Starship Rogue series Box Set

by Chris Turner

  “Any problem here, Balt?” his deep-throated voice rasped.

  “Nah, just Rusco being an old woman with a finicky bladder, slow as dogshit.” He came close and smacked me on the shoulder, breathing down my neck. “That pecker of yours sawed off or something? Hurry up.”

  I held up a hand. I let warm spray sprinkle the tin siding, sniffed the sulfury air, maybe my last polluted breaths yet. As I zipped up, I darted eyes around the desolate yard. Death inched closer.

  “Get going,” Balt grumbled. They herded me up to the warehouse, then busted through a boarded up door with the ends of their rifles.

  We came into a gloomy equipment bay that I remembered opened up to a loading area. The place had maybe an extra layer of dust and rat dung, cobwebs and reek of spilled oil. Several grubby rooms spread out along the wall. I could see activity here. Bootprints etched in the dust. Somebody had been storing cargo here, and then moving it from time to time. Large wooden crates, dozens of them. They lay stacked against the wall.

  “Anything familiar?” grunted Mong.

  “There,” I lifted a mangled hand to the first room on the left. Toward a battered door, leaning on its broken hinges. They prodded me along, cursing and wrinkling their noses at the musty stench that hit them when they entered the room and thrust me forward.

  “Search through that pile,” I said.

  They kicked through the bags and broken pieces of wood and metal strewn in a corner. From the likes of the broken machinery and tubs, at one time, I guessed, this had been some sort of meat grinding facility or canning factory.

  Balt’s face lit in a sick grin. The tech was still there—in that pile of junk amid the rat dung and the mice piss. A U-shaped contraption with thin, flat base and parallel plates standing waist-high on either side. Now it was covered in fly shit and rat dung, but still glowing with that dark, sullen greenish hue and emitting that disturbing low hum.

  Mong practically fell to his knees in adulation of the precious artifact. “At last!” he rasped.

  He held it up in his hands with reverence, lifting it to the grubby ceiling, and I could see the primitive, feral madness in his eyes.

  The gunmen looked at him with odd curiosity, but I could see something of the falseness in those grins, as if they too thought their master was more than a bit off.

  We came out of the warehouse and set out toward the ship, a man beside Balt carrying the prize.

  A voice like a crow’s caw echoed off the stone behind me. I staggered in my limp, my good right hand slapping involuntarily to my hip—for a weapon I did not have.

  “Hold it, you fucks,” came the voice. “Yeah, you!” The voice called louder.

  Mong and his men kept walking as if deaf. I turned, saw a thin-faced security guard training his R3 at us at the edge of the watchhouse.

  “I’m talking to you!” The man’s rifle came up with a click.

  One of Mong’s men whipped out his weapon and plugged the guard in the brow. He fell in a crumpled heap.

  In detached curiosity Balt swaggered over, treading over the body and grunting without a backward glance.

  I licked my lips.

  Mong beamed. “Mr. Rusco, you’ve been a good boy. You should be proud of your achievement today. I offer you my congratulations. This is history in the making.”

  “Yeah, seems so, and I bet that dead guy is cheering you on.”

  Mong sniffed. “That man will rise again, in another life. Long is the cycle of painful lessons to learn in this life and the next.”

  “Is it? A little rabbit once whispered in my ear that the call of the screech owl isn’t to be considered an invite. I don’t buy into your spiritual jabber, or your warmed-over bible shit.”

  Mong shrugged. “Your loss, Rusco. It means little to me.”

  “Yeah, well—”

  “And now, for the second part of this operation.”

  “Let Blest go,” I urged. “He’s innocent in this.” I braced myself for annihilation.

  “Nobody is innocent in this world, Mr. Rusco. People must learn to accept the consequences for the company they keep.”

  I tensed, my teeth gritted for bullets to fly.

  “Relax. I see you think I am about to snuff you out. No. On the contrary, I have plans for you. I reward those who bring me opportunities. I am not an ungrateful man. I am the angel of death. The ones who get in my way are blood sacrifices who are crushed under the boot of an enlightened future.”

  “If you say so.” I let out a breath of contempt.

  “Phase two may cure that defiance of yours, Rusco. If not, there is always phase three.”

  “Just can’t wait.”

  Mong chuckled, a grunt at the end of an evil threat, a throaty, brooding sound, the closest I’ve heard to a laugh. In truth...my bluster was pure bullshit and I felt a cloying fear rising as a crest of warm bile in my throat, bursting at the seams, on the heels of a repressed scream.

  Chapter 15

  Back on the Vulpin’s bridge, I looked down with wary distaste on Brisis 9, that slum planet of my nightmares as it slowly receded into the background stars. I wished the hell I’d never gone down there with Marty, my old co-partner in crime, and heisted that alien tech some months ago.

  Our resident Star Lord seemed a changed man, all ebullience and bright smiles as he directed affairs from the captain’s chair. Now that he had a working amalgo, why shouldn’t he play captain of the universe? His despicable lieutenant Balt had dropped hints that the other amalgamator never worked, that its green glow had fizzled out long ago and the few attempts at exploration of its powers had denied him access to the alien worlds he so coveted. The box of small, disc-sized transporters given him by his erstwhile captain Baer had likewise yielded zippo, only toxic places of doom.

  My hand ached like a bitch, my fingers skewed at unnatural angles. Torturer Balt had seen to a maximum of pain.

  “Instruct your men on the amalgo,” boomed Mong in his resonant baritone. “Any who so much as touches the device, shall be skinned alive. Is that clear?”

  Lieutenant Balt nodded, grumbling an acknowledgement. He beckoned Hadruk forward, the security officer, looking a cross between a bulldog and an ape, given his stoop, glinting baboon-like eyes and the bristly hair on his cheeks and the back of his hands.

  The bridge, a dim-lit place with high ceiling, black panels, viewports and holo displays, showed various state-of-the-art equipment. The setup made Bantam look like a toy. As Mong directed operations from his raised seat, a crew of nine of his men hunched around various consoles, operating computers and monitoring sensors.

  I’d not seen hide nor hair of my shipmate Blest since we’d last journeyed to Hoath. Mong had ignored all my attempts to wrest information on his status. He assured me he was being taken care of.

  Mong kept me on the bridge right next to him, like a pet hamster, flashing eyes my way every minute, along with his precious amalgamator, that blood diamond of treasures he’d forced me to uncover for him at Hoath. Mong had stationed it by the weapons console where he could keep an eye on it. The device glowed with a baleful purpose, a sickly green, its parallel plates inviting vistas into nowhere. Exactly what this fuck Mong planned to do with it was beyond me. But I’d visited one of those alien worlds some months ago via the phaso that the Skugs had destroyed—jolted there in a dangerous split of a second—to some freakish landscape with barely breathable air and desiccated bodies. I remembered the sallow dawn lit with strange clouds and aphid-like shapes crawling across the horizon. For all I knew they could have been far-off alien spacecraft—either way, I had no desire to experience such hell again.

  Two long-haired men with war helms crested with eagle wings stood at attention by the U-shaped contraption, gripping R3s. Six more manned the bridge, all well-built soldiers wearing deep scowls and leather breastplates with firearms at their hips. My chances of taking any of them by surprise were zero given my crippled hand. As for Mong, well, I’d never gotten used to his intimidati
ng size and strength. His leather and fur-clad bulk, some mythic incarnation of Genghis Khan, cast a cold shadow and exuded a magnetism that never failed to give me the creeps.

  “How are our campaigns going in the frontiers?” he barked.

  Balt shrugged. “They are going tolerably well, lord. We have puppet figures dancing Azron a tune in the Denista system. Funds and raw materials trickle in slowly from conquests in Bagrish. We grow our Beryllium plants there and on Phenix and other worlds in the Veglos sector. Captain Yisil is producing more warships every week on Susol’s moon.”

  Mong gave a gruff acknowledgement. “Anything else?”

  “A continued resistance on Melinar, sir. We have Guptaon under control, her sister planet. We’ll blast them to compliance, if needed. But the Melinarians pose a worse threat. I propose we exercise extreme military force, move in on their planet with prejudice.”

  “Melinar?”

  “They have cunning spies, lord. Also advanced tech which seems to have jammed our signals.”

  “Ingenious bastards, eh? Rebels?”

  “More than that, sir. They rile up the neighboring worlds, the Vendecki, who are pooling forces with the Jaiwils on Xistris.”

  Mong slammed his fist on the console. “This is unacceptable, Balt. We must quell this budding rebellion and crush them all. We’ll fly to the Azileus system immediately. Assemble the armada. Full speed. The kid gloves come off. No mercy.”

  “Very well, my lord. And the jammers?”

  “I doubt they can jam an entire fleet.” Balt nodded and barked orders into the com to the war captains.

  “Prepare the enhanced fareon beams we received from Trellian,” Mong instructed. “Have our vanguard outfitted with our most impenetrable armor. The insurgents will learn not to meddle with my plans. They’ll be slaughtered. They’ve ignored our terms for too long and flout our authority like sharp-toothed badgers. I’ve offered them every reasonable alternative.”

  Balt grinned. “Too true.”

  I felt the ship lurch as we warped into Melinar with an armada that would make General Krod’s historic fight against the Fineus rebel strike of 2401 look like a baby shower. Mong’s ships materialized from the ethers, ships outfitted with augmented tech and now deployed. A thousand strong.

  My mouth hung open. I’d never seen such a force of warships. They must have warped in from all over the galaxy.

  “Look at their pitiful defenses,” gloated Hadruk. “Two hundred Vendecki warships and a smattering of Melinar skyslips—That against our millardian? Paf.”

  Mong spat a wad of phlegm on the deck. “We’ll overpower them with our superior firepower. Our armor is better and our new shields juiced with neutron boosters. Strike at will.”

  The ships sped forward to meet the defending vanguard. The first squadrons branched out in complex, crazy spiraling loops, each army trying to outflank the other. Mong’s, of course, having the superior numbers. I cringed at the sight of the Melinarian forces surrounded and crushed.

  Mong barked a command, “Order the left wing to bank and wipe out that Vendecki wedge.”

  “Signals jammed, sir,” the weapons engineer cried.

  “What?”

  “It’s bizarre. Like the last time. We were sure it was a temporary glitch—”

  A Warhawk went up in flames beside us, now a smoking fireball, prey to Vendecki fire. Another disintegrated in a cindery ruin to our starboard.

  Hadruk swore. “We cannot communicate with our fleet, lord! Jamming signal at 90%.”

  “Where’s the source?” Mong bawled.

  “We don’t know. Conflicting reports.”

  Mong’s face turned beet red. “Find it, you fools!”

  The weapons engineer cried in vain, “Sir, they not only jam our signals, but scramble our weapon’s systems. Fareons have gone haywire.”

  Mong blew air out of his nose.

  I grinned a sour clown’s grimace. Finally a world that could fight back against these mongrel war dogs. I rocked on my heels, relishing to see Mong fall, even if I were to die in the process. I stared down at my mangled hand. If I didn’t get regen soon, the nerve damage would be permanent. I doubted dear old Mong was about to outfit me with another robot hand. I clenched my good right fist, the prosthetic, the robot implant, and ached to use it against his ugly face. Maybe drive it into his skull. Kill him in one last stand.

  “Report.”

  “Weapons still jammed, sir. We’ve traced the sources to two small moons, Twidor and Anxaste, orbiting Melinar.”

  Mong hissed. “So fast? You knew this before? Why the hell didn’t you say something earlier?”

  “We ignored it because the signals ping-ponged back and forth, confusing our sensors.” The engineer clacked keys on the pad nervously. “We thought they were malfunctioning. I now believe they have dual jammers going.”

  “Of course they have, you numbskull. How can they jam our signal and keep their channels open?”

  “We don’t know. They must have penetrated our encrypted messages. Some new phantom tech.” The weapons engineer’s heavy jaw clamped then quivered under the heavy boom of more strikes on the hull. Multiple enemies were encircling us. I jerked about and snatched a look through the viewport. Melinar and Vendecki craft swirled in dive formations to bomb the hell out of Mong’s flagship. “If we destroy any station down there,” the engineer quavered, “we destroy any chance of using such tech in our own campaigns.”

  “If we do not wipe out that jammer, Verlioze, we’ll lose this fight.”

  “Shall we retreat, sir?” Balt suggested, his eyes narrowed pinpricks of feral intensity. Bombs erupted around us, though shields for now held.

  Mong glared at him as if he were a poisonous toad. “I never retreat, Balt. Never. I win every battle I fight.”

  “The losses, lord, they could be catastrophic.”

  Mong’s hand came out and grabbed the lieutenant’s neck. Balt choked, clutching at Mong’s wrist. It was as if the lieutenant’d swallowed a lizard. “Catastrophic, yes, Balt. But risk is inevitable and to be expected. We will win this battle, as I said. Find those damn transmitters.” He threw Balt down.

  “Take the ship to the nearest source,” the lieutenant croaked, massaging his reddening neck.

  Another wing fighter caught in flames and disintegrated in atomic ruin.

  Hadruk and Verlioze muttered, then Verlioze raised his voice in a hoarse bray, “Our fleet, lord. We cannot communicate with them! Do we just leave them here? Our last command was to attack with prejudice.”

  Mong’s face remained impassive. I looked to see his reaction. He bared his teeth, then said in a dangerously low voice, “For all your sakes, where’s the exact source of those transmitters?”

  The weapons master shook his head. Confusion clouded his face. “Sometimes they seem to come from Twidor’s Ghost Mare Valley, other times from Anxaste.”

  “Triangulate! Send a probe in to investigate and fly back out. We can manually scan its databanks.”

  “We’ve done that before, sir—”

  “Do it again!” Mong snarled. “Wait! Scrap that idea! Bring Vulpin into Twidor’s Mare Valley. On the double!”

  It was a gutsy move. We left the war front, unable to reach by signal the rest of the fleet. To Twidor we sped at full impulse, leaving the fleet behind to hold the line, or sink against the lockspring tide of resistance. In their glee at targeting Mong’s gigantic front line, the defenders failed to notice Vulpin’s absence.

  Within moments, we were passing through the threadbare atmosphere of Melinar’s closest moon, skimming across the surface, a grey desolation of changeless hills and valleys. The ship roared across the pitted craters and low rises of crumbled rock and layers of moon dust.

  Mong advanced to study the holo readout as if oblivious to the damage his shields had sustained. I wondered what went on in that rattrap mind of his.

  “There! In that thin ring of boulders! I see a weak signal pulsing on the scanners.”
>
  Hadruk, twisting about his stout, ape figure, said hoarsely, “Our probes must have missed it prior. That, or their signal is now operating at full strength and traceable. Helmsman, turn us about. Make another sweep!”

  The 3D projection shifted to higher resolution. A clutch of displaced boulders rose on a low rise. A thin rod nestled inside, its tip poking above the cradle of its rocky protection.

  “There’s an antenna! Are our weapons up?”

  “Fareons are inoperable, sir, but traditional drop bombs are active.”

  “Blast the transmitter to dust.”

  “With pleasure,” Hadruk grunted.

  The landscape incinerated below us and Mong stared in triumph. The ship soared upward into space. The communication static had diminished. Now only the thin garble of screams of dying men carried across the black gulfs.

  “Move quickly!” Mong ordered. “To that shithole Anxaste. Since we can’t reach our scouts, impulse over to Anxaste.”

  Vulpin’s heavy–duty Vega 8 impulse engines roared under our feet, bringing us to Anxaste, another dead satellite of Melinar—the place of the second illusive triangulated signal.

  Sure enough, a high-energy transmitter lay cached within the rocks on some barren moon hill.

  “Fire at will,” Mong bellowed.

  I saw a mushroom cloud erupt on the desolate horizon. A dozen breaths tensed on the bridge. If they undermined the communication jammers, Melinar fate would be sealed…

  Seconds passed and communications systems came online.

  Mong’s lip curled in a vindictive leer and my heart plummeted. It was clear what would happen now—another world lost to Mong’s mad vision of galactic supremacy.

  Orders were shouted across the com and traded across the air waves as Vulpin raced to the battle front.

  It was as I feared, his ships, the bulk of which had survived the onslaught of the smaller forces, now united in full assault and communication, drove in a wedge, firing full on into the defending ships, which up till now had held the advantage. Mong’s remaining ships, some seven hundred strong, blasted a hole through the thin line of defense. A dozen assault fighters impulsed at max speed down toward the orange globe of defenseless Melinar. The defenders, stunned by the sudden downturn in fortune, brought their ships back to meet the strike. But fareon beams prevented them from making any difference.