Space Team: The Search for Splurt Read online

  SPACE TEAM

  THE SEARCH FOR SPLURT

  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

  A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

  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

  To the ever-growing ranks of Space Team fans. I love you all.

  Just, you know, not in that way.

  Also by Barry J. Hutchison

  The Bug

  Space Team

  Space Team: The Wrath of Vajazzle

  Space Team: The Holiday Special

  CHAPTER ONE

  Cal Carver sat on a tall stool at a low bar, drinking uncomfortably.

  He was alone, despite the crowds around him, and estimated he was roughly four-thirds of the way towards being drunk. Which said it all, really.

  The sign above the bar’s front door translated as Mishak’s Tavern, which, despite having no idea who or what ‘Mishak’ was, Cal had thought sounded quite quaint. Inside, however, it was anything but.

  Hundreds of weirdly misshapen aliens filled the place, flirting and fighting and – in the darker corners – doing other things that may or may not have started with ‘f’.

  They laughed, shouted, cheered and roared all around him. He narrowed his eyes and peered over the top of his glass at the mirror behind the bar, trying to take it all in without drawing any unwanted attention to himself.

  The bar’s clientele were like the assembled cast of all Cal’s more creative childhood nightmares. There were slug-like things with their eyes out on stalks, rough-skinned green things with nonsensical teeth, and something that looked like a cross between a spider and a fish, but with none of the good bits of either.

  There were things made of rock, things that oozed pus from their empty eye sockets, things that took on a ghostly shimmer in the shadows, and faded completely when the light hit them. All it needed, Cal thought, was his second-grade teacher dressed like a clown and he’d have a bad-dream full house.

  Voices rose over by one of the dimly-lit booths. There was the scream of blaster-fire, the splat of something wet hitting the wall, then the thud of someone heavy hitting the floor. A sarcastic cheer filled the place, like the kind a group of boorish drinkers might have made back on Earth when a bartender dropped a glass, and then everyone went back to the business of trying to talk more loudly than everyone else in the place.

  Cal brought his glass close to his mouth and tried to take a sip, but his arm was swaying and his aim was off and so he sipped at the air, instead. He didn’t seem to notice, and it didn’t stop him smacking his lips together and letting out a satisfied, “aaah.”

  With some effort, Cal turned and looked along the bar to his right. A reedy little yellow-skinned guy perched on a stool, nursing his own drink. He had bulbous white eyes that reminded Cal of Kermit the Frog, and a little curled mustache that positively screamed space-hipster.

  His clothing, on the other hand, said casual sportswear. It was as close to a tracksuit as Cal had seen this side of Earth’s atmosphere, and made of something that looked like the unholy offspring of velour and nylon. He wore a wide-peaked baseball cap low on his head, although Cal knew it wasn’t really a baseball cap, because they almost certainly didn’t have baseball in space. They probably had something else. Space-ball, or something.

  Cal spent a few seconds trying to devise the rules of Space-ball.

  That done, he sipped his drink – successfully this time - drew back his lips in utter revulsion at the taste, and turned his attention to far more pressing matters.

  “What the fonk is it with these stools?” he asked.

  Tracksuit-guy didn’t answer, or even glance Cal’s way.

  Cal leaned closer and raised his voice. “I said, what the fonk is it with these stools?” he repeated, shrugging heavily for added emphasis. “I mean… look.”

  Cal sat up straight and tried to reach for his drink on the bar. Even at full stretch, he couldn’t get his fingers to the glass. “See? What’s the point in that?”

  “I don’t know,” the yellow-skin replied.

  “Hmm?” said Cal, pushing his ear forward and closing one eye, in the hope that the reduction in visual input would magically boost his hearing. “What’d you say?”

  “Nothing. Forget it,” the guy said. He knocked back his drink in one gulp, shuddered slightly, then moved to get up.

  “Wait!” Cal slurred, sliding off his stool in a quite breathtakingly undignified way. He shuffled closer to the stranger, leaning on the bar for support. “I’m Cal.”

  He held a hand out for the little guy to shake. The alien looked at it, confused, then shook his head. “Whatever. Have a nice night.”

  “Hold on!” said Cal again. “Here, let me… Bartender!” He tried clicking his fingers, but they refused to work for some reason. He glared at them through his one open eye, hoping to force them into making the noise.

  A female alien with dark hair and faintly blue skin appeared behind the bar, as if from nowhere. “Yes?” she said, smiling too broadly for it to be natural. “How can I be of service?”

  “Aha! You can be of service by getting my new friend here another drink,” Cal replied.

  The yellow guy’s Kermit-eyes darted around the bar, looking for something. A way out, probably.

  “Look, I ain’t your friend, mister,” he said, his voice coming as a low hiss. He lifted his tracksuit top to reveal the handle of a knife tucked into the waistband of his pants. “So, if I were you, I’d back off. Unless you want this.”

  Cal shambled from foot to foot, trying to focus on the long handle. The bar’s dim lighting didn’t help. “Is that your penis?” Cal asked. “Are you… why would I want your penis? Jesus, is it supposed to be that color?” He raised his voice and looked around at the thronging masses in the bar. “Is there a doctor in the house? This man has something wrong with his--”

  “It’s a knife,” the skinny guy hissed. “OK? It’s a knife. So, you’d better back away right now, man.”

  Cal let out a very deliberate exhale. He looked down at the knife, then slowly raised his eyes. “I’m afraid I can’t do that… Narp, isn’t it?” he said, his voice now dangerously sober. “See, my friends and I would like to talk to you.”

  Narp’s ping-pong ball eyes widened. He stared at Cal for a handful of seconds, then turned and hurled himself into the crowd.

  “He’s running!” said the bartender.

  “Yes, thank you, Loren. I’d noticed,” replied Cal, throwing himself after the fleeing Narp. Behind him, Loren vaulted onto the bar, sending half a dozen glasses crashing to the floor. The same sarcastic cheer as before rose up around Cal as he shouldered his way through a flailing fores
t of alien arms, legs and a number of other largely unidentifiable appendages.

  “Excuse me, sorry, coming through!” Cal said, dodging and weaving through the tightly-packed throngs. Then, when that didn’t work, he tried a different approach. “Move! Out of the way! Space Police, clear the way!”

  This technique turned out to be marginally less effective than the first approach, with everyone in the bar squeezing just a little closer together to slow his progress even further.

  “OK, not Space Police. I hate those guys!”

  Loren, meanwhile, raced along the bar top, scattering glasses and bottles and little bowls of nuts. An eight-fingered hand made a grab for her ankle, but she skipped over it, paused briefly to shatter the wrist with one quick stamp, then pressed on.

  Narp was pulling ahead of Cal, but there was a knot of revelers in relaxed business wear gathered tightly near the door, ready to make a quick exit if needed. Narp collided with them, and they all went down in a tangle of limbs and a chorus of breaking glass.

  Muttering and cursing, Narp kicked himself back to his feet. Loren launched herself off the bar, aiming for his back, just as Cal stumbled through a gap between a hippo-like thing and a little green creature with pointy ears and a walking stick.

  Cal barely made it halfway through the sentence, “Hey, that guy looks like Yoda!” before Loren landed on him, knees first.

  It was Cal who hit the floor first, his fall cushioned somewhat by the terrified office-worker he landed on. Loren tucked her head and shoulder into the beginnings of a forward roll, but the rest of the business-dress brigade blocked her as they all fell over one another on their mad scramble to the exit.

  Several feet behind Cal, the creature whose wrist Loren had shattered produced a blaster pistol and began firing indiscriminately at the unsuspecting ceiling. Chunks of plaster and masonry rained down, and the bar erupted in a frenzy of anger and fear.

  “Come on, move,” Loren hissed, grabbing Cal by the arm and dragging him towards the door. They were carried on a wave of heaving bodies all trying to escape from the gunman.

  Cal caught a mercifully fleeting glimpse of the Yoda-a-like being squished beneath one of the hippo-thing’s feet, briefly thought, “Well, there goes my childhood,” then was slammed against the door frame before tumbling out onto the dark, rain swept street.

  Despite being on a different world, the city had seemed more ‘foreign’ than ‘alien’ to Cal. There were no flying cars, people on jetpacks, weirdly-lit pods or any of that stuff, just dirty buildings that gave a nod in the direction of looking futuristic, and a lot of noisy traffic.

  Cal had never been to Tokyo, but this place was how he thought some of the rougher parts of that city might look. Only, instead of millions of Japanese people, this one was populated entirely by the cast of a nightmarishly drug-fueled episode of The Muppets.

  “Up there!” shouted Loren, over the roaring and screaming of the fleeing crowds. Cal followed her finger and saw Narp scrabbling up a ladder leading to the roof of a nearby building. It was four or five floors high, and Narp was already climbing quickly past the second.

  “Oh Jesus,” Cal wheezed. The collision with Loren, then the door, had knocked most of the wind out of him, and an impromptu spot of ladder climbing didn’t exactly appeal. “Can’t we just shoot him?”

  “We need him alive,” said Loren, hurrying towards the ladder.

  “Then set your gun to stun mode,” Cal suggested, hobbling after her.

  “What are you talking about?” Loren bent her knees and sprang upwards, catching the bottom rung of the ladder. “It doesn’t have a stun mode.”

  Cal jumped, hands grasping for the ladder. He missed and slid down the wall. He squatted down low, then launched himself upwards. He hissed as he caught the ladder and his arms almost jerked out of their sockets. “It doesn’t have a stun mode? What sort of space gun doesn’t have a stun mode?”

  “All of them. None of them,” said Loren, gritting her teeth and hauling herself up the ladder. “That’s a confusingly-phrased question!”

  Cal’s arms burned as he clambered up the side of the building, leaving the worst of the city noise below. The rain lashed at him, prickling his skin with icy forks, and sticking his hair to his forehead. The wind, which apparently couldn’t decide which direction to blow in, battered him from every angle at once.

  Even the one positive about the whole experience – an excellent view of Loren’s leather-clad butt – was ruined by the slicks of rain in his eyes. He shook his head and managed to blink the worst of the water away just as he arrived, panting and heaving, at the top of the ladder.

  With a strangled, “Wah!” he toppled over the low wall that surrounded the rooftop, and fell heavily onto the roof itself. It was wide and perfectly flat, and as Cal clambered to his feet he saw Loren taking off after Narp, who was already more than halfway to the opposite side.

  Sucking it up, Cal threw himself into a run. The storm protested, whistling and howling as it tried to slap him down. He gritted his teeth, muttered enough swear words to almost make the censorship module of his translation chip go into meltdown, and pushed on.

  Wiping his eyes on his sleeve, Cal saw Narp throw himself off the edge. The little yellow guy bounded effortlessly across the gap between this roof and the next, paused briefly to glance over his shoulder, then broke into another run.

  Loren threw herself after him, her arms flailing in the wind as she tumbled across the gap. She hit the other roof awkwardly, stumbled to one knee, then was off again in pursuit.

  “You have got to be fonking kidding me,” Cal groaned, skidding to a stop at the rooftop’s edge. The gap was only five or six feet, and would have been easily doable with a run up. But the wall around the roof meant he’d have to make the leap from a standing start, and he was far less confident about that.

  He leaned over the edge, hoping to see a trailer filled with feathers or mattresses parked right below him, but it wasn’t to be. There wasn’t even a garbage dumpster someone had conveniently left open for just such an emergency.

  If he was jumping, he would be doing it without a safety net.

  Which meant he shouldn’t jump.

  Jumping was madness.

  He jumped.

  For a moment, there was no sound but the crashing of his heartbeat. Even the storm seemed to abate as Cal hurtled across the gap, arms outstretched, legs trailing behind him. And then…

  WHAM!

  His fingers found the edge of the roof, and the rest of him found the wall. He felt the last of the breath depart his lungs, and saw a tunnel of darkness closing around his vision. His fingers loosened, and he had to focus to make them hold on.

  Cal’s legs kicked limply on the rough stone wall as he fought to pull himself up. “Come on,” he wheezed. “Come on.”

  Sluggishly, awkwardly, he heaved himself up until he could hook one leg onto the roof. He clung there in that position for a moment, waiting for the world to stop spinning and the urge to vomit to pass. Then, with a guttural grunt of effort, he pulled himself the rest of the way onto the rooftop.

  Cal laughed. He couldn’t help it. The lack of breath meant it came out as a series of short hisses, but it was a laugh, all the same.

  “I made it,” he gasped, standing up. “I’m… I’m alive.”

  He fired a salute towards the rooftop opposite, turned on his heels, then screamed as the roof collapsed beneath him.

  Cal’s scream barely registered over the howling of the wind, but it was enough to make Loren look back. Shielding her eyes against the wind and rain, she scanned the rooftops. “Cal?” she cried, but her voice was stolen away by the storm. She stumbled back in the direction Cal should have been and tried again. “Cal, where are you?”

  Further away, and getting further every second, Narp hurled himself across another gap, bounded across another rooftop, then half-climbed, half-slid down another ladder.

  He dropped the last few feet into a narrow alleyway, gl
anced up to make sure no-one was following him, then allowed himself a smile. He had no idea who the people chasing him were, but they’d have to move quicker than that if they wanted to keep up.

  Adjusting the collar of his tracksuit, Narp turned towards the alley’s mouth. A figure made almost entirely of metal blocked his path.

  “Don’t even think about running, man,” warned the cyborg.

  “I’d listen to him,” said another voice from behind Narp. He whipped around in fright and found himself staring into the tooth-filled jaws of a powerfully-built figure who was covered from head to toe in thick, dark hair. “Because no matter how fast you might be, I am totally faster.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Narp hesitated, one hand on the handle of his apartment’s front door. He glanced back over his shoulder at Loren, who had her blaster pistol pressed against the small of his back.

  “Look,” he whispered. “You’re not… You guys aren’t going to hurt my mom, are you?”

  “Of course we ain’t gonna hurt your mom,” said Mech. His face – one of his few remaining organic parts scowled. “What do you think we are?”

  “I… I don’t know,” Narp admitted, shooting a nervous glance at the wolf-woman, Mizette. “I don’t know what this is about.”

  “Then why did you run?” Loren asked.

  “I thought you were the cops,” replied Narp.

  Loren frowned. “Why?”

  “Well, because he shouted, ‘Stop, Space Police,’” said Narp, nodding in Cal’s direction. Cal was nursing a cut above his left eye, and an ache that radiated upwards from his ass-bone.

  “Oh yeah, blame it on me, why don’t you?” said Cal. He winced. “Does your mom have any, like, Aspirin in the house?”

  Narp’s eyes flicked anxiously across the group. “Promise me you won’t hurt her.”

  “Just open the motherfonkin’ door, shizznod,” Mech barked. “We ain’t got all day.”

  Hesitantly, Narp pushed the door open and led them into a narrow hallway. The carpet was thin and threadbare in patches. It was a sickly green, with a pattern of zig-zags that gave the impression the floor was undulating quite unpleasantly beneath their feet.