Space Team: The Guns of Nana Joan Read online

  SPACE TEAM

  THE GUNS OF NANA JOAN

  By

  Barry J. Hutchison

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Copyright © 2017 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 Carrie Fisher

  Also by Barry J. Hutchison

  The Bug

  Space Team

  Space Team: The Wrath of Vajazzle

  Space Team: The Search for Splurt

  Space Team: Song of the Space Siren

  Space Team: The Holiday Special

  CHAPTER ONE

  Commander Junta of the Symmorium stood on the secondary bridge of his Thresher battleship, staring down the approaching Zertex fighter.

  In the four years he had spent in command of the ship, this was only the third time he had ever set foot on the secondary bridge. The first had been during his induction tour. The second time, he’d been playing hide and seek with his daughter, Tyrra.

  His daughter, Tyrra, who had been sucked into the vacuum of space along with most of his crew, when the primary bridge had exploded.

  The shark-like Symmorium, with their tough gray hide and dark, glassy eyes, were a warrior race, first and foremost. Junta was ready for death. He had always been ready for death – both his own, and that of his crew.

  But not her. Not his little girl.

  Still, he would join her, soon enough.

  “What do we have?” Junta grunted, as the first Zertex attack ship was joined by another. The two of them had struck out of nowhere, ignored all attempts to hail them, and rejected Junta’s attempts to surrender.

  On the deck behind him, Assistant Communications Officer Glorian – the only remaining crew member - rummaged in a spaghetti of sparking wires, trying to restore power to shields or weapons or comms, or anything useful. There was no urgency to her attempts, though. Why rush a lost cause?

  She hadn’t had the heart to tell the commander that she had absolutely no idea what she was supposed to be doing with the wires. On a normal day, her job largely involved her pressing one of three clearly marked buttons, and very occasionally speaking into a microphone. Rerouting power through a damaged secondary systems console didn’t even fall within spitting distance of her skillset, but the commander had asked so nicely that she’d felt compelled to give it a go.

  She spliced two wires together, just in case. They let out a brief fzzt and a tiny puff of smoke that somehow managed to make the whole situation feel just a tiny bit more depressing than it already was.

  “We have nothing, Commander.”

  The commander nodded, as if this had only confirmed what he already knew. He folded his hands neatly behind his back, puffed out his chest, and watched the Zertex ships’ weapons flash.

  “Please,” he said, the distant glow of two incoming torpedoes reflecting in his glassy eyes. “Call me Junta.”

  Glorian stood. She wanted to salute, but her hands were shaking too badly. She wanted to say something noble and memorable. Something befitting the situation. But her words betrayed her.

  “I am afraid.”

  The torpedoes streaked across open space, closing fast. Any moment now. Any moment.

  “Between you and I, Glorian,” said Junta. “Me, too.”

  From nowhere, the dark hull of a ship banked up between the Thresher and the torpedoes. Its shields flared as the energy projectiles hammered into it, and then the ship was gone, streaking upwards into a spinning climb.

  Glorian’s jaw dropped, revealing all her many teeth. “Who…? Who was that?” she whispered.

  Junta stepped closer to the viewscreen and ducked, peering up at the mystery ship as it looped and launched itself towards the Zertex ships on an intercept course.

  “I do not know,” Junta admitted. He smiled, grimly. “But, whoever they are, I hope they know what they are doing.”

  * * *

  Cal Carver flailed around in his chair, his face buried in a paper bag that was filling at quite an alarming rate with vomit. The short, sudden burst of light speed, followed by some fonking insane maneuvering and the jarring impact of two photon torpedoes had played havoc with his inner ear, and his digestive system was currently paying a pretty hefty price.

  “Incoming transmission from Zertex fighters,” announced a dry, upper-class British voice from somewhere up near the ceiling. “How should I respond?”

  Cal lifted his eyes to roughly where he guessed the voice of the ship’s artificial intelligence, K-Seven-Zero Dash Nine-Three-Three-Zero-Seven Dash Zeta – or ‘Kevin’, if time wasn’t on your side - was coming from.

  “Tell them to…” He buried his face in the bag. Hruuuuueeerk!

  “I see. Very good, sir,” said Kevin. “How are you spelling that, in case anyone should ask?”

  “Tell them to go fonk themselves,” barked the towering cyborg, Mech. He stood before the ship’s large viewscreen, his metal fingers darting across a touch screen panel below it. “In fact, don’t bother, I’ll tell them myself.”

  He stepped back from the screen, made a hand gesture which Cal interpreted as something quite rude, then held the pose until the screen flashed and clicked.

  “They’re firing cannons, hold on!” warned Loren, leaning left in the pilot seat and throwing her weight onto the controls. The ship rolled into a tight corkscrew spin as crackling red energy beams scorched the void around them.

  “Oh, Jesus! Why do you always do this to me?” Cal spluttered, before his insides noisily tried to become his outsides once again.

  “Mizette, any response from the Symmorium?” Loren barked, slamming the stick right and pulling out of the spiral.

  Slouched in her chair, Miz picked a piece of lint from her fur, rolled it between two claws, then flicked it away before shrugging her broad shoulders. “How should I know?”

  The ship dropped into a plunging dive, and Cal briefly remembered how much he’d always hated rollercoasters, before everything suddenly banked upwards again, compacting his testicles against the seat.

  “Because you’re supposed to be trying to hail them,” Loren snapped.

  Miz tutted. “Well, no-one told me.”

  “Yes we did!” Loren yelped. She pushed, pulled and twisted the controls, sending the ship into a sequence of moves Cal couldn’t even begin to describe, and never wanted to experience again. The stars and ships on the viewscreen tilted and lurched. His stomach flipped and jiggled. His testicles, for their part, didn’t do very much. Although, to be honest, after that last maneuver he’d be surprised if they ever did anything noteworthy again.

  As Cal heaved the last of his stomach contents into the bag, it occurred to him that it had, all things considered, been a pretty rough day. Or, not day, exactly
, because they didn’t have days in space, so Mech kept telling him, anyway. A pretty rough day-length period of time, then.

  He had started it dressed as a lizard, and ended it battling a city-sized spider that breathed fire. Many, many things had gone wrong between those two events, the most notable of which being his own violent death.

  It hadn’t been all bad, of course. He’d discovered they had a machine on board that made banoffee pie – albeit after it literally tortured the recipe out of him - and the crew had all earned a share in a two-million credit fortune.

  He was also no longer dead, which was a bonus.

  But then, just as they’d been setting off across the nebula to escape the brewing Zertex vs Symmorium war, they’d picked up Junta’s distress call. Much as they were all against the idea of getting dragged into a galaxy-shaking punch-up, Cal had been even more against the idea of leaving Commander Junta to die. Since then, his empty, quivering stomach and pancaked testicles had both given him pause to reconsider, but he was still reasonably confident they were doing the right thing.

  “Fine. I’ve called them on the comm-thing, or whatever,” Miz said. She scowled mostly at Loren, but partly at the universe in general. “Happy now?”

  “Have they answered?” Mech asked, not looking back. Miz sat a little more upright in her seat. Her voice lost its surly edge.

  “Doesn’t look like it. Want me to try them again?”

  “Do it!” said the cyborg.

  Miz shuddered. “Man, I love it when you take charge,” she told him, then she rolled a purring sound between her enormous teeth, before turning her attention to the control panel beside her.

  “A scan of the Symmorium Thresher suggests a reply is unlikely to be incoming any time soon,” Kevin announced. “All systems are down. Only minimal life support is in place. And, if I may be so bold, their kitchen is a bloody shambles.”

  “How many alive?” Loren asked, flipping the ship upside-down as a barrage of cannon-fire ripped past.

  “Eighty.”

  Cal looked up from his sack of sick. “Eighty?”

  There was a moment’s hesitation from Kevin. “No, wait. Two. Sorry, I was thinking of something else. Oh.”

  “Oh?” said Cal. “What? What’s ‘oh’?”

  “Incoming transmission sir, relayed via one of the Zertex fighters. It’s from the president.”

  “Sinclair?” said Cal. “Shizz. I hoped we could just duck in and out of this without anyone noticing.”

  He looked to the others for guidance. “Any suggestions? Do we talk to him?”

  “No,” said Mech.

  Loren considered it for a moment, then shook her head. “No.”

  Cal turned his chair to look at Mizette. She shrugged petulantly. “Whatever. How should I know?”

  “Yeah, probably best if we don’t answer it, Kevin,” said Cal, turning back to the front. The tanned, square-jawed face of President Hayel Sinclair filled one third of the screen. “Oh, you already did.”

  “My apologies, sir,” Kevin chimed. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  “Mr Carver,” said Sinclair in a voice that was so full of warmth Cal almost forgot all the times Sinclair had tried to imprison or kill him. “Fancy seeing you here.”

  “Hayel Sinclair,” Cal said, in a way that positively cried out for a Nazi salute. “Always a pleasure. Except, you know, when it isn’t. Which is always, because you’re a mass-murdering psychopath.” He smiled. “So. How’ve you been?”

  “Better than you, it seems,” said Sinclair, his eyes flitting down to the bag clutched in Cal’s lap. “Space travel still not agreeing with you?”

  Cal rolled the top of the bag closed. “What, this?” he said. “This is just… onions.”

  On screen, Sinclair blinked. “Sorry?”

  Cal had no idea what had possessed him to say the bag contained onions. It very clearly did not contain onions. A thick, lumpy onion puree, perhaps, but not onions in their native, regular form. Still, on the upside, Cal was almost certainly the only person involved in the conversation who had any idea what the fonk an onion actually was, so he reckoned he could bluff it.

  “Onions,” he said. He gave the bag a shake, as if that somehow confirmed everything, then set it on the floor beside his chair. “Now, sorry, we’re pretty busy here. What was it you wanted?”

  Sinclair smiled, showing off his perfect teeth. “Short term, I want you to withdraw from this encounter and allow my fighters to continue their engagement with the Symmorium Thresher,” he said. “Longer term, I want to have your head on a spike, and use your hands as back scratchers.” He shrugged. “But let’s focus on the immediate issue, for now.”

  He leaned closer to the camera, so his face filled the whole right third of the viewscreen. The movement cast most of his features into shadow, but his eyes seemed to blaze in the darkness.

  “You have intervened in an officially sanctioned wartime confrontation between Zertex and its enemy. Failure to withdraw immediately will only serve to draw you deeper into the conflict, and result in a redoubling of my efforts to detain you, torture you, then kill you.”

  He leaned back, his smile returning. “You don’t want to get involved in this, Mr Carver. Trust me.”

  Cal drummed his fingers on his armrest, staring blankly into space. When he realized Sinclair had stopped talking, his eyes widened and he sat up straight. “Sorry, were you talking to me? I was miles away, thinking about how awesome this ship is that we stole off you. You were saying something about back scratchers?”

  Sinclair’s smile dropped away, revealing the true expression behind it. He opened his mouth to speak, but Cal reacted before the president could utter another word.

  “Mech, mute this shizznod.”

  “Done.”

  Sinclair ranted for a few seconds, before realizing what had happened. Cal returned the president’s smile from earlier, plus interest.

  “See, the thing is, Hayel, we’re already involved in this, since you used footage from our ship to set up the Symmorium and justify going to war with them,” he said. “We know what really happened – you blew up that moon, not them, and you used us to do it – so, unless you want us to tell everyone exactly what you’ve been up to, I’m going to have to ask you to back off.”

  On screen, Sinclair laughed in complete silence. It went on for quite a long time. Cal signaled for Mech to cut the mic feed from their ship.

  “Guess he doesn’t believe us,” said Cal.

  “Oh, he believes us,” said Loren. “He just knows no-one will listen. Who’s going to take the word of a group of on-the-run criminals over the galactic government?”

  Cal thought for a moment. “Crazy conspiracy theorists?”

  “Great,” said Mech. “And that helps us how, exactly?”

  “Incoming torpedoes,” announced Kevin.

  “Son of a bedge,” Cal spat. He gave Sinclair the finger, then the feed snapped off, clearing the right side of the viewscreen in time for everyone to see an explosive ball of energy hurtling towards them.

  “Brace!” Loren warned. Cal gripped his arm rests as the torpedo detonated against the ship’s shields, rattling his skeleton and making his bag of barf jiggle dangerously on the floor beside him.

  A second torpedo struck somewhere off-screen, and the lights aboard the Currently Untitled flickered.

  “I mean, did you even try to dodge those?” Miz barked.

  “They appear to be readying more torpedoes, sir,” Kevin intoned. “Would you like me to retaliate?”

  “What’s the alternative?” Cal asked.

  “We get blown to bits.”

  “Then yes,” said Cal. “Retaliate. Do that one. Jesus, why did you even have to ask? Fire torpedoes.”

  “Missiles, sir,” Kevin corrected. “We don’t have torpedoes, we have missiles.”

  “Whatever! Just fonking do it!”

  “Very good, sir.”

  There was a moment of silence, followed by t
wo blinding flashes at either edge of the screen.

  “All done, sir.”

  Cal frowned. “What? That’s it? You blew them up?”

  “Indeed.”

  “They ain’t showing on the scanners,” Mech confirmed. “Looks like they’re dust.”

  “Oh,” said Cal. He shifted in his chair, making the leather creak. “I mean, where’s the fun in that? When I did the guns, it was far more seat-of-your-pants, high adrenaline, ‘fonk, we’re probably all going to die’ space adventure. Now? Boom. Done.” He sighed. “I miss the old days.”

  “I could deliberately miss next time, if you like, sir?” Kevin suggested.

  Cal considered this. “No, it’s not the same,” he decided. “Well, I mean, maybe just once.” He slapped his hands on his thighs. “Anyway, Loren, bring us in close to the Symmorium ship.”

  “Without crashing into it,” Miz added.

  “Ideally, yes, without crashing into it,” Cal agreed. “I can’t wait to see the look on Junta’s big shark face.”

  * * *

  Cal stood outside the airlock door, waving at the two Symmorium through the little porthole window. The smaller of the two – the one who wasn’t Commander Junta – waved back, until Junta shot her a sideways look and she snapped her arm down to her side.

  “There he is!” beamed Cal, as the inner airlock door slid aside and Junta stepped through. He wasn’t much taller than Cal, but his width, mannerisms, and the fact he was essentially a man-shaped walking shark all made it very clear which of them would emerge victorious from a fight.

  Fortunately, Cal had no intention of fighting.

  “C’mere, you,” he said, stepping in and giving Junta a hug. The Symmorium reacted by not reacting at all. He simply stood, looking impatient, until the ordeal was over.

  Cal pulled away and beckoned the other Symmorium over. “Don’t think you’re getting away, either, mister!”

  “Miss,” said Glorian, her gray skin blushing ever so slightly.

  “Wow, seriously?” said Cal. He recovered quickly. “I mean, get in here, you!”

  He hugged her. To everyone’s surprise, but mostly her own, she hugged him back.