Starship Rogue series Box Set

by Chris Turner

  “If it’s arms you want,” I began, “I can get you as many as you want, Froy. Shitloads, discounted, no end to them. You name your price. Free, if you give me enough time.”

  “Too late for that, asshole,” he spat. “This war’s lost. Writing’s on the wall. We’re all dead.”

  “What the fuck are you on about?” cried his husky crony who guarded me. He turned on Froy. “You loco? I say we waste this bastard, close his gibbering mouth forever then use his girl and take those arms he brought and blow—”

  Froy waved him off with a bitter snarl. “Quiet down, Garr. For months we’ve been fighting this dogged war. Mong’s got black magic on his side—stealth wizardry and weaponry. Armor that doesn’t crack, missiles that never miss, military intelligence beyond our scope. How else could his few ships have neutralized our entire air force? We only dodge like rats from one filthy hole to another.”

  Sense at last. I licked the blood off my lip. Froy must be coming down off his ride. The edge peeling off his belligerent hide. For the first time, I glimpsed the flicker of madness seep out of his haggard face.

  “Some say he’s the devil,” jeered another of the gunmen, “an angel of fate.”

  “I say he’s a rotten scumbag,” said Garr, “one who desperately needs a bullet in his brain.”

  “Maybe so, but how long can we keep dodging him like weasels?” probed Froy. “We’ve been fighting this war with not one break yet. We’ll all be martyrs. One of the few worlds that fight back—the rest of the pussies capitulate and become puppet regimes of Mong’s feudal state—like lapdogs to a bull terrier. He’s making an example of us. Look! Our beautiful city, once an oasis amongst the stars, is now pigs’ swill!” He waved a fanatical arm, spitting fire at the wall, chewing it full of holes. “Palm trees ripped to shreds, fountains and gardens blown sky high! Public squares blasted, schools destroyed, women and children killed in cold blood in the streets, destroyed by that madman.” He kicked at the plaster on the ground.

  His comrades had no answer; Garr’s tongue licked out to wipe at his dirty lip, followed by a sudden slap of hand on my face while the rage boiled in his leonine skull.

  We were back in the alley under the weight of the looming buildings and their gutshot decay. No sign of Wren. A few men came loping up from the debris.

  “Nothing,” said one.

  A darker rumble came from the sky. Eyes looked up. To a looming mass, turtle-green with a nose of mottled color. It was all menace, some fantastic monster as it tilted toward us. Before the first red flares came spearing from its port wing, I dove for cover. A bullet sheared through the thigh of the man next to me. I saw the flicker of pain register in his face and a barrel reaching from the second story window. I recognized the arm movement at once. Wren! So, she’d survived. Been playing possum. More fire laid in behind us. Blest came charging up the alley like a mad bull, all kamikaze, spreading fire in Froy’s direction.

  Mong’s ship bore down on us, the pilot now recognizing the source of the blast back at the warehouse.

  An odd thing happened, as if time warped. The ship slewed sideways, as if racked by gunfire from the side.

  I strained my eyes upward. The ship pulsed green as a missile hit it broadside. For a few seconds it wavered as if it would drop out of the sky. But it didn’t. The Warhawk turned and sent a red arc of fury toward the city in the direction of Froy’s rebel base. A deafening boom rocked the air.

  “Fools!” Froy croaked, clutching at his hair. “They need to launch triple RPGs at a single point to pierce those shields and armor—Aie!” His anguished voice rose above the roar of engines as some shrapnel caught his left leg in a cloud of fire. Black smoke mushroomed over the tops of the ruined buildings. I guessed the rebel base was no more. The massive army-grey bird of prey swung its nose toward us again.

  In the cloud of dust, Garr lifted his R3 to plug me full of holes.

  “Wait!” Froy choked on his own spit. He lay sprawled there amidst the chaos of men’s screams, grimacing in pain, but lucid now, clutching his ruined leg. “Rusco, run while you can. Mong’s taken enough sacrifices today. We don’t need more. Get away from here, you stupid idiot!—before I change my mind.”

  I tipped my head. “Peace be with you, Froy. We’ll see each other in hell.” I half staggered from the shock concussions.

  I limped off and heard Froy’s savage groan as Garr and two of his last men dragged him to shelter. “Rusco!” he called back. “You see what war does to a man? Makes us no better than beasts! Killers and rapists. So far down the rabbit hole we go, we don’t know who we are any more.”

  In a moment of lucidity, Froy had spoken truth. His last words evoked a sad memory in my brain. How far had I gone, with my morals twisted like pretzels and my long-running policy of turning a blind eye to the suffering of the universe? Hustling here, grubbing there, without a second thought of tomorrow or the consequences of my actions.

  The gunmen dragged Froy off, cussing and screaming, his ruined leg beyond repair if he didn’t get some regen soon.

  Wren came stumbling up out of the building, her rifle cocked. She was ready to shoot anything that moved. Crouching, she moved in from pile to pile. Another deep rumble shook the sky. I turned. The Warhawk had edged in, banking sharply, its shields taking some of the damage of the RPG hit. But now another ebon shape rose over the crumbled buildings. It appeared out of the sky like a magic trick and for an instant a flicker of hope rose. Fire lashed out from its port guns and hammered the Warhawk in her rear flank, wresting wide its lethal fire, sending the grey streak smashing into the building next to us and crumbling it to ruin.

  The building overhead exploded, sending a fresh spray down on us.

  “Down!” I shrieked, covering my head pelted with bits of mortar and stone, my throat hoarse as the shockwaves rang through my bones.

  Blest was panting beside me, his face nicked, his arms cut and a wild confused look in his eyes.

  A whine of engines came out of nowhere. A hulking brown fuselage with an hourglass figure came swirling out of the dust to land in the square not fifty feet away. Bantam! Noss couldn’t have been a more joyous sight. He must have heard my signal. Shoddy of me to have ever badmouthed him. Dust pooled at our feet and stung our eyes and lungs.

  We coughed and stumbled out of the billowing cloud toward the giant black curve of the smoking hull where Bantam had taken fire. The cargo hatch slid open. We piled in and the engines gunned as the hatch slid back. We were thrown to the far side as the sudden g’s accelerated us skyward. Noss was efficient; he’d gotten us this far. If there had been two of those bastard Warhawks though, we’d be goners now.

  Return fire chipped against our starboard armor. I shuddered at the damage to our shields. I shook out the haze and stumbled down the companionway to the bridge. Wren was at my back. Soon she overtook me; Blest was still in shock, staggering somewhere in the hallway behind.

  I took the helm and slapped Noss on the back. “Good man!” He gave me a curt acknowledgement and flung back his head of brown curls. He ceded the weapon’s helm to Wren.

  She worked the controls, lashing out at the Warhawk which was fast looming up on our viewport.

  The holo grid showed black-green silent death stalking us. Auto-guided missiles blipped bright red on the most vulnerable areas of our hull; Wren fixed her own targets mid-wing near the power cells and the reactor on the bogey’s weapon’s port.

  Torpedoes flew out of our wing cannons. They smashed harmlessly against the enemy craft’s shields and heavy armor. I cursed, maxed out Bantam’s impulse power, took us straight up toward the twin moons of this sorry world, away from our low wide arc that skimmed over the remains of Resus and the nearby sea.

  We couldn’t warp out in the planet’s gravitational field. Not without risking structural overload.

  Nerve-wracking seconds passed. Shields dimmed to 5%. The hull shuddered to surface blasts, then another. Shit, the next hit would finish us. Wren’s lips parted in a
gasp. The enemy missile launched, loomed on the viewport, coming up on our rear at gut-wrenching speed. A half second to impact. I felt that faint flutter of life flashing by before my eyes as we cleared planetary gravity. The Varwol light drive clicked in. Bantam’s hull became a non-entity. Space-time collapsed—or whatever contradiction the physics people call it, for an object cannot be in two places at one time. In a half-light second we were thrown down the wormhole, unreachable by any Warhawk fire.

  Through the slipstream of hyperdrive we passed like insignificant ants within an ethereal world. I saw Wren and Blest as they moved puppet-like on a screen out of a cartoon. As the nightmare slowly washed away from my mind, I thought of Froy and his doomed cause. Despite the man’s madness, his unexpected turnaround had surprised me. It helped me better understand him and his people and others like him, terrorized by Mong and his military machine around the Veglos sector. The warmonger was a menace. He must be stopped.

  But how? It looked as if no force in this universe could stop the man. Small time arms traders like me could hardly scratch a dent in his growing empire.

  Chapter 4

  My body ached from the bruises back on Resus. Staring at the silent controls and its maze of blinking lights, I marveled at the machinery that took us those light years and beyond, away from the dust-rubbled planet.

  A hollow pang stuck at the back of my throat. The loss of Tager and Klane could not be brushed off. A sick feeling pressed at my insides, knowing the obscene thousands of yols I now owed my long-time seller, Gretch, from that failed arms’ shipment. I’d promised him his share the first chance I got. Though he’d warned me of the risk of COD. Now he’d be breathing fire about the botched deferred payment and out for blood. Ready to set his enforcers on me.

  We slid through the ethers like greased eels and I reflected on the wonder it was to be alive. The three of us had survived Froy’s manic persecutions—though we all should have been dead. That said, I wouldn’t be going anywhere near Uziles in Veglos nor Gretch for that matter.

  A voice intruded on my bleak speculations.

  “What now, Rusco?” Wren murmured. She turned, shook out her dusty hair and let out a long sigh. Studying the holo image of the vast star cluster of the Veglos sector, she looked a figure of enchantment. Noss stared at the panorama too, gloomily, drumming his thin, pale fingers on the console, as if watching the stars with an air of fatality. Blest, beside him, oblivious to the others, picked at the mole on his left cheek.

  I needed regen badly. I reached a shaky hand for the emergency kit in the forward bulkhead just as the orange light flickered on the transcall unit—I knew instinctively it must be a message from Gretch. I turned the unit off.

  First things first. We needed to ease out of the stupor of battle so I held back on the regen, cracking out the Binny’s Gin instead and the Black Dog Whiskey. I poured stiff rounds for all of us and pushed the shot glasses before our team of heroes gathered around the communal table on the bridge.

  I poured Blest a double dose. Seems as if our bully boy needed it. All bleary-eyed and bruised and sullen, he looked like an alley cat come out of the rain after fending off a pack of wild dogs.

  He lifted his glass, inclined his head at Noss, asked him why he’d come when he did.

  Noss swallowed a mouthful of Black Dog. “I saw your beacon. More than far enough away from where you should have been. The Warhawk was taking crossfire from the warehouse. Figured it was the only chance to get you out alive.”

  “Lucky you did,” I grunted.

  “Took you long enough,” Blest said. With a shake of head, he cursed under his breath.

  “Get off it, Blest,” I growled. “We all should be dead, you included.” He shut up when both Wren and I glared at him.

  “Klane was an idiot.” Wren muttered. “Shot off his mouth after they tried to shortchange us. We’d maybe still be whole and with loot in our fingers if he hadn’t gone south.”

  I gave a wincing grimace. So what was to be learned from this wasted exercise? The futility of war? The dumb luck of a crew of misfits? Considering my bad luck of the past, I’d been expecting disaster.

  I sighed. We’d have to lay low for a while. The other bad news—Mong’s bounty hunters would be after me. They wanted those pieces of alien tech bad. The little phaso disc I had on board, plus the larger, U-shaped amalgo I’d hid on Brisis 9 months ago. Both transporter devices sent animate and inanimate matter to other dimensions like a souped-up warp drive, so it seemed. Mong and his war ghouls had a reputation for persistence. They had placed an outrageous price on the return of such tech, inspiring certain desperate individuals to thrust an ice pick in my brain. Space hound Rusco was a marked man. I had a hunch, an almost certain one, Mong’d be tipped off after the Froy incident. If we could have wasted that Warhawk…but it didn’t happen. Mong’s goons would soon ferret out the rebels responsible for harboring fugitives. Then they’d interrogate Froy and his roughboys until they squawked like pigeons the name of Rusco, the details of our ship and the drop off, with all the willingness of vultures pecking at fresh roadkill. I winced at the bite of the gin sloshing down my throat. This caper was never supposed to end like this.

  I applied regen paste on sensitive areas, the sticky stuff causing me to wince. Wren came to assist. She pulled up my leather pantleg and rubbed in a wad on the red, raised sore where the bullet had grazed my flesh. I could feel the skin stitching over. My supply of miracle glue was getting low, in need of replenishing. Another task on the to-do list. Once we got some money together, I’d get a whole box of the stuff.

  I dipped my fingers in the jar to apply some salve to Wren’s shoulder but she declined.

  “I’ll be okay.” She waved my ministrations away then passed the jar to Blest.

  “We need to go where the goods are,” I said.

  “Yeah, like really?” said Blest. “What goods would those be?—and where do you get the idea finding jobs is as easy as picking apples off a tree?”

  “Stuff isn’t going to come floating to us.” My eyes stared at a faraway place in the endless panorama of stars that glowed in the viewport. “We need to go out and find them.”

  Blest sighed.

  “We’ve got to keep moving,” I reiterated. “We can’t let a little setback stall us out.”

  “How about a little setback featuring two broken legs and a cracked back?”

  “Hold on, that’s not the kind of—”

  “Tager and Klane dead and you want to flirt with more disaster?”

  “No, to stay alive and keep our heads above water. Keep a cash flow going.”

  “It’s madness,” protested Blest.

  “It’s a mad world out there.”

  Wren touched the young man’s arm. “We need to stay in the game.”

  Blest loosed a bitter laugh. “You too, Wren? I thought you had more sense than him.” He glared at me. “I only listen to her. Not you. If she weren’t here—”

  I grinned. “What? You’d chicken-whip me, Blessie? Give me a big whooping? Good thing we have her.”

  Blest shrugged. The conversation was fast losing its conviviality.

  “We lost big time on that last job,” I said absently. “Paid a lot of money and got nothing back. Two dead. Damn it.”

  I let the words sink in. “So, needless to say, we have to amp up our game. We’ll get stocked up—food, water, and maintenance at the next hub. O two hundred. I’ll see what I can do to rig up some new angles on a gig. Always something out there, if we look hard enough, keep our eyes and wits about us.”

  Blest peered at me between his dark lids. “Seems you’re always flying by the seat of your pants, Rusco.”

  “And so?”

  “Just wondering when you’re going to nosedive and get us all killed. I’d like to have some advance warning about my death.”

  “This isn’t a ma and pa rig. If you want to go somewhere else, Blest, we’ll let you off at the next hub. You can find your fortunes elsewhere.”<
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  The others looked at him with mouths set. A tense silence ensued.

  Blest just cracked his knuckles and shrugged. “I’ll stick around for a bit, Rusco.”

  “I thought you would.”

  I picked at my teeth. Blest wasn’t a team player. Surprised he didn’t get busted up back there. Klane was just plain foolish, a dumb fuck extraordinaire. We were close to nailing that deal and he had to go and foul up the nest and get himself killed. But then, that had been said too many times already, so maybe I should just drop it.

  Chapter 5

  On an inspiration, I searched through the free store—the spacefarer’s planetary-wide network of information. I checked some ledgers and current events and set the course for Badinis Major. According to the register there, a space station orbited the productive world of Gistron, rich in Beryl and other minerals useful for drives and ship hulls. Gistron station had escaped the long arm of Mong’s domination—thankfully. Apparently an auction was in the works on the station—for used and vintage star cruisers. Interesting. Likely it would draw a well-to-do crowd that I could work some angle on. If not, vie for the ships themselves at least. I expected a mix of the usual space prospectors, entrepreneurs looking for easy pickings, the ubiquitous greaseballs, hangers on and con artists. My kind of crowd.

  We turned in to our respective cabins and slept the sleep of the dead. We took turns to watch the helm. I instructed them to wake me in case of a contingency, no matter how minor. Not much could happen while we were in the slipstream cocoon of warp—or could it?

  Bantam auto-kicked out of Varwol and I heard the tiny whir of engines. The thrum of power circuits booted up as they now returned us to the dimension of reality.

  The space station loomed up in the viewport, a gigantic ring with docking berths on the inside of the ring. Gistron was one of the few places not ravaged by space thugs—her lattice of interconnected girders and spirals were a product of earlier generations, built in days of opulence. How old—a hundred, two-hundred years? Mong and his crew had not got to this part of the galaxy yet.