Space Team: Sting of the Mustard Mines Read online

  “I’m going to ask you again. Who sent you?” he demanded.

  Cal’s reply was a gargled slur of sounds that roughly approximated the word, “Nobody!”

  The stranger shook him. “Who sent you?”

  “OK! I… tell you,” Cal managed to eject through his constricted windpipe. “I’ll tell you everything.”

  The stranger relaxed his grip enough that Cal was able to speak more clearly.

  “Tell me,” he demanded.

  “Fine. You win. Billy Ocean,” Cal said.

  The stranger hesitated for a moment.

  “Who?”

  “It was… It was Billy Ocean. Billy Ocean sent us,” Cal said. “I don’t know what you did to him, but that guy really fonking hates you.”

  The grip tightened again. “What are you talking about? I don’t know who that is.”

  Cal frowned. “You don’t?” he croaked. “Don’t tell me we’ve got the wrong guy again. Are you, uh, Harold Spaceman?”

  The stranger scowled behind his goggles. “What the hell are you talking about?” he barked.

  Cal felt those fingers constrict further around his throat, then there was a flurry of movement from the quicksand. Cal exhaled through his nose. “Oh, thank God,” he whispered, before something that looked like a cross between the Hound of the Baskervilles and the much larger and more aggressive cousin of the House of the Baskervilles crashed into the stranger, sending both him and Cal sprawling across the sand.

  The large dog-creature became something not unlike several species of octopus all trying to exist at the same point in space and time, and all coming off badly. The stranger kicked out, but one of the thing’s countless whipping tentacles pinned his limbs to the ground, then dropped the weight of its blobby green body on top of him, completely trapping him in place.

  “Way to go, buddy,” Cal said, rubbing his throat. “You really seized the element of surprise there, good job.”

  Splurt wobbled.

  “No, element of surprise,” Cal told him.

  Splurt wobbled again.

  “Well… I don’t know. What even is an elephant of surprise?” Cal asked, then he gave a shake of his head. “Forget it. It’s element. Trust me. Now, keep that shizznod there while I figure out what to do with him.”

  Cal turned, cricked his back, then shuffled over to the others, who were all still sprawled on the sand. “Salutations, Cal!” said Mech, his voice ringing out without him actually moving his mouth. “I appear to have found myself in rather a spot of difficulty! Your assistance would be immeasurably gratifying.”

  “But you’re always so much nicer like this,” Cal said. He sighed. “OK, fine. I’ll switch you back. Hold still.”

  “I do not exactly have a myriad of other choices in that regard,” Mech chimed. “Vis-à-vis staying still, I mean.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Bending, Cal twisted Mech’s dial back to center. The high-pitched whine became a much lower hum that quickly blurred into background noise. Mech’s metal frame twitched back into life and he sat up, glaring at the captive stranger.

  “Oh man, I am gonna have me some words with that guy,” he grunted.

  “You’re welcome,” said Cal, crossing to where Loren and Miz lay side-by-side. “Miz, honey, don’t move, OK?” he told her. “This won’t hurt.”

  He tugged on the metal disk that was stuck to the back of her neck. Electricity surged through them both.

  “Ow! Ow! No, my mistake. That hurt a lot,” Cal said, sucking on his fingers.

  “You should try it from my side sometime,” Miz groaned, smoke rising from the ends of her fur.

  “Mech, can you take this thing off?” Cal said. “I’ll get Loren.”

  “I’m thine,” Loren said. She flomped on the sand and managed to yank her mostly lifeless left arm out from beneath her.

  Cal hung back, giving her space to do whatever she was going to do next.

  Nothing much, it seemed.

  “Thine. Githe me a hand, then,” Loren said.

  Cal applauded.

  “Thunny,” Loren sighed. “Help me up.”

  Hooking an arm around her, Cal heaved Loren up onto her feet. She hopped unsteadily for a moment, tentatively placed her left foot on the ground, then gave Cal a slightly wobbly nod.

  “You sure?” Cal said.

  “I’m OK,” Loren said.

  Cal released his grip on her, but kept his hands raised, ready to catch her if she fell.

  “I’m fine,” she insisted. She opened and closed her mouth a few times, waggled her tongue, then gave a more confident nod. “I’m fine.”

  There was a crack and a fzzt as Mech crushed the metal disk that had been keeping Miz down. She sprang up with one swift pounce and bounded across the sand on all fours, tail extended, the fur around her collar all standing on end.

  “Miz, wait!” Cal called.

  A tentacle blocked her path, forcing her to skid to a stop. She peered down at the pinned stranger from the other side of the gooey barricade, her muzzle twisted in an angry snarl.

  “You don’t scare me, Greyx,” the man told her, and the even tone of his voice suggested he meant it.

  “Give me thirty seconds and I’ll totally change that,” Miz growled.

  Cal and Mech joined Miz, while Loren limped up behind them. Splurt raised his tentacle barrier, letting Cal pass.

  “So,” Cal said, looking the stranger up and down. “Comfy?”

  The stranger glared back through his goggles.

  “Who are you?” Cal asked.

  “You know damn well who I am.”

  Cal frowned. “Uh, no. No, I don’t think so. Mech?”

  “Nuh-uh,” said Mech, crossing his arms over his chest.

  Cal turned to Mizette. “Miz? Do you know who this guy is?”

  “No,” said Miz. She extended her claws to their full, terrifying reach. “But, like, I’m going to know him intimately in a minute.”

  Cal placed the back of his hand next to his mouth and spoke to the stranger in a stage-whisper. “I think you got on her bad side!”

  He turned to Loren just as she limped up, dragging her leg behind her. “Loren? Are you familiar with our friend here?”

  “No.”

  “No,” Cal agreed. He looked away, then looked back. “You’ve, uh, you’ve got some drool on your chin there.”

  Loren wiped her chin.

  “Not that side,” said Cal. “The side where your face is all fonked.”

  Loren’s eyebrows raised. Or one of them, at least. “What do you mean where my face is fonked? How is my face fonked?!”

  Mech turned to look. His usual scowl briefly became an expression of horror. “Oh, man!” he grimaced. “That is nasty.”

  “What’s wrong with my face?” Loren yelped.

  Cal raised his hands in a calming gesture. “Nothing! Nothing, it’s fine. I shouldn’t have said ‘fonked’. That was the wrong choice of words,” he said. “I just mean it’s kind of…”

  He placed a hand on his cheek and pulled down one side of his face, making himself look horribly disfigured. “Like that. Like you’ve had a stroke.” He caught Loren’s horrified expression and tried to head off her concerns. “But, you know, a sexy stroke. Like a hot, sexy… I like it, is the point I’m trying to make. It’s a good look. I hear plastic left too close to a radiator is really in this season.”

  Loren patted anxiously at the side of her face.

  “I’m kidding. It’s fine,” Cal said. “I’m sure that’ll all tighten right up in no time.”

  He turned back to the stranger. “So, I’ve done a survey, and it turns out that none of us have the faintest fonking clue who you are or why you attacked us.”

  Cal squatted just beyond the man’s maximum possible reach and offered him one of the most natural-looking of his many well-rehearsed smiles.

  “So, here’s what’s going to happen…” he began.

  “We’re going to turn all your inside parts
into outside parts,” Miz said. “Then feed them to you.”

  Cal raised a finger. “Well, not exactly where I was going, but sure. Definitely a possibility. We’re definitely not ruling that out, just putting it on the back burner for now. Right now, we’re going to try a different approach. We’re going to wipe the slate clean. We’re going to assume all this has been some hilarious misunderstanding that we’ll all have a good laugh about later, and we’re going to start afresh.”

  He glanced around at the others, then back to the stranger. “Nobody sent us. We’re only here because our pilot didn’t notice your enormous planet until we were one-sixteenth of a mile away from it.”

  “Way to go, Loren,” Mech muttered.

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “So, if you promise not to switch us off, or electrocute us, or punch us until we have a stroke…” He looked back at Loren and gave her a reassuring smile. “Sexy stroke. Then I’ll tell Splurt to let you go. OK?”

  The stranger said nothing.

  “It’s good for you that I’m wearing my trusting pants and am going to take your calculated indifference as a ‘yes,’” Cal said. He stood up, and Splurt sproinged back into a ball shape, all his many tentacles retracting back into his rapidly shrinking body.

  Cal held a hand out to the stranger. For a moment, it looked like he might accept it, but then he rolled backward and was suddenly up on his feet. He didn’t raise his fists or adopt any sort of fighting stance, but he had an air about him that suggested he could kick the living shizz out of them all without having to do either.

  “I’m Cal. Cal Carver,” Cal told him, keeping that smile fixed in place. “That’s Miz, Mech, and Loren. And this adorable little bamston is Splurt,” he said, as Splurt rolled up onto his shoulder. “We’re Space Team. You’ve probably heard of us.”

  The stranger shook his head. “No.” He looked them up and down. “Are you with the circus?”

  Cal deflated a little. “The circus? Seriously? No, we’re not with the circus.” He looked around at the others. “Wait, there’s a circus? Why have we never…? Forget it.”

  He directed his attention back to the stranger. “We saved the galaxy, like… what? Five times? Saved the whole fonking Universe at least twice. Space Team. Capital S, capital T. You must’ve heard of us. No?”

  “I tend not to keep up with the news,” the man said.

  “Ah. Then that explains it,” said Cal. “That’ll be why. I thought it was weird you not knowing about us. We’re kind of a big deal.”

  Cal raised his eyebrows expectantly. “And you are…?”

  “I’m not a big deal,” the stranger said.

  “Well, no. Obviously,” said Cal, gesturing at the rugged emptiness around them. “That pretty much goes without saying. I was asking your name.”

  “Oh.”

  The stranger regarded them all for a few long moments, then sighed. “Ah, what the hell?” he said, more to himself than to Cal. He pushed his goggles up onto his head, revealing two eyes that seemed to be narrowed in a state of permanent suspicion. “The name’s Konto Garr. And if you folks really did wind up here by accident, then you must be the unluckiest sons-of-bedges I’ve ever met.”

  “Yeah,” Mech sighed. “Yeah, that pretty much sums us up.”

  Three

  “Unlucky? Why are we unlucky?” Cal asked. “I mean, aside from being shot down, crashing, and having our ship sink into the ground?”

  He turned to Splurt before Konto could answer. “Did you find it, by the way? Did you see the ship?”

  Splurt wobbled.

  “What did he say?” asked Loren.

  “He said…”

  Cal wobbled.

  Loren closed her eyes for a full two seconds. “And what does that translate as?” she asked, once she’d opened them again.

  “No, he didn’t find the ship.”

  “Great,” said Mech. “That’s just fonking great.”

  “If it’s in the siltch, it’s gone,” Konto said.

  “The what?” asked Cal.

  “The siltch. The sand that pulled your ship down. We call it the siltch.”

  Cal nodded slowly. “Right. We could call it that, but I was thinking—hear me out—‘Space Quicksand,’” he said.

  “I don’t much care what you were thinking,” said Konto. “It’s siltch. And your ship is gone.”

  “What? No,” Cal snorted, like the very suggestion was laughable. “It can’t be gone.”

  “That stuff goes deep,” said Konto. He pulled his goggles back down over his eyes and took a small tin from his pocket. It was bashed and dented as if it had seen some hard times. “Your ship could be a mile down by now, and still sinking.”

  “Fonk,” said Loren. “What about Kevin?”

  Konto opened his tin, then paused. “You have someone on board the ship?”

  “Yes. No. Kind of,” said Cal. “He is the ship. I mean, I think.” Cal turned to Mech. “He is the ship, right?”

  “No.”

  “He’s kind of the ship,” Cal told Konto.

  “He ain’t the ship,” Mech insisted.

  Cal made a face that Mech couldn’t see, but which suggested that Konto should ignore him.

  “He’s kind of the ship,” Cal whispered.

  Konto reached into the tin and took out a clear capsule no bigger than a grain of rice. He tossed it all the way to the back of his throat, swallowed, then held the tin out to Cal. “Water?”

  Cal peered into the tin. There were a few hundred of the translucent grains nestled in the bottom. “Uh, I hate to tell you, but that’s not water,” he said. “I’ve seen water. It’s a liquid.”

  “It’s dehydrated water,” Konto said. “Take one, or the heat’ll kill you.”

  Cal hesitated. Konto withdrew the tin.

  “Or don’t. I don’t care.”

  “No, I’ll take one,” said Cal. He fumbled in the tin until his fingers finally managed to grasp one of the miniscule tiny capsules. “When in Rome, right?”

  He raised the capsule in a sort of toast, then placed it on his tongue.

  “So, how does—?”

  Half a gallon of water exploded from Cal’s mouth, fountained out through his nostrils, and flooded backward down his throat. He bent double, hacking, coughing, and spluttering, his eyes wet with tears, the rest of him just wet in general.

  “Jesus!” he ejected through a series of desperate gasps. “What the…? What the fonk happened there?”

  “You’re supposed to swallow it,” Konto explained. He offered the tin again. “Want to try again?”

  “Fonk, no,” said Cal, waving the tin away. He coughed some more, hiccupped loudly, then straightened up. “I’m fine,” he assured everyone, his voice higher than usual, like his throat was being squeezed. “Just took me by surprise, that’s all.”

  Konto offered the capsules to the others. “Anyone?”

  “Sure,” said Loren, taking one.

  Miz stepped in closer and eyeballed him. “Like I’d accept anything from you,” she growled. Despite this, she snatched three, tossed them all to the back of her throat, and swallowed. That done, she bared her teeth at Konto, then stepped back to join the others.

  “What were we talking about?” Cal asked.

  “Your ship being gone,” said Konto, snapping the tin shut and returning it to his pocket. He glanced up at the sky. One of the suns was half-hidden by the horizon, while the second was headed in the same direction. “But we have bigger problems right now.”

  “Of course we do,” said Mech, in the tone of someone who had come to expect that a bigger problem was already lurking just around the corner. “What is it this time?”

  Cal groaned. “Not space bears. Tell me it isn’t space bears.”

  “Slurrits.”

  Cal frowned. “Say what now?”

  “Slurrits.”

  “Yeah, I thought that’s what you said,” Cal replied. “But just repeating it doesn’t really clarify it any.”


  “Slurrits live down in the siltch,” Konto explained. “They come out at night to hunt and scavenge.”

  “Hunt and scavenge in, like, a nice way?” Cal asked.

  Konto shook his head. “Not if you’re the hunted or the scavenged.” He gestured to a spot a few hundred yards away that looked much the same as every other patch of empty ground surrounding it.

  “I’ve got a camp that way,” he said. “We should head there.”

  “And leave the ship?” said Loren. “We can’t leave the ship!”

  “She’s right,” Miz agreed. The way her nostrils flared suggested she didn’t enjoy being on Loren’s side. “If we lose the ship we’ll, like, be totally stuck on this shizzhole of a planet.”

  Cal nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “Mech, can you mark this spot so we can track our way back here?

  “Mark the spot?” Mech scowled.

  “Yeah,” said Cal. “Have you got an app for that? Like for keeping track of where you parked? You must have some way to mark this place.”

  Mech looked at the ground around him, shrugged, then he drew an arrow in the sand with his foot. “That good enough?”

  Cal sighed. “Well, I was hoping for something a little more high tech. But fonk it, it’ll do.” He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted toward the siltch. “Kevin, don’t worry, we’re coming for you. Eventually. We haven’t forgotten you, pal. Hold tight. Be strong, sweet prince. We all love you!”

  He looked around at the others. “Was that too much?”

  “Maybe a little,” said Loren.

  Konto set off past them, headed in the direction he’d pointed. “We should go. The Slurrits will be rising soon. We don’t want to be here when they do.”

  Cal and the others watched him go.

  “So, like, we’re not actually going with this guy, are we?” asked Miz.

  “It’s him or the Slurrits,” said Cal. “And I’ve heard some pretty nasty things about those guys.”

  “From him,” Mech pointed out.

  “True,” said Cal. “Yes, he might’ve kicked our asses and punched Loren’s face loose, but… I don’t know. I quite like him. He reminds me of someone. Don’t know who. But someone awesome.”

  He jumped in again before anyone could reply. “Side note: We can definitely say ‘ass’ now. How do we think that happened?”