Chapter Fourteen
Spatial Relations
From the moment Krackus left him in the medical bay, Smytus smelled a rat. Two rats.
He was tired of being made a fool of. He was tired of always being one step behind. He was tired of being tired. He was not going to let all that happened to him leave him unprepared again.
It did not take a detective to figure out that the lights going out was not a common occurrence. Even if Vexus and Krackus were not surprised, they were not exactly unsurprised. There was one thing that was different around here that Smytus knew of. Those fleshlings! It had been wrong of him to leave them alone in an area that had not been proven secure— a mistake he would resolve before Vexus could know.
Besides, he wanted revenge. Really, really badly!
Whatever devious plot those humans were hatching, he would be the viper to eat the hatchling before it grew wings to fly.
He marched for the engine room, got sidetracked once, and then, quick and literal, he backed up. He found the right door and grew grim with determination, but he did not hesitate. He walked right in expecting a pathetic sort trap.
Sure enough?
It was quiet when he entered. Too quiet. No Krackus. No humans. Yet he could sense the tension. He could taste it. He was a warrior, a commander. He stepped a pace or two into the room, all senses on alert. Then he heard a sound.
wwwmmmvvvvvvvvVVVVV!
He stopped. His eyes blinked in surprise at the flickering lights and then adjusting to the sudden brightness as the lights prevailed. Had Krackus fixed the lights? Smytus felt duped again, but he doubled down. A sound of movement came from behind one of the panels in the wall.
He strained his audio sensors to the frequency in which he knew those squishy things would not be able to hide their inner workings. Regardless, he was surprised when he ripped open the first appropriate panel. No one was there.
"Huh?"
The space behind the panels was the perfect size for little vermin. They must have scampered as into their own burrows at his approach.
He paused and listened again. How distinct their inner workings sounded now. Two in different locations, but if he moved they would hear the smallest shift of his built-on boot. Every move of his joints too would give him away. Even the movement of his optical sensors could be heard to them if he was close enough. He would be playing whack-a-mole at best in this situation. He was not built for stealth.
No matter. He knew what he was built for.
"Ah, humans!" he mocked as he straightened himself to his full height. "How kind of you to turn on the lights, now it will be easier to find you."
He pulled back another panel— ripped it clean off the hinges. It was pretty easy and it felt good to yank something. He wondered if it would be just as easy to pull open the medical cupboards and hope there was something better to patch him.
The pair of fleshy cores fluttered faster and those wind-bag air circulation systems grew heavier as Smytus, cold, hard, and well-built pulled open another panel for the classic villain door-buster cliché! One of his favorites.
He pulled another.
Then another.
Then another.
The fleshlings were not moving from their spots, but he would get to them when there was less places to hide. He ripped open one panel and had one of the little vermin: the female human. She was clever, squeezing behind the wires and equipment as far back as she could to make it harder for Smytus to grab her.
"Don't you dare!" she hissed like a cornered weasel. "If ya wreck this station, you'll be wreckin' the gravity one."
Smytus winced and lowered his sound reception. She was such an obnoxiously loud human.
"How can you be so sure?" asked Smytus. "Maybe it's the life-support system and you're pathetic little body will suffocate from lack of oxygen."
"Ya gunna dare it? I can just picture Vexus floppin' in anti-gravity like a drowning bumble bee."
"Ha, foolish human. Anti-gravity will not harm my queen."
"How 'bout you? You can't fly," huffed the female.
With dexterity Smytus reached his hand in through the wires to pluck her out. She ducked low under the wires and small pipes, but she had nowhere to go and there was nothing she could do to him. She would break her own fuel grinders if she tried to bite him.
"Hey, Smytus!"
Smytus spun around. That had not come from behind a panel.
His eyes went wide at the sudden appearance of the electric glare of the sear-spear in the hand of the leaping primitive. Smytus recoiled. It was a movement just enough to keep the human from his aim at his more vulnerable neck. It hit the shoulder piece of his apparel plating instead. Smytus let out a cry at the sting of the searing pulse. There was a rip and crack as reflex as he tore the cables with his other hand still lodged behind the panel.
The human called Tiff screeched from the sparks that flew. With a clang Smytus fell against a cooling unit. The other human cried out too.
A big tumbling tumult, and then everyone was left in a steaming heap. Moaning, Smytus shook his head to survey the damage, and the humans were already trying to escape past him. An emergency sound went off. He half expected the gravity to give way, but it didn't. Nor did any hiss convey that the oxygen was being sucked out or anything to that effect.
He reached out and grabbed the sear-spear still sizzling on the floor. Adjusting it, he swung his aim towards the first fleshling available.
Fruitless Tiff held out her hands against the sparking weapon.
"No, wait!" wailed Sheldon.
Smytus stopped, but he still held his weapon in front of the human. He recognized Tiff quite well. How mighty she had thought her puny self when she had the Pip Crystals she did not even understand under her command. Did she not think she had been so clever along with her strange fellow-model in mental design even if not so much exteriorly when they defeated Smytus? At that point they could have defeated anyone and yet to this day he did not know how XJ-9 had stopped them. Now?
Those huge eyes were painted black around the edges for who knew what cultural purpose. They served to accentuate her quivering terror now.
"What's the matter, fleshling?" Smytus asked Sheldon; though he gave him the briefest glance. "Don't' want to see her fried into a hotdog?"
The girl's eyes darted at Sheldon.
Sheldon stood his ground; though his eyes also were wide with fear and uncertainty.
However, as soon as he felt that despair in his captives, Smytus turned off the weapon. He had shown them who the destroyer of worlds was.
"No matter. It's not worth it to kill you that way," Smytus shrugged, "now that you have accepted your failure. What was it that I destroyed?"
"The… uh… escape pods," Sheldon admitted.
"Oh, you were trying to escape and warn XJ-9 of her imminent demise, I suppose."
"No, we were trying to escape before the self-destruct sequence goes off," Tiff declared.
"A likely story," said Smytus. "If there was a self-destruct sequence activated there would be a countdown, but there is no count down, so there was no self-destruct sequence initiated. I would know."
"Yeah, cuz you self-destructed yourself, right?" shrugged Tiff.
Smytus growled and grabbed her around the middle.
"Put me down!" cried the girl.
"There is no use struggling," said Smytus. Putting down the weapon he grabbed the boy too. "Now, you will tell me—"
"Krackus!" snapped the voice of Vexus over the loudspeaker.
Smytus slumped releasing an audible sigh as he lowered the humans so that they were dragging along the ground like dolls and he like some very unhappy ape.
"Krackus, report to the bridge now that you have repaired the lights. Smytus, you also must report if Krackus has completed repairs on you."
"Yes, my queen."
"Where is Krackus?"
"I don't know… yet."
"But you are both in the engine room's main area."
"Yes, and so are some unpleasant pests that apparently were taken aboard when Krackus brought me here."
"You mean the humans?"
"Yes."
"Deal with them. Find Krackus."
"I believe that the humans are responsible for Krackus' disappearance, my queen."
"Well, if Vexus knows that you're both in here," Sheldon piped, "doesn't that mean she's reading his unique bio—?"
"Then torture them until they tell you what happened," Vexus snapped.
"He's in there, alright!?" screamed Tiff pointing as well as she could to a certain panel in particular.
Smytus moved both humans into one hand.
"Ack!" they both cried as they squashed together.
He flung open the panel. "Yes, Krackus is here. Unconscious."
"Well, make him unconscious!" ordered Vexus. "I have no time for delays!"
Easier said than done. At first Smytus made to punch him, but he stopped and flicked the side of his head instead like flicking a loose light bulb. His mental processors made about the same sort of noise bouncing around the inside of his cranium, but his optical sensors did begin to flicker to life.
"Huh—! Whu—!" sputtered Krackus. "I don't know if you use H2O or CH2O—"
"Interstellar or planet bound?" asked Sheldon.
Tiff grimaced. "What?"
"Formaldehyde," muttered Krackus and went limp again, falling right onto Smytus' feet.
"What are you dead and need embalming?" demanded Tiff.
Smytus pushed him off with annoyance. "Enough of this foolishness!"
"What, but school isn't over yet!" cried Krackus awake again— in a sense.
"Oh, yes, it is!" said Smytus. "Vexus has just called us to the bridge, and you had better get your act together or there will be trouble for you."
"What did I tell you about that tone, Smytus!" Krackus warned leaping upright and he thrust a claw up at Smytus as though he might do something dangerous with it.
Smytus snorted. "What don't you ask Vexus about your own?"
"Cuz both you twits are her water boys," muttered Tiff.
There was an awkward pause. Sheldon's shifted uneasy eyes at Tiff, but Krackus and Smytus were frozen for a few seconds as they digested the insult. As the pause lasted a moment longer, Sheldon bit his lip.
"Say, Smytus," said Krackus as casual as meeting a coworker in a break room.
Smytus blinked at him in disbelief, though what he did not believe, Smytus was not positive himself.
"Yeah?" he asked.
"I know where we can put these little pests where they won't bother anyone."
"Where?" demanded Smytus.
Krackus swirled round to a spot on the floor and pulled out from it a secret cupboard compartment.
"In here. It's funny how I found this thing, actually. Heh, heh! I was first examining the wiring back here and then lost my wrench and when I found out that the floor had almost literally eaten it—"
Smytus rolled his eyes. "Yes, sounds riotously humorous. Let's just get back to Vexus. It looks like a secure enough spot to keep the humans from escaping, anyway.
"But wait!" wailed Sheldon. "What if we suffocate in there?"
"Then you should have thought twice about escaping your larger and therefore more airworthy cell in which I left you," said Smytus.
And he tossed them inside before slamming the compartment into the floor as hard as he could. After a few seconds of reflection he asked curiously, "Will they suffocate in there, Krackus?"
"How should I know?" Krackus demanded. "I haven't studied how well Humans breathe aside from needing oxygen, but the floor is pretty well ventilated, so they should be okay."
"Well ventilated enough that they can crawl around under the floor?" snapped Smytus.
"No. Why?"
"Hmph!" Smytus grumped as he went through the door.
Krackus followed.
#
Sheldon dared no breathe when first shoved inside, and more because he was constricted in movement than air constricted by how sealed it was. What made it worse was that he might have been able to shift about had he been the only human in the container. He was shoved so tight against Tiff that he felt like they were sardines in a can, but there was ventilation. It came from beneath the "floor", which was really more of a grate, and below it was that well-ventilated space Krackus had mentioned.
The air swirled in up around his ankles, and it afforded at least one sense of relief in the situation as he was already sweating in the cupboard-like space.
Tiff was first to let out a full breath. He could feel her whole body reacting to her respiratory action, and it was sure a lot closer to Tiff Crust than he had ever wanted to be.
"Now what, Brains?" she snarled. "This is the worst day ever!"
No one could have argued with that.
"Well…" Sheldon ventured. "We shouldn't yell at each other for one thing."
"Hmph!" growled Tiff shuddering with rage— unless it was really with full devastation, he thought.
Sheldon sure felt devastated.
#
"At last!" said Vexus before the doors had opened the whole way at her lackeys' advance. "No more distractions! We can commence with the directive."
"What directive is that?" asked Smytus stepping onto the bridge as he looked about him full of interest.
He and Krackus entered upon an observation deck that circled a cylindrical center colored in bold red and gold. A consul of so many controls one could only guess what they all did made up the outer rim of the circular observation deck. Over the consol looked out into a spherical space that would fit a decent army; though Victorum were a bit larger than most Cluster people, including Smytus who was already quite an impressive specimen in design with a wide enough berth for most races. Needless to say, it was hard to keep in mind that this was a garbage ship.
The bridge below looked miserably unutilized so empty. It was a heavy reminder that there was no Cluster army. Not for Commander Smytus to command. Not for Vexus to be worshiped by. Not for Krackus make a fool of himself in front of.
The feeling of loss was a burden he had not missed on his latest misadventures. He did not hold back his forlorn sigh.
"Why so low spirited, Smytus?" asked Vexus with a tease in her otherwise professional tone.
Smytus raised his brow, bowed his head a little, but said nothing as he knew the question was rhetorical.
"This is the day we return to glory," Vexus asserted.
She spread her arms out in full grandeur. Her voice echoed thunderously over the vacant bridge.
"You have so much confidence in one space-phenomenon?" asked Smytus.
"It is no mere phenomenon, Smytus; it is the phenomenon beyond the space between universes!"
"You mean it can disrupt space and time?" Smytus demanded.
"Hardly," grumbled Krackus in a fake cough that Vexus did not seem to notice. Then he said, "But it is impressive."
"Take us up, Krackus," Vexus ordered.
Krackus pushed a button. Up they went along the central cylinder to the sound a stoic military-styled chime. A circular door blossomed open above to a dome that looked straight up out into space. Right above them Smytus was surprised to see that they were very near a hot-blooded planetoid.
It was luminescent in a gruesome, bruise-colored way. Swirling gaseous vulgarity pulsed with a rhythmic beat. In some spots it was a translucent biological soup or a massive swamp bubble ready to burst. In its depths shapes like buggers looked trapped in mucus. Some of those buggers were metallic— haphazard sharp to blunt edges like great ruins. Then Smytus noticed one metal relic that he could see if he zoomed in his visual focus. He could just make out the Victorum insignia.
"The armada…" said Smytus in awe. "But… where is the beast?"
Vexus set loose a savage grin, but she stood imposing and composed more than any time she had been the recognized queen of Cluster Prime. She was a warrior in her own perilous way looking out upon the cosmic atrocity she had single-handedly wielded like a goddess from the inter-dimensional heavens, a spirit of doom sent out upon them in vengeance.
"You're looking at it!" Vexus declared.
Smytus staggered. "What?!"