The Lost Destroyer (Lost Starship Series Book 3)

by Vaughn Heppner

  The slarn hunter was blocky with a thick neck and an ugly scar running across his right eye and down his cheek. It must have come from a slarn’s claw. The eye-socket contained a smooth ball bearing. Likely, it doubled as a tech tool, giving the man radar vision. Villars wore leather garments, probably cured slarn skin. Everyone prized slarn fur. Only hunters used the toughened leather.

  Villars had grizzled white hair and weather-beaten features. He gripped a long slarn knife in his right hand. It glittered in the hall-light. He waved a stun rod in his left fist.

  “Does Ludendorff know what you’re doing?” Maddox asked.

  Villars frowned for just a moment. Then, the white-haired hunter grinned nastily.

  “You’re the fancy-pants boy who can save the universe, aren’t you? But look at you. The shine of a knife makes you sweat. You want the professor to gallop along and save you. What a mama’s boy.”

  Maddox snorted, allowing his body to relax so he appeared bored. “Yes. You’ve nailed it. I’m positively frightened by an incompetent like you.”

  “That’s right, boy. That’s why you sprinted to see if your little lover girl was still in one piece. I let your lieutenant see my intentions. She did exactly what I wanted. But here’s what I’m wondering about you. Aren’t you curious yet if I’ve already carved Meta up?”

  Maddox shrugged as if indifferent. Inside, he seethed.

  “Yeah,” Villars said. “That’s nice. Your balls are sweating. I know what you’re thinking. Are you ever going to nail her again? Maybe I have her hanging like a piece of beef, with blood dripping to the floor from the places where I carved her. She don’t deserve such a fast death, though, not after what she did to Gorgon. That was a hell of a way to die from one-punch Sally.”

  “You’re a sadist,” Maddox said.

  “We all got our problems, right? Yours is my knife. Of course, you’re not going to have that problem much longer, as I’m going to pull the lungs out of your chest. They’ll flap a few times before you die, boy. It’s called a blood eagle, and it’s what I done to the last mama’s boy who pissed me off.”

  “Why does Ludendorff keep a sadist in his company?” Maddox asked.

  Villars’s grin grew, which put crinkle lines at the corners of his eyes. “I’m the best at what I do, and the professor, he appreciates skill. I help keep his skinny butt alive. The old man thinks he needs you, but Gorgon’s death shows me this time the professor is wrong.”

  “Meta killed Gorgon, not me.”

  “Shifting the blame, are we? Nice job, punk, let your woman take the blame. And here I thought you wanted to leave this universe as a man.”

  “Your logic escapes me,” Maddox said.

  “Better and better,” Villars said. The hunter crouched, and he began to maneuver toward Maddox. The slide of his left thumb made the stun rod hum with power. It must have been set at maximum strength.

  “You see, boy, I happen to know you’re the white knight type. You want to ride in on your horse and rescue your little lady. But she’s got several days of screaming ahead of her, see? So, first I take you out, and then I take my time with her and do it right.”

  “And when Ludendorff discovers what you’ve done?”

  Villars snarled as hatred flashed in his eye. Flat-footed, he charged Maddox.

  The captain kept his smile within. With ease, Maddox dodged the knife thrust. The slarn hunter acted with passion instead of cool intellect. Maddox struck, and surprised filled him as his hand harmlessly passed the man’s neck. The next second, the stun rod slammed against the captain’s ribs, discharging with a heavy zap.

  Maddox catapulted backward. His back slammed against the deck plates. Trying to move, he found himself frozen in place.

  “Smart boys always fall for that little trick,” Villars said. “They think I’m a hotheaded bozo. I think my little scar does it. What do you think?”

  Maddox squeezed his eyes shut. At least he could still do that much. The slarn hunter had tricked him. Villars hadn’t attacked with blind fury, but with guile. Maddox should have realized a slarn hunter didn’t survive a Wolf Prime trapping season without animal cunning. This man must have lasted many winters on the ice world.

  “I’m going to make this quick, boy,” Villars said. “So, you don’t have to piss yourself just yet. That’ll come ten seconds from now.”

  Maddox opened his eyes. The slarn hunter peered down at him. Could he get the trapper to kneel?

  With an act of will, Maddox opened his mouth. He spoke in a slurry way, “One…last question.”

  “What’s that, boy? I can’t hear you. You have to speak up.”

  The slarn hunter enjoyed taunting him. Maddox would have to play on that. He pretended to have trouble speaking.

  The hunter chuckled, lowering his head. “Better hurry, lover-boy. Your days of talking are almost at an end.”

  “If…” Maddox managed to say.

  “Yeah, if what?”

  “I could…”

  Villars snarled with impatience. “You know I ain’t got time to listen to you blubber. So, you’ve got one more chance. Then I’m stroking you with the rod and going to work cutting out your lungs. The next thing you’ll know, you’ll be trying to fly with a blood eagle.”

  Maddox strove with all his considerable concentration. He raised his head. The slarn hunter actually cocked an eyebrow in surprise. The head motion was a distraction. While making his lips writhe and his eyeballs bulge outward with pleading—causing Villars to chuckle with nasty enjoyment—Maddox thrust his fingers in his pocket and felt for a mini-grenade. It was hardly bigger than his thumbnail with an equal thickness in all directions. He pressed his thumb against the correct side, withdrew his hand and counted, hoping he got this right.

  “I’ve had enough to this,” Villars said. He raised the stun rod.

  Maddox used his thumb, flicking the grenade upward.

  Villars caught the motion. His head twisted that way. “What the—”

  The grenade exploded, expelling knockout gas. A single whiff would be enough. Maddox held his breath as he waited.

  Understanding filled Villars’s good eye. He swung the rod, but he was already falling. The rod missed Maddox, striking the floor and discharging. Then the hunter’s body slammed against the captain. Maddox had tried to ready himself for it. His numbed body couldn’t do it in time. The captain’s wind was knocked out of him, and he involuntarily sucked down air, inhaling knockout gas as well.

  ***

  Maddox came to groggily. For several seconds, he didn’t understand the heavy weight on his chest. Why was breathing so difficult? His sandpaper-dry mouth tasted vile.

  Lying across his torso, Villars groaned. Maddox could feel the slarn hunter stir.

  That started a contest the captain wasn’t sure Villars even knew he was part of. Holding himself perfectly still, Maddox strove to wake up, and he tensed his body.

  I have to make my muscles work. Maddox knew he had to get up faster than the psycho lying on top of him did. Villars was a dangerous sadist. The professor must know that. So, why did Ludendorff keep the man with him?

  Villars stirred, smacking his lips.

  Maddox redoubled his efforts at concentration.

  “What happened?” Villars muttered. “What—”

  A waft of bad breath billowed into Maddox’s face, making him cough.

  That caused Villars to stir with more effort. “Tricky bastard,” the hunter whispered. The man’s left hand dragged across the floor. The fingers didn’t hold anything yet. The hand shifted direction.

  By straining, Maddox turned his head. Villars’s hand reached for the knife, his fingers nearing the handle. Maddox hissed between his teeth, and he wriggled, moving his body just enough so the knife remained out of Villars’s reach.

  “Yeah,” the hunter said. “I get it now.” He put both palms on the floor and pushed upward.

  Maddox convulsed with effort. He wriggled part way out from under Villars. Th
e hunter woke up all the way then, and he dropped, clutching Maddox’s knees.

  “No you don’t, boy,” Villars said.

  Maddox forced himself to sit up. Villars looked at him. Three times, Maddox hit the man’s face with his fists. They were weak blows, probably helping Villars to wake up faster rather than doing him any harm.

  The hunter shoved his face against Maddox’s legs. The fists drummed uselessly against Villars’s skull. Maddox stopped the attack, and Villars chuckled nastily. A second later, the hunter opened his mouth and bit the captain’s left thigh. The teeth tore through fabric and cut into flesh.

  Maddox bellowed with pain. He drove his knees up, grabbed the slarn hunter’s head and twisted savagely. Villars rolled with it onto the floor.

  Both men struggled to their feet, panting, glaring at each other from a few meters away.

  “You’re an animal,” Maddox said.

  “I always win,” Villars boasted, “because I’ll do what I have to. You’re making this a memorable event, boy. That makes it fun and exciting.”

  “Are you a Methuselah Man that you keep calling me boy?”

  Villars laughed. “You’re a freak, a hybrid. I’m going to crush you with my bare hands.”

  Maddox jabbed three times, connecting the last time against the nose. The blow sent Villars reeling. The captain didn’t follow the attack. Instead, he picked up the fallen knife. It had a good heft, and he began to advance on Villars.

  “No,” Professor Ludendorff said. “This is no good. I need both of you.”

  Maddox didn’t pay any attention to Ludendorff. Instead, he accelerated the attack, wondering if he had enough time.

  The web field caught Maddox as it had on the bridge. The only consolation was that Villars was also caught in a force field web.

  Ludendorff stepped into Maddox’s view. The professor held the flat device. At the older man’s side walked Galyan. Ludendorff made tsking sounds.

  “Cesar, you know we need the captain.”

  The slarn hunter squirmed as his harsh features twisted with the intensity of his efforts to break free of the force web.

  “You must stop that, or you’ll tear tendons,” Ludendorff said.

  “Kill him,” Maddox said. “Villars is a madman.”

  The professor pretended not to hear the comment.

  Maddox repeated it, adding, “You know he’s emotionally unstable.”

  Ludendorff finally regarded the captain. “You’re young and full of righteous judgments. Life does not always proceed as one might wish.”

  “Meaning you keep a sadist in your company,” Maddox said.

  “Cesar has proven invaluable several times,” Ludendorff said. “He doesn’t know the meaning of the word quit. Without him, the New Men would have slain me on two different occasions on Wolf Prime.”

  “He wants to torture Meta before he kills her,” Maddox said.

  “I suppose I should have foreseen that,” Ludendorff said. “It’s too bad Meta had to interfere as she did. None of this would be happening, otherwise.”

  “If you’d come to me and told us the truth,” Maddox said, “it wouldn’t be happening like this either. You’re the one to blame, not Meta.”

  “We don’t have the luxury of blaming each other,” Ludendorff said. “Now, I’m going to release both of you. Cesar, I want your word you will shake hands with Captain Maddox.”

  “No,” Villars said. “His woman killed Sten. She has to die for that. This boy would try to stop me from enacting justice.”

  “I see your point,” Ludendorff told Villars. “But I happen to need Maddox in order to save humanity. Maybe Sten would have understood that.”

  “Sten saved my life when the slarn took me down,” Villars said. “I’d be dead if Sten hadn’t waded into battle with the beast. That’s not something you forget, Professor.”

  “No, I suppose not,” Ludendorff said.

  “So, his bitch gets a wild hair up her—”

  “Listen to me,” Maddox said in a calm voice.

  “Don’t talk to me, punk,” Villars snarled.

  “Oh, my,” Ludendorff said. “This is worse than I thought. Cesar, what am I going to do with you?”

  “You’d better kill me, Professor,” Villars said, “because I’m never going to stop going after—”

  Ludendorff held up his device and tapped it once. That cut off Villars’s rant before it could get properly started. The web squeezed Villars so hard he gasped for air.

  “I don’t appreciate that kind of talk even from you,” Ludendorff told the slarn hunter. “You’re my guard, my final ring of protection. The others are gone, Cesar. Don’t you understand what that means?”

  Villars looked at Ludendorff with bulging eyes. It was clear the slarn hunter could no longer breathe.

  “You must think long-term,” Ludendorff explained. “Maybe we’ve been on Wolf Prime too long. You’ve picked up some of their wilder customs. That will not do this time around. Don’t you see that?”

  Maddox wasn’t sure, but Villars might have nodded the barest fraction.

  The professor tapped his device.

  Villars inhaled deeply.

  “Let us try this again,” Ludendorff said. “Cesar, can you withhold seeking justice until the end of our endeavor?”

  “I can,” the slarn hunter said, with his eyes downcast.

  “There,” Ludendorff told Maddox. “I’m glad that’s settled.”

  “He tried to cut off my feet with monofilament wire,” Maddox said.

  “He won’t do that again,” Ludendorff assured the captain.

  “That isn’t what he said,” Maddox told the professor. “He agreed to forego his attempts right now.”

  Ludendorff shrugged. “Isn’t that good enough?”

  Maddox stared at the professor.

  “Come now,” Ludendorff chided. “Consider the various possibilities. Cesar might die before we complete our task. You or Meta might perish. Maybe we’ll fail, and we’ll all die together. Then, you will have worried about a future that never existed. It’s true he might kill the two of you later. But then you’ll be dead, and it will no longer be of concern to you. The point is that you’ll have helped save humanity by working together now.”

  A fixed grin remained on Maddox’s face. He realized the futility of trying to reason with the man who had the power to imprison him at will. The captain planned to bide his time and kill Villars when an opportunity presented itself now that he knew the hunter’s agenda.

  “Are we agreed then?” Ludendorff asked.

  “I already said I am,” Villars declared.

  “Captain?” the professor asked.

  “Certainly,” Maddox said. “Until we have completed the mission, I will shelve the matter.”

  Villars laughed harshly. “Do you hear that, Professor? The punk takes you for a fool. He’s lying. He’s going to try to murder me the first chance he gets.”

  “This really is too much, Captain,” Ludendorff complained.

  “I’ve given you my word,” Maddox said.

  “A false word,” Ludendorff said. “It’s clear you have other intentions.”

  “I don’t know how you could tell that,” Maddox said.

  “With the greatest of ease, boy,” Villars said. “Once you’ve been around the block enough times, it gets easy to see when a punk like you lies through his teeth.”

  “Let us see if we can try this again,” Ludendorff said.

  “Yes,” Maddox said. “I won’t try to kill your friend.”

  “There you go, Cesar. Do you hear that? This time the captain spoke genuinely.”

  Villars glowered.

  “He thwarted your surprise attempt to kill him,” Ludendorff pointed out. “That should show you Maddox has more resources than the average man.”

  “He’s a freak,” Villars said.

  “No, Cesar,” the professor said. “That is ill-mannered. You should not say that to him.”

  “Frea
k,” Villars said, hotly.

  Ludendorff turned to Maddox. “It appears you’ve gravely angered my friend. For your own good, I suggest you stay out of his way.”

  “Naturally,” Maddox said.

  Ludendorff peered into the captain’s eyes. Finally, the professor exhaled, turning toward Villars. “Come along then. Some separation appears to be in order.”

  Ludendorff took the slarn hunter by the right elbow, guiding him down the corridor. The blockier man moved sluggishly, as if the web was still on enough to make his movements difficult. It seemed the professor wasn’t only going to trust Villars’s word.

  A few seconds later, the force web vanished from around Maddox. He stumbled several steps before he stood in quiet contemplation, examining the knife that Villars had planned to use to cut out his lungs.

  Turning around, Maddox went to the monofilament wire. It would take careful work to take down something like this. Afterward, he would have to warn Meta about Villars.

  What would the professor do once Maddox killed Villars? It would appear the captain would find out soon.

  -10-

  Hundreds of light-years from Victory in the Beyond, an agent of the New Men sat alone in a room, enduring his latest rehabilitation due to mission failure.

  Kane was born on the Rouen Colony. Thanks to scientists of the Chabot Consortium, he had been genetically modified to work on the two-G mining world. He was big and square-bodied, with gray hair and flat slabs of muscle. Kane had the bleakness of a glacier even though he seethed where he sat.

  He was aboard a star cruiser in a punishment chamber. At the command of Oran Rva, he attempted to purge his emotions. A condenser ray beamed down from the ceiling at his brain in order to aid the process, or so they had informed him. Kane had begun to doubt the explanation, believing the ray did something else to his mind.

  Kane gripped his knees, enduring the process. The beam made his head pound and his teeth ache. As the ray did its work, he attempted to reconcile a truism of his existence.

  Regular humans were no match for his excellence. Yet, despite his superiority over the norms, the dominants—what Star Watch called the New Men—were better than he was in every way. Kane understood that he would always be a second tier citizen in the New Order. That was better than becoming cattle like the rest of humanity. Was it not?