ruining the paintwork, I lost a shoe…”

“Yeah, well here’s one to add to the list,” Mech said. He jabbed a metal finger in the direction of the fast-approaching exit. Through the shield, they’d been able to see a decent-sized strip of stars. Now, though, the view was developing an odd sort of letterbox effect, with two black bands cutting off the vista at the top and bottom.

“They’re closing the security shutters,” Loren realized. “Fonk.”

“We’re going to make it,” Cal assured her. “Just go, we’re going to make it.”

“We’re not going to make it!” Loren argued. She began to ease back on the thruster. “We have to stop.”

“Don’t slow down! Never slow down. Isn’t that what they say?”

“Isn’t that what who says?”

Cal shrugged. “Fonk knows. Someone wiser than us. Just keep going,” he insisted. He waited until Loren returned to full thrust, then glanced upward. “Kevin, give me control of the torpedoes.”

The ship’s AI said nothing. Cal muttered something uncomplimentary below his breath.

“Jesus, OK. Give me control of the missiles .”

“Very good, sir,” Kevin replied.

“You’re so fonking pedantic,” Cal grumbled.

The weapons control headset dropped down from the ceiling and cracked him on the top of his skull. He hissed and clamped a hand over the injury. “Ow! Fonk!”

“Apologies, sir. I wasn’t aware you were leaning forward,” Kevin explained.

“I’m not leaning forward!” Cal protested.

“Well,” Kevin sniffed. “You have your version of events, and I have mine.”

Up ahead, the gates continued to grind shut. The gap was maybe twice the size of the Untitled now, but closing fast.

Cal pulled the headset on. A couple of sharp, stabbing pains pricked his temples, then he suddenly found himself in gloomy darkness. He’d been expecting his consciousness to be projected above the ship like it had in the past, and it took him a moment to figure out why he couldn’t see.

“Down, Loren. You’re still on the ceiling!” he instructed.

He didn’t hear the answer, but the Untitled dipped sharply, lurching his stomach up somewhere around his ears. Now that his consciousness was no longer jammed between the ship and the ceiling, he could see the docking bay around them, complete with narrowing exit and a squadron of ant-sized Zertex troops giving chase on little hoverbikes somewhere far behind.

“I’m rather afraid our missiles won’t penetrate the shielding in time to destroy the gate, sir,” Kevin said, his voice coming from every direction at once. “Much as we all hate to agree with Mistress Loren, I fear that, in this instance, we have no choice but to stop.”

“I heard that!” came Loren’s voice.

“I wasn’t planning to shoot the gate, Kevin,” Cal said. He raised his hands and felt the tickle of power as the ship’s weapon systems synched with his movements.

He chose a cargo ship half a mile or so away on the right. It was a nice ship. Expensive looking.

Most of its value was lost when a missile struck it, reducing it to flaming debris. Cal grinned and threw out his other arm, sending a second missile hurtling across the dock in the opposite direction.

BABOOM! A stack of house-sized cargo containers met a hot, fiery end.

KABLAM! A sleek silver ship that reminded Cal of a boomerang suffered an explosive fate there would be no coming back from.

PTCHEOW! Another missile slammed into the base of a loading crane. The giant metal arm toppled, smashing through the wing of another ship and crushing a trailer of barrels.

Explosive barrels, as it turned out.

The blast rocked the Untitled , forcing Loren to wrestle frantically with the controls.

“What are you doing?” she yelped.

“I’m making us unwelcome,” Cal explained. He cheered as another missile exploded ahead of the pursuing Zertex troops, flipping them and their fancy-schmancy bikes into the air.

“I think it may be working, sir,” said Kevin. “The gates have stopped closing.”

“Yes!” Cal whooped, then he threw his arms wide and launched another couple of missiles for good measure. At opposite ends of the landing bay, two very valuable things became thousands of not-even-remotely valuable things.

“Gate opening!” Mech announced. “They want us out of here before we do any more damage.”

Cal looked around at all the smoldering wreckage, then nodded. Yes, he was pleased with that.

“Loren, let’s oblige them. Kevin, get me out,” he instructed. “My work here is done.”

Pain nipped at his temples. There was a sensation of movement and something not unlike existential loss, then he was back in his chair, blinking himself back to the here and now.

“The gate’s opening, but not fast enough!” Loren warned. The exit was hurtling up. Five seconds away. Four. “We’re going to hit it.”

“So? You’ve already hit everything else,” Miz pointed out. “What’s, like, one more thing?”

“HOLD ON!” Loren cried, jamming the throttle, jerking the stick, and—unnoticed by anyone sitting behind her—tightly shutting her eyes.

There was a shudder as the ship passed through the phase shielding.

There was a bang as a wing clipped the bottom of the gate.

And then the Currently Untitled cleared the exit and streaked out into space, trailing flakes of paint behind it.

“Holy shizz, we did it,” said Mech.

“We did?” said Loren, sounding as surprised as anyone. She opened her eyes just in time to see Mech turn toward her, frowning. She nodded back at him. “I mean, yes. We made it.”

“Nice work, Loren,” Cal told her. The familiarity of it all—the blaster fire, the bad flying, the skin-of-the-teeth escape—had made him once again forget his earlier awkwardness. He smiled at the back of her head. “Imagine what you could do if you didn’t shut your eyes.”

Loren said nothing, but saluted him over her shoulder with a raised finger.

“Wrong one,” Cal told her.

“Oh. Right.”

She changed fingers.

“That’s your pinkie. The middle one. We’ve been over this.”

Loren tutted and lowered her hand. “You get the point.”

Cal’s smile broadened. “Yeah, I get the point.” He gestured ahead. “Better warp us out of here before anyone tries to pin the blame on us for blowing up the docking bay.”

“That was us,” Mech pointed out.

“Mech, I resent that accusation,” Cal said. “There’s no evidence that we did it.”

“Uh, yeah. Pretty sure there is,” Mech argued.

Cal placed a finger to his lips. “Shh, now. Let’s never talk about it again,” he said. “Except later, when we all discuss how awesome I was to think of it.”

“Going to warp speed,” Loren announced.

“Fonk. OK. Go!” Cal said, gritting his teeth and pushing himself back into his seat in anticipation.

“We’re being hailed, sir,” Kevin said.

“Loren, wait.” Cal relaxed a little. He glanced up. “Who by?”

“Someone angry, sir. Very shouty. I don’t much like the look of him, to be honest.”

“Ah, fonk him, then,” said Cal. “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. That’s my motto.”

“What? You say nasty shizz about people all the time,” Mech pointed out.

“Yeah, so?” Cal blinked a couple of times. “Wait, is that what ‘motto’ means? You actually do the thing?”

“That is kind of the entire point, yeah,” Mech confirmed.

Cal pulled a surprised face. “Huh. You learn something new every day,” he said, then he braced himself again and nodded ahead. “Loren, punch it.”

Space stretched unpleasantly, turning the stars into thousands of parallel lines and Cal’s insides into three cups of warm butter. The stuff in front of them became the stuff behind them as the Currently Untitled leapt to several times the speed of light, and physics ceased to make very much in the way of sense.

Cal coughed his tongue out from the back of his throat, blinked his eyes back into position, and scooted forward and back in his chair until it was no longer giving him a wedgie. That all done, he unfastened his seatbelt and stood up.

It had taken him a while to get used to flying at greater than light speeds, as the fifteen-minute video Mech had made of him begging for death while vomiting into a wastepaper basket ably demonstrated.

Still, he wasn’t like that anymore. That sort of thing was all in the past.

It had to be… what? At least two weeks, he reckoned, since the video had been shot. Roughly that, anyway. It was hard to be sure, as the concept of ‘weeks’ didn’t really hold much water in deep space.

Much like that wastepaper basket hadn’t held vomit, in fact.

He took a moment to get his balance, hampered a little by the lack of one boot. Once he had, he looked up into the vents and pipework that covered much of the bridge’s ceiling. “Splurt? Buddy? You there? You and I need to have a little talk, mister,” he said. “Where were you? We needed you out there.”

“Didn’t you, like, tell him not to come?” said Miz.

“Yes, I told him not to come,” said Cal, with a tone that suggested this was a stupid question. “But since when has that ever stopped him? You know Splurt. He always comes. Even when I don’t want him to—especially when I don’t want him to—he just comes.”

He pointed in the direction of the corridor. “I tell him to stay, and then I go out and I know one thing for certain. Splurt’s coming. That’s what he does. Splurt never stays. Splurt comes,” Cal continued.

His voice trailed off as he heard the words coming out of his mouth.

“Shizz. That woman in the restaurant may have had a point,” he acknowledged, clicking his tongue against his teeth. “That does sound kind of sexual.”

He shuddered, then looked up again. “Splurt? Where the fonk are you?”

“Master Splurt is in his room, sir,” Kevin intoned.

“Oh, he is, is he?” said Cal. “Well, we’ll just see what… Wait. Splurt has a room?”

“Technically not, sir,” Kevin admitted. “But given that we have company present, I felt it sounded better than, ‘He’s in the kitchen cupboard.’”

“Good call,” Cal conceded. “But what the fonk is he doing in… Shizz. Wait.”

Company present .

With all the excitement of their escape, Cal had completely forgotten the reason for it. He turned to the guest chairs to find Tyrra rocking back and forth, her arms wrapped around herself, her razor-sharp teeth grinding together.

“Yeah, I know, kid. Loren’s flying has that effect on all of us,” he said.

“Wait, ain’t that Junta’s kid?” Mech asked.

“Tyrra,” Cal confirmed. The girl flinched a fraction at the sound of her name, but continued to rock and stare.

“She kicked the shizz out of you a while back, right?” asked Mech, smirking slightly.

“No, she did not! I mean, sure, she got in a few good punches and battering-rammed me in the balls a couple of times. But, ultimately, I kicked the shizz out of her,” Cal said.

Even as the words came out of his mouth, he suspected they didn’t paint him in quite the light he hoped they would. He doubled down, though, and added a, “So, there,” for good measure.

“You know she’s a child, right,” said Mech.

“She’s an alien shark child,” Cal corrected.

“Still a child,” Mech insisted.

“No. I disagree. It’s not the same,” Cal countered, although he was floundering a little. “The nasty little bedge tried to break my neck. She totally had it coming.”

He remembered for the second time in as many minutes that Tyrra was right there in the room. He flashed her one of his most winning smiles as he squatted next to her and patted her on the knee. “Hey, you!” he said. “Uh, just go right ahead and ignore that stuff I just said, OK? Will you do that for me?”

Tyrra rocked back and forth, her eyes staring blankly through him.

“I’m going to go ahead and take that as a yes,” Cal said.

Miz turned in her chair. “What’s wrong with her?” she wondered.

Cal snapped his fingers in front of Tyrra’s face a couple of times. Her eyes darted around as if searching for the source of the sound, but never quite finding it.

“I have absolutely no clue,” Cal admitted. “Kevin? You got any ideas?”

“Oh! Yes! I do as it happens. I’m very glad you asked, sir,” the AI replied, excitement coloring his voice. “So… You know wigwams…?”

“Specifically about this current situation,” said Cal, cutting him off before he could go any further.

Kevin’s voice flattened out. “Ah. I see,” he said. “Then no, sir. No ideas about this, I’m afraid.”

Loren appeared at Cal’s side. Tyrra flinched when Loren placed a hand on her forehead. “She’s burning up.”

“She’s sick?” Cal asked. “I mean, obviously she’s sick, but… What is it?”

Loren shook her head. “I don’t know.”

Cal beckoned to Mech. “Hey, big guy, how about you use that thing and find out?”

Mech frowned. “What thing?”

“You know. The thing,” said Cal, waving some imaginary device around in front of the Symmorium girl. “The woo-woo thing.”

Mech glanced around at Miz and Loren in turn. “Either of you two got any idea what the fonk he’s talking about?”

“The thing. The box. The space medicine box,” said Cal. He made another woo-woo noise and gave Mech a look that suggested everything should now be crystal clear. Mech’s own expression, however, said otherwise.

“The thing. The box,” Cal repeated. “The… You know. The fonking thing !”

“What fonking thing ?”

Cal sighed. “Jesus. OK. So, just shut up and listen, OK?”

He mimed holding something around the size of a brick. “It’s a box. It’s a little box that goes woo-woo and tells you what’s wrong with someone. Yes? Sound familiar? You point it, and it’s like, woo-woo. Bing ! AIDS,” he explained. He frowned momentarily. “I mean, I don’t know why I jumped straight to AIDS and not, like, flu there, but that’s not the point.”

“Oh, you mean like a medical scanner?” Mech asked.

“Yes! Exactly,” said Cal, clapping his hands together and pointing up at the cyborg. “A medical scanner.”

“We ain’t got one.”

Cal threw his arms up. “Well, why the fonk not?” he demanded.

Mech shrugged. “Didn’t think we really needed one.”

“Oh, and did we need space bagpipes, Mech? Was that high on our list of must-haves?” Cal asked.

“It’s called a Blufflebag. And, if you must know, I wanted one for a long time,” said Mech, folding his arms across his chest defensively.

“Also, what the fonk are you talking about, ‘I didn’t think we needed one’ ?” Cal continued. “We always need one.”

He pointed to Miz. “She was dead for a week, we’re all literally getting shot, beaten, or blown up on a weekly basis, and you recently poured my insides back into me using a mop bucket. You ask me, we should probably have one each.”

“Where’s her dad?” asked Miz, showing uncharacteristic amounts of interest in the situation. This wasn’t really saying much, as showing any interest whatsoever was out of character for Mizette, but it did not go unnoticed by Cal and the others.

“I don’t know,” Cal admitted.

Mech clanked a little closer. “He wasn’t on the station?”

“No,” said Cal. “I mean… I don’t think so.” He shot Loren a sideways glance and saw the same expression of dawning concern on her face. “I mean, I guess he might have been.”

“You didn’t check?” Mech asked.

Miz tutted. “So we, like, just kidnapped a kid,” she said. “Is that what’s happening now?”

“What? No! We didn’t kidnap her,” Cal objected. He patted Tyrra’s leg and smiled reassuringly. “We didn’t kidnap you. OK, honey? It’s important you say that, if anyone asks.”

Tyrra’s chair squeaked as she rocked. A dribble of drool hung like transparent string from her lower jaw.

“Atta girl,” Cal told her.

He straightened and put his hands on his hips. “So, first things first. We find Junta.”

“Found him, sir,” said Kevin.

Cal looked up. “Well, that was easier than I thought. Where is he?”

“He’s dead, sir.”

Cal hesitated, then leaned forward and placed his hands over the sides of Tyrra’s head, roughly where he guessed her ears would be. “He’s dead ?” he whispered. “How can he be dead?”

“Well, by dying, sir,” Kevin explained. “He was alive, then he stopped being alive, and now—”

“Jesus, Kevin. I get that part,” Cal said. Despite his hands clamping her around the head, Tyrra hadn’t stopped rocking, forcing Cal to rock with her. “How did he die?”

“The same way most of the Symmorium died, sir,” said Kevin. “At the hands of Zertex and the Earth Defense Initiative organization that you inadvertently created when—”

Cal clamped his hands more firmly over Tyrra’s ears and sang, “Lalalalalala!” until Kevin shut the fonk up. “OK, we don’t have to go into all that right now. And, so we’re all clear, the key word there was ‘inadvertently.’”

He shot Loren a look. “That means ‘not on purpose,’ right?”

Loren nodded to confirm.

“Right. Exactly. Inadvertently,” said Cal. He gave a nod of his own. “Agreed.”

“What about her mom?” asked Mizette.

“Yes! Her mom. Good thinking, Miz,” said Cal.

“One moment,” said Kevin.

A moment passed.

“Also dead.”

“Damn it,” Cal muttered. “Any aunts? Uncles? Kindly neighbors?”

“Actually, I have been able to trace one aunt on her father’s side, sir,” Kevin confirmed. “Haruunta. Records indicate she’s Tyrra’s Shoalmother. Sort of the equivalent of a Godparent where you come from. Technically, she would be classed as Tyrra’s next-of-kin.”

“Well alright!” said Cal, brightening.

“Were she not also dead.”

“Shizz. Seriously?” Loren groaned.

Miz shifted in her chair. “Poor kid,” she said, then she realized that this might come across as some sort of expression of interest, so shrugged and added, “Or whatever,” just to be on the safe side.

“They can’t all be dead, can they?” Cal demanded, adopting a tone that suggested this was some sort of personal affront to him. “How can they all be dead?”

“Technically, I can’t say with absolute certainty that they’re definitely dead, sir,” Kevin admitted.

“Aha!”

“Just that they were all vaporized by advanced military weaponry.”

“Oh.”

“And then set on fire.”

Cal sighed. “I mean, I guess that’s pretty definitive.”

“So, how many Symmorium are left, exactly?” asked Mech, his neck whirring as he looked up.

“Exactly, sir? That’s hard to say,” Kevin replied.

“What about death certificates?” asked Cal.

Everyone looked at him, but only Loren voiced what they were all thinking. “Huh?”

“You know? Death certificates. The certificate you get when you die,” Cal explained.

“You people give out certificates just for dying?” asked Mech. “Why the fonk would you do that? Ain’t like it’s an achievement.”

“Is it one of those, like, everyone gets a medal things?” asked Miz. “You know, for people too lame to actually win anything?”

“It’s not that kind of certificate,” Cal said. “They don’t put you on a fonking podium and present you with it. It’s just a way of keeping record of who has died.”

“I’m afraid the Symmorium didn’t much go in for that sort of thing, sir,” Kevin said. “What records I am able to access are mostly incomplete. I could give you an estimate of how many remain alive, if that’s any use?”

“Go for it,” Mech instructed.

“Very good, sir.”

Kevin took a moment to run some calculations. If they listened carefully, they could hear him whispering as he worked it out.

Finally, he made the announcement. “Right. So. Roughly—and I stress, these are only rough figures, sir. Roughly…”

He double-checked his math.

“None, sir.”

Everyone on the bridge, with the exception of Tyrra, looked up.

“None?” Cal spluttered.

“Wait. No. I tell a lie. It’s not that bad,” Kevin said. “Sorry. I miscalculated. I forgot to carry a one.”

There was a collective sigh of relief.

“One, sir,” Kevin announced. “There is one Symmorium left.”

All eyes crept slowly to Tyrra.

“And, if I may be so bold, sir,” Kevin continued. “She does not look in very good shape.”

Six

Cal’s history with the Symmorium was a short but complex one. Other than the crew and the then space president, the Symmorium was the first alien race he’d ever encountered. Commander Junta’s had been the very first face he’d seen on the screen of their original ship, the Shatner . It had not been a nice face, but then Junta hadn’t been a particularly nice guy.

On that first encounter, way out in deep space, Cal and Junta had been enemies. By the second encounter, though…

Well, technically they’d been enemies that time, too.

And, on the third encounter, Junta had encouraged his daughter to headbutt Cal in the testicles.

But the fourth encounter. By the fourth encounter, when Cal helped save the Symmorium god from being blown to bits, Junta had afforded Cal a sort of grudging admiration.

Sure, he hid it well. So well, in fact, that no one—not even those closest to him, or even Junta himself—knew it was there, but Cal was sure of it.

Then, later, when Space Team had saved Junta, Tyrra, and the rest of their ship’s crew from a Zertex attack, that grudging admiration had become something not unlike friendship.

It wasn’t exactly like friendship, either, Cal would admit. He didn’t, for example, know when Junta’s birthday was, or even if he had a second name. Junta also appeared to regard him with complete disdain. But the point was that their relationship wasn’t entirely unlike friendship. It had passing similarities to friendship and that, for Cal, was close enough.

Yes, Junta had been an alright guy. The Symmorium, in general, were a decent bunch, once you got past the gruff demeanor and terrifying outward appearance. He’d liked them.

And now they were dead.

And, although he was going to great pains to gloss over this part entirely, it was probably his fault.

Cal, Mech, and Loren had retreated to the kitchen to discuss the situation. Miz, to everyone’s surprise, had volunteered to stay behind and keep an eye on Tyrra. Sure, she’d phrased it as, “Ugh, do I have to come?” but they’d all figured out what she really meant.

Loren and Mech stood on one side of the table, watching Cal who sat on the bench across from them.

“What?” he asked, his voice muffled by the volume of food in his mouth. He stabbed a toffee-coated banana with his space fork, smeared it into a blob of cream, then crammed it in alongside the rest. “I eat when I’m stressed.”

“That is a lot of food,” Mech pointed out.

Cal scowled. “It’s a very stressful situation.”

His mouth chomped, slowly masticating its contents. From the pained expression on his face and the way his breathing came in erratic whistles through his nose, it appeared to be quite hard work.

“Anyway, it’s only, like, half a pie,” he managed to add.

“Half a large pie,” Loren said.

“That’s just semantics,” Cal argued, waving his fork dismissively.

He swallowed too soon, spent a few seconds going, “Hrng!” and hitting himself in the chest, then went back to work on the giant half-pie.

“Can we at least talk while you eat?” sighed Mech. “Or do we have to stand here waiting for you to finish?”

“I’m never going to finish,” Cal told him. “I’ve got, like, six of these queued up in the machine. Shoot. What are we looking at?”

Loren watched him shovel another clump of Banoffee Pie into his mouth. “Diabetes?” she hazarded.

Cal paused, mid-chew, glanced down at himself, then sucked in his gut and swallowed. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, set his fork down, and pushed the plate away.

“I would have burned that right off,” he offered as some sort of defense, then he ran his tongue over his teeth, burped gently, and leaned back in his chair, temporarily forgetting he was sitting on a bench.

“I’m OK. I’m OK,” he said, jumping up from where he landed on the floor. He clapped his hands once, placed them so high on his hips they were practically on his ribcage, then let them flop to his side.

He shot Loren the briefest of looks, checking if she’d seen any of what just happened. Annoyingly, she had. Even more annoyingly, she looked like she was struggling not to laugh.

Fonk.

He casually crossed his arms and leaned his upper back against the wall, playing it cool.

“Uh, are you OK, man?” Mech asked.

“Fine. Totally fine. Why?”

“You’re acting kinda weird,” Mech told him.

“Maybe you’re acting weird, Mech?” Cal retorted. “Did you ever consider that?”

Mech shook his head. “No.”

“Exactly,” said Cal, sniffing triumphantly. “Agreed.”

“Agreed? What the fonk is ‘agreed’? What are you agreeing to?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Cal said. “Let’s move on. We have a problem. That girl out there is the last of the Symmorium. They’re all dead.”

Mech glanced around the kitchen. “Who the fonk are you recapping for?” he wondered. “We were both there. We know.”

“Just wanted to make sure we’re all on the same page,” Cal said. “What else do we know? She’s—and I don’t mean to sound mean here—she’s practically a vegetable.”

Loren sat on the bench across from where Cal stood. “I can’t imagine what she must have seen. What she’s been through.”

“What the fonk was she doing on that station?” Mech wondered. “It’s a long way from Symmorium space. Or what used to be Symmorium space, I guess.”

Loren snapped her fingers. “Wait. Those guards. They were looking for something. They kept asking her where it was, what she’d done with it.”

“Right. Right,” said Cal, who had been so wound up about confessing his feelings for Loren at that point that he hadn’t really been paying attention to anything else going on. “What was it again?”

Loren shrugged. “I don’t know. They didn’t say. They weren’t messing around, though, so I guess it was something important.”

Cal sucked in his cheeks while he thought. “A diamond?”

“Sorry?”

“It could’ve been a diamond. I’m just thinking of things it might have been,” Cal explained.

Loren nodded slowly. “I mean, I guess it could’ve been. Or something else.”

“Or something else,” Cal acknowledged. He realized that this would be the perfect juncture at which to say, ‘Agreed,’ but the novelty had worn off a bit, so he didn’t bother. “A diamond or something else. Let’s assume it’s one of those two.”

Mech muttered quietly, then nodded. “Sure. Let’s go with one of those. But does it matter what they were looking for? We got bigger problems. Like what the fonk we’re going to do with her.”

Cal’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Are there orphanages in space?” he asked. “You know, like—”

“Space orphanages,” said Loren. “We get it. And yes.”

“Well, alright then,” Cal began.

“But most of them are run by Zertex,” Loren added. “And they’re the better ones.”

“Yeah,” Mech agreed. “The others ain’t so much orphanages as child labor camps.”

“She’s a sturdy girl. Besides, a little hard work never hurt anyone,” said Cal, but the expression on his face contradicted the words coming out of his mouth. He sighed. “OK, so it’s a no to the space orphanages. She has no family that we know of. I doubt she has any friends because, you know, she’s a genuinely unpleasant person…”

“We could keep her,” Mech suggested.

“She’s not a stray puppy, Mech. We can’t just keep her,” Cal said.

“I didn’t mean like a fonking pet. I meant, I don’t know, maybe she could stay with us. We could look after her.”

“We can barely look after ourselves,” Cal reminded him. He pointed out into the corridor. “And did you see her? She’s nuts.”

“She’s suffered a trauma,” Loren said. “I think it’s some kind of shock.”

“Exactly. And now she’s nuts,” Cal said. “Unless either of you has some kind of PhD in Symmorium Psychiatry you’ve never thought to bring up, she needs a lot more help than we can give her.”

Mech grunted begrudgingly. “You may have a point.”

Cal sat on the bench opposite Loren, caught himself reaching for his pie, then pushed it away again. “So, what do we do with her? What do we do with the last Symmorium in the universe?”

Kevin’s voice emerged from the ceiling. “There is, of course, a more pressing matter, sir.”

Cal and the others all looked up. “Fonk, what now?” Cal groaned. “Is the ship on fire? Have we flown into a black hole?”

“Not that I’m aware of, sir.”

That was something, at least. Cal looked up. “Then what?”

“How did it go?”

“How did what go?”

“You know,” said Kevin. “The…” He made a sound like someone whistling quietly through their teeth. Which was impressive, considering his complete lack of teeth. Or, for that matter, mouth.

Cal flicked his eyes to the others. They both looked equally as confused as he felt.

“The what?”

“The…” Kevin made a coughing sound. “The old… you know.”

Cal closed his eyes. “Kevin, what the fonk are you talking about?”

“The date, sir. How was the big date?”

Mech frowned. “The what?”

“They were on a date, sir,” Kevin gushed, with teenage-girl levels of breathless enthusiasm. “Master Cal and Mistress Loren.”

“It wasn’t a date!” Loren protested.

“No, it definitely wasn’t… Well, it was kind of a date,” Cal said, then he caught Loren’s look and hurriedly backpedaled. “But not, like, a date date, obviously. It wasn’t a date date.”

“Are you sure?” asked Kevin. “Because I distinctly recall you saying it was a date when you were running through your speech, sir.”

Loren raised an eyebrow. A beautiful, perfect eyebrow.

“Speech?”

“What? No. Haha! What? It wasn’t a speech ,” Cal said, jumping up. He snorted out a laugh, rolled his eyes, then shook his head and made a tutting sound for quite a long time. “Speech!” he chuckled, after a while. “No. Uh-uh. I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

“I could replay it for you, if you’d like, sir,” Kevin said. “I recorded the whole thing.”

“No! Kevin, shut the fonk up,” Cal yelped. “Delete that recording. That’s an order.”

“Very good, sir,” Kevin replied. There was a pause, then he said, “Beep.”

Cal glared up at the ceiling. “Did you actually delete it, or did you just go ‘beep’?”

“Yes.”

“To which one?” Cal demanded.

There was a pause. Kevin’s voice, when it came, was a slightly mysterious whisper.

“Beep .”

Before Cal could probe any further, a metal hand clamped on his shoulder. He turned to find Mech grinning at him. The cyborg’s other hand was on Loren’s shoulder. His neck whirred as he looked back and forth between them.

“So, look at you two lovebirds,” he said. “Man, if I had a heart, it would be warming up like a motherfonker right now.”

“That’s not… It’s not like that,” Loren insisted.

Cal’s head movements tried to agree and disagree at the same time, which resulted in it drawing a vague oblong shape in the air. “Exactly. It’s not like that,” he said.

“They did kiss, though,” said Kevin.

Mech’s eyes blazed with delight. His grin widened. “They did ?”

“Yes, sir. I was watching.”

“You were fonking watching?!” Loren spluttered.

“He watches everything,” said Cal.

“But I watched that with particular interest,” Kevin added. “I watched that very closely.”

“OK, now you’re just making it sound creepy,” Cal said, looking up. “I was trying to help you out there, buddy, and you blew it.”

Kevin hesitated. Then:

“Beeeep .”

Mech squeezed Cal’s shoulder. It fonking hurt.

“Well this is exciting ,” he said, his grin growing as he watched them both wriggle uncomfortably. “You two. Dating .” He gave a little shudder of delight. “I mean, there ain’t no way this can possibly go wrong.”

“We’re not dating. It was one date,” said Loren. She winced. “And it wasn’t even a date.”

“Not a date date,” Cal agreed. He realized his head was still drawing circles in the air, and forced it to stop. “But, listen, you can’t tell Miz, OK?”

“Fonk, no. Don’t tell Miz,” said Loren.

Mech snorted. “Yeah, like I want to be the one to have that fonking conversation.”

Cal smiled weakly. “I mean, she’ll be fine with it. She’ll be totally fine with it,” he said. “But for the love of God, don’t tell her under any circumstances.”

“I ain’t gonna say a word,” Mech said. “But she’ll find out. You know she’ll find out.”

“She won’t,” said Loren. “There’s nothing to find out.”

There was a sound from over by the kitchen door, making all three of them freeze. Their eyes were the only parts that remained moving. Their eyes all darted between each other, panic growing behind them.

At last, Cal cleared his throat and spoke. “Miz, honey? Is that you?”

The reply, when it came, was flat and measured, and dropped the temperature in the kitchen by a full degree. “The kid’s acting weird,” she said. “You’d better come and see.”

“Uh, sure. We’ll be right there,” Cal said.

They all listened as she thumped off along the corridor, then jumped when she slammed the door to the bridge shut behind her. Considering that the door was of the automatic sliding variety, this did not bode well.

“You think she heard any of that?” Cal whispered.

“I think she heard all of that,” replied Mech, releasing his grip on their shoulders.

Loren looked over at the open door. “Poor Miz.”

“Never mind, ‘poor Miz,’” said Cal. “Poor us. She’ll fonking kill us.”

A splintering sound from the kitchen cupboard interrupted the flow of conversation. Cal, Loren, and Mech watched in silence as a gooey green blob shot through the cupboard door, rolled in a wide circle around them, then returned via the same hole to its original starting point.

They waited to see if Splurt was going to do anything else, then eventually decided that he wasn’t.

Cal exhaled slowly. “I don’t even have the headspace right now to wonder what that was about,” he muttered.

He smoothed down his shirt, ran his fingers through his hair, then kicked off his one remaining boot in case he had to make a run for it. All that taken care of, he took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and aimed himself at the door.

“Right, then,” he announced. “Let’s go do this.”

Seven

Mizette’s hurt feelings, it turned out, weren’t the most pressing problem on the bridge.

It had taken Mech a couple of solid tugs to get the door open, then he had stood there staring in wonder, completely blocking the view of Loren and Cal behind him.

Once he’d eventually stepped through into the bridge, making room for the others to follow, all three of them had stopped again.

“I thought you said she was acting weird,” Cal whispered.

Miz, who was slouching in her chair and scowling at the rest of the ship in general, gave a little grunt. “Yeah. And she is.”

“She’s floating,” Cal pointed out.

Miz’s eyes flicked to the middle of the room, where Tyrra was levitating three feet off the floor, her head lulling forward, her arms outstretched like some kind of shark-faced-space-Christ.

“And what? You’re saying that isn’t weird?” Miz said.

“Oh, no. I mean, it’s definitely weird,” Cal said, side-stepping cautiously around Tyrra, keeping as much distance from her as possible. “It’s just… It’s more weird than I was expecting, I guess. I thought she was maybe, like… I don’t know. Singing, or something.”

Miz’s scowl deepened. “Why would she be singing?”

“Why would she be fonking floating ?” Cal countered.

“I don’t know. That’s why I came to get you,” Miz said. Her eyes went from Cal to Loren and her expression became one of utter contempt, then she tutted and turned her chair to face the viewscreen, and the glittering trails of the onrushing stars.

Cal opened his mouth to say something to her, but Loren caught his eye and shook her head. He wrestled with himself for a moment, then nodded in agreement.

“Mech, what are your scanner doohickeys telling you?”

Mech took a couple of steps forward, consulting the readouts on the sensor panel in his arm. Cal took the opportunity to stand close behind him, using the cyborg as a giant not-quite-human shield.

“I ain’t getting much,” Mech said. “Besides the fact that she’s floating, which we can all see.”

“Is she conscious?” asked Loren. She was also keeping her distance, but squatted down to get a better look at Tyrra’s face. “Her eyes are closed.”

Cal tapped Mech on the arm. “Try waking her up.”

“What? No. You try waking her up,” Mech said.

“You’re closer,” Cal argued.

“I ain’t waking her up,” Mech said. He shifted on his huge feet. “Anyway, ain’t it supposed to be dangerous?”

“That’s sleepwalking,” Cal said. “She’s sleepfloating. It’s a totally different thing. Just wake her up.”

“You fonking wake her up!”

Cal sighed. “Jesus, she’s a little girl. Don’t be such a coward.”

“Man, you are literally cowering behind me right now,” Mech pointed out. “I ain’t the one who’s scared here.”

“I’m not scared ,” Cal said, snorting incredulously at the suggestion. “Fine. Know what? That’s just fine,” he said, stepping out from the cyborg’s shadow. “I’m not scared of… whatever Exorcist shizz is happening here.”

He shuffled incrementally closer to Tyrra, and decided that this was quite close enough. Her body was trembling as if the effort of staying aloft was taking its toll.

Cal looked around at Loren. She nodded encouragingly.

“Right, then,” he muttered, then he ducked a little lower so he could look her in the face. “Uh, Tyrra? Honey? You OK?”

He waited for a response.

“Hello?” he said, trying again. “Wake up, sweetheart, you’re hovering.”

A thought struck him and he straightened. “Are we sure the Symmorium don’t all hover when they sleep?”

“We’re sure, sir,” said Kevin. “This is really rather unusual.”

“You can say that again,” whispered Loren.

Cal sucked in his bottom lip, then clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth a few times. “OK, I have a plan,” he announced. “Mech. Nudge her.”

“That’s your fonking plan?” Mech snapped.

“Well, can you think of a better one?” He cupped a hand around his mouth. “Tyrra! Wake up!” he barked. “See? Nothing. You have to nudge her. It’s the only way.”

“You nudge her.”

“Oh, for Kroysh’s sake,” Loren muttered, storming past them. She stopped directly in front of the floating girl, looked her over, then placed a hand on her shoulder. “Hey. Tyrra,” she said, giving the shoulder a little shake.

Tyrra’s eyes snapped open so suddenly that Cal and Mech collided with one another as they both jumped back.

“Jesus!” Cal shrieked. He placed his hands on his thighs and breathed, composing himself. “She almost gave me a fonking heart attack.”

He realized that Mech had raised one of his arms to blast the girl to pieces, and slapped him on it. “Put that thing away.”

Mech quickly dropped his arm. “Uh, instinctive response,” he explained.

“That’s your instinctive response to a little girl opening her eyes, sir?” asked Kevin. “Shoot her in the face?”

“I didn’t shoot her in her fonking face,” Mech pointed out. “I didn’t shoot her in her anything.”

Cal raised an eyebrow. “And if Loren hadn’t been standing in front of her?”

Mech’s jaw creaked, but he said nothing. Cal rocked on his heels.

“I thought so.” He patted Mech on the back. “It’s OK, big guy, we all panic sometimes. Even me.”

“Oh, you mean like right then when you screamed and said you were having a heart attack?” Mech snapped.

“Almost having a heart attack, Mech. Almost,” Cal clarified.

“And if you didn’t have those healing abilities you have?”

Cal’s jaw creaked.

“Touché,” he said, then they both turned their attention to Loren and Tyrra.

Tyrra continued to float in the air. Loren was still in front of her but had removed the hand from the girl’s shoulder. It was raised slightly in front of her, held between them like a defensive barrier, ready to throw itself into action if the need arose.

“Well?” Cal whispered to her.

Loren half-turned. “Well, what?”

“Is she awake?”

“I don’t know,” Loren admitted.

“Well, her eyes are open,” Cal pointed out. “Do this.”

He raised a hand and made a frantic waving motion. “Do this in front of her face.”

Loren did that in front of her face.

“Anything?” asked Cal.

“You’re looking at her exactly the same as I am,” Loren said. “No, she didn’t react.”

“Damn it, that usually always works,” Cal tutted.

“This is weird, man,” Mech whispered. “This shizz is creepy.”

“It’s not ‘creepy,’” Cal said. “It’s just a floating child. OK? Just a regular, everyday floating child who may or may not be possessed by space Satan.”

Miz sighed forcibly. It was a sigh that said a lot of things, none of them particularly complimentary about those around her.

“Just, like, get out of the way,” she said, marching over and pushing Loren aside with more force than was strictly necessary.

Cal raised a hand in a calming gesture. “Miz. Honey. Don’t hurt the kid, OK? Ripping her insides out through her throat will not help us figure out what’s wrong with her.”

“Technically, it might, sir,” Kevin pointed out. “You can learn a lot from an autopsy.”

“Well, sure. OK,” Cal conceded. “But unless we can put all the pieces back together again afterward, it’s not going to help get her better, is it? So, Miz, just step back and leave her…”

The words stopped coming when Miz knelt in front of the girl, bringing them both to the same height. She placed a furry hand on Tyrra’s cheek and caressed it gently. Her voice, when it came, was a soft, soothing whisper.

“Hey. Hey, it’s OK. You’re OK.”

Cal and Mech’s eyes met, shared their mutual surprise and asked a few questions of each other, before both men shrugged in response.

Miz brought up her other hand so she was cupping both of Tyrra’s cheeks. She held the girl gently, gazing deep into her black, shark-like eyes. “Can you hear me, kid?” she asked. “We’re going to take care of you, OK? Like, no one is going to hurt you. You’re safe now.”

Something swam in the dark pools of Tyrra’s eyes. Her mouth twitched.

“S-safe?”

“Uh-huh,” Miz confirmed, stroking one of her cheeks with a thumb. It was the most tender and caring Cal had ever seen Miz be with… Well, with anyone. “You’re safe. We got you, kid. No one is going to hurt you.”

Tyrra’s face thawed. That was the best way Cal could think to describe it. The muscles relaxed, just a fraction, and her features went from looking like a photograph to suddenly being alive.

“Safe,” she repeated, and then her mouth opened, her stomach tightened, and a series of powerful retches shuddered through her floating body.

Miz tried to hold on to the girl, but the force of her retching became too violent. She stepped back, the fur on the back of her neck rising as Tyrra thrashed and kicked in the air.

“What’s happening to her?” Miz barked. “What’s going on?”

“Fonked if I know,” said Cal, taking cover behind Mech again.

As he did, an alarm chirped from Mech’s forearm. He studied the scanner, then stumbled back, almost crushing Cal underfoot.

“Ow! Watch it!”

“We got an energy surge,” Mech announced. “Everyone back. She’s gonna blow.”

Miz whirled around. “Blow? What, up ?”

“Well, mostly out , I think,” Mech said. “But sure, up too.”

“No,” said Miz. “Make it stop.”

Mech frowned. “How?”

“Well, like, I don’t know! You’re supposed to be the brainy one, or whatever!”

Cal snorted. “He’s the brainy one? Then we’re in bigger trouble than I thought,” he said, then he grinned and raised a hand to receive a high-five from nobody in particular. “Am I right?”

He held the hand there until it was clear everyone was going to leave him hanging, and then lowered it again. Damn. Where was Splurt when he needed him.

“OK, maybe that wasn’t the right time,” he admitted. He pointed at the thrashing Tyrra. “Mech, do something.”

“I already told you, I don’t know what to do!” Mech barked. “This ain’t like anything I’ve ever seen bef—”

Tyrra vomited something out. Or, more accurately, the thing that had been inside Tyrra vomited her off.

She flew several feet backward and flopped to the floor, sobbing and babbling, her smooth gray skin slick with sweat. Miz rushed to the girl’s side, and despite some initial flailing and snapping jaws, quickly surrendered and let Miz pull her into a hug.

Miz’s arms wrapped around the girl’s heaving body, holding her close. She rocked back and forth, whispering, “I got you. I got you,” soothingly in her ear. There was nothing kind or soothing about her gaze, though, as it locked onto the thing that now hovered in the space Tyrra had been occupying.

The thing that had emerged from inside the girl looked almost exactly like a bowling ball, aside from the fact that it was hovering in the center of the room and emitting a pulsing glow that cast a shimmering radiance across the bridge. Size and shape-wise, though, it was more or less bang-on.

The ball cycled through a range of colors. Possibly all the colors, in fact. It ebbed through shades of sunrises and sunsets, of summer skies and of crisp fall leaves. From somewhere—not in his ear, nor in his head, but somewhere even deeper—Cal heard the sound of distant whale song.

Eventually, the color scheme settled on half a dozen shades of green and cycled so slowly between them that it was almost impossible to notice each change.

Cal whistled quietly. “I have puked up some crazy shizz in my time,” he mumbled. “But this beats all of it.”

He gave this a little more thought.

“Well, most of it.”

He took a shuffled step closer and peered into the ball’s brilliant glow. Despite its brightness, it didn’t hurt his eyes, or leave even a whisper of an imprint on them when he blinked. As he stared at it, he could swear he felt it stare back at him, too.

“Is that what I think it is?” he whispered.

Mech nodded slowly, the sensor screen on his arm flooded with data. “Yeah, man. Seems like it.”

Cal smacked his lips together. “OK. Cards on the table? I have no idea what that thing is,” he admitted.

“What? Yeah, you do. Look at it,” said Mech. “You’ve seen it before. You know what that is.”

Cal took a brief recess to rummage around in his memory, then shook his head. “I really don’t,” he said. “A glowy green thing? Is that it? Is it a glowy green thing?”

“No,” said Loren, stepping forward. “I mean, yes, obviously, but…”

She raised a hand. Flecks of green lights gathered like baby fireflies around her fingertips and tickled across her palm.

“It’s the Sentience,” she whispered. “This thing is the Symmorium Sentience.”

Loren looked back over her shoulder. “Tyrra wasn’t sick,” she explained. “She’d swallowed a god.”

Cal cocked his head. “Shizz. You’re right. Now I remember it.” He frowned. “Is it just me, or did it get smaller?”

Mech grunted. “Well, considering they had to build a fonking space station to contain it last time, yeah. Yeah, I’d say it got smaller.”

“But it’s friendly, right?” Cal asked. “I mean, we saved it’s life before. It has to be on our side.”

The light from the Sentience pulsed, becoming blindingly, blisteringly bright. The faint whining of the Untitled’s engines spluttered into silence. One by one, the ship’s lights clunked off, until only the shimmering aura of green remained.

Cal’s eyes darted around them. When he spoke, his breath came as a cloud of white vapor.

“Or, you know, maybe not.”

Eight

“What do we do?” Cal asked, his voice muffled by the darkness. And, to a greater extent, by his own fist, which he was anxiously gnawing on as he shuffled from foot to foot.

The temperature inside the bridge had plummeted. Swirls of frost bloomed on every metal surface and misted the viewscreen. Cal hugged himself and wriggled his toes inside his socks, trying to keep warm.

“I got no idea,” replied Mech. His own towering frame was developing the same delicate icy patterns as every other metal thing in the room. He ran a finger down his chest, leaving a trail that quickly frosted over again.

“K-Kevin, can you p-put the heating on?” Cal asked, shivering.

Kevin didn’t respond.

“Kevin? You there?” Cal asked, the fog of his breath a luminous green in the glow of the Sentience. “H-hello?”

Loren backed up to her console and tapped a couple of keys. “Controls are dead,” she announced. “I guess Kevin’s down, too.”

“It killed Kevin!” Cal yelped. “Th-that thing k-killed Kevin!”

He gave a nod of encouragement. “Get it, Mech.”

Mech scowled. “What?”

“Go get it. Show that f-fonk who’s b-boss.”

“Uh, no,” said Mech. “It’s a god. I ain’t taking on no damn god.”

“I will,” Miz hissed. She moved to get up, but Tyrra clung to her and sobbed into her fur, forcing her to stay on the floor.

“What if we all rush it at once?” Cal suggested. “And b-by ‘us all,’ I mostly mean Mech.”

“Already told you, man. Ain’t happening. It’s too powerful to fonk with.”

“Assertion: Rejected. ”

The voice of the Symmorium Sentience did not enter their heads via the traditional method. In many ways, it didn’t enter their heads at all. It felt more like the words were exiting their heads, like they’d been there inside them the whole time and were only now making themselves known.

“My power has left me ,” the voice continued. “My end is imminent. Soon, I shall share the same fate as the Symmorium. As my children .”

The next word rose as a bubble of fear inside the heads of everyone listening.

“Extinction .”

“S-sorry to hear that, you’re S-Sentienceness,” Cal said. “But do you think you m-might turn the heating up just a smidgeon? K-kind of fr-freezing my butt off here.”

“Assertion: Rejected ,” replied the Sentience. “I have no control over this vessel’s systems .”

“Well, you managed to s-switch it all off without t-too many problems,” Cal pointed out.

Loren prodded at a few more keys, then thumped a fist on the console. “I don’t think the systems are damaged. They’re just rebooting.”

“C-can they reb-boot faster?” Cal wondered, bouncing from foot to foot and hugging himself tightly. “Like bef-f-fore I f-freeze to d-death?”

Loren brushed a thin layer of ice from her chair, then sat in it. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Cal managed a single thumbs-up, then went back to hugging and slapping himself to encourage his blood to keep circulating.

“You claim to know me ,” spoke the Sentience. “You claim to have saved me once.”

Cal’s head bobbed up and down. Little flakes of frost fell from his eyebrows. “We d-did.”

“Assertion: Rejected ,” said the Sentience. “I do not know you . We have not met. ”

“W-we have.”

“Assertion: Impossible, ” insisted the Sentience. “My power is faded, but my knowledge remains. You are new to me. You are unknown. ”

Cal shrugged, but his body was trembling so violently that it was impossible to tell. “T-time sh-sh-shizz,” he offered in explanation. “D-different t-time l-lines, and holy fonk, it is cold! ”

“Almost got it,” Loren said.

“I must investigate, ” said the Sentience. “Do I have your permission? ”

“S-sure. Wh-whatever. Go for i-it.”

“Assertion: Appreciated, ” replied the Sentience, then Cal yelped in terror when it came streaking through the air toward him.

It hit him in the face, but while Cal had valiantly tried to brace himself for the impact, there wasn’t one. Instead, he coughed and gagged as the bowling ball-sized orb forced itself into his mouth, stretching and elongating as it slithered down his throat.

“Heimlich! Heimlich!” Cal rasped, for the second time in as many hours. Before anyone could jump to help him, though, the Sentience passed down through his throat and plopped into his stomach.

Cal stumbled back, tearing open the front of his shirt to get a better look. The skin there was tinged faintly green, like an anemic Incredible Hulk. The Sentience churned unpleasantly through his guts, and while Cal’s first instinct was to shove two fingers down his throat and vomit the fonker back up, the warmth that radiated from it felt like absolute bliss in the coldness of the bridge. Even if it did kind of make him want to pee himself.

And then, the warmth became more than something physical. It no longer filled Cal’s body, it filled his head. Filled his spirit. Filled his soul. He saw nothing and saw everything, both at the same time. He knew things he couldn’t know, shouldn’t know, and would completely forget in a handful of seconds. He learned all there was to learn as all the thoughts and knowledge of the Symmorium Sentience flooded him from top to bottom.

And not just its knowledge, its feelings, too. All its love, all its pain, all its loss, and sorrow, and joy, and fear, all thrashing around inside him.

He coughed, hacked, then crashed backward onto the floor, the taste of the Sentience still fresh on his tongue. If he’d had to describe it, he’d have said it tasted like old batteries. And, in keeping with most things, a bit like chicken.

“What the fonk?” he wheezed, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “What did you do that for?”

The Symmorium Sentience was hanging in the air again, its colors pulsing, Cal’s gastric juices evaporating off it as threads of steam.

“You gave permission ,” the Sentience said.

“Not to fonking violate me!” Cal protested. Mech offered him a hand and helped him to his feet. The cyborg’s metal frame was now almost completely frost-free.

“Hey, the lights are on,” said Cal, looking around the bridge.

Loren was standing by her console, which was back to being lit up like a Christmas tree. The viewscreen was back on, although still too fogged up to see through it clearly. The stars weren’t moving, though, so Cal assumed the ship wasn’t, either.

Cal glanced to the ceiling. “Kevin, you back with us, buddy?”

“Mostly, sir,” Kevin replied. “Some of my databanks are still rebooting, so I may not be as much use to you as I usually am.”

“Jesus, I can’t even imagine what that would look like,” Cal muttered.

“Sorry, sir?”

“Nothing, Kevin. Good to have you back with us,” Cal said. “Do we have engines?”

“Not yet, sir. I shall endeavor to bring them online at the earliest possible.”

Cal waited.

“Earliest possible what?”

“Sorry, sir. I think that word must be on one of the databanks that haven’t yet fully rebooted,” Kevin explained. “I’m sure, based on context, you can fill in the.”

Cal waited.

“Blanks?” he guessed.

“Hmm?”

“Fill in the blanks?”

“If you say so, sir.”

Cal shook his head, choosing not to get any more involved in the conversation than he already was. He looked over to Miz, who was now sitting in one of the guest chairs, with Tyrra propped up against her. “You guys OK?”

Miz glanced up from the girl, nodded once, shot the Sentience a positively evil look that, god or not, made Cal fear for its safety, then she turned her attention back to Tyrra.

“Right. So, we’re all good. Ish,” Cal said. He gestured to the Sentience. “And what about you? You get what you need in there?”

“Assertion: Accepted ,” said the Sentience. “Though I do not know you, you know me. You all know me. You were friends, when I needed you most. You saved me. ”

The voice sounded weaker, like the effort of burrowing through Cal’s innards had taken even more of a toll on the Sentience than it had on Cal.

“Save me again ,” it said, its voice pleading.

Miz hissed out a mirthless laugh. “Save you? Like, no way. You were totally killing this poor kid.”

“Assertion: Rejected, ” the Sentience said. “Tyrra is of the Symmorium. One of my children. The last, I fear. We sustain each other. We were attempting to return to my point of origin, that my power might return. That I might fully restore the Symmorium. ”

“Restore the Symmorium?” asked Cal. “You mean, like, bring them back?”

The Sentience pulsed faintly in response.

“Help me. Please ,” it said, its voice cracking with emotion that they all felt, rather than heard. “Save me, as you saved me once before. Help me restore the Symmorium. ”

“How?” asked Loren. “Where do we need to take you?”

“I… do not remember,” the Sentience said. “I have forgotten. ”

The orb fell silent. Cal sucked in his bottom lip, then spat it out again. “Well, that was careless,” he said.

Then, before he could say anything else, something flashed on the misted-up screen. Another something flashed close to it a moment later, followed by a third.

“What’s that?” Cal wondered.

“Shizz. Ships,” said Loren, checking her screen. “Incoming ships dropping out of warp.”

“Are they nice ships?” asked Cal, more hopefully than experience told him he had any real right to be.

“Zertex,” said Loren. “They must’ve tracked us somehow.”

“Since when could they track a ship going at warp speed?” Mech asked.

“It’s EDI technology, sir. From Earth,” Kevin said. “Rather clever, really. Zertex simply reverse-engineered it.”

“Ha! From Earth ,” said Cal. He grinned at Mizette. “Still think Mech’s the brainy one? Earth invented that thing.”

“But, like, you didn’t invent it,” Miz pointed out.

“Not me personally, maybe, but I’m from Earth, so… You know. It was kind of me.” He gave Mech a consolatory pat on the back. “Better luck next time, big guy.”

Miz rolled her eyes and tutted. Beside her, Tyrra’s cries had fallen into a sort of shocked mute silence, broken only occasionally by the odd throaty sob.

“Zertex ships locking weapons, sir,” Kevin announced.

Cal groaned. “Damn it. On us?”

“On us, sir, yes,” Kevin confirmed.

“Who the fonk else would they be locking weapons on?” Mech grunted.

“Indeed, sir. I did rather think that was something of a given.”

Cal gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “OK, OK, it was a long shot, I’ll give you that. Do we have engines yet?”

“Still working on it, sir.”

“Shizz. Shields?”

“No, sir.”

“No?!” Cal spluttered. “What do you mean, ‘no’?!”

Kevin hesitated. “Well, you know the word, ‘Yes,’ sir…?”

“I mean why don’t we have shields? Give us shields.”

“Forget the engines, sir?”

“Do both!” Cal yelped.

“Both engines?”

“Jesus Christ , Kevin,” Cal cried, clamping his hands on either side of his head. “I mean fix both the engines and the shields!”

“How many hands do you think I have, sir?” Kevin asked him. “It’s none, by the way, in case you were wondering. Which, if you ask me, makes the fact that I’m repairing anything even more impressive.”

“More ships incoming,” Loren warned, as three more flashes illuminated the frosted screen. “All locking on.”

Mech hurried for the exit in a chorus of rattling clanks. “Kevin, keep working on the engines,” he instructed. “I’ll go see what I can do about the shields.”

He jabbed a finger at Cal on the way past. “Buy us some time.”

“Buy you some time.” Cal nodded. “That, I can do.”

As Mech left the room, Cal pointed to Loren. “Hail them,” he said. “Put in a call to the lead ship.”

Loren glanced back at the glowing green orb hanging in the air. “What about the Sentience? We should hide it before they see.”

“Good point,” said Cal. “Uh, Sentience. Can you hide somewhere? Preferably somewhere that isn’t inside anyone’s digestive tract?”

The Sentience didn’t move. Its voice failed to make itself heard inside their heads.

“Hello?” Cal said. He waved a hand in front of the ball, just as he’d instructed Loren to do with Tyrra. The Sentience didn’t respond.

“Shizz, its batteries must be running low,” Cal groaned. Tentatively, he placed a hand on the orb, then hissed and drew back as a jolt of energy buzzed up his arm. “Fonk. No, that’s not going to work,” he said.

“They’re hailing us,” Loren said. “They’re saying we have ten seconds to respond, or they’ll blow us up.”

“Fonk, fonk, fonk. OK, think,” said Cal, looking around. “Hide it. How do I hide it?”

A thought struck him with such force he let out an involuntary yelp of surprise. Wrenching off his shirt, he draped it over the Symmorium Sentience, covering it completely. Its glow was still faintly visible through the dark material of the shirt, but it would have to do.

Cal casually leaned an elbow on the inexplicably hovering garment, smiled warmly at the viewscreen, then gave a nod.

“OK. Patch them through.”

“That’s it?” Loren hissed. “That’s how you’re hiding it?”

“Well, do you have any better ideas?” Cal demanded. “Because I’m all fonking ears!”

Loren’s eyes darted briefly around the bridge, then she sighed and faced front. “OK, here goes.”

At the flick of a switch, the screen changed. Quite what it changed to, exactly, was hard to tell, thanks to the layer of moisture vapor that still covered it.

Cal could make out the shape of what he could tell was a person, probably male, wearing something red. Beyond that, it was anyone’s guess. It might’ve been a Zertex officer, but then it just as easily might have been Santa Claus. There was no way to tell for sure.

“Unidentified vessel,” the voice boomed.

Cal cut it off before it could go any further.

“Wait. Wait. Hold up, we’ve got a bit of a tech situation going on here,” he explained. “Give us a second.”

“What’s wrong with your screen?” the voice demanded. It had a sneering, officious sort of tone that at once made Cal dislike the owner of it, and stirred some distant memory tucked away at the back of his brain.

“What makes you assume it’s our screen that’s the problem?” asked Cal. “Maybe it’s yours.”

“You just said you had a tech situation,” the voice pointed out.

Cal hesitated. “Oh. Yeah. OK, then that’s fair, I guess.” He looked up. “Kevin, can we turn on the defroster?”

“The what, sir?”

“The defroster. For the windshield,” Cal said. He looked to Loren for support. “We have a defroster, right? You know, the blowy thing?” He made a sound like a car defroster to help convey what he meant.

“It’s not a windshield,” Loren explained. “And no.”

“Shizz, seriously?” said Cal. “OK, so, then I don’t know what to do.”

“What’s happening there?” the shape on screen demanded. “Who am I speaking to?”

“Just hold your space horses. We’ll be right there,” Cal said. He gestured to Loren. “You’ll just have to give it a wipe.”

Loren turned and opened her mouth to object, but decided it wasn’t worth the bother. With a huff of indignation, she got to her feet, walked over to the screen, and began to wipe off the moisture.

“Not with your hand. Jesus, you’re just smearing it around,” Cal said. “Use your sleeve.”

Loren muttered something too quietly for him to hear, then pulled her sleeve up over her wrist and continued wiping. As she did, the blurry red garment came into focus, revealing a Zertex officer’s dress uniform.

Cal counted the officer’s medals. This helped stop him from focusing exclusively on Loren’s ass as she stretched to reach the screen. They were nice medals, he thought. Shiny. Beautifully curved, and so damn pert. Man, he’d love to…

Shizz.

He flicked his eyes back to the medals. Loren had cleared a six foot by six foot area of the screen, which was all she could reach without the aid of a stepladder. She turned, shrugged at Cal in what he felt was quite a confrontational sort of way, then returned to her chair.

“Great. Thanks. Now I can see the center of his chest. Perfect,” Cal told her. “That’s the only part I wanted.”

Loren glared at him, then tapped a series of controls. The image on screen reduced in scale until it fit the area she had cleared, albeit slightly squashed so the person on the feed looked weirdly stunted and fat.

Even out of proportion, though, Cal knew that face. The blue skin. The thick eyebrows. The way the nostrils curved up as if something had taken a shizz on the man’s top lip, and his nose was trying to keep its distance.

It was the face of a man Cal had killed. Twice.

At least, he’d killed him once and had tried to kill him again quite recently. He’d thought he’d succeeded, but the fact that the guy was glaring back at them from the viewscreen now suggested the mission hadn’t been quite the success he’d thought it had.

Loren let out a gasp of shock. “Oh fonk,” she whispered. “You have got to be kidding.”

Nine

Loren stared in horror at the face on the screen. “Legate Jjin,” she whispered, which was a relief to Cal, because while he remembered the bamston’s face all too well, his name had completely escaped him.

Jjin looked down at Loren, but no recognition registered on his face, and he soon drew his eyes back in Cal’s direction.

“Legate Jjin,” Cal echoed, with an air of confidence that suggested he’d known his name all along. “As I live and breathe. I heard you were dead.”

Most of Jjin’s face remained fixed in his usual mask of indignation, but his nostrils flared to their very limits as he looked Cal up and down.

“What is this?” he demanded.

“What’s what?” Cal asked. He looked down at himself, following Jjin’s gaze, and suddenly remembered he was topless and leaning on a faintly glowing shirt that was hanging in mid-air.

“Oh, this,” Cal said, trying his best to look nonchalant about the whole thing. “It’s, uh, it’s not what it looks like.”

Jjin’s eyebrows met in the middle, like two fat caterpillars about to have a fight. “What does it look like?”

Cal thought for a moment. “I don’t know. But whatever it looks like, it’s not that.”

Jjin gave him another withering up-down once-over, then looked him fully in the eye for the first time. Recognition crept across his face like sunset shadows across a desert floor.

“You. It’s you.”

“It’s me, alright,” Cal confirmed.

“The assassin,” Jjin spat. “You murdered the president.”

Cal winced. “Don’t you think ‘murdered’ is a little harsh? I mean, technically it’s correct, yes, but it just sounds a little…” He shuddered. “You know? Like kind of…” He shuddered again, sticking his tongue out this time and flapping it in distaste. “Right? Can’t we stick with ‘assassinated’? Or even just ‘killed’? I’m happy with ‘killed.’”

“You shot me,” Jjin continued. “EDI scum, you shot me !”

“Again, technically correct, but how about we say I projected an energy blast in your direction ? ‘Shot’ just sounds a little…” He began to shudder again, but a roar from Jjin cut it short.

“SILENCE!” the Legate demanded, flecks of foam forming at the corners of his mouth. “You murdered the president of Zertex. You maimed a high-ranking commanding officer.”

“Hold up! No, I didn’t do that one,” Cal objected.

“I meant me ,” Jjin hissed.

Cal held up his hands. “Gotcha. OK, yeah, I did that one,” he admitted.

“And I assume you were behind the attack on the Academy,” Jjin concluded. “You filthy EDI scum.”

Cal shook his head. “Now, hold on. We saved the Academy. Lady Vajazzle wanted to give us a medal. Or, you know, so we heard,” he said. “And we’re not with the EDI.”

“Lies!” Jjin hissed. “I’ve seen the pictures and vid-feeds of you. We all have. You’re their glorious poster boy. You’re Cal Carver, their great conquering war hero.” He gave Cal another up-and-down glare, making no attempt to hide his distaste. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

“Yeah, well so are you, pal, so…” He reached for a clever conclusion he could draw, or some snappy quip to finish on, but failed to find one “…there. Also, I know you can’t see it, but on this screen, you look about four-feet-tall and morbidly obese. So, I guess the joke’s on you.”

He rocked back on his heels. That had shown him.

“You are in possession of the Symmorium girl,” Jjin said. “You will hand her over, then we will destroy you.”

Cal’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t you mean or you’ll destroy us?” he asked. “Hand her over or you’ll destroy us.”

“No, not or ,” said Jjin, speaking slowly, as if to a child. “Then . Hand her over, then we will destroy you.”

Cal smirked. “Not sure you’ve got the hang of the whole negotiation thing there, Jjin. See, if you’re going to destroy us anyway, then why would we hand the girl over?”

“So that she might live,” Jjin said. “Even though you will not.”

“Oh,” said Cal. “Right.”

“I presume you do not wish her death on your conscience?” Jjin continued.

“Well, no, but—”

“You would rather she not die in vain?”

“Well, yes, but—” Cal sucked air in through his teeth. “I mean, I have to hand it to you, Jjin, as negotiation strategies go, I guess it does kind of make sense.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” said Jjin. “This is not a negotiation. You will do as I say, and then you will die. That is the entirety of it.”

“Can we have twenty minutes to think about it?” Cal asked.

“No.”

Damn it. Worth a try.

“Can we have five minutes to think about it?”

“You can have three minutes to arrange the handover,” Jjin countered. “Then we open fire.”

“Hey, come on, now, Jjin. Be reasonable,” Cal said. “If you shoot us, you don’t get the kid.”

“Honestly? We don’t want ‘the kid,’” said Jjin.

Cal blinked. “You don’t? OK, now I’m confused.”

“We want what is inside her. She can live, or she can die. It makes no difference to us. The thing inside her will survive, either way.” Jjin stared at Cal’s chest for a moment. “What are you doing?”

Looking down, Cal realized he was idly toying with one of his exposed nipples.

“Huh? Oh.”

He stopped and dropped his hand to his side.

“Sorry. That was inappropriate,” he acknowledged.

“You have three minutes. Starting—”

Jjin’s head snapped sharply to the right as if something had caught his attention.

“More ships dropping out of warp,” said Loren.

“Zertex?” Cal whispered.

Loren shook her head. “No, don’t think so.”

She tapped her controls and squinted at the screen. “Shizz,” she groaned. “They’re Earth ships. It’s the EDI.”

Cal’s whole body tensed. “OK,” he breathed. “This is fine.”

He adjusted his position, trying to look more relaxed and at ease. After the whole time travel, altering the timeline, accidentally creating a hyper-advanced imperial Earth with genocidal tendencies thing, he’d been dreading coming face to face with someone from his homeworld.

Sure he’d met that Manacle guy, but he just seemed like some crazy robot-dude with a Darth Vader fetish. Cal came across people like that a lot in space. Mad helmet-wearing despots, he could deal with. It was the regular, everyday Earthlings he was worried about.

He knew it had to happen at some point, obviously. He just didn’t expect it to be so soon. Similarly, he didn’t expect to be semi-naked, leaning on a god, or to have one erect nipple.

Maybe he should give the other one a flick so they were both erect. Would that be better, he wondered? Or worse?

Decisions, decisions.

Before he could come to one, the image of Jjin blinked out and was replaced by that of a burly dark-haired woman with the complexion of an overripe orange. At first glance, her eyebrows were thin and elongated, with slightly bulbous heads. They immediately made Cal think of sperm, and he had to resist the urge to say as much out loud.

With some cursory closer inspection, though, it was easy to see her real eyebrows directly below the painted-on version. They were thick and solid, and would’ve given Jjin’s a run for their money had the woman not attempted to cover them with foundation, or fake tan, or whatever the fonk had turned her that color.

Her face was fixed in a grotesque sneer, showing yellow-brown teeth that suggested chain-smoking, coffee addiction, and years of neglect. Her uniform was an unflattering shade of gray. It was also an unfortunate size, and bulged unevenly on the woman’s rounded shoulders.

Cal had only half a second or so to take all this in before she started shouting.

“What’s your fackin’ game?” she spat. Literally spat. The flecks of frothy foam speckled the screen in front of her face. “Eh?” she demanded, giving no one a chance to respond. “Well? What’s the big fackin’ idea?”

Loren glanced back at Cal. “Do you know her?”

“No. Why would I know her?” asked Cal.

“She’s from Earth.”

“It’s a big place,” Cal pointed out.

Loren made a sort of scoffing face. “Well…”

“It’s big enough that we don’t all know each other,” said Cal.

“Oi! Shut your maaath, you little green fack!”

Cal’s lips moved as he replayed the sentence. “Shut my mouth?” he guessed. “And wait, who’s green? Is she talking to me?”

The woman leaned in closer to the camera, affording a clearer view of her awful teeth. Cal’s eyes didn’t want to study the teeth in too much detail, so diverted down to the badge on the woman’s lapel. It read: Sgt Heseltine.

“Don’t you fackin’ talk back to me, you disgusting anal-probing little shizzbag,” Heseltine warned. “Because I will suck you in. Alright? I will fackin’ suck you in and spit you out the other side, sunshine. Is that what you’d like? Is it?”

“I don’t… I mean, I don’t think so, no,” said Cal.

“No. I bet you fackin’ don’t,” Heseltine hissed.

She placed a finger against the side of her nose, flattening one nostril. There then followed several seconds filled with some of the worst sounds Cal had ever heard, as the Earth woman rearranged the contents of her sinuses and nasal passage, then spat them unceremoniously onto the floor.

Under cover of the snorting, rasping, and general horrifying unpleasantness, Cal whispered to Loren.

“Any updates?”

“Still no shields,” Loren whispered back. “Sub-warp engines online, but not light speed.”

Fonk. What the hell was taking them so long?

“Half the Zertex ships are locking weapons on the EDI,” Loren continued. “EDI’s doing the same to them.”

“Well, I guess that’s something,” Cal replied.

“Yeah, but with the EDI ships, we’ve actually got more weapons pointed at us now than we had before.”

Cal sighed. “You can’t just let me have one silver lining, can you?” he whispered.

“You know why we’re here,” barked Heseltine, once she’d sorted everything out, phlegm-wise. Her face was all puckered up with rage, like she was one wrong word away from smashing the shizz out of everything within arm’s reach. “So, give us the Sentience and maybe we won’t kill ya.”

It was, Cal had to admit, a better deal than the one Zertex had offered. Possibly being killed was a step up from definitely being killed in anyone’s book. Still, something about the woman—everything, in fact—told him she wasn’t to be trusted.

“The what?” Cal asked.

“Oh. Finks you’s a funny fack, does ye?” Heseltine sneered.

Her accent was incredible. Technically, she was speaking the same language as Cal did, and yet he was barely catching one word in two. Maybe he’d been relying on the translator chip for too long.

“You know what we want. You got it aboard your silly little fackin’ ship. An’ if you don’t hand it over, we’ll sack the fackin’ lot of ya.”

Cal raised his hands in surrender. “OK, OK. Sorry, I thought I could outsmart you, but obviously I’m dealing with a greater mind than my own here,” he said. “I apologize.”

He nodded graciously, then lowered his hands. “Can I ask you a question, though? Before we go any further?”

Heseltine’s face twisted as she edged closer to the swirling abyss of fury, but didn’t yet throw herself in. “What is it?” she seethed.

“So, you’re from Earth, right?” Cal said. “I’m guessing you’re British, from the accent. London, is it?”

“That your fackin’ question?” Heseltine grunted.

“No. Sorry,” Cal replied. “So, I know a lot has changed on Earth, but do they still have movies?”

“Movies ?” snapped Heseltine. “Course we still got fackin’ movies. We got lots of fackin’ movies.”

“Right. Right. Great!” said Cal. “So, that wasn’t my question, either. My question is…” He took a deep breath. “Have you ever heard of an actor called Tobey Maguire?”

He clenched his fist, bit a knuckle, and braced himself for the response.

“What? The guy from all them Spider-Man films?”

Cal thrust his fists into the air. “Yes! The guy from all the Spider-Man films!” he whooped. “Wait. By all the Spider-Man films, how many do you mean, exactly?”

Heseltine shrugged her broad shoulders. “I don’t know. Like… eight.”

“Eight!” Cal cried, a grin splitting his face in two. “Loren, eight ! He did eight !”

Loren looked back at him. “You know I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, right?”

“Eight !” Cal said again. He lowered his arms and sighed contentedly. “That’s my special guy.”

He gave himself a shake, suddenly all business. “OK, so here’s the thing. You want the Sentience. Normally, I’d be happy to give it to you, but—”

“Wait,” said Heseltine. She leaned in and gave her screen a wipe, then her scowl deepened. “Clear your viewscreen. Let me see you properly.”

Cal gestured to the screen. “This is as good as it gets. Unless you can beam us over an extendable mop or one of those squeegee things.”

Heseltine made a series of swiping gestures at the screen, then tilted her head, squinted her eyes and leaned in closer. None of the expressions she’d demonstrated since first appearing had been altogether flattering, but this one took her to an all-new low.

Fortunately, it didn’t last long.

“Wait a fackin’ minute. What is this?” she demanded. “Whatchoo looking like that for? How fackin’ dare you?”

Cal self-consciously covered his nipples with his hands. “We, uh, we have a very warm ship,” he explained.

“How dare you try to pass yourself off as Earth’s greatest war hero, you shapeshifting little green fack ?” Heseltine seethed, her orange face empurpling as her rage swelled. “How fackin’ dare you?”

She grabbed her monitor and shook it violently, making her image flicker. “Know what? Forget the fackin’ Sentience. We’re just gonna kill all of ya!”

“Wait, no!” Cal yelped “I can explain. Kind of. I mean, it’ll take a while, but—”

With a final roar from Heseltine, the screen went dark.

Loren turned in her seat. “Are all Earth women like that?” she asked.

“No. At least, I fonking hope not,” Cal said. He snapped his fingers. “Quick, get Jjin back.”

Loren opened her mouth as if to question this, then turned and busied herself at her console. Jjin’s face appeared almost immediately.

“Finally. What is happening?” the Zertex officer demanded. “Are you giving us the girl, or are we killing you first? Your choice.”

“Yeah, we got a problem with that, Jjin,” Cal said. “See, the EDI, they already took her.”

Jjin’s eyebrows knotted. “They what?”

“I know, I know. I told them we’d already promised her to you, but they were pretty insistent. They just beamed over, took her, and beamed away again. If you’re quick, you might be able to stop them.”

“Beamed ?”

“Yes, they beamed! It’s an Earth thing,” Cal said.

“And they took the girl?” said Jjin.

“They did,” said Cal. He shook a fist vaguely at the galaxy in general. “Those fonks.”

“That girl?” said Jjin, pointing past Cal. “They took that girl?”

Cal lowered his fist. He licked his lips and took a peek back over his shoulder to where Miz and Tyrra were sitting.

“Oh. You can see over there, can you?” Cal asked, facing front again.

“I can,” Jjin confirmed.

“Right. Gotcha. I didn’t realize,” said Cal. He puffed out his cheeks. “If I said that was a different girl, would you believe me?”

“No,” said Jjin.

“No. No, thought not,” said Cal, nodding slowly.

Beside him, the Symmorium Sentience vibrated and his shirt began to slip. He jammed his elbow against it, pinning it in place.

“The Earth ships are preparing to fire,” Loren announced.

Jjin’s eyes flicked to the display that was presumably before him.

“Jjin, if they shoot us, they’ll get the Sentience,” Cal warned.

“Not if we get it first,” Jjin said. He turned to someone off-screen. “Open fire. Destroy that ship.”

“Wait, is he talking about our ship?” Cal asked. “Are you talking about our ship?”

“They’re firing!” Loren cried.

“Mech, where are the fonking shields?” Cal demanded.

“Gimme one minute!” came a voice from the back.

“We don’t h-h-ave one m-m-inute!” Cal told him, the shuddering of the Sentience rattling his teeth together.

At the back of the bridge, Tyrra let out a sob. Miz pulled her in close and shushed her, rocking them both back and forth. The girl trembled in Miz’s arms, her full-body vibrations matching up perfectly with those of the orb beneath Cal’s shirt.

Loren gripped her chair. “Impact in five, four, three…”

Cal shot Loren an imploring look as if she could somehow stop what was about to happen.

He hadn’t told her, he realized. He hadn’t worked up the courage to tell her, to say all those things he had rehearsed. He hadn’t told her. And now, he never would.

“Loren—” he began.

“One!” she yelled.

And then the screen flickered, the hull rocked, and the Currently Untitled was consumed by a ball of brilliant light.

Ten

Colors danced and swam. Blues. Reds. Yellows. A purple.

That sort of thing.

They were all quite pretty, really. Orange. Pink. A sort of… what was that one called? Magenta? Lilac? He’d never been great at remembering all the different names, even before he’d been blown to pieces. Now that he was almost certainly dead, he was finding it even more difficult to recall them clearly.

Still.

Nice, though.

Cal watched the ebb and flow of the intermingling shades for a while.

Beautiful. Just beautiful.

He followed their complex, intricate webs.

Gorgeous.

His eyes traced the swoops and curves.

Stunning. Just stunning.

…

Bit samey , though.

Not that he was criticizing, but if he had to pick a fault, it would be that it was all starting to look a bit… familiar.

Repetitive, almost.

When you’d seen one swirl of red gradually bloom into a streak of pastel orange, you’d kind of seen them all, he thought.

He watched for a while longer as a blue became purple.

If anything, it was even less impressive than the red-to-orange.

And the green-into-yellow was, quite frankly, a fonking debacle.

God, was this Heaven, he wondered? Was this it? Just colors swirling around? It wasn’t the traditional view of Heaven he’d had drilled into him as a kid, but then, what did they know? What did anyone know?

Besides, this might not even be Earth Heaven. It might be Space Heaven, and fonk knew what the rules for that were.

Either way, the thought of spending eternity here was not a happy one. At least when he’d died last time he’d had someone to talk to, even if it had been an imaginary version of Tobey Maguire.

“Eight Spider-Mans,” Cal muttered into the color void. “What a champ.”

He wondered briefly if it should technically be Spider-Men , but then came to the conclusion that he had more pressing issues to concern himself with right now.

His body ached. Particularly his elbows, which he felt was odd. It wasn’t as if his elbows had exploded any more than the rest of him. Or had they? Was that possible? What sort of explosion focused predominantly on a point midway down both arms?

As well as the aches, he was hungry. He also badly needed to go to the bathroom. These were not sensations he equated with Heaven. Or Space Heaven. Or even just being dead in general.

He was also still topless and bootless. Was that right? Was he really expected to spend the entirety of his afterlife in a permanent state of semi-undress? What if Jesus popped round? What was he supposed to do then?

Sure, no doubt the son of God had seen nipples before, or was at least aware of their existence, but would he really want to see Cal parading his around the place? Wouldn’t that just make things awkward?

What was the correct etiquette in such a situation? Cal had no idea. He didn’t remember anything in the Bible that covered it, although he’d never read it all that closely. Most of his knowledge of religion had come from one Sunday school class, a handful of cartoons, and eighty-seven consecutive plays of the 1989 single, ‘Jesus is My Spaceship (Let’s Ride Him Through the Stars)’ by German Christian Rock act, Klaus Hugen, which had kept him and several friends amused for an entire weekend when he was twelve.

He hummed the melody as he recalled the lyrics, checking them for anything useful. The search proved fruitless. Klaus Hugen had nothing to say on the subject of Jesus and nipples. He might’ve touched on it in the chorus, but the way he roared into the microphone in a thick Germanic accent had made it indecipherable to Cal’s ears.

Hilarious, but indecipherable.

Cal was workshopping a few possible explanations that might help smooth things over should Jesus show up unannounced, when Mech woke him up.

“Huh? Wha—?” he blurted, gazing up at the cyborg towering above him. Mech’s foot was pressing down on Cal’s chest. It gave him another jiggle, and Cal yelped in protest. “OK, I’m awake! I’m awake! Quit standing on me.”

Mech withdrew his foot and Cal sat up. When he saw the screen, he quietly lay down again.

The same colors that had been swimming before his eyes a moment before now swirled and writhed on screen, only with a level of intensity that made Cal recall his early days of space travel, and the many vomiting episodes that had filled them.

Although he’d only glanced at it, the screen had looked like he’d imagine normal warp speed would look, were it viewed upside-down through a kaleidoscope, while on an acid trip. He slid his hands out at his sides and gripped the floor, the sensation of solidity it offered providing some small measure of reassurance.

“What happened?” he whispered. “Are we dead?”

“Man, I hope not,” Mech muttered. “If I have to spend my afterlife with you, I’m gonna demand a fonking recount.”

He clanked backward, making room for Cal to stand up. Cal had absolutely zero intention of standing up, though, and was perfectly happy lying on the floor, thank you very much. The metal was cool against his bare back, which helped with the creeping nausea he could feel working its way up through his insides.

“It’s the Sentience,” Mech said.

“What is?”

“This. All this,” said Mech, gesturing to the screen. “At least, we think that’s what it is. Just before the missiles hit—”

“Torpedoes,” Kevin corrected.

“I thought you wanted us to call them missiles?” said Cal. From his position on the floor, he had a clear view of the ceiling, and scowled generally in that direction.

“They have torpedoes, sir. We have missiles,” Kevin explained. “It’s not difficult.”

“Whatever the fonk they had,” Mech barked. “Just before they hit, we went into some kinda weird superwarp.”

Cal raised his head a fraction. “Superwarp? What the fonk’s a superwarp?”

“I don’t know. It’s just the name we gave it,” Mech said. “We ain’t ever seen or heard of anything like it before.”

“We?” said Cal. “Who’s all awake?”

“Everyone’s awake,” Mech told him. “You’re the only one who passed out.”

“Seriously? Just me?” said Cal.

“Just you.”

“Not Loren or Miz?”

“Just you,” Mech reiterated.

“Tyrra? Did she pass out?”

Mech tutted. “No one else passed out, man. You were the only one. Only you passed out. No other passing out took place but yours. Is that clear enough for you?”

“Well, I was closest to the Sentience, so that was probably it,” Cal said. “I’ll have taken the brunt of it and momentarily lost consciousness.”

“You’ve been out for forty minutes,” Loren said, appearing at Mech’s side.

“Just forty short minutes,” said Cal. “Despite everything, just forty short minutes. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m impressed.”

“Also, so you know, your shirt’s gone,” said Mech.

“Gone? Gone where?”

“We have no idea. But it ain’t here.”

Cal groaned. “I loved that shirt. First my jacket, then my boot, now this… What a day.”

He sat up again. The screen swam.

“No. No, not ready for that yet,” he muttered, returning to his horizontal position on the reassuringly solid floor.

“Are you OK?” Loren asked.

“Me? Fine. I’m great!” Cal said, with a little too much enthusiasm. He smiled with even more of the stuff, showing off all his teeth. “Uh, and you?”

“Yeah, I’m good,” said Loren, brushing a stray strand of hair over her ear. She glanced away for a moment, then gestured back to the screen. “I just wish we could figure out where we are.”

Cal risked lifting his head enough to look around the bridge, but took great care not to look directly at all the churning colors on screen. “Where’s the Sentience?” he asked, then he clutched his stomach in panic. “Shizz, hold on. It’s not in me again, is it?”

Loren made a vague sort of circular motion with a hand. “It’s out there. From what we can tell, it’s surrounding the ship. That stuff on screen you’re trying so hard not to look at?”

Cal gave a snort. “I’m not trying not to look at it. I could totally look at it if I wanted. I’m just choosing not to for personal reasons.”

“Whatever. That stuff? That’s the Sentience,” said Loren. She shrugged. “I mean, we think it is.”

“To be honest,” added Mech. “A lot of what we know right now is guesswork. We’re figuring out most of the weird shizz as we go.”

“Welcome to my life,” said Cal.

He tilted his head back until he found the guest chairs. “Where did Miz and Tyrra go?”

“Tyrra got agitated,” Loren said. “Miz took her through the back to try to get some rest.” She sucked air in through her teeth. “Poor kid.”

“Which one?” asked Mech. He looked between them both. “Looked to me like she took your date thing pretty hard.”

“Wasn’t a date,” Loren said on auto-pilot.

“Not a date date,” Cal agreed. “And she’ll be fine. She doesn’t like me like that. Not, like, like like me. You know what I mean?”

Mech replayed the words. “Kind of. I think,” he said.

“Have we checked on Splurt?” Cal asked.

Loren’s gaze went briefly to the door. “No. We just… I guess we assumed he’ll be fine. He’s always fine.”

“He was acting kinda weird earlier,” said Cal. “I’d better go check on the little guy.”

He started to sit up, decided that this wasn’t in anyone’s best interests, and rolled over onto his front, instead. “I’m just going to go this way,” he said, crawling on his elbows and dragging his feet behind him. “And if someone could get me a new shirt and some comfortable footwear from my room, that would be awesome.”

* * *

Cal dragged himself up on the kitchen table just as Loren came in, dropped a pair of boots by his feet, and handed him a t-shirt.

“Thanks,” he said, taking the shirt and unfurling it from the crumpled ball he’d left it in. He brightened considerably when he saw the Thundercats logo printed on the front and gave a little triumphant cheer in Loren’s direction.

“Hoooooo!”

Loren looked taken aback.

“Shizz, no. Not like that. I wasn’t saying you were a…” Cal winced. “It’s just a thing they say.”

“A thing who says?”

“The Thundercats,” Cal explained. “When there’s trouble they need to go stop they shout, ‘Thundercats, hooooo!’”

Loren looked dubious. “Why?”

“What do you mean?” Cal frowned. “Because they’re the Thundercats.”

“I get that they’re called the Thundercats, but why do they shout, ‘Hooooo!’?”

“Well…” Cal gave this some consideration. “Actually, I have no idea. I’ve never really thought about it. Why the fonk do they shout, ‘Hoooo!’?”

He pulled on the shirt, still deep in contemplation. “It seemed to make sense at the time.”

“‘Thundercats go,’ would work,” Loren suggested. “It’s better, even. And it doesn’t have the, you know, the sexual connotations.”

Cal had to concede that one.

“You’re right. You’re absolutely right. You’ve convinced me,” he said. He clapped his hands together. “Next Thundercats AGM, I’m totally going to go along and suggest that.”

Loren looked quite pleased with herself. “Oh. Well, great. Let me know what they say.”

“I absolutely will,” Cal promised.

He moved to jab her playfully on the shoulder like he’d done so many times before, but a niggling anxiety stopped him. They’d kissed. He wanted them to kiss again. He wanted them to do a lot of things. Were playful jabs to the shoulder still allowed? Should he do it more often, or less? Or at all? Should he ever have done it?

Jesus, had that been his attempt at flirting? Punching her? How old was he, six?

He realized he was standing with a fist extended halfway toward her. They both looked at it for a while, then Cal quietly cleared his throat and said, “One potato.” He stacked another fist on top of the first. “Two potatoes.”

He continued climbing with his hands. “Three potatoes, four. Five potatoes make a bunch and so do… Shizz, wait. I mixed up two different songs,” he said.

Loren was watching him with growing concern. He dropped one hand to his side and turned the other into a backward jab over his shoulder. “Doesn’t matter. It’s an Earth thing. I should go check on Splurt.”

“Uh, yeah,” said Loren. She backed toward the door. “I’ll go see what’s going on up front. Shout if you need me.”

“I will,” said Cal.

Loren hesitated just inside the kitchen. “Make sure you do. OK?”

Cal nodded. “Oh, yeah. I will. Sure. I mean, totally . I will.”

She hung there for a moment, as if she was going to say something else, then turned and slipped out into the corridor. Cal drew in a breath like he was going to call after her, but couldn’t find the words to say. He let the air out as a long sigh.

Then he thonked himself on the forehead with the palm of one hand, mumbled something about ‘fonking potatoes,’ and turned to the cupboard with the hole in the front.

“Splurt? Buddy, you in there?” he asked, approaching the cupboard door and peering through the hole into the dim interior. “Everything OK? Sorry I didn’t come check up on you earlier. It’s been kind of a crazy day.”

Cal couldn’t see enough through the hole, so caught the door by the ridge at the top and eased it open.

There was a puddle on the cupboard’s bottom shelf. It was a thick, viscous green puddle, with two eyes floating in it like a couple of eggs yolks. They gaze forlornly upward at the bottom of the cutlery drawer, unmoving.

“Splurt? You OK, pal?” Cal asked. “You look kind of… flat.”

Splurt’s eyes rolled laboriously until they met Cal’s. A small bubble rose through the thin layer of Splurt’s pancake-shaped body and popped on the surface like a sigh.

“Hey now,” said Cal, gently scolding him. “What’s all that about? Where’s my happy little guy?”

He shuffled back and beckoned to him. “What are you even doing in there, anyway? Come on out.”

Splurt burbled again, then oozed over the edge of the shelf and plopped unceremoniously onto the floor. He lay there, eyes down, his body a congealing lump of green grease against the cupboard’s footplate.

“Are you sick?” Cal asked. He looked up. “Kevin, is Splurt sick?”

“One moment, sir, and I shall consult the Bumper Book of Illnesses Found in Shapeshifting Entities of Unknown Origin.”

Cal blinked. “You have one of those?”

“Just my little joke, sir,” said Kevin. “There is, to the best of my extensive knowledge, no such text.”

“Oh,” said Cal. He looked down at Splurt, then back at the ceiling. “So, is—”

“I don’t know, sir. That’s rather the point I was trying to make, albeit humorously,” Kevin explained. “I’m afraid I do not know if Splurt is sick.”

Cal gave Splurt a gentle prod with a fingertip. A thin strand of him stuck to Cal’s finger like snot, then snapped back with an elastic splat . Another bubble sighed its way up from somewhere inside him.

“I mean, does he look well?” said Kevin. “No. But then, I’m no expert.”

“Do we know where to find an expert?” asked Cal.

“We don’t even know what he is, sir—an obstacle which I fear would rather hamper our search,” Kevin pointed out. “The closest we have to an expert on Master Splurt is you.”

Cal bit his lip. “Jesus. That’s a terrifying thought,” he mumbled, then he slid his hands under Splurt and gently lifted him off the floor. “Up we go, little buddy. You hold on now.”

He hurried to the table, Splurt drooping off the sides of his hands and oozing between his fingers. Once there, he flopped him over onto the tabletop so his eyes were pointed upward. As Cal watched, they rolled over again so they faced down.

Cal stood back, his hands on his hips. “Shizz. What do I do now?” he wondered. “I’m the expert. I’m the expert.”

He said the words a few more times with different emphasis, in the hope this would somehow make it true and magically level-up his knowledge.

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t.

“OK, so what do I know?” he asked him. “What does Splurt like? What does he like?”

He snapped his fingers. “Wait. Got it.”

Bending, Cal addressed the slimy pancake. “Hey, buddy! You up for a game of Hide and Seek?”

Splurt loved Hide and Seek. He was also, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the greatest Hide and Seek player in the Universe, thanks to his ability to become anything and anyone on the ship at will, and his complete inability to make a sound.

Once, he’d fooled everyone by lying on the engine room floor and transforming himself into another identical floor, just a fraction of an inch deep, and positioned exactly atop the original so that nobody could tell the difference.

It had taken a week to find him. Even then, they only discovered him because Cal had threatened Kevin with a hard reboot if he didn’t show them the security camera footage of the entire ship from the day the game had started.

Yes, if the galaxy ever held a Hide and Seek Olympics, Splurt would be guaranteed the gold, silver, and bronze. Or whatever weird alien metals the medals might be made out of, at any rate.

Now, though, he didn’t so much as shudder in acknowledgment at Cal’s suggestion.

“I’ll let you hide first,” Cal said. He waited for a response, but got none. Still, he knew the little guy wouldn’t be able to resist once he got going.

Cal covered his face with his hands. “One. Two. Better get going, buddy,” he encouraged. “Three. Four.”

He peeked out through his fingers. Splurt remained on the table, eyes down.

“Shizz. No? OK,” Cal sighed, dropping his hands. He clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth. “What else do you like? What else?”

Space Charades? That was a possibility, although Kevin would insist on joining in, everyone would fall out, and Cal would vow—for the fifth time—never to play the stupid fonking game again, before storming off in tears.

No, he’d been stung once too often by Space Charades. That, unlike Splurt, was off the table.

What else?

What else ?

Cal’s eyes fell on the food replicator. A big, beaming smile lit up his face. “Of course!” he said. He felt himself relax, safe in the knowledge that everything was going to be fine.

“Just you wait right there, buddy,” he said.

Splurt did nothing to indicate that he’d heard, but showed no interest in going anywhere, anyway.

Cal skipped across to the machine standing upright in the corner. “Give me twenty-five of your finest Spit Nibbles,” he said.

His stomach whimpered. Cal patted it fondly, as if reassuring a frightened animal. “Actually,” he told the replicator. “Better make that fifty.”

Eleven

Loren and Mech stood side-by-side on the bridge, watching the colors on screen. They had exhausted the limits of Mech’s sensors. The ship’s, too, after an infuriating conversation with Kevin in which they had to remind him several times what the sensors were, and then explain exactly what they wanted him to attempt to sense.

Everything had come up blank. All readouts agreed there was something out there around the ship, but they were all a bit perplexed as to what it might actually be. Mech and Loren stuck with their original hypothesis that it was the Sentience itself, and they all agreed to leave it at that.

All attempts to find out where they were going had also failed. All they knew was that they were traveling at speeds far beyond anything they’d attempted before, and that they hadn’t yet—to the best of their knowledge—crashed into anything.

While the second point was comforting, the first gave them cause for concern. The ship was holding together for now, but this level of warp was going to start taking its toll soon. Nothing could sustain these speeds for long.

Although, that said, the ride was exceptionally smooth, with only a vague background vibration alerting them to the fact that they were moving, at all.

But moving, they were. Kevin may not have been able to tell them where they were going, but he could confidently tell them they no longer were where they’d been.

“And this is it when it’s weakened,” Mech remarked, watching the Sentience’s dance of color and light. “No wonder those fonks want to get their hands on it. No saying what they could do with this much power.”

“Maybe they’d blow each other to pieces,” Loren said.

“Yeah, maybe. And half the galaxy with it.”

Loren sat in her chair and tapped a few buttons, trying to determine if she had any control yet. She’d checked half a dozen times already, and had been disappointed each time. Mech, who didn’t really want to consider the implications of Loren blindly piloting a ship at superwarp, had been somewhat relieved.

This time was no different.

“Nothing,” Loren said.

“Aw,” said Mech, side-eyeing her. “That is a real shame.”

They stood and sat in silence for a while, the shimmering glow altering the sizes of their shadows on the back wall.

It was Loren who eventually spoke.

“You think Cal’s OK?”

Mech shrugged. “Sure. I mean, he’s infuriating, he never shuts up, and sometimes I want to punch his head clean off, but I guess you could do worse.”

“Uh, no. Not like that. I wasn’t asking…” Loren fumbled. “I mean do you think he’s feeling OK. He seems kind of, I don’t know, on edge.”

Mech turned. “Can’t say I noticed.”

“It’s nothing major. Just little things,” said Loren. “At the restaurant, he got really angry with the waiter, and then it was like he couldn’t string a sentence together.”

“The restaurant where you didn’t go for a date?”

“Not a date date,” said Loren, parroting Cal without meaning to. She shook her head in a way that suggested she wished she hadn’t mentioned it. “It’s probably nothing.”

“Normally, I wouldn’t say that the man has a lot on his mind, because he ain’t got a whole lot of mind available to begin with, but… I guess he does. He just found out that in this timeline he grew up to be a genocidal monster, and that his home planet is now so fonked-up that it produced a dude called ‘Manacle, Enslaver of Worlds.’”

Mech glanced in the direction of the door. “I guess that kinda thing is gonna have an effect. Even on someone as brain-dead and shallow as him.”

Loren ran her fingers through her hair, then tightened her ponytail. “You’re right. I hadn’t even thought about any of that. Someone should go talk to him.”

Mech nodded absently.

“You think?” said Loren. “Someone should probably talk to him.”

Mech continued to nod. He realized Loren was staring at him.

“What, me?”

“He listens to you,” Loren said.

Mech scowled. “When? Name me one time.”

“I’m not saying he ever does what you say,” Loren clarified. “But he listens. He takes it in.”

“Then ignores it.”

“Then ignores it, granted,” said Loren. “But he takes it in.”

“Why don’t you go talk to him?” Mech demanded.

“Because it wouldn’t do any good,” Loren said. “You know what he’s like, he’s not going to tell me he’s hurting. He’ll make a joke about it and insist that he’s fine.”

“And you think he’ll tell me?”

“Maybe. Yes,” said Loren. “That’s what guys do when they get together, isn’t it? Discuss their feelings, share their problems, help each other?”

Mech’s frown deepened. “Have you ever even met any guys?” he asked. “If you had, you’d know that shizz don’t happen.”

“I could talk to him if you like, ma’am,” said Kevin.

“Fonk, no,” said Loren, a little too quickly. She smiled. “I mean, we need you keeping an eye on…” She gestured at the ship in general. “But thanks.”

“Very well, ma’am,” replied Kevin, sounding a little put out.

Loren gazed up at Mech. “Please. Talk to him.”

Mech groaned. “I don’t know…”

“If you talk to Cal, I’ll go talk to Miz.”

Mech thrust out a hand. “Fonk. Deal,” he said. “But leave a note so that when you come back in pieces, we know what you want us to do with them.”

* * *

Cal sat at the kitchen table, licking clean a plate that had, until recently, held Spit Nibbles.

Once he was sure he’d collected every last crumb, he set the plate down beside Splurt’s equally empty one and belched quietly.

“God, those things are amazing,” he said. He traced a finger across his plate, just in case his tongue had missed anything. “I can’t believe you didn’t want any.”

Splurt continued to lie flat on the table, his eyes down. Cal leaned back in his seat, cradling a stomach swollen by twenty-five Spit Nibbles. And then swollen further by twenty-five more Spit Nibbles a few minutes later.

“Seriously, you don’t know what you missed,” Cal said. He said it as brightly as he could manage, given his worry about Splurt, and the regret he could already feel building over the whole eating-fifty-Spit-Nibbles-in-one-sitting thing.

Splurt didn’t react. No ripple. No wobble. No bubble.

Nothing.

Cal leaned his elbows on the table and looked down at his blobby little pal, all spread out like a puddle of slime.

“What is it, buddy?” he asked. “What’s wrong? You’ve got to pull yourself together, Splurt. I can’t lose you. Not you, too.”

His head flopped down. His voice became a mumble.

“I could really do with having you back to your old self, Splurt. Not having the greatest time of it of late, I’ll be honest. You know, it’s great that everyone on Earth’s alive—thumbs up to that. It’s just, I think they’re all kind of fascists now, which is… Well, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s kind of a fonking downer.”

He shifted awkwardly on the bench.

“And the things that people say I did… The other me, I mean. But, you know, still me. He killed a lot of people. Like, a lot . The Earth guys all seem to have liked him, but you know when some Darth Vader fetishist who calls himself the ‘Enslaver of Worlds’ is singing your praises, you’re probably batting for the wrong team.”

He sighed. It was a heavy sigh, as if the very act of expelling the air took some great physical toll on him. “I was a good kid. Hell, I was adorable. I mean, not you adorable, obviously, but still pretty sweet. Rosy cheeks. Twinkling eyes. Skinned knees. The works. And I was nice, you know? The old lady who lived across the street? I used to rake up the leaves in her backyard.”

He shrugged. “For money, obviously, but I did a good job, and my rates were super low. Like, too low, now that I think about it. I mean, a dollar for three hours work. How is that fair? It’s exploitation, is what it is.”

Cal realized he was getting off track, and swerved back onto it. “But I did it, and I didn’t complain. Because I was a good kid. So, how come a good kid became what he became? How could that smiling, skinned-kneed, criminally underpaid yard raker commit fonking genocide? And not just once! Once I could maybe forgive.”

He thought about it.

“No, I couldn’t forgive once, either. Even one genocide’s too much. But, still. How could he do it? How? Because if he had it in him, then so do I, Splurt. So do I. Because he’s me. Or I’m him. Or…”

He unleashed another of those sighs, this one supported by a groan of frustration. “Whatever. The point is, I didn’t think I was capable of anything like the things he did, but I guess I am. I guess I must be.”

Cal sniffed, screwed the heels of both hands against his eyes, then let them drop back onto the table. “Anyway. Like I said, it’d be really great to have you around, pal. So let me know what I can do to help.”

The edge of the puddle closest to Cal rippled, just faintly. A thin tendril of slime snaked out and crept across the table toward him. As it reached him, the end of the snake became four little fingers and a thumbnail-sized palm and clutched him gently by the tip of his thumb.

Cal’s voice, when it came, was low and hoarse.

“Thanks, buddy.”

On the other side of the kitchen door, Loren stood listening, having stopped on the way to Mizette’s room. From the bridge behind her, she heard the clank of footsteps, and quickly gestured for Mech to stay back.

“It’s, uh… Maybe give him a few minutes,” she whispered, then she tiptoed past the kitchen until she reached Miz’s door.

Taking a deep breath, Loren raised a fist and knocked.

Back on the bridge, Mech hurriedly retreated and closed the door.

“Who is it?” Miz demanded.

“It’s me,” Loren replied. She felt it was probably unnecessary to add, “It’s Loren,” but found herself adding it, anyway.

Miz’s reply was short and to the point.

“Ugh .”

“I, uh, I wanted to find out how you’re doing. Both of you, I mean. Is Tyrra OK?”

“Fine.”

“She’s fine?”

“Well, she’s, like, either totally catatonic or basically just crying all the time, but yeah.”

“Oh. OK,” said Loren. She brought her face closer to the door. “It’s just… that doesn’t sound fine.”

The door opened suddenly, just enough for Miz’s head to fit through. She didn’t look quite as angry as Loren had been bracing herself for. Then again, Loren had been bracing herself for a tornado of furry fury that would instantly tear her apart. Miz wasn’t quite at that level, but her expression, demeanor, and the way all the hair was standing up on her collar suggested she wasn’t far off.

“She’s as fine as she was after that thing came out of her, OK?” Miz barked. “She’s, like, no better and no worse. OK? That clear enough for you?”

Loren nodded quickly. “Sure. Yeah. Makes sense.” She shifted awkwardly. “And, uh, what about you? Are you—?”

The door slammed in her face. Loren made a move to walk away, then stopped.

“Nothing happened. With Cal, I mean.”

“Like I even care,” came the reply.

“No, I know. It’s just… We agreed it wasn’t fair. To you, I mean. That wasn’t all of it, but… Nothing’s going to happen.”

There was silence from beyond the door.

“I just thought I should tell you,” Loren said.

Miz’s reply was notable by its absence.

“So, OK. Bye.”

Silence.

Then:

“I know you’re still out there.”

“Uh, yeah,” said Loren, almost sounding surprised. “I’ll just… I’ll go.”

Nothing.

“Yeah. I’ll just go.”

She about-turned, gave the door a look that was part disappointed, part relieved, then headed for the bridge and met Mech along the way.

“You up?” she asked.

Mech groaned and side-eyed the kitchen door. “Yeah. I’m up.”

“Good luck.”

“Thanks. Well done on not getting torn to pieces.”

Loren winced. “Not sure I’m in the clear quite yet, but we’ll see.”

She gave the cyborg an encouraging pat on the shoulder, then continued along the corridor to the bridge.

Mech turned to the kitchen door, spent several seconds muttering and shifting uncomfortably, then he tapped the button to open it.

Cal sat at the table, his arms wrapped around a thin, droopy-looking Splurt who was pressed to his chest. Two pencil-thin arms had sprouted from the green pancake and clung tightly around Cal’s neck.

Both man and blob heaved and shook, as if sobbing big, silent tears.

Mech pressed the button again.

“Nope. Not getting involved in that,” he decided, then he swiftly swung around and hurried back to join Loren on the bridge.

Loren looked round from where she was trying her controls again.

“That was quick. Did you talk to him?”

Mech clanked to his spot up front. “In a way.”

Loren watched him, eyes narrowing. “In an actual, it really happened kind of a way?”

“Not strictly in that way, no,” Mech admitted. He waved a hand. “But he’ll be fine. He’s getting it out of his system. Right now, we need to worry about where the fonk this thing is taking us.”

“I may have some thoughts on that, sir,” Kevin announced.

Loren and Mech both looked up. “Oh?”

“Indeed. While I haven’t been able to pinpoint our exact location, I’ve been able to cross-reference our origin point with an estimate of our heading. When I factor in our current velocity, something quite interesting happens.”

“Oh?” said Mech. “What?”

“My CPU catches fire,” Kevin replied.

Mech’s eyes narrowed. “And how does that help us?”

“Oh, it doesn’t, sir,” Kevin replied. “I mean, it’s a hindrance, if anything.”

Loren did her best not to appear annoyed. Getting annoyed with Kevin rarely achieved anything. Or nothing you wanted it to achieve, at least.

“You said you might know where we were going,” Loren reminded him.

“Oh, yes. Well, once I extinguished my CPU and assembled the corrupted calculation data, I was able to plot our trajectory and calculate approximately where we are,” Kevin continued. “If you’d care to look at the screen, I can show you a map.”

The swirling colors became solid blackness. Loren and Mech waited for the map to appear.

“Well?” snapped Mech, who didn’t have quite the same level of self-control as Loren did. “Hurry the fonk up.”

“That’s it, sir,” said Kevin.

“Say what?”

“The map, sir. That’s it.”

Loren raised the obvious point. “It’s blank.”

“Indeed, ma’am. By my calculations, we are in uncharted space,” Kevin explained. “I’m sure there are things out there—stars, planets, and so on and so forth, but I don’t know where to put them at present, hence the map being black.”

“Then why show the damn thing?” Mech groaned. “Why not just say, ‘We ain’t got a map’?”

“Because we do have a map, sir. You’re looking at it,” said Kevin. “Granted, there’s nothing on it at present, but it’s still technically a map.”

“Doesn’t really help us, though, does it?” said Loren.

“I disagree, ma’am,” said Kevin, a little haughtily. “For example, I’ve been able to project that we are here.”

A red dot appeared in the otherwise featureless blackness.

Loren briefly closed her eyes, then gave a nod of resigned acceptance. “Well, I stand corrected.”

“Get it the fonk off the screen,” Mech barked. “Come back to me when you got some star systems, or planets, or any point of fonking reference whatsoever.”

“As you wish, sir,” said Kevin.

The map—for want of a better word—shrank and moved up to the top right corner of the screen. A cancerous rectangle infecting the otherwise elaborate wash of moving color.

“I said get it off the screen,” said Mech.

“I thought it might be more useful there, sir,” Kevin argued. “Also, it did take me quite a long time…”

“Know what? I’ll memorize it,” said Mech. “There, I memorized it,” he concluded, after an infinitesimal pause. “Now, get rid of it. We don’t need to see it.”

“As you wish, sir.”

The map halved in size.

“All the way, Kevin.”

The map halved in size again and became semi-transparent.

Mech considered pressing the matter, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. “Fonk it, that’ll do,” he grunted.

The swirling colors were replaced by blackness again. Mech’s fists clenched all on their own. “No, Kevin, that wasn’t an invitation to put the map back!”

“I didn’t, sir,” Kevin said. “This wasn’t me.”

The screen wasn’t black, Mech realized. Not all the way. Pinpricks of light dotted the darkness—faint, but growing steadily brighter.

They weren’t the only thing growing brighter. The inside of the Untitled’s bridge was illuminated in broad strokes of vibrant light. Loren turned in her chair and saw a brilliant ball of green pulsating in the air near the center of the bridge.

The Symmorium Sentience had returned.

“Help me ,” it said inside their heads, and then it dropped with a clank and lay motionless on the floor.

Twelve

Cal gave the Symmorium Sentience a prod with the toe of his boot, waited a moment, then said, “Hello?” quite quietly.

When no response came, he said it again, only louder.

He, Loren, and Mech stood around it, waiting to see if it was going to do anything.

As the seconds passed, they concluded that no, it probably wasn’t.

Cal put his hands on his hips, made a series of clicking noises with his tongue, then said the word, “Well,” a few times in succession. None of this really helped with the current situation, but it successfully conveyed the impression that he was doing something , and bought him an extra few seconds before anyone might reasonably expect him to do something useful .

Splurt hung over his shoulders like a scarf, eyes pointing to the floor, tiny arms hanging limply against Cal’s chest. If he had any interest whatsoever in what was happening with the Sentience, he was going out of his way not to show it.

“Is it dead?” Loren asked.

“Of course it’s not dead ,” Cal scoffed. He raised his eyes to Mech, who stood across from him on the other side of the dormant green ball. “Is it dead?”

Mech studied the display on his forearm. “I don’t know. I’m still getting energy readings, but I don’t know what they mean.”

“Energy’s good though, right?” said Cal. “That’s a positive sign.”

“Maybe,” Mech said. “But for all we know this thing self-destructs after it dies. It could just be building up to an explosion.”

Cal drew air in through his teeth and looked down at the ball. “Well, that would suck.”

He looked back over his shoulder at the screen. “Kevin, how’s the rest of your map going? Found out where we are yet?”

“Actually, sir, I more or less had it exactly right the first time,” Kevin crowed.

The red dot that signified the location of the Untitled pulsed to draw attention to itself. “This is where I calculated we were,” Kevin said.

The dot shifted half an inch to the left and down. “And this is where we actually are.”

“Hey, that’s not bad,” said Cal. “That’s almost dead-on. Good work, Kevin.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Loren looked up. “What scale is that map?”

There was a pause.

“Sorry, ma’am?”

“The map. What scale is it?” Loren asked. “Without any stars or anything I can’t tell. How far off were you with your guess?”

“It wasn’t a guess ,” Kevin protested. “It was a calculation.”

“Sorry. How far off were you with your initial calculation?”

Another pause.

“You mean, how far apart was my estimated location from our actual current location, ma’am?”

“Yeah.”

There was a sound not unlike someone puffing out their cheeks. “A distance, ma’am.”

Mech craned his neck upward. “I think what’s she asking is, how much distance?”

“Was it a long distance?” Loren asked.

“Long is such a subjective word, don’t you think, ma’am?” said Kevin. “Is a mile a long distance? Hmm? Is two-point-eight million light-years a long distance?”

“First one no, second one yes,” said Loren.

“Is it?” asked Kevin. There was that sound again, a slightly-sheepish blowing out of air. “Then yes, ma’am. I was off by a long distance.”

Loren nodded slowly. “Right. So you were—”

“A smidgeon over two-and-a-half million light-years away, yes,” said Kevin, a little snippily. “Although, in the grand scheme of things, that’s barely even a blip.”

Mech regarded the viewscreen. “So, we’re almost three million light-years out into uncharted space?” he grimaced. “Well, ain’t that just fonking great? How are we supposed to get back?”

“Oh, no, sir,” said Kevin. “I merely thought we were headed out into uncharted space, because I assumed the Sentience was taking us in a straight line.”

Everyone looked up at the ceiling. “And I’m guessing it didn’t?” asked Cal.

“No, sir. It seems to have gone around the houses somewhat. We’re barely twelve light-years away from where we started, in fact. If you squint, you can probably still see the Zertex and EDI ships.”

Cal narrowed his eyes and leaned closer to the screen.

“Just my little joke, sir,” said Kevin. “Of course you can’t. That would be madness.”

Cal tutted and turned back to the Sentience. “So, it took us here. Why? What’s here? What’s around us?”

“Not a lot, sir,” Kevin said. “We’re between systems. No stars or planets in the immediate vicinity. It’s all a bit empty, really.”

On screen, something brown and planet-sized rose into view.

“What about that?” asked Mech.

“Oh!” said Kevin, sounding genuinely surprised. “Where did that come from? I swear it wasn’t there a moment ago.”

“It’s OK, Kevin. We all make mistakes,” Cal said.

“No, I mean it, sir,” Kevin insisted. “It couldn’t possibly have been there. I double-checked and everything.”

“Seriously, Kevin, don’t worry about it,” Cal assured him. “Just find out what you can about it.”

“Wait,” said Loren. She stepped past Cal and closer to the screen. “Mech, look at that.”

Mech followed her finger. He stared blankly for a while, then began to shake his head.

Then he stopped.

Then he stared.

“What the fonk is that?” he wondered.

A circle of brilliant orange, approximately the size of the planet’s visible icy pole, hung like a spot in its upper atmosphere. It rotated in time with the planet itself, hanging in geostationary orbit above the equator.

“Some kind of portable sun?” Loren guessed. She looked to Mech to gauge his reaction. “Surely not?”

Mech considered this. “Kevin, you said there are no stars around here, right?”

“None close by, sir, no,” Kevin confirmed. “Nothing this could be orbiting, at any rate.”

“And you’re sure?” asked Cal. “Because you did fail to notice the big desert planet just a minute ago.”

“I didn’t fail to notice it, sir, it wasn’t there,” the AI insisted.

They all regarded the planet for a while. It was barren and rocky, with a scattering of dark-green lakes on each hemisphere, none of them connected together. Those, and the dusting of snow at the pole were the only distinguishing features about the place.

“Well, it’s there now,” Cal said. “Anyone have any suggestions as to what we do?”

“Uh, yeah,” said a voice from the door.

Miz stepped in, holding Tyrra by the arm. The girl’s eyes were dull and lifeless, but she shuffled along under her own steam, albeit leaning on Miz for support.

“She does,” Miz said.

“The Library,” she said, in a dry, rasping voice that suggested a sixty-a-day smoking habit. It didn’t sound like the voice Cal remembered, and he found himself wondering if it was even her own.

Tyrra’s arm rose shakily. Her eyes struggled to focus as she extended a finger toward the planet. “The answers I require may be found in the Library.”

Cal turned back to the screen again and regarded the barren, largely lifeless-looking world below. “Which part is the Library?” he asked.

Tyrra sagged against Mizette, the words emerging from her as a strained, breathless hiss. “All of it.”

* * *

“OK, you’re doing great. Now down,” said Cal. “Down. Down . Slowly, not so fast.”

“Will you shut the fonk up?” Loren told him. “I know what I’m doing.”

“No, I know,” said Cal. “I’m just trying to help, that’s all. But you’ve got this. I’m not worried.”

He sat in his chair, knuckles white from where he was gripping the armrests. “I have complete faith. Total confidence.”

A rough, rocky horizon leveled off a few hundred miles ahead of them as the Currently Untitled descended toward the planet’s surface, sand and dust billowing up around it before the heat from the ship’s landing thrusters turned them into tiny shards of glass.

Up front, Mech stood bracing himself against his console. This did not go unnoticed by Loren, but she chose not to comment on it and instead focused intently on the instrument panel before her.

A wind buffeted the ship, forcing Loren to make a series of minute adjustments to their descent. She gently guided the Untitled lower, easing it toward the planet’s surface.

It was easier if you didn’t think about the viewscreen, she’d discovered. Most of her training had been done on a Zertex simulator, and provided she only paid attention to the ship’s readouts and not what was happening outside, it was just like being back at the Academy.

Of course, if you crashed on the simulator the worst thing that happened was some disapproving looks from the instructors and, if you were involved in a team activity, a light beating from the other cadets. Crash an actual ship, though, and the consequences were far—

There was an almighty clang as the Currently Untitled landed.

It was fair to say that it wasn’t one of the all-time great landings. It wouldn’t be going down in history anytime soon as a textbook example of how to land a spaceship.

And yet, it had technically been a landing. An actual landing, not one prefixed with the word ‘crash’ and suffixed with an outburst of creative swearing.

“There. We’ve landed,” said Loren, trying not to sound too surprised by this. She cautiously removed her hands from her controls but held them close, as if the sticks and levers might do something unexpected at any moment.

They didn’t. The controls, like the ship, remained completely stable.

“Jesus,” said Cal.

He looked around, not quite believing it. “We’re on the ground?”

Mech checked the screen, then looked at his console. “Uh, yeah. We’re on the ground,” he confirmed. “We’re actually on the ground.”

“And we’re in one piece?” Cal asked, before deciding he could answer that one himself. “I mean… We’re in one piece!”

Loren sighed. “You don’t have to sound so surprised about it. I am a pilot. Like, an actual pilot. It’s what I do.”

“It’s not what you usually do,” Cal reminded her. “But I have to hand it to you, Loren, that was a pretty good landing. Great job.”

Loren looked pleased with the compliment, if a little uncomfortable. “Thanks.”

She looked meaningfully toward the guest chairs, where Miz sat with Tyrra. She had her hands wrapped protectively across the girl’s face, shielding her from the impact they had all been bracing themselves for.

Miz held Loren’s eye for just a moment, then scowled and looked away. It wasn’t an insult, though, not technically, so Loren took it as a win.

She was just facing front again when Kevin spoke.

“Should I extend the legs, ma’am?” he asked.

“Huh?” Loren asked, the words not yet filtering through.

“The landing legs, ma’am,” Kevin said.

Loren froze. Her eyes flicked to a button situated in the center of her console. It was quite a large button, and not easily missed.

“Would you like me to lower the landing legs? It’s just, I notice you haven’t deployed them, and thought it best we do so before we…” Kevin’s voice trailed away. “Oh. It seems that we’ve already landed.”

There was a creak , then a groan , then a sensation of slow, inexorable movement as the ship toppled sideways onto the sand.

“Well,” breathed Cal, once the Untitled had finally settled. “It was nice while it lasted.”

Thirteen

Cal dragged himself up until he stood on the edge of the open airlock door, adjusted the Symmorium Sentience to make sure it was safely held beneath his arm, then jumped.

It wasn’t a long way from the airlock to the ground. It was even less than it usually was, in fact, thanks to the angle at which the ship was leaning. Despite that, it was almost a full ten seconds before his feet thacked down onto the surface, sending fragments of stone shrapnel spinning lazily into the air.

“Hey, check it out,” Cal said, his voice crackling over the speaker of his spacesuit. He kicked off from the ground, ran for several seconds in midair, then touched down a dozen feet from where the Untitled had landed.

It had been a while since he’d had to wear the suit. Most places they visited had a breathable atmosphere, but scans had suggested that this one was a mix of several unpleasant things. Cal couldn’t remember what Mech had called any of the atmospheric gases, but the list of potential side-effects he’d read out still burned fresh and clear in Cal’s mind.

So, spacesuit it was. Cal hadn’t been looking forward to trudging around in the cumbersome suit, but that was before he’d discovered the planet’s low gravity.

Inside the suit, Splurt flopped limply against Cal’s chest, still hanging scarf-like around his shoulders.

“Think a happy thought, buddy!” Cal encouraged, then he bent his knees and sprang up into the air, twisting like a ballerina as he soared up, up, up, then drifted down, down, down somewhere back close to the Untitled .

“This is awesome!” Cal laughed. “Why haven’t we done this before? Check it out—backflip!”

He crouched, threw himself up and over, and backflipped. Then he backflipped again. Then he backflipped for a third time, struck a Karate Kid style crane kick pose in the air, and alighted on one leg.

“Can we live here?” he asked, his voice reverberating around inside his space helmet. “Guys? Can we live here.”

“No, we cannot fonking live here!” Mech’s voice hissed in Cal’s earpiece.

“Spoilsport,” Cal told him. He kicked away from the ship again, drifted horizontally in the air for a while like Burt Reynolds on a bearskin rug, then brought his feet down in time to nail the landing.

He’d been in space for a while now. Hell, if you counted the fifty years he’d spent trapped on the cruise ship with Splurt, he’d been in space longer than at least half the crew.

Most of that time had been spent aboard ships with artificial gravity, or on planets with the natural kind. Sure, he’d ventured into zero-gravity situations before, but he’d never been able to go leaping and flying around on a planet with low gravity.

At least, he didn’t think so, although he’d sustained quite a number of head injuries along the way, and there was a chance he’d been on a number of similar planets, but had subsequently forgotten all about them.

He chose to believe this was the first time, and performed a technically perfect one-handed cartwheel in celebration.

“Will you quit messin’ around?” Mech barked in his ear. The voice had an odd echo to it, and Cal turned to see Mech stepping from the airlock and gliding down onto the sand a short distance away.

“Hey, big guy! Check me out.” Cal did a one-armed star jump, struck a number of elaborate poses, then alighted gently just a few feet from where Mech stood. He grinned. “What do you say? Jumping contest?”

Mech regarded him with something bordering on disdain.

“That’s the spirit!” Cal said. He tucked the Sentience more firmly under his arm. “OK, we go on three. One—”

“I ain’t having no fonking jumping contest,” Mech snapped.

“Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?” Cal clucked.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mech demanded.

“I mean you need to lighten up, big guy,” Cal said. “You’re always so… so… Mech , you know? Your springs are wound too tight. If you don’t cut loose every once in a while, you’re going to go crazy. Hell, it’s already started.”

“Bullshizz!” the cyborg retorted. “I ain’t crazy.”

“You made space bagpipes , Mech,” Cal reminded him. “Space bagpipes that you can’t even play.”

“It’s called a Blufflebag. And I’m adapting it so that I can play it,” Mech said.

“How are you adapting it?” asked Cal, interested despite himself.

“I made this kind of bellows-type—” Mech tutted, annoyed. “Know what? It don’t matter how I’m adapting them. The point is, I ain’t crazy.”

“Prove it,” said Cal, squaring up. “Jumping contest.”

“How will that prove anything?” Mech barked.

“Are you scared? Is that it? You afraid, Disselpoof?”

“No, I ain’t scared of no damn jumping contest. I just don’t want to do it.”

“Buuuuck-buck-buck,” Cal clucked.

Mech shook his head. “I don’t even know what that’s supposed to be.”

Cal strutted around, thrusting his head out and flapping the arm that wasn’t currently occupied by carrying a god.

“I don’t even know what you’re doing right now,” Mech pointed out.

“Bu-buuuuck!”

“Fine! Know what? Fine. I’ll do the motherfonking jumping contest. Let’s do it. But you’re going down, man. You are going down.”

“Well, that’d be completely the wrong direction, but alright ,” Cal cheered. “Jumping contest it is! Me and you. Clash of the jumping titans. Man versus machine in what will surely be considered one of the greatest, most all-time epic—”

“Just hurry the fonk up,” Mech barked.

“OK, you got it, big guy. Let’s do this,” said Cal. He jammed the Sentience between a couple of rocks, then spent a few seconds limbering up. “OK. Ready?”

“Let’s just get it over with,” Mech grunted.

“That’s the spirit! OK. One, two, three, go!”

Cal crouched, then launched himself toward the sky, one arm stretching above his head, the other tucked in at his side. He whooped as he lifted off, feeling like Superman hurling himself to the sky. There was no way that big heavy lug could jump this high. No fonking way .

“No fonking way!” Cal protested, watching Mech sail past him, rockets blazing from the soles of his feet. “No fair, that’s cheating!” he yelled, as the feeble gravity finally took hold and he drifted back to the surface.

Mech landed a few seconds later, sending little chunks of rock tumbling in all directions as his feet touched down.

“Eat that, shizznod,” Mech crowed. “I win.”

“You’re disqualified. You’re not allowed to use rocket feet,” Cal insisted.

“Bullshizz, I’m disqualified. That’s the only way I can jump,” Mech retorted.

“Well, I’m very sorry to hear that, Mech. But ultimately? I don’t care. Rules are rules, and rocket feet? Those are against the rules.”

“What rules? You didn’t tell me about no rules.”

“At-at-at ,” said Cal, gesturing for the cyborg to zip his lip. “You’re out, mister. That’s all there is to it. You’re out. I totally won that,” Cal said. “And I will take you to goddam court over it, if I have to.”

Mech turned away. “Whatever man,” he grunted as he regarded the toppled ship. “I don’t even care.”

“What’s happening out there?” asked Loren, her voice sounding in both their ears.

“Jumping contest,” Cal explained. “Which I comfortably won, in case you were wondering.”

There was a moment of exasperated silence.

“Right. Well done. And what’s happening with the ship?” Loren inquired. “How’s it looking?”

“Sideways,” said Mech. “It’s looking sideways.”

“Can you fix it?”

“You mean can I lift an entire spaceship high enough for you to deploy the landing legs you should have deployed on the way down?”

There was a pause, then a crackle.

“Can you?”

Reaching up, Mech placed a hand against the hull of the Currently Untitled and gave it a push. The tip of one of the wings, which had been resting on the sand, was raised a few inches off of it.

Mech carefully lowered it back again. The Untitled groaned, as if disappointed.

“In normal gravity, not a chance,” Mech said. “But in this? Yeah. Yeah, I can do it.”

“Can I help?” asked Cal.

Mech’s head whirred as it turned. “Help? Lift this? You?” He gave it some thought. “Sure. Sure, you can help. You can help by standing back there.”

Cal looked down at the spot where he stood. “Here?”

“No. Back up,” said Mech, motioning with his hand. “Further. A little more. A little more. Good. Now, a little more.”

Cal sighed. “How about I just leave it to you?”

“Perfect,” said Mech. “Let’s go with that plan.”

“Fine. Gives me more time to do this,” said Cal, handspringing into a technically complex Arabian Double Front with a pre-flight twist. Of course, he didn’t know this was what he’d done, only that he’d spun in the air for quite a long time and in a number of different directions, then landed with a, “Ta-daa!” that had echoed inside his helmet like a fanfare.

After a few more flips, Cal took some time to check out their surroundings. The low-gravity thing was a lot of fun, but the rest of the place looked drably familiar.

“How come there are so many rocky planets?” he wondered. “We always seem to end up on rocky planets. Like that mine place with the mustard. That was a rocky planet.”

“That was a moon,” Loren corrected in his ear.

“Same thing,” said Cal.

“No, it’s not the same thing,” Loren insisted.

“Fine. I mean, if you’re going to be an uptight shizznod about it, fine.”

Loren gave a little gasp of offense. It was playful, though, and he could practically hear her smile. “I’m not an uptight shizznod!”

“OK. Sorry. You’re right. ‘Shizznod’ was harsh,” Cal said. “You are uptight, though.”

“And whose fault is that?” Loren asked.

Cal reacted in mock-horror. “Mine? You’re blaming it on me?”

“Totally your fault,” Loren replied. “You’re so annoying you make me like this.”

“Annoying ?” Cal gasped. “I mean, I’d take ‘endearingly frustrating,’ but annoying ?”

“Meh. Not so much with the endearing part,” Loren retorted. “But frustrating, you can have.”

This was… easier, somehow, Cal thought. Being unable to see her helped stop him from becoming some mumbling, tongue-tied teenager. It was good. Nice.

“You know I can hear all this, right?” said Mech. “You know I’m linked into this conversation? What you may not know, is that it’s making me want to throw up. And I ain’t even got a stomach. So, if you wouldn’t mind keeping… whatever the fonk it is you’re doing until some other time—ideally one where I ain’t forced to listen to every word you both say—then I’d appreciate it.”

Neither Cal nor Loren said anything for a while. It was Cal who finally broke the deadlock.

“OK, now him? He ’s annoying.”

To Cal’s immense disappointment, Loren’s response was back to business.

“Rocky planets are just more common than others,” she explained.

Cal tutted and bounced around in a circle. “Well, that’s boring. We should go somewhere nice next time. Somewhere where there’s a color other than orange. Somewhere moist.”

“Moist?” said Loren, and the sound of it coming out of her mouth made Cal blush for only the fifth or sixth time in his adult life.

Retrieving the Symmorium Sentience, he tossed it from hand to hand like a basketball, and briefly considered dribbling it before concluding that this was, on balance, probably a bad idea.

The Sentience was still mostly a dark, forest green, but there was a faint glimmer deep in its center that at least suggested it was still alive.

“So, how is this a library?” Cal wondered. He kicked a stone and watched it sail off until it was too far away for him to see. “Maybe it’s a rock library,” he thought aloud. “I mean rock rocks. Not rock music. Which would be better.”

As it did sometimes, the mention of rock music brought an image of a furious Black Sabbath frontman, Ozzy Osbourne, unbidden into his mind. Cal flinched, shuddered briefly, then pushed the memory back down.

“Are the scanners telling us anything yet?” he asked.

“Not really,” said Loren. “Nothing we wouldn’t expect. Looks like there’s nothing here.”

Cal leaned back and shielded his eyes with one gloved hand. “Then why did the Sentience brings us here? And why go to the trouble of building a fake sun?” he asked. “Those can’t be cheap, can they? Unless they are, in which case, let’s get one.”

“Why the fonk would you want an artificial sun?” asked Mech, clearing some debris from beneath the Untitled .

“Are you serious? Why the fonk wouldn’t we want to have our own sun?” Cal replied. “Think of all the things we could do with it!”

“Name one,” said Mech.

Cal sniffed. “I’ll name a hundred .”

Mech shrugged. “Fine.”

“Well, not a hundred, obviously,” said Cal. “I didn’t mean an actual hundred. I’ll name ten.”

Mech shrugged again. “Fine.” From his tone, it was clear he was starting to regret getting involved.

“OK, ten,” said Cal. “But I’ll give you three now, and seven at a later date. So.” He began to count on his fingers. “One…”

He clicked his tongue against his teeth a few times and idly passed the Symmorium Sentience from hand to hand.

“Solar power,” he announced, after some thought. “We could power the ship with solar.”

“No, we couldn’t,” said Mech.

Cal tutted. “Look, just because you might not be able to get the technology worked out, don’t turn that around to be my fault, Mech,” he said. “The first one stands. Now. Two. Suntans. Who doesn’t like a suntan?”

The act of counting on his fingers made the action of catching the Symmorium Sentience somewhat more difficult. So much more difficult, in fact, that he completely failed to. It flew through the air at a downward angle, clacked off a rock, then rebounded and began to climb.

“Fonk, fonk, fonk,” Cal muttered, kicking off and launching himself after the lazily spinning god-sphere. “I got it, I got it.”

His fingers brushed against it, sending it into a sideways rotation away from him.

“Damn it,” Cal cursed. He ran in the air and did a sort of reverse flap with his arm, trying to hurry his descent.

“What the fonk are you doing?” Mech demanded. He was hidden behind the Untitled , unable to see Cal’s frantic attempts to recover the Sentience. “You got what?”

“Huh? Oh, just a joke someone once told me,” Cal replied. “Took a while but I finally understood it. I’ll tell it to you sometime.”

Thack . Cal’s boots touched down and he kicked off again, propelling himself toward the Sentience. “OK, this time, baby, this time,” he said.

“This time what?” Mech snapped.

“Jesus, Mech, do you have to listen in to everything I say?” Cal grumbled, stretching his arms out like a soccer goalkeeper about to make the save of his career.

“Well, you’re currently saying it right in my ear,” Mech pointed out. He emerged from behind the Untitled and stood, frozen, as he watched Cal go flying after the spinning Symmorium Sentience. “Oh, what the fonk have you done now?”

“What is it?” asked Loren. “What’s happening?”

“Nothing!” Cal insisted. “Everything’s fine. Everything’s totally fine!”

He felt gravity tug gently but firmly at his spacesuit. He roared with effort, throwing his arms out as far as he could, hands grabbing for the Sentience’s smooth sides.

No! His upward flight became a downward descent. He watched, helplessly, as his fingertips fell short of their goal, and barely had time to bring his feet around below him before he crunched back onto the desert floor.

“Fonk. Missed it,” he grimaced.

He was readying himself to jump again when the Sentience landed on the sand beside him. Cal glanced up at the sky, then down at the sphere by his feet. “Oh, yeah. Gravity,” he said. He looked across at Mech and grinned. “For some reason, I thought it was going to float off into space, or something. But, yay gravity.”

Bending, he scooped the Sentience up and brushed off some of the dust and sand. He blew on it to speed up the cleaning process, reacted with surprise when a gust of air blew back in his face, then remembered he was wearing a helmet.

“I saw that, man,” Mech called over.

Cal chose to ignore the comment. Balancing the Sentience in one hand, he raised it victoriously above his head. “And to think you two were worried,” he said, grinning.

“I wasn’t worried,” said Loren. “Should I have been worried?”

“He dropped the Sentience,” Mech said.

“He what ?!”

“The point is, it’s fine now,” said Cal. He lowered the orb and tucked it under his arm. “I got it back, and I’m going to keep a tight grip on it from now on.”

“Yeah, you’d better,” Mech grunted.

“Relax, big guy,” Cal said. “It’s fine. We’re golden. Nothing else is going to go wrong.”

The ground beneath his feet trembled. Cal’s eyebrows met quizzically as he looked down.

A perfectly circular area of sand snapped open beneath him, and gravity suddenly began to have a much greater sense of urgency about it.

“Oh fonk,” was all he managed to eject, before the supercharged gravity’s pull took hold and dragged him screaming into the darkness.

Fourteen

Cal hit something hard, bounced off, spun twice, and then hit something harder.

After that, there were several blissful seconds when he didn’t hit anything at all.

These, in turn, were followed by several concerned seconds when it occurred to him that if he didn’t hit something soon, he was going to break every bone in his body.

This spell of worry preceded one final second of absolute panic during which he vividly pictured himself smashed to pieces against some rocks, and then the whole ordeal ended with a crunch that hurt tremendously, but fell just short of shattering any bones.

He lay face down in the darkness, catching his breath. Splurt slithered forlornly across the back of his neck. Cal reached a hand back to pat him through the padding of the suit, but the angle made it impossible.

With some effort, Cal rolled himself onto his back, so he was gazing up at the circle of light overhead. It looked small from down here. If Cal were to form a circle with the thumb and finger of one hand, the area of sky he could see would fit comfortably inside it.

Not that he was going to do any such thing, of course. Everything ached, and the thought of expending unnecessary energy on finger-circles only made it ache worse.

With even greater effort than the rolling over had taken, he managed to outsmart the cumbersome spacesuit to the extent that he was able to successfully stand up.

Raising a hand, he leaned against the wall beside him and wheezed in some of the suit’s stale air.

“What the fonk happened?” barked Mech’s voice in his ear.

Thank fonk for that. The communicator was still working.

“I’m not sure on the technical description,” Cal said, groaning as he cricked his lower vertebrae into something that more closely resembled their original position. “But in layman’s terms, I fell down a big hole.”

“You still got the Sentience?” Mech asked.

“I’m fine, thanks for asking. No harm done. Thanks for your concern, it’s genuinely touching,” Cal replied, sarcasm dripping down the inside of his visor. He glanced at the dimly-glowing ball by his feet. “And yes, I have the Sentience. Now hurry up and get me out of here.”

Overhead, the hole snapped shut. It closed suddenly and without any warning, two semi-circles slamming together, two sets of metal teeth interlocking and plunging him into a thick, oppressive darkness tinted just faintly by the Sentience’s weak glow.

“Mech? The hole just closed,” Cal said. “Can you open it?”

A soft static hiss purred in Cal’s ear, almost too low to hear. “Very funny, Mech.”

Kssssssh .

“Loren? You there? Can you hear me? Tell Mech to stop messing around.”

Silence.

Maybe not quite silence. If he listened hard, he could make out a faint swish of sound, as if he were listening to the ocean inside a shell.

But still close enough to silence to be of no fonking use to him.

“Great,” he said, exhaling slowly. As he did, his breath fogged up the inside of the visor, revealing a spider-web shaped crack in the glass above his right eye. “Even better.”

Picking up the Symmorium Sentience, Cal held it close to his head. The faint glimmer of green better illuminated the crack, and he saw that there was a tiny hole, just a little larger than a pinhead, straight through the glass.

Shizz . The list of ill-effects the planet’s atmosphere could cause came rushing in to fill Cal’s head.

He held his breath.

Some time passed.

He released his breath in one big gasp.

“Fonk. That’s not going to work,” he decided.

There was only one thing for it. Setting the Sentience on the floor, he fiddled with the suit’s neck clasp until it gave a hiss . Twisting, he removed the helmet and held it just a few inches above his head, ready to pull it back on if it turned out to be necessary.

Cal’s nostrils flared as he sniffed the air.

Nothing. No vomiting. No eye-swelling.

He sniffed again.

Still nothing. No blindness. No internal hemorrhaging. No rectal bleeding.

He flicked his tongue out and tasted the atmosphere around him, like a cat lapping at milk.

Still nothing. No violent seizures. No full-body fungal infections. No erectile dysfunction. Or, at least, none that he was aware of.

“I think we’re OK,” he said. He drew in a deep breath, held it, then expelled it through his nose. “Yeah. This is good. I think we’re OK.”

He placed the helmet down next to the Sentience and set about dealing with his other problems. “Now, lights. Lights,” he said, patting the spacesuit. There was a torch on the shoulder, but it had been a while since Mech had explained how to turn it on. Also, he hadn’t been paying any attention at the time, which didn’t help.

He found a toggle switch on the chest and flicked it. The suit immediately inflated until he resembled a beach ball with arms, then all the air farted up through the gap at his neck, making his hair stand on end.

“That might’ve been useful two minutes ago,” he muttered, smoothing his hair back down.

He continued to run his hands over the front of the suit, searching for the correct button.

After thirty or so seconds of this, a thin green tendril reached up through the neck of the spacesuit, clicked a switch on the torch itself to activate it, then retreated again.

“Thanks, buddy,” said Cal. “What would I do without you?”

Splurt trembled, just faintly.

“Now, you take that back, young man! I would not be better off,” Cal scolded. “And I don’t want to hear that kind of talk again. Is that clear?”

Splurt did nothing.

“That had better have been a yes,” Cal warned him, then he turned on the spot, sweeping the circle of white light in an arc across the curved wall.

The wall was smooth and tiled like the wall of a subway tunnel, only without the standard covering of graffiti, or the pebble-dashing of blood and human excrement. There was another wall just like it on the opposite side, with both together forming a wide passageway that, coincidentally, also reminded Cal of a subway tunnel.

Fonk. He hoped this wasn’t a subway tunnel.

There were no tracks or rails, but that didn’t mean anything. This was space. Subway trains probably hovered or something. They wouldn’t need to mess around with anything as primitive as tracks.

Over the next few moments, Cal came to the firm, unshakeable conclusion that he was about to be turned to mush by a speeding underground train. He looked both ways along the tunnel, trying to guess which direction the train might come from.

He couldn’t hear anything approaching, so that told him nothing.

He licked a finger of one of his gloves and held it up. He’d seen people do it in movies, but had absolutely no idea what it was supposed to tell him. Fonk all was the conclusion he eventually drew.

His understanding of science now fully depleted, Cal whispered out an Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe , and let that dictate his direction.

“This way,” he announced, turning on his heels and retrieving the Symmorium Sentience.

It was ten minutes later, after a lot of walking and several spontaneous right-turns down corridors, that he realized he’d forgotten his helmet.

He momentarily entertained the idea of going back for it, but decided that he probably wouldn’t be able to find it, and he might get smashed in the face by a train. Besides, it was broken. It wasn’t like it could do him a lot of good. Also, now that gravity was almost back to full strength, the Symmorium Sentience was getting heavy. He’d already passed it from arm to arm half a dozen times, and the thought of juggling his helmet, too, wasn’t one that massively appealed.

And so, he plodded on, his torchlight bobbing in the darkness, dancing its clinical white glow across the tiles as he weaved his way through the vast underground maze.

The floor beneath his feet was covered by the same tiles as the walls and ceiling, only flat and level, not curved like the walls. The tiles squeaked beneath his boots as he walked—little squeaks of outrage that anyone would dare tread on them.

Splurt had squeezed his top half out through the neck of the spacesuit. It now lay folded up like a melted stick of toffee on Cal’s shoulder, while Splurt’s lower half remained hooked around his neck. He bubbled occasionally, each one a little sigh of despair whose silence spoke volumes.

“You have to snap out of this, buddy,” Cal said. “If anyone should be depressed here, it’s me.”

Splurt twitched.

“What do you mean, why ? Because of everything, that’s why. The Earth stuff. The me being evil stuff.” He rolled the next few words around before letting them loose. “The Loren stuff.”

Splurt gave a tiny shudder. Cal stopped at a junction, shone the torch in both directions, and decided to continue straight ahead.

“Well, no, it didn’t go great, actually,” Cal said.

Another vibration.

“I know I rehearsed it, but, I don’t know. It wouldn’t come out. I couldn’t say any of it, not when she was right there,” Cal said.

Splurt rippled faintly.

“That’s harsh!” Cal protested. “No, I’m not scared, I just… I was going to say it, and then she said she thought it best if we didn’t, and everything just kind of fell apart.”

Splurt shuddered, just a little.

“She said it was a mistake,” Cal said. “Said she shouldn’t have done it. How it wasn’t right.”

Tremble .

“I don’t know. You tell me, buddy,” Cal sighed. “You tell me.”

Cal rounded a bend in the passageway and the floor went paff beneath his foot. Looking down, he saw that the tiles had been replaced by a patterned carpet. The pattern was made up of two very similar grays, set out in little triangles, but it was more welcoming than the tiles, at least. Monsters didn’t have carpets, did they? Even thin, corporate-looking carpets like this one.

No. Monsters didn’t have carpets, Cal was sure of it. Which meant that, given he was now standing with both feet on a carpet, his chances of being eaten alive had just dropped quite substantially.

A few dozen feet further along the corridor, the walls became lined with racks of empty wooden shelves. Cal ran a gloved hand across the top of one, and it came back thick with dust. He gave it an experimental sniff, accidentally inhaled, and sneezed eight times in rapid succession.

Shh .

The sound came from both directions along the passageway, a short sharp shushing that wasn’t much quieter than his sneezing had been.

Splurt adjusted the angle of the torch so the beam cut through the darkness ahead. More shelves were revealed, presumably all with more dust on them. Beyond that, the light fell away into darkness.

“Hello?” Cal called. His voice rebounded along the passageway.

Shhh, came the reply, more insistent this time.

Somewhere beyond the torch’s reach, something squeaked . It was a rhythmic sort of sound, like a gate swinging back and forth, back and forth on rusted hinges.

Eerk. Eerk. Eerk.

Splurt drew closer to Cal’s cheek, his surface rippling in time with the crashing of Cal’s heart. Something was up there somewhere. Something loomed ahead of him in the dark.

Thankfully, he’d remembered to take a blaster pistol. He was rarely allowed to carry one, but as the planet had seemed to be nothing but rocks, Loren and Mech had eventually relented and let him take one, on the basis that there was very little damage he could do.

He’d chosen a chunky looking silver one with hologrammatic sights and a butt that molded itself to the user’s grip. It could stop a Thrynock at fifty paces, Mech had told him, but since Cal had no idea what a Thrynock was, or how difficult they were to stop, he didn’t find the comparison particularly useful.

Whatever, he was glad he’d brought it. He could feel its reassuring weight tucked into his leg holster, just waiting to be drawn should any crazy shizznod come leaping at him out of the shadows.

“Hello?” he tried again, lowering his voice to a stage whisper.

There was no shushing this time, just the steady eerk-eerk-eerk of squeaky metal coming from somewhere up ahead.

Without another word, he pressed on, walking as quietly and sticking as close to the shelves as he could in an attempt to avoid detection.

Obviously, the sneezing fit and his shouting, “Hello!” probably meant he had already been detected, but there was no point making it worse.

He had been walking for three or four minutes before he noticed there were no more walls. Instead, there were only shelves in every direction, set out like rows of dominoes waiting to be toppled over.

Ahead of him, shelves.

Behind him, shelves.

Left and right? Shelves and shelves. Lots of shelves. So many shelves, stretching all the way to the edge of the torch’s narrow cone of light, then onward into the darkness beyond it.

So many shelves. All of them empty.

Eerk. Eerk. Eerk.

It was impossible to pinpoint the source of the squeaking. It whistled and creaked between the freestanding shelving units, echoing in a hundred-thousand strong chorus as it bounced off their dust-covered surfaces.

His torch chose that moment to flicker, and blackness rushed in to fill the void it left.

To his relief, the light returned just a split-second later, albeit a little thinner and weaker than before. Cal tapped it gently. He wasn’t really sure why, since it was already back on. There was a sense of admonishment about it, as if he was telling the torch not to do anything so silly again.

And then he pressed on, winding his way through the maze of shelving, partly hoping to find the source of the squeaking, but partly praying he never did. There was something about it that made him deeply uneasy and caused the hairs on the back of his neck to stand on end. Or, it would have, had Splurt not been draped across the area, pinning the hairs down.

He heard the whispering a few minutes later. At first, he’d thought it was someone whispering to him, specifically. After standing to listen for a while, though, he’d worked out that what he was hearing was a lot of people all whispering at once, and he was fairly sure that none of it was aimed at him in particular.

Because the hairs on the back of his neck were currently inoperable, the hairs on his arms took it upon themselves to stand upright, instead. Cal suddenly felt very hot inside his suit as the whispers rose and the creaking eerked from somewhere around him. On the left, maybe? The right? Above him? Below?

Probably not below, he thought. Below made no sense. It could be coming from anywhere else, though, and the not-knowing was playing havoc with his nerves.

“I, uh, I fell down a hole,” he announced.

The whispering abated, momentarily.

Shh . The air itself seemed to urge him to be silent. Cal found himself complying and dropped his voice until it, too, was just a whisper.

“I fell down a hole. I’m not supposed to be here,” he said.

But the only reply was the chorus of murmurs from somewhere not far away, and the slow, laborious eerk of metal on metal.

* * *

Loren’s voice peaked the limits of the audio feed, making the inside of Mech’s head crackle uncomfortably.

“What do you mean he’s gone ?” she demanded. “How can he be gone? Gone where?”

“Did you kill him, sir?” asked Kevin, joining in the conversation. “Because I’ve always thought it was only a matter of time.”

“What? No! I didn’t kill him. He fell down a hole,” said Mech. “You heard him, right? You heard him say, ‘I fell down a big hole.’”

“No, I lost his audio,” Loren said. “And what do you mean he fell down a big hole ? What big hole?”

“You know. Just, like, a big hole,” said Mech. “Like a standard hole, only bigger.”

“Then get him out!” Loren barked. “Get him out of the big hole.”

Mech scratched the part of his face that wasn’t made of metal. “Uh, yeah. About that,” he said. He slammed a foot down on the spot where the hole had been. The ground clanged faintly. “It’s closed.”

Loren tried to process this, but failed.

“Closed? What do you mean it’s closed ?”

Mech scowled. “Look, I’m only saying what I saw. Seems to me like the things I’m saying, they’re pretty clear. There was a big motherfonking hole. Cal fell in the big motherfonking hole. The big motherfonking hole closed. Tell me what, in any of that, is open to interpretation?”

“And we’re absolutely sure you didn’t kill him?” asked Kevin.

They both ignored him.

“Details, Mech, details,” said Loren. “Why did the hole open? Where did it go? Is he in danger? Is he hurt?”

Mech began to list his responses on his fingers. “Uh, I have no idea. I got no clue. Very possibly. And no. At least, not when I last spoke to him. The comms cut off when the hole closed.”

“He has Splurt, right?” said Loren.

“He’s got Splurt and the Sentience,” Mech said. “Even if he didn’t, the guy can survive anything. He’s like a fonking gronkroach, only without the personality. We both know he’s gonna be just fine. He’ll turn up when we least want him to. Which is potentially anytime.”

“I should come out. We should look for him,” Loren said.

“Except he took the last working suit, and this atmosphere will kill you in seconds,” Mech said. “And not in a way you’d enjoy.”

He kicked away a boulder that was jammed against the front of the hull, launching it toward the horizon. “We stick to the plan and get the ship back on its feet. Mark my words, Cal will turn up before we’re finished.”

He adjusted his dial, diverting more of his battery power to his hydraulics. His voice became flatter and slower, the light dulling behind his eyes. “Until then, him on him own.”

Fifteen

Cal crept around a stack of shelves, his boots padding lightly on the thin carpet. He had navigated past hundreds of the Mech-height shelving units now, the sound of whispering growing louder with every shuffled step. The units were open on all sides, supported by four thin columns, one at each corner, which allowed him to see right through them to yet more shelves beyond, and more beyond those, on and on and on as far as his light could reach.

He seemed to be in some vast hangar-like room—so big that he couldn’t even begin to guess how far away the walls were. Certainly beyond the limit of his torch, and he suspected it went on for a long way after that.

The shelves were different now. They were still empty, but had been polished as if in preparation for something being placed on them. Quite what that something might turn out to be, Cal didn’t know. He didn’t know if he wanted to know, either, in case it turned out to be his carefully arranged body parts, all laid out with labels and tags.

But no. That was the whispering getting to him. He couldn’t make out a word of it, and yet it was one of the creepiest things he’d ever heard. All those voices, all muttering their secret chorus. In the darkness. Underground. On an alien planet.

“I am so fonked,” he groaned. He shot the blob on his shoulder an encouraging look. “Think you’re up to helping me out here, buddy?” he asked. “I could do with the back-up.”

Splurt had demonstrated countless useful transformations over the months that Cal had known him. He’d been a spider-smashing death machine, a savage multi-limbed monster, and at least one much-loved member of 1980s TV sitcom, The Golden Girls . Whatever form he had taken, he’d proven himself to be violently inventive, reliably murderous, and borderline psychotic—exactly the sort of guy you wanted on your side when the shizz hit the fan.

Now, though, he sagged feebly on Cal’s shoulder, his eyes hanging down like an old woman’s breasts. Cal would find no help there. Not unless he dropped the little guy, and somebody slipped on him.

He filed that away as a possible option and continued on between the stacks.

The creaking metal sound came again. It was close this time, somewhere ahead and to the right.

Eerk. Eerk. Ee .

It stopped. Cal held his breath, his heart thumping with enough force that Splurt trembled with every beat.

The whispers continued, sounding louder in the vacuum that the squeaking had left behind.

Cal suddenly became aware that having his torch on may not be the best idea. Sure, it meant he could see anything directly ahead of him, but it also meant that anything in the immediate vicinity could see him, too.

Reaching up, he flicked the switch. The beam grew brighter, then turned orange.

“Shizz.”

Cal felt around until he found another switch on the torch’s cylindrical body. When he flicked it, a shrill alarm blared out, the sound howling like a foghorn in the darkness. Simultaneously, the orange light began to flash on and off like a car indicator.

“Shh! Jesus! Shut the fonk up!” Cal sobbed, slapping it with the palm of his hand.

A second alarm went off, this one even louder than the first.

Panic made Cal’s movements wild and clumsy. Unable to find the off switch, he wrenched the screaming flashlight off his shoulder, hurled it to the ground, then stomped on it until it coughed and wheezed into silence.

Cal exhaled in relief.

The alarm screamed.

Cal stamped on it again until it was nothing but an assortment of dark, silent pieces on the floor.

He froze then, listening. The whispering continued. Maybe no one had heard.

What was he talking about? Of course, they’d heard. Hell, Mech had probably heard all the way up on the surface, so whoever was down here with him would definitely have picked up on it.

Unless they were deaf, he thought. And blind. God, that would be awesome. Deaf and blind, he could deal with. If they were deaf and blind, he was in the clear.

Something scuffed the ground in the darkness ahead of him. The squeaking returned. Eerk. Eerk. Eerk. It was getting closer.

He could hear something breathing now above the creaking of metal, the air rattling in and out of its throat as it drew steadily nearer. Through the dark, he could just make out the suggestion of an outline advancing toward him.

“I’m armed!” Cal warned, making a grab for the blaster in his leg holster.

It was at this point that he realized he was wearing the holster under his spacesuit and that, as a result, it was completely unreachable.

He shoved his fist in his mouth and bit down on the glove to stop himself from crying out in frustration, then grabbed the Symmorium Sentience in both hands and raised it above his head, ready to bring it down on the skull of whatever came creeping out of the darkness.

A rickety trolley appeared first, squeaking along on its partially seized wheels. A stack of identical hardback books sat atop it, the edges neatly squared off so that everything was just so .

A set of hands arrived next, resting on the trolley’s handle, shoving it along. They were quite small hands, as hands went. Not freakishly tiny, but smaller than his own. There was a pleasing lack of claws or scales or anything else unpleasant, although an angry looking boil near the thumb could probably have done with a visit to a dermatologist.

The sleeves of a sensible cardigan came next, followed by the rest of the cardigan itself. Poking up through the neck hole was a face and, presumably, the rest of the person’s head, although that was still lost in shadow at the moment.

In many ways, the face was the perfect match for the cardigan. It was fascinating in its plainness—average eyes, average nose, average mouth—and struck Cal as a face that may well be the median of every other face that had ever existed anywhere in the galaxy. It was so utterly bland and forgettable, in fact, that every time he blinked he was slightly surprised to see it again when his eyes opened.

Surprised, but not shocked. It wasn’t the sort of face that could ever elicit shock.

The rest of the figure stepped into view, and the trolley squeaked to a stop. She was female, he thought, with lightly graying hair tied back in an upsettingly sensible bun. A set of half-moon spectacles were balanced on her utterly uninteresting nose and secured around her neck by a shiny length of chain. If she’d been human, he’d have put her somewhere in her mid-fifties, but the way her features were arranged suggested she wasn’t exactly human, although she might well be a distant cousin.

“Who the fonk are you?” Cal asked. Behind the woman, a million voices continued to whisper.

“Please keep your voice down,” she said firmly.

“Sorry,” Cal whispered. He didn’t think he’d spoken loudly in the first place, but thought it best not to get on her bad side.

“I am the Librarian,” the woman told him, in a voice that suggested he really ought to have known this. “The real question is—who are you?”

Cal extended a hand. “I’m—”

“Cal Carver. Yes, I know. It was a rhetorical question,” said the Librarian. “So, I suppose the real question is actually, ‘What do you want?’”

Cal opened his mouth.

The Librarian made a sharp swatting motion to silence him.

“Actually, I know that, too,” she said with a sniff. “The real real question is…”

The trolley gave a final eerk as she took a step closer.

“What are we going to do about it?”

* * *

Tyrra of the Symmorium and Mizette of the Greyx sat on the unmade bed in Miz’s room, jammed against the headboard by the ship’s uneven slant.

Tyrra leaned against Miz’s powerful shoulder, her dark eyes gazing glassily ahead. She hadn’t spoken since she’d instructed them to go to the Library planet. She hadn’t done much of anything, in fact, beyond emitting the occasional throaty sob.

Miz had an arm around the girl, holding her protectively. Something about the kid had really gotten to her. She was a fighter—a warrior—and yet she’d lost everything. Everything she had known, everything she had loved had all been taken from her. Her parents. Her friends. Her entire species. Gone.

Mizette had tried her best to talk to her, to tell her that everything was going to be OK, but all she got in reply were gruff, disinterested grunts.

“Wait a minute,” said Miz, straightening. Tyrra’s head bounced on her shoulder then rested on her upper arm. “Wait a fonking minute.”

Of course. That was why she cared so much about the girl. That was why she had been drawn to her, and why she was consumed with an overwhelming urge to protect her.

“You’re, like, basically me,” Miz said. “We’re both totally the same.”

And she was. And they were.

The ultimate orphans, both the last of their kind. And they had found each other. Somehow, in all the galaxy, they had found each other.

They were the same. They were kin.

They were sisters.

And there, in her off-balance room, for the first time since discovering the fate of her species, Mizette of the Greyx began to cry.

* * *

“Tea?”

“Hmm? Oh, no. Thank you,” said Cal, adjusting himself on a plastic chair in a futile attempt to get comfortable.

A delicate cup of deep brown liquid was set in a saucer on the table before him.

“Oh, maybe just a small one,” he said.

He still had the Symmorium Sentience under one arm and looked around for somewhere to put it, before finally settling on the table.

“Not there,” instructed the Librarian before he had the chance. She removed another of the plastic chairs from a stack and placed it beside him. “Sit her there.”

Cal put the Sentience on the chair, held his hands above it until it had stopped wobbling, then sat back.

“Her?” he asked.

The Librarian took her own seat across from him. It was also plastic, but with a floral cushion on the seat. She peered over the top of her spectacles at him, saying nothing.

Cal pointed to his head. “I mean, I guess the voice is female.”

The Librarian nodded curtly, then poured herself a cup of tea from a nondescript metal teapot, added two cubes of sugar from a chipped china bowl, then tipped in just a splash of milk from a little flask.

Replacing the flask’s lid, she turned it until it was tight, tipped the flask upside-down a couple of times to test the seal, then nodded her satisfaction.

That done, she took her cup and raised it to her lips. Her eyes flicked down to Cal’s own cup on the table before him. “You should drink it before it gets cold.”

“Oh. Yeah. Right,” said Cal, reaching for the cup.

The handle was a problem. It was small and circular, and the hole would have been a tight fit for one of his fingers even if he hadn’t been wearing a spacesuit. As it was, the best he could do was wrap his hand around the outside of the cup, although the smallness of it compared to the largeness of his gloves meant it was almost immediately lost in the fabric.

With some maneuvering, he managed to bring the cup to his mouth, but the glove’s padding meant he couldn’t quite get his lips to the rim. Feeling the pressure to drink it and keep the woman happy, he tried tossing some of the liquid into his mouth. The results, he’d be the first to admit, were mixed, at best.

He erupted in a fit of coughing as half of the liquid sloshed up his nose and found its way into his throat via the side entrance. The other half—arguably the worse half—sloshed into his eyes, temporarily blinding him.

He bent forward, his body wracked by the coughing, tears filling his eyes. “Oh God. Oh God, it burns,” he wheezed, vigorously wiping his face on his sleeve.

After almost a full minute of this, and with the cough now subsiding, Cal straightened and deposited his empty cup on the table. “Thanks,” he said, in a croaky, uneven voice.

The Librarian raised the teapot. “Top up?”

“I’ll pass,” Cal told her.

“And your… friend?” she asked, turning her attention to Splurt for the first time.

Splurt was still sagging on Cal’s shoulder, his eyes two drooping testicles of despair.

“He’s not a big tea guy,” Cal said.

The Librarian looked briefly offended by this, but then nodded graciously and returned the pot to the table.

After they’d met, the Librarian had led Cal through the stacks until they’d reached the area they sat in now. Aside from the addition of the chairs, table, and tea-making facilities, it seemed to be pretty much like any other part of the room—same empty shelves, same whispering voices.

One thing there had been though, and which Cal was pretty delighted about, was a light switch.

“I prefer the dark, actually,” the Librarian had explained, but she’d flicked the switch, anyway, and an area the size of a football field around them had been bathed in a clinical fluorescent light.

The light had revealed more of the same empty shelving units as Cal had already seen, but at least had reassured him that whoever was doing the whispering wasn’t lurking around the corner, ready to jump out at him.

“So,” said the Librarian, taking another sip of her tea. “The Symmorium Sentience.”

Cal glanced at the ball on the chair beside him. It was still dark and dormant, with just the faintest glow throbbing at its center.

“Uh, yeah. I think it’s broken,” Cal said. “But it brought us here.”

“It is not broken. Not exactly,” said the Librarian. She tilted her head a fraction, then nodded, as if in response to some secret voice. “Or rather, it is not broken all the way .”

“Can you fix it?” Cal asked.

“Oh my, no,” said the Librarian. “I could not even begin to start. I am the Librarian. No more. No less.”

“Right. Right,” said Cal, nodding. He looked around at the rows and rows of empty shelves. “I can see you have your work cut out for you.”

“You can say that again,” she replied, either missing the sarcasm or choosing to ignore it completely. “There were more of us at one point. But, you know how it is. Budget cuts.”

She made a clucking noise that made her disapproval very clear.

“They tried to cut my role, too,” she said, gazing into her tea. “There was a petition in the end, I believe, and they kept me.”

“Good,” said Cal. “I mean, great. I’m glad.”

The Librarian nodded curtly. “Librarians are vital. A library is not a library without a librarian. Is it, Mr Carver?”

“I guess not,” said Cal.

The Librarian arched an eyebrow.

“I mean, no. No, it isn’t.”

“It is merely a room filled with books.”

Or not filled with books, Cal thought, shooting another look around.

“And while a room filled with books is quite lovely a thing in and of itself, it is not, as I say, a library. The two are different.”

“Right,” Cal agreed. He laughed a little unconvincingly. “I mean, they’re certainly spelled different.”

The Librarian eyed him above the rim of her cup. “Yes,” she said. “Quite.”

The whispers continued around them. Cal gestured in the direction of the sound. As this was ‘everywhere’ it was quite an elaborate sort of gesture.

“What is that?” he asked. “What’s with all the whispering?”

A frown troubled the Librarian’s brow. She cocked her head, and one of her ears wiggled independently of the other. “Oh, that. Yes. Sorry, I barely notice it these days,” she said. “That, Mr Carver, is the books.”

Cal stole another sideways glance at the empty shelves. “The books?”

“You don’t know what the Library is, do you, Mr Carver?” she asked.

“This library?” asked Cal, pointing to the floor. “Do I know what this library is?”

She placed her cup gently on her saucer and waited

“I mean, I have a pretty good idea,” Cal said. “But you might want to go over it again, just so we’re both on the same page. Pun intended.”

“Yes. I think that would be wise,” the Librarian agreed. She removed a scrunched-up tissue from the sleeve of her cardigan and dabbed around her mouth with it. Once she had returned the tissue to its original hiding place, she neatly crossed her legs, and placed both hands on one knee.

And then, she began.

Sixteen

The Library had not been the first thing in existence, of course. That would have been ludicrous. Impossible, even.

It had been the second thing.

No one really knew how or where it had come from, not even the Librarians themselves. Especially not them, in fact. All they knew was that on that first day there was a shelf, and on that shelf was a book with empty pages. And, as they stood bunched together, all watching in wonder, the words began to write.

To begin with, the words came slowly. Paragraphs appeared over the course of thousands of years, sometimes one laborious word at a time, sometimes all at once. Those early entries spoke of expansion and fire, of matter colliding in the void, of nothing becoming something, albeit nothing much.

Not yet.

Time passed. The infant Universe cooled. The Librarians discovered a little cupboard with a kettle in it, and half a packet of coconut fingers in a little plastic tub. And lo, they gave thanks. Although, they did wonder among themselves if it would’ve killed whoever had bequeathed the coconut fingers to have left the whole packet.

Still, they didn’t complain. And they were right not to because, it transpired, regardless of how many coconut fingers were removed from the packet, there was always half a pack left over. None of the Librarians really understood this, but they also instinctively knew not to look a gift horse in the mouth, and so never questioned it aloud.

And beyond the library’s walls, infinity took shape.

Over the next few million years, things picked up, and the pages flew by. The Librarians all gathered together one afternoon and watched as the words in the book crept the last few inches down the final page. They had no idea what would happen when there was no space left to write on.

The words whispered aloud as they wrote themselves down. They spoke of stars forming, of debris smashing together, spinning in circles, becoming great solid spheres that revolved around even greater balls of burning gas.

The Librarians paid them no heed. Most of the words in the book were pretty similar, and it wasn’t the content they were currently interested in, but what would happen when there was nowhere left for it to go.

The answer came in the form of another book, which appeared beside the first. Or maybe, they thought, it had always been there, and they’d just never noticed it.

Yes, they agreed, as they polished off several coconut fingers and a few of the chocolate digestives they’d discovered waiting for them in the box that morning, that was probably it.

Time passed. The Universe developed. The Library grew.

The rate at which the books appeared increased exponentially as the planets cooled and life started to show up all over the galaxy in a trillion different flavors of primordial soup. It took several billion years for the first set of shelves to be filled.

The second set of shelves was filled in a quarter of that time. The third, in less than a quarter again.

The tenth shelf, when it arrived, was filled in a week. And that was when the problems started.

Space became an issue. Until then, the Library had seemed pointlessly big to the Librarians. Much of it was a vast hangar-like room that stretched for hundreds of miles in every direction. A few of them had set out to explore it once, returning months later only to announce that, aside from the bit they already knew about, it was almost entirely empty.

They had found some Earl Grey tea bags and an unopened pack of gingernut biscuits on the way back, though, so that was nice.

A scant thousand years after the tenth shelving unit had appeared, you could hardly move for the bloody things.

Books were stacked haphazardly, jammed into every available bit of shelf space and piled in teetering towers on top. The Librarians found themselves perpetually on the back foot, frantically trying to catalog and organize the thousands of volumes that appeared on a daily basis, falling further and further behind as, out in the Universe, fish-things grew legs and began to make decisions more complex than ‘eat it or mate with it’.

Not much more complex, granted, particularly the male ones, but sufficiently complicated that entire chapters were dedicated to their thought processes on even the most trivial of matters.

Should they go left or right?

Another chapter.

Was that thing with all the teeth dangerous?

Another chapter.

Was it possible to stitch a leg back on?

Two more chapters, plus an extensive series of footnotes.

Faster and faster the books appeared. Bigger and bigger the problem became.

Until, one day, one of the Librarians stumbled upon something that would change the Library forever. She saw it in the pages of a book that had fallen off a shelf and flopped open on the floor. It was on a page that described the instability of the Universe, and the relative thinness of its walls.

Curling up as best she could on one of the Library’s uncomfortably plastic seats, and with a nice pot of tea and a delicious selection of baked goods beside her, the Librarian read up on parallel dimensions and bubble universes.

And a plan began to form.

* * *

Cal looked around again at the Library. “Oh,” he said. “Huh!” he said. “So…” he said.

He didn’t really have the heart to tell the woman that, despite her explanation, he was still pretty much none the wiser.

“So, the books are all…”

“On the shelves,” said the Librarian.

“These shelves?” said Cal, pointing to the closest one. “The books are on these shelves?”

“Yes,” the Librarian confirmed.

“These shelves right here?”

“Yes. And, simultaneously, they are somewhere else.”

“Aha. Right. Gotcha,” Cal said, despite the fact that he very obviously hadn’t.

“We call it the Appendix,” said the Librarian. “It isn’t technically a bubble universe. Not exactly. It is more like a blister on the side of this universe, if you can imagine such a thing. A space, trillions of light-years across, which we use for storage purposes.”

Cal could just about get his head around that part, but was still having trouble with the rest.

“So they’re in another universe,” he said, replaying the conversation. “But also on these shelves?”

“Exactly,” said the Librarian. She produced a plastic box and held it open. “Coconut finger?”

“I’m good, thanks,” said Cal.

The Librarian nodded encouragingly. Cal relented and fumbled one of the long cookies from the packet. He bit, crunched, then swallowed. “Thanks.”

“The shelves are reference points,” the Librarian explained. Well, not explained , exactly, as Cal just stared back at her in confusion. “The Appendix contains the volumes, but the shelves allow us to access any book of our choosing. The shelves are a filing system, the Appendix holds the files.”

Cal ate the rest of the coconut finger. It was pretty good, and nowhere near as stale as he’d been expecting, given how long it must’ve been in the box.

“So, with all those books filling it up, aren’t you worried the Appendix might, you know, burst?” asked Cal. “I’ve heard that can be unpleasant.”

The Librarian smiled a thin smile. “We have a few million millennia before we need worry too much about that.” She glanced sadly around the old place. “It’ll probably be staffed by volunteers by then. We’ll let them worry about it.”

Her eyes widened a little in surprise, as if she hadn’t been expecting to say the words out loud. “Lovely people, of course, and they mean well, I’m sure, but…” Her nose wrinkled a little. “They’re not Librarians , are they? Not really.”

“No,” said Cal. “I guess not.”

He reached for another coconut finger and waved it around like a conductor’s baton. “So, all this. The books. They tell you everything?”

The Librarian swished her teapot gently, then topped up both cups. “Everything, yes. Everything that has happened all across the universe, from its very beginning until this moment.”

“Can it tell the future?” Cal wondered.

The Librarian snorted as she poured milk into her cup, spilling a little into her saucer. “Of course it can’t tell the future. It’s not magic ,” she scoffed. “Besides, the future can be changed, Mr Carver. Few know that better than you.”

Cal winced. “So, you know about all that?”

“Oh yes,” said the Librarian, raising her cup to her lips. “We have a robust Alternate History section. You feature in it quite prominently.”

“Can I read some of it?” Cal asked.

The Librarian blew lightly on her tea. “I’d strenuously advise you not to.” Her eyes went to the Symmorium Sentience, then looked pointedly back at Cal.

“Right. Yes. That’s why I’m here,” Cal said, picking up the message loud and clear. “The Sentience told us it has to get home, but it doesn’t seem to know where home is. I guess it thought it might be able to find out here.” He smiled hopefully. “Would that be something you might be able to help with?”

“It is a popular subject of late,” the Librarian replied.

Cal’s chair creaked as he adjusted his position. “What do you mean?”

“I mean you are not the first to come to the Library seeking information on the Symmorium Sentience recently.”

Cal glanced down at the Sentience, then at Splurt. Neither gave him much in return.

“Who else?” he asked, his voice dropping to a whisper, as if whoever else had been inquiring might still be hanging around.

“Someone not all that unlike you, Mr Carver. An Earthling.” She sniffed haughtily. “At least, I believe so, although it was hard to tell with his silly outfit and mask. Manacle, he called himself. I didn’t much take to him, to be honest.”

Cal’s stomach sank. “Manacle? When was this?”

“A day or two,” the Librarian said. “No more.”

“Damn it,” Cal sighed. “I thought we blew that guy up. Did you tell him anything?”

“This is a Library, Mr Carver. Its entire purpose is to share information.”

“Fonk!” Cal spat.

The Librarian placed a finger to her lips. “Shh,” she urged. “If you’d be so good as to keep your voice down. Thank you.”

“What did you tell him?” Cal asked. “What did you say?”

“I told him nothing. It was a book,” the Librarian said. She placed her cup back in its saucer and rose gracefully. “Come, Mr Carver. This way.”

* * *

Mech was struggling. Physically, partly, but mostly mentally.

It was the dial that was the problem. In order to power himself up enough to be able to lift the ship, he’d had to crank it several notches to his right, but while this had greatly enhanced his strength, he was having some difficulty in thinking clearly.

He knew, for example, that he had to lift the ship into position, he just couldn’t quite recall why. He knew that Cal had fallen down a hole, but couldn’t remember how big a hole, where it had been, or what Cal looked like. At least, not beyond a vague sort of sense of something small and irritating.

The blue one spoke in his ear. He’d known her name once, but that was a thing of the past. She spoke in slow, deliberate tones, using short words and phrases. He vaguely recalled instructing her to do that, but the memory felt made-up, and not quite real, so he wasn’t putting a lot of faith in it.

Whatever the reasons for them, her simple instructions were helping him to stay focused. And that, he thought, was the main thing.

Or possibly it wasn’t. He couldn’t remember.

“OK, so you should be standing under the ship, just in front of the wings,” said the blue one.

Mech’s brain groaned with the effort of processing this. He was under the ship. He was confident of that. And the wings were… not in front of him. The other one. Back-something.

“Yes,” he said.

“Good. You’re doing great,” the blue one told him. “Now, do you see a little door?”

Mech shuffled around, searching the ground beside him.

“Sorry, on the bottom of the ship. Above you. It’s a little square door that says ‘Emergency access,’ on it.”

Mech looked up at the underside of the ship until he found the little square door. It had something written on it, but the symbols were gibberish.

“Yes,” he said again.

“Great! Well done, you’re doing great,” said the blue one, and Mech’s chest swelled with pride.

“Bit slow, perhaps,” interjected another voice. Mech recognized it, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t picture a face to go with it. “Could possibly do with getting a move on.”

“Kevin, stop,” the blue one said.

“Stop,” Mech agreed. “Kevin . Stop.”

“You tell him, Mech,” said the blue one. “Now, there are two handles, one on either side of the hatch. They’re supposed to be for access, but we think they’re strong enough to support the weight of the ship for a little while.”

Mech stared blankly.

“Sorry. Not important,” said the blue one. “You see the two handles?”

Mech saw the two handles.

“You’re going to grab those, and when I tell you, you’re going to lift, OK? You’re just going to push both arms straight up and lift the ship as high as you can. You got that?”

Mech replayed the instructions slowly. Then he replayed them again, to be on the safe side.

He then went over them for a third time, but as he’d forgotten the first time by that point, it didn’t really help reinforce the instructions any more than it already had been.

“Yes,” he said.

“Great. We’re almost there, Mech,” the blue one told him. “We’re almost there.”

He heard her take a breath. “OK, so, if you’re ready, take hold of the handles.”

Mech took hold of the handles.

“Yes.”

“Now lift, Mech,” the blue one told him. “Lift !”

* * *

The Librarian brushed a fingertip back and forth along what looked to Cal to be a row of nothing at all, then stopped and gave a little cluck of approval.

“Aha. Here we are.”

She mimed, quite accurately, the act of removing a heavy leather-bound volume from a bookshelf, and then, to Cal’s surprise, the book was there in her hand, two words inlaid in gold leaf on the dark cover.

Symmorium Sentience .

And then, further down, another word enclosed by brackets.

(The)

“This is just one volume among many, of course,” the Librarian said. She blew some imaginary dust from the cover and wiped it with her sleeve. “But I think it contains all the pertinent information you seek.”

She clutched the book to her chest for a moment, eyed Cal warily, then handed it over with a reluctance that was readily apparent. “Be careful with it,” she instructed, as Cal fumbled with the book and the Sentience. “It is extremely old.”

“Great. Thanks. And I will,” said Cal, once he had the book safely in his hands and the Sentience tucked beneath an armpit. He flicked to a random page and saw hundreds of lines of small, densely-packed print that immediately made his brain switch off. He closed the book and smiled graciously at the Librarian. “So, do I get it stamped somewhere, or how does this work?”

The Librarian peered over her spectacles at him. “I’m sorry?”

“How do I borrow it?” Cal asked. “So that I can take it back to the ship.”

“Back to your ship ?” the Librarian gasped. She looked utterly horrified by the suggestion. “You can’t take it anywhere. This is a reference library, not a lending library.”

Cal looked down at the book. “So, what are you saying? I can’t check it out?”

“No, Mr Carver, you cannot ‘check it out,’” the Librarian told him. “You may peruse. You may memorize. You may even take notes. But the book stays here. Is that understood?”

Cal groaned. “But there are so many words,” he protested. “This is really more Mech’s kind of thing. If I could just take it up to him…”

The temperature in the Library dropped a few degrees. The whispering voices became a hushed murmur of anticipation.

“The book stays here,” the Librarian insisted, her voice strained. Her uninteresting nose gave an almost-interesting little twitch that made her glasses fall off. They swung on the chain in front of her chest, and she made no move to replace them on her face. “Is that understood ?”

“Uh, sure. Sure,” said Cal, shifting uneasily.

A sheen of sweat had formed on the Librarian’s brow. She tugged at the neck of her cardigan, as if suddenly growing hot.

Still holding the Sentience under one arm, and with Splurt sagging on his shoulder, Cal turned a few pages of the book.

Fonk, it looked dull. Even before he’d focused on any of the actual words, he could tell it was going to be tedious. It was the way all the text was so tightly bunched together, broken only by the occasional indecipherable graphic that might have been some sort of graph or diagram, but might equally have been the erratic doodlings of a madman.

It was big, too. There had to be hundreds of sections. Where did he even start to look?

The beginning, he decided. He wanted to know the Sentience’s origin, so it made sense to start at the beginning. Also, that meant that the heaviest side was on the right, so he could prop most of the book against the Sentience itself, saving his wrist from the effort of holding it up. It was a classic win-win scenario.

Except for one problem.

“Hey, there’s a page missing,” Cal remarked.

The Librarian trembled. “What?” she asked in a startled hiss.

“Someone’s torn a page out,” Cal said, angling the book so she could see. Sure enough, most of one page had been ripped out, leaving only a thin strip of ragged paper in its place. “Is that allowed?”

The Librarian dabbed at her forehead with her tissue, mopping up the sweat that was pouring off her now. “No. Of course, it’s not allowed,” she seethed. “It must have been the Earthling. I knew I didn’t like him, I knew it !”

One of her eyes bulged, swelling to a couple of times its natural size before returning to normal. Cal’s jaw flopped open.

“Uh, you might want to… You’re having some… I don’t want to say ‘face problems,’” Cal said. “But you’re having some face problems.”

“Give it to me,” the Librarian spat, her voice pitched somewhere between a squeak and a grunt. “Give me back the book! You can’t be trusted with it. No one can be trusted with them.”

She lunged for it, hands grasping, fingers twisting into claws.

Cal dodged, then instinctively swung with the thick, leather-bound volume. It thwacked her across the back of the head, sending her stumbling into a rack of shelves.

The whispers fell silent. Cal could only watch with a growing sense of terrible inevitability, as the shelving unit toppled and hit the one behind it.

And then that one toppled, too.

And the one behind it.

And the…

Well, you get the idea.

The crashing reverberated around the Library as shelves fell like dominoes, fanning out, spreading the destruction far and wide.

“N-noise!” hissed the Librarian, grabbing at her ears. “Too… much… noise!”

Cal clutched the book to his chest and quietly took a backward step away. “Uh, sorry, partly my fault,” he said. “But listen, I promise I will bring this right back. OK?”

Down on the floor, the Librarian reared back her head. Her neck twisted and she turned to Cal so suddenly that her face fell off and splatted onto the carpet.

Cal held his breath and stared at the heaving mass of reddish-brown flesh that wore the librarian’s scalp as a hat.

He looked down at her bland, forgettable features on the floor.

Actually, from this angle it was quite an interesting face, after all, he thought.

And then, as something big, slimy, and unmistakably furious erupted from inside the Librarian’s body, he ran.

Seventeen

Cal hurtled along the passageway between two rows of shelves, the Symmorium Sentience under one arm, the book under the other, and Splurt clinging to his shoulder like a cowboy on a bucking bronco.

He was racing the collapsing shelves, which were in the process of toppling all around him. He was also, to a much greater extent, racing the bus-sized worm creature that was slithering along behind him, its bloated body shushing as it chased him down.

It was closing fast. He could hear it. Hell, he could smell it. It reminded him of bacon. But not good bacon. Old bacon. Bacon you shouldn’t eat but, in his case, inevitably always did. Bacon that made you suffer.

Running in the spacesuit was difficult, but fortunately, he knew a trick that would help. It involved swearing repeatedly in a high, shrill voice.

“Oh-shizz-oh-shizz-oh-shizz-oh-shizz!”

Yes, that worked. Powered by panic, his cumbersome feet drove him onward.

A few dozen feet ahead, the light became a blank wall of darkness. That wasn’t good. During the brief, horror-stricken glimpse he’d gotten of the worm, he’d noticed it didn’t have any eyes. Big weird spike-like teeth things? Yes. Eyes? No.

And yet, it was still following him. And if it was still following him, then it knew where he was. And if it knew where he was, then that meant it could find him in the dark just as easily as it could in the light. And if it could find him in the dark, then that meant…

He decided not to dwell on what that meant.

“Splurt, do something!” Cal yelped, weaving sideways as a set of shelves toppled towards him. He made it past a half-second before it thumped onto the carpet at his heels, blocking the path. The worm turned at a sudden right angle, avoiding the obstacle rather than crashing through it.

“Hey, we lost it!” Cal wheezed.

The smell of bacon came rushing up on his right.

“Shizz, shizz, shizz! Spoke too soon!”

The worm was still gaining, but there was a row of shelves between them now. These units hadn’t yet toppled over, and the worm seemed to have no desire to knock them over itself, so they acted as a barrier, keeping man and monster apart.

“Ha! Not so scary now, are you?” Cal lied. The shelves hadn’t really helped in that respect. The worm was still terrifying. “You’ll have to work a lot harder if you want to…”

The next few shelves were missing, creating a wide opening. Cal’s butt-cheeks tightened, giving him an extra burst of speed that propelled him across the gap before the worm swerved back into the aisle.

“Catch me! It’s going to catch me! Splurt, I need you, buddy!”

Splurt flopped across to Cal’s neck, then squeezed himself down through the neck of the suit.

“Wait, are you… Are you hiding?!” Cal yelped. “How is that helping me? Get back here, you little bamston!”

He gave an involuntary shudder as Splurt wriggled down his front. It was only when the movement stopped by his right hip that Cal realized what was about to happen. He simultaneously jumped, ducked, covered his head with a big book, and ejected the words, “No, God, don’t!” from his mouth and both nostrils.

His hip exploded. At least, that was his initial thought on the matter. The fabric of the suit erupted outward as a burst of laser fire punched from within.

“Ow, ow! Jesus!” Cal grimaced, throwing all his weight onto his left leg and hopping a few times before resuming his run. There was a hole in his suit’s pants, the material black and charred around the edges.

Cal glanced down in time to see the barrel of his blaster poke out and take aim at the monster slithering along behind them.

“OK, not what I was hoping for, but I guess it’ll have to do!” Cal wailed. “Shoot it!”

Two tiny green hands strained against the pistol’s trigger. Cal felt the gun kick against his thigh, and then a blaster bolt went screaming upward past his face.

“Jesus Christ , Splurt! Watch where you’re pointing that thing,” he yelped. He gestured backward with his head. “That way! Shoot that way! I shouldn’t have to explain this.”

Up ahead, the wall of darkness was almost upon him. His head snapped left and right, searching for another route that would let him stay in the light, but the way was blocked by shelves on all sides, and he couldn’t take the time to clamber over them.

He shrieked in panic as Splurt fired again. The shot hit the carpet immediately behind Cal’s feet.

“What are you even doing? Can’t you aim that thing?”

Splurt rippled.

“What do you mean you’ve never fired a gun before?” Cal cried.

The blaster went off again. Cal’s right buttock became blisteringly hot, and a bolt of fiery energy skimmed past above the worm’s head. The worm lurched to the side, collided with a set of shelves, then the shushing returned as it rejoined the chase.

Cal ran onward into the dark. It fell over him like a blanket, heavy and oppressive, slowing him down.

Splurt fired twice in rapid-succession, echoing a perfect pew-pew around the Library. There was a satisfying thack as one of the bolts slammed into the worm, and Cal felt a momentary surge of hope. Maybe that would stop it, or at least scare it off.

But, no. If anything, it just made the fonking thing angrier.

The shushing came faster. The smell of bad bacon filled Cal’s nostrils. He stumbled blindly on, his instincts screaming at him to hold a hand out as an early-warning system for anything solid that might be blocking the way ahead. Unfortunately, both his hands were currently occupied, and so he resigned himself to the fact that his face would just have to take the brunt of it.

He hit a shelving unit.

His face took the brunt of it.

Spinning, he guessed a direction and went that way, blood oozing from his nose. Tears blinded him. Given that he couldn’t see anything, anyway, this wasn’t as much of an inconvenience as it otherwise might have been.

He hit another set of shelves, shoulder-first this time. The Symmorium Sentience was jolted from his grip and thudded onto the floor. As it hit, the dim glow inside it stirred. Perhaps it was because they were now surrounded by darkness, but the green light of the Sentience seemed brighter now.

Not that Cal had time to admire it. He made a grab for it, but the ball rolled away from him, its glow flashing across the shelves on either side as it trundled across the carpet.

“What are you doing? Come back!” Cal called.

The worm shushed closer and Splurt fired a volley of shots from the blaster, none of which hit anything useful.

Cal threw himself into another lumbering run, chasing the Sentience as it rolled off. When it reached a junction in the aisles, it stopped, and he had almost caught up with it when it rolled off to the left, leading him in a different direction.

“Wait, do you know the way out?” Cal shouted after it. “Are you leading us out?”

A word rose in Cal’s head. It was weak and quiet, but he understood it, all the same.

“Follow.”

* * *

Mech stood back, admiring his handiwork. The Currently Untitled stood upright on its landing legs, gleaming in the light of the artificial sun. It looked good as new. Provided you ignored the dents and scuffed paintwork.

“Great job, Mech,” the voice spoke encouragingly in his ear. “You’ve done very well. We’re all really proud of you, mister.”

“Yeah, I turned the dial back,” Mech told her. “You don’t need to talk to me like I’m five.”

Loren exhaled. “Thank fonk for that.” Her tone switched from patronizing to concerned. “Any sign of Cal?”

“He’s not back yet?”

“No. When would he have come back? He’d have had to walk right past you.”

Mech shrugged. “With my dial cranked, there’s no saying I’d have noticed.” He turned and surveyed the landscape around them. “I ain’t seeing him.”

“I’ve been trying to contact him, but the signal’s still blocked,” Loren said. “I’m worried, Mech. He could be in trouble.”

“This is Cal we’re talking about. Of course, he’s in trouble. The man’s like a fonking magnet for trouble. But he’ll be fine,” Mech insisted, although he sounded a little less sure than he had last time. “Like I said, he’s got Splurt and he’s got the Symmorium Sentience. That’s some pretty serious back-up.”

“I don’t know. Splurt’s been acting kind of strange,” Loren pointed out.

“Still. You know the weird fonked-up relationship they have. No way Splurt’s going to let him get hurt. And then, throw in the Sentience—a god. An actual god. And, well…”

He cast his eye across the empty horizon. “…what’s the worst that could happen?”

* * *

“This is the worst thing that could have happened,” Cal sobbed, staring up at the blank, featureless wall that completely blocked his path.

The Sentience had led him out of the main chamber and into a corridor like the one he’d first landed in. The worm had plunged in after them, it’s broad, gelatinous body a perfect fit for the curved walls. He could hear it shushing closer now, narrowing what little gap Cal had been able to create.

“OK, so what now?” he rasped, staring imploringly at the Sentience. It rolled back and forth for a moment, then sprang up against Cal’s chest, forcing him to grab it with his free arm.

The Symmorium Sentience nestled against him, its glow turning faint.

“Wait. What? What are you doing? Wake up!”

The blaster in his pants fired, sending a bolt streaking along the corridor. The shot missed the worm by several feet, but painted it briefly in a bright red wash, revealing its full terrifying length.

The smell of bad bacon was thick and choking. The worm’s spike-like teeth snapped together. Clack-clack.

Cal did the only thing he could think to do. The only weapon left in his arsenal.

He screamed.

It was not a scream he was particularly proud of. It was the screech of a horror starlet from the 1950s—shrill, piercing, and utterly devoid of hope. It depressed him that it would probably be the last sound he ever made. As final words went, “Yeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaeeeeeek!” wasn’t exactly up there with the greats.

The worm reared back from the sound as if wounded, its pronged head thrashing so violently it slapped against the tiled walls with a series of damp, thunderous thwacks .

The echo of the scream bounced back to Cal, and he winced with embarrassment. Jesus, that had been high. Still, at least the rest of the team hadn’t heard it. It was a small comfort, if he was going to die here, then at least that penetrating screech of terror wasn’t how the others would remember him. He’d have hated that.

“Cal? Is that you?”

Loren’s voice was a series of broken hisses in his ear.

Damn .

“Loren! Yes, it’s me!” he cried, ignoring the hot flush of shame that crept up his neck. “Get me out! Get me out!”

“Where are you?”

“I’m…”

Cal’s eyes darted pointlessly around the darkened dead end. “I’m here. I don’t know! Can’t you track me?”

“No. But you must be…” The line was filled with static. “…urface. Can you…?”

“Can I what?” Cal asked. He pressed his earpiece more firmly into his ear. “Loren? Loren, can you hear me? Can I what?”

The worm’s shaking stopped. It swayed woozily for a few seconds, then seemed to pull itself together.

“The scream. Sound,” Cal whispered. “Of course it hates sound. It’s a fonking librarian.”

He let out another scream, taking care not to make it sound quite as pathetic as the previous one, and swung with the book just as the worm reared back. The heavy hardback made a loud, echoing crack as the leather met the tiles. The worm twitched violently and slithered back a few feet.

Cal stopped screaming. No matter how manly he tried to make it, it just wasn’t cutting it. His mind raced to find an alternative. Something loud. Something impressive. Something that didn’t make him sound like Janet Leigh in the shower scene in Psycho .

Not entirely on purpose, Cal began to sing. Specifically, he sang the 1989 single, ‘Jesus is My Spaceship (Let’s Ride Him Through the Stars)’ by German Christian Rock act, Klaus Hugen.

He’d barely made it to the end of the first verse (‘He’ll take us all to Jupiter, He’ll take us all to Mars’) when the Sentience vibrated in his arms and the wall behind him slid away, letting a blazing artificial sunlight flood in and revealing a rocky incline leading to sweet, sweet freedom above.

“Yes, yes, yes!” Cal cried, turning and throwing himself up the climb.

“Cal? That you?” Mech grunted in his ear.

“Where are you?” Loren demanded.

“I’m coming!” Cal told them.

He was halfway up the incline when the headache kicked in. It stabbed through his brain like an icepick, knocking him back down into the mouth of the tunnel below. He cried out in pain, the sound temporarily keeping the worm at bay.

“What is it?” Loren asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Don’t know,” Cal hissed. His voice was a croak through the pea-sized gap that had, until a moment ago, been his throat.

“Wait. You still got your helmet on, right?” Mech asked him.

The helmet.

Shizz.

Gritting his teeth, Cal squeezed the Sentience and the book against his chest and powered up the slope. Every step sent another jarring jolt of pain through his skull, down his spine, and then out into the rest of his body.

His lungs burned. His eyes bled. His bowels opened.

Splurt hastily extricated himself from the leg of Cal’s pants, crawled up his side, then settled on his shoulder.

“S-sorry, buddy,” Cal slurred.

Kicking up the incline, he powered over a rocky ridge. As he did, the artificial gravity lost its grip on him and he rose in a great, leaping bound into the air.

“I see him!” Mech’s voice barked. “I see you.”

“Where?” Cal wheezed. He turned, blinking through the blood and the colors that swam before his eyes, until he finally saw the Untitled .

Fonk, that was far away.

He twisted in the air, alighted gently, then sprang off in the direction of the ship just as the worm-creature reared up through the hole behind him, propelling slow-moving rocks toward the sky.

“What the fonk is that thing?” Mech demanded.

“It’s the librarian,” Cal explained. His rapid healing ability was fighting back against the toxic atmosphere, but the bout could still go either way.

“What do you mean, ‘It’s the librarian’? How is that a librarian?”

“I mean it’s… Just shut the fonk up and shoot it!” Cal urged.

He hit the ground and bounded on, Hulk-style, toward the ship and the miniature metal figure he could just make out in front of it.

A light flared on Mech’s arm. The sound reached Cal a moment later, hot on the heels of the bolt itself. The ground erupted on his left, spinning debris into the air.

“What was that?” Cal wheezed. “Seriously, can none of you guys shoot straight?”

“Overcompensated for the gravity,” Mech said. “Hold on.”

Another flash. Another scream. Cal looked up to see the tumbling ball of fire go curving up above his head.

“Undercompensated,” Mech said.

“You think ?”

He landed, crouched, then bounded on. Behind him, the worm was closing fast, its bloated body sticking to the ground, unaffected by the low gravity.

A halo of darkness was closing around Cal’s vision. He could taste his nostrils. His skin was alive with a thousand stabbing pains, and one of his lungs had gone on strike.

And the ship… The ship was still so far away. Too far.

The worm shushed closer. Cal tried to scream, but every part of his body assured him this was no longer an option.

“Sound. It… it hates sound,” he managed to wheeze, his throat snapping shut on the last word, silencing him.

“Hold up. Hold up,” said Mech. “I got this.”

Cal watched in mute horror as Mech turned and launched himself toward the ship’s open airlock and vanished inside.

The ground came upon Cal unexpectedly. One second he’d been gliding through the air, the next he was stumbling across rocks, his eyes peeling open.

Shizz. He’d passed out.

He tried to kick off again, but his feet flailed uselessly against the loose gravel. He fell—slowly, and for quite some time—then bounced and rolled for several feet, the padded suit carving a trench through the sand.

Shush. Shush. Shush .

The worm was coming. There was nothing he could do. Nowhere he could go. Even through the choking atmosphere, he could smell its bacony stench growing like a cloud around him.

And then, there it was, rearing up, its pincer-teeth snapping at the air. This was it, then.

It was over.

The sound tore across the rocky desert floor like an inharmonious tidal wave. The volume and sheer unpleasantness of it struck the worm as a physical blow, bending its upper half backward and slamming it onto the sand.

Cal’s headache, which had been threatening to make his head implode, grew in intensity until his back arched and his limbs tightened, and the last of the air in his one working lung forced its way out through his throat as a bird-like cheep.

Splurt vibrated on Cal’s shoulder and squirmed down into the suit. Gasping and gagging, Cal managed to roll over, just as the sound came again. No, not sound. Sound was too nice a term. It was an affront to sound . A mockery of it. A din so awful, so nerve-janglingly terrible, that Cal almost found himself wishing the worm would deliver a killer blow and put him out of his misery.

Steeling himself, Cal raised his head a fraction off the sand. There, marching toward him, was Mech. He strode purposefully, his mouth twisted into one of the broadest, most joyous smiles Cal had ever seen on the cyborg’s face.

And there, tucked under one arm and attached to a set of industrial-looking bellows, was the source of the unholy racket.

“Fonking space bagpipes,” Cal managed to eject, and then his body gave up, his brain shut down, and his face plopped forward into the sand.

Eighteen

“Uh, hey,” said Cal, shuffling onto the bridge.

He had woken to find himself on the bed in the room they had designated as the medical bay. Or, as Mech had taken to calling it, ‘Cal’s other room.’

His injuries had healed up. His aches and pains were no more. Someone, to their credit, had taken what was left of the spacesuit off him, and presumably hosed his lower half down. He didn’t think he wanted to know who had ended up with that job, but hoped it was a random stranger who just happened to stop by, and who had now left forever.

Loren turned in her chair and stood before it had finished its rotation. She took a step towards him, then her eyes went to Mizette who was slouched in her own chair, and she stopped.

On screen, space cruised by at a steady sub-warp clip, inching distant stars across the darkness.

“You OK?” Loren asked.

Cal scratched his head. After stumbling from the medical bay, he’d taken the time to shower and get changed, but the clinical, bleach-like scent of the Zertex-brand body wash had done nothing to erase the smell of the worm, or the taste of the Library planet’s atmosphere from his memory.

“Uh, yeah. I’m fine,” he said. “Thanks for asking.”

He nodded.

She nodded back.

After a pause, he nodded again.

Loren sat down.

Cal got the impression that everyone else had been watching this closely, and so he hurried to fill the awkward silence that followed. “What about Splurt and the Sentience? Did you pick them up?”

“Mech did,” Loren confirmed.

“And the book?” asked Cal. “Did you get the book?”

Mech frowned. “What book?”

“Oh, you have got to be fonking kidding me!” Cal groaned. “You know what I went through to get—”

“You mean this book?” asked Mech, holding up the leather-bound volume.

Cal’s chest heaved with relief. “You are a mean person, Gluk Disselpoof. I hope you know that.”

He looked over at Miz, trying to do so as casually as possible.

“And how you doing, kiddo?” he asked, smiling a little too widely.

Miz tutted and shifted her weight. “Ugh, like you even care,” she muttered.

Cal blinked. “Huh? What’s that supposed to mean? Of course, I care. We all care.”

“I’m fine. OK?” Miz snapped, shifting huffily and crossing her arms. “Why wouldn’t I be fine?”

Cal met Loren’s gaze. She gave a little shake of her head, suggesting he not go there.

“How’s Tyrra?” he asked, taking Loren’s advice and changing the subject.

“Sleeping,” Miz said. “Or, like, catatonic or whatever. But she’s fine.”

“She’s fine,” Cal repeated. “You’re fine. We’re all fine. That’s good.”

“I’m fine, too, sir,” Kevin announced. “Not that anyone asked, but I thought I’d share it with you, anyway.”

Cal gave a half-hearted thumbs up to the ceiling. “Glad to hear it, Kevin.”

“Master Splurt seems less than fine, however,” Kevin continued. “In fact, I’d go so far as to say that he seems rather down, sir.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” said Cal. “Where is he?”

“Under your bed, sir,” Kevin said.

Cal sighed. “I’ll go talk to him in a minute. Let me know if he does anything weird. Or, weirder than usual.”

“Very good, sir.”

Cal stretched and cricked his neck a few times. “What happened to the librarian-worm?” he asked. He slapped himself on the forehead. “Wait. Shizz. Book worm. That’s much better. What happened to the bookworm? Did you kill it? Did you bagpipe it to death?”

“No, we didn’t kill it. I just drove it back enough that I could grab you.”

Cal gave a satisfied nod. “Good. A library needs a librarian. Otherwise, it’d just be a room full of books, and where would we be then?”

“In a room full of books?” Loren guessed.

“Exactly,” said Cal. He felt there was probably a point he’d been trying to make, but it now eluded him.

With a shrug, he moved to sit in his chair, and almost sat on the Symmorium Sentience. It lay there, pulsing faintly, its surface lightly scuffed and faded.

“Shizz. Sorry, didn’t see you there,” he said, then he turned and whispered at Mech from the side of his mouth. “It’s in my seat. Why is it in my seat?”

“I don’t know. Just seemed like the obvious place to put it. You weren’t sitting there.”

“But I want to sit there now,” Cal said.

He flashed a smile at the Sentience, then glowered at Mech again. “Can I move it, do you think? Or would that be rude?”

“It looks pretty comfortable, man,” said Mech. “Maybe best not to disturb it.”

Cal couldn’t tell if Mech was messing with him. The Sentience had saved his life, though, so he supposed the least he could do in return was let it borrow his seat for a while.

A little while. It had better not get too used to it.

Cal gestured to the book in Mech’s hand. “You find anything out?”

“I learned a lot—a lot about the Sentience,” Mech said. “Like, way more than I cared to know. This thing is fonking detailed. There’s only one problem.”

“There’s a page missing,” said Cal.

“There’s a page missing,” Mech confirmed. “And it’s a page we need if we want to figure out where we need to take the Sentience.”

Cal leaned a hand on the arm of his chair. “Can’t we do anything? Isn’t there a way of, I don’t know, putting it back?”

Mech brightened. “Oh! You mean like a Repaginator?”

“Yes!” said Cal. “That sounds perfect. A Repaginator. Do we have one of those?”

“There ain’t no such thing, shizznod,” snapped Mech, dropping the act. “No, we can’t just magic a page back into the damn book.”

“What happened to it?” Loren asked. “Did you tear it out?”

Cal shook his head. “Not me. Manacle.”

“The ‘Enslaver of Worlds’ motherfonker?” said Mech. “I thought you blew him up?”

“That’s the guy, and I thought so, too, but it seems not,” Cal replied. “Seems he turned up recently and snatched the page. The Librarian didn’t notice until I pointed it out to her. She didn’t take it well.”

“Great, so… what does that mean?” Loren asked. “The EDI knows where the Sentience comes from? Is that a problem?”

Mech gave a metallic shrug. “Only in the sense that we don’t know where it comes from, which means we don’t know where to take it so it can get its mojo back.”

Cal sighed. Fonking Manacle. Fonking EDI. Fonking Earth . Much as he hated to say it, he actually preferred it when his home planet had been dead. When they’d been dead, he’d remembered them fondly, and had been able to ignore all the bad stuff the human race had done over its lifespan. He’d been able to gloss over all the violence, hatred, and brutality, and to remember a sort of idealized version of his species, instead.

That was right out the window now, though. Cal had always assumed that Zertex was the biggest shower of shizznods in the galaxy, but it turned out that Earth, when given half a chance, was even worse.

And what was more, he was responsible for it. Both hims. Both the actual him and the other him who’d grown up to be a mass-murdering military despot. They shared equal responsibility for the clusterfonk the galaxy had become.

Cal sagged into his seat, only remembering the Sentience was there when it buzzed vigorously against his butt-cheeks. He leaped up like a scalded cat, apologized profusely, then plodded to the back of the bridge and flopped onto one of the guest chairs.

God, they were uncomfortable.

God, he wanted his own chair.

God , everything sucked.

He blew out his cheeks. “So, what now?” he asked. “Anyone have any ideas? Because I am all out.”

Mech opened his mouth.

“And even if I did have an idea,” Cal continued. “It’d be a bad idea. It would go wrong. It’d only make things worse.”

“Cal—” Loren began, but Cal waved a hand to silence her.

“We all know it, Loren. Think about it. Think about everything that’s happened,” Cal said. He gestured out into space. “Out there. The Greyx are dead. The Symmorium? Also dead. Dozens of other species, hundreds of other planets, all wiped out, because I tried to do the right thing. Because I tried to be… what? A hero?”

He snorted and looked away, unable to hold anyone’s gaze. The floodgates were opening now, he could feel it. All the thoughts and fears he’d harbored since they’d returned to this timeline and discovered the damage they’d caused now came bubbling to the surface.

“You guys? The you guys from this version of reality, I mean? I killed you all.”

“That wasn’t you,” Loren told him.

“But it was me, Loren. Don’t you get it? It was me. It could be me,” Cal said, standing again. “Everything that made up that me makes up this me. Only this me didn’t have another this me butting in and screwing up his life like this me did to that me.”

“Did anyone follow that?” Kevin wondered. “Because I’m afraid I got somewhat lost.”

“Forget it,” Cal sighed, sitting again and staring at the floor between his feet. “It’s just… It doesn’t matter. Forget it.”

A hush fell over the bridge. It was Miz who eventually broke it.

“Bullshizz.”

Cal looked up. “Huh?”

“All that. What you said. It’s, like, total bullshizz,” Miz scowled. “You didn’t kill us. You didn’t, you know, like wipe out the Greyx, or whatever. We’ve been with you the whole time, we’d totally have noticed. And, even if we hadn’t been, we’d know it. That wasn’t you. Like, it could never be you.”

Cal sat up. “Miz…”

“Look, just shut up, already,” Miz told him. She plucked at her fur self-consciously, avoiding everyone else’s gaze. “So, something happened to that other you that turned him into a psycho. Like, so what? Does it suck that he killed everyone? Totally. Do we blame you for it? Why the fonk would we? That guy, he wasn’t Cal. Not our Cal.”

Cal’s eyes stung. His lip wobbled. He dug his fingernails into his palms to distract himself.

“Our Cal has saved us all, like, so many times. Our Cal risks everything to help people who need help. The guy who came into the afterlife and fought what was basically, like, the Devil so he could bring me back? That was our Cal,” Miz told him. “That was you.”

Mech raised a hand. “Technically, I fought that guy,” he pointed out.

“Team effort,” Cal said. His throat was tight again, although this time not thanks to the lack of atmosphere.

Mech lowered his hand and conceded with a nod. “No, man,” he said. He rested a hand on the back of Miz’s chair. “Space Team effort.”

Cal groaned. A bubble of snot burst from one nostril. “Oh, Jesus. That was horrible,” he laughed. “That was… God, I’m actually embarrassed for you, you big, cheesy bamston.”

“So lame,” Miz agreed.

Loren had her eyes pointed at her feet. “That was so awkward I want to die,” she said, smirking.

Mech tutted. “Fonk y’all,” he said. But, for once, he didn’t sound like he meant it.

The door swished open. Splurt rolled unsteadily onto the bridge, found Cal, then oozed up onto his shoulder. Once he was balanced, he wobbled, just a little. Cal scratched him with a finger roughly where his chin should have been.

“Yeah, well I’m worried about you, too, buddy,” Cal told him, leaning his head against the little guy. A thought occurred, and he turned as best he could to see the little green blob. That close, it was hard to focus, and he found himself going cross-eyed from the effort, so he turned away and looked at him sideways, instead.

“Wait, is that what’s wrong? You’re worried about me? Is that why you’re acting all…” He gestured. “This?”

Splurt did nothing.

A blade, meticulously fashioned from pure, solid guilt, twisted in Cal’s stomach. “Now, you listen here, Splurt. I’m fine, OK? I am A-OK. I’m just working some things out. You’ve got nothing to worry about. OK?”

Splurt rippled faintly.

“Well, make sure you do try,” Cal told him.

He gave him a playful tap on what would have been his chin, if he had one, then he slapped his hands on his thighs and stood up. “OK, so sitting around here feeling sorry for ourselves isn’t getting us anywhere,” he announced.

“It was kinda just you who was doing that,” Mech pointed out.

“Let’s not get bogged down in semantics,” Cal said. He pointed to Mizette. “Miz, I love you. I want you to know that. Mech, you’re going to hate me for this, and I can’t believe I’m saying it, but I love you, too.”

His finger swung to Loren. The words dried up in his throat. “Loren, I… Uh, in fact, I love all you guys,” he said, turning away. “And bonus points to whoever cleaned me up after that unfortunate business with the bookworm and the, you know, the…”

He gestured vaguely to his lower half.

“…the unpleasantness.”

“That was—” Mech began, but Cal waved emphatically at him.

“Jesus, shut up, I don’t want to know! I’ll never be able to look them in the face. Just, whoever it was, know that I appreciate it,” he said. “And now, let us never speak of it again.”

He snapped his fingers. “Mech, make a list. There are some things we’re going to need.”

“For what?” Mech asked.

Cal looked confused. “Well, for the plan, of course.”

“I thought you said all your plans sucked?” Mech said.

“I did say that. And they do,” Cal conceded. He rubbed his hands together and grinned. “But isn’t that half the fun?”

Nineteen

Sunstation Kappa-Seven had originally been built as a vast science station in orbit around a dying star. The race who had built it—the No-nee—were a gentle, peace-loving lot, with an intense, all-consuming fascination for pretty much everything in existence.

The thirst for knowledge was there in every man, woman, child, and everything in between. Their driving motivation was to look at things closely, prod them, and make copious notes about the results. Those results would then be analyzed at length by other No-nees, then those findings would be broken down further by a third team, whose data would, in turn, be pored over by others.

And on and on it went.

After one-too-many prods of the wrong thing in the wrong place, and one-too-many subsequent explosions, implosions, and full-scale nuclear meltdowns, the No-nee had collectively come to the conclusion that it was only a matter of time before they wiped out all life on the planet, and so they began to look for alternative locations in which to conduct their experiments.

And so, the Sunstations were born.

Each station took decades to construct, with the manual labor hating No-nees bringing in contractors from all over the galaxy. Each station was built to resemble one of the eight great cities of Noge.

Horus, with its gleaming spires and high walkways.

Pauron, famed for its liquid-metal lake and interconnected podhomes.

Five of the other cities—Troron, Meshik, Muggluk, Doowan, and Bom—were each as spectacular as the other, each a glittering, shining testament to the creativity and intellect of the species who had designed them, admired from one end of the galaxy to the other.

And then, there was Kappa.

The city of Kappa was the capital of Kappanistan, one of Noge’s less affluent countries. The citizens of Kappa were just as curious and driven by the same scientific leanings as the rest of the No-nee. It’s just that they weren’t very good at it.

Kappa was a city of tryers, no one could doubt that. The problem was that try as they might, they didn’t actually achieve all that much. Or, not on purpose, anyway. They achieved quite a lot by accident—mostly things that turned their fully intact scientists into lots of little bits of scientists, all flying in different directions.

Kappa had never won any of Noge’s prestigious awards for science and discovery, although a few years before construction of the Sunstations began, they did successfully petition for the creation of an annual “Great Job!” award. This award, which took the form of a golden hand with a thumb extended, was intended to celebrate the city or institution that may not have made the greatest scientific discoveries, but who’d had the most fun trying. Because, they reasoned, it was the taking part that counted. And, while the councils of the other seven great cities vehemently disagreed, they went along with it to shut Kappa up.

None of the plans for the original Sunstations included Kappa, but thanks to persistence, doggedness, and a successful crowdfunding campaign, it was agreed that one station would be constructed in orbit around one of the less-interesting suns. But only a small one.

The then Mayor of Kappa, Froongo Mips, readily agreed to this, and sat down with some of the greatest minds in Kappa to design their station.

Three years and a lot of correction fluid later, with construction on the other stations well underway, they finally settled on a blueprint. It was not as grand as the other stations, nor as well-equipped. From a science perspective, it was the runt of the litter, and it wasn’t even a close-run thing.

What generations of No-nee Historial Sciences students would go on to report, however, was that at the insistence of Mayor Froongo Mips, the first Kappa station possessed two qualities that none of the other Sunstations had.

The order of importance in which each student ranks these qualities varies from study to study, but the qualities themselves are never in any doubt.

They were, in no particular order: a casino, and a strip club.

Six months after Sunstation Kappa-One went online, its transfer request system crashed under the weight of demand. Despite its size, despite its relative lack of scientific equipment, No-nee from the other stations began applying for citizenship in the tens of thousands.

To cope with the demand, construction began on Sunstation Kappa-Two. Although much larger than the original station, the steady flow of funds from Kappa-One saw work completed in half the time.

Sunstation Kappa-Two was officially opened by Mayor Froongo Mips Jr, the son of the original Froongo Mips, who had tragically drowned in his hot-tub the year previously.

The new station boasted some of the most intricate and powerful scientific equipment that Noge had to offer, as well as six bowling alleys, eight massage parlors, and a nightclub called simply, ‘Mips.’

The rest, as they say, was history.

Life had been good for the residents of the twelve Kappa stations. Sure, they weren’t getting much work done, but they were having fun. And that, according to the motto emblazoned across the walls of all the stations in the Kappa Sunstation network, was what counted.

Life became less good a few decades later, when an invasion fleet from the planet Earth wiped out all life on Noge, took control of all the Sunstations, and ejected the inhabitants out into the empty void of space where the No-nee tried, with a zero percent success rate, to survive.

But they tried. And that, according to the other motto of the Kappa Sunstation network, was also what counted, albeit to a lesser extent than the having fun part.

With the No-nee gone, the people of Earth moved in. The Kappa stations, which had previously been exclusively No-nee only venues, were opened up to the rest of the galaxy. The rest of the galaxy soon came, bringing its money with it.

Sunstation Kappa-Seven, with its low alcohol prices, cheap food, and thriving brothel district, proved the most popular of all. And while, officially, it was still known by the same name as it had always been, those who’d been there came to call it by a different title entirely.

* * *

“The Sinstation,” said Cal, skim-reading the notes that had appeared on the screen alongside a live visual of the station. “Cute.”

“It ain’t cute, man,” Mech warned. “It’s far from fonking cute. This place is crazy dangerous.”

“Mech’s right,” said Loren. “I don’t like it.”

Cal smirked. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“I mean I don’t like the plan,” Loren replied. “It’s risky.”

“It’s also full of drunk EDI guys,” Cal reminded them. “And it’s the only Earth facility we can get into without drawing attention to ourselves.”

Loren still looked doubtful.

“I mean, I don’t like it either,” Cal told her. “All that booze and gambling? All those women ? Nu-uh. Not my thing.”

Loren made a sound at the back of her throat that was almost the start of a laugh. Not a full chuckle, by any means—barely even a chu —but it lit Cal up inside.

“Someone has to do it, though, huh?” Loren asked.

“It’s my cross to bear, alright,” Cal said.

Loren eased forward on the throttle, and Kappa-Seven grew slowly on screen.

“Taking us down.”

Cal picked up a backpack he had hooked on the side of his chair and wrestled his arms into the straps. The heavy sphere tucked inside the bag toppled him backward, but Miz jammed a foot against the bottom of his spine, stopping him from falling.

“Thanks,” he said.

Miz didn’t break from studying her claws. “Whatever.”

“How’s—?”

“Still sleeping,” Miz said. “I’ll know when she wakes up.”

“Right. Cool,” said Cal. He looked out into the corridor, then back to Mizette. “You two got some kind of magic bond now, or…?”

Miz rolled her eyes and flicked up her pointed ears.

“Oh. Yeah. That makes way more sense,” Cal said.

“I thought you were going in disguise?” said Mech. “You know, on account of you being a famous war hero who everyone down there knows.”

Cal gave a little wince. “Yeah. I’d hoped Splurt might be able to help me out with that, but I don’t know if he’s up to it.”

Splurt sat on one of the guest chairs, sagging like half-set Jello. His eyes followed Cal as he approached.

“What do you say, buddy?” he asked. “You able to give me a hand on this one?”

Splurt shuddered.

“Of course, you can,” Cal said soothingly. “Don’t you talk like that. Never before has the phrase, ‘You can be anything you set your mind to,’ been more literally accurate.”

Splurt rippled.

“No, it doesn’t have to be anything big. I’m not asking to go riding in there on a space dragon,” Cal said. He gestured to himself. “If you could just, you know, help me blend in a little better and stop anyone from recognizing me, that would be awesome.”

There was a moment of silence as Splurt considered this.

Then, with a slow, reluctant sort of squelch , the little green blob shifted shape until there, on the chair, was a stick-on handlebar mustache.

Sighing, Cal picked it up, turned it over a couple of times, then attached it below his nose. It wriggled into position on either side of his mouth, then adhered itself to his skin.

“What do you think?” he asked, turning to the others.

“Who the fonk are you?” Mech demanded. “What have you done with Cal?”

“Funny,” said Cal.

“Actually, whatever you’ve done with him, it’s fine,” Mech continued. “We don’t want him back.”

“Seriously, you should do one of those Netflix stand-up specials,” Cal told him. “I mean, would I watch it? God, no. But you should definitely do one.”

There was a fairly catastrophic-sounding clang and Cal was sent stumbling across the bridge. Miz’s foot caught him again. Her claws dug lightly but painfully into his flesh, holding him steady as the Untitled juddered and shook to a stop.

“We’re here,” Loren announced.

“Seriously? Already,” said Cal. He grimaced as Mizette’s claws withdrew from his back. “I don’t know about you guys, but I barely even noticed.”

* * *

Docking Administrator, Phil Bumbridge, was sick of this shizz. He had joined the Earth Defense Initiative to protect his home from extraterrestrial threats. He’d been promised excitement! Adventure! A big gun with a stabby bit on the end!

‘Aliens are going to probe your mom’s ANUS!’ the posters had warned. ‘Only you can stop them!’

As calls to action went, it had been a pretty compelling one, although that particular campaign hadn’t been Phil’s main reason for signing up. His mom’s anus, as far as he was concerned, was her own private business.

No, it was another poster that had convinced Phil to sign his life away to the EDI. It was a large, billboard-sized display that had been set up just down the street from his cramped studio apartment in one of Chicago’s less affluent suburbs, completely blocking his view of the sewage processing plant two blocks over.

The billboard ad was simple. It was mostly colors—pinks, purples, and blues—with a tiny, fly-sized speck in one corner which, if you got close enough, revealed itself to be a spaceship.

At the bottom of the poster were two lines of text in a simple, relaxed typeface.

‘The galaxy is waiting,’ it read. ‘So, why are you?’

And below that, slightly smaller, was the address of the EDI Recruitment website, where visitors were bombarded with images and videos of distant worlds, swirling nebulae, and happy looking recruits all having a thoroughly enjoyable time to themselves.

One application, six weeks of training, and a thirty-day space hike later, Phil had arrived at his posting on Sunstation Kappa-Seven.

That had been nine years ago. He was assured his transfer request was due to be looked at any day now.

“Next,” Phil sighed, beckoning to the man standing behind the white line.

“Hola, Amigo!” said Cal, in an astonishingly thick Latin American accent.

Shizz. Why had he done that? Why had he put on that voice? That hadn’t been part of the plan.

The man in the EDI immigration uniform eyed him suspiciously from the other side of his blasterproof screen. Cal smoothed down his mustache, then cleared his throat. “Uh, sorry. I thought you were Mexican. Are you Mexican?” Cal asked, going back to his regular voice.

Phil shook his head. “No.”

“Oh.”

“And, if I was, that would’ve been kinda racist,” Phil pointed out.

“No, you’re right. You’re absolutely right,” Cal agreed. “Sorry. I guess I’m just excited! It’s my first time here.”

Phil visibly didn’t care. A slot in the counter opened. “Papers.”

“Right, right,” said Cal, fishing in the pockets of his cargo pants. “I’ve got them here somewhere. Give me a sec.”

Phil sighed disdainfully and cast his eyes across the line forming behind the white marker. His was just one of two-hundred immigration counters running on this level, and this was just one of seventeen different docking levels. At certain parts of the year—usually around the opening of a new casino, or the Red Light District’s bi-annual ‘BreastFest’ event—the wait to be processed took days.

Today was a slow day, with an average waiting time of less than three hours. Still, they were short-handed at the moment, following the recent suicide epidemic, so it wouldn’t do to let things get too backed up.

“Can you hurry it up, sir?” Phil asked.

“Aha. Here you go!” said Cal, producing a clumsily folded and extensively crumpled sheet of paper from a pocket. It had taken forty minutes of folding and unfolding plus a quick run through the washing machine before the ID paperwork didn’t look as if it had been newly printed off that day. Which, of course, it had.

Still, Mech was convinced it should stand up to scrutiny. Anyway, even if it didn’t, he reasoned, the worst that would happen is that Cal would immediately be shot in the head, so it was pretty much a no-lose situation.

Phil took the sheet from the tray, flared his nostrils in disgust at it, then carefully unfolded it with his fingertips.

His eyes skimmed across the text, then flicked to Cal.

Cal smiled.

Phil regarded the paperwork again. He sucked air in through his teeth, then raised his eyes to Cal again.

Cal waggled his eyebrows and nodded encouragingly.

“Nob Muntch?”

Cal groaned inwardly. Outwardly, he kept smiling. “That’s me! That’s my name. Don’t wear it out.”

“Your parents must’ve hated you,” Phil told him.

“Someone certainly does!” Cal replied, laughing falsely. He shook a fist. “That fonk .”

Deep in his ear, Cal heard Mech snigger.

Grudgingly, as if it was the most Herculean task in all the universe, Phil passed the sheet above a scanner.

Bzzt .

A light on the side of the cubicle turned red.

Cal’s eyes darted to it. Beneath his shirt, his jacket, and the pack he carried, a bead of sweat ran down his back.

Phil tutted, one-finger-typed something into a keypad, then set the paperwork down beside him. “What’s in the bag?” he asked.

“Bag?” said Cal. “Oh! Yeah, this bag. It’s, uh, it’s my bowling ball.”

Phil held his gaze.

“You know, for bowling,” said Cal. He did a little bowling mime. “It’s my lucky ball.”

Phil may have paused to consider this, or may just have been staring blankly ahead, it was hard to be sure.

Finally, he stuffed the ID paperwork back into the slot and prodded a couple of keys. The light on the cubicle went from red to green.

“Welcome to Kappa-Seven,” Phil said, beckoning him through. “Enjoy your visit.”

“Seriously? Ha!” said Cal. “No way. You’re letting me through? I mean… I’m in?”

“Move along, Mr Muntch,” Phil urged. He was beckoning for the next person to step forward, Cal already a rapidly fading memory.

Cal bowed gratefully as he scooped up his ID and crammed it into one of his pockets. He backed away just as a tall orange humanoid who was mostly legs stalked up to take his place. And then, Cal was swept up by the crowds who came filtering through the rows of immigration counters and swarmed as one toward just six sets of doors leading through to three elevators. One of which, it transpired, was broken.

A few minutes later, Cal stood wedged against an elevator wall, trying to keep a tight rein on his stomach as the car rocketed up through the station’s various levels.

A solid mass of people—some weird and wonderful, others presumably human—filled all the available floor space. And, in some instances, the ceiling space, too.

The elevator car’s walls were covered in colorful adverts, all offering a range of discounts and special offers.

‘VooVoo Juice – Doubles 1 Credit!’

‘Glorian Sex Droids! Multi-Attachment! Very Lightly Used!’

‘Try Heroin! It’s Great!’

None of the ads contained any further details beyond a little barcode down in the bottom right corner. Cal leaned back as far as he could as a large, muscular arm stretched past him, scanned the Glorian Sex Droid barcode with something that looked like a cell phone, then retreated.

The elevator jolted to a stop. Cal had no idea what this floor was, but he didn’t care. It would do. The plan didn’t specifically call for any particular area of the station. It didn’t call for anything all that particular, in fact. It was quite unparticular, as plans went. Despite some misgivings from the others, he’d insisted that was for the best.

“Sorry. Excuse me. Coming through,” he said, squeezing through the throngs. Only a handful of people seemed to be getting off on this floor, and those waiting outside had already started to push their way in.

“Doctor on call! Out of the way!” Cal barked. “Emergency. Clear the way, people. Someone’s dying, for fonk’s sake!”

The crowd inched aside a fraction. A few of those piling in from outside hung back, making room for him to stagger out.

“Good. Thank you,” he said, adjusting his jacket. He turned back to the elevator and raised a hand in thanks. “Good job, everyone. You’ve all helped save a life today, and I think you should all—”

The elevator doors closed.

“Or not,” Cal concluded, lowering his hand.

He gave his mustache a reassuring stroke, pulled his bag higher on his back, then turned and took in his surroundings.

Compared to what he’d seen of the station so far, this level was practically a ghost town. Hundreds of glass-fronted buildings lined a long, wide street ahead of him, their windows all steamed up. The smell of springtime hung in the air, tainted just at the edges by something harsher and more chemical.

“I think I’m on the laundry level,” he said.

“I’ll be honest,” Loren said in his ear. “That’s not where I expected you to head.”

“Doesn’t matter, it’ll do,” said Cal. “This is all we need.”

So far, so good. The plan was working.

Not that there was a lot of scope for it to go wrong. He’d deliberately made it as straightforward as possible to limit the risk. He’d called it ‘elegant in its simplicity.’ The others had called it other, less complimentary, names. But what did they know?

“Step one, infiltrate an EDI facility, accomplished,” Cal whispered. “Step two, find an EDI agent,” he continued, narrowing his eyes and cracking his knuckles. “And beat the living shizz out of him.”

Twenty

“Officer, officer! Thank God I found you,” Cal wheezed, stumbling to a stop before a disinterested man in an EDI Security uniform.

The guard flinched visibly at Cal’s panicked outburst, but listened with a palpable sense of resignation as Cal babbled out an explanation.

“I just saw someone fighting,” Cal said. “In that alleyway.”

The EDI man shrugged. “So?”

“So… shouldn’t you stop them?”

“Why?” asked the guard, appearing genuinely confused. He was short and a little weedy—both qualities Cal had specifically looked for when choosing his victim. The weak chin and skinny wrists were just a bonus.

“Well, uh, just because… it’s your job? You know, to stop people fighting?”

“Stop people fighting ?” asked the guard. He gave a little snort. “Listen, son, if we spent all our time stopping people from fighting, we’d get nothing else done.”

Cal felt the ‘son,’ thing was misjudged. The guard couldn’t have been older than twenty and, unlike Cal, he wasn’t rocking an oversized handlebar mustache.

“But, you weren’t doing anything,” Cal pointed out. “You were literally doing nothing else.”

The guard looked briefly alarmed, as if he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t, but then gave a dismissive wave of a gloved hand. “It’ll sort itself out. It always does. Have a good day, son.”

Cal glanced around them. They were standing in a well-lit side street off the main laundry thoroughfare. This street seemed to be mostly ironing outlets, with a few of the stores down at the far end offering, ‘XXX While U Wait.’ Cal assumed the ‘XXX’ on offers wasn’t the 2002 action movie of the same name starring Vin Diesel, or any of its lackluster sequels, but he hadn’t gone inside to inquire.

There were a few dozen people milling around, meaning this wasn’t the ideal location in which to carry out Step Two of his plan.

He jabbed a thumb back at the alley again. “What if I said one of the people fighting is an elderly gentleman?”

The guard shrugged.

“In a wheelchair. He’s extremely physically handicapped,” Cal continued. “It’s horrible. For him, I mean! Not horrible to look at,” he added quickly. “He’s fine to look at. Although, how long that’ll last if you don’t do something to help him, I don’t know.”

The guard remained unswayed.

“His granddaughter is watching,” Cal elaborated. He held a hand down at knee level. “She’s, like, yay big. Huge eyes. She’s just staring helplessly. Just crying her little heart out as some nasty bamston pummels the shizz out of her wheelchair-bound…” His voice trailed off. “Is any of this convincing you in any way?”

The guard rocked back on his heels. “Not my problem, son,” he said.

Cal looked back at the alleyway. Man, that would’ve been perfect.

“Fair enough,” he said, then he drove a right-hook into the officer’s jaw with enough force to shatter three bones, two of them his own.

The guard pirouetted clumsily, then went down hard, a wail bursting from his bloodied lips. Cal grimaced and flexed his fingers a few times as the fractures knitted together again, then stamped down on the EDI man’s wrist as he grabbed for the blaster on his hip.

“Not so fast there, Tex,” Cal said, taking the man’s gun for himself.

The guard sobbed when Cal caught him by the front of his uniform and heaved him up onto his knees. “I need you to answer a few…”

Cal grimaced. “Oh, Jesus, your face,” he said, staring in horror at the way the guard’s lower jaw was now a full inch to the right of his upper one. “God, I am so sorry. I’m sure that’ll just pop right back in,” Cal told him, then he got back down to business.

“What did Manacle do with the page?” he demanded, shaking the guy violently.

The guard’s eyes bulged, terrified. “Whath pathge?” he slurred, saliva dribbling from his sideways slanting lower lip.

Cal glanced around. None of the passersby had stopped. If anything, they were speeding up, trying to get as far from the scene as possible.

“You know what page,” Cal spat, giving the man a shake. “From the book. In the Library. What did he do with it?”

The guard drooled in confusion. “Whath libthathy? Whath boothk?” He let out a little moan of distress. “I dothn’t know whath thou’re talthking abouth.”

Cal backhanded him across the cheek and flinched almost as much as the guard did. “Shizz! Sorry, sorry,” he said, before pulling himself together and fixing the scowl back on his face. “You know damn well what I’m talking about,” he barked. “The page. The book. The fonking… The page.”

He waved the blaster pistol in the man’s face. “You want me to shoot you? Is that it?”

“No! I donth’t! I donth’t want thou to thoot me!”

“Because I’m going to shoot you,” Cal warned. “I’m going to shoot you right in the feet.”

“The theet?”

“Yes! The feet!” Cal barked. “And then I’ll shoot you in the shins, and then the knees, and then the thighs, and then the… Well, you get the idea. I’m moving upward. That’s the point.” He gave him another shake. “Unless you talk. Unless you tell me where Manacle took the—”

The barrel of a gun pressed against the back of his head. A voice spoke, low and menacing.

“Don’t move a goddam muscle, shizz stain.”

* * *

Cal knelt in the center of a perfectly transparent box that hung suspended several feet above an electrified floor, his wrists cuffed together at his back. He had woken to find himself curled up on the floor of a plexiglass cube, his backpack having been swapped for a pounding headache and some fading bruises.

There were two other similar cubes hanging on either side of him. The one on his left was empty. The one on his right was occupied by something that made him think of a shaved Ewok. It was toddler-sized and ratty-looking, with gray, insipid skin, long, twitching whiskers, and eyes that were checking if the coast was clear in at least two different directions at once.

“Psst,” he hissed, even though Cal was staring right at him. “You. Over there.”

“Uh, yeah. Hi,” Cal said.

“Rank.”

“Don’t have one,” Cal replied. “I’m not in the space army, or whatever.”

“No. Rank. That’s my name. Rank.”

It was an unusual name, Cal thought, but it fit him perfectly.

“You?” Rank asked.

“Ca—Uh, Nob. Nob Muntch,” Cal said.

The conversation resumed once Rank had finished laughing. “What you in for?”

“I beat up a guard,” Cal said. “Big guy. Real strong,” he added, because he knew from experience how important it was in a prison environment to appear tough and mean.

“You beat up a guard ?” said Rank. “And they put you in here?”

Cal glanced around. “Looks like it.”

“Why would they stick you in here for beating up a guard?” Rank wondered. “Punishment for beating up a guard is a good kicking. You don’t end up in the swingboxes for beating up no guard.”

His eyes gleamed greedily. “So, why you really in here?” he whispered. “Huh? Go on. Tell your old pal, Rank.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Rank,” Cal said. “I got in a fight with a guard, I got knocked out—probably by several people all working together, because I’m incredibly strong—and I woke up here.”

Rank’s whiskers twitched as he considered this. “Nah,” he decided, after much thought. “Doesn’t make sense. See, the swingboxes are for politically-motivated crimes. Treason. Terrorism. That sort of thing. So, unless the guard you beat up was the King of Earth, that ain’t why you’re in here.”

He rubbed his tongue across his two oversized front teeth. “They got more on you, friend. You might think you’re here for fighting a guard, but they got something more on you. Something worse. You mark my words.”

Cal chewed his bottom lip. “You think?”

“I know.”

Cal struggled to his feet and tried to twist his hands free of the cuffs. There was a knack to getting handcuffs off. All it took was a certain turn of the wrist, some meticulously applied pressure, and a thumb that was prone to dislocation.

Unfortunately, Cal had no idea which direction or how far to twist, or how much pressure was just the right amount. He could dislocate his thumb, if he had to, but without first mastering the other steps, it would likely prove to be more of a hindrance.

“How about you?” Cal asked. “What are you in for?”

“Spying,” Rank replied. “I’m a spy for the… You know the Burracks?”

Cal shook his head to say that no, he didn’t.

“Little gray fellas. Whiskers.”

“Like you?” Cal asked.

“Yeah! Yeah, like me. Know them?”

Cal was forced to confirm again that he didn’t know them.

“Oh. Well, I’m a spy for them. You know, sniffing around the EDI, scoping them out, reporting back. That sort of thing. We’re planning on taking over one of these stations. You know, eventually.”

“Right,” said Cal. “A spy. Cool.”

“I mean, I’m not a very good one,” Rank said. “I realize, now that I look back on the last little while, that I just told you everything about me, which is generally frowned upon. In spying circles, I mean.”

“It’s fine. Your secret’s safe with me,” said Cal.

Rank gave a dry little chuckle. “Thanks. For the next few minutes, anyway, eh?”

“Exactly,” said Cal. He rocked on his heels, making the cable holding the box aloft creak . “Wait, what? What happens in a few minutes?”

“Well, they kill us, don’t they?”

“Do they?!”

“Course they do. Political prisoners. They kill us,” Rank explained. He shrugged his scrawny shoulders. “It’s the risk we take, innit? Death.”

Cal groaned.

“Slow, agonizing death.”

Cal sobbed.

“No more than we deserve, of course,” Rank said, sniffing. “Spike through the head? Internal acid wash? Good enough for the likes of me and you. Too good, some would argue.”

“Aw, Jesus,” Cal murmured, twisting his wrist. “Mech, we have a problem with the plan.”

From Cal’s ear there came nothing but silence.

“Mech? Loren? Anyone there?”

“Who you talking to?” asked Rank.

“No one,” said Cal. And he was right.

“You praying? I wouldn’t bother,” said Rank. “What kind of twisted, demented god is going to listen to a couple of crims like us? Worthless, we are. Worthless crims. Hang the lot of us, I say. Hang the bloody lot of us.”

Cal chose to ignore all this. He pursed his lips and looked down past his nose.

“Well, at least I still have the mustache.”

“You do,” Rank confirmed. “Well done. It’s a good one. It’s… what’s the word? Luscious? Is that it? It’s very nice, anyway.” He shook his head, ruefully. “Too nice for someone like us. We don’t deserve a mustache like that. Not me, and not you.”

Down below, a door slid open in a wall.

“Oh-ho. Here we go. Death awaits,” said Rank, twitching his whiskers and straightening his back. “And rightly so. Has to be done. Only fair.”

Cal side-eyed the rat-creature. He seemed to be genuinely excited about the prospect of his imminent death.

“Who’s up first, d’you think? You or me? We could put money on it, if you like. Not that it’d do us any good. And not that either of us would deserve to win a penny of it. Scum, we are. Filthy crim scum.”

He smiled, showing off his big front teeth. “Nice to meet you, Nob Muntch. See you on the other side!”

“Uh, yeah, you too,” said Cal.

“By which I mean I’ll see you in Hell,” Rank said. “Which, if you ask me, is no more than the likes of us deserve. Too good for us, if anything.”

If Rank said more, Cal didn’t hear it. The figure in the doorway had grabbed his full attention. She was tall and broad, with bad skin and greasy hair. Her eyebrows were painted on and sperm-shaped, the real brows concealed beneath a layer of fake tan.

Her piggy eyes glared up at Cal disdainfully, her mouth twisting into a sneer that showed her yellow-brown teeth.

“That’s the jumped-up little fack, alright,” she spat. She stepped back and gestured for two armored men with batons to take her place. “Now, get him facking down and then bring him to me. Me and him are going to have us a little chat.”

Twenty-One

“Look at you. Look at you fackin’ sitting there.”

Sergeant Heseltine stood flanked by two armed guards in a room that Cal had been dismayed to discover was marked, ‘Interrogation Chamber 9.’ He wasn’t sure what bothered him more—the fact that he was being taken to something called an ‘Interrogation Chamber,’ or the fact that the other eight were presumably all occupied.

Cal had been shoved into something that was not unlike a dentist’s chair, complete with recline function, overhead spotlight, and a palpable sense of dread woven into the wipe-clean fabric. His hands were still cuffed at his back, which only served to make the whole thing even more unpleasant.

His backpack sat on a little wheeled trolley beside one of the guards. Both guards were tall and Nordic-looking, with blond hair and matching closely-cropped beards. They made Heseltine herself seem even more repulsive by comparison. Considering where she’d started from, this was quite a feat.

“I said look at you fackin’ sitting there!” she said, her bloated features twisting into a grimace.

“Uh… OK,” said Cal. He looked down at himself. “Yep, that’s me, alright,” was all he could really think to add.

“Thinks he’s a funny fack,” Heseltine said. “He won’t be laughing in a fackin’ minute.”

Her eyes flicked briefly to a locked metal box marked, ‘Equipment.’ Cal’s own gaze followed, then immediately wished that it hadn’t.

“I owe you an apology,” Heseltine said, folding her hands together behind her vast back. Or getting them as close together as possible without mechanical assistance, at least. “See, I thought you was some fackin’ alien nonce, but then I had me a chat with a few of the higher-ups.”

She sucked air through her horrible teeth and smiled. “And, well, seems you’s one of us.”

Heseltine cocked an ear toward him. “That right? You one of us?”

Cal looked across their faces and winced. “I mean, I know I should say yes, and then maybe offer to take us all out for dinner, but… I can’t. I can’t say it. The thought of being one of you…” He shook his head. “No. Thanks, but no thanks. Hard pass. I’m out.”

Sergeant Heseltine’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t get a fackin’ choice. You’s a human, just like what we are.” She took a step closer. Despite still being several feet away, her sheer girth meant she was dangerously close to encroaching on Cal’s personal space. “You’re the other one, ain’t ya? You’re the other Cal Carver. The one he saw when he were a tiddler. The spaceman . That’s you, ain’t it?”

Cal groaned inwardly, and felt Splurt’s grip on his face loosen a fraction. He tilted his head back a little to make sure the mustache didn’t plop down into his lap.

“You got me,” he said.

“I fackin’ knew it,” Heseltine cackled. “Boys, we’s in the presence of celebrity here! I remember the kid used to talk about you all the time on TV back in them days.”

“TV?”

“Oh, yeah. Once the press got wind of the big fackin’ spaceship dropping in to see him, everyone wanted to talk to him. He was the most famous kid in the world. Made sense that the government got him to front all their EDI recruitment stuff. Everyone fackin’ knew him. Proper little celeb, he was.”

Cal wasn’t sure what to feel about that. It was simultaneously too much and too little information to form any real opinion.

Her eyes blazed wickedly. “He used to say you was some kind of great space hero. Said you saved the galaxy.”

“It has been known,” Cal admitted, with what he liked to think was his trademark modesty.

“Must fackin’ eat you up knowing what you became, eh?” Heseltine sniggered. “Vicious, you was. Proper vicious.”

“He.”

“You what?”

“What he became,” said Cal. “Not me.”

Heseltine snorted. “Same thing.”

“It isn’t.”

“Well, you keep telling yourself that.”

The bottom of Cal’s mustache came loose and flapped limply in front of his chin.

Heseltine motioned to the backpack, and the guard on her right retrieved it. Undoing the zip, he held it open, allowing her to fish out the darkened orb inside.

“So, this is the Symmorium Sentience, is it?” she asked. “Don’t look like all that much to me. Don’t know what all the fuss is about.”

She tossed it from hand to hand, and Cal squirmed uncomfortably. “Please be careful with that.”

Heseltine held his gaze as she deliberately missed the next catch. The orb hit the floor with a loud crack that made Cal flinch.

“Oops. Clumsy me,” the sergeant said, then one of the guards retrieved it and handed it back.

“If it was up to me, I’d keep you around. Maybe have a bit of fun with you,” Heseltine said. “But the higher-ups want rid. Can’t risk you walking around with a fackin’ face like that, spoiling all the real Carver’s hard work, they say.”

She shrugged her whale-like shoulder. “Couldn’t believe their luck. They were building up a whole fackin’ division designed to hunt you down, and then you just come striding in here, and suddenly we’ve got you right where we fackin’ want you!”

Cal raised an eyebrow. “Or maybe I’ve got you just where you want me,” he said.

Heseltine frowned at him.

“Wait, no, that’s not right,” Cal said. “Maybe I… No. Maybe you’ve got me just where you want me.”

“Yeah. I know. That’s what I fackin’ said.”

Cal’s brow furrowed. “Is it? Shizz.”

He mouthed silently, replaying it.

“Damn it, you’re right. I had this worked out back on the ship. Knew I should’ve written it down,” he said. “Maybe I’ve got me … Hold on. No. Wait. I’ve got it. Maybe you’ve got me just where I want you!” he finished, triumphantly, then winced. “Want me , I mean,” he corrected. “Maybe you’ve got me just where I want me .”

He gave a nod of satisfaction, but the expression on his face said he wasn’t really buying it.

“That wasn’t really worth the wait,” he admitted. “It sounded much better in my head.”

“What are you even fackin’ talking about?” Heseltine demanded.

Cal opened his mouth as if to respond, but then shook his head. “Forget it. Doesn’t matter. You’ll find out.”

“Find out what?”

Cal shrugged. “It’s just… No. You’ll see. We’ll leave it as a surprise.”

Heseltine sneered, showing her teeth and the dark, hairy caverns of her nostrils. “You want us to think you’s got some great trick up your fackin’ sleeve. Think you can get one over on us, grab the Sentience, and get the fack out of here, don’t ya?”

“Something like that,” Cal admitted.

“Still thinks you’s some big space hero,” Heseltine smirked. “You know you killed millions, right? Men. Women.”

She leaned forward a little. “Kiddies,” she whispered, then she rejoiced at the expression that flitted across Cal’s face. “Oh yeah. I heard you liked doing the little ‘uns especially.”

She straightened again and went back to passing the Sentience from hand to hand. Cal’s skin felt prickly and hot against the cool vinyl chair. His body was suddenly heavy, like it wanted to sink through the floor and keep falling. Most of his mustache peeled off until it was hanging on by just a thin strip immediately beneath his nostrils.

“Don’t seem much like no space hero to me,” Heseltine cackled. She nudged one of her guards. “Do it.”

The sound of a blaster being drawn from a holster kicked Cal back into life. “Wait! OK, I’ll tell you. I did have a trick up my sleeve,” he admitted.

He nodded to the ball being passed from hand to hand. “That’s not the Symmorium Sentience.”

Heseltine sneered. “Fack off.”

“I swear,” Cal said, bracing himself as the guard raised his blaster. “I swear! It’s not the Sentience.” He swallowed. “It’s a bomb.”

Heseltine caught the orb in her right hand. This time, she didn’t pass it back to the left. Her eyes flicked down to it, then back to Cal.

“I mean it. It’s a bomb,” Cal said. “It’ll blow this whole place up. I just have to say the word.”

The guard with the gun looked to his commanding officer for her instructions. She slowly brought the ball up to head height and peered at it down the crooked length of her nose.

“If you let me go, I won’t have it blown up. You all get to stay alive.”

“You think we’s fackin’ idiots?” Heseltine asked. “We took your comm-link. Even if you was telling the truth, there’s no way for you to contact anyone.”

Cal hesitated. “I have another one,” he said. “It’s… hidden.”

“Bullshizz.”

“I mean it,” said Cal. “You’d better let me go. I just have to give the word. All I have to say is, ‘Push the button,’ and—”

The orb exploded in Heseltine’s hands, turning everything down to her ankles into a hot, fast-moving puree that splattered across Cal, the chair, and the rest of the room.

The explosion took out half the guards. Specifically, the left half of the guard on Heseltine’s right, and the right half of the one on her left.

“Jesus Christ , Mech!” Cal hollered, spitting out something lumpy and sour-tasting. “That wasn’t me giving the word!”

A tinny voice echoed out from inside Cal’s mustache, too quiet for him to hear even without the blaring alarm that now sounded.

“Never trust a fonking robot,” Cal muttered. He kicked and wriggled his way down the chair and jumped down into a steaming puddle of goo. Twisting his shoulders, he brought his cuffed hands out from behind him. “Splurt, a little help with this?”

The mustache flopped off his face and crawled laboriously on its two hairy legs down Cal’s chest and around to his back. From somewhere outside, Cal heard the sound of raised voices.

“Hurry up, buddy!” Cal urged. “We don’t have a lot of time here.”

Something tickled against his wrists, then the cuffs clanked to the floor. Catching the mustache, Cal deposited it on his shoulder, where it immediately collapsed into a gooey green smear.

Inside the smear was a miniature earpiece, and a little black square the size of a piece of Starburst candy. Splurt shoved them both to his surface, where Cal could retrieve them. Cal took the smaller of the two and screwed it into his ear, but left the other square where it was for the moment.

“I’m here,” he said. “And still in one piece, no thanks to you.”

“You said, ‘Push the button,’” Mech’s grunted. “You gave the fonking instruction.”

“I was speaking hypothetically at the time,” Cal said. “I was explaining to her what would happen if…” He sighed. “Forget it.”

Stooping, Cal scooped both of the guards’ blasters from the soup of their remains. “Can I activate the thingy yet?”

“Not yet,” said Mech. “You’re too far. You need to get out of the room you’re in and go right.”

Cal groaned. “Right. Got it. How far?” he asked, heading for the door.

“Not far. Maybe twenty feet,” Mech replied.

Cal punched the door open button. “OK. That’s not bad. I can do twenty feet.”

“Uh, yeah. I should warn you, though,” said Mech, as Cal stepped out into the corridor. “You’re gonna have company.”

A blaster bolt screamed along the corridor from his left, scorching a chunk out of his ribcage.

“Fonk, fonk, fonk!” Cal yelped, dancing in panic and firing blindly back along the corridor. The shots ricocheted wildly, but a couple of throaty Urks told him he’d hit something, at least.

Ducking, he threw himself forward, still firing behind him. Splurt grabbed Cal’s ear and twisted with such force that Cal instinctively stumbled sideways away from the pain, just before a volley of blaster-fire tore through the space he’d just been occupying.

“Thanks. I think,” Cal wheezed.

“Ten feet,” Mech instructed. “Then deposit, and extract through the door on the left.”

“What?” Cal hollered, struggling to hear over the sound of shouting, gunfire, and the clattering of his own boots.

“Five feet.”

“What ?”

“Now!” Mech barked.

Cal stumbled. “Now? Now! Splurt, now! Eject, eject!”

The Starburst-sized device shot upward from inside Splurt, flipped once in the air, then landed on the floor somewhere behind Cal. Unnoticed by everyone in the corridor, it sprouted eight little legs, scuttled toward a ventilation grate in the wall, then crawled inside.

A moment later, a small red light began to blink in the air vent, and the little robot set off to explore.

“Door on the left. Now!” Mech bellowed.

Cal threw his shoulder at the door and stumbled through, but not before a blaster bolt grazed his thigh as it whistled past.

The room beyond was a large, open-plan office. Dozens of heads rose like Meerkats from behind cubicle partitions, all watching Cal with wide-eyed horror.

“What the fonk is this place?” Cal asked.

“Emergency call handling,” said Mech. “Try not to kill any of them.”

“Of course I’m not going to kill any of them. Why would I kill any of them?”

“Because you got guns in your hands,” said Mech. “And you have a history of accidentally shooting people.”

“Good point,” Cal said. He waved the blasters above his head. “Everyone out! That way!” he ordered, gesturing to the door behind him. “Go, go, go!”

The terrified call center staff hurried to comply. He sprinted past them as they surged for the door he’d just entered, blocking the way for the pursuing guards.

“Mech, get me an exit!” Cal hollered, limping for a few seconds before his healing factor kicked in and sealed the wound in his leg. “Which way?”

“Door on your right,” Mech said. “They’ve locked down the elevator network, so we’re resorting to Plan B.”

Cal skidded toward the door, shot it several times just in case it was locked, then kicked it open.

“Plan B? Since when did we ever have a Plan B?” he cried. “What’s our Plan B?”

Part of the wall erupted as a blaster bolt slammed into it. With Splurt clinging to his shoulder, Cal ducked through the door, then stumbled to a stop in what looked like a manager’s office. There, behind a shoddy desk overburdened by paperwork and dirty coffee mugs, was a large window the size of a cinema screen. It showed a view of space and the curved edge of the sun around which Kappa-Seven was orbiting.

And it showed something else, too. It showed the Currently Untitled .

What was it doing here? It wasn’t supposed to be here. It was supposed to be waiting on the docking platform.

“Not that I’m not pleased to see you guys,” Cal said. “But what are you—?”

“You’re gonna want to duck,” Mech warned him.

“Duck? What do you mean, I’m going to want to—?”

Cal screamed and threw himself headlong to the floor just as a beam of cannon-fire spat from the Untitled’ s weapons systems. The window shattered into a billion flakes of safety glass, all moving in slow motion thanks to the sudden lack of gravity.

The abrupt loss of pressure sucked Cal up off the floor. He instinctively cried out as he tumbled, end over end, through the shattered window, but no sound escaped in the vacuum of space.

His head went light and heavy at the same time. His limbs cramped up. His lungs inflated.

And Jesus , it was cold.

Peeling his eyelids open, he saw a humanoid metal frame come drifting towards him, gleaming against the dark curtain of space, rockets flaring at his feet.

“Relax, man,” said Mech’s voice in Cal’s ear. “I got you.”

Twenty-Two

“I got him,” announced Mech, once the outer airlock door had closed behind them. The Untitled ’s engines droned faintly as the ship accelerated and climbed.

“F-f-fonk, it’s cold,” Cal wheezed. He blew on his hands to warm them up, then wrapped his arms around himself. “Oh, and for the record? I preferred Plan A.”

From outside came the thack-thack of cannon-fire hitting the shields.

“Wait. They’re attacking us?” Cal asked.

Mech jabbed the button to open the inner airlock door. “Course they’re fonking attacking us,” he said. “Don’t know if you noticed, but we just did a whole series of illegal things.”

Cal followed Mech out into the corridor. “No, I know, but… I just thought we’d have more time before they—”

Loren sent the ship into a dive. Cal stumbled forward and crashed into Mech’s back.

“Ow. Sorry. Not my fault.”

The Untitled bottomed out, then began to rise suddenly. Cal held his arms out and moved them in tight forward circles, trying to compensate for the sudden shift of balance. It was no use. As the ship rocketed upward, he found himself unable to stay upright on the suddenly sloping floor.

“No, I’m going,” he announced.

Mech caught him by the front of his shirt, stopping him tumbling all the way to the end of the corridor.

“Thanks, big guy,” Cal said. He looked past him to the door of the bridge, then raised his eyebrows and grinned.

Ten seconds later, Mech clanked onto the bridge, with Cal nestled in his arms.

“Hey, guys! I’m back,” Cal announced, then the action on screen caught his attention. “Ooh, spaceships.”

“A lot of spaceships,” Loren confirmed, spiraling the Untitled into a corkscrew as two probing streams of red spat at them from different directions. “We need to start shooting back, or we’re toast.”

“Kevin, can you do weapons?” Cal asked. He rubbed a hand across Mech’s metal chest. “I think I’m going to stay here.”

“No, you ain’t,” Mech grunted.

“What? But I feel so safe,” Cal protested, then he was dumped unceremoniously into his seat. He strapped himself in while Mech strode across to his console. “Can we make that a regular thing?” Cal asked.

“No.”

“Like, just a few minutes a day?”

“Shut the fonk up,” Mech said. He tapped and swiped at the console.

“Did we get it?” Loren asked through gritted teeth, as she rolled to avoid a torpedo. “Are we good?”

“I don’t know. I gotta interface with the ship first.”

“Can you take care of your love life on your own time, Mech? We’re kind of up against it here.”

Mech muttered darkly, but continued working on his terminal.

“Where’s Miz?” asked Cal, looking around the bridge.

“With Tyrra,” came Loren’s curt reply.

“Oh,” said Cal. He watched her from behind as she jammed the ship into a sideways climbing maneuver he didn’t know the name for. Her movements were wild, yet somehow precise. It was like she was dancing, he thought, and he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

It was like she was born to do this. Like the controls were an extension of herself.

Sure, she might crash them into the sun at any moment, but if she was the last thing he saw as they plunged helplessly into a lake of fire, he thought, that wouldn’t be so bad.

Still bad , obviously—really awful, in fact—but if he absolutely had to be burned up in the heart of a dying star, then this would be the time to do it.

The very real possibility of them all dying at any moment made him want to talk to her. To tell her how he felt. To say the things he’d been trying to say since she kissed him.

He cleared his throat.

“So, uh, how have you been?”

“Shut up and get on the weapons!” Loren barked without looking back at him. “Or we’re going to get torn to pieces.”

Cal frowned. “I thought Kevin was doing those?”

“Kevin’s helping Mech,” Loren said. She grimaced as a staccato hail of cannon-fire thundered into the shields, making them flicker. “Now hurry up!”

“OK, Kevin, plug me in,” said Cal, wriggling upright in his chair. “Mech, how long do you need?”

“Yes!” Mech cheered.

“That doesn’t help me, big guy. ‘Yes,’ is not a unit of time,” Cal replied. He braced himself as the weapons interface unfolded around his head. Splurt dropped off his shoulder and landed in his lap like the contents of a particularly violent sneeze.

“The hackbot is online and broadcasting,” Mech said.

“Seriously, that’s what we’re calling it? ‘The hackbot?’”

“What the fonk else do you suggest we call it?”

Cal thought. “Spiderlegs,” he said. “Wait, no, that’s too on the nose. Arachnaspy.”

“Fine. Call it what you like,” Mech said. “I’m in. Give me a minute.”

“One minute,” said Cal. “No more, no less.”

He grimaced at the sudden pricking at either temple, and then came the sudden whooshing sensation as his consciousness was projected outside the ship.

From up there, he could survey the whole battle scene. The station was on either his right, his left, above him, or below him, depending on which way Loren was jamming the stick at any given moment.

Twelve fighter ships, each roughly the size of the Untitled , approached in loose formations from two sides—one squadron closing from in front and on high, the other below and behind. More ships approached from the opposite side of the station, but they were still just dark pinpricks against the sun, and something he could worry about later.

Cal flexed his fingers, then cracked his knuckles. One minute, that was all he had to hold them off for. Hell, less than that now. Forty seconds, probably. Maybe even—

A torpedo exploded against the shields, rocking the ship.

“Will you hurry up and shoot them?!” Loren yelped.

Cal raised his right hand and fired the cannons. A solid red beam of crackling energy tore upward through one of the squadrons, forcing the six ships to break ranks and bank off in different directions.

As soon as the beam had passed, they dropped back into perfect formation.

“Whoa, that was some fancy flying,” Cal said.

“They’re drones,” said Loren, just a touch defensively. “It’s an automated process.”

“Drones?” Cal asked. “So, there’s no one aboard?”

“No, they’re AI controlled,” said Loren. The shields flared as cannon-fire hammered them from below. “Now shoot them!”

Cal felt better knowing that there weren’t real people on the attacking ships. He might not be the biggest fan of the EDI, but those guys were still from Earth. They probably had families back there, waiting for them to come home.

Sure, the same could be said for all the Zertex pilots they’d blown to pieces, but that was different. That was Zertex . It didn’t count.

Another torpedo detonated off the stern, rocking the ship.

“What are you waiting for? Fonking shoot them!” Loren yelped.

“Hmm? Oh. Shizz. Sorry, miles away,” Cal said. He raised both arms and pumped out a couple of missiles. They streaked across space, rapidly closing the gap on the front two ships.

The ships all split up, performed a series of acro-space-batics, then returned to their original formation.

“You missed, sir,” Kevin informed him.

“I can see that, Kevin,” Cal said.

“Everything. You missed everything.”

“Noted. Thanks.”

Twisting, Cal rained cannon fire on the other squadron. It, too, split up to avoid the blasts, then retaliated with three fast-moving torpedoes.

“Loren, behind!”

Loren’s eyes darted to a small rectangular screen just above her main screen, then jammed the yoke forward and right. Two of the torpedoes tumbled past them, but the third smashed into the shield, making it flicker erratically.

“Shields at twenty-seven percent,” Mech announced.

“We’ll worry about the shields, you worry about getting that page,” Cal barked. “What’s taking so long?”

“They got some serious security around it. Trying to crack the master password,” Mech explained. “Running a brute force attack, but it could take a while.

“Have you tried ‘password’?” Cal asked.

Mech snorted. “They ain’t gonna secure an encrypted private server with ‘password’ as the fonking password.”

“They’re from Earth, right?” said Cal. “Try it.”

“It’s a waste of time, man.”

“Try it!” Cal urged, slicing through one of the squadrons with another beam of cannon fire. Just as before, he hit nothing.

“There. Tried it. Didn’t work,” said Mech.

“Try ‘password123.’”

Mech sighed. “Look, man. I know you’re trying to help, but you ain’t. OK? I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I don’t need or want your fonking help.”

“Just try it!” Cal yelped, his stomach leaping up to his ears as Loren dived to avoid another explosive blast.

Mech tapped his console.

A moment of silence followed.

“You Earth guys are fonking idiots,” Mech announced. “I’m in. Gimme a minute.”

“Another minute? Jesus. Hurry it up,” Cal urged.

The squadron of ships that had been approaching from behind suddenly ejected a series of small shiny objects from their undersides. Cal watched, helplessly, as they passed through the shields and thundered into the hull, denting it until it looked like the surface of a golf ball.

“Ooh, that’s going to take some buffing out,” he said. “What the fonk are they firing?”

“Railguns,” Loren hissed, jamming on the space brakes and forcing the ships to overshoot. “Our shields won’t stop them.”

Cal swished both arms in the direction of the passing ships. Even at this distance, they easily avoided the blasts.

“And they won’t stay still so I can to shoot them,” he protested. “How is that fair?”

“Mech, how long?” Loren demanded.

“Just a minute.”

“Another one? What is that now, like, eight?” Cal spluttered.

Another volley of railgun fire hammered the front of the ship. The sound of each impact was terrifying, a sharp, sudden crack that was far too close for comfort.

Cal launched three missiles at the closest squadron of fighters. He watched, with not entirely unexpected dismay, as the ships took evasive action.

“I’m just wasting bullets here,” he said. “Retract weapons.”

“What are you doing?” Loren yelped, as the spikes withdrew from Cal’s head and he found himself back in his chair. “Shoot them!”

“I can’t shoot them. They move,” Cal pointed out.

“They always move!” Loren replied. “The point is to shoot at where they’re going to move to !”

“Yeah, that’s not working,” Cal said. “But it’s fine.”

Those rattling keracks pummeled the hull again. “How is this fine?” demanded Loren.

“It’s fine because I have an idea. Head for the station,” Cal said.

Loren glanced back, just for a moment. “What?!”

“Fly close to the station. You know, like really close, so they can’t risk shooting at us.”

Loren hesitated, as if about to argue, but then shrugged. “Why not?” she sighed, then she twisted the yoke and jammed forward on the throttle, and the Untitled lurched sickeningly around until the screen was filled by the ugly expanse of Sunstation Kappa-Seven.

“Get down there and hug that bedge,” Cal urged. “Those ships won’t be able to shoot. Not unless they want to risk hitting the station.”

“Do we really want Mistress Loren flying us that close to something, sir?” Kevin inquired. “The consequences of hitting it would be quite catastrophic.”

“She’s not going to hit it, Kevin,” Cal assured the AI. He flicked his gaze to Loren. “You aren’t, are you?”

“Guess we’ll find out,” said Loren, throwing the Untitled into a dive.

Cal gripped his armrests and braced his feet on the floor in front of him as the station grew larger. They were close enough that he could see windows now, with faces watching them from the other side. Human faces. The bad guys’ faces.

Down in his lap, Splurt bubbled sadly.

And then, Loren pulled them out of the dive, leveling the ship off so it was flying parallel to the station.

There was a screech and sparks appeared at the bottom of the screen.

OK, parallel-ish .

“Got it, I’ve got it,” Loren said, adjusting their trajectory a fraction. “That part was sticking out.”

“Well, it isn’t sticking out anymore,” Cal said.

The station raced by below them. Above and behind, the attacking ships fell into a single follow formation.

“They’re hanging back,” Loren said, her relief palpable. “They’re not shooting.”

“See? What did I tell you? What did I say? They can’t risk it,” Cal grinned. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I’m the captain.”

“You ain’t the captain,” Mech told him.

Cal smiled down at Splurt. “He doesn’t mean that. See, he might be stubborn, angry, aggressive, stuck-up, just plain mean, and…” He frowned. “Where was I going with this again?”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. The point is, I am the captain, and I’m the one who saved us once again from being blasted into a million pieces.”

Up ahead, two gun-turrets unfolded from the walls of Kappa-Seven. Out of the corner of his eye, Cal saw more popping up at the edges of the viewscreen.

“OK, just FYI, there’s a possibility I spoke too soon,” he admitted.

“Shizz!” Loren hissed. She pulled up just as the turrets opened fire. Laser blasts crisscrossed all around the Untitled as it twisted into a desperate corkscrew maneuver that took it up and away from the station’s surface.

Behind it, the pursuing ships returned to battle formation and fired a flurry of torpedoes.

“You made it worse!” Loren snapped. “You actually found a way to make it worse!”

Cal wished he could argue, but it was a fair comment. The situation was worse. They were now being shot at by countless more guns than they had been a few minutes before. However you looked at it, whether objectively or subjectively, it was worse.

“Mech, tell me you’ve got it!” Cal hollered.

“Almost. Gimme—”

“Don’t you dare say ‘a minute!’” Cal warned.

“Got it!” Mech announced. “I got a copy of the page scan. We know where the Sentience came from.”

“Punch it in!” said Loren, spinning to avoid a burst of turret fire, but failing spectacularly. She pointed the ship away from the station and pushed the sub-warp engines to Full Speed Ahead.

“Coordinates locked,” Mech announced. “Can we risk jumping to warp this close to these fonks?”

“Have to,” Loren said. “We’re about to lose shields.”

Mech gripped the console. “Then go!”

“Wait!” Cal yelped.

“We can’t wait!” Loren protested, shouting to be heard over a hail of railgun ammo that smashed against the hull.

“They already had the page. They know where we’re going. Either they’ll follow, or they’ll already be there waiting,” Cal said. “We’ll be flying right into danger.”

“We’re already in motherfonking danger!” Mech pointed out. “Shields are at three percent. One more hit and we’re done.”

“They’re going to be waiting for us. I know it.”

“So, what do you suggest?” Mech demanded.

“Broadcast the coordinates to Zertex,” said Cal. “Send them to Jjin. Tell him where we’re going.”

“What?!” Loren spat. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Maybe,” Cal agreed. “But if we get Zertex and these guys fighting, maybe it’ll buy us enough time to do what we have to do.”

“Damn it. He’s actually got a point,” Mech groaned. “It might work.”

“And it might get us killed,” Loren hissed through gritted teeth.

“With these shields? We’re already dead,” Mech said. He tapped the console. “It’s worth a try.”

“Kevin, attach this photograph,” Cal said. He fired off a middle-finger salute with both hands and sneered in the direction of the camera.

“Got it, sir.” A picture of Cal appeared on screen. “Like this?”

“Exactly like that, Kevin. Only not upside-down.”

“Very good, sir. Image attached.”

“Sending now,” said Mech. “I hope this don’t backfire, man.”

Cal smiled. “Since when have any of my—?” He shook his head. “No. No, I almost walked right into that one,” he muttered. “I hope so, too, Mech. I really do.”

“Done. All sent,” said Mech. “Now, get us out of here.”

“Gladly,” said Loren.

And then the warp disk spun, the stars stretched out, and the Currently Untitled leaped blindly into the unknown.

Twenty-Three

The last of the Greyx stood over the last of the Symmorium, a clawed hand resting on the girl’s head. Tyrra was restless, her feet shuffling, her fingers flexing in and out.

She was not, as far as Miz could tell, conscious. Not properly, although she wasn’t exactly unconscious, either. It was as if she was stuck somewhere between the two states, neither one nor the other.

“Hey, it’s OK. It’s OK,” Miz whispered. “Shh. You’re OK.”

They were in the medical bay, Tyrra taking up just a little over half the space on the bed. Savage shark-species or not, she was still just a kid. A kid who’d been through too much.

Miz shot a glance over to the Symmorium Sentience. It was propped on a chair, wedged in place by a pillow and a pair of Loren’s boots. Having it close had seemed to calm Tyrra at first, but the Sentience’s glow had gradually faded, and once it was dark, Tyrra had quickly become agitated again.

“We’re going to fix it,” Miz whispered to her. “We’re going to bring your people back. You won’t be alone anymore. I promise.”

There was a knock on the doorframe outside. The door stood open, and Miz turned to find Cal leaning there. She immediately withdrew her hand from Tyrra’s head.

“Hey,” Cal said. “How you guys doing back here?”

Miz shrugged. “Like, how should I know?” she asked. “How did I end up on babysitting duty, anyway? Oh, wait. It’s because I have to do everything around here.”

Cal held her gaze. She relented surprisingly quickly.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” she admitted, her voice softening. “It’s, like, I don’t even know if she’s there. You know? I’m talking to her, but I don’t know if she can hear me.”

“She can hear you,” Cal said. “I’m sure she can hear you.”

Miz shrugged again, but looked secretly reassured by this.

“Whatever,” she said.

Cal entered the room, patted Tyrra on the leg, then crossed to the Sentience. “This doing anything?” he asked, rapping his knuckles on it.

“Not since it went dark,” Miz told him. She looked from the Sentience to Tyrra. A long, curved canine tooth chewed her bottom lip. “Are they going to die?”

“What? No. They’re not going to die. We won’t let them,” said Cal. He smiled. “And, if they do, we’ll just go and get them back like we always do.”

Miz swallowed and looked down for a moment. She blinked a few times before looking up again. “You promise?”

“Promise? No,” Cal admitted. “I’ll do better than promise.” He winked, and fired off the double fingerguns. “It’s a Cal Carver guarantee.”

“You’re so lame,” Miz said, smirking.

“Normally, it’s not actually a legal binding guarantee. Thankfully, no one ever thinks to check the small print. But on this occasion?” He put a hand on Miz’s shoulder, and glanced from her to Tyrra. “I’ll make an exception.”

He gave her a reassuring pat, then gestured toward the door. “Anyway, you got a minute? We’re having a strategy meeting. So far, the best we’ve been able to come up with is, ‘don’t die,’ so we could really use some more input.”

Miz shot Tyrra a worried look.

“Kevin will keep an eye on her,” Cal said.

“I don’t have eyes, sir,” Kevin pointed out.

“Not an actual eye, Kevin. I don’t want you to put an actual physical eye on her,” Cal said. “I want you to watch her.”

“The way I watch you, sir?”

“Yes, but without the creepy undertones, or those whispering sounds you sometimes make when you think I’m sleeping,” Cal said. “Just keep her under observation.”

“Very good, sir.”

Cal turned to Miz, then a thought occurred to him. “And, you know, tell us if anything happens.”

“Oh. Right. As you wish, sir,” said Kevin. “For clarity’s sake, though, what sort of thing?”

Cal made a vague waving gesture. “Just, I don’t know. Anything. If she does anything, tell us.”

“Very good, sir,” Kevin replied.

Cal turned to Miz. “See? She’ll be fine for—”

“In. Out. In. Out.”

Frowning, Cal raised his eyes to the ceiling. “What are you doing?”

“Reporting, sir. In. Out. In. Out. In.”

“Reporting on what?” Cal asked.

“Her breathing, sir,” said Kevin. “You told me to report if she did anything.”

“I meant anything significant,” Cal sighed.

“Breathing is quite significant, sir.”

Cal rubbed his temples and muttered darkly. “OK. Thank you. No, you’re right. You’re absolutely right,” he admitted. “So, you see how she is now? You see everything she’s doing right now? Ignore all that. Take that as a given. Tell us if she starts doing anything that isn’t any of the things she’s doing now. OK?”

“Got it, sir.”

“Or, if she stops doing any of the things she’s currently doing,” Cal added, just to be on the safe side. “If she stops—you know, picking an example—breathing, then you should tell us.”

“Goodness, this is more complicated than I first thought,” Kevin said. “But you can count on me, sir.”

Miz scowled at the ceiling. “Can you just, like, show us a video feed on the main screen?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Kevin confirmed. “Of anything in particular? I have some of Master Carver’s space-kitten footage queued up, if that’s of interest.”

“Of this room,” Miz tutted. “Show us a feed of this room so we can keep watch on her ourselves.”

“Aha! Yes. That’s an even better idea, ma’am. I shall start at once,” Kevin said.

From up front came the sound of Mech’s dulcet tones. “What the fonk is that shizznod doing on the screen?” he wondered.

“We heard that,” Cal said.

“You were supposed to!” Mech called back. “Now hurry the fonk up.”

Cal held an arm out to Miz. “Shall we?” he asked.

Miz moved to take his arm, then stopped herself. “Better not. Wouldn’t want to upset your girlfriend, or whatever,” she said, her usual scowl returning.

With a final check of Tyrra, she strode past Cal and thumped heavily in the direction of the bridge.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Cal muttered.

“You can say that again,” Loren called from up front. Cal grimaced as he remembered the video feed. “Now, hurry up so we can get started.”

* * *

Cal sat in his chair, willfully ignoring the usual warp-speed fireworks that streaked across the screen. The top right corner of the screen showed a feed from the medical bay, where Tyrra lay fidgeting fitfully in her not-quite-sleep.

Loren and Miz had turned their chairs to face his. Mech stood across from Cal, so together they formed the four points of a rough square.

“Where is it we’re actually going, anyway?” Cal asked.

Mech frowned. “What? We’re bringing the Sentience home. You know that. Seriously, do you ever pay attention?”

“I mean where exactly ?” Cal asked. “Where do Sentiences come from?” He frowned. “Is it Sentiences? Sentii, maybe?”

“It’s a planet,” Loren said, ignoring everything after the first question. “It’s listed as uninhabited, but the atmosphere’s breathable.”

“Good. I like breathable. Breathable’s good,” Cal said. “So, let’s run through the plan as it stands so far. We come out of warp. We expect the EDI to be there waiting for us.”

“And Zertex,” Loren reminded him.

“Zertex?” asked Miz. “Why will Zertex be there?”

“He called them,” said Mech, pointing to Cal.

“What? Technically, you called them,” Cal retorted.

“Only because you fonking told me to.”

“Oh, and if I said you should jump in a river, would you do that, too?” Cal demanded.

“Depends. Can I drag your sorry ass down with me?” Mech asked. “Because if so, then hell yeah, I’m in.”

Cal shook his head reproachfully. “You know, with an attitude like that, you’re never going to get into Robot Heaven.”

“Not a robot.”

“Robot Space Heaven.”

“I’ll hurt you, man. I mean it. I’ll hurt you.”

“Guys!” said Loren. “Can we focus?”

She waited until she was sure they’d both stopped, then turned to Miz. “We thought if Zertex showed up they might keep the EDI occupied.”

“She says ‘we,’ but it was really my idea,” said Cal.

“It’s a terrible idea,” Miz said.

“No, Loren was right, it was a joint decision,” Cal continued. “I mean, it’s risky, sure, but…”

His lips moved silently.

“Actually, I don’t really have anything more to add after that. It’s just risky.”

Miz rolled her eyes. “Great. So, we come out of warp and all those losers are waiting for us. What then?”

“That’s kind of the entirety of the plan,” said Cal.

Miz snorted in something like amusement. She waited, her eyes darting around the others.

“Wait, what? That’s seriously it?” she asked. “Stop the ship near a whole load of bad guys? That’s the plan?”

“Not all of it, no,” said Cal, shifting a little uncomfortably. “We workshopped some stuff about trying to not get ourselves killed, but decided that was pretty much a given, so we left it out. I’m open to putting it back in, though, if you think it would help.” He raised a hand. “All those in favor?”

No one responded.

“Overruled,” Cal said, lowering his hand again. “It’s going in. Captain’s decision.” He smiled at Miz. “We’re also going to try not to get ourselves killed.”

Miz flared her nostrils. Her brow was furrowed in a way that Cal had rarely, if ever, seen before. After a few moments, he worked out what she was doing.

She was thinking. Properly thinking, not just conjuring up some new insult, or contemplating which of her claws looked better than the others. Actually properly thinking.

“So, like… We come out of warp, and what? There’s a load of Earth and Zertex ships fighting in orbit?”

“Ideally, yeah,” said Mech. “Course, they could just decide to team up on us.”

“They wouldn’t!” Cal gasped. He chewed his lip. “Would they?”

“Maybe,” said Mech. “They worked together for years until just a few days ago.”

“Shizz. Then why the fonk did you call Zertex, Mech? What were you thinking?”

“Everyone just, like, shut up, already,” Miz barked. Literally. She leaned forward, her arms resting on her thighs as she thought. “So, when we stop it’ll be us, all the ships, then the planet?”

Cal blinked. “Huh?”

“When we stop,” said Miz, more slowly. “It’ll be us, then the ships, then the planet?”

“Is that…? Did that make it clearer for anyone?” Cal asked, looking around.

“Yes. The EDI and Zertex ships will be between us and the planet,” Loren said. “That’s the order. Us, the ships, then the planet.”

“Oh. Gotcha,” said Cal. He nodded. “Yeah, that’s the annoying part.”

“Then can’t we do, like, them, us, then the planet?” Miz suggested.

Cal looked around at the others. “She’s lost me again.”

“Come out of warp on the other side of the blockade?” asked Loren. “Jump behind it?”

“Could we do that?” asked Cal, perking up.

Loren shook her head. “No.”

Cal tutted. “Oh. Way to get my hopes up, Miz.”

“I mean, theoretically, maybe,” Loren continued. “But there are too many variables.”

“Like what?”

“Well, for one thing, we don’t know how many ships there are, or how close they’ll be to the planet. To be safe, we’d have to stop right at the edge of the upper atmosphere.”

Cal nodded his approval. “OK, then let’s just do that.”

“Oh, sure. No problem. I’ll just do that,” said Loren.

“Great,” said Cal, clapping his hands on his thighs. “So, next thing on the agenda—”

“Wait, I wasn’t being serious,” said Loren. “I can’t just do that .”

Cal raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”

“Because it’d mean overriding the jump system and doing a manual emergency stop. Which is… Well, it’s…”

“Impossible?” asked Cal.

Loren tilted her head from side to side a couple of times quite begrudgingly. “I mean, maybe not impossible , but—”

“Great. Then I have complete faith in you,” Cal said. “Anyway, what’s the worst thing that could happen?”

“Uh, we hit the atmosphere at warp speed then crash into the planet,” Loren said.

“And that’s bad ?” Cal asked. “Kidding. I know that’s bad. God knows you’ve crashed us into enough planets that I know it’s less than ideal. But we’ve survived all those.”

“What do you mean all those?” asked Loren. “You make it sound like it happens all the time.”

“It happens a lot of the time,” Mech pointed out.

“Most of the time,” Miz said.

“Agreed,” added Cal, because he hadn’t said it in a while and he felt like trying it out again.

Loren tutted irritably. “OK, well we’ve never hit one at warp speed before.”

“Will that be worse than normal?” Cal asked.

“We’ll tear the planet in half and turn the ship to atoms,” Loren said. “So yeah, it’ll be worse.”

Miz scowled. “What’s the problem? It’s, like, totally obvious what we need to do,” she said.

The others turned to her, all ears.

“We stop after the ships, but before we smash into the planet,” Miz said. She threw her arms up in a shrug. “Isn’t that, like, just common sense?”

“She has a point,” Cal said, nodding sagely. “Can’t we just do that?”

“I swear, I have to think of everything,” Miz complained.

Loren gaped between them both, open-mouthed. She shot Mech a pleading look, but he just shrugged and sighed in response.

“Fine. Fine, I guess I’ll just do that, then,” said Loren. “I’ll override the jump coordinates and manually brake a ship traveling at several times the speed of light so it stops in a gap of fewer than fifty miles.”

“Great!” cheered Cal. “So, it’ll go bad guys, us, then the planet, right? Simple as that?”

“Yep. Simple as that,” Loren muttered. “Don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself.”

“Don’t be hard on yourself, Loren. That’s why we’re all here,” Cal said. “So we can brainstorm these things.”

He twisted from side to side in his chair as he went over the updated plan in his head.

“So, we stop, we high-tail it down to the planet before anyone spots us, we take the Symmorium Sentience and, I don’t know, plug it in somewhere, it comes back to life, there’s magic and wonder. Probably rainbows. Maybe one of those, like—” He sang a high note. “Like just, laaaah , with the Heavenly light shining down like in Hallmark movies. You know?”

“No,” said Mech.

“Laaaah !” sang Cal, holding his hands up to a Heavenly light that only he could see. Mech appeared to be none the wiser. “Doesn’t matter. It’ll be great. You’ll love it. So, we do that, then the Symmorium come back, we all talk about old times, Zertex and the EDI blow each other to pieces, and then we kick back and bask in the satisfaction of a job well done.”

He thudded a fist on his armrest. “Boom. Nailed it. Lock it down, guys. We have ourselves a plan.”

Mech scowled. “What? How is that a plan?” he objected. “That ain’t a plan.”

Loren sighed. “Thank you. I did try to point that out.”

“What are you talking about? It’s a solid plan,” Cal insisted. “It has all the components any good plan needs. You know, in the sense that it has things happening.”

“I mean, yeah, in that sense, it’s a plan,” Mech agreed. “Except the things that happen in the best plans generally don’t just involve a lot of guesswork and wishful thinking.”

“Mech, ‘guesswork and wishful thinking,’ describes every plan ever made.”

“No. No, it don’t,” said Mech. “It only describes every plan that you ever made.”

“That’s the spirit,” said Cal, jumping up and ignoring his protests. “How long until we get there?”

Loren turned in her chair and checked the screen. “Couple of hours.”

“OK, good,” Cal said. “Miz, you want to go back and keep watch on Tyrra? We’ll have to take the Sentience with us when we land, so you might want to get her as comfortable as you can before that.”

He put his hands on his hips, sighed, then looked toward the door. “I guess I should go check on Splurt.”

“How’s he doing?” Loren asked.

“Honestly? Not great,” Cal said. “He’s pretty flat. Often in a literal sense.”

“You figured out what’s wrong with him yet?” Mech asked.

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, I think so,” said Cal. He smiled weakly. “Me.”

The others looked back at him, confused.

“It was something I said earlier that set me thinking about it,” Cal told them. “Me and Splurt, we’re linked. In some weird psychic… I don’t know. We’re connected.”

Mech figured it out first.

“He ain’t the one who’s depressed. You are.”

Cal forced a laugh. “Depressed? Me? Come on!” he said. “No, I’m not depressed. I’m just… I’m recalibrating. I’m processing all the stuff about Earth.” He hung his head. “About me. Him. The other one. I’m, you know, I’m dealing with it.”

He straightened, inhaled deeply through his nose, then smiled. “It’s not fair that it’s affecting Splurt. So, I’m dealing with it.”

The others looked doubtful.

“I am!” he protested. “It’s a lot to take in, but I’m working my way through it.”

He jabbed a thumb at the doorway as he backed toward it, keen to end this conversation as quickly as possible. “I’m going to check on the little guy. Shout at me when we’re getting close.”

Without waiting for an answer, he turned and hurried out into the corridor. A moment later, they all heard the kitchen door slide open and closed.

Loren lowered her eyes, exhaled quietly, then turned to face the screen. She was gazing unseeingly at the stars when Miz spoke.

“Are you just going to sit there?” she asked. “Or are you going to go talk to him?”

Loren turned in her chair. “Me?”

“Of course, you ,” Miz scowled. “Who else would it be?”

“Well, I just thought…”

“It’s always been you, you know?” Miz told her. “I could smell it off him the first time he saw you.”

Loren turned all the way. “Smell what? What do you mean?”

Miz side-eyed Mech. “Seriously? She seriously doesn’t know?”

“Know what?” asked Loren.

“Don’t seem like it,” said Mech. He shrugged. “But I go out of my way not to get involved.”

“What are you talking about?” Loren asked. “What could you smell?”

Miz tutted. “Ugh, you’re so lame. Doesn’t matter,” she said, standing up. “I gotta go take care of someone.” She met Loren’s eye, then nodded, just once. “And you do, too.”

* * *

Loren opened the door to find Cal trying to inflate a pancake-shaped Splurt with a drinking straw. Their eyes locked, and Cal froze like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming juggernaut.

“Uh, knock-knock,” said Loren.

Cal withdrew the straw and set it on the table without comment.

“Hey, Loren. Didn’t see you there,” he said.

Loren sidled into the room, leaned awkwardly against the replicator, then straightened again when she realized how unnatural it must have looked.

“How are you doing?” she asked, once she’d adopted a more normal position.

“Great!” Cal said, grinning up at her. “We have a plan. We know what we’re doing. I’m doing just great .”

Down on the kitchen table, Splurt grew flatter and thinner, his eyes shrinking until they were the size of garden peas.

“Juuuuust great,” Cal concluded.

Loren folded her arms self-consciously. “You know you can talk to me, right?” she said. “I know we… I know I… I know that thing happened between us, and that it… Well, it probably shouldn’t have.”

She sighed, becoming exasperated with herself. “You can talk to me, OK? If you want to.”

“I want to,” said Cal.

Loren’s eyes widened a little. “Oh! OK.” She adopted an expression that suggested she was listening intently. “Well, I’m all ears. Go for it.”

“No, I mean I want to talk. I really do. It’s just… I’m not sure I can. Not yet.” He pointed to his head and twirled a finger. “It’s all still processing.”

“Maybe I can help you process,” Loren offered.

“You absolutely can,” Cal said. He smiled thinly. “Just, not right now. Right now, I have to work it out on my own.”

Loren’s expression was half-offended, half-relieved. She nodded in understanding. “Good. Well, you know where to find me,” she said.

She shifted her balance from foot to foot, then motioned toward the corridor. “Well, I guess I’ll be back on the bridge.”

“OK.”

“Shout if you need me.”

“OK.”

Cal sat slumped on the bench, watching her leave. Watching her go somewhere else. Somewhere that wasn’t here, now, with him.

She was almost through the door when he called to her.

“Hey, Loren?”

She stopped. Turned.

“Yeah?”

Cal’s eyes went to the replicator. “We never did get that dinner…”

Twenty-Four

Cal sat across from Loren, barely able to contain his excitement as he watched her chew thoughtfully.

“Well?” he asked. “What do you think?”

Loren pointed to her mouth to indicate she was still chewing, and said nothing.

Cal rocked on the bench, drummed his hands on the table, and tried very hard to wait patiently.

It didn’t last.

“Just give me a clue. Thumbs up or down?”

Loren gave this some consideration, then raised a thumb.

“Alright! I knew it,” Cal said, thrusting his arms in the air in triumph. “Philly cheesesteak. Never fails.”

Cheesesteak—essentially a hot dog bun with some meat in it, over which cheese was smeared in abundance—was one of just a select handful of food items Cal had programmed into the replicator.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like the idea of having a more varied menu to order from, it was just that the process of programming the replicator was so painfully unpleasant that he didn’t like subjecting himself to it very often. It involved several sharp things exploring his mouth, various implements being shoved up his nose, and something deeply troubling happening to his brain.

As a result, he settled for a limited range of favorites—cheesesteak, banoffee pie, spit nibbles, Twix chocolate bars, and Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes . Specifically, the limited-edition Pumpkin Spiced Frosted Flakes that were only generally available around Halloween.

He dimly recalled having endured the whole horrifying process at least eight times, but couldn’t for the life of him remember what else he’d ordered, and there was no way of retrieving the information from the machine without risking having his facial cavities violated.

“It’s great, isn’t it?” Cal gushed, when Loren swallowed the mushed up mouthful. “Isn’t that one of the greatest things you’ve ever tasted?”

“Fonk, no,” Loren laughed, wiping the corners of her mouth on the back of her hand.

“No? What do you mean no ?” Cal gasped.

“I mean, it was OK. It was nice.”

“It was OK ?!”

Cal reached across the table, scooped an arm around her plate, and pulled it back toward him. “You don’t deserve the rest of this,” he said. “I’m confiscating it.”

“Hey!” Loren protested, grabbing the little pot of Frosted Flakes that Cal had served up as a side. “These are good, though.”

“Correction,” said Cal. “They’re greeeeeeeeat! ”

Loren had the good grace not to look perplexed by this, and just smiled as she picked up a few of the cereal pieces between finger and thumb and sprinkled them into her mouth.

“I take it that’s an Earth thing?” she asked.

Cal nodded. “It’s an Earth thing,” he confirmed. “At least, it was. For all I know, they’ve skinned the poor bamston and turned him into a rug.”

“Who?”

“Tony the Tiger,” said Cal. “Giant talking cartoon tiger. Well, pretty much a regular-sized tiger, I guess, only walking upright. Nice guy. Wears a neckerchief.” He waved a hand. “I doubt you’d know him.”

Loren agreed that, on balance, she probably wouldn’t.

“OK, best meal you’ve ever eaten,” she said. “Go.”

Cal, who had crammed the untouched end of Loren’s cheesesteak in his mouth, pointed down at the plate. “This, obviously,” he managed through a mouthful of doughy bread and precious, precious cheese-coated meat. “You?”

Loren settled in, leaning her arms on the table. “It was just after I left the Academy. They send us on these, like, basic training jaunts around different planets, so we can get a feel for them. There was one—can’t remember what it was called—where they would eat this, I don’t know how you’d describe it. Smoke.”

“Smoke?” mumbled Cal, dropping crumbs on the table.

“I know, it sounds weird,” Loren said. “But someone was selling it at a little food market. The smoke came in these little transparent bubbles. They were beautiful,” she continued, gazing wistfully ahead. “All these colors swirling inside, like little galaxies. Then you just put them in your mouth and bit down until they popped.”

Cal grimaced. “Jesus. That sounds horrible.”

“It wasn’t,” said Loren. “I mean, it was strange, but then the taste hit you, and you didn’t care.”

“What did it taste like?” Cal asked, or as close as he could get to forming the words with a mouthful of cheesesteak.

“I can’t describe it,” Loren said. “It wasn’t like anything else I’ve ever tasted. It was like tasting colors.” She shook her head. “No, music . Yeah. That was more like it. It was like tasting music.”

Cal swallowed. “And it was definitely food?”

“Yes.”

“Not drugs?”

“No!”

“What was this food market like?” he asked.

Loren thought back. “Small. Just, like, a couple of stands on a street corner.”

“Was it a couple of stands on a street corner, or was it one sketchy guy with a big coat?”

“A couple!” Loren said. “I think. I mean, I don’t remember it too clearly.”

“Uh-huh,” said Cal, clicking his tongue against his teeth. “And the smoke things—would I be right in thinking the first one was free?”

Loren frowned. “He was giving out samples, yeah. So?”

“Samples . Right. And how many did you go back and buy after that?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” said Loren.

“Roughly.”

Loren puffed out her cheeks. “Just, like…”

Cal raised his eyebrows and watched the realization dawn.

“Six hundred.”

“Jesus! Six hundred?”

“Ish. Six-hundred-ish. And they weren’t big,” Loren quickly added. Her face took on a wistful, longing look. “And they were delicious .”

“And, as a bonus, they made space monkeys fly out of the ceiling and let you dance for thirty-six hours straight,” Cal said. He shook his head. “Six hundred. Wow. Teela Loren, you’re a junkie.”

“They weren’t drugs!” Loren insisted, slapping him on the arm. Rather than withdraw her hand, though, she kept it there, resting on his forearm just above the wrist. He was wearing a t-shirt—a Warhol-inspired print that showed the faces of the Golden Girls in a selection of colors—and the touch of her skin on his bare arm was electric.

Behind him, Splurt bloomed from a pancake into a pear-shape.

“Hey, there’s my little guy,” said Cal.

With a calculated casualness that was anything but, he rested a hand on top of Loren’s, not yet meeting her eyes. Their fingers interlocked lightly, tips brushing together, and Cal’s heart thumped like a drum against the inside of his chest.

When he finally looked up, Loren’s gaze was carefully averted so she looked as if she was closely scrutinizing the tabletop in front of her. A strand of her hair had come loose and was hanging down so it almost touched the table. Cal felt an overwhelming urge to fix it for her, but that would mean removing his hand from hers, and he wasn’t ready to do that. Not yet.

“Loren,” he said.

Her head stayed down, but her eyes raised to meet his. “Yeah?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper. Cal could feel her pulse through the back of her hand. It was racing almost as fast as his own.

Fonk it. He was going to say it. He was just going to say it. Get it over and done with. Let her know how he felt. Now or never.

A tiny, panicked voice at the back of his brain objected strenuously, but he kicked it into submission.

He was going to tell her. He was fonking well going to tell her! Right here, right now.

He inhaled. His lips parted. His tongue went low, forming the letter “I,” then moved to between his teeth as it began to form the letter “L.”

He was doing it! He was actually doing it. He was actually saying it!

And then, with crushing inevitability, Kevin went and ruined everything.

“Apologies for the intrusion, sir,” he said, cutting Cal off.

Cal didn’t take his eyes off Loren’s. “What is it, Kevin?”

“You asked me to let you know if something was happening with young miss Tyrra.”

“And is something happening?” Cal asked.

“No, sir.”

Cal tried not to show his irritation, but didn’t make a great job of it. “Right. Good. Then why the fonk are you—?”

“It’s the Symmorium Sentience, sir,” said Kevin, interrupting again. “It’s acting rather peculiar.”

Reluctantly, Cal tore his eyes from Loren and looked up. “In what way?”

“I rather think you should come see for yourself, sir,” Kevin said.

Beside Cal, Splurt collapsed back into pancake batter. Cal felt a moment of harsh, biting emptiness as Loren withdrew her hand and stood up. “Come on,” she said. “We’d better go check it out.”

“Yeah,” Cal sighed. The bench scraped on the floor as he pushed it back and stood. “I guess we’d better.”

They arrived in the medical bay to find the Symmorium Sentience propped up in the same chair as before, its glassy surface still dormant and dark. Miz sat in a chair beside the mostly motionless Tyrra, one of the girl’s hands clasped between both of her own.

“She OK?” Loren asked.

Miz gave a non-committal sort of shrug, then glanced meaningfully to Cal. Loren made a weighing motion and shrugged back.

Cal, meanwhile, was squatting by the Sentience, peering into its darkened heart. “OK, so… It’s not doing anything,” he said, looking to the ceiling. “What’s the problem, Kevin?”

“Give it a moment, sir,” said Kevin.

They gave it a moment.

“It’s still not doing anything,” Cal pointed out.

“Hold on, sir. I’m sure it’ll do it again any moment now.”

They waited.

“Any moment now,” said Kevin.

“Kevin,” Cal groaned.

“Nnnnow. Wait. Nnn—”

The Sentience vibrated gently in the chair.

“There! Did you see that, sir?” Kevin asked. “It went bzzzt. ”

Cal sighed and stood up. “That was the chair.”

It took a moment for Kevin to answer. “Sorry, sir? It was the…?”

“The chair, Kevin,” said Cal. “We’re moving. The chair shook. It rattled the Sentience. That’s what made the noise.”

“I don’t think so, sir,” said Kevin.

“Well, I just watched it happening from six inches away, so…”

“I watched it, too, sir,” said Kevin.

“Yes, but from up there, I’m right down… Fine. Look.”

Cal squatted and placed the fingers of one hand around the stem of the chair, but not quite touching it. “Watch.”

They waited.

And waited.

When the Sentience finally vibrated, Cal quickly grabbed the upright part of the chair. The sound stopped immediately. He raised his eyes accusingly to the ceiling.

“See? It’s the chair.”

“Well, I never,” said Kevin. “In that case, my apologies for the interruption. You should go back and continue your meal. Pretend I didn’t say anything.”

“Thanks,” Cal grunted.

“I really am most dreadfully sorry, sir.”

“It’s fine,” said Cal, with an expression and tone that completely contradicted the words coming out of his mouth.

“Gracious as always, sir. Also, on a side note,” said Kevin. “We’ll be arriving in forty-seven seconds.”

“What?!” Loren spluttered.

“Arriving where? At the thing?” asked Cal, suddenly alert. “Arriving at the thing? At the place?”

Loren was too busy running to answer.

“Miz, strap yourself and Tyrra in. Now!” she urged.

Miz, for once, didn’t waste time arguing.

Loren skidded out of the room and went powering along the corridor, bellowing at Mech as she reached the bridge.

“Why didn’t you tell me?!”

Mech looked up from his console. It was mostly covered by the Blufflebag, which he’d been making some tiny and largely pointless alterations to.

“Huh?” he asked, then he pushed the space bagpipes aside enough to let him see the console screen. The reddish-brown skin on his face paled. “Oh, shizz.”

“Twenty-three seconds until we arrive,” Kevin announced.

“Arrive where? At the planet? Surely not at the planet?” asked Cal, who still hadn’t been given an answer. He stumbled onto the bridge half a dozen paces behind Loren and rushed to his chair. “Tell me we’re not arriving at the fonking planet in twenty-three seconds?”

“Fifteen seconds, sir,” Kevin corrected.

“Why didn’t you warn me?” Loren barked, strapping herself into her chair and toggling what seemed to Cal to be all the switches on her console.

“I did, ma’am,” Kevin reminded her. “In the medical bay.”

“Why didn’t you warn me earlier ?”

“Six seconds.”

“Aw, fonk,” Mech groaned, activating his magnetic feet and bracing himself against the wall as, behind him, Cal furiously fiddled with his seat belt.

“Everybody hold on!” Loren cried.

“Two… One,” said Kevin.

Loren jammed her feet and hands on several different parts of her control terminal all at the same time, while simultaneously hissing through her teeth, screwing her eyes up until they were almost shut, and offering up a prayer to Alstrong, the God of Space Flight and, she hoped, of Not Crashing into Things.

Nothing happened. The controls didn’t respond. The screen continued to show the streaking warp effect that they all knew and, with the exception of Cal, loved.

They weren’t stopping! Alstrong had ignored her prayers, the make-believe shizznod. Loren’s heart leaped into her throat as she braced herself for the end.

From the ceiling, Kevin gave a little snigger.

Slowly—ever so slowly—all three occupants of the bridge looked up.

“Just my little joke, ma’am,” said Kevin, struggling to hold it together. “Oh, you should see your faces. They’re priceless.”

“You idiot !” Loren cried.

“Jesus, Kevin!”

“But… the screen,” said Mech, looking down at his console. “It was on my fonking screen.”

“My doing, sir!” Kevin laughed. “Rather a clever touch, I thought. Here, allow me to fix it.”

The data on the console screen changed. Mech blinked.

“Have you fixed it?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s just it says we arrive in eight seconds,” Mech said.

Kevin hesitated for exactly one-eighth of this time. “Does it, sir? Oh. In all the excitement, I forgot the actual arrival was coming up in just a few—”

Loren hit the brakes. Everything that wasn’t fastened down, as well as several things that were, flew forward and thumped, smashed, or in Splurt’s case, splatted against the closest available forward-facing wall.

Cal’s insides became spaghetti. This nicely complimented his brain, which temporarily took on the consistency of homemade pasta sauce with extra onions and garlic. His skeleton, which had seemed perfectly content to remain wrapped in muscle and skin throughout most of his life, suddenly made a break for freedom. He felt every inch of it as it tried to vacate his body through the front, taking full custody of his teeth as well.

Cal imagined his eyes boinging out from his head, like Daffy Duck when he saw an attractive lady duck, unaware that it was really just a dragged-up Bugs Bunny winking coquettishly.

At least, he hoped he imagined it. His brain, in between gently simmering and lightly seasoning itself with basil, tried very hard to convince him he was imagining it, certainly.

And then, every terrible thing that had been happening to him happened again, only harder and in the opposite direction.

He saw his ears, tasted his feet, and inhaled his own face, all at the same time. His skeleton stormed back in, slammed the door, then raced up the stairs to its room, screaming about how it hated his guts.

Metaphorically.

There was a moment that Cal would later come to think of as ‘The Great Jiggling,’ and then the Currently Untitled hammered to a stop just a few hundred miles above the glowing blue atmosphere of a planet that looked to be made entirely of salad.

“You did it!” Cal wheezed. He looked around the bridge. “Did she do it?”

“Not yet,” Loren hissed, still wrestling with the controls.

The problem, Cal realized, was thus: They were still moving.

Specifically, they were still moving in the direction of the planet below. And, while they were no longer traveling at warp speed, they were still moving really quite fast. Too fast, one might say, as the atmosphere came rushing toward them with no signs of slowing down.

Cal wriggled upright. “You should probably stop now,” he suggested. “Loren? You should probably stop.”

“Trying!” she retorted. The yoke, throttle, and various braking mechanisms all shuddered and shook. The atmosphere was almost on them now, too close, too fast.

Loren groaned. “Fonking Alstrong,” she spat, and then the Currently Untitled smashed into the atmosphere at an unfortunate angle, and ignited into a tumbling ball of fire.

Twenty-Five

As the Currently Untitled plunged in a spinning, screaming dive toward the surface of the planet below, a line from a song popped unbidden into Cal’s head. The line in question came from the fourth verse of the 1989 single, ‘Jesus is My Spaceship (Let’s Ride Him Through the Stars)’ by German Christian Rock act, Klaus Hugen, and went like this:

When flying in the Jesus-ship, you’ll laugh, you’ll love, you’ll cry,

But don’t go crashing to the ground, unless thou wish to die!

Sure, some of that was guesswork on Cal’s part, thanks to Klaus Hugen’s mostly impenetrable German accent, but that was the general thrust of it. Crashing was bad. Crashing was to be avoided, even if you were doing so in a spaceship that was, for reasons never fully explained, made out of Jesus.

Cal didn’t want to crash. He didn’t want to die.

This was actually quite reassuring. He hadn’t exactly been feeling himself lately, and the whole evil version of himself murdering his way around the galaxy thing had been weighing heavily on his shoulders. It was nice to know, then, that despite all that, he very much did not want to go smashing into the planet below at blisteringly high speeds.

Not that he had a lot of say in the matter.

“Controls unresponsive!” Loren yelped. She glanced to the ceiling—a final desperate gambit. “Kevin, can you do something?!”

A trumpet arrangement of traditional Spanish folk song, ‘La Cucaracha,’ came blasting from the speakers.

“Something useful! ”

The music stopped as quickly as it had started. Kevin, it seemed, had nothing more to offer.

The planet that was rushing up on them was lush and green as far the eye could see. Considering they could see roughly one full third of its surface, this was a lot of foliage.

“Damn. This one actually looks pretty nice,” Cal muttered.

And it did. Vast areas of it looked like a tropical rainforest, with sunlight dappling the canopy. It was probably full of weird but delicious alien fruit. Maybe some cute monkeys with four tails and a big face.

Yes. Yes, he’d have very much liked to have seen that.

“Fire the front thrusters,” Mech barked.

“I’ve already fired them,” Loren replied, raising her voice to be heard over the increasingly high-pitched whine of their descent.

“You have?” asked Mech. “Both of them?”

“Both of them!”

Mech tutted. “Shizz.”

“What if we fired all guns forward?” asked Cal. “Just, like, full cannons to the front. Would that help?”

“It’d help kill everything in a two-hundred-mile radius directly below us,” said Mech. “Otherwise, no. Ain’t gonna help.”

“Damn it,” Cal spat. He sat back and thought for a moment, then leaned forward suddenly. “Wait! Do we have a big parachute?”

“No,” said Loren.

“Can we make a big parachute?”

Mech sighed. “Man, I ain’t gonna even dignify that with a response.”

“I’m going to make one,” said Cal, unclipping his belt. “We can use a bedsheet.”

“Wait, don’t!” Loren cried, but it was too late. Cal was torn off his feet and sent rocketing backward across the room. His scream echoed loudly around the bridge, less loudly as he went hurtling out into the corridor, then stopped abruptly when he hit the raised hatch at the back of the ship.

The G-force of their descent kept him pinned there, arms wide, testicles AWOL, cheeks merrily exploring the insides of both ears.

The medical bay was just a few feet ahead on the right. The door stood open, and if he concentrated, he could just make out the bottom of the bed through the swirling patterns of color that painted his eyeballs.

Tyrra’s feet were there, twitching violently.

She was going to be extinct, Cal realized with a start. Well, not her personally, but the Symmorium species. And also her personally, he supposed. She was the last of them.

The Greyx, too. As far as they knew, Miz was the sole survivor of that proud, wet-nosed warrior race, and her odds of surviving the upcoming impact probably weren’t great. The same odds as any of them surviving, in fact.

Without even trying, they were about to score themselves a double genocide.

The colors swooshing around in Cal’s vision had become predominantly green. Almost exclusively green, in fact.

Great. Now his eyes had broken.

Jesus. What a day.

He tried to blink the other colors back in, but his eyelids were pinned open. Cal had just resigned himself to the fact that the last few seconds of his life were going to be spent only seeing the color green when the Untitled suddenly decelerated.

He took off like a missile, rocketing along the corridor and back toward the bridge. He blinked through eyes filled with tears, and gasped through a throat filled with tongue as he sailed through the door and hurtled, headfirst, toward the viewscreen.

Cal stopped an inch from the screen, close enough to see the individual pixels of the ship’s display. He exhaled slowly, and watched his breath mist across the expanse of digital green that made up the entirety of his current worldview.

He drifted gently, like a leaf on a breeze, and found himself back in his chair. A pressure held him down while he fastened his belt, then left him with the faintest whisper of relief.

On the screen, a canopy of greens and yellows rolled by just below them. Far ahead, the lush jungle stretched all the way to the horizon. They all watched it in silence, no one—especially Cal—daring to speak.

Of course, it didn’t last.

“What the fonk just happened?” Cal asked, approximately four seconds later. “We stopped. How did we stop? Loren?”

Loren shook her head. “Not me,” she said.

“Going by the way you came flying through here then stopped in an eerie fonking green light, I’m gonna just go ahead and say the Sentience played some part in it,” Mech said.

“I thought it was dormant?” said Loren.

Mech shrugged. “Unless we got something else aboard that emits magic green light, I’m sticking to my theory,” he said. He gestured to the screen. “Maybe being here is charging it up. Maybe this is all we had to do.”

“You know this won’t be all we have to do, Mech,” Cal said. “When is it ever this easy?”

Loren sat up, looking quite proud of herself. “Speaking of easy, check it out.”

Part of the screen switched from showing the jungle to displaying a battle raging in space. “I did it. I came out of warp this side of the EDI and Zertex.”

“Damned impressive, Loren,” Cal told her. “I mean, did it require divine intervention to stop us from smashing into the planet? Yes. Yes, it did. But, still. Good job.”

“They ain’t following,” Mech announced, checking his console. “The ships up there, they ain’t coming. I don’t think they noticed us.”

“Holy shizz, you mean it worked ?” Cal blurted. He recovered quickly. “Not that I had any doubt, obviously.”

“Obviously,” said Loren.

“Where are we headed?” Cal asked.

Loren waggled her various controls and shrugged. “No idea. I’m not flying the ship.”

“Kevin? You flying?” Cal asked.

“Not that I’m aware of, sir.”

They watched the tops of the trees skim by beneath them. From above, it was impossible to tell how tall they were, only that their foliage was thick and their leaves were a wide variety of shapes and sizes.

For a moment, Cal thought he saw something flitting from treetop to treetop, but then they were past it. God, he hoped this place didn’t have space squirrels. Those little fonks were vicious.

“It’s so green,” Mech said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anywhere so green.”

“Beats another desert planet,” Cal said. He watched, transfixed, as a flock of birds rose from the treetops ahead and took to the air. They each had four wings, two of which flapped furiously while the other set just coasted along, enjoying the ride.

He liked their style.

The treetops tilted and slid away as the Untitled turned. A clearing the size of a small Scottish island loomed ahead. The ship straightened and descended smoothly into the clearing, before plummeting the final twenty feet and landing with a teeth-jarring crunch .

“Way to go, Loren!” called Miz from through the back.

“It wasn’t me!”

Cal leaned forward in his chair. The ship had landed with its nose raised at an angle, meaning most of what they could see was a pale blue sky. If he squinted, he could just make out the flare of cannons and torpedoes up beyond the atmosphere’s edge.

“Kevin, magnify that,” he said, pointing to the area of the screen where the action was.

The image zoomed to focus on the battle. Cal tried to decipher who was who, and whether anyone was currently winning, but it was impossible to make out.

He had just leaned forward for a really good squint when an enormous purple face with eight eyes and a mouth like an industrial nutcracker appeared, blocking the view of anything else.

“Aaargh! What the fonk is that thing?” Cal screamed.

“I don’t know, sir,” Kevin confessed.

“We’ll figure it out later. Shoot it now, before it kills us all!”

The image on screen returned to standard magnification. A tiny purple bug hovered on a blur of wings near the center of the image, then pootled off to go about its day.

Cal cleared his throat. “Right. Yes. I knew that,” he said.

“Don’t suppose you also know where we are?” Mech asked.

“No, but there’s only one way to find out,” Cal said, unclipping his belt. He stood, stretched, then gestured to the screen. “You said there’s atmosphere, right?”

“Right,” Loren confirmed. “A little thinner than you’re used to, but you shouldn’t notice much difference.”

“What’s the gravity like?”

“Same as Earth. Slightly heavier, in fact. But, again, marginal,” Loren told him.

“Damn it,” said Cal, who’d had visions of another jumping contest. “Can’t have everything, I guess.”

He about-turned so he was facing the corridor. “Mech, fetch me the keys to the gun cabinet.” He kicked a foot up behind him, caught the toe and pulled, giving the muscle a stretch. “And let’s go see what we’ve got waiting for us.”

* * *

Cal stood halfway up the ramp, peering into the sludgy green water that completely covered the lower two feet or so. Reeds and rushes sprouted haphazardly through a surface mostly covered by some sort of floating moss.

“Well,” said Loren, hanging back and covering her mouth to try to fend off the worst of the stench. “You did say you wanted moist.”

“There’s moist, then there’s moist ,” said Cal. He watched as another of the purple bugs went skimming across the water, darting from moss-clump to moss-clump, and was glad he’d taken the time to pull on a long-sleeved shirt that covered his arms. Those little fonks looked like biters. “How deep do we think it is?” he wondered.

Mech, who stood between Cal and Loren, tapped the scanner built into his forearm. “Not deep. Walkable.”

“What do you mean ‘walkable’?” Cal asked.

“I mean you can walk in it.”

“Why the fonk would I want to walk in it? Look at it!” Cal said. “There could be anything living in there.”

“We came rather a long way, sir,” said Kevin. “It would be a shame not to complete the quest just because of a little water.”

“Then you fonking do it!” Cal yelped.

“Alas, sir, I cannot,” Kevin replied. “What with the whole being a disembodied voice thing. Otherwise, I’d be all over it.”

“Kevin’s right. We brought the Sentience all this way. We can’t give up now.”

“Who said anything about giving up?” said Cal. He snapped his fingers and pointed back to the medical bay. “Loren, do me a favor, bring the Sentience out here.”

He looked out across the swamp while he waited for Loren to return. The smell of it had been unbearable at first, but his nose was adapting and it was merely almost unbearable now. At this rate, it would be borderline bearable before he knew it.

Still, it wasn’t really the smell he was worried about. What he was worried about—the thing that was almost entirely consuming his thoughts at the moment, in fact—was the one-eyed monster that inhabited the Death Star trash compactor in the first Star Wars .

That fonking thing had haunted him after he’d first seen the movie. For weeks, he couldn’t pass a body of water—river, puddle, or even reasonably full bathtub—without expecting the vicious cycloptic little bamston to lunge out and pull him under.

His parents had tried to reassure him, of course. They’d told him that it wasn’t real, and that even if it had been, it was high unlikely to be found lurking in their downstairs toilet.

But that was the problem. Logically, no, it shouldn’t be in his toilet, or bath, or anywhere else. But then again, logically it shouldn’t have been in the Death Star’s trash compactor, either.

How did it survive in there? That was one of the questions that kept him awake in the days after he’d first seen the thing. How did it stay alive? The walls squashed together, crushing everything inside the trash compactor. That was where the ‘compactor’ part came in. It was the entire point.

So, how come the one-eyed monster wasn’t killed during this process? Could it survive being crushed into paste? Did it regenerate upon death? The thought of both these things only served to make it seem all the more terrifying. Not only was it a creepy one-eyed worm-squid, it was also functionally immortal.

Cal’s mom had suggested that maybe there was a gap at the bottom of the walls, but his dad had quickly dismissed that. What would be the point in a compacting-based disposal system that didn’t reach all the way to the floor? Smaller items would get wedged beneath it all the time, Cal’s dad had argued, causing all sorts of maintenance headaches for the Stormtroopers.

Couple a constantly jamming compacting mechanism with an aggressive underwater-dwelling alien entity, and you had the recipe for a Health & Safety nightmare, he’d reasoned. When Cal’s mom had suggested that, fine, if he was so bloody clever maybe he could explain it, his dad had sucked thoughtfully on his mustache for a moment, before concluding that it probably exited the compactor using a network of pipes and underwater chambers, which allowed it to slip into other areas of the station at will.

This had not helped quell Cal’s fears in the slightest.

That sense of dread came back with a vengeance as Cal looked out across the swamp. It was probably full of one-eyed monster squids. Hoaching with them. Setting foot in that thing, he knew, would be an open invitation to drag him under and do… whatever it was they did to people.

Cal had a few theories about that back in the day, too, but his subconscious had gone to great lengths to subsequently forget them all.

“Got it,” said Loren, appearing behind him. The Symmorium Sentience was in her hands, glowing just faintly at its center. “Tyrra got kind of agitated when I took it out of the room, but Miz is keeping her calm.”

Cal nodded and took the Sentience from Loren. It felt cold against his hands.

“What are you gonna do with it?” asked Mech.

Cal indicated the ramp with a flick of his head. “I’m going to roll it in.”

Mech frowned. “You’re what?”

“I’m going to roll it into the water. Or slime. Or whatever it is,” Cal said. “I’ll just—boop—roll it in.”

“And you think that’s going to work?” Loren asked.

Cal shuffled around and shot her a reproachful look over his shoulder. “Please. I know it’s going to work.”

Setting the Symmorium Sentience on the ramp, he gave it a quick polish with his sleeve, then placed both hands on top of it. “Here goes,” he said. “You’re home, Senty. Fly. Be free, my special angel.”

With a shove, he sent the Sentience trundling down the ramp. It rolled a foot or so along the sloping metal, then hit the swamp with a thlump .

They all watched it slowly sink until it was swallowed by the swamp.

“OK, wait for it,” said Cal, standing and shuffling back. “Wait for it.”

They waited for it.

“What’s supposed to happen?” Loren eventually whispered.

“Just hold on. Give it a sec,” Cal said, silencing her. “Just… give it… a sec.”

They gave it a sec. Several secs, in fact.

“You think that thing can drown?” Mech asked.

“Oh, for fonk’s sake,” Cal grumbled, wading into the water and fishing around until he found the Sentience. The swamp farted its objections as he pulled it free, then he frantically backtracked up the ramp, kicking wildly at some imagined pursuer.

“OK, so that didn’t work,” Cal breathed, once he was sure nothing had tried to follow him. “Anyone else have any suggestions?”

He looked hopefully across their faces. “No? Anyone?” he cheeped. “Mech, what if you threw it?”

“Threw it?”

“Yeah. Just tossed it out there. Really launched it.”

Cal was about to deliver his reasoning as to why this might be a good idea when the Symmorium Sentience spoke inside his head.

“Follow.”

“Follow?” said Cal.

Loren and Mech stared at Cal in confusion. “Huh? Follow what?” Loren asked.

Cal pointed to his head. “Didn’t you guys hear that?” he asked. “It said we should follow.”

“Assertion: Rejected ,” the Sentience said. “Follow alone .”

“Alone? What do you mean ‘follow alone’?” Cal asked.

“Follow who?” Loren asked.

Cal shook the Symmorium Sentience. “This thing.”

“It’s not going anywhere,” Loren pointed out.

Cal urked as the Sentience pulled itself out of his grip and drifted down the ramp. It stopped just above the swamp, then floated around the side of the ship, its light pulsing gently.

“You had to go and open your mouth, didn’t you, Loren,” Cal chastised. He shot a brief but anxious glance at the surface of the swamp, then turned back to the others. “So, you guys stay here, I guess. Keep an eye on Splurt, make sure we don’t sink. That sort of thing.”

“You ain’t really going alone, are you?” asked Mech.

Cal sighed and tapped the side of his head. “That’s what it said. Besides, you’ll only rust.”

“Be careful,” Loren urged.

“I always am,” Cal told her, which everyone present knew was an outright lie. “Try to move the ship somewhere less… you know. This. But close, so I can find you.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Loren.

“You do that,” said Cal, delaying the inevitable.

“I will,” Loren confirmed.

“Well, good.”

“Just get a fonking move on,” said Mech, giving Cal a shove.

Cal shot Mech a brief but brutal dirty look. Then, with a groan and a couple of lengthy sighs, he plodded down the rest of the ramp, sloshed into the knee-deep swamp water, and hurried out of sight around the side of the ship.

“Alright, alright, slow down. What am I? Made of legs?” Loren and Mech heard him call, and then the voice and the sloshing faded as Cal followed the Symmorium Sentience toward parts unknown.

Alone.

Twenty-Six

“Far be it from me to question,” Cal said to the dimly-glowing ball that was once again tucked under his arm. “But are you sure we know where we’re going?”

They’d made their way through the swamp until they’d reached the tree line of the vast rainforest the Untitled had flown over on the way down. The wet, marshy ground had given way to a ground that was incrementally less wet, but harder to wade through.

Several times, Cal had become convinced he’d felt something brush against his leg, and had exploded forward in a series of high-kneed shrieks, while uncontrollably flapping his arms at his sides.

Eventually, after a long, agonizing three to four minutes of this, they’d reached ground that, while not quite solid, was unlikely to be harboring any one-eyed monsters from the Lucasfilm prop archives.

As soon as they’d reached land, the Sentience had dropped from the air and thacked onto the tangle of roots and weeds that made up the forest floor. Cal had watched it for a few moments, hoping it was going to do something amazing and he could go back to the ship.

Instead, it had just sat there, mostly dark and totally dormant. It was only once Cal had picked it up that he felt its voice inside his head again.

“Onward .”

Cal ducked under some low, thin branches, swatting idly at a little cloud of tiny translucent bugs that danced in the air in front of him. At first, he’d thought they were pretty interesting, but now they were just fonking annoying. He slapped himself on the side of the face, killing at least ten of them in one swift strike.

“It’s just, I’m pretty sure we’re going around in circles,” Cal said. “We’ve been walking for hours.”

“Assertion: Rejected ,” voiced the Sentience. “It has been nine minutes .”

“Jesus, is that all?” groaned Cal. He huffed miserably as he stepped over a decaying log that positively heaved with creepy crawlies. “Still, the point stands. You sure you know where we’re going? I mean, I know you came from here, or whatever, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

He yelped shrilly when he spotted a fat, glistening caterpillar thing on his leg, and swatted at it until it fell off.

“Fonking bugs,” he mumbled, hastily checking himself over for more of the things before continuing. “One time, after I’d been out of Philly for a while, I came home and decided to walk to Walmart. Can’t remember why.”

He squelched through a puddle.

“Eggnog. That was it. It was Christmas time.” He shook his head. “Not important. The point is, I walked to Walmart, only guess what.”

The Sentience said nothing.

“Walmart wasn’t there. Where it was supposed to be, I mean. It was—Aargh! Fonk off!” he spat, flicking a twelve-legged bug off his arm. It landed in a marshy puddle with a gloop .

“It was gone, is my point,” he continued. “I’d been going to that Walmart my whole life, and then it was gone. Poof. Vanished.”

Cal looked up at the canopy of foliage far above him. Light filtered through narrow gaps in the high treetops, casting columns down around him. He was sure things were moving up there, and had made a point of unbuttoning the strap on his holster to allow easy access to the blaster Mech had given him.

“You know what I realized that day? Things change. Nothing stays the same forever,” he said, trying to make it sound as profound as possible. “I also eventually realized that I’d got on the wrong bus and was actually in Baltimore. But the point still stands. Maybe things have changed, you know? Maybe we should go back to the ship and try to figure out—”

“We have arrived .”

Cal stopped. He looked around, but saw nothing any more or less noteworthy than anything else he’d already seen during their expedition.

“Oh. OK,” he said. He stole another look around them. “Are you sure? It’s just, there doesn’t seem to be anything here. Besides these fonking insects, I mean.”

“I am certain ,” said the Sentience. “I ask one last thing of you, Cal Carver. ”

“Uh, sure. OK,” said Cal. “What’s that?”

“Brace yourself ,” came the reply.

And then the ground below him opened like the gaping maw of some great, terrible beast and Cal fell, complaining loudly, into a moist, oppressive darkness.

* * *

Mech leaned out of the open hatch, calling instructions to Loren up front.

“Down at port side. Level off. That’s it. Now, steady. Steady. Not so fast.”

With the Symmorium Sentience no longer locking the controls, Loren had been able to lift the Untitled out of the swamp, and was now trying to land it on a small peninsula of dry land near the jungle’s edge.

The peninsula was four times larger than the ship. Or, as Loren had described it, only four times larger than the ship. Combined with the close proximity of some large and heavy-looking trees, this allegedly made the landing maneuver a difficult one, hence Mech lending a hand.

She could have asked Kevin to do it, of course, but she still hadn’t forgiven him for not warning her about the imminent planet-strike on the way here. Also—and more importantly—he was always smug for days if she ever asked him for help.

Inside the medical bay, Mizette stood over Tyrra, mopping the girl’s sweating brow with her furry forearm. Tyrra had become restless and agitated when the Sentience had left, hissing through her teeth and clawing at some unseen enemy.

Now, though, her breathing was shallow and her eyes were dull. She was dying, Miz, knew. And there was nothing she could do about it.

“Hurry up, Cal,” she whispered. “Please.”

Out by the hatch, Mech’s instructions came a little more urgently.

“OK, almost there. Hold it level. Down steady. Down steady. Aaand—”

The Untitled ’s landing legs thumped down onto the hard-packed soil, almost making Mech lose his grip.

“There. We’re down. Good job.”

“Yes, very well done, ma’am,” Kevin echoed. “And with only one assistant, too. You must be very proud.”

From up front, Mech heard Loren muttering something, then she appeared in the doorway. “Any sign of Cal?”

Mech peered out into the trees. “Not yet,” he said. “Comm-link ain’t working, neither. All I’m getting is some kind of interference. Something to do with the trees, I think.”

“Can the scanners—?”

“Too many life signs around,” said Mech. “Already tried. Best I can figure out is he’s that way.”

He pointed off into the trees. “But that assumes he’s still with the Sentience, because that’s the only thing I been able to get a trace on.”

Something on his arm went bleep . He frowned down at it just as Loren stepped up behind him. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Huh.”

Mech gave his arm a prod. For a split-second, a red light had flickered on the display. It had come and gone so quickly that Mech wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t imagined it.

“Thought I picked something up,” he said. He shook the arm and listened to it, as if checking the workings of an old wind-up watch. “Guess it was nothing.”

“It probably was nothing, sir,” said Kevin.

“Yeah.”

“Or, alternatively, it may have been that ship.”

A whole series of lights illuminated on Mech’s forearm as a dart-shaped black craft landed nose-down in the dirt a few dozen feet ahead of them with a thunk that shook the trees and sent long, lazy ripples rolling across the watery surface of the swamp.

“Who’s that?” Loren asked, reaching for her blaster.

“Beats me,” said Mech. He raised an arm and folded his hand out of the way of his wrist-mounted cannon. “So, how about we just shoot the shizz out of them and don’t wait around to find out?”

* * *

Cal lay slumped on something that he supposed could, given a certain amount of imagination, be described as ‘the ground.’

It wasn’t solid, exactly. Not like proper ground. It was slimy and wet, but with several large and uncomfortable rocks lurking beneath its slick, spongy surface. Still, it wasn’t moving, and it had broken his fall, so ‘ground,’ it was, for now.

His head ached from where he had cracked it on one of the rocks. He nursed it with one hand and supported himself against the wall with the other hand while he slid and slipped his way into a vaguely standing position.

Wait. Wall.

Cal looked up. “Jesus Christ. Another hole?” he said, spotting a vaguely circular edge some twenty feet above him. “What is it with me and holes lately?”

This particular hole was tall and narrow, with barely seven or eight feet between the walls. It was oval-shaped, rather than circular, and Cal didn’t have to look too closely to know that the walls were far too slippery to climb.

He tried to climb, anyway.

“Fonk,” he spat, after he immediately slid down again.

While lying there, he saw the Symmorium Sentience. It was mostly buried in a mossy pool, only its domed top protruding above the sludge. Cal lodged a number of objections as he fished around up to his elbows in the watery gunk, trying to get enough purchase on the smooth orb to pull it free.

“Man, this is frustrating,” he muttered, squelching both hands down past the Sentience’s sides. “You think you could maybe give me a little help? Since, you know, it’s your fault we’re here.”

The Sentience glowed faintly, but its voice failed to echo in Cal’s head.

“Yeah. That’s what I thought,” he said, sighing heavily as he scooped both arms right down beneath the ball.

Grimacing, he leaned back on his knees, letting his weight do the lifting while his hands concentrated on gripping the sphere as tightly as possible.

“Come… on !” he hissed.

And then, parping like a diarrhetic walrus, the Sentience flew free. It sailed up over Cal’s head, slipped from his fingers, and slammed into the wall behind him.

Cal turned to find it buried almost all the way in the sludge. “Son of a…”

He sobbed quietly for a few moments. He’d earned that right.

That done, he skidded and slipped his way up onto his feet and shuffled over to where the Sentience just barely curved out of the wall.

“OK, let’s try that again,” he said, reaching for the orb’s smooth surface.

The Sentience sunk fully into the wall, and the slime oozed down to cover the indent it left behind. Cursing, Cal clawed at the spot where the god-sphere had been, but came away with only handfuls of mud to show for his efforts.

“Shizz,” he groaned, then he tentatively sniffed his hands to make sure that it wasn’t.

Wiping them on his shirt, he looked around. There wasn’t much to see, so he looked up. There wasn’t a whole lot worth looking at up there, either. Just the top of the hole and, quite a distance beyond that, the treetops.

It was about then that Cal heard the sound of blasters firing. He froze, listening to the high-pitched pew-pews , then kicked himself at the wall and tried to scrabble his way to the top.

His grip slipped almost immediately. He slid back down, then launched himself upward again, feet plowing through the slick mud, fingers grabbing desperately for some kind of handhold, but finding none.

Cal landed at the bottom of the hole in a soggy, filthy heap. The sound of gunfire came again. It was faster this time, like some kind of turret firing. Pewpewpewpewpewpew-p-pew!

“Loren? Mech?” Cal called jamming his earpiece deeper into his ear canal. “What’s happening? What the fonk is going…”

The sight of the wall made him hesitate.

“…on?” he whispered.

A line of glowing green crept across the patch of wall that had swallowed the Symmorium Sentience. It appeared as if being painted on by a shaky hand, wobbling a little as it covered nine or ten inches before ending with a little flourish.

Branches grew from this first line, sprouting until they formed lines of their own. From those, new branches formed. They curved and crisscrossed, hundreds of pulsing green strokes, all growing and developing before his eyes until they formed a perfect circle in the mud.

A beam of light emerged, struck Cal in the face, and almost burned his eyes out of his head. He stumbled back, alternating between blinking furiously and jamming the heels of his hands into his eye sockets.

“Fonk. Jesus. What was that for?” he demanded, as the beam went back to being a glowing circle on the wall.

“Apologies, Cal Carver, ” said the Sentience. “Apologies, and gratitude. ”

The voice was stronger than before. The Sentience was clearly turning on the charm, too, because suddenly Cal didn’t mind that it had almost blinded him.

The gunfire had stopped. Silence had fallen. But it was an uneasy sort of silence that made Cal’s insides knot up in fear.

“It’s fine. Forget it. No harm done.”

“You are a loyal friend, Cal Carver. You have served me well. Even now, my strength returns. ”

“Great. That’s great,” said Cal, giving a double thumbs-up to the circle. He pointed up. “Now, could you maybe help—”

“I have your reward. ”

Cal raised an eyebrow. “Reward? What kind of reward?”

“The thing you need most of all, ” said the Sentience. Its voice had a rumble to it now, that made his teeth vibrate uncomfortably in their sockets.

“Is it a stepladder?” Cal asked, looking up.

“More. Much more. ”

Cal considered this. “Two stepladders?”

“No, Cal Carver. ”

Cal felt thin roots wrap around his ankles and twist up his legs, binding them together.

“Hey! What the fonk?” he demanded.

A plug of mud spat from the wall, releasing a spray of a thick, viscous green liquid.

Another mud-blob shot out on his other side, like a champagne cork popping free. More of the gloop glugged in, covering the floor of the hole and rising up over his ankles.

The roots had wrapped around his arms now. He wrestled against them, trying desperately to thrash his way free.

More of the liquid came pouring in through half a dozen more holes. It was past his knees now, then up over his waist, then rising past his chest.

“I give you what you truly need, most of all, ” the Sentience sounded in his head.

Cal took a deep breath as the liquid rose up over his chin.

“I give you peace. ”

Twenty-Seven

Two minutes before Cal took an involuntary slime-bath, the doors to the arrow-shaped landing pod swung outward and a man in an EDI uniform jumped out, a rapid-repeater rifle raised.

“Corporal Tim Blagbrough, Earth Defense Initiative! Everyone on their knees!” was what he had started to say, but Mech shot him dead just before the second ‘o’ in ‘Corporal,’ and so he never got the chance to finish.

For a little while, nothing else had happened. Loren and Mech had equipped wrist-mounted portable energy shields they’d found at the bottom of the armory box, and had watched the dropship through the semi-transparent blue-tinted forcefield, guns aimed squarely at the door.

It was a bad design choice, Mech thought. If you’re dropping into battle, what you don’t want—what you actively do not want—is a single door that opens onto the battlefield, wide enough to allow just one person through at a time.

And, if you did find yourself in such a position, the last thing you would want to do would be to run through said door dressed in the uniform of the enemy and waving a big gun.

“I mean, that’s just common sense, right?” said Mech, after discussing his thoughts on the matter with Loren.

Loren squinted through the energy shield and nodded. “It is.”

A heavy-set man wearing a hydraulic exoskeleton bounded out through the door, twin blaster pistols taking aim at the Currently Untitled’s landing ramp.

“Freeze! Nobod—” he cried, before being cut down in a hail of blaster fire.

“I mean, this is just sad,” Mech said. He looked to Loren. “Ain’t it?”

Loren nodded in reply.

“YEAAAAAAARGH!”

Someone jumped out of the doorway wearing some sort of shoulder-mounted cannon that completely obscured their face. The short drop from the ship caught them by surprise and they tripped as they landed.

“Ooh, shizz,” a female voice said, and then the cannon rapid-fired several hundred blaster bolts directly into the ground, obliterating both it and the woman who landed on top of it.

After a few seconds, the cannon stopped firing.

“This is just fonking sad ,” Mech reiterated. He shook his head. “How the fonk did these guys win even a single fight, never mind wipe out whole species?”

Loren’s eyes shrunk. “What?”

“I mean, they’re totally fonking clueless,” Mech said. He deactivated his shield. “Know what? I ain’t even gonna use that. There ain’t no point.”

Loren glanced back into the ship. “Kevin. Do a scan of the area. Any more ships around?”

Silence.

“Kevin?”

Kevin’s voice, when it came, was choked with despair. “I’m so very sorry, ma’am,” he whispered. “They used the airlock. I didn’t see them come in.”

And then, before Loren or Mech could turn, a single powerful blast knocked them off their feet, and sent them tumbling limply into the mud.

* * *

Cal floated, still and unmoving, suspended like some prehistoric insect in amber.

He wasn’t dead. Not in the traditional sense, at least. Although, nor was he exactly alive in the traditional sense. He was somewhere between the two, balanced perfectly between everything and nothing.

As he floated, he dreamed.

He dreamed of a child who changed the world. Changed the galaxy .

He dreamed of a boy becoming a man, of a dream becoming a nightmare, of a lie becoming a truth.

It was a truth that would be trumpeted with great aplomb by those who had created it, and spoken of in fearful whispers by those who had not.

But it was a lie. A twisted, insidious lie. Cal saw that now. He saw everything.

The boy. His hope. His betrayal.

His legend.

Cal floated, still and unmoving, like some prehistoric insect trapped in amber.

The dream ended. The vision passed.

Cal floated.

And then, Cal moved.

* * *

“A Symmorium and a Greyx,” scoffed Lieutenant Frank Tallon of the EDI Advanced Protection Division. “As I live and breathe. I thought we’d killed all those things?”

He poked the unmoving Tyrra with a foot. She lay sprawled on the mud where she had been thrown, her eyes gazing vaguely up at the sky above. The battle still raged there, tiny streaks of color zipping to and fro as Zertex and the EDI ships slugged it out.

“Looks like this one ain’t got long left,” he said. “Still, those teeth’ll make a fortune on eBay. Symmorium’s a hot market right now. They love all that rare shizz. Those teeth’ll fly, mark my words.”

A few feet away, the hair on the back of Mizette’s neck stood on end. She was on her knees between Loren and Mech, a dozen blasters covering each of them from a range of directions.

“If you hurt her, I’ll kill you,” Miz hissed.

Tallon chomped the end of a cigar between his teeth, drew deeply on it, then smirked at Miz as he placed a boot on Tyrra’s chest and pressed her deeper into the mud.

Miz snarled. Her claws extended. The butt of a rifle cracked across the back of her skull, and twelve different fingers tightened on twelve different triggers.

“Miz, don’t,” Loren whispered. “Don’t.”

Mizette’s chest heaved. Her muscles strained with the effort of holding herself back. Her eyes darted across the faces of the EDI soldiers and to the guns in their hands. There was no way she could get to all of them. Hell, she might not get any of them before she was cut down.

Ugh . Lame .

Miz sunk back onto her knees and lowered her gaze. Satisfied, Tallon took his boot off the girl’s chest and went back to pacing back and forth in front of the captives.

“Would you like to know where you went wrong?” he asked, his eyes boggling gleefully beneath his wild white eyebrows. He didn’t bother to wait for an answer. “You made the same mistake as all the others. You underestimated us. You think humans and you think, ‘Those losers? Those new kids on the block? They’re nothing to worry about!’”

He took another puff of his cigar, stopped in front of Mech, and rocked on his heels. “It is, isn’t it, Robbie? That’s what you think.”

“Who the fonk is Robbie?” Mech grunted.

Tallon grinned broadly. “You know. The robot.” He brought his hands up, fingers together, and did a brief robot dance. “Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!”

“Uh, sir,” began one of the troops behind him. “That isn’t—”

“I know who the fonk it is,” Tallon spat, rounding on the man. Despite the fact he was larger than the lieutenant and packing a powerful blaster rifle, the soldier shrank back.

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

Tallon eyeballed him for a moment, then turned back to find Mech glowering up at him. “I ain’t no fonking—”

“Exterminate! Exterminate!” laughed Tallon. “R2D2, it is you, it is you!”

Tallon laughed again, then took his cigar from his mouth. He looked for somewhere to stub it out, then leaned over and ground the end of it against Mech’s shoulder, holding eye contact the whole time. “Thank you, Robbie,” he said. “Much obliged.”

With a wink, he straightened, slipping the cigar into the breast pocket of his uniform.

His pacing resumed.

“So, just like everyone else, you assume that because we’re relative newcomers out here in the black, we pose no real threat. And, just like everyone else, you were wrong.”

He stopped in front of Loren this time. “You know how long I’ve been a soldier? Thirty-seven years. Thirty-seven years in service to my country. And, laterally, to my planet.”

His voice became a growl. “Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

Loren, who had been watching Tyrra, raised her eyes to Tallon’s. “Aw, sweetheart. Why so blue?” he asked, eliciting sniggers from some of his men.

He went back to pacing. “Thirty-seven years. And that’s just me. The human race? Well, we’ve been fighting for a long time. A long time. There were some centuries where it was all we would do. Invade, kill, conquer, repeat. Invade, kill, conquer, repeat. We’re good at it. Real good. Hell, maybe it’s the only damn thing we’re good at.”

He pointed with the unlit cigar to Mech, Miz, and Loren in turn.

“Invade. Kill. Conquer. Repeat.”

His smirk was a cold, mirthless curve across his face. “You alien morons didn’t stand a chance.”

Mech hated to admit it, but the guy was right. He had underestimated them. Only an idiot would drop a landing ship directly in front of the enemy then come running out one at a time, but having spent so long in Cal’s presence, Mech had pretty much taken it for granted that humans were idiots, and so hadn’t suspected a thing.

The other ships came in quietly and without drawing attention to themselves. They’d infiltrated the Untitled and caught them off-guard. He’d let himself be surprise-attacked by human beings.

Man, that stung.

The one consolation was that he wasn’t entirely convinced that the person who had led the attack part was actually human at all.

He stood apart from the others, his back to the crew as he gazed into the darkening woods. The sun was sinking toward the distant horizon, lengthening the man’s shadow until it reached into the trees like a dark probing finger.

The crew hadn’t been formally introduced to him, but they didn’t have to be. They’d seen him before, back in the Mustard Mines on Moktar, and his distinctive fashion sense made him easy to pick out in a crowd.

Manacle, Enslaver of Worlds, turned to them, the waning sun reflected in the visor of his helmet. He stalked, sure-footed as a predator through the mud, the bottom of his cape swishing just an inch or so above the uneven carpet of filth.

The soldiers parted to let him through, keeping their weapons trained on their three targets. Loren had made twenty-four troops in front of them, and caught a glimpse of roughly the same again behind before a grasping hand had caught her head and forced her to face front.

Manacle’s boots squelched to a stop a few feet from where Mech, Loren, and Mizette knelt. Tallon shuffled back a pace, either worried he might catch something, or making sure he was beyond the immediate reach of Manacle’s arms.

“Where is it?” Manacle asked. His voice was surprisingly soft, with a hint of an electronic hum between each letter.

“Where’s what?” Mech asked.

Manacle’s head tilted a fraction. A soldier behind Mizette slammed the butt of his gun against the back of her head.

“Ow! Like, what the fonk ?”

“I will try again,” Manacle said. The twin suns reflected in the lenses of his mask were eclipsed when he took a step closer and looked down at the captives before him. “Where is the Symorrium Sentience?”

“It’s gone,” Loren said. “We don’t have it.”

Crack . The gun butt struck Mizette again. She hissed angrily.

“Will you guys just, like, stop talking, already?”

“I am aware that you don’t have it, or I would have taken it from you,” said Manacle. He sounded like he was growing impatient now, his voice coming accompanied by little hisses of static. “That is why I asked you where it is. I have no interest in where it is not.”

“You ain’t gonna find it, man,” Mech grunted.

Miz moved before the gun could strike her, leaning left and avoiding the blow. The soldier stumbled, off-balance, and suddenly her hand was on his throat, claws digging into his windpipe, teeth drawing back into a vicious, terrifying snarl.

Manacle raised a hand, motioning for the troops to hold their fire. With a tilt of his head, he drew Miz’s attention to Tallon. The Lieutenant had drawn his pistol and stood over Tyrra, the gun pointed between her eyes.

“Put him down,” Tallon instructed. “There’s a good doggy.”

Miz’s claws tightened briefly on the man’s windpipe, then she released him and shoved him back.

“Leave her alone. She’s just a kid,” Miz said.

“Oh, I know. They’re the best kind,” said Tallon. Bending, he used the barrel of his blaster to draw back one of Tyrra’s gums, showing off her teeth. He rubbed a finger and thumb together and beamed back at Miz. “The bids are going to fly in.”

“Final chance,” said Manacle. “Tell me where it is, or you will all die. Painfully. Over a period of months.”

His fists clenched inside his leather gauntlets. “Where is the Symmorium Sentience?”

“You know,” called a voice from the trees. Cal raised his hands as several blasters and at least one shoulder-mounted cannon swiveled in his direction. “It is funny you should ask.”

Twenty-Eight

“You,” said Manacle. There was no surprise in his tone, but some of the soldiers who had turned Cal’s way stared at him in wide-eyed disbelief.

“Sir, is that who I think it is?” whispered one of the men. A look from Tallon silenced him.

“Where is the Sentience?” demanded Manacle. “What have you done with it?”

Cal came closer, picking his way across the uneven scrub. His hands were still raised, but he was otherwise completely ignoring all the guns that were pointed in his direction.

“What, no ‘hello’? No Earth guy to Earth guy chit-chat?” he said. “No, ‘Whoa, awesome! You survived that explosion, too ?’”

“Where is the Sentience?”

“That’s far enough,” Tallon said, leveling his own gun at Cal.

Cal stopped and studied the angle of the weapon. “Are you…? Are you deliberately pointing that at my balls?” he asked.

Tallon nodded to confirm.

“Jesus. So that’s the level we’re at, is it? Noted.”

Manacle’s voice was an electronic hiss. “Where is—?”

“Right. Right. The Symmorium Sentience. I’m going to get to that in just a sec,” Cal said. He scooped some slime off his shoulder and flicked it onto the ground. Most of it stuck to his fingers, and it took four or five increasingly violent snaps of his wrist before the stuff fell off.

“Can you believe this?” he asked, gesturing to himself. “You do the thing a favor, and how does it pay you back? Tries to drown you in slime. How’s that for fonking gratitude?”

Cal rubbed his hands on his pants, but they were equally as slime-sodden, so only made things worse. “Why do you want it, anyway?” he asked.

Neither Manacle nor Tallon responded.

“Is it a weapon thing? Are you going to use it as a weapon?” he guessed. “Because that’s what we do, isn’t it? Earth guys like us. We see something cool and we figure out ways to use it for ourselves. Something that powerful? Got to be a weapon. Got to be.”

“Where—”

“Jesus, change the record, Manny. I told you, I’m getting to that in a minute,” said Cal.

Manacle half-turned and gestured in Loren’s direction. Something long, brown, and vine-like snaked from his arm, wrapped around her throat, and yanked her toward him. She landed on her knees at his side, fingers digging desperately between the tendril and her windpipe, eyes wide through panic and an increasing lack of air.

“You may want to speed it up,” Manacle said.

“OK, OK, let’s get to it now! I’ll take you to it!” Cal said. “I’ll show you, just stop, OK? Just let her go!”

Manacle continued to strangle her for a few more seconds, then released her. Loren sank back into a sitting position in the mud, rasping and gasping for breath.

Cal wanted to run to her, but knew that he dare not. He wanted to hold her, to tell her it was going to be OK, but he couldn’t. He’d be dead before he was halfway to her. They all would.

The vine from Manacle’s wrist moved to tighten around Loren’s throat again. “The Symmorium Sentience,” he said. “Where is it?”

“OK, OK, OK,” Cal said. “Fine. You want to know where it is? Fine. Like I said, I’ll show you.”

He pointed down at the ground directly in front of him. “It’s here.”

All eyes went to his feet.

“Where?” demanded Tallon. “In your shoe?”

“No, not… You’re standing on it, shizznod,” Cal told him. “It’s the planet. The planet is the Sentience.”

The EDI soldiers shuffled uneasily, eyes darting to the ground.

“The bit we had—the thing we all know and love as the Symmorium Sentience? That’s only, like, a fragment of it. This place—all this—that’s the rest of it. Or, I don’t know, like the Mothership, or something. The point is, now that it’s home and all powered-up, it’s going to bring the Symmorium back to life, and they’re going to kick your collective asses.”

He glanced into the trees on either side of him, hoping to see movement there in the shadows.

Instead, he frowned. He put a finger in his ear, as if listening to a voice on a comm-link.

“What? No ? What do you mean, no ?”

Everyone present heard the voice’s response inside their heads.

“I cannot bring back the Symmorium. They are gone, beyond even my reach .”

While the other EDI troops all looked around in a sort of terror-stricken surprise, Lieutenant Tallon bowed graciously. “You’re welcome,” he said. “The pleasure was all ours.”

“But, you said you could,” Miz protested. “You promised.” She looked down at the inert Tyrra. “I promised!”

“Bring them back,” Tallon snorted. “There ain’t no bringing them back from what we did to them. Right, boys?”

From the ranks came a mumbled confirmation, but it wasn’t enough for Tallon’s liking.

“I said right, boys ?”

The confirmation came again, a little more enthusiastically this time.

“Assertion: Rejected. I did not say I could bring them back, ” the Sentience insisted. “I said I could restore the Symmorium. Return it to what it once was. ”

The voice hesitated, just for a moment.

“A promise that I now keep .”

Down in the mud, Tyrra gasped. Her eyes, which had been a dirty, muggy charcoal, became black and shiny.

And angry. Very, very angry.

The middle section of Tallon’s left leg, from his ankle to a few inches above his knee, went in one bite. His finger instinctively tightened on his trigger as he fell, and Cal yelped as a blaster bolt skimmed past half an inch below his scrotum and exploded on the ground behind him.

Tallon’s shoulder went next. He was still screaming when Three Hundred Juvenile Symmorium Teeth – (Near Mint - Rare) bit through the top of his head, severing everything from the lips upward.

Spinning, Tyrra flicked the blaster with her foot, catapulting it in Loren’s direction. Snatching it from the air, Loren shot through the tendril that had her held by the throat, then turned and took out the two soldiers standing behind Mizette.

Several things then happened at approximately the same time.

Tyrra launched herself at the closest available human and relieved him of his gun, three fingers, and part of his ribcage.

Mech helicoptered his top half around, spinning his arms out and shattering the hips of the two soldiers unlucky enough to be standing within reach.

Cal opened fire with his blaster, hitting absolutely no one, but sending the already spooked soldiers into a sort of panicky chaos that made several of them break ranks and retreat into the swamp.

And then, there was Miz.

Unleashed, and unrestrained, she had eviscerated three of the troops before she’d even made it to her feet. Once upright, she pirouetted neatly, drew her claws across the face of the guy who’d kept hitting her, and watched as all the individual parts flopped off onto the floor.

A blaster bolt tore past her, missed her by inches, then exploded the man’s exposed skull.

“Sorry! My fault!” called Cal.

He danced frantically as a volley of gunfire came whistling past him, but then Mech was opening fire with his arm cannons, sending EDI guys spiraling into the air as various bits and pieces.

“Stop.”

Manacle’s voice came amplified from somewhere inside his helmet.

He stood in the center of the chaos, one hand holding Loren by the hair, the other pressing a blaster to her temple.

Cal snapped his gun up, taking aim. “Let her go, shizznod!”

“Fonk, don’t you try and shoot him!” Loren protested.

Cal sighed and lowered the gun. She was right. Maybe he’d hit Manacle, maybe he’d hit Loren. Maybe he’d hit the ship. Maybe he’d hit himself. It was always something of a guessing game when it came to his blaster accuracy.

Tyrra crouched to spring, but Miz caught the girl and held her back. Around them, the EDI soldiers—of which there were considerably fewer than there had been—pulled themselves together, gathered up their weapons, and formed a circle.

“Mech, don’t,” said Cal, gesturing to the cyborg. Mech stood with both arms raised, wrist-cannons locked onto Manacle.

“I’m prepared to bet that my reactions are faster than yours,” Manacle said, his voice hissing and popping with barely constrained rage. “Shall we put it to the test?”

“Mech,” Cal said, his voice pleading. “Don’t. OK? It’s fine. I’ve got this.”

“How the fonk have you got this?” Mech asked, glaring around at the circle of soldiers.

“Just trust me, OK?” Cal said.

Mech kept his arms raised. Loren grunted in pain as the blaster was pressed more firmly against her head.

With a whirr , Mech lowered his arms to his side, his face a picture of mechanical contempt.

Cal scratched his head and gave an apologetic half-shrug. “Actually, truth is, I haven’t got this,” he admitted. “I lied.”

Mech moved to raise his arms again, but Manacle’s voice came as a harsh, buzzing crackle. “I wouldn’t.”

Cal raised his hands and shot Mech a pleading look. “Mech, please.”

He waited until Mech had dropped his arms to his sides, then continued. “Like I said, I lied. Because that’s one of the things we’re good at, isn’t it? Earth guys. We sure know how to spin a story.”

He wiped a smear of slime from his arm, regarded it for a moment, then rolled it up between his fingers and flicked it away into the undergrowth. “The Sentience, it told me a story,” Cal said. “Or showed me, maybe. Whatever. The point is, I know what you did. The EDI, I mean. I know what you did.”

“We have done a lot of things,” Manacle said. “In such a short space of time.”

Cal nodded. “Right. Right. You certainly have been busy,” he said.

His eyes met Loren’s. Wide. Terrified. And yet, defiant, too. She wasn’t going to let Manacle see her fear. She wasn’t going to let anyone see it, in fact. She never did.

And yet, she was showing him. She was letting him in.

There was no holding them back, even if he’d wanted to. The words came on their own. It was, he accepted, high fonking time.

“I love you,” he told her.

Loren stopped breathing, but voluntarily this time. She stared back at him, saying nothing. Cal had a horrible sinking feeling that she hadn’t heard him, and an even more horrible sinking feeling that he might not be able to work up the nerve to say it again. His mouth began to backtrack.

“What I mean…”

She smiled at him. Her reply, when it came, emerged croakily through her damaged throat.

“I know.”

Cal blinked.

Wait.

Had she just…

No.

No!

Yes. She had. She’d just fonking Han Solo’d him.

“No,” he said. “You’re supposed to say—”

“This is all very touching,” Manacle barked. He flicked the gun away and pulled the trigger. A blaster bolt erupted just inches from Loren’s head, making her stiffen in fright. “The next shot kills her,” he warned, jamming the muzzle up against her temple again. “Bring me the Sentience. Now.”

“Were you even listening, Manny?” asked Cal. “I can’t bring you the Sentience.” He stamped a foot a few times into the mud. “This is the Sentience. Even if I could give it to you, how would you even fit it on your ship?”

He shook his head. “No. I can’t give you the Sentience, but I can finish telling you what the Sentience told me,” Cal continued. “It said it was giving me peace, and at first I thought it was trying to kill me, but then—well, then it covered me in slime and I still thought it was trying to kill me—but then I realized what it was doing.”

He smiled. It was a wide, beaming, toothy grin, and the first actual real one in days. “It was showing me the truth. It was telling me how you fonks took a wide-eyed innocent kid, and turned him into propaganda.”

Cal took a pace closer. “Cal Carver didn’t wipe out the Greyx, or kill the Symmorium, or fight in the battle of fonk knows where. Cal Carver was just a kid who wanted to see the stars, and you used him. You used him, and then you killed him, and then you kept using him to recruit more people to your cause.”

He looked to the soldiers standing with their guns in their hands. “Those recruitment videos you’ve all seen? Those legends you’ve heard about the great space warrior, Cal Carver? They’re all fake. They took the most famous kid in the world, and they fed him into their propaganda machine. And you shizznods lapped it up.”

He held his arms out in a shrug. Loren, Mech, Miz, and Tyrra all watched him in a stunned, solemn silence.

“So, there you have it. That’s what the Sentience gave me. It gave me the truth. You used him, and you killed him. You killed me.”

A tear trickled down Loren’s cheek, cutting a thin line through the grime. “Oh, Cal. I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Cal’s smile grew. “Sorry? Shizz, no, don’t be sorry? Don’t you see, guys? Don’t you get it? I’m not sad about it—sure, I’m angry, maybe—but I’m not sad . It turns out you were right. I’m not a genocidal maniac. I never was! I didn’t kill you all. I didn’t kill anyone. I died standing up to evil fonks like this guy. For what I believed . For what he believed.”

He rocked back on his heels. “Honestly? I’ve never been happier. It’s like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I’m honestly feeling so much better.”

“I’m sure we’re all very pleased for you,” said Manacle. “Now—”

Cal raised a finger to silence him. “I wasn’t finished. Because, you see, Manny, if I’m feeling much better…”

He pointed to the ramp leading up into the Currently Untitled . A small, unassuming green blob sat there, bobbing gently.

“…then so is he.”

Somewhere in the circle of troops, someone snorted.

“Ooh, scary. A sentient booger.”

Splurt didn’t move. Not exactly. Not in any traditional sense of the word, at least.

Later, were an observer to slow down the footage, they’d be surprised to discover that he did in fact move, after all. To those gathered at the time, however, he instead appeared to co-exist in two places at once. The first being on the ship’s ramp, the second being halfway through the sternum of the soldier who’d made the booger remark.

Splurt emerged from the soldier’s back not as an adorable green blob, but as veteran WWE wrestler, ‘Hacksaw’ Jim Duggan. The force with which he exploded through the man’s torso, wearing only an ill-fitting pair of blue trunks and swinging a two-by-four piece of timber, caused some consternation amongst the troops, who all immediately started screaming and opened fire.

‘Hacksaw’ Jim Duggan didn’t appear to be all that concerned as round after round of blaster fire slammed into him. Each blast punched a neat hole through his barrel-like bare chest, which then promptly closed over again half a second later.

The two-by-four swung, striking a soldier with enough force to lift him off the ground and send him catapulting into the swamp.

Ker-ack! Another swing. Another strike. Another EDI guy was sent sailing off toward the trees.

Cal raised a fist triumphantly, and bellowed Hacksaw’s catchphrase. “Hooooooo!”

Loren’s eyes narrowed. Cal smiled weakly. “No, again, that’s also a catchphrase. That wasn’t aimed at—”

He flinched as Loren twisted out of Manacle’s grip, and watched her pummel his kidneys with a flurry of ineffectual punches.

Manacle’s head, which had been pointing squarely at the winner of the 1988 inaugural Royal Rumble , rotated two-hundred-and-seventy-degrees to look at Loren.

He moved to grab for her, then staggered as the last remaining survivor of the Symmorium race drove a shoulder into his waist, her jaws clamping onto his hip.

Manacle delivered a hammer-strike to Tyrra’s back, flooring her.

“Get your fonking hands off her!” Mizette roared, throwing herself at the masked tyrant. He caught her with one hand, hoisted her over his head using her own momentum, then drove her face-first into the mud.

“OK, that’s it. This fonk is going down!” Mech barked, but before he could raise his weapons, a long stinger burst from Manacle’s arm and jammed against the side of Miz’s head, pinning her skull to the ground.

“Call that thing off,” he warned, gesturing to where ‘Hacksaw’ Jim Duggan was in the process of decapitating a Third Lieutenant.

Behind Duggan, another EDI man slumped to the ground, his skull bearing a rectangular indent that was exactly two inches wide by four inches deep.

Cal shuffled awkwardly. “Uh, Splurt. I know this is possibly a little late, but could you stop killing those guys? Thanks.”

‘Hacksaw’ Jim Duggan thoughtfully rubbed his beard for a moment, then pulled a cartoonish, cross-eyed salute and collapsed, two-by-four and all, into a ball shape.

Manacle gave a little nod of satisfaction. “Now—” he began.

And then, he exploded. One moment, he was standing there, the next he was just a lot of guts, leather, and space plastic covering an area directly behind where he had been standing. His legs remained upright from the knees down, the flesh sizzling gently.

After a moment, they both fell outward in opposite directions and landed in the mud with a thup .

Everyone stared in mute shock. From the Currently Untitled there came the whine of the weapons system winding down.

“Dreadfully sorry, everyone,” said Kevin. “It occurs to me that I probably should have thought of that sooner.”

* * *

Cal stood just inside the kitchen doorway, dancing awkwardly from foot to foot and snapping his fingers to a rhythm only he could hear. Loren sat on the table, her feet resting on the bench, eating Frosted Flakes like popcorn.

Splurt was on the table beside her, his eyes wide and pleading. Loren tossed him a few flakes and he devoured them ravenously. They sat, clearly visible in his gelatinous middle, as he went back to begging mode.

“So,” said Cal.

Loren tossed back some more of the flakes. “So.”

“You OK?”

“I’m OK. You OK?”

“I’m OK,” Cal confirmed. “I’m better than that. I’m A-OK . Which is, like, a step up from… It’s the best kind of OK you can…”

He shook his head. What the fonk was he talking about?

He laughed falsely. “So, ‘I know,’ huh?”

“Thought you’d like that,” Loren said. “It’s from that movie you made us watch. With the mice.”

“Yeah, I… wait, what? What mice?”

“The little mice,” said Loren, gesturing to the floor as if Cal could somehow see them there. “Boop-boop. The little robot mice who lived with the bad guys. They zoomed about the place. Boop-boop. ”

“Jesus, that’s what you took from The Empire Strikes Back ?” Cal asked. “Robot mice?”

Loren shrugged. “Well, that and, ‘I know.’”

“Ahaha. Yes. Yes, you got that from it, alright,” he agreed. He tried to stay on topic, but found that he couldn’t let it go. “Robot mice , though? They were maintenance droids.”

“What did they fix?” Loren asked.

This caught Cal off guard. “I don’t know. Small things, I guess.” He shrugged. “Just anything at ankle-level or below. The point is—”

“I love you, too.”

Cal froze. Something inside his head seized up. Some vital cog that was necessary for his continued functioning stopped spinning. His mouth dropped open. He tried to say something, but was only able to form a single sound.

“Huh?”

Loren stood up and set the bowl on the table. Splurt eyed her until he was sure she wasn’t looking, then tipped the bowl onto the table in front of him and set about hoovering up the mess.

They met somewhere by the replicator, their bodies entwining, their lips locking together. Splurt munched quietly on the Frosted Flakes , his eyes two saucers of wonder as he watched them kiss. He wasn’t sure what they were doing, exactly, but after some consideration and some more cereal, he decided he approved.

“Sorry to interrupt, ma’am,” Kevin said. Loren and Cal pulled apart, both smiling awkwardly as they held each other’s gaze.

“What is it, Kevin?” Cal sighed.

“Master Mech has requested Mistress Loren’s presence on the bridge. He has asked that…” Kevin’s voice trailed off. Despite not actually possessing one, he quietly cleared his throat. “Do you know what, ma’am? I’ll tell him you’re busy. There’s no rush. It can wait.”

Cal stepped closer to Loren, his hand on her lower back, pulling her close. He grinned up at the ceiling. “I love you, Kevin.”

“I know, sir,” said the AI, his voice fading as he discreetly removed himself from the room. “I know.”

* * *

Tyrra of the Symmorium sat at the bottom of the landing ramp, her bare feet resting in the mud. It sang to her through her toes, telling tales of her people. Of what they had been. And what, through her, they could be again.

She didn’t understand it. Not fully. Not yet. But she was young, the Sentience told her. And she had all the time in the world.

She remembered her father. She remembered all of them, of course, but she remembered her father most of all. He had guided her, supported her, loved her unconditionally. And now he was gone. They were all gone.

“I don’t want to be alone,” Tyrra whispered into the forest.

“Assertion: Rejected ,” the Sentience replied in her head. “You are not alone .”

“Hey, kid,” said a voice from the top of the ramp. “You’re, like, totally letting the cold in. Are you coming, or what?”

The soil sang through Tyrra’s toes, telling tales of what she had been, and of what she would be.

She stood up, dusted herself down, then turned and joined Miz at the top of the ramp.

They met Cal as he danced out of the kitchen. Splurt bobbed happily on his shoulder, his eyes wide and bright and brimming with life, his insides positively packed with a certain sugar-coated Halloween breakfast cereal.

Cal smiled at them both. One of his good ones, too. “Ladies!” he cheered. He bowed to them, theatrically. “Shall you be joining us on the flight deck this fine evening?”

Tyrra and Miz exchanged a glance. Their eyes rolled in perfect unison.

“Ugh,” said Miz.

“Whatever ,” added Tyrra.

Cal’s smile fell a little as they both pushed past him and went stomping onto the bridge.

“Well,” he whispered, looking sideways at Splurt. “This is going to be fun.”

And then, with a spring in his step, and a song in his heart—(Jesus is My Spaceship (Let’s Ride Him Through the Stars), Copyright Klaus Hugen and Gottlieder Records, 1988 )— he about-turned and headed for the bridge, and for whatever awaited them out there in the galaxy beyond.

Epilogue

The liquid in the pod burbled softly, gradually building to the sort of light simmer that would be perfect for boiling an egg, were one so inclined.

Outside the pod, though, the solitary onlooker was not thinking about eggs. Instead, Lower Technician, Ray Gorman, was thinking that this wasn’t supposed to be happening. He was thinking that no one had warned him about this.

The display was lit up like a Christmas tree, lights flashing and twinkling at him from all over the plastic panel. He’d found the manual in a little cupboard below the console, hidden behind a box of bulbs, a first aid kit, and a book of Sinstation discount vouchers that had expired three months earlier.

Ray sat with it open now, his eyes tick-tocking between a diagram and the control panel as he attempted to make sense of what the lights were trying to tell him.

A lot of things , seemed to be the answer. The lights were trying to tell him a lot of things, all at the same time. And, from what he could gather, none of the things they were trying to tell him were good.

It wasn’t supposed to be doing this. Any of this. If it had been, there would’ve been someone better equipped than him to keep an eye on it. He was a glorified cleaner, nothing more. His job was to give the pod a daily once-over with a duster and, in the unlikely event that the need ever arose, to hit the button that activated the alarm.

Ray reached for the button now and gave it a prod.

It fell off and rolled under the terminal.

“Fonk!”

He didn’t know exactly how the pod worked, only that it was filled with some kind of genetic soup, and was used by Manacle when undergoing one of his regular gene splices, where elements of alien DNA were merged into his.

There endeth his knowledge of the subject. He didn’t know what the genetic soup did, how the splicing worked, and he definitely didn’t know what that flashing red button with the question mark on it meant.

He was never around when Manacle used the thing. The Boffins came in, and he cleared out to the staff canteen with a crossword for half an hour while they did whatever it was they did.

He wished the Boffins were here now. They’d know what to do.

Inside the coffin-size pod, a shadow moved.

That wasn’t right, was it? There was nothing in there besides the liquid, and that was mostly clear, aside from a few lumpy bits that sometimes gathered around the filters.

Curiosity getting the better of him, and with a hundred blinking lights illuminating him from below, Ray leaned over to get a better look through the dark-tinted glass.

A hand—red, shiny, and barely fully formed—smashed through the pod’s glass front. Ray tried to cry out, but suddenly found himself sorely lacking in the windpipe department.

“Maaa-teeeeee-reeee-al,” bubbled a voice from inside the pod, and then the lifeless body of Lower Technician, Ray Gorman, was pulled through the glass and swallowed by the darkness inside.

THE END

A Note from the Author

I wasn’t supposed to write this book. Not yet, at least.

Don’t get me wrong, there was always going to be an eleventh Space Team book. If I have my way, there’ll be dozens of the bloody things. But I had no plans to write it for several months, and was instead going to be filling the time working on the second Sidekicks book, and the first in a brand new Space Team spin-off series.

And then one of my best friends upped and died on me.

Neil and I were in high school together when we first got to know each other. We shared an eerily similar sense of humour and a love of The Golden Girls , and became friends immediately. That friendship continued into adult life, and we spent pretty much a solid five years in our early twenties playing Goldeneye on the N64 while drinking copious amounts of tea.

We even worked together for a while, with Neil being my direct supervisor. He was almost as terrible a boss as I was an employee, and it was only by some miracle that the bar we worked in at the time didn’t burn to the ground or face some other disaster thanks to us messing around.

In August 2018, Neil was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. We expected to still have a few months with him, but on October 26th , a month before his 41st birthday, he suffered a hemorrhage. He was found by his mother later that morning. He died alone. We’re told it would have been quick.

I had scheduled to start writing the second Sidekicks book the same week that Neil’s funeral was held. Along with some of Neil’s other close friends and family, I helped carry the coffin and lower him to his final resting place. It was a strange day – so hard to say goodbye to an old friend, yet bittersweet at being surrounded by other friends I hadn’t seen in years, who had travelled from all over the country and beyond to pay their respects.

The next day, I sat down to write the next Sidekicks book and… nothing. The words wouldn’t come. No jokes presented themselves. My fingers sat motionless on the keys.

The same happened the next day. And the next. And the day after that. Try as I might, I couldn’t write a thing.

And then, around 4am a few nights later, something happened. I woke up with a scene in my head. I scribbled it down and tried to go back to sleep, but the scene wouldn’t let me. One character, in particular, kept irritating me until I eventually relented and got up.

Cal’s like that, sometimes.

Still half-asleep, I stumbled through to the office and started hammering out the scene. I’d just get the bare bones of it down, I thought, then I could go back to sleep.

Six hours later, the first three chapters of the book you have just read were written.

Those of you who’ve been with the series from the start may know that the Space Team series was born at my mum’s bedside when she was battling cancer. After she died, I found comfort in writing about Cal and the crew, escaping my pain by zooming off across the galaxy on ridiculous adventures.

Writing this book brought me similar comfort. Being back about the Currently Untitled with Space Team felt like reuniting with old friends. I felt less like I was writing the book, and more like I was a fly on the wall, recording the conversations playing out before me.

Just like they had before, Space Team took me from a sad, dark place and dragged me along on another adventure. I hope that you enjoyed it as much as I did. Wherever Neil’s latest adventure has taken him, I hope they’ve got tea and cake in abundance, and Goldeneye on split-screen.

Happy trails, old friend. The world is a much lesser place for not having you in it.

And thank you to you, dear reader, for making it through another Space Team adventure. I’m eternally grateful for your support. (And if you have two minutes to leave a review, I’ll be eternally grateful for that, too!)

Best space wishes,

Barry

Also by Barry J Hutchison

SPACE TEAM SERIES

Space Team

Space Team: The Wrath of Vajazzle

Space Team: The Search for Sp lurt

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: Sting of the Mustard Mines

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