Author: Barry J Hutchison
Date: 2016-12-02 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Adventure; Humour; Fantasy
Description: Die Hard meets the Nativity - in space! A Space Team short story. Having successfully saved the galaxy on his very first day in space, Cal Carver and the crew of the Shatner drop by the North Star space station for Kroyshuk - an annual celebration of peace and goodwill - and some well-earned rest and relaxation. But the universe has other plans, and Cal soon finds himself playing guardian angel to a mysterious pregnant woman, whose unborn son is being hunted by a malevolent baby-eating king. With the king's forces closing in, and the woman's contractions coming at an increasingly alarming rate
Publisher: Zertex Books

SPACE TEAM

THE HOLIDAY SPECIAL

By

Barry J. Hutchison

Copyright © 2016 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 Books.

www.barryjhutchison.com

For Itchy, Malla and Lumpy. You poor, neglected souls.

Also by Barry J. Hutchison

The Bug

Space Team

Space Team: The Wrath of Vajazzle

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the Space Team Holiday Special! This short story is set between the events of the first two novels in the series, Space Team and Space Team: The Wrath of Vajazzle. While the title of the story is inspired by the hypnotically dreadful Star Wars Holiday Special, you can rest assured that there the similarities end. Mostly.

This story was originally written as a free giveaway for members of Team Space Team, a group of readers who have signed up for notifications and news on the Space Team series, and who I regularly shower with free reads.

If you’re reading the preview of this book and haven’t yet bought it, go ahead and grab it for free via my website. If you’ve already paid for it then, hey, at least it was cheap, and you can still grab some other free books at that same link, including an exclusive prequel to my Space Team spin-off, The Bug, and a short horror story, The Bone House.

But for now, settle down, make yourself comfortable, imagine the cast of the story waving awkwardly at the camera while someone announces their name in an overly-enthusiastic manner, and enjoy this Space Team Holiday Special…

CHAPTER ONE

Cal Carver was a man of many talents. Or of some talents, at least.

He could talk his way out of almost any situation. Granted, the situations he talked himself into in the process were often significantly worse than those he’d been in before, but at least it kept life interesting.

He could be charmingly persuasive, particularly to women of a certain age who felt their husbands weren’t paying them nearly enough attention. To be fair, though, he’d lucked into a face that was handsome in a ‘bit of rough’ kind of way, so he didn’t exactly have to work hard to win them over. A smile would usually do it. A wink, if they were being stubborn.

From there, even Cal would admit that there was quite a steep drop-off to the rest of his skillset.

He could do a reasonable number of sit-ups. He knew six guitar chords, four of which he could comfortably play. Following a nine-month period of unemployment in his early twenties, he could reliably describe the plot of any given episode of Cagney & Lacey within six seconds of the opening credits ending.

After those, he started to struggle. On a good day, his sense of balance was marginally above average. He could run quite fast, but only while being chased. He could take a surprising number of punches to the head before falling over. Nothing to really write home about.

One thing he didn’t consider to be one of his skills was the ability to identify a space station, like the one that was currently filling most of the viewscreen of his stolen spaceship, the Shatner.

Another of the skills Cal very much did not possess was precognition - the ability to see into the future. If that had been among his talents, he would almost certainly have turned the ship around there and then, and everything that followed could have been avoided.

The station was an enormous barrel-like construction, made of a dark metal that would have made it difficult to see against the blackness of space, were it not for the hundreds of lights dotting its surface like well-organized stars.

It looked… dirty, somehow, like the metal had rusted in patches. Cal vaguely remembered learning that metal couldn’t rust in space, but either no-one had bothered to tell this space station that, or the brown marks were something other than rust.

For a moment, he had a little flashback to the cell he’d briefly shared with an enormous cannibalistic serial killer back on Earth, and to the lumpy body-fluidy streaks across the walls. He shuddered. Since being taken to outer space a couple of days ago, most of his time had been spent trying to escape death. Even so, he’d take almost being killed by aliens over shizz-stained walls any day.

“Shizz.” He said the word out loud, testing it.

After his alien abduction, he’d been forcibly implanted with a translation chip which allowed him to understand any known alien language (good) but censored any swear words he might attempt to say (bad). He’d been fonking furious about it to begin with, but now trying to find curse words which hadn’t been censored had become one of his favorite pastimes. ‘Jerk’ was the best he’d come up with so far, but he’d used it so many times in the three hours following its discovery that the novelty had well and truly worn off.

“Hey, it ain’t that bad,” grunted a voice from over on Cal’s right. Mech, a seven-feet tall tangle of metal and flesh stood comfortably upright, his magnetic feet locked onto the flight deck floor.

Actually, calling him a tangle of metal and flesh was being generous. He was almost entirely metal, except for a patch of skin on one arm, and his face, which, from the top lip to halfway up the forehead was… not exactly human, but definitely organic. His skin was a dark reddish-brown, the whites of his eyes actually closer to yellow.

His hulking metal frame had been spray-painted with a variety of symbols and emblems which announced him as a space pirate. This, however, wasn’t true. The spray-job had been part of a cover story that had recently been forced upon him by President Sinclair, head of the Zertex Corporation. Mech didn’t like his new design. Nor did he like anything else Sinclair had done to him. And that was one of the main reasons why they had plotted a course for this place.

“North Star station, dead ahead,” announced the pilot, her eyes flicking from the screen to her banks of controls and back again.

Teela Loren had been a fast-rising officer in the Zertex military, marked as ‘one to watch’ by her superiors. Of course, that was before she’d realized she was working for the bad guys. Now, she was a fearless fugitive on the run from a corrupt government that was desperate to take her down. Or so she liked to tell herself, at least.

“Yeah, we can totally see it. It’s, like, right there,” sighed the voice of a teenage girl. Cal glanced across at the creature sitting in the chair closest to his. As well as a teenage girl’s voice, she had a matching attitude and dress sense. There, though, the similarities ended. Unlike most teenage girls, Mizette of the Greyx – Miz to her friends – was a powerfully-built werewolf-like alien who was covered with fur from head to toe.

She had recently adapted her chair to make it more comfortable. Largely, this involved tearing a hole in the base with her claws for her tail to fit through. Cal could see it now, hanging down below the seat. It gave an involuntary flick of excitement when she realized Cal was looking at her.

“Hey,” she said, adopting a seductively husky tone. She flicked her tongue across her lips. It was presumably meant to be a sexually suggestive gesture, but all it suggested to Cal was that she’d just enjoyed a delicious bowl of Pedigree Chum.

“Hey yourself,” said Cal, smiling weakly. He turned his attention back to the screen.

“I’m supposed to announce it,” said Loren. “It’s protocol.”

“It’s pointless,” said Miz.

“It’s so everyone on the flight deck is aware of our current status,” said Loren, sounding annoyed. “What if you hadn’t been looking at the screen? You wouldn’t have known we were approaching the station.”

“I wouldn’t have cared,” Miz said with a sullen shrug. “I’m not flying the ship. I don’t need narration.”

“But it’s protocol,” Loren insisted.

“Zertex protocol,” Mech pointed out. “You don’t work for Zertex no more.”

Loren sighed. “Fine. That’s… fine. I won’t announce anything again. We all happy now? We’ll just fly towards things without me saying a word. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Miz.

“Oh, I bet you would,” Loren said, her voice taking on a slightly manic shrieking tone. “I bet you would.”

Miz turned her seat just a fraction towards Cal. “Is she having, like, a breakdown or something?”

Cal shrugged, just briefly, then flashed an encouraging smile at the back of Loren’s head. It was quite attractive, as far as backs of heads went.

Her hair, impossibly dark, was scraped back into a viciously tight ponytail. At the edges of her seat he could just make out the outsides of both shoulders. The skin looked starkly white, but on closer inspection was actually a very pale blue. Not that he’d actually had a chance to inspect it all that closely, though not for want of trying.

“Well, I for one appreciate you announcing things we can all clearly see on screen,” said Cal. He winced a little. “Which, I appreciate sounds sarcastic, but it isn’t. Honest. This whole being in outer space thing is all pretty new to me…”

“Really?” sighed Mech. “You ain’t mentioned that before.”

Cal pointed to him and grinned. “Now, that was sarcastic. I had no idea you were programmed to understand sarcasm.”

Mech’s face darkened. His metal bottom jaw snapped up and down as he spoke. “Programmed? I ain’t programmed!” He tapped the side of his skull. It made a low clanging noise. “Up here, this is all me, man. I ain’t no robot.”

“Of course you’re not,” said Cal, soothingly. He turned back to the front. “You’re a space robot.”

Mech’s metal fingers whirred into fists, but before he could make a move, a line of text flashed at the lower right of the viewscreen. “We’re being hailed,” said Loren.

Cal shuffled himself into a more upright position in his seat and channeled his inner Captain Kirk. “On screen,” he said, then he jumped in fright as something that was 70% teeth, 22% eyes and very little else filled the screen. “Jesus Christ, what the fonk is that?” he yelped.

“You know he can hear you, right?” said Mech.

Cal cleared his throat and smoothed the front of his shirt down. “Uh, by which I mean… hello!” He waved at the monstrosity on the monitor. “Hi there. I’m Captain Cal Carver of the… of the…”

He licked his lips, which had suddenly gone very dry under the boggle-eyed glare of the tooth-thing. “Uh, Loren, you’re better at all this official stuff than me,” he croaked. “I’m going to let you handle this.”

Loren stiffened with excitement. This was her moment. “This is First Officer Teela Loren of the Shatner, a scavenger-class vessel on route through this system. We request docking authorization so that we might affect some repairs on--”

“Gluk?” said the tooth-thing, in a voice that Cal thought was probably male, but with a light dusting of female inflections he suspected were put on for effect. “Gluk Disselpoof, is that you?”

At the mention of his real name, all eyes went to Mech. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, it’s me.”

“You know this guy?” asked Cal.

The tooth-monster put a clawed hand to his chest and gasped in mock indignation. “You mean he’s never mentioned me?”

“I only known them for two days,” Mech said. “I ain’t exactly given them my life story.”

“Two whole days and you haven’t told them about me?” said the creature, feigning hurt.

“Oh, please be his wife, please be his wife, please be his wife,” Cal whispered, crossing his fingers.

“Wife? Ha! Chance would be a fine thing,” the tooth-thing snorted, waving a dismissive claw. His terrifying mouth contorted into something that very vaguely resembled a smile. “Harlosh Ko.”

Cal frowned. “Uh, yeah. Harlosh Ko to you, too.”

The creature let out a high-pitched giggle. “No, silly, my name is Harlosh Ko. I’m one of the hosts here on North Star station, and will be pleased to welcome you aboard.” He turned to the side and his face was illuminated by a glow from off-screen as he tapped a few controls. From that angle, and with the light shining up from below, he managed to look even more terrifying. “There is, of course, a docking fee to pay. How do you wish to make payment?”

Cal looked around the bridge. “Anyone have any cash on them? No?” He turned back to the screen. “Would you take an IOU?”

“Haha. Unfortunately not,” said Harlosh. He tapped a few buttons again. “But your ship appears to have an open line of credit, funded by… huh.” He blinked his many eyes and looked more closely at his off-screen display. “The Zertex Corporation. Should I charge the fee there?”

Cal smiled. “Yes. Yes you should. Can we use that for other purchases while on board?”

“Yes, of course,” said Harlosh. “I’ll just need your thumbprints when you arrive.”

“Excellent!” said Cal, leaning back in his chair. “Then spread the word – drinks are on us!”

CHAPTER TWO

It took Loren four attempts to line the Shatner up with their assigned docking platform aboard the North Star. Technically, she had been one of the best pilots in the whole of the Zertex fleet, but that ranking was based almost exclusively on her flight simulator scores – a form of training which, she had discovered, didn’t necessarily translate to the real world.

On the fourth try, she’d managed a textbook landing, but when they’d tried to leave they’d discovered she’d parked too close to the landing bay wall for them to get the exit ramp open, so she’d had to reverse out and come back in again.

Finally, and accompanied by a running commentary from Miz which was surprisingly catty for a dog-woman, the ship touched down in the correct position. Unbuckling his seat belt, Cal reached under his chair, then briefly recoiled as something wet and slimy pressed itself against his palm.

“Sorry, buddy, still getting used to that,” he said, holding his hand steady this time for the blob to hop aboard.

The part of Splurt that was green and gelatinous quivered. As the little guy was almost entirely green and gelatinous, the effect was really rather impressive.

The only bit of Splurt that was neither green nor all-that gelatinous were his eyes. They floated inside the goo - two perfectly round and oddly human-looking detached eyeballs. Cal had convinced himself that he could read the emotions in Splurt’s eyes, despite the fact their range of expression stretched from ‘bloodshot’ to ‘marginally less bloodshot’.

He – if, indeed, that was even the correct pronoun – was a shapeshifter that had been discovered in deep space by a Zertex mining operation. President Sinclair had intended to use him as a bargaining chip for a deal with an alien gangster-type, but Cal had intervened, and now Splurt was considered a valuable and much-loved member of the Shatner’s crew by everyone aboard - with the possible exception of Mech, Loren and Miz. Still, Cal thought he was fonking adorable.

“You ain’t taking that thing, are you?” Mech grunted.

“He’s not a thing,” Cal pointed out. “He’s Splurt.”

“You ain’t taking that Splurt, are you?”

Splurt’s eyes tick-tocked between Cal and Mech, watching them both. “Of course I am,” said Cal. “He’s part of the crew. If we go aboard, he comes, too.”

“North Star can be a little… lively,” said Loren. “By which I mean unpleasant and dangerous.”

“Yeah, I got that from the way you pulled that face when you said ‘lively,’” Cal replied.

“Something like that – rare species, or whatever – it’s going to attract unwanted attention,” said Mech.

“It’ll be fine. He’s a fonking shapeshifter. Look.”

He set Splurt down on the floor. “So, let’s say there’s trouble. Some bad guy has spotted Splurt and fallen in love with him – because, let’s be honest, only a monster wouldn’t.” He shot Mech an accusing glare, then continued. “He decides he’s going to Splurtnap him, then – boom – what does Splurt do? He shapeshifts!”

With a dramatic flourish, Cal pointed to Splurt. Splurt stared back at him, impassively.

“He shapeshifts!” said Cal, louder this time.

Nothing happened.

If Splurt had eyelids, he would have blinked.

But he didn’t.

Cal cleared his throat, leaned down, and spoke out of the side of his mouth. “That’s your cue, buddy. Help me out here.”

He straightened as Splurt’s surface began to ripple. The green goo expanded upwards, stretching and twisting as it adopted a new form. Cal turned and grinned triumphantly at the others. “He shapeshifts, blending into the background as he transforms to become…”

He turned back to the now drastically-altered Splurt and stopped. “Dorothy out of the Golden Girls!” he said, the words surprising even him as they slipped from his mouth.

And it was. There, standing in the middle of the flight deck, was a tall, gray-haired and ever-so-slightly masculine older woman.

“Who the fonk is Dorothy?” demanded Mech.

“And, like, what are the Golden Girls?” asked Miz.

Having lived their entire lives on other worlds, none of the rest of the crew were even passingly familiar with 1980s TV sitcom, the Golden Girls, or its spin-off sequel, the Golden Palace. This extended to Splurt, too, who Cal had to assume had never seen even one of the original show’s one-hundred-and-eighty episodes.

Despite his inability to speak, however, Splurt possessed some sort of mind-reading ability, which allowed him to draw images and memories from the minds of those around him, and transform his physical form to match.

But quite why, out of all the billions of memories in Cal’s head, Splurt had selected Dorothy out of the Golden Girls would, Cal supposed, forever remain a mystery.

“She’s a Miami spinster,” said Cal. He saw no benefit in going into it any further. “But my point stands. Splurt’s perfectly safe.” He patted Dorothy on one sturdy shoulder. “So, you coming, buddy?”

Splurt nodded enthusiastically. Cal kept his smile fixed in place. “You changing back, or…?”

Splurt shook his Dorothy-like head. “Well, alright then!” said Cal, sounding just a little too positive about the situation to be convincing. He looked around at the rest of the team. “I guess it’s us four and Dorothy.” He smiled across at the scowling cyborg and gestured towards the corridor leading to the ship’s exit. “Mech, lead the way!”

With a final glance back at Dorothy from the Golden Girls, Mech shook his head, then ducked through the doorway that led through to the rest of the ship. Cal gestured for Miz and Loren to go next, then followed behind as they made their way down the ramp and into the docking bay.

There were three other ships in this part of the bay, with enormous hangar-like doors on two of the walls suggesting further areas in both directions. The ship closest to the Shatner was an angry-looking beast of a thing that made Cal think of a grumpy shark.

“Hey, isn’t that a Symmorium… what’s it called? Thrasher?” he said.

“Thresher,” Loren corrected. “And yes. The North Star is in Symmorium space. There’ll be more where that one came from.”

“Well that’s good, right?” said Cal. “They like us, don’t they?”

“For now,” said Mech. “But I suggest you don’t talk to them too much, in case you make them change their mind.”

Cal thought about protesting, but shrugged. “Good point, well made.”

The other ships were types he didn’t recognize. One was small and sleek, and looked barely large enough for one pilot, while the other was its exact opposite – a bulky, clumsy-looking construction that looked like it could have been knocked together in someone’s back yard over a long weekend.

The hangar itself was a grim affair, like an underground car park in the wrong part of town. The walls were a mish-mash of welded metal plating, each plate a slightly different shade of gray to its neighbors. They were marked with colorful graffiti, and somewhat less-colorful blaster-first scorch marks. The chip implanted in Cal’s eyeball tried translating the stylized graffiti text, but the sheer amount of it was proving overwhelming, and the words swam and slithered disturbingly across the walls.

“So… where now?” asked Cal. The hissing of a door sliding open in the farthest wall answered the question for him. A squat figure with a lot of teeth and only marginally fewer eyes raised a stubby arm and waved enthusiastically.

“Coo-ee!” called Harlosh Ko. “Over here!”

CHAPTER THREE

Cal, Miz, Loren, Mech and Dorothy out of the Golden Girls hurried along an erratically-lit corridor, trying to keep pace with Harlosh. For someone with such short legs and a torso that was basically a chubby triangle, he had the quickest ‘non-emergency’ walking pace Cal had ever seen.

“So, Gluk and I go way back, don’t we, Gluk?” Harlosh trilled, his voice sounding tinny inside the narrow passageway. They had been hurrying along it now for a good couple of minutes, but appeared to have made no progress whatsoever. Cal was sure they’d passed the same featureless expanse of metal wall half a dozen times already, and he was starting to feel like they were stuck in a chase scene in a particularly low-budget episode of Scooby Doo.

“Sure. Yeah. Way back,” said Mech, begrudgingly.

“Former work colleagues?” Cal guessed. “Old roommates? Wait, no! Childhood sweethearts!”

“Haha. Oh, I like this one,” laughed Harlosh. He led them around a corner into what was, to all extents and purposes, the same corridor. “No, we served together. Didn’t we, Gluk?”

“Yeah. Yeah, we did,” said Mech, grudging those words even more than he had the last few.

“What, like, in the army?” asked Cal.

“We don’t like to talk about it,” Mech told him.

“Well, he doesn’t,” said Harlosh, stopping outside a door and spinning into a crisp about-turn. “I, on the other hand, will happily spill all once I get off duty.” He looked Cal up and down, then winked. At least, Cal thought he winked. With so many eyes to keep track of, though, there was a good chance it was involuntary. “For a price.”

“Tempting, but we won’t be staying long,” said Cal.

“We’ll be here until tomorrow,” said Mech. “I’m getting my paintwork fixed.”

Harlosh tapped a finger against a few different teeth in quick succession, making a sound like a broken xylophone. “Hmm. We don’t have many rooms. It’s Kroyshuk. Always busy on Kroyshuk.”

“Fonking Kroyshuk,” said Cal, sighing. He looked expectantly at the others, waiting for them to say something. No-one did. “Anyone going to tell me what Kroyshuk is?”

“It’s a holiday,” Loren explained. “A celebration. A lot of planets in this sector consider it a special day, where they get together, exchange gifts, celebrate the love of family and friends--”

“Throw up in their own mouths…” Miz sneered.

“So, it’s like Christmas?” said Cal. His eyes shifted to Mech. A smile crept across his face. “Which, I suppose…”

“Don’t say it, man,” said Mech.

“…makes it…”

“I’m warning you. Don’t go there.”

“…space Christmas!”

Mech’s face darkened. He muttered something below his breath, but resisted the urge to pick Cal up and smash him face-first into the ceiling.

Cal looked left and right along the corridor. Aside from Harlosh, the crew and Dorothy out of the Golden Girls, there was no-one to be seen. “It doesn’t look very busy,” he said.

Without a word, Harlosh pushed open the door beside them. A noise rushed in through the gap, flooding the corridor in both directions. At first, Cal thought it was a single overpowering roar, but after the initial assault he began to pick out individual sounds in the din. Music. Laughter. Raised voices. Chinking glasses, breaking bottles and the occasional high-pitched scream.

Beyond the door was… a room, Cal supposed, although that didn’t really do it justice. It was a vast hall, a couple of football fields from end to end, and stretching a good seven or eight floors high. Moving ramps ferried thousands of... not people, exactly, but individuals between each floor, where they milled around on vast mezzanines, or leaned over the balcony railings, watching the other groups of individuals below.

The reason Cal didn’t describe them as ‘people’ was that very few of them bore even a fleeting resemblance to what he had, until very recently, considered the textbook definition of a ‘person’. Creatures of all shapes, sizes, textures, colors and consistencies mingled, drank, argued, danced, or found other ways to occupy themselves in every available space.

It looked like the Cantina scene in the original Star Wars might have looked, had George Lucas had access to a bottomless budget, several thousand jobbing actors, and an unlimited supply of methamphetamine.

Cal whistled softly between his teeth as he stepped out of the corridor and into the multi-story area. His eardrums protested by vibrating painfully, and only stopped when he stepped back into the corridor and took cover behind the door frame.

“OK, yeah, that’s pretty busy,” he admitted, as the door closed again.

Harlosh looked up from an iPad-like device he had produced from somewhere. While it wasn’t easy to read his face with all those teeth and eyes cluttering it up, Cal thought he looked pleased. Or hungry.

Possibly horny, although Cal hoped it wasn’t that one.

“It’s your lucky day,” Harlosh said. “I’ve been able to secure four rooms for the night.”

“I’ll share with Cal,” Miz suggested.

“Best if Splurt bunks up with me,” said Cal, jabbing a thumb in Dorothy’s direction. Dorothy waved both hands excitedly, then stopped as abruptly as she’d started. He shot Miz a smile he hoped conveyed disappointment, rather than the overwhelming sense of relief he actually felt. “No saying what he’ll get up to if left to his own devices.”

Miz crossed her arms and shrugged. “Whatever.”

“Very good, I’ll just go ahead and…” Harlosh tapped his screen a couple of times. “There. All done. You all have rooms for the night. Good ones, too, on our more… amicable floors.” He shrugged, just a fraction. “Mostly.”

“Mostly?” said Loren. “What do you mean?”

“Well, as I say, we’re very busy,” Harlosh explained. “You know, what with Kroyshuk, and everything. Ideally, I’d have got you all close together, but unfortunately it just wasn’t possible. Three rooms are located on our more desirable premium decks. The fourth, uh… isn’t.”

“Great,” said Loren. She looked around at the others. “So how do we decide who gets that room?”

Cal raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “It’s fine, it’s fine. Let’s not argue about it,” he said. “Mech can take it.”

“Say what?” Mech snapped. “How come I gotta take it?”

“Because I’m the captain, and the others are girls,” Cal said. “Women,” he corrected, catching Loren’s expression. “The others are women.”

“So?” Mech demanded. “They can handle themselves.”

“You’re not even the real captain,” Loren pointed out. “We’re just pretending you’re in charge until we figure out what we’re going to do.”

Cal gasped. “You take that back!” he told her. “Of course I’m the captain. I’ve got a badge!”

“A badge you made from a fonking bottle top,” Mech pointed out.

“And then lost,” added Loren.

“That don’t count,” concluded Mech.

“Fine. You know what? Fine,” said Cal. “If you don’t want to do the decent thing and sleep in what I’m sure is a perfectly pleasant room…”

“It isn’t,” said Harlosh.

“If you don’t want to do that,” Cal continued, ignoring the host, “then I guess there’s only one way to decide who’s sleeping where.” He turned to Harlosh. “There’s a bar in there, right?”

“Several,” said Harlosh. “Why, you planning on buying me a drink?”

“Hey, you never know your luck,” said Cal. “But actually, I was wondering – does the bar have such a thing as four drinking straws, and maybe a pair of scissors?”

#

“Well, buddy, looks like we drew the short straw,” said Cal, as he and Dorothy from the Golden Girls surveyed the graffiti-marked metal door set into the wall of the single most intimidating corridor Cal had ever set foot in. Everything about the corridor, from the flickering overhead lights to the blood smears that dribbled down the walls and pooled on the scuffed vinyl floor. “I mean, you know, we literally did draw the short straw, obviously. Whose dumb idea was it to do that?”

Dorothy shot Cal a slightly accusing look, but then mock-punched him on the chin.

“You know what? You’re right,” said Cal. “I don’t know what I’m complaining about. It could be worse.”

He pressed his thumb against the door’s locking pad. The door itself slid open with a grinding, juddering squeak. A smell – no, not a smell, a full-blown stench - billowed out of the cramped, darkened room beyond.

“Oh Jesus,” Cal groaned. “It’s worse.”

Turning away long enough to gulp down a deep breath, Cal leaned close enough to the door that he could see almost all of the room, without actually putting any of himself inside it. “I reckon we go back and sleep on the Shatner,” he said. “This place does not look sanitary.”

A door opened behind them, making Cal jump in fright. He spun, fists raised, and came dangerously close to punching a pregnant woman in the face. Of course, ‘woman,’ was stretching it, as was more and more often proving to be the case these last few days.

She was not a woman in the traditional sense of the word – most women Cal had known until recently didn’t have such wide eyes, for example, or bean-shaped skulls that curved quite so far back. None of them, as far as he could recall, had skin that was such a vibrant shade of pink, or a neck so agonizingly thin and fragile-looking.

So, not a ‘woman,’ exactly, but something about the way her features and figure were arranged told him she was female, at least.

He wasn’t sure how he knew she was pregnant, but he somehow did. Yes, she had a swollen belly that was one of the traditional hallmarks of pregnancy back on Earth, but she also had six fingers on each hand and little fleshy frills around both wrists, so he wasn’t sure the tummy bump counted for much.

The way she clutched her hands protectively across the bump, though, that was a dead giveaway.

“Sorry,” said Cal, dropping his fist to his side. “You took me by surprise. Hope I didn’t scare you.”

The… ah, what the Hell, he was going to stick with ‘woman’ shot glances along the corridor in both directions before her eyes darted up and down over the strangers standing in front of her.

“Cal Carver,” Cal said, smiling warmly. “This is my friend, Dorothy out of the Golden Girls. Presumably she has a second name, but I don’t know what it is.” He gestured to the open door behind them. “We’re in the room right across the hall,” he said. “Although, to be honest, it’s not really to the standard we were hoping…”

Still looking them both up and down, the woman retreated into her room and closed the door. A moment later, a light above the thumbprint pad switched from green to red.

“Well, she seemed friendly,” said Cal. He turned back to the open door of his own room, considered venturing inside, then tapped his thumb against the sensor pad. The door shuddered closed. “Come on, buddy,” Cal said. “What’s say you and I go find the bar?”

CHAPTER FOUR

It turned out that Harlosh was right, and there were a number of bars on North Star. In fact, whole sections of the station were nothing but bars. They ranged from cosy little nooks with a clientele that seemed to value the silence as much as the alcohol, to cacophonic nightclubs where heaving, sweating bodies thrashed, squirmed and occasionally floated around in time to a variety of thumping dance beats.

After some exploration, Cal settled on a place that was somewhere between the two extremes. Not so noisy that his eyeballs vibrated in is skull, but not so lacking in atmosphere that he immediately contemplated suicide.

The sign above the door was written in an ornate alien language, with lots of swirls, whorls and twiddly-bits. Cal stared at it for a few seconds until the text resolved itself into English, but the word – Mumfle – meant fonk all, as far as he was aware, so he wished he hadn’t bothered.

The bar was lively, but not in that way that required raised eyebrows or heavy emphasis to accompany the word. Sure, some of the individuals drinking in the place looked like they’d stepped out of a fever victim’s nightmare, but they were keeping themselves to themselves as they enjoyed a quiet drink, tucked into some disturbingly wriggly bar snacks, or huddled around what Cal could only assume was a quiz machine. From the way they groaned after every tap of the screen, it didn’t look like they were doing very well.

There was an air to the place that bordered on being festive. Strings of twinkling lights were slung above the long metal bar. Bursts of good-natured laughter filled the air. In the far corner, Cal spotted something that he at first thought was a Christmas tree, but then it had moved and he’d realized it was a heavily built woman wearing a dress he could only think to describe as ‘ill-advised.’

Ordering drinks had been easier than he had expected. He had no idea what any of the vibrant liquids on display actually were, but after pointing at a bottle of something the color of unripe bananas and pressing his thumb against a pad, he’d returned to the table armed with two tall glasses.

Splurt raised his graying head and gave Cal a goofishly gummy smile as he returned to the table. Once the drinks had been set down, the shapeshifter – still firmly shifted into the shape of Dorothy out of the Golden Girls – stood up and wrapped his arms around Cal, pulling him against his chest.

“Hey, I missed you, too, buddy,” Cal said, as Splurt kissed him lightly on top of the head. “Thanks for that,” he added, once Splurt had released him again.

They both took their seats, and Cal raised his drink in toast. “To you, pal,” Cal said. “Thank you for being a friend.” He waited a moment for a reaction, then shook his head. “Yeah, that totally went over your head, didn’t it? Golden Girls theme. Doesn’t matter. Cheers!”

He sipped his drink. It tasted like soap. He shrugged and took another sip. He’d had worse. Splurt stared blankly down at his own drink.

“It’s good,” said Cal, nodding in encouragement. “I mean, no, it’s not good, it’s pretty fonking far from good, but it’s not bad.”

He took a bigger gulp and winced. “Well, not terrible,” he said, his voice croaking.

There was a sudden twanging sound like an elastic band stretching and snapping into place. Cal watched with a growing sense of horror as Dorothy out of the Golden Girls unfurled an insect-like proboscis from within her mouth, and thrust it deep into the glass of green liquid. With a slurp, the glass emptied, then the appendage rolled up like a party-blower and vanished behind Dorothy’s wrinkled lips once more.

“Well, there’s something I’ll never be able to unsee,” Cal muttered, forcing down another swig of his drink.

Settling back in his chair, he looked across the bar and was struck by how much it reminded him of Earth bars. Even the music – a generic up-tempo song about someone whose heart had been broken ‘in that Grunshun way’ – could have come straight out of MTV. Apart from the bit about the Grunshun way, obviously, which even after four verses and an annoyingly catchy chorus, Cal was still none the wiser about.

It was hard to believe that bars probably didn’t exist on Earth anymore. Not since Zertex had flooded the planet with mind-controlling parasites in an attempt to cover their tracks after they abducted him.

He wondered, not for the first time, if anyone was still alive. And, if so, what sort of world were they living in? He’d been quite partial to the occasional zombie movie, but if the whole world was currently plunged into the middle of one, he was relieved that all he had to worry about was a malevolent galactic government and the occasional gangster made of rock who got a hard-on at the thought of Cal eating himself.

With that, Cal downed the rest of his drunk, convulsed from head to toe, then stood up. “Another round!” he announced, then he flicked finger-guns at Dorothy out of the Golden Girls several times, for reasons he wasn’t quite clear on, and walked awkwardly towards the long, stainless-steel bar.

The music changed. Something that sounded suspiciously like a novelty Christmas hit began to blast from the speakers. On either side, Cal was dimly aware of a few people getting to their feet and dancing, but it felt muffled and indistinct, like he were viewing it through a net curtain.

His legs felt funny. Funny strange, as opposed to funny ha-ha. He tried to talk some sense into them as he stumbled through the crowds, but they didn’t really listen. In fact, he thought he heard them laughing at him for a moment, and made a mental note to give them a serious talking-to once he got them home.

Cal frowned. Something about those last few thoughts didn’t feel quite right, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Besides, he had more pressing things to worry about, like the fact the whole space station had started rotating. As if that weren’t bad enough, it was rotating both clockwise and anti-clockwise at the same time.

“Well, that’s fonking selfish,” he slurred, then he looked around him, wondering who had said that. “Yeah, you’d better run!” he said, failing to spot whoever had spoken in the merrily-jigging crowds around him.

The bar appeared as if by magic, catching him by surprise. He let out a little, “Wah!” of shock, then glanced left and right to see if anyone had noticed.

By the third glance to the left, he’d forgotten what he was looking for and frowned deeply. The room was still gyrating, so he leaned against the bar to try to hold it down. The metal of the bar top felt pleasingly cool against Cal’s hands. He pressed them flat, splaying his fingers wide, and gave a contended sigh.

He wondered it if would feel as pleasant against his face. He tried. It did. “This is nice,” he said, then he whipped his head up, belted out the one line of In that Grunshun Way he could remember, then snapped to attention and tried to pretend the last few seconds hadn’t happened.

“Barkeep!” he called, ringing what he imagined to be a tiny bell, but was, in fact, just his fingers. “More drinks over here, if you please!”

He gazed down at the bar in front of him, appearing surprised by the lack of drinks. He reached for one anyway, just in case it was there but somehow invisible. It wasn’t.

Frowning, he looked along the bar in both directions. The bartender, a portly chap with a red waistcoat and either one eye or three eyes, depending on how hard Cal tried to focus, stood at the far end of the counter. He was listening to either one man or three men who were talking to him in what, even to Cal’s reduced powers of deductive reasoning, looked to be quite an aggressive way.

Cal raised a hand, trying to get his attention, waited in that pose for approximately three fifths of a second, then tutted loudly and staggered towards the group, mumbling a stream of half-formed gibberish, and leaning on the bar for support.

As he got closer, Cal decided there were definitely three men, but he still couldn’t make up his mind on the barman’s eyes. He could make out some of what the angry men were saying. It was something about a girl. Or a baby. A baby girl, maybe? They were keen to find her, anyway.

“I used to be a baby,” Cal announced, the words sort of dribbling out of his mouth and down his chin. The three men and the bartender turned to look at him. Something about the men reached all the way through Cal’s inebriated haze and gave his brain a slap. His brain, unfortunately, chose to ignore it.

“You look mean, like… big meanies,” he said. He giggled in a way he’d never giggled before, then leaned across to the bartender and whispered in a voice that was several decibels louder than his normal speaking volume. “Can I get two more drinks please? Thank you very much. I like your waistcoat, by the way. Well done.” He turned his attention back to the three men. Two of them were considerably larger than he was, while the other was a good foot or so smaller.

“Or is he sitting down?” Cal asked out loud. He squinted and examined the smaller man. “Nope,” he concluded. “Just a shorty.”

“What did ‘e say?” the smallest man growled. “What’d you say, you fonking nonce? You got a deathwish or somefink?” The way he pronounced ‘deathwish’ made it sound like ‘deafwish.’ This amused Cal no end, and he erupted in an explosive cackle that stopped just as quickly as it started.

“Shhh!” said Cal, putting a finger to his lips. “Let’s just be friends. It’s nicer.” He put an arm around the small-but-surly looking gentleman’s shoulders and pulled him in close. “See?” he said, then he leaned down so his mouth was close to one of the man’s misshapen ears and began to sing the first few lines of the Golden Girls theme in a husky, breathless whisper.

“Dorothy!” Cal gasped, straightening up and turning around on the spot. “Has anyone seen Dorothy?” He spotted the now furious-looking little man and reacted in surprise. “Oh, look at you. You’re titchy! I bet I could fit you in my pocket.” He chewed his lip. “Should we try? Is that allowed?”

Cal was vaguely aware that the other two men were standing behind the smaller one now. They really were an ugly bunch, all scars and rotten teeth and lank, greasy hair.

They reminded him of something, but he couldn’t quite remember what. The one with the eyepatch especially, he thought. “You have a very black beard,” Cal said, reaching out and waggling his fingertips in the eyepatch-guy’s facial bush. “Does that tickle?”

“All right, that fonkin’ does it!” the smallest of the men growled.

“Hey, gentlemen, gentlemen, let’s go easy now. It’s Kroyshuk, after all,” said the bartender in a voice as rich as hot chocolate. There were three clunks as he set shot-sized glasses of red liquid down on the bar. “Clearly this fella can’t hold his liquor, but he’s harmless enough. Nothing a gang of fearsome space pirates like you need worry about.”

On the words space pirates, the barman shot Cal a warning look. It was designed to make him stop talking and walk away, but instead had completely the opposite effect.

“Wait, you guys are space pirates?” Cal yelped. “Me too! I’m a space pirate! Well, we’re pretending to be, but don’t tell anyone else that.” He tried to tap his finger against the side of his nose in a secretive way, but missed and poked himself in the eye instead. “Ow. What was that for?” he muttered, glaring accusingly at his own hand.

The smallest pirate let out an animal-like snarl, then flicked one of his arms back with a sudden jerk. Through the alcohol-murk, Cal spotted something sharp, metallic and pointy, and came to the conclusion that, all things considered, this probably wasn’t a positive turn of events.

“Hey, be careful,” Cal slurred, closing one eye so he could better focus on the tiny pirate. “You’re too little to be playing with stuff like that.”

“Oh, I’m gonna enjoy this,” the pirate hissed. He lunged forwards, thrusting the blade upwards towards Cal’s woefully underprepared intestinal region.

A large shape in an unflattering cardigan bounded past Cal before the blade could connect. There was a thud as Dorothy out of the Golden Girls drove her knee into the little pirate’s lower jaw, then a series of rapid pops and a scream as his blackened teeth exploded in their sockets.

A blur of activity followed. Neither of Cal’s eyes were functioning particularly well by this point, so he was quite sketchy on the details. He was vaguely aware of Dorothy out of the Golden Girls delivering a spinning roundhouse kick, but couldn’t for the life of him work out who was on the receiving end. He was reasonably confident it wasn’t him, but beyond that the recipient was anyone’s guess.

A bone snapped. There was something like a howl. Cal found his attention drawn to the three glasses lined up on the bar in front of him. “Finally!” he said, oblivious to the rrrrip of tearing beard and the wailing of-dehaired pirate that followed. “Our drinks are here. Bottoms up!” he said, then he tipped the fiery red contents of all three glasses down his throat, one after the other.

Something happened. He couldn’t say what, exactly, but definitely something.

He touched his nose, suddenly fearing it wasn’t there. It was, he thought, but not with any degree of certainty. He tried to touch it again to double-check, but missed his face completely.

He pulled his mouth into a circle of surprise, then laughed a sort of staccato laugh that made everyone at the quiz machine and the closest few tables turn to look at him.

“Shhh,” he said, to no-one in particular. “Not so loud!”

Yes, something had happened.

Or was happening, perhaps?

Or, Cal realized just a little too late, was about to happen.

The floor became the ceiling. The walls became the door. Time slowed down and started to run very quickly all in the same moment. Cal looked down at his shoes, and his shoes, for their part, looked back.

“Alright?” he asked them, then he toppled forwards like a falling oak and smashed, face first, through a chair.

CHAPTER FIVE

Cal opened his eyes. His brain screamed. He closed them again.

He tried to think, but he was still in that not-quite-awake phase where his IQ was so low that thinking wasn’t yet a possibility.

He opened his eyes. His brain screamed. He closed them again, and had a serious case of Déjà vu.

His lips were as dry as parchment. His hair hurt. There was a weight on his chest that he assumed was probably cancer. That was a bummer.

He tried to think again, but his thoughts were scattered and disconnected, like train carriages after a derailment. Accessing memories from more than a few seconds ago was still not possible, so he focused on the more recent past, instead.

The ceiling. From the brief glance he’d got of it, it had been white. Had being the operative word. Now it was a murky swirl of creams and browns, with a bulge of black mold in the corner.

The fact he’d been facing the ceiling told him something else, too. It took him a moment to figure out what it was. He was lying down.

From somewhere not too far away, there came a crash and a scream. He held his breath. It was all he could really contribute to the situation at the present time.

“Splurt?” he said, his voice coming out like crushed glass. “You there?”

There was no reply, but then as Splurt couldn’t speak to the best of anyone’s knowledge, this didn’t reveal much. Cal had no choice but to open his eyes again. His brain protested, but his brain would just have to learn to live with it.

Cal lifted his head. The brain’s protest was joined by every other part of his body, all demanding to know what the fonk he thought he was playing at. He managed to keep his head raised long enough to figure out that neither Splurt nor Dorothy out of the Golden Girls were in the room, then collapsed back onto the pillow again.

There was another crash. Raised male voices. A woman’s sob.

“Hey!” he managed, but it was little more than a whisper. His arms slipped down to his sides, and he realized the weight on his chest hadn’t been cancer, but his hands. That was something, at least.

The part of his brain that processed smells chose that moment to wake up. “Oh, Christ,” he grimaced draping an arm across his face. The room reeked. It was sour and mulchy at the same time, with a tangy note that could have been just a suggestion of horse urine.

It was the same smell he’d been hit with when he and Splurt had gone to check out their room. Ignoring his body’s complaints, he lifted his head again and looked around. Yeah. This was the same place.

His thoughts shuffled into something more closely approximating chronological order. He remembered the bar. He remembered drinking. He remembered something about wanting to put an angry little man in his pocket.

After that…? Not much. Flashes at most. A chair. Some shouting. A blood-soaked Dorothy out of the Golden Girls. Some more shouting. Then… Mech?

He blinked.

Yes, Mech had been there. Loren and Miz, too, he thought, although he couldn’t see them, just sort of vaguely sense their presence.

‘No, please, no, don’t!”

The cry came from somewhere just beyond the door. Cal fixed his gaze on it until it shimmied into some sort of focus. It was then he saw the note pinned to it. We’re up in Mumfle, it read, then was signed in quite an official-looking squiggle at the bottom by Loren.

“Where the fonk is Mumfle?” Cal wondered, then the sharp crack of flesh slapping against flesh and a brief, breathless sob of shock made him shift his gaze towards the door handle.

Cal swung his legs out of bed and stumbled towards the door. The carpet alternated between moist and sticky and hard and flaky in the space of a few steps, and he realized he had no shoes or socks on.

Still, no time to worry about that now. Besides, he’d thrown all his momentum into reaching the door, and now had no means of stopping. He stumbled into a little table with a solid-looking metal lamp sitting on top, apologized profusely, then pulled open the door.

“Hey, what’s all the noise?” he demanded, then his voice trailed off.

Eight large and surly-looking space pirates filled the corridor directly outside his room. They surrounded the same pregnant alien woman he and Splurt had met earlier. Her vibrant pink skin had a blush of deep red across one cheek, and a graze across the other. Two pirates held her arms, one on each side, but her hands still instinctively reached for her swollen belly, trying to shield it from harm.

The woman’s eyes met Cal’s. They were naturally wide, but he suspected they were currently wider than they had ever been. The emotion in them struck him like a hammer-blow, shattering the crust of his hangover and snapping him… not to attention, but into less of a bleary-eyed slump.

There was everything in those eyes – helplessness, despair, fear, doubt and - the one that really kicked Cal in the nuts - hope. She thought Cal was going to save her. Him. On his own. From eight big ugly bimsterds with knives and swords slung at their hips.

“Help me,” she pleaded. “Please. They want to take my baby.”

“Get back in your room and stay there,” barked one of the largest pirates, his hand gripping the hilt of the curved blade he had tucked into his belt. “This ain’t your concern.”

Cal looked across the faces of the pirates. Some of them genuinely wanted him to go back inside. The others looked like they’d prefer him to try something stupid.

He didn’t meet the woman’s gaze again. He couldn’t bring himself to.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, then he quietly closed the door.

He leaned his forehead against it, listening to the woman pleading for her life, and the life of her unborn child. He listened to the footsteps turn and begin to move off along the corridor.

He picked up the lamp.

He opened the door.

WHANG! He brought the lamp’s metal base down on the back of the closest pirate’s head, then drove a bare-footed kick into the leg of another, right behind the knee. Both men went down, falling forwards and stumbling into the other men in front.

Cal swung again with the lamp, catching another pirate across the forehead as he turned. Blood fountained from a split that appeared above the man’s left eye, and the corridor erupted into bellowing chaos.

Swinging the lamp by the power cord, Cal clipped another of the pirates across the jaw, but his straggly brown beard cushioned him from the impact. Swinging upwards with his sword, the pirate sliced through the cord, and the lamp thudded to the floor.

Despite the loss of his only weapon, Cal wasn’t done for yet. The narrow corridor was working to his advantage, as it stopped all the remaining pirates all jumping on him at once. Still, it wouldn’t take all of them to beat him, just one of them would probably do the trick.

He thought about running. Running was definitely an option. Sure, it would mean leaving this nice alien lady and her baby to whatever the pirates had planned for her, but was that really his problem?

Yeah, he thought. Annoyingly, it was.

But why? asked that little devil on his shoulder. They’re not going to hurt the baby, just take it. That’s what she said.

The voice was right. That was what the woman had said. Maybe they had good reason for taking the baby. Maybe they were from some sort of space social services unit and were going to ensure it got the best possible start in life.

He looked across the scarred, misshapen faces of the pirates. None of them exactly screamed ‘child’s best interests.’

All of the above took place in the space of around half a second, fear and adrenaline having kicked Cal’s hangover-ravaged brain into overdrive. By the end of it, he’d had an idea.

He grabbed for the sword of the pirate he’d KO’d with the lamp and whipped it free of its leather scabbard. His experience of swords was limited to being able to make them from modeling balloons, and he wasn’t even very good at that. Fighting a band of experienced pirate-types was out of the question, but then hopefully he wouldn’t have to.

Cal thrust the tip of the sword towards the pregnant woman’s belly. The woman and several of the pirates all gasped at the same time. Cal almost grinned. Just as he’d hoped.

He brought the sword to a stop just inches from the woman’s stomach. “Anyone moves and I run her through,” he warned. “Then it’s bye-bye baby. That’s what you want, isn’t it? The baby?”

There was a moment’s silence, then one of the pirates offered an unconvincing, “No.”

“Nice try, fatty,” Cal said, which caused the man to briefly glance down at himself in a moment of acute self-consciousness.

“Let the girl go, or I kill the baby!” Cal said.

The pirate who had sliced the lamp’s power cord narrowed his dark eyes. They were ringed with lumpy black mascara, like he’d partly based his look on Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean.

“But if you take her, we won’t have the baby,” he intoned.

“And if you don’t let me take her, the baby is a gonner,” Cal said, twisting the sword for emphasis.

“Yeah. But that’s my point, innit?” said the pirate. “Either way, we won’t have the baby.”

“Right,” said Cal, somewhat less certainly. “But at least the baby would still be alive.”

“But what good does that do us, is what I’m saying?” said the pirate. “King Anderle wants the baby, right?”

“Right,” said Cal, despite this being completely new information, and despite the fact he had no idea who King Anderle was.

“So, if you take the girl, we ain’t got the baby, has we? And he ain’t going to like that.”

Behind him, the other pirates mumbled their agreement. “No, he ain’t going to like that one bit, is King Anderle.”

“Will he like it if the baby’s dead?” Cal asked, giving the sword a quick upwards flick which made the woman sob in fright. Cal instinctively opened his mouth to apologize, but stopped himself just in time.

“No, he won’t like that, neither,” said the pirate. “But, well, the thing is, he’ll be just as angry either way. So, way I see it, is we got two choices. Either we let you take the girl, and King Anderle is angry, or you kill the baby, and King Anderle is angry.”

“So you might as well let me take the girl, then?” said Cal, hopefully.

“Well, I mean, yeah, that’s one option, certainly,” said the pirate. “But that way we don’t get to kill you or nuffing. If we let you go ahead and kill the baby, then we get to cut you up into little bits.”

“Or take him upstairs and feed him to the Oznark,” suggested one of the other pirates.

A smile split the lead pirate’s beard, revealing two rows of golden teeth. “Oh, yeah, that is a most excellent suggestion, Brian. If he kills the baby, we can feed him to the Oznark.”

The sword was getting heavier in Cal’s hand. His mind raced, frantically trying to process these latest developments. He wasn’t sure what an Oznark was, but he was reasonably sure he didn’t want to be fed to it. He was also a little taken aback that one of the pirates was named Brian, but that felt a little less pressing than the whole Oznark situation.

“OK, third option,” Cal announced. “How about I take the girl, you guys count to sixty, then come after us.”

The pirates considered this.

“Ten,” said the lead pirate.

“Fifty,” said Cal. “Final offer.”

“Five,” growled the pirate.

“OK, Jesus, ten then!” said Cal. “But I keep the sword and you have to--”

“One,” began the pirate.

“Oh, you’re just mean,” Cal yelped. He grabbed the woman by an arm and pulled her free of the piratey-throng. “Come on, lady, move!”

They stumbled along the corridor, past the open doors to their rooms, the woman trying desperately to pull her arm free of Cal’s grip.

“Two!” The pirate’s shout was accompanied by jeering and laughter from the others.

“Stop fonking pulling your arm, we need to run!” Cal said.

“You were going to kill my baby, let go!” the woman cried.

“Three!” More jeering. More laughter.

“Lady, I just saved you and your kid,” Cal pointed out, pulling her around a corner and onto a long straight corridor that stretched out ahead for a dishearteningly long distance. “If you want me to continue saving you and your kid, you have to trust me.”

“Four!”

Cal powered on, his bare feet slapping against the vinyl floor. The woman struggled for a few more seconds, then seemed to accept that it was getting her nowhere, and picked up the pace.

“Thank you,” said Cal. “Now, we need to find a way to get to my ship. I think there’s an elevator or something around here somewhere. If we can just--”

“Fivesixseveneightnineten,” bellowed the pirate all in one breath. His friends all cheered and there was a sudden thunder of footsteps as they all raced towards the corner.

“Those cheating fonkers,” Cal hissed. There was a door on the left that looked different to the others. It had a frosted-glass pane, a bar handle and an illuminated sign above it bearing a series of cryptic symbols. Cal didn’t wait for the letters to translate, and instead just threw himself at the door, pushed down the bar, and dragged the woman inside.

CHAPTER SIX

Beyond the door were two sets of stairs, one going up, the other down. Cal knew his room was deep in the bowels of the North Star station, so he raced for the stairs leading upwards and took them two at a time.

Three paces – six steps – up, he felt his head throb and darkness start to close in, and decided to take them one at a time, instead. His hangover may have gone, but it hadn’t gone very far.

After a dozen or so steps, the stairway reached a narrow landing, before another set of steps led up in the opposite direction. They turned the corner and hurried on, the woman waddling awkwardly up the stairs, holding onto Cal with one hand and the handrail with the other.

They reached the next landing just the pirates came barreling through the door on the floor below. There was another door here, leading out into an equally grim-looking corridor. Cal hesitated, hoping to hear the pirates go charging down the stairs, but their footsteps grew louder, and he realized they’d made the correct choice.

“Shizz,” he whispered. He shoved the woman towards the next set of steps. “Go, go,” he urged. She hesitated, panic flaring behind her wide eyes for a moment, then waddled upwards as fast as she could.

Cal pulled open the door leading out into the corridor, then darted up the steps behind the woman, catching up with her at the next landing. Taking her by the arm again, he pulled her up the next flight, then stopped and listened as the pirates arrived on the previous floor, spotted the door slowly closing, then barreled out into the corridor.

Head swimming from the effort, Cal climbed another few flights of steps, helping the woman along behind him. Three stories up, they heard the pirates pile angrily back into the stairwell again, and Cal decided that was his cue to leave.

Easing open the next door they came to, he guided the woman through, then quietly clicked it closed. They pressed themselves against the wall on either side of the door as the thunder of pirate footsteps clattered past, and held their breath until the din had continued past them and upwards to the floors above.

“Thank fonk for that,” said Cal, sliding the sword into the belt of his cargo pants. He looked over at the woman. She was breathing heavily, her hands slung below her belly like support scaffolding. “Shizz. You OK?”

The woman nodded. “Fine,” she said, between two long, drawn-out breaths. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’m Cal. Cal Carver. What’s your name?”

The woman studied him for a moment, as if unsure whether she should be parting with the information. “Morana,” she said, at last.

“Well, nice to meet you, Morana,” Cal said, offering her the best smile he could muster in the circumstances. “Mind telling me why a gang of pirates want your baby?”

Her arms tightened around the bump. “They don’t,” she said. “King Anderle does. He’s offered a reward for anyone who brings him my son.”

“King fonking Anderle,” said Cal, shaking his head. “What a jerk.” He shrugged. “Who’s King Anderle?”

Morana looked taken aback. “Pardon?”

“Who is he? King Anderle?”

“You don’t know who King Anderle is? How can you not know who King Anderle is? Everyone knows who King Anderle is.”

“I’m pretty new around here,” Cal explained. “So he’s, like… what? The King of Space?”

Morana shook her head. “No, he’s not an actual king. Not really. That’s just what people call him. He runs a few systems in the Remnants.”

“Oh, I know someone from the Remnants!” said Cal. “Korvack. Stone guy? Got a butler. Or did have, anyway. Know him?”

Morana shook her head. “You don’t know who Korvack is? How can you not know who Korvack is?” said Cal, mimicking her. “Everyone knows who Korvack is!”

“Wait, do you mean Kornack?” Morana asked. “The Igneon? The K’Tubboth lord? Shornack’s brother?”

Cal thought about lying, but then sighed. “Yes. That guy.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Morana. “Everyone knows him.”

Cal tutted quietly, then tried to peer through the frosted glass of the door that led back to the stairs. “I think the pirates are gone. You should be safe now.”

“Safe?” said Morana, the word coming out as a snort. “I’m not safe. I’ll never be safe. You think King Anderle just sent those guys to get me? There are hundreds of people on this station looking for me. Pirates, bounty hunters… any idiot with a lack of funds and a lack of conscience. They’re all looking for me.”

“Jesus,” said Cal. “How come he wants the baby so bad?”

Morana’s grip tightened still further on her bump. She shook her head, as if refusing to say the words out loud. Eventually, they found their way out.

“He wants to eat him.”

“The baby?” said Cal. “He wants to eat the baby?”

“Yes.”

“King Anderle? King Anderle wants to eat the baby?”

“Please stop saying it,” Morana pleaded. Her wide eyes shimmered. “You’ll help me, won’t you? You’ll help keep my baby safe?”

Cal held her gaze for a moment, then looked down at his bare feet. “Man, I totally should have grabbed my shoes,” he muttered.

He turned his attention back to the stairs. If Morana was telling the truth - and he had no reason to believe she wasn’t - the floors between here and the Shatner would be swarming with pirates and bounty hunters, all searching for the girl and her unborn child.

Dozens of stories. Hundreds of heavily-armed bad guys. And all Cal had were his wits, a sword, and a hangover sent from the bowels of Hell itself.

“Fonk it,” he decided. “Let’s just take the elevator.”

#

Finding the elevator proved to be more difficult than Cal had expected. He’d stood for several long seconds staring at the spot on the wall he’d expected to see it, his brain refusing to accept it wasn’t there.

“But this is where it is downstairs,” he insisted. “On our floor, this is where the elevator is, so it should be here. It goes up and down. That’s just science.”

“What do you mean?” Morana asked, her eyes darting anxiously along the corridor. “Why would it just go up and down? That’s pointless.”

“No it isn’t!” Cal insisted. “It’s a fonking elevator. It elevates. It goes up! And, you know, down. I don’t know what the word is for that. Descendevator, maybe?”

“What are you talking about?” Morana demanded. “We can’t hang around here. Someone might see us.”

Cal tapped the wall, just in case the elevator door actually was there, but hiding from them. It wasn’t.

Somewhere far back along the corridor, a door opened. It was hidden by the corridor’s slight curve, but the footsteps they heard emerging sounded like they belonged to some pretty serious feet.

“In here,” said Cal, throwing open a door and pulling Morana through. They emerged into a vast cargo area, stacked high with rusted containers, oozing barrels and several hundred wooden crates. Cal didn’t actually notice any of those details at first, his attention being grabbed by the much more eye-catching monster that took up a full third of the cage directly in front of him.

“Jesus, what is that?” he gasped, closing the door at his back just as the beast turned its dark, soulless eyes towards him. “It looks like Godzilla humped a lion.”

The creature hurled itself at the bars, a thrashing fury of fur and scales and claws and teeth. It hit the thick metal rods with such force that the whole cage leapt forward a full inch and a half.

“I don’t know,” Morana whispered. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one before.”

“I’m pretty sure you’d have remembered,” said Cal. He took Morana by the hand and they sidled along the wall, keeping their distance as the creature thrust a powerful front limb through a gap between two bars and slashed furiously at the air. Its face was twisted up in rage, showing teeth that were almost the length of Cal’s entire hand. “Nice Godzilla-lion,” he soothed. “Good Godzilla-lion.”

The thing roared with rage and smashed its head against the cage bars. They rattled in quite a worrying way, and Cal made the executive decision that now would probably be a good time to run. They skirted around a stack of crates and out of the monster’s line of sight. It kept roaring at them, regardless.

Something whirred past Cal’s head and he instinctively ducked. When it was apparent that whatever it was wasn’t trying to kill him, he risked a glance up. The thing that had buzzed him looked like a cross between a drone and a forklift truck. Cal watched it swoop down and slide its prongs beneath a crate, then heard the pitch of its engines change as it raised the box into the air and carried it towards another stack on the other side of the deck.

A few more of the flying forklifts zipped around the place, lifting and depositing cargo for reasons best known to themselves. They didn’t really seem to be achieving all that much, but they were keeping busy, and seemed happy enough.

“Here,” said Morana, tugging on Cal’s arm. Two sets of elevator doors were set into the wall just ahead and to the right. They hurried towards them, then Cal jabbed at the call button several more times than was strictly necessary, and impatiently tapped a bare foot.

“Come on, come on,” he muttered. The Godzilla-lion had stopped making any noise now, but Cal was too scared to turn around in case it was standing right behind him, licking its lips. “We’ll get on this, head to the landing decks, find my ship and…”

His voice trailed off. “Shizz. No, wait! We can’t.”

“Why not?” asked Morana, suddenly panicked.

“Because I need the rest of them.”

“The rest of what?”

“The rest of the crew. My… friends, I guess, although that’s quite a strong word to describe them at this point in time.”

Morana took her turn at frantically pressing the elevator’s call button. “Well, where are they?”

Cal reached through the fog of his memory, stretching back towards the note on the door. “They’re in… a place.”

“That doesn’t help,” Morana said.

“It’s a word. I can see a word,” he said, squinting as if he could somehow bring the writing into focus. “Mumble? No, wait. Mumfle, maybe?”

“The bar?”

Cal slapped himself on the forehead. His hangover didn’t thank him for it. “Of course! The bar. That’s the place me and Splurt went. I even know where that is. Vaguely.”

There was a ping and one of the elevator doors opened. Cal bundled Morana inside and began studying the circular brass buttons that lined all three of the walls. There were hundreds of the fonkers. When he and Splurt had gone on their bar-hunt, he’d pressed a few at random and hopped off at the floor that looked the most promising.

“It’s this one,” he said, settling on a button that looked identical in every way to all the others. “Or possibly that one, that one, this one, or one of these two,” he added, pushing all those, too. A light illuminated beneath each button and the door clunked closed.

The elevator climbed smoothly. This worried Cal a little, because the one he’d been on with Splurt had been a real bone-rattler he’d been convinced was about to drop at any minute. This was a different elevator, and quite possibly didn’t even go to the floor they needed to get to.

Still, he could worry about that in a minute. Right now, there was something else that required his attention.

“Are you OK?” he asked. Morana was leaning against the back wall, her breath coming in short, shallow gulps. A sheen of sweat shone across her pink forehead, and she was flexing the fingers of one hand in and out, while rubbing the underside of her bump with the other. “Tell me you’re not having a baby.”

Morana shot him an irritated look and indicated her bump.

“Now, I meant,” said Cal. “Tell me you’re not having a baby right now.”

After a moment that seemed to Cal to stretch on for all eternity, she shook her head. “Not now, no.”

“But soon?” said Cal.

Morana nodded. “I think so.”

Cal shot a glance up at elevator’s metal mesh ceiling. “Hurry the fonk up!” he urged.

As if on cue, the elevator car glided to a stop. Cal and Morana pressed themselves against the wall on either side and waited for the door to slide open.

Another warehouse-like cargo bay stood beyond the doors. “Nope,” Cal said. “Not this one.”

The door closed and they were on their way again. This pattern repeated four times – the elevator stopped, the doors opened to reveal a cargo deck, or an accommodation corridor, and they continued upwards.

“Are you sure you pushed the right button?” Morana asked.

“No,” Cal admitted. “They should really have, like, a map or something in here, instead of people having to rely on guesswork. It’s a terrible system.”

The elevator stopped. They adopted the position. The door opened.

A flicker of recognition stirred at the back of Cal’s brain. This floor wasn’t loaded with cargo or featureless doors, and was instead filled with people and laughter and the unmistakable chinking of glassware.

“Bingo,” said Cal. He moved to step out of the elevator, but Morana held him back. She pointed past him, to where a group of mostly human-looking men in matching leather armor stood talking to what appeared to be a person dressed as a big rat. Cal had seen enough in the past few days that he knew it probably wasn’t a person dressed up at all, and was, in fact, just a big rat.

Whatever it was, it looked frightened, and anything that could frighten a giant space rat was something to be avoided, that was Cal’s motto. Admittedly, it hadn’t been his motto for long, but he was damn sure it would be from this point on.

The men all wore gun-metal gray helmets which attached to their armor at the back of the neck. From where Cal was standing, he couldn’t see the front of the helmets, but they seemed to be full-faced, designed to protect the wearer’s head, while simultaneously scaring the bejesus out of anyone who met them.

“Bounty hunters,” Morana mouthed.

Cal grimaced. “Great,” he muttered. The crowds were pretty thin around the elevator door, but quickly grew more densely packed together just a few dozen feet away. If they could get past the bounty hunters without them turning, they could feasibly use the crowd as cover all the way to Mumfle.

If they could get past the bounty hunters. That was what it all came down to. And now, with their backs still turned, looked to be as good a time as any.

“Come on,” Cal said, taking Morana by the wrist. They hurried out, Cal striding, Morana waddling a few steps behind him.

“Happy Kroyshuk!” bellowed a grey-skinned creature with walrus-like tusks, lunging towards them. Cal nodded briefly in response and ducked past him, hauling Morana along.

He dodged past a small knot of revelers, sticking close so he and Morana looked to be part of the same group. The main bulk of the crowd was just a few more feet ahead now. Cal spotted a narrow gap in the bodies and headed towards it.

It was then that he made the mistake of checking on the bounty hunter situation. As he looked over, his eyes met those of the big rat. He whipped his head around to face front again, far too quickly for it to look natural, he realized.

“Shizz,” he muttered, wanting to look back, but keen not to look even more suspicious. He waited until they’d reached the gap in the crowd, then chanced a quick peek back over his shoulder.

The rat had one arm raised, a long, thin finger jabbing towards Morana. The bounty hunters had all about-turned, revealing their helmets to be even more intimidating than Cal had imagined them to be.

“Uh-oh, time to go,” Cal said, shoving his way into the throngs of bodies. They were barely a few steps in when the first shot came. It screamed above their heads, a searing streak of blaster fire that slammed into the wall of a restaurant just ahead of them, shattering the window and scattering glass across the floor.

Everyone in the crowd began to scream at once. They surged away from the approaching bounty hunters, carrying Cal and Morana along with them. Cal hissed and shrieked as his bare feet trampled through the shards of glass.

“Ow! Fonk! Shizz! Fonk! Ow!”

Another blast scorched the air. The crowd tightened around them, all screaming and elbows and trampling feet. Cal made it through the glass, holding onto Morana as tightly as he could. He risked a glance back in time to see the bounty hunters gunning down the back few rows of the rushing crowds. This only served to make the next few rows push forwards with even greater enthusiasm, and Morana screamed in panic as she and Cal were forced apart.

There was a gap in the wall ahead, a narrow alleyway between two bars that was presumably some sort of staff access. Cal shoved himself backwards, grabbing for Morana’s sleeve. He hissed as a shard of glass wedged itself more deeply into his right foot, but then felt a surge of relief when he locked his hand onto Morana’s arm.

Cutting right, they worked their way through the fleeing horde, keeping their heads low. Several of the things in the crowd were substantially taller and wider than Cal and Morana put together, so staying out of sight wasn’t too much of a problem.

They stumbled out of the throngs and into the alleyway. “Come on, down here,” Cal urged, hobbling painfully away from the screaming crowds and the screeching blaster-fire.

The alleyway turned into a couple of sharp right angles. They hurried down them, the sounds of chaos getting quieter and more distant with each turn. “Keep going,” Cal said. “I don’t think they saw us.”

“What about that?” Morana asked. She pointed to the trail of bloody footprints that stretched out behind Cal. “They’ll follow those.”

“Shizz!” Cal spat. He lifted the marginally more painful of his feet, looked at the sole, then wished he hadn’t. “Can you give me a piggy-back?”

“No!” Morana said.

“No, right, of course not,” Cal said. He clicked his fingers. “What if I gave you a piggy-back?”

“How would that help?”

Cal winced. “Yeah, you’re right, that doesn’t make any sense, does it?”

“Down here,” crackled a voice from back along the alleyway. “They went this way.”

Morana scampered ahead as fast as a heavily pregnant woman could possibly scamper. Cal shuffled behind her, his feet curved inwards so all his weight was on the outside edges.

“Go, go, don’t wait for me,” he said, gesturing for her to run. She chewed her lip fretfully for a moment, then turned and rushed on, zig-zagging around another set of corners.

Cal was closing on the first corner when he heard her cry out in panic. “No!” she yelped.

“Shizz, what now?” Cal grimaced, hobbling faster. He made it around the z-bend and immediately spotted the problem.

The alleyway opened up into a rectangular storage area that ended in a solid wall dead ahead of them. There were no doors. No way in or out, other than the route they’d just taken.

They were trapped.

And there was nowhere left to run.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Cal turned, placing himself in front of Morana just as six bounty hunters flooded out of the alleyway and into the wider clearing. He held the sword in a way he hoped suggested he knew how to use it beyond a basic ‘stabby end’ and ‘non-stabby end’ level.

“Hey, guys!” he said, trying to sound breezy and confident. He looked their matching uniforms up and down. “So, are you all dressed the same on purpose, or was it just an awkward coincidence?” he asked. “I bet you were all like, ‘Wait, I said I was wearing the leather armor and sinister helmet.’ Must’ve been pretty embarrassing.”

The bounty hunters fanned out until they stood like a firing squad before him. Cal hobbled on the spot, gritting his teeth against the pain in his feet, and trying not to show how rapidly his fear levels were rising.

“Anyway, I’m really sorry to disappoint,” he said. “I can’t let you take the girl.”

“We don’t want the girl,” crackled one of the masked men, an audio waveform flickering across his helmet’s visor in time with his voice.

Cal glanced back at Morana, then pointed to himself. “Wait… you’re here for me?”

“The baby,” voiceboxed another of the men.

“Right, yes, of course!” said Cal. “Gotcha. Makes sense.”

He raised the sword. “But, you see, the thing is, I can’t let you take the baby, either,” he told them. “Although that thing you do with your mask and your voice is pretty fonking cool. I can see why you all decided to wear it. Hell, if I had a mask like that I don’t think I’d ever take it off.”

While Cal spoke, all six of the bounty hunters simultaneously saw three things flash up beside a little target icon which appeared over his head in their in-visor display. The first was his name. The second was a word which, if viewed with a visual translator chip, would have approximated the word ‘Wanted.’ The third thing was the part they were most interested in. It was a number. A number with a lot of zeroes.

“Cal Carver,” crackled the man in the center. “Looks like we do want you, after all. Or someone does. This is going to be a more productive day that we thought.”

All six weapons snapped up. Morana covered her eyes and pressed herself behind Cal’s back. “Guys, guys, wait!” Cal urged. He smiled weakly. “I mean, come on. It’s Kroyshuk. Season of peace and goodwill. Or, you know, something like that. It’s not a time to be rounding up completely innocent people in alleyways, it’s a time for friendship. For family.”

He looked across at all six visors. “I mean, you’re kidnapping an unborn child. I’m pretty sure that’s, like, in the top ten worst things you can possibly do. Top twenty, anyway. A helpless infant being hunted by a wicked king – that’s not what Kroyshuk is all about.”

None of the men had made any move to shoot him, so he took a breath and prepared to deliver the killer blow. “I mean… what would your moms think?”

Silence fell. There were no screams from out in the main concourse any longer. The only sound was the distant jingle of piped music. It sounded quite festive, which Cal hoped would do his case no harm at all.

“Oh good,” said the middle bounty hunter, as new data flashed up on his screen. “Dead or alive.”

All six of the men’s blaster rifles swung to target Cal. He gritted his teeth, shut his eyes, held the sword up at an angle he hoped would miraculously deflect every one of the men’s shots at the same time, and braced himself.

“Ugh. Like, who is that fat chick?”

Cal opened one eye. A powerfully built figure stood behind the bounty hunters, her hairy head and toothy snout towering above them all.

“Miz!” Cal cried. “Thank fonk for that.”

Three of the bounty hunters spun on the spot, taking aim at Mizette. The others kept their sights trained on Cal.

“Halt!” barked one of the masked men.

“Halt yourself,” scowled Miz, sneering down at him. She eyeballed him for a few moments, then looked him up and down. “That armor is so last year, by the way,” she informed him, then she lifted her eyes to Cal again. “Seriously, who’s that?”

“Uh, Morana, Miz, Miz, Morana,” said Cal, quickly. He gestured to the bounty hunters. “Possibly not the best time.”

Miz glared at Morana, her eyes narrowed. “Whatever,” she said, at last. “Mech says you should move to the left.”

Cal frowned. “Why?”

“What am I, his secretary? He just said you should move to the left.”

“My left or your left?”

“He didn’t say,” said Miz, sounding more and more annoyed. “All he said was, ‘Tell him to move to the--”

The wall on Cal’s right exploded. He moved left, pulling the screaming Morana with him. Two of the bounty hunters trained their weapons on the smoking hole and the pile of rubble on the ground in front of it.

Mech’s metal frame whirred as he clanked through the gap in a cloud of masonry dust. The paint job he’d been given by Zertex was gone. It hadn’t been painted over, but removed somehow, as Mech now looked in the same scorched and battered state he’d been when Cal had first met him.

“Can’t leave you alone for five minutes, can we?” Mech grunted. He stepped in front of Cal and Morana, his back to the gunmen.

“Stand aside!” crackled one of them. Mech held up a finger.

“One second. I’m talking to my boy here,” Mech told them. He nodded towards Morana. “Who’s the girl?”

“Morana, Mech, Mech, Morana,” said Cal. “She’s pregnant.”

“I can see that,” said Mech.

“Wait… it’s not yours, is it?” demanded Miz.

Cal leaned past Mech and shot Miz a reassuring smile. “Hey, come on, I’m fast, but I’m not that fast!”

A bounty hunter swung his weapon to take aim at Cal’s head, and Cal quickly ducked back in behind Mech.

There was a flash of movement by the hole in the wall. Loren rolled expertly through the gap and over the rubble, coming to rest on one knee, her blaster pistol drawn and already taking aim at the closest bounty hunter.

“In position!” she announced.

Miz rolled her eyes. “Hooray, we’re saved,” she said, then she sneered. “We totally had this before you arrived. You’re literally making no difference right now. You just look stupid.”

The bounty hunters now didn’t know who to aim for. When there had been three targets and six guns, it had been simple math. Two guns per target. That was assuming you counted Cal and Morana as one target, which was fine as they were close enough together to be touching.

Now, though, there were four targets and six guns, and from a pure division point of view, that didn’t work. Cal and Morana were both behind Mech, but the gunmen at each end of the line could still see them, which only served to complicate the whole aiming thing further.

On the plus side, the inside of each bounty hunter’s visor was currently a switchboard of names and reward notifications. If they could round up this little lot, they could probably retire on the profits.

“We’re taking you all in,” barked one of the bolder men. “Surrender, or be destroyed.”

Mech clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, then tapped his forehead at Morana in a little gesture of salute. “Lady, you might want to avert your eyes,” he said.

He turned to face the bounty hunters and regarded them in silence for a few long moments. “In fact… Miz, Loren,” he said, at last. “Why don’t you two take Cal and his lady friend somewhere?”

“Aw!” Miz protested. “How come you get all the fun?”

“Miz. Please,” said Mech.

Miz sighed loudly, folded her arms and shoved her way through the line of gunmen, forcibly shouldering one of them aside. She trudged past Loren, over the rubble, and stopped just inside the hole. “So, are you, like, coming or what?” she demanded.

Cal and Morana shuffled sideways out of Mech’s cover. An alternating number of guns followed them as they joined Miz on the other side of the hole.

Loren straightened up, her blaster still raised, then retreated for the gap in the wall. “You be OK?” she asked.

Mech snorted. “Come on. You serious?”

“Have fun!” Cal called, then he popped his head around the edge of the hole again. “Oh, and once you’re finished, bring me one of their boots, will you?”

He vanished into the hole, then popped back out again. “And by that I mean bring me the boots of one of them, not one boot. Just to be clear. Two boots.”

“Gotcha,” said Mech.

“A left and a right, don’t try to be cute by bringing me two identical boots or anything.”

“Just go, man,” Mech said. “I’ll get you the fonking boots.”

Cal gave him a thumbs-up, then waved briefly at the bounty hunters. “Bye, guys. Merry Kroyshuk.”

He turned away, just as Mech reached for the big round dial fixed to the center of his chest. Turning it one way, Cal knew, cranked up Mech’s brainpower, making him super-intelligent, but at the cost of his physical strength.

Turn it the other way, however, and Mech’s power levels were drastically increased, but his IQ dropped several dozen points.

Cal didn’t see which direction Mech turned the dial, but judging by the animalistic roar that followed, and the high-pitched shrieks of the bounty hunters, he reckoned he could probably hazard a guess.

Miz and Loren led Cal and Morana into a dark, noisy but semi-deserted nightclub. Smoke hung in the air like fog, proving a handy backdrop for a series of colorful laser lights that danced across the almost-empty room.

A handful of panicked revelers were forcing their way out through an emergency exit, sobbing and screaming as they tumbled over each other in their rush to escape.

“Great rescue, guys. Seriously, couldn’t have been better,” Cal said, raising his voice over the music. “A couple of minutes earlier wouldn’t have hurt, of course, and I might not have feet full of glass, but still… textbook stuff. How did you even find us, by the way?”

“Miz got your scent,” Loren explained. “Then Mech’s scanners picked you up.”

“And she did absolutely nothing,” said Miz, flicking her eyes to Loren just for a moment.

“Thanks,” said Loren, shooting her a deeply insincere smile.

They crossed the hall in the direction of the fleeing crowds. “Wow. I guess Mech blowing the wall up really scared them,” Cal said, watching them all try to force themselves through the gap.

“N-not that. I don’t think it was that,” said Morana, tugging on Cal’s sleeve. He turned to see the pirates he’d encountered in the hall outside his room marching across the dance floor towards them. One of them was being pulled along by a chain he gripped with both hands. A chain which was in turn attached to the collar of a heavily muzzled Godzilla-lion.

“Oh, right,” said Cal. “So that’s the Oznark.” He sighed. “Yeah. Yeah, of course it is.”

Loren raised her gun and fired a couple of warning shots at the pirates. With a flick of its chain, the Oznark’s muzzle retracted into its collar, and the beast was unleashed. It bounded towards them, shrugging off Loren’s blaster shots, silvery strands of drool dribbling from its gaping jaws.

“It’s not stopping!” Loren warned.

The hair on the back of Mizette’s neck stood up. She dropped to her haunches, one hand pressing against the floor. “I got it,” she said.

“What? Are you insane?” Cal yelped. “You can’t fight that thing! It’ll tear you apart.”

“Ha! In its dreams,” Miz said, but even over the bluster of her growl, Cal could tell she didn’t quite believe her own words. “Get the fat chick out of here, if that’s what the plan is. I’ll take care of this.”

“Go!” Loren said, unleashing another volley of fire at the pirates, forcing them back. Cal hesitated, but then felt Morana’s grip on his arm tighten. She groaned loudly, almost doubling over. When she straightened, there was a puddle of clear liquid at her feet.

“Uh, Cal?” she said, her face a picture of oddly serene panic.

Cal gaped at the puddle, then up at Morana. “You have got to be kidding me.”

The Oznark was chewing up the ground now, its powerful paws thundering across the dance floor. Mizette extender her claws, her own growls mimicking those of the approaching monster.

“Loren! I need help here!” said Cal.

“I can’t leave Miz on her own!” said Loren, squeezing off another round of blaster fire. It hit a pirate in the chest, propelling him backwards across the room and slamming him into a stack of equipment.

The Oznark launched itself into a final, terrifying leap. Its jaws unhinged, opening to reveal a mouth almost big enough to swallow Mizette whole.

Then, with a sudden jerk, it stopped in mid-air and let out a sharp screech of pain. With a thud, the Oznark fell to the floor, revealing a tall, silver-haired figure standing behind it, the monster’s tail gripped in one wrinkled hand.

It was Dorothy.

Dorothy out of the Golden Girls!

“She’s not alone,” said Cal, almost sobbing with relief. He punched his fist into the open palm of his other hand. “Now come on. Let’s go deliver this fonking baby!”

CHAPTER EIGHT

As time was something of an issue, Loren kicked open the first door they came to and they all barreled inside, Morana gripping her stomach and groaning like she were battling the early symptoms of demonic possession.

Judging by the number of coats hanging on racks around the room, they’d found themselves in the club’s coat check. Loren immediately set about pulling down the clothing and piling it on the floor, while Cal occupied himself by staring at Morana’s stomach and wringing his hands in panic.

“Lie her down,” Loren barked, as Morana let out a groan that rose to the beginnings of a shriek. Cal hooked an arm under one of Morana’s, taking some of her weight. His glass-ridden feet didn’t think much of that, and made their feelings clear with a fresh wave of agony.

“Shizz, ow, fonking… ow!” he grimaced, helping Morana lower herself down onto the nest-like pile of coats Loren had prepared. He dropped to his knees beside her and took one of her hands in his. With his free hand, he tried to pull a sliver of glass from his heel, discovered it hurt far worse than any pain he’d endured in his entire life to date, and stopped.

Loren knelt near Morana’s feet – the ‘business end’ as Cal was already coming to think of it – and began working Morana’s pants down.

“What are you doing?” Cal asked. Both women looked at him and the penny dropped. “Oh, yeah, of course, that makes sense.” He took a few deep breaths. “So, we’re really doing this, huh?”

“It’s really happening,” said Loren. “Whether we do anything or not.”

Morana cried out in pain and tightened her grip on Cal’s hand. His arm twisted. He shoved his other fist in his mouth and bit down on his knuckle, praying for the pressure to pass.

“Ow, that hurt!” he protested, once Morana’s contraction had eased. She shot him a look that wouldn’t have looked out of place on an Oznark, and he smiled uncomfortably. “But, you know, whatever helps, I guess.”

She threw her head back and screamed. Cal glanced down at his rapidly reddening fingers and decided to join her in a little scream of his own.

“Make it stop!” Morana howled.

Loren ducked down and peered between Morana’s legs. Cal wasn’t sure what she saw there, exactly, but from the expression on her face he was glad it wasn’t in his line of sight.

“You’re doing great!” Loren said. “Seriously, you’re doing amazingly well.”

“You’ve done this before, right?” Cal asked Loren. Loren shook her head. “What? But… don’t they teach you that stuff in the army?”

“I’m a pilot!” Loren pointed out. “Why would they teach me how to deliver babies?”

Cal gestured to Morana with his free hand. “In case this happens!”

He grimaced as Morana grabbed this hand, too. Another contraction arched her back and she squeezed both hands at once. Cal’s mouth opened in a silent scream this time. Outside, in the main club, they could just hear the sounds of battle raging above the thudding of the dance beat. Despite the pirates, bounty hunters and Godzilla-lion, he was starting to think he’d been given the raw end of the deal.

“Ooh, that one nearly broke my fingers,” he muttered, as the peak of Morana’s contraction passed. She panted heavily, her pink face slick with sweat. “Breathe. Just breathe. In. Out.”

“I know how to fonking breathe!” Morana snapped.

A spasm of pain rocked her. Loren let out a gasp. “I see something!”

“Please don’t describe it!” Cal pleaded.

“Push, Morana!”

Morana tightened her grip on Cal’s hand even further. He bit his shirt at the shoulder, grinding the material between his teeth and trying not to pass out through the pain.

Loren let out a panicky yelp.

Morana groaned with relief.

And then… silence.

Nothing.

Nothing but the battle and the music. Distant, and feeling more distant with each second that passed.

In her hands, Loren held a bloody shape. Inert.

Silent.

Not moving.

Morana made a sound that was part gasp, part sob.

“Aw… shizz,” said Cal.

A pudgy pink hand twitched. A toe curled. A cry, sharp and strong and fonking beautiful echoed around the room.

“It’s a boy,” said Loren, smiling despite her ashen-face and trembling hands as she passed the infant to Morana. “You have a little boy.”

Cal flexed his fingers and blew on the knuckles. “Word of warning, kid, your mom has one crazy grip.” He looked down into the baby’s wide eyes and his pain melted away. He smiled. It wasn’t one of his normal smiles, the ones carefully honed to elicit a particular response in whoever he was aiming it at. It was just a smile, meant for no-one’s benefit but his own. “Well, look at you,” he said, tickling the baby’s bare belly.

He tore his eyes away from the squirming infant and met Morana’s gaze. “Thank you,” she said.

“Hey, it was nothing,” he said. “I mean, I’ll never play piano again, but no big deal.”

The door swung inwards. Loren spun on her knees, gun raised. Mech appeared in the doorway, caught a full-on view of between Morana’s legs, recoiled in horror, then abruptly about-turned.

“Uh… everything OK in here?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Cal. “Yeah, we’re good. You?”

“All taken care of.”

“What about the Hell-beast?” asked Loren.

“Miz dealt with it.”

Loren smirked. “I was talking about Miz,” she said.

“Now, now,” said Cal. “Where are you two going to learn to play nice?”

Something that was all teeth and eyes appeared around the doorframe. At first, Cal thought it was the Oznark, but then it let out a theatrical gasp and flapped its arms about in a way that bordered on hysteria.

“Oh my!” yelped Harlosh. “What is going on here?”

“A child has been born unto us this day,” said Cal, which he reckoned explained everything. It didn’t, obviously, but Harlosh was too polite to push the subject.

“We should get you to a room, my dear. You can have my suite. We can’t have you stuck in here, it’s not sanitary.” He leaned in closer to Mech, who still hadn’t turned around. “Or safe. I think people might be looking for this child. It’s all over the feeds.”

“Really?” said Mech, brushing a lump of bounty hunter off his forearm. “You don’t say?”

#

Five minutes, and a blissfully uneventful private elevator ride later, Cal stood at the foot of a grand, four-poster bed, rocking gently from side to side, the swaddled infant in his arms. Morana watched him from the bed, sipping on a cup of something hot and sweet.

Loren, Miz and Mech had gone to stock up on supplies and get the Shatner ready for take-off. Dorothy out of the Golden Girls sat in a wicker chair next to a mirrored dressing table, looking a little green around the gills.

“You don’t need to keep that up now, buddy,” Cal said. “We’re all friends here.”

Dorothy melted, becoming a mound of quivering green goo on the chair. Even in slime-form, Splurt somehow managed to look exhausted. Keeping up the transformation for so long must have taken it out of the little guy.

“You’re really good with him,” said Morana.

“Who, Splurt?”

Morana smiled. “The baby.”

“Oh! Yeah, right,” said Cal. He looked down at the infant’s sleeping face. His tiny lips formed a miniature pout, and he let out a little murmur as he wrapped his pudgy hand around Cal’s finger. “Thankfully, he doesn’t yet have your grip.”

“You have kids?” Morana asked.

Cal opened his mouth, ready for the useful stuff to tumble out. “Blah, blah, blah, too young. Blah, blah, blah, don’t want to get tied down. Blah, blah, blah, something about maybe someday.”

Instead, though, and to his immense surprise, he said. “Yes.”

And then he corrected it to, “No.”

And then he added, “Not anymore.”

“Oh,” said Morana. “I’m sorry. What happened?”

Cal shrugged, keeping his gaze fixed on the baby in his arms. “She was… There was an accident. A few years back.” His jaw tightened, stopping him saying any more, and pushing back the tears he could feel amassing behind his eyelids. “Just one of those things.”

He cleared his throat and the baby jumped awake. “Sorry!” Cal whispered, then he held his breath as the boy’s eyelids slowly closed again.

“How come this King Anderle guy wanted to eat him, anyway?” Cal asked. “I mean, not that I’m saying he doesn’t look pretty fonking appetizing, but… why go to all this effort to eat him? There are bound to be loads of babies out there he could eat.”

“Because of who his father is,” said Morana. She set the cup down on Harlosh’s antique bedside table. “There is a… story. A legend. A boy will be born – a boy of great power – who will destroy King Anderle and his entire domain.”

“This little guy?” said Cal. “He doesn’t look like he’d destroy anyone. I mean, look at that face. And why eat him? That seems a bit… much.”

“Like I say, he thinks my son has power. By eating him, he thinks he can take it.”

“Ah, so he’s a total nutjob? Gotcha,” said Cal. “Who is the dad, anyway? If, you know, you don’t mind me asking?”

“That,” said Morana, puffing out her cheeks, “is a very long story.”

“OK. So… where is he?”

“That’s an even longer one,” Morana said. “He’s… around, I guess.”

“We could take you to him,” Cal suggested. “On the Shatner. We could take you both.”

Morana smiled. “It’s not that simple. You see, he’s not really in any specific sort of…”

The door opened. Harlosh ducked his head around the frame. “Knock knock!” he said, remaining outside. “Everything OK?”

“Hey! Yeah, all good here,” said Cal.

“I want to thank you, Mr Ko,” said Morana. “You’ve been so kind.”

Harlosh waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, now, stop!” he trilled. “Stop it at once! I couldn’t very well leave you lying there on a pile of coats, could I? Plus, it’s Kroyshuk, for goodness sake.”

“Well, thanks anyway, Harlosh,” said Cal. “When I first saw you I thought… well, it wasn’t really a word, more a sort of panicky internal scream, but you’re OK. You’re one of the good guys.”

“Haha. Yes!” said Harlosh. “And on that note… you have a guest.”

He withdrew from the doorway and was replaced by a towering figure in a flowing red robe. The man’s long, dark beard entered first. He ducked to avoid scraping his golden crown on the doorway mantle.

“King Anderle!” Morana gasped.

“Morana,” boomed the King, in a voice that shook the very walls themselves.

Cal glanced at Splurt just as he reared up, taking the form of something large and scaly. Without looking, King Anderle took aim with a small handgun and shot Splurt at point blank range in what was becoming his stomach. A crackle of electricity ripped through Splurt, stopping his transformation midway through and reducing him to a quivering pile of gloop.

“Splurt!” Cal yelped. He spun, thrusting the baby back into Morana’s arms, then launched himself at King Anderle, pain radiating upwards from the recently-bandaged soles of his feet.

Anderle backhanded him across the face, sending him spinning into an expensive-looking table. A vase, which looked even more valuable, shattered beneath Cal as he landed on top of it.

“You’re going to pay for those damages!” Harlosh said, aiming the sentence at Cal rather than at King Anderle.

“You’re going to pay for being a traitorous shizznod,” Cal growled. He stumbled to his feet, only for King Anderle to shoot him in the chest. Cal’s body spasmed fitfully, his muscles tightening until his arms bent back. He fell sideways, almost completely rigid, and slammed against the floor once again.

He tried to move, but nothing worked. There was a total disconnect between his brain and the rest of him. He could see and hear, and there was a definite burning smell filling his nostrils, but his limbs refused to respond to his commands to move. Right. Fonking. Now.

Up on the bed, Morana kicked backwards until she was all the way to the headboard, her son clutched protectively to her chest. “No, no, please, don’t hurt him. Don’t hurt my baby,” she pleaded.

“Come now, Morana,” King Andrele intoned, advancing towards the bed. “You know I have no choice in the matter. To protect my subjects, I must devour the infant. The legend is very clear about that.”

Cal tried to cry out for help, but barely managed a groan. From where he lay, he could see King Anderle approaching the bed, his hands, both adorned by a dozen or so gold rings, reaching towards Morana and her child.

“N-nnn,” Cal said, as King Anderle wrapped those thick, sinewy fingers around the baby and tore it free of its mother’s grasp. Immediately, the child began to wail. Harlosh checked the hallway outside, then pulled the door closed and stood with his back against it.

“Please, no, don’t!” Morana screamed hurling herself at the king. He caught her easily with his right hand, the baby wriggling and squirming in his left. With a single shove, he launched Morana backwards. She hit the headboard hard and folded over, the breath, if not the fight, going out of her.

“P-please,” she pleaded, struggling back to her knees. “Don’t.”

“He doesn’t look like him, does he?” Anderle said, peering down at the struggling child. “Then again, how could he? Around the eyes a little, perhaps, but…” He leaned in closer. “How are they glowing like that?” he wondered.

And then, he exploded.

Later, Cal would recall two bolts of crackling white light blazing from the baby’s eyes. He’d remember a sound not unlike trumpets. Space trumpets, perhaps. He’d recollect the fleeting moment of surprise on King Anderle’s face, right before he disintegrated in an eruption of flaky white ash.

The baby fell, bounced once on the bed, then was snatched up by his mother and swaddled in against her chest. He cooed once, wriggled into a more comfortable position, then promptly fell asleep.

Cal’s fingers twitched. He focused, and with some effort managed to turn his head to look over at Harlosh, who was still pressed against the door, looking… surprised, Cal guessed, although the whole teeth and eyes situation meant that was pretty much just a guess.

All of Harlosh’s eyes went to King Anderle’s weapon. It had fallen, and was now in the process of being covered by the flakes of white ash floating to the floor.

Before he could make a move, the door was thrown open, and Harlosh was sent tumbling across the room, where he smashed, teeth-first, into what Cal hoped had been a priceless antique lamp.

Mech, Miz and Loren stepped into the room. They looked at Cal and Splurt on the floor, then over at Morana kneeling on the bed with her baby in her arms.

Finally, they looked at the white flakes drifting through the air. “Uh… did we miss something?” Loren asked.

“Yy cld say tht,” Cal slurred. His face was tingling and his arms felt like lead, but he managed to prop himself up against the wall. He raised his eyes to the drifting flakes of white and felt a sudden flurry of excitement. “Hey, ’slike snow,” he said. He stuck out his tongue to catch a piece, then remembered what the flakes actually were, and quickly spat it back out again.

With help from Loren and Miz, he slid himself up the wall. His legs gave way immediately, and Loren quickly ducked under his arm to support him. “Thanks,” Cal said. “But in the interests of full disclosure, I’ve wet myself.”

Splurt pulsed on the wicker chair, drawing himself upwards into his traditional blob-like shape. His eyes swam around for a few moments, before coming together and settling on Cal. “Good to have you back, buddy,” Cal said. “Let’s agree never to get shot by one of those things again.”

“So what is this stuff?” asked Miz, sniffing the air. “Smells like dandruff.”

“That’s King Anderle,” said Cal. “The baby blew him to bits.”

“The baby?” said Loren.

“Yep.”

“Blew him to bits?”

“Yep. He’s one tough kid,” Cal said. “Takes after his mom.”

Morana smiled. She looked down at the sleeping infant in her arms. “I guess we can’t keep calling him ‘the baby,’ can we?” she said. “He needs a name. Any suggestions?”

“Hmm, let me think for a moment,” said Cal, tapping a finger against his chin. “A child, born to a mysteriously powerful absent father, hunted by an evil king on Space Christmas Day?” He smiled. It made his face feel weirdly rubbery. “I think I have the perfect name…”

#

Cal sat slouched in his seat as Loren fired up the Shatner’s thrusters. “I can’t believe she didn’t like the name!” he complained. “I mean, seriously, what kid wouldn’t want to be called Santa?”

“She didn’t like it, man, get over it,” said Mech. “She called the kid Cal, what more do you want?”

Cal shifted in his chair and gave a begrudging shrug. “Yeah, that was pretty cool, I suppose. But still. Santa.”

“Think she’s going to be OK?” asked Loren, leaning back on the stick and tilting the ship’s nose off the deck. “Staying here, I mean?”

“Well, no-one’s looking for her now, are they?” said Miz. “And, like, she’s got a baby that can blow stuff up.”

“Yeah,” said Cal. “Yeah, I think she’ll be fine.”

The ship edged towards the wide doors that led out into the vastness of outer space. Mech’s metal feet clanked across the deck, and Cal turned in time for a pair of leather boots to be thrust towards him.

“Merry Kroyshuk,” Mech grunted.

“Aw, Mech, you shouldn’t have!” Cal said, taking the boots. “I didn’t get you anything.”

He tilted the boots, studying them. “A matching pair, about the right size, nice leatherwork. These are perfect, Mech, thank you.”

Mech nodded. “Hey, no problem. My pleasure,” he said, returning to his spot.

Cal crossed his legs. He was about to pull one of the boots on, when something inside it caught his attention. He peered inside and his stomach did a little loop-the-loop.

“Uh, you do know there are still feet inside these, right?”

“Yeah,” said Mech, his metal mouth curving into a smirk. “Yeah, I know.”

And then the stars all stretched out, and the Shatner shot off into space, leaving the North Star, Morana, and the newborn boy child far, far behind.

SPACE TEAM

A hilarious, fast-paced space adventure from the author the Independent calls "the new Terry Pratchett."

Cal Carver is having a bad day. Imprisoned and forced to share a cell with a cannibalistic serial killer, Cal thinks things can't possibly get any worse.

He is wrong.

It’s not until two-thirds of the human race is wiped out and Cal is abducted by aliens that his day really starts to go downhill.

Whisked across the galaxy, Cal is thrown into a team of some of the sector's most notorious villains and scumbags. Their mission should be simple enough, but as one screw-up leads to another, they find themselves in a frantic battle to save an entire alien civilization - and its god - from total annihilation.

Read Space Team Now

SPACE TEAM: THE WRATH OF VAJAZZLE

Suicide Squad meets Galaxy Quest, in this fast-paced, laugh-out-loud novel from the author the Independent calls, "the new Terry Pratchett."

After saving an alien race and its god from a sentient zombie virus, Cal Carver and the crew of the Dread Ship Shatner are feeling pretty pleased with themselves.

Unfortunately, the creator of the zombie virus is out for revenge, and has recruited the galaxy's deadliest - and oldest - assassin, Lady Vajazzle, to hunt Space Team down. But when Vajazzle discovers the crew is under the protection of a species known as the Greyx, she is forced to implement a Plan B so diabolical it threatens to plunge the entire star system into chaos.

With time running out, Cal must find a way to outmaneuver and outgun the galaxy's greatest killer before she murders his friends, butchers the Greyx, and buys the whole galaxy a one-way ticket to total annihilation.

Read Space Team: The Wrath of Vajazzle Now