by Ian Cannon
“Uh—we’re being targeted,” REX called.
The world of the moon rotated through the viewport shifting into a vista of deep space. Ben craned, looking hard. “I don’t see any—”
“It’s the station! They have security measures.” REX cried out as laser strikes came pounding at them. One hit its mark and jolted the ship—Youch! They bucked in their seats.
“Hold on!” Ben cried angling REX up and around the eastern moon face. They blasted away watching the moon’s near horizon roll toward them as they coursed over the landscape at tremendous speed. Up ahead, the peak of the primary cannon barrel jutted into space like a massive tower standing several thousand feet high, its big barrel eye looking toward the distant planet Stathos. That thing was the heart of the whole operation. Planet killer.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
“What’s that?” Tawny barked.
Ben felt his skin go cold. “That would be that outer perimeter you mentioned.” A column of Confederation war vessels scooted toward them, fanning out in approach and seizure formation. The Underworld Cabal. They surrounded the entire moon. Gunships off the bow. They were faraway, but too close. There would be no breaking orbit.
“They have us sighted,” REX gasped.
Ben pulled the ship to a stop. “They won’t fire. Not with their little toy sitting here.”
They were in a standoff. They’d penetrated the Cabal security, got inside the operation. Now, there was no getting out. They were trapped. Escape was a pipe dream.
“What do we do?” Tawny asked.
Ben flicked his lips with a finger, thinking. There was a frantic look on his brow, then the flicking stopped.
An idea!
“REX, bring up our schematics on Menuit.”
The holopad emitted the moon.
“Zoom.”
The image expanded.
“Forget the foundry. Let me see the internal core.”
It showed the heart of the entire operation sitting at the bottom of that towering cannon—a massive, subterranean reactor using neutron power to mulch entire mountains of the lunar core into usable solar energy. It churned and frothed within, bringing planetary tonnage to the point of nuclear overload. They were turning the moon into a small sun to kick-start their cannon.
“There, yeah,” Ben said, a thought twinkling in his eyes.
“What is it?” Tawny asked him.
Ben grinned and said, “A big bomb.” He knew immediately; shatter that outer casing and disrupt the energy balance within, and the entire moon would go unstable. “Umm—we’re about to go for one hells of a ride, sweetheart. Hang on.”
Ben took a big breath, grasped the guidance control and slammed the accelerator forward. They rocketed straight up toward the formation of Cabal warships, zinging passed the vertical length of that humungous cannon barrel. Buzzers and blips started going off like crazy.
REX said, “They have tracking systems on us, targeting systems, tractor beams. They’re about to lock on. We’re screwed!”
Ben smiled big. “No we’re not.”
“Uh, hello, Cap! They’ve got our trajectory! They’re emitting!”
Ben wrenched the vessel into a U-turn changing their trajectory, and slammed back toward the moon. REX groaned under duress. The top of that big, lunar cannon approached with its mouth opened. They could see the reactor pulsing a deep, fiery-sun-colored light from deep within. Tawny sank back in her seat, eyes wide. “Babe, babe, babe?”
“You ready to hammer the hippo, sweetheart?” he yelled.
“Whatever—just do it, do it!”
He blasted the retrograde rockets hard and full, swinging the entire length of the vessel around like a two-hundred foot, maglev powered catapult. The artigrav failed. They each pinned back into the seat, jaws clenched on the verge of blacking out. “REX. Release. Cargo. Unit. Twelve. Now!”
Outside, the lower cargo unit ejected from the mag-spires sliding the others down into place with a bang! It zinged forward with the force of fifty tons flying at extreme velocity, full of 1-B-1 mol bot gelatin stew. It flew down into the cannon’s gaping mouth ricocheting back and forth like a hammer, plummeting toward the moon’s core—and that throbbing reactor.
Ben yelled, “It’s away.”
REX corrected his spin throwing Tawny and Ben forward in their seats as the ship sped across the moon surface.
An incoming alarm went—beep beep beep!
REX went, “Uhh—”
Laser rockets came raining down around them blasting the moon surface into geysers of stone and sand.
“Awe gee, they’re firing!” REX said weaving in and out of blossoming columns of moon surface. Debris pelted across their fuselage. Impact blasts jarred them back and forth. Ben looked up, saw the faraway gunships mimicking their path across the moon. “Great, they’re creating a perimeter. And they’re madder than a Obsalom bitch!”
“They’ll never let us go,” Tawny said.
Then, the first sign of a damaged planetary reactor happened from deep inside the core. The entire moon jerked in its natural rotation like a hiccup inside a cosmic engine. They felt a belch in the magnetosphere, a ripple in space. It made REX jump, then overcorrect and drop way down. The ground below them split open into a sudden, depthless maw spitting humungous dollops of moon mantle into the sky—as if the moon were trying to swallow them. Ben yanked on the control lever avoiding a plummet, and leveled out.
“Jeez!”
In the distance, the lunar mountain horizon began breaking apart. Entire mountain caps deteriorated, their central cores crumbled all the way down to their base. There was nothing left but fields of rubble expanding across the horizon. Whole mountains—just gone. Tawny and Ben’s faces lit up in a mutual expression of horror and awe.
The whole moon jerked again like a machine whose cogs were banging askew, grinding unnaturally against each other. Out on the eastern plains, tectonic plates slammed into each other lifting an ocean of rubble into space. A canyon formed as an entire swath of ground fell away. White light burst up from the crag in curtains of blinding radiation.
“Uh, Cap? I think this moon’s gonna blow!” REX said.
Ben said through clenched teeth, “That’s what happens when your lunar boom-boom stick goes critical. Give me more thrust!”
“Yeah, okay. Go!”
He guided the vessel back around under the endless canopy of the moon’s underbelly evading the rockets raining from above. The entire, sprawling foundry was beginning to shudder apart as the planetoid became more and more unstable. Towers buckled fanning steel tonnage into space. Long, exposed access ways began rending and bending, tearing their heavy anchors from the lunar mantle. Space stuff spit out from the moon surface all around them in huge cascading eruptions.
REX streaked passed the assembly extruder as it seethed like a flue. Its energy stores fed directly from the fusion fountain at the planet’s core choked and sputtered. The whole operation buckled, stretched—huge swaths of plating being peeled away, flushing the low skies with huge plumes of rolling flame. Ben zipped around an expanding area of wreckage in rapid sweeps of motion, and then the whole thing came apart under an explosion that spread across the crumbling moon underbelly.
Tawny screamed. Ben flinched, hands on the guidance control like death traps twisting and turning. They thundered across the personnel sector as hubs full of privateers and station members started ejecting—life pods evacuating from an unraveling world.
Just ahead, the cataclysm reached its zenith—the moon’s axis reeved apart in an enormous, final act of defiance. An ocean of internal rock and rubble exploded into space scattering mankind’s hold like a bunch of matchsticks and filling the void with swirling debris. A thousand collisions speckled the vista. Asteroid impacts blossomed into an impassable field of space garbage. The new sun boiling within the moon’s core showed in blinding rays of thermal energy—an atomic star of nuclear profusion slicing the moon’s surface open in incredible bands of light. Then, the
entire worldlet came apart at its seams. Planetary bodies the size of continents pulled apart spewing moon parts everywhere. There was no path to take through the debris, no road to hold, no way to escape.
And in its midst, Tawny, Ben and REX screamed one last breath heading directly into the maelstrom.
On the surface of Stathos, an entire fraternity of concerned military leaders, scientists and private onlookers alike viewed the destruction of their smallest, outer moon through their quantum telescopes. They’d been nervously observing the creation of a planetary pounder for years, helpless to stop the day of their demise from marching ever closer. Now as they looked on, the whole moon became consumed in fracture lines like deep canyons reaching to the core. White-blue light as bright as a star shone through before the entire lunar body wrenched apart, depleting into huge fields of brash and scree. The whole moon was simply gone, replaced by an expanding debris field.
From that day forward, the Stathosians knew what to expect. Slightly higher tides. Intermittent meteor showers. Perhaps a marginal change in the seasons. Plus, they’d begin to see a band of asteroids coalesce into a thin planetary ring over the next generation or two. But it was better than watching that Cabal cannon blast their home into smithereens. Anything was better than that. They could now put their global evacuation plans to rest.
The majestically beautiful green-brown planet would come to know that day as the day a privateer crew they had never met sacrificed all to save their planet. It would become a worldwide holiday, celebrated by everyone in which their voices would lift in a universal note of joy to be heard across the entire Imperium, as well as the Cabal.
Chapter Two
Imperium Controlled Space
Dark Sector
She wore her informal matriarch apparel for “the selection.” It was black on black on black—thigh-riding sleeve boots under a wrap sash that split up to her waist, a belt canted along the flare of her hips baring a round buckle which was emblazoned with the mountain-and-raptor seal of the Portaxian homeworld. A long, narrow muscle-rippling midriff showed under a sleeveless halter-harness, and she bore a gaiter that accentuated a graceful neckline. Her skin was white as snow, lips like onyx tapering at the corners to blood red tribal stripes encircling her skull, and eyes that burned an icy gray, almost colorless. A single round cap of jet black hair jutted from the back of her head falling into a long, braided tail that swept down to her lower back. It complimented the long tamer’s whip everpresently looped at her hip displaying her dominance over all within eyeshot.
At six feet tall, slender and physical, she was a daunting creature with hyper-accentuated curves. She moved more like a snake than a biped dripping with a dark, lusty ambulation.
She came to the first of three men plasma chained to their maglev escort rack. The first man was once a bold thing, handsome and rugged, until slavery came to him. Now, his countenance was buried under what was left of him—a haggard thing just beginning to whither.
But nothing hid from the steel gaze of the Prime Matriarch of the Obsalom Order, Bitch Xantrissa Von’Domina. She could still see the man underneath the slave.
She looked him up and down, studying him, and said in her slow, slithery timber, “This one is not so bad. A decent specimen for the gaming arena.” She put her finger under the man’s chin and forced his gaze up to match hers. “I look forward to seeing how you face a foe when death is the outcome of failure.” She turned to her attendee and said, “Take him to the training barracks.”
The attendee nodded with a grin and said, “Yes, my Matriarch.” They hustled the first man-slave away.
Xantrissa stopped before the second. The man’s eyes looked up at her, filled with a recently earned sense of resignation, yet his grin was forced, a show of willing servitude. She frowned at him. “This one,” she said. “Too eager. A poor showing. Get rid of him.”
The man’s face fell. It was death for him, either through terminal labor in the engine rooms, a vacuum execution or the feeding of her pet Molosian raptors. “P-please no,” he muttered.
Xantrissa flicked her wrist and her service entourage jerked the man away.
She came to the third and final. He was the tallest, the narrowest, with hard looking shoulders and hair that dangled down around his face. Her eyebrow lilted upward into a curious expression working in tandem with a crooked grin. “And this one,” she said. Her eyes drifted across him, moving down and back up. “Mmm—an interesting genealogy. Long limbs. Large joints. This one will be sufficient where I want to be sufficed.” She shot a look back at her head attendee and said, “Paleron, I want this one cleaned. Take the hair off his back and administer a dose of erecta-roids. Escort him to my chambers and tell him to wait.”
Paleron nodded, said, “Yes, my Matriarch.”
Her eyes went back to her slave, and she said, “Impress upon him that his life hangs on his performance. I expect to be fully satisfied … or else I’ll kill him myself.”
The man-slave blinked in horror, looked into her.
“Yes, Matriarch.” Paleron nodded to the remaining members of the service entourage and off they went.
“What’s next?” she said.
Paleron hurried to follow her, a diminutive man with clear eyes and a ruthless obedience. “A report among the Aphrodisian council.”
She made a bored face and motioned for him to continue.
He read his holotablet as they moved along, going from the selection post toward her command dais. “The service union has logged complaints to the city seat. It seems they want to extend the gaming period to a full cycle.”
“Do it.”
“Yes, ma’am. The council, though—”
“What about them?”
“Councilman Junn Re’Tok will counter. A full cycle will disrupt his hold over the Aphrodisian commonwealth.”
Xantrissa sniggered. “Junn Re’Tok is a puffy little man who gives himself more credit than he deserves.”
“Perhaps, yes. He and the council have contended that a full cycle of gaming will require added security conscripts.”
“If they want to force a compromise, tell them they have my blessing to conscribe members from the service union.”
“That will trigger an uprising, my Matriarch. Junn Re’Tok will—”
“It will force balance. That’s what uprisings do, Paleron.”
“Yes, but—”
“Paleron,” she said without so much as slowing her stride, “I will not explain myself to you. I will not explain that I take no sides; that I care very little for the trials of little people. If the council and the union want to fancy themselves, let them do so at each other’s expense. It will be entertaining at the least.”
“You will lose your power over them, Matriarch.”
She stopped, forcing him to stop behind her. She turned slowly, with malice, and said, “I do not derive my power from Aphrodisia.”
Paleron forced a swallow at her inflection, looked down.
“Look at me, Paleron.”
His eyes came slowly up to meet her gaze.
“Do you fear me?”
“I do, my Matriarch.”
“Do you believe I would execute you at any moment for the sake of watching you die?”
“I do, ma’am.”
“Would you move against me?”
He said, perfectly aghast, “Not ever, my Matriarch.”
“That is my power. That is the only power.” She let the moment shrivel him, then turned and continued across the tremendous control stage of her ship. He followed quickly as she said, “Politics, squabbling, unions and councils—it’s all simply amusement. It’s why I have them. Let them tear themselves apart along with Aphrodisia. It will be quite a show. I will watch and laugh when they do.”
Paleron said, “Yes, my lady. As will I.”
“They are not why we’re here, anyway.”
“No.”
“Of the Obsalom panel?”
“They are assembled, my
highest Bitch.”
“Good. We have more pressing things to discuss than city matters.”
Xantrissa sat at the head of the table leaned comfortably back in her chair, one elbow on its arm rest, knuckles pressed into her cheek, knees widely apart, feet forward on the floor. Her panel of xeno-advisors sat before her, each well-dressed in their military officer’s uniforms. They were vaguely reminiscent of the Imperium with high-lapels and double-breasted button-over coats, but with subtle changes to the insignias—each bearing the “faceless man” pins on their chests—and not-so-subtle changes to their color and styling. Where the official Imperium dress blues were a two-toned gray with black embossing, the Obsalom Order had highlights of purple. Like the Imperium, though, each face was stern, each expression full of stoicism.
Minister of Xeno-antiquities Major Lars stood at his station at the far end of the table continuing on with his statement. “Political fervor over approaching Imperium maneuvers has triggered a paleontological venture to find the Ch’tickott of the Nid. They are the primary Iotian religious group of Iot, whose reach also encompasses Zet.”
Xantrissa said, “The Ch’tickott?”
“Yes, Matriarch. An artifact,” he continued, “thought to have been lost in historic obscurity some twenty thousand years ago. It holds the key to certain promises made to their people. Evidence has arisen suggesting they’ve pinpointed its location. There is, currently, an excavation sight to locate the object.”
“Mmm,” she said, showing a hint of added interest.
“Its theological value to the Iotian people is insurmountable, the cradle, if you will, from which all living matter spilled, and to which all life must return. Its existence is paramount to the most fundamental core of their belief system. They would do anything to possess it.” He grinned almost ear-to-ear. “Its theft would devastate their society. Its ransom would topple industry, sway the sister planets of Iot and Zet away from Wi’ahr.”
“Is there a plan in place?” Xantrissa asked.
“We have infiltration agents at work now,” he said offering the tinniest nod.
