Space Team: The Time Titan of Tomorrow Read online

  “I’m sure he gets the point,” said Loren.

  “Hmm? Oh. Right. Right,” said Cal. “So, Dravey, what’s it to be? Are you going to give us your old man, or do we have to do this the hard way?”

  Draven’s eyes blazed. “Let’s do it the hard way.”

  “Fair enough,” said Cal. “You totally asked for this.”

  He drove his elbow sharply into the midsection of the monster behind him. A spasm of pain shot through his arm. “Oh Christ. Totally just hit my funny bone,” he grimaced. “Ow. Ow. Ow. Ugh. It’s really tingling.”

  Draven shoved Cal against the bar and lunged at Loren, moving impossibly fast for someone of his size and age. He wrenched the blaster from Loren’s grip, squeezed it until it cracked, then tossed it across the room. At the same time, he caught her by the throat, then hoisted her into the air and slammed her backwards onto the floor, pinning her down.

  He looked back over his shoulder at Cal and drew his lips up, revealing all those many, many teeth. “Yes,” Draven drawled. “Let’s definitely do it the hard way.”

  “OK, let’s do this,” said Cal. Grabbing a bottle from the bar, he flipped it so he was holding it by the neck, then hit it against the edge of the bar top. It connected with a thunk, but didn’t smash like he’d hoped it would.

  Loren squirmed on the floor, Draven’s hand still on her throat. She choked out a cry for help as Draven’s jaw unhinged once again.

  “Alright, alright, I’m coming,” said Cal. He hit the bottle against the bar again. Again, it didn’t break.

  “Jesus, what is this made of?” he wondered, thudding it repeatedly against the angular wooden edge.

  Down on the floor, Loren brought a knee up sharply between Draven’s legs. This didn’t seem to bother him all that much, unlike when she shoved her thumbs into his eyes a moment later, which left much more of an impression. Twisting sharply, she rolled the temporarily blinded space vampire over and slammed him sideways onto the floor, breaking the grip on her throat.

  “Thanks for the assist,” she wheezed.

  Cal was studying the label of the bottle. He looked up and appeared surprised to see Loren straddling Draven, her hands tangled in his hair as she cracked his head repeatedly against the floor.

  “I swear, this thing is fonking unbreakable,” he said, but anything else he was about to add was knocked out of him by the impact of Sliske shoulder-barging him in the stomach. The momentum carried them both through the second door and out into the artificially lit plaza beyond.

  Cal felt briefly weightless as Sliske hoisted him into the air, then felt pain as he went crunch against a sidewalk made of polished black glass.

  He swung with the bottle, but Sliske caught it. It exploded in his tightening fist, spraying both men with purple-pink alcohol.

  “Great, now it breaks,” Cal groaned, then he leaned his head sideways to avoid a fist to the face. Sliske hissed as his knuckles met the sidewalk, but it was more through annoyance than pain.

  A vague circle of interested bystanders was forming around them – close enough to afford the onlookers a good view of what was happening, but far enough away to give them a decent head start if it looked like things might be about to turn ugly.

  The way Cal was pinned meant he couldn’t get a hand to Sliske’s head. He went for the nipples, instead, grabbing them through Sliske’s thin silk shirt and twisting like he was searching through several radio stations at once.

  Sliske reared back enough for Cal to mash a handful of broken glass into his face. This did nothing to help the monster’s temperament, but succeeded in forcing him back far enough for Cal to kick his way out from beneath him.

  The polished glass sidewalk was slippery with booze. Cal’s attempts to get back to his feet were short-lived and disastrous. His boots squeaked. His center of balance lurched. His chin hit the ground first, filling his head with light and noise.

  Through a gap in the growing audience, he could see the Currently Untitled docked on a landing pad just a couple of hundred feet ahead. The ship’s back end was pointed directly at him, the ramp standing open in case they had found themselves in the now all-too-familiar situation of having to make a hasty escape.

  A hand caught Cal by one of his feet. Yelping, he kicked and scrabbled on, pulling his foot free of the boot and this time managing to get himself all the way upright. He exploded through the crowd, hobbling and stumbling on his unbalanced footwear, only too aware of the furious figure already in hot pursuit.

  The ring of Gorfs gave Sliske a wide berth. A few of them, not wishing to get on his bad side, even cheered him on as he chased Cal down.

  Cal zig-zagged, dodging a grab that caught nothing but air. “Fonk off!” he cried. “We’re not here for you!”

  He swerved again, ran straight into the path of some kind of hovering sled, and barely staggered clear before it could hit him. He tried jumping onto the back of the thing as it passed, hoping to make his escape that way, but an electrical charge shot through him, launched him through the air, then deposited him unceremoniously onto the glass plaza.

  “Fonk. That backfired,” he wheezed, trying to ignore the smell of burning that now filled both his nostrils.

  He’d have liked to take a moment or two to catch his breath and extinguish any small fires that might be smoldering about his person, but Sliske was still coming. Cal’s muscles were taut and painful, but they got him up onto his feet and relented enough to let him lumber into something like a run.

  For all the good it did him. The Nostro boy was young and fast. He also had both shoes, which didn’t hurt, either. He closed quickly, until Cal could feel the brush of the vampire’s elongated fingertips grabbing at his back. The Untitled was just twenty feet ahead now, but he wasn’t close enough. He wasn’t going to make it.

  Time for his secret weapon.

  “Miz!” he hollered. “Miz, where the fonk are you?”

  A shape, large and hairy, streaked down the ramp and hurtled towards him. Cal flopped forward onto the ground and felt the whoosh of Mizette as she soared over his head.

  Sliske barely managed a, “What the f—?” before the furry missile hit him at chest height.

  For a mean and scary murderer-type, Sliske sure could scream. The space-vampire’s squeals rang out across the plaza as Cal grimaced and groaned his way back into a standing position, his joints giving little creaks and pops of protest.

  “Get it off! Get it off!”

  Cal placed both hands on his lower back and pushed his hips forward. He let out a little moan of pleasure. “Oh. Oh yeah, that’s the stuff.”

  “My face, not my face!”

  With his right hand, he took hold of his left elbow and pulled the arm across his chest. Something crunched in his shoulder. It wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t unpleasant, either, and he took an odd sort of satisfaction from it.

  “Help! Someone help me!”

  Cal ran his hands through his tousled hair, then cupped them in front of his mouth and blew into them, testing his breath. He smiled and waved at the crowd of bloated, toad-like Gorfs that had drifted in the direction of the Untitled.

  “Don’t worry, folks. Nothing to see here.”

  “It’s going to kill me!”

  “Except that, obviously,” Cal said, indicating the pinned and terrified Sliske. “That’s pretty exciting.”

  He put a hand on Mizette’s shoulder and squeezed lightly. Her densely-packed muscle was solid beneath the luxurious layer of fur.

  “Good job, Miz. I can take it from here,” he told her.

  Miz snarled and snapped her jaws a few times in Sliske’s face, then stood up and shrugged. “Fine. Whatever.”

  She eyeballed the watching Gorfs. “What are you weirdoes all staring at?” she demanded. “Take a holo, it’ll last longer.”

  This last part she said to a circle of retreating backs, the Gorfs having hastily about-turned and scurried off in an attempt to pretend they hadn’t been watching in the first p
lace.

  Cal, meanwhile, stepped closer to the scratched and shell-shocked Sliske, and flashed him one of his favorite grins. It was a particularly patronizing one he liked to use on Mech, although usually only when separated by a distance of several feet and, ideally, a number of large obstacles.

  “Well hey there, you!” Cal said. “What brings a nice guy like you to…?” He frowned and turned to Miz. “What’s this place called again?”

  “How should I know?” Miz tutted, slouching her weight onto one hip and crossing her arms.

  “That’s a funny name for a town!” said Cal, beaming at her. He waited for a reaction that didn’t come. “No? You’re right, it was terrible. Forget I said anything.”

  Cal turned his attention back to Sliske. “I’m going to cut to the chase here, big guy. We’re looking for your dad. We’ve heard he’s a real shizznod, and we’ve been asked to, you know, slap the cuffs on him and bring him to the boys downtown. Think you could help us out with that? You’d really be doing us a solid.”

  Sliske turned his head and spat on Cal’s feet.

  “Oh, come on. There was no need,” Cal protested. “That was right on my sock.” He wriggled his toes and grimaced. “I can actually feel that soaking through. I hope you’re happy.”

  He nudged Mizette. “Miz. Would you mind?”

  Miz sighed and rolled her eyes. “Ugh!” she exclaimed, dropping her arms to her sides. Her claws extended with a snikt. “Fine.”

  “No, wait, no!” Sliske shrieked, his face a mask of terror, his nostrils a bubble of snot.

  Cal motioned for Miz to wait. “Sorry. Were you about to tell us something?”

  Sliske swallowed. His dark eyes flitted from Cal to Miz and back again.

  “Just point,” Cal suggested. “Just point to a window in that big building of yours and you can tell people that you didn’t talk. Hell, we’ll back you up. We’ll say, ‘Who, Sliske? Didn’t say a word. Solid as a rock, that guy. Solid as a rock!’ What do you say?”

  Sliske’s face tightened. His body went rigid as he braced himself. “Do your worst!” he spat.

  “What? Fonk, no! Miz, don’t do your worst!” Cal said, catching her by the arm before she could lunge. “Do, like, your ninth worst. Eighth tops.”

  Miz’s tail drooped a little. “Seriously? Where’s the fun in that?” she asked.

  The ground shook.

  It wasn’t a big shake – barely a tremble, really – but there was definite movement. The Gorfs, who had been walking briskly away from Mizette, now slowed. A few of them stopped and looked down, then gasped and yelped as a second tremor shook the polished glass plaza. A few lights flickered in the windows of the buildings that lined the square. Somewhere not too far away, an alarm chirped.

  Cal frowned. “What’s that about?” he wondered aloud, then he looked down as he heard Sliske laugh. It was a low, hollow sort of laugh with very little actual mirth in it. It sounded desperate. Frantic, even. It was the laugh of a Kamikaze pilot who’d resigned himself to his fate. The empty, desperate guffaw of someone on the brink of losing everything, but who no longer cared.

  “Now you’ve done it,” he whispered. “Idiots.”

  The ground shook again. A crack appeared suddenly between Cal and Mizette, zig-zagging like forked lightning across the smooth, polished glass.

  “Uh…?” said Miz, as another fracture appeared a dozen or more feet away. This one was shaped like a spider’s web, only several hundred times larger. The whole plaza trembled when it appeared, and Sliske’s laughter shot up in both volume and pitch.

  “You wanted my father?” he said, the words coming out as a half-choked sob.

  Another impact shook the ground. There was the sound of a lot of glass being broken at once.

  Cal and Miz leaned back as a fist emerged from beneath the plaza. It rose like the head of an enormous sea serpent, twenty feet above the plaza, then thirty, then forty.

  Sliske’s eyes blazed. Tears rolled from them, then fell sideways down his cheeks and into his hair. “You’ve got him!”

  FOUR

  CAL WHISTLED QUIETLY as he watched the head appear through the hole in the plaza. It was fair to say that it was quite a large head. In fact, that would’ve been an understatement. It was easily the size of the Currently Untitled, but with none of the ship’s aesthetic qualities.

  A number of tusks – too many to count – sprouted like roots through its bottom jaw. It had one eye and one dry, shriveled hole where another should have gone. Its nose was sharp and crooked, and the few clumps of long gray hair it had were matted and tangled with grease.

  And it was large. Stupidly large. Cal felt that couldn’t really be emphasized enough.

  “Uh…” said Miz, for the second time that minute. Cal slowly nodded in agreement.

  “Yeah. Just what I was thinking. I mean, they said he was big, but I thought they meant, like, beefy, you know? Not… not…”

  He gestured up at the figure. The head, both arms, and part of a naked torso were all visible now as Old Man Nostro heaved himself out of the ground.

  “That,” Cal concluded. He puffed out his cheeks and put his hands on his hips. “I knew we should’ve brought the bigger handcuffs.”

  “Father! Father, down here!” Sliske called.

  The giant’s eye flicked down to the fallen space vampire. His vast, scarred lips curved into a sneer, then the eye turned away again.

  “Ooh, ouch. Burn,” said Cal. “Guess you’re not in the old man’s good books.”

  “How can you even be that thing’s kid, anyway?” Miz asked. “I mean, how did that happen?”

  Cal took a breath. “Well, see, when a daddy space giant and a mommy space giant love each other very much…”

  Miz shot him one of her more withering looks. “Size-wise, I meant.” She gestured to Sliske. “He’s, like, normal-sized or whatever. That thing’s pretty big.”

  “Pretty big? It’s like Godzilla’s creepy uncle,” said Cal. “But you raise a good point.”

  He looked down at Sliske. “Have you considered that you might be adopted? Just throwing that out there.”

  Miz’s question was answered a few seconds later, when Papa Nostro heaved his swollen, bloated gut out of the hole. Seven or eight humanoid figures protruded from his bare flesh like blisters. Their skin was red and waxy, their features at varying degrees of smoothness. One or two seemed to have been fashioned in quite remarkable detail, while some of the others were barely more than person-proportioned lumps of fatty flesh. The eyes of the more detailed ones were open, their faces trapped in a drawn-out silent scream.

  “Well that’s up there with the worst things I’ve ever seen,” Cal muttered. “I mean, it’s got to be top five, right?”

  Miz’s mouth was hanging open. She said nothing.

  “Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Cal said. “Got to be top five.”

  The Gorfs were, sensibly, nowhere to be seen. The only remnant of their presence was the distant chorus of their screaming as they fled off into the night, and even that was drowned out by the roar of shattering glass as Papa Nostro dragged the rest of his belly bulk above ground.

  “He’ll kill you. He’ll kill everyone!” Sliske bellowed.

  “Huh?” said Cal, cupping a hand to his ear. “Did you say he’d kill everyone, or kiss everyone?”

  “Kill,” Miz clarified. “He said ‘kill’.”

  “Oh,” said Cal, a little despondently. “Yeah. That figures.”

  The glass fractured as the giant’s hip bones pressed against it from beneath. A topiary of coarse pubic hair puff-balled through the hole from below. Cal turned his head aside, then shielded Miz’s eyes. “OK, we don’t want to see that,” he said.

  Sliske seized his chance. Springing to his feet, he hurled himself at Miz, catching her off-guard. His jaw unhinged. His long fingers tangled in her hair.

  The element of surprise bought him almost three full seconds of advantage, before Miz stabbed three claw
s through his shoulder, and amputated one of his hands at the wrist. He tried to scream, but his flapping jaw made it tricky.

  Cal winced. “Ooh. Ouch. That’s gotta sting.” He looked from Sliske to his enormous father, then back to Miz. “You OK here? I’m going to take down the big guy.”

  Miz’s brow furrowed. “How?”

  Cal jabbed a thumb back towards the untitled. “I’m going to blow him to bits with a spaceship.”

  “Oh. Oh, yeah. That should work,” Miz conceded.

  “Once you’ve finished with this guy, go check on the others, would you?”

  Miz groaned. “Why do I have to do everything?”

  “Thatta girl,” Cal said. He winked at her, then he turned and hurried up the ramp into the Currently Untitled and shouted at the ceiling. “Kevin! Fire up the thrusters. Or the boosters, or whatever the fonk we’re calling them this week.”

  There was no answer. Cal ran along the corridor and stopped outside the door to the bridge. “Kevin? You there, buddy?”

  “Hm? Oh, sorry, sir,” intoned a voice from somewhere on high. “I was miles away. Is everything alright?”

  “Yes and no,” said Cal. “We’ve found the guy we’re looking for.”

  “That is good news, sir.”

  “Well, you’d think so,” Cal said. “Except it turns out he’s kind of this horrifying giant monster thing, and now he’s about to kill us all.”

  “Are you quite sure, sir?” Kevin asked. “I’m checking the area, and I can’t seem to find any trace of…”

  The Untitled was jolted violently. A set of fingers closed across the front screen, blocking the view of the city outside.

  “Ah. No. Hang on. There he is,” said Kevin. “I was looking the wrong way.”

  Cal ran for his seat. In hindsight, he should’ve gone for Miz’s, which was closer, or one of the ‘guest chairs’ that lined the bulkhead wall and no-one ever sat on. He liked his chair, though. Besides, it was the only one that had direct control over the weapon systems, and he was very keen to shoot the horrifying giant monster thing in the face.

  His fingers had barely brushed against the fabric of the chair’s high back when the Untitled’s nose lifted. Or rather, was lifted. The whole ship lurched as it was jerked into the air, and everything that wasn’t fastened down – a list that was made up of Cal, two coffee cups and a half-eaten Twix – suddenly found themselves sliding toward the corridor.