Strange Tails

All was dark.

Squirrel peered about, waiting for his pupils to adjust, only for a searing light to suddenly fill the room—Snodberry had given up his labors. Squirrel watched his unhappy face fly away, a furry orange grocery bag in the wind.

The outside air yelled at him loud enough that it took a few moments to hear Potbelly on the other side of the void. It was a void because no sane person could think of it as a room. Much to his consternation, the void had no floor, which was more troubling than it also having no walls and no ceiling. Yet he wasn’t floating in space. He was standing on something, he felt it, but when he pushed one foot down the not-floor went with it. It was like he stood on invisible, sticky springs.

“Think … way,” shouted Potbelly, watching his small bumpy shape in relief against the gash of light. “I’m … a djinn … ear.”

“What?” returned Squirrel, and again Potbelly mouthed a reply, but the wind grabbed her words and threw them out the ship. “Think!” he heard her yell, before she turned to the hamster squadron next to her and to the something they were studying on the floor.

Think, she said. Not normally his strong suit. Think about what? He thought about walking over, about pushing one leg down and then the other, and whilst this proved a pleasant way to burn calories it got him nowhere. He thought about jumping. He willed himself to roll, to stride, to hike, to jaunt, to parade, to step, to stroll, and at one point even to perambulate, but nothing budged.

He wondered how Potbelly knew how to do this. Frustration set in. Forever off somewhere she was, somewhere he had to follow, like he was the puppy dog, and now he couldn’t even be that. He watched her wrinkled, stubbly butt wiggle in the air, as the other end joined in the whatever-it-was the hamsters were doing. Distractedly, he thought how interesting it might be to nestle in there and have a good old sniff. And in a second, he was.

“Squirrel!” cried Potbelly, leaping in the air, or at least trying to, her feet rooted to an invisible set of floor springs. He could hear her clearly now.

“Sorry,” he said, retrieving his snout from her nether regions. It seemed to be a day for such things. “So you have to think where you want to go and then somehow you just go there?”

“Yes,” she replied, wiggling her dignity back together. “I wanted to find Stinkeye, and then I ended up here.”

“He’s here?”

“Well, no. What I actually thought was, what are those damn Navy Squeals up to, and pop, I shifted a few yards. They say you need to imagine a specific part of the ship to end up there. Which is fine, if you know what the ship looks like.”

“Really? I wonder where else it works?” Squirrel closed his eyes to picture the far-off exotic Twinkie factory he knew lived in Kansas. In his mind, like Dorothy, he transported himself to Oz, only with extra sponge and cream filling. He opened his eyes to see Potbelly’s butt again. He guessed it didn’t work.

“They’re playing some sort of hamster gag, right?” he said. “It’s those little plastic wheels, you know. Makes ’em crazy.”

“No. We all have special powers to think ourselves around the ship.”

Squirrel peered at her, like she’d offered him a tin of elbow grease or a left-handed screwdriver. “OK, space cadet, for your sake I’ll ignore that. Instead, let me ask you where Delta Force’s mogwai division here suggest we might magic to next.”

“This wasn’t their original choice—Plan A was the tractor beam room where they rescued us. This is Plan B. B must stand for Bugger-It because they seem to have no idea what they’re doing.”

Squirrel looked at the huddle of small bodies. They gazed at something projected onto the sort-of-floor, from a small device on the commander’s foreleg. The thing they gazed at was a tiny map.

“Is that a map?” he asked, knowing full well it was.

Muttering amongst the group continued.

“If it’s a crossword puzzle I’m pretty good with those.”

“Shh,” said Potbelly. “Let them study.” The muttering continued yet Squirrel persisted. “So you need to locate an actual place, is that right? Like the bridge, or the holodeck, or something?”

“Is it that damn dog again?” asked one of the hamsters.

“No, it’s that damn something else,” replied another, twisting around. “Will you please go away?”

“I see you are practiced in the art of irony,” he replied, pedaling against his invisible springs.

“Our schematics are all wrong.”

“Oh.” He nodded to the projected map. “So what you have there, then, is more like a pretty flashlight.”

The hamster sighed. “There’s an organic entity controlling the ship. We have to find it. The base is transmitting data at a wavelength that’s disorienting its navigation and defense systems. We won’t be in range forever. We have to find the brain before the ship is lost.”

“The brain?”

“I appreciate you may not know what that is.”

Squirrel eyed him coolly. “And the ship will be lost? You mean, like we’ll self-destruct?”

“No, we’ll leave Earth.”

Potbelly stared in alarm. “I’m kind of attached to Earth,” she said. Squirrel nodded.

“So why can’t you find it?” he continued. “Didn’t you think of this before you came aboard?”

“The schematics are not for this model ship. And we just lost contact with Sergeant ChocolateChip. It’s possible she thought herself into the reactor. We knew this might happen. No way of knowing. But it’s worth the risk. We’re prepared to die for the cause.”

“I’m not,” said Potbelly.

“Yes, we’re not,” agreed Squirrel.

“Then you should have stayed on the tender craft.”

Potbelly turned to the bright gash of daylight behind her. Wherever the tender craft was now, it’d be a bit of a jump from here. “There’s no Plan C?” she asked.

“We are equipped with self-destruct devices.”

“Ah that’s a relief,” she said, pointing again with her aghast expression back to Squirrel.

“What does it look like, this brain?” he asked, understanding the urgency.

“We have no idea, the humans didn’t show us.”

“And there’s me thinking you were all just making this up as you were going along.”

“We have readings from a single organic entity. At first we thought a pilot, but then we received intelligence that this brain, however it works, is plugged into the ship.”

“Intelligence? From where?”

“Classified.”

“Come on, we’re all rodents together.”

“Classified.”

“Give us a clue then.”

“That’s not how classified works.”

“Does the brain look like a tin foil squid in a snow globe?”

“How do you know that?”

“Classified.”

Squirrel gazed at the hamster innocently and clicked his tongue. The commander was paying attention now.

“Are you the one that found the encoded spider leg?”

“Classified.”

“Tell me!”

“Class … hang on. That happened at the Silence. How do you know about Tina’s Deena?”

“Who’s what?”

“Tina’s DNA,” corrected Potbelly. “Yes, we found it.”

“How do you know about that?” demanded Squirrel again.

“Cedric—damn! I meant classified. Imagine I said classified.”

“It’s a little too late for that, Agent Blabbermouth. Who might Cedric be?”

“You said you’d seen a brain?” interrupted a second hamster, paying attention now also. It addressed Potbelly. “If the brain looks like a bunch of spaghetti attached to an icky beach ball, then yes,” she replied.

“Did you see what part of the ship it came from?”

“Actually no, we just saw the bit that exploded. Then it sort of reappeared in a snow globe.”

“Snow globe?”

“Yes, but less Christmassy. Definitely no reindeer.”

“Here! In the atrium!” One of the hamsters pointed to the map. “Different location on this ship, but same spherical shape.” Another slapped something onto Potbelly’s collar. The something beeped. “Think of it now!”

“Why?”

“You’ve seen it. You’ve seen where it comes from. Think yourself there.”

“But what about Sergeant ChocolateChip? In the reactor? She’d have melted.”

“All we have left is Plan C. C stands for Controlled Combustion. This is our only shot.”

“But I can’t see how it’d work. All this hocus-pocus, this flying around. And then ChocolateChip—“

“Think of the snow globe!”

“But!—“

Potbelly disappeared. A delicate popping sound was all that remained.

The commander addressed his comrades. “Forget the map.” He switched it off. “We have a way to get to the brain. Use your tracker. Think of the small fat dog. Think of the atrium. Imagine your destination. Rodent thing,” he reached for Squirrel, “here’s my paw. Now, on my command: 3 … 2 … 1 … ”

Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.

“Wait!” yelled another hamster, still fiddling with his tracker. “Which atrium? Guys? Guys?”