Starship Rogue series Box Set

by Chris Turner

I gaped at the hopelessness of it all. Another Skug vessel moved on us, its weapons trained.

  “Wren, Noss! Get back.”

  I turned my head away as Bantam went up in a ball of flames. Wren and Noss were knocked backward, sliding down the metal runway. They picked themselves up.

  Shock hit me in a blind fury. Half a shipment of Myscol and a half mil credits of ship up in smoke.

  I saw Noss grab up Wren and they hurried to Alastar.

  I turned to fire at the ship in the air. Blest tugged at my arm. My mouth dropped when I saw steam coming from the rear thrusters of a Warhawk parked nearby. The ship was stationed beside a Skug craft. My suspicions confirmed.

  “How in the name of Jesus—”

  “I’d recognize those Warhawks anywhere,” said Blest. “See the eagle insignia on the left side?”

  “Must have been our friends, the Skugs. Can always count on them. Mong must have put the word out to even the raiders to keep an eye out for us.”

  Blest groaned. “Either way, we’re fucked.”

  A rustle came to my left. Not Skug but human. A swarthy, slant-eyed, bushy-browed face of a muscled ball-breaker peering at me. “Weapon down. We’ve got you tagged, Rusco. We don’t want to kill you but…”

  I gaped. The three black kevlar-vested figures had ‘bounty hunter’ written all over them. I went kamikaze, spraying fire in their midst, roaring as they ducked back under the struts of the Warhawk. I grabbed Blest, pushed Follee behind the nearest vessel, the beetle-shaped Skug craft.

  Blest gave back fire at the enemy, cursing aloud, hobbling on his fucked-up leg.

  Looked as if I’d underestimated Mong’s obsession with getting his hands on my phaso.

  “The phaso, Rusco!” one of Mong’s men called out in a raspy voice from the curling smoke. “It’s all we want.”

  I looked left and right. No options.

  “You want the phaso, you fuckbitch?” I called. “Catch.” I snatched at a kerchief and pulled the disc out of my pocket, careful not to let my fingers touch it while chucking it at the foremost attacker. He went to slap it away from his face. But in that split second his body mushroomed into a shimmering halo of heat and flame. The man fizzled out to nothing, as if sucked into a black hole. The phaso had done its dirty work and fell ringing to the ground. All this after shuttling its victim to a far off, dark and deadly universe or some unimaginable dimension. The nearest thug gaped, licking his lips. A section of the hangar roof caved in and fell on his head, crushing him along with the phaso.

  The bounty ranger-captain crouched behind the tail of his ship and stared bug-eyed. “You’re dead, Rusco! Mong will skin you alive for destroying that most precious artifact of his!”

  “Tough luck,” I yelled at him. “Give Mong a personal message from me that he can go fuck—”

  Fire bit back at us, nicking off the metal struts of the Skug’s landing gear. I cursed, ducked back under deeper cover.

  We would have gotten away. All of us would have, if not for ill-fated luck.

  To my left came a clink and a roar. I dropped to my knees, tagged a grotesque shape with a full head of horns. The thing sagged, snuffled like a bison then fell in a sloppy heap. I ran and kicked the energy gun from the twitching hand.

  Skugs, I hated them all, hated the look of them. This mutant was no exception and still alive.

  I peered ahead, seeing gunfire lancing from all angles. A regular midnight fireworks show. Follee breathed like an animated doll, still clutching his unfired R3. Blest stared in shock at our unlikely prospects. Wren and Noss scrambled to reach Alastar before she was blown up.

  They were fast on their feet, disappearing into Alastar’s airlock, but we were pinned down. Skugs held down the hangar. No way of reaching Alastar without getting shredded by crossfire. Despair crept over me.

  I flicked on my com, rasping, “Wren, listen to me.”

  “Rusco, there’re too many of them. Alastar’s warp is screwed—”

  “Shut up and listen. Take Alastar and get the fuck out of here. Use whatever drive you have. Forget the shipment. Forget I ever got you into this mess. Sorry Wren. Get Noss to fix the problem, if he can.”

  “But you’ll—“

  “I’ll make my own getaway on another ship. We’ll rendezvous—somewhere—the usual place. I’ll draw them away.” I cut communication and dragged the fast-dying Skug before the cargo bay. Blest helped me. Maybe we’d need him to fly this thing. I didn’t know what condition the mutant’d be in, in the next five minutes. “Into the ship!” I croaked. I dug through his suit pouches and snatched up a grey-red keyring, looking like a wireless hatch control.

  “A Skug vessel?” Follee whined.

  “Move!” I swatted him with my gun. I’d wasted one Skug. I hoped there weren’t others aboard.

  “Get in,” I commanded the two of them. Pushing buttons on the keyring remote, I got the airlock opening. Follee scurried in to the small pressure chamber beyond. Dumb fucker. If he hadn’t stopped to play peekaboo with that stupid eel, maybe we’d have had that extra minute to get to Bantam. Yeah, and maybe be blown up in the meantime. All real useful conjecture, Rusco.

  I darted into the mutant craft’s airlock after Blest, dragging the Skug last. He didn’t look good, his tusked face a pasty white and drenched in sweat. We sealed the door and re-pressurized the chamber. Then we scrambled out the back into the cargo bay. Blest combed the periphery, hobbling on his one good leg. Nobody seemed to be around. The other Skugs who’d manned this vessel must have gotten baked back in the station.

  According to the suit sensors, the air seemed breathable so we took off our helms. We shuffled to the bridge, Follee helping me drag the Skug down the hall. A bloody slime pool trailed from his bleeding wound. His breath came as a tortured rasp.

  “You can fly this shitbox?” I barked at Follee.

  “Y-yeah, I think so. Not so different than an A2X.”

  “Do it! What are you standing around waiting for?”

  He scrambled to attention, flicking controls on the console while mumbling under his breath.

  “We can force this mutant to show us how to run this thing,” I said, “if I have to wake him from the dead and shove his teeth into the nav panel myself.” I looked down at the control panel in growing disgust. Lots of green and red lights flashing amid myriad dials, more intricate than Bantam’s console, packed with symbols and script incomprehensible to my eyes.

  Follee got the craft moving out of the hangar. Some of the Skugs had tuned into our escape. Their ships lifted off after us.

  I grimaced, uttering nasty words. Wren and Noss had Alastar up and running, limping along at impulse speed. Christ, their warp was still inactive. What could they do? Skugs took pursuit, three of them, and now one of Mong’s Warhawks lifted into the fray. My heart dropped. I looked out onto a dead hope as the station slipped behind us, a massive grey cube with broken antennae and cannons fading in the rear viewport.

  The logical course was to engage the Skug light drive and warp out of here, drive away the memories with a lot of drink and Myscol. But the memories of Wren played in my mind, and how they would haunt me to the end of time. The times she’d saved my ass and aroused my passion and caressed my body. As much as Alastar was doomed without light drive, I couldn’t leave Wren or Noss to die.

  With a roaring oath, I smashed my fist on the console aside Follee and ordered him to speed after Alastar. He blinked in confusion. To avoid my wrath, he set the craft chasing after her. I manned the warp if things got dicey. I shot beams of fire at whatever came out of the hangar.

  An echoing boom struck our hull, high and aft. Echoing hits raked our hull. My eyes squinted at the grey panels above. Blest licked his lips, clutched the table with a white-fisted hand.

  “Dodge them!” I bawled. “Follee, keep them away from Wren and Noss!”

  Follee was no fighter pilot. Our shields were getting hammered. But he maneuvered with confident hands clicking the toggles and pushing sliders
, guiding the Skug beetle on a tortuous course after the beleaguered Vega 6. Blest watched in white-faced horror.

  Although we were Alastar’s rearguard shield, I saw she was getting hit hard by fiery blasts. Follee hailed her on general frequency. “Noss!” He blurted out in a hoarse voice. “Do you read me? Noss!”

  Noss’s voice came fluting over the com, a faint-edged staticky rasp.

  “About the warp…reboot the time relapse circuit. I know that ship! It must have flaked out while on course to The Dim Zone. The reboot will recalibrate the light drive…”

  Despite Noss’s maneuvering and Wren’s fire, Alastar was taking too much damage. We looped inside each other’s paths. Suddenly there was a wild swarm of enemy ships all around us. Skugs, Warhawks, green, red, yellow, blue beams flaring in all directions.

  Fareon fire flashed in wild torrents. A complete soup bowl of chaos. I saw a Skug ship explode in front of our starboard viewport. Then it took out another of its kind, rolling, burning, flipping end over end to splatter shrapnel against our hull. The junk clattered like hail stones. Our heat sensors beeped out warnings as temperatures rose. A thin, robotic voice called out in some guttural tongue, which I guessed was something like, “Danger, Will Robinson, danger. Hull integrity at 30%!”

  I targeted anything that moved. Another Skug vessel caught fire and exploded in a blazing ball.

  Sudden triumph dawned as the light-drive trails on Alastar gleamed from her stern. A rainbow color blazed from her like a light highway turned to infinity. She stretched to a pancake, then was gone.

  I howled in glee. “Follee, get us away—”

  But my voice faltered as the cabin lights dimmed and the bridge went dark. The ship lurched. A hell of a whump hit our starboard side, knocking us tumbling end over end.

  I picked up my feet, scratching my head where it had struck the console weapons’ board.

  Mong’s warship loomed in our viewport. We yawed and rolled. I caught flares coming from the fuselage just aft of his wings. The reserve power came on—an eerie maroon light. Follee gave a hoarse shriek. Blest looked up from the place where he was sprawled.

  My eyes flicked to the display. All too well did I know the spider-gripping force of the tractor beam that now drew us toward Mong’s much larger vessel.

  Chapter 13

  I watched Follee in the pilot’s chair clutching at something at his side—it’s as if he had a monster itch or some nervous tic on his gonads. “You okay over there, chief?” I groaned. “You picked a hell of a time to choke your chicken.”

  Follee’s face paled as our power drained from the main thrusters. They petered out. I felt the sudden g’s of deceleration and I teetered in dismay as our ship was pulled toward the larger craft. Its big quad fareon cannon loomed, enough to blow a hole in a small planet. It’d make mincemeat of our shields. Stars slipped sideways past the glass viewport, then a massive cargo door slapped shut behind us.

  We were trapped like mice in the enemy’s ship.

  I heard the clinking and cutting of tools at the hull’s hatch. My blood turned to ice as I stared at Blest. “Christ, can’t you do anything, Follee? Anything at all?”

  “I don’t know how to work these shitty Skug weapon controls!” he brayed.

  I looked around. Panic swept over me like a bad rash. The electro shock. The explosives. Where were my usual bags of tricks?

  I stumbled over to the weapons console, slamming my fist down on the panel before Follee. “Can’t we blast our way out of this situation? Take over their ship?”

  He stared at me as if I were a lunatic.

  “Direct the shield power to the outer hull. Quick!”

  Follee nodded. Nearly wagging his head off, he fumbled with the touchpads while Blest stared, green-faced, fists clenched in agony as another wave of pain rippled through his leg gripped by the alien plant. The door to the bridge door burst open in a blaze of blue fire.

  I dropped to my knees, bringing my R4 up in one continuous motion. Shots emptied from the barrel. Blest choked out a gasp. He leveled death into the area behind us.

  A hulking figure loomed at the doorway, weirdly immune to our fire. He held himself erect, fearlessly confident. Long leather wine-colored trenchcoat trailing with golden eagles on the sides. Wolf furs draped around his shoulders. Hair thick and black as buffalo fur trailing past the middle of his back. The man was enormous. He filled the doorway, must have been seven feet tall. I recognized him at once.

  Silent despair crawled over me. A tidal wave of fear and loathing all at the same time, like no other.

  The Star Lord.

  I fired back at him but he ducked, seemed to flick out his hand and deflect impossibly that burst of fire and absorb it back into his body. What the hell did he have under that leather of his, hyper-kevlar? Plate armor? He wore a sick grin on his wide, sideburned face, eyes windows into nowhere. He jerked his other hand. The weapon sailed out of my grip to slap against the wall. “What the fuck?” I cried.

  Staring at my empty palm, I felt a stupor enveloping me as I rolled for cover.

  Blest lifted his weapon to loose hell and blast the shit out of the intruders, for there was another figure coming up behind. Blest’s fire went wide and ate into the wall, shredding it to pieces. But it was too late. Mong’s techno-psi power was in motion; with a twist of a wrist, Blest’s weapon seemed to wither in his hand. He gave a mournful cry. The R4 clattered to his feet. Blest blinked, shaking his head, staggering and reaching to grab it. But Mong was a step ahead, kicking it out of his grasp.

  Follee was too stunned for action. He just sat there, staring like a zombie. Mong turned to him, a fatherly expression on his face, ignoring me while Blest writhed for cover on the debris-ridden floor.

  Two gunman came in behind to waste Follee and the rest of us if we dared to breath too loudly.

  Mong grabbed the nearest gunman’s barrel and shoved it down. “Wait! I want these people alive.”

  Follee jerked in a weird way. Maybe it was just panic or madness taking him over. Lurching off his chair, he clutched a dark lump in his palm, the same pod he’d been fumbling with earlier. One of those damned bulbs from the space station. The thing in his hand had been birthed from the dying eel-lizard, pulsing now and shimmering with an eerie expectancy.

  Follee gave a harsh laugh. “Stop, or I’ll chuck this at you. I’ve seen what these things can do.”

  Mong hesitated. His lips parted and his large brown eyes stayed trained on the bulb.

  The other two gunman circled us. Raising the bulb in a trembling hand, Follee gripped his firearm in the other, as if he’d never shot a gun before.

  Mong motioned. “Who is this momma’s boy?”

  His nearest henchman shrugged.

  I lay on the floor by the debris of the destroyed door, praying for a miracle.

  “Come on, boy,” the dark figure said to Follee, “you don’t have the nerve to shoot me, a Star Lord, do you?” His deep-throated voice echoed through the seashell-shaped bridge.

  Follee faltered. The tech man was cracking. Why didn’t he shoot? It was unthinkable to just stand there and threaten Mong with that bulb...and yet, Mong did not advance.

  Follee hoped to bluff his way through this. Like as if something was going to hatch and attack on his command—even if it did, so what? I remembered the Myscol I’d force-fed him and I did a face palm—a fool gag to play. One that could get us all killed now.

  Mong continued to stare down Follee with that avuncular look. It was a look of grave concern, one I remember all too well back on Trellian when he blew my hand off and plugged acid in the stump for kicks. The memory, burned indelibly in my brain, was one I wished to erase. Follee seemed to freeze, as if hypnotized by Mong’s mesmeric stare—caught like a deer in the headlights.

  “Shoot him, you idiot!” I croaked.

  Follee gave his head a vigorous shake then his hand twitched as if to make a move with the bulb.

  “Don’t—” Mong’s warning came
too late.

  The nearest gunman pegged Follee’s nasty little bedroom surprise, blowing off some of Follee’s flesh, maybe a finger or two. He sagged with a thin-mouthed squeal. The shifty-eyed gunman whipped up his gun, firing more warning shorts. He leveled blasts at me and Blest when we started to inch forward.

  The shattered bulb clattered to the floor like a Humpty Dumpty egg.

  I watched spellbound. It hissed, imploded, suddenly sagged inward and rippled, as if bubbling with hot lava. For Christ sakes. It then burst in a splatter of red and green pap, spraying the nearest gunmen with acid, sizzling his leathers and flesh. “What the fuck—?” cried one.

  A winged cricket, or some other unnameable horror, burst out of the mash and flew around the room, buzzing and hissing above the gunmen’s heads. They ducked, cursing in bewilderment. They swatted and fired at it, but it evaded their shots, hissing like an angry serpent. Without warning, it dive-bombed, burying itself in the face of the first gunman who’d fired at it. He gave a wild shriek and clawed at his face, beating at his nose until it was a pulp of blood and gore in what was left of his disintegrating face. The thing burrowed deeper into his mouth and nose like a termite.

  The other gunman gave a cursing yell and rained fire into his comrade, frying both man and winged thing.

  “Bloody hell,” moaned Follee, staring at the crimson ruin of his palm. He stared around him from one horror to the next, then back to his maimed hand. Fumbling for his R3 which he’d dropped and lifted it to pepper Mong and crew, he gasped, but Mong uttered a hypnotic word and Follee seemed to suddenly freeze, as if beguiled by the Star Lord’s impending powers.

  “Shoot! What are you waiting for, you dumb fuck?” I cried.

  “Try.” Mong mouthed the word as if blowing a bubble to a baby. I could see the snicker of triumph curl the lip on his swarthy face. The sightless eyes penetrated into a person’s soul. The man’s presence was what awed one most. Terrible, unwielding, irresistible. He flicked out a hand in an almost negligent gesture. Follee suddenly flew across the room as if propelled by an invisible force. I heard a snap, then a neck bone break as Follee’s back thudded hard against the panels. He slid to the floor, a straw puppet, gazing up in dumb fascination, his spinal cord snapped in two.