Foston Slacks - Time's Flies

32

The monster baby blew air bubbles against the glass of reception area door, coating it with a glob of dribble that trickled down the glass at a slow, sickening rate. Hiding behind Foston, Clara dearly hoped that the door would hold the strangely cute creature. Even Half-ne only poked one finger above Foston's shoulder and Clara wondered how the robot hand could see anything at all, much less with only one of its fingers.

Foston, however, didn't seem bothered in the slightest. Cooing, tickling the glass, making googly eyes and making baby talk noises at the creature beyond. Cute it may be, but Clara felt a kind of revulsion she hadn't felt since that one time where her date turned out to have more hair than a gorilla underneath his smart looking clothes. Sweaty hair. She retched at the mere flash of a memory.

"Right. So, I'm going to kill it. Will this death pen kill it?" She pulled the silver and gold death pen from her lovely new jacket, pressing the red button for the kill setting.

"You can't kill it!" Foston sighed over his shoulder. "It's a baby!"

"It's an evil mutant baby with teeth longer than my hand. Of course I can kill it." Clara had never even considered motherhood. After seeing this thing, the very thought about the tiniest inkling of the merest possibility of child-bearing wasn't just off the table, it had been thrown in the bin, sent to a tip and been used in an electricity producing incinerator.

"Or we could just wait for the station to finish attaching engines to the escape pod, fly back to Earth and find another Breach to somewhere else." Foston started playing peek-a-boo with the monster baby. Hiding below the window, then popping up like a jack-in-a-box. The baby laughed so much, it lacerated its own face with its teeth.

"No. I just want to kill it." Cuteness, unless in shoes, did nothing to sway her feelings.

"You really are an exceptionally violent person, you know that?" Foston turned to her, scowling. This made the baby scratch at the window, leaving gouges on the surface.

"Yes. Now, will this death pen kill it?" She rocked back and forth on her chromium stilettos, now finally used to moving in them. She supposed being somewhat sober helped on that count.

"Probably not." Returning to the baby to keep it mollified and stop it from gouging through the window, Foston changed up his game play. He disappeared to the side, slid under the window and appeared from the other side. The baby, silent through the thick window, looked like it hiccuped with laughter.

At this point, Foston's watch began to beep furiously. Lifting his arm, he stared at the readings on the tiny display, occasionally raising his eyebrows and, every so often, wiggling his fingers for the baby to see. He looked up from the watch, glanced at Clara then looked at the door, his shoulders slumping.

"What is it? Are we about to be attacked by some other disgusting, if a little cute, abomination of science?" She gripped her death pen and hoped, really hard, that whatever it was could be killed.

"No. I set my watch to scan for Breaches. Even with the new engines, Earth is almost a week away. I hoped there'd be something closer." He almost looked sad, then happy, then suicidally sad. "There's a Breach here. Somewhere down in the bowels of the station. Probably with some incredibly dangerous things between us and it."

"That's okay." Clara held up her silver and gold weapon. "We have death pens!"

"I'm not killing a baby!" Foston almost shouted. He very rarely shouted. "I think we should lure it back into the room you let it out of. How fast can you run?"

"I'm not going to be bait for an eight hundred pound baby! Let's use Half-ne, instead." Half-ne spun around on Foston's shoulder, appearing to glare at Clara and made some complicated signs with her fingers.

"She says, 'No chance!'." Absentmindedly, Foston tickled Half-ne's palm as the hand glared at Clara.

"Why not? Come on, Half-ne! Take one for the team." She gave the hand a thumbs-up. She added a wink, unsure if the hand could see and hoping the wink was a deal-maker. The hand made a long series of signs, a very long series, and then spread its fingers, defiantly.

"She says, 'No.'." Foston hesitated before translating.

"That wasn't all she said, was it? What else did she say?" Clara squinted her eyes at Half-ne, attempting a staring contest with a hand that had no eyes.

"You really don't want to know."

Clara wasn't having that. If she was going to be insulted, it would be by a fully functioning body, with vocal chords, not by an aggressive little manipulator with flexible fingers. She grabbed Half-ne from Foston's shoulder, ignoring the speedy sign language that surely had escalated into insults about her parentage, opened the reception room door, threw Half-ne through before it finished opening and then closed it again.

Nothing happened for a few seconds, then Half-ne appeared at the door's window, middle finger extended, before flipping around, splaying out against the glass as the baby caught sight of the disembodied appendage.

Half-ne dropped out of sight and Clara and Foston jockeyed with each other to see through the glass. The baby saw Half-ne before they did, raising a slab of a hand and swatting down towards the floor, giggling as a couple of claws ripped from its cute, pudgy fingers. Half-ne scuttled to the side, running as fast as its little fingers could carry it.

The baby followed the disembodied robot hand, squealing. Or, Clara imagined it squealing. The door and window had great sound-proofing. Half-ne just barely managed to avoid another sweeping, dribble covered hand, ducking into the room the baby originally came from.

Foston and Clara couldn't see what happened inside the room, except for the vague sight of things flying through the air, smashing into walls and light fittings being broken, causing the lights in the room to flicker like a cheap horror movie. Or an expensive one. They all seemed to go for flickering lights. Damned aesthetic tropes!

Things seemed to calm down in the room, returning to an eerie stillness as lights in the room swung, sending ghostly patterns out of the door. Clara held her breath and wondered if she should run out and close the door, with Half-ne still inside or, and this was her preferred option, pushing Foston out of the door to do the same thing.

Fortunately, she didn't have to bowl on that sticky wicket. She hated cricket, but that seemed like an appropriate metaphor. It didn't matter. Half-ne skittered out of the room, launched itself upwards and pressed the panel to close the door. The door slammed shut in an instant, quickly followed by the baby slamming against the inside. The door buckled, but held.

When Foston and Clara exited the reception room, they found Half-ne leaning against the door holding back the baby, standing on two fingers, the others curled, resembling crossed arms. Clara had never seen a more cocky, casual disembodied robot hand in her life. Seeing (somehow) Clara approaching, Half-ne curled its fingers into a barrel shape and moved back and forth, vigorously.

"She says ..."

"I know exactly what she's saying." Clara scowled at Half-ne as the hand clambered up Foston's body, returning to his shoulder.

Foston checked the door, to ensure it was, indeed, secure, before dashing off, back into the reception room. Clara had no idea what the man, lemur, was doing, but he returned seconds later, a big beaming grin on his face.

"Just adding another refit addendum for the escape pod. Not to worry. Everything is fine." Clara didn't like that. No-one said everything was fine and not to worry unless everything was about to go horrendously badly and they should all worry until their hair fell out.

"Whatever. So, now we head into the deepest, darkest bowels of the pleasure station, eh?" She returned to the railing, her handprints from earlier still visible, and looked down into the interior of the space station.

"Yes. Probably the most dangerous place we've ever entered." Foston gave her a grave, deeply serious look. "We don't know what we'll face down there, but, if that baby is anything to go by, it will be big, it will be dangerous and it will have far too many teeth than any mouth has any rights to have. We could be walking to our deaths."

"Right. Should I drop Half-ne down to scout the area?" Half-ne raised onto her finger tips and this time Clara was certain she heard a vicious hiss.