Space Team: Sting of the Mustard Mines Read online

  Space Team: Sting of the Mustard Mines

  Barry J. Hutchison

  Copyright © 2018 by Barry J. Hutchison

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

  Published worldwide by Zertex Media Ltd.

  www.barryjhutchison.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

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  Oh! I Almost forgot…

  Also by Barry J. Hutchison

  One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  A thought hit him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Cal swallowed, sobbed, and grimaced all at once.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Well hurry up!” Loren barked.

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

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

  “Cal, hurry!” Loren hissed.

  “What other half?” Mech demanded.

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

  Mech glowered at him.

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

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

  “I see it!”

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

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

  “I need the other half!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “And that’s better?” asked Cal.

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

  “Well, yay, Loren,” said Cal.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Both,” said Loren.

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

  “I doubt it,” said Mech.

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

  Another torpedo slammed against the underside of the ship.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Look out!” Kevin belatedly warned again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Boorango! Buk-tuk-shung. Gra!”

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

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

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

  Loren glanced up. “Busy with what?”

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

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

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