7.5  ·  Down With the Ship

As Tam thrust their way out of the viscera and tore their fingers through the ship’s skin, like an infant xenomorph bursting through a chest cavity, they gave a sheepish wave to Al, who was on the other side, watching them emerge. His cigar smoke drifted upward, leaving his alarmed eyes looking through the haze.

“Welcome back,” said Tam, climbing to their feet and giving Al a nod. “Be glad you can’t smell this.”

Tam wiped away the fluids from their eyes and mouth, spitting away the cursed flavours, and gazed around the cramped corridor they were now standing in.

Just a little further.

“Well I’m just glad I was on the clean end of the bed when Beth was giving birth,” Al said. “I’d love to blow a few chunks, but there’s a more pressing issue, Sam.”

“Sorry, but hold that thought,” Tam said, and reached a hand into the gaping wound in the wall, grasping the hand that awaited, and pulled Sherri out, followed by Tim, who was holding her other arm for dear life and screaming.

At this, Al was unable to hold back, and leaned over, retching.

What, he’s never seen this much blood and gore before?

He was a prisoner of war, you know.

Then what’s the problem?

Sherri took clumps of biological tissue that were stuck to her face, and threw them to the ground with a full body shiver.

“How many more of these walls are there?” she whined. “I once leaped into a guy living in a sewer and it wasn’t even this bad.”

“That’s all of them, we think,” Tam replied.

John blinked into the room, and his eyes popped open at the scene. “My god, I just stepped into a horror movie.”

But if we replace one of our arms with a chainsaw, it could become an action movie.

Tam threw an envious look at the unsoiled Willy Wonka coat wrapped around John’s slim frame. Then they found their eyes wandering a little too much.

Mm. He’s cute in that.

Could you not?

Oh come on, it’s like the rules of the universe that if you ever meet your doppelgänger, you have to sleep together. It’s in the Bible.

I’m not gay. I’m not attracted to myself. And it’s not in the Bible.

Aren’t you? And I submit that the Holy Trinity is a three-way.

Thames, would you stop dividing our attention with these tangents?

Tam shook their head, and turned to Al, who was still looking a bit green in the face. “Al. You said there was a pressing issue?”

“Yeah, I just watched a guy die, and that’s not even the shocking part.” Al looked up through the hair of his eyebrows with serious eyes. “Quinn leaped, Sam.”

???

Tam had no idea how to process this information.

“He… did what now?”

Al began gesturing. “He was there one minute, looking all… deceased – not like I could check his pulse, but he sure didn’t look like he was breathing – and then… blue light, poof, gone!”

Tam exchanged an astonished look with John, before relaying the message to Sherri.

“Well…” said Tam, after a moment, “That’s certainly a… development. But we don’t know what to make of it. Let’s put that one on the back-burner, because we’re running out of time here.”

Tam gestured to the group. “Keep on your toes.”

They crept, single file, down the warm, glistening pink passageway, dodging drips of some form of mucous.

“I don’t want to know what this tunnel is for,” Tim commented from the back of the line.

“I’m still trying to dig out gunk from my eye socket,” Sherri moaned.

“Don’t worry,” John said, “when you finish here, I’ll retrieve you, and you’ll leave all of this behind. Sound good?”

Sherri was silent as they continued trudging through the goop.

“What’s wrong?” John probed.

“I’m just gonna miss Uncle Sam. That’s all.”

I’ll miss you too.

Tam felt Sherri’s hand take theirs from behind.

“Sam… when you left before, I felt such a sense of loss. Even though I hadn’t seen you in twenty years, I…”

Isn’t this the same person who held you at gunpoint and chained you up?

How many people who you loved as family have you chained up or held at gunpoint?

Touché.

If you don’t mind, I need a moment.

Sam squeezed her hand. “Sherri, I promise you I’ll find some way to see you again after all this is over. All of you.”

He looked ahead at Al. “I don’t know how, but I will.”

“So you’re not coming home?” Al asked gravely.

“I’m trusting my gut on this one, Al,” he said with a smile. “This new… awareness… wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t meant to keep going, even when the Project is gone. I don’t need Ziggy’s help now.”

That’s not strictly true, but I’m not going to get into the weeds on being connected to her through spacetime.

Al gave him a forlorn look. “Really gonna miss you, pal.”

Sam felt tears welling in his eyes. “Y-yeah. Look, save it for when we’re done. I uh… need to focus.”

We need to focus.

As they rounded a corner, Tam pulled open a four foot grate at the end of the tunnel, before crouching and turning around, finger at their lips, and handing the blaster to Sherri.

“Wait ’til we mention the Commander, count to ten, then drop down after us,” they whispered, before flinging themselves feet-first into the grate, their mucous-slathered shoes making contact with a Kromagg worker, who had been hunched over a large engine access panel.

The worker fell flat onto the hard, mercifully inorganic, floor, and Tam stepped off him, glancing casually at the handful of other workers who were staring at the fluid-covered man who’d just been deposited into the room through a slimy canal.

“Uh, hey fellas,” they said. “Listen, we recommend you flee for your lives, because we suspect this ship may explode within the next nine-ish minutes. Just a fair warning.”

The workers glanced among themselves for a moment, before one of them raised a blaster, aiming it at Tam. They raised their hands calmly, as John and Al blinked into the room on either side of them, watching them with curiosity.

“A guy falls out of your… mucous… ducts… and your first thought is ‘kill it?’ You guys are working on quantum probability translocation, aren’t you? Be smart about this. Don’t give us physicists a bad name.”

“How did you get in here?” barked the man with the gun.

Tam pointed at the grate. “Came through there.”

“You know what I meant!”

“You weren’t very specific. Did you mean in the military base, in the hangar, or in the ship?”

The Kromagg seemed to hesitate as he, too, tried to figure out what he meant.

“Actually, we’re here at the behest of Commander Kerrick. But we had to sneak in because he didn’t want anyone knowing he needed the help of a human.”

“I can tell you’re lying without having to read your mind. And why do you keep saying ‘we?’ Who else is–”

At that moment, Sherri plummeted out of the duct, landing in a crouched position as she held two blasters out at the workers.

Tam placed a hand to her back and ushered her forward, as Tim fell from the grate, landing much less gracefully.

“That answer your question?” asked Tam, as they looked up to the opening. “Wanna stick around and see how many more are gonna plop outta there?”

At that, the room cleared out, with the gun-toting worker bringing up the rear.

“Don’t forget to get out of the blast range,” Tam called to the fleeing Kromaggs. “And there’s a guy tied up in the storage closet; he might want to leave, too.”

Tam flashed a wide grin at Sherri, who seemed to be relaxing more around the dual leaper since seeing them show mercy for the second time.

“We agreed that murder is probably wrong,” they explained, before excitedly crossing the room to a small panel on the wall.

They popped it open, revealing Nexus Quinn’s timer, set into a panel, with wires protruding from its sides.

“They were so lazy they just adapted the existing timer,” laughed Tam.

Sherri eyed it with a furrowed brow. “There’s no time display on it.”

Tam nodded as they rummaged through one of the abandoned toolboxes in the room. “Yeah, seems the name ‘timer’ is antiquated for Nexus Quinn. He figured out how to use it at will. Meaning…”

Tam returned to the panel with a screwdriver, and began unfastening the timer from its place.

“We can use it to send Tim and Janet away,” said John, “while I retrieve Sherri.”

He stared a moment at Tam. “And you… I don’t know what you’re gonna do.”

“We’re gonna leap out of here, of course.”

John’s eyebrows met. “Of… course. The… both of you.”

Tam jimmied the screwdriver under the timer, leveraging it so it finally popped out of its recess. They inspected the wires, then flipped it and opened the back up.

“While we’re doing this,” they said, turning an eye to John, “would you walk Tim and Sherri through looping the power cells into the exhaust cores? We’re gonna go out with a fireworks show, just for funsies.”

“But that’ll only explode once the ship is powered up,” John said.

Tam nodded. “So we’ll power it up after you guys are out of here.”

“And you?”

“We’ll leap out before the kaboom. Don’t worry about it.”

Al, who had been quietly taking in the scene, finally piped up.

“How do you know that’s what’s gonna happen, Sam? Ziggy doesn’t even know.”

Tam looked at him with a sage calm. “We’re gonna make it out. And in the off chance we don’t… at least we saved a few people along the way.”

That’s the spirit.

No strings attached, right? Still, I can’t deny that my decision to join you was informed by a strong desire to stop being tortured.

Good enough.

As John assisted Sherri, and Sherri assisted Tim, Tam disconnected the external wires in the timer, and set the coordinates for Earth Prime.

Gotta admit it, Nexus Quinn did have an intellectual edge on the one we know. This timer is a thing of beauty. Pity it was about to bring ruin to the multiverse.

“Who’s ready to slide out of this dump?” they called out, and Sherri looked up.

“Just a sec, we’re almost done.”

John and Al were now standing back together, each looking at their handlinks with concerned expressions.

Tam sidled up to them. “Whatcha guys doing? Tweeting?”

Stop confusing them with future stuff.

Ignoring their puzzled faces, Tam crossed their arms, leaning to see the two devices, one of which looked a lot like a thick smart phone with a deep crack down the middle, and the other that looked like it could be a baby’s chew toy if it were made of silicone.

“Something’s interfering with Higgins,” John mumbled, in a low enough voice that Sherri couldn’t hear.

“And Ziggy,” added Al, slamming his hand on the side of the whining block as it flashed with red and yellow.

Interfering?

“What do you mean?” asked Tam, glancing at the readouts scanning past the displays.

We’ve never seen anything like that before.

Tam closed their eyes for a moment, as Sam accessed that new part of himself that allowed him to float above time. He listened, and searched. He traversed along his own lifetime, trying to understand.

And he felt a hand touch his shoulder; strong, and firm, but one that held some familiarity. And he was pushed away, back into his body, and combined back into Thames like two rivers meeting.

As Tam opened their eyes, one short message bounced around in their mind:

Trust me.