The screen flickered back to life just in time to reveal a flash of the Kaiju's razor-sharp teeth before they sank into the Argo's hull. The massive strike from the beast shook the entire ship and jerked it sideways in space, which did a number on their speed and orbital pattern. The members of the bridge crew who were not strapped into their seats were thrown about like ragdolls, bouncing against their consoles and tossed violently into the bridge's walls. The bridge filled with the sound of snapping bones and crashing bodies. Everywhere around him, people were crying out in pain or calling for help. Stations overloaded from power surges through the Argo's central systems and blew apart like small flash bombs. Fires raged in the dim red lights of the bridge.
“We... we hurt the thing, sir!” Hiro shouted from his station, which by the grace of God was still intact. Nathan looked around, his head swimming. He saw Tiffanie lying on the floor several feet from her station, her neck twisted in an awkward and unnatural angle as blood dripped from the corner of her open mouth. Her dull, lifeless gaze seemed to blame him for what had happened to both her and the Argo. The captain felt sick to his stomach, but he knew that his responsibilities were to the entire ship, and not just his bridge crew.
This included the thousands of souls he had sworn to keep alive.
He jumped from his seat and raced for the helm. The Argo's pilot was dead, her headless body strapped into her seat at the station. The chair was soaked in blood. A piece of the bridge's ceiling had collapsed and shaved the poor woman's head cleanly from her shoulders. The Argo continued to shake as alarms blared like air raid sirens. The Kaiju had hold of the Argo and it was pummeling the sturdy hull with its fists between slashes of her giant claws along the topside.
“Clearly, we didn't hurt her enough!” Nathan shouted at Hiro as he spun the chair containing the helmsman's corpse out of his way. Their only hope was to get away from the beast before it tore them completely apart and finished off humanity. An unprogrammed jump was dangerous, but he had been left with no other option. He had to keep everyone alive, no matter the cost to him. Nathan’s fingers flew over the controls of the helm as he manually brought the warp engines online.
“Captain, this jump is unadvisable,” Medea chimed in from the computer terminal. He scowled as he continued trying random combinations of coordinates, hoping one would work.
“I don’t have a choice, Medea! If we don’t, then this Kaiju will open us up and that’ll be all she wrote, sweetheart! Poof! Humanity is done! Game over!”
He finished typing in the coordinates and pressed the confirmation button. The lighting on the bridge, already dim, turned nearly completely off as the engines drew almost all the available power to them. The Laws of Physics broke as space bent and blurred around the huge ship and the even larger monster still clinging to it.
The great Kaiju writhed and shuddered in pain as the jump bubble formed around the Argo. It released the ship as one of its mighty hands was severed at its wrist by the growing bubble of distorted energy and time. One last, defiant strike to the ship’s hull rocked the entire vessel from bow to stern. The main view screen shattered into a mass of flying shrapnel. Shards of it caught Nathan in his right shoulder as he tried to turn away from the explosion. He fell to the floor with glass protruding from the ghastly injury, his own blood mixing with his deceased helmswoman. The shaking from the Kaiju stopped suddenly as everything around them turned sideway. The Argo blinked out of existence, leaving the dying home world of humanity far behind – and the Mother of All with it.
*****
An entire day had passed since the Argo escaped from Earth, and damage reports continued to come in, though not in the flood that they had initially. The captain had been discharged from sickbay and returned to duty, much to the chagrin of the Medical Board. They wanted the captain to take more time off before going back to work. He ignored their advice, though, and found himself on the bridge a mere five minutes after being cleared for active duty once more.
Bandages were wrapped around his right shoulder and his arm was set against his chest in a sling. Still, he worked on. The Argo's engines were fried, the power surge that had given them their unplanned jump overloading the circuitry which drove them. It would take weeks, if not longer, and more than a little luck to get them online and fully functional again. That, he recalled, was the good news.
Thousands of colonists and crew had perished in cryo-sleep. The great Kaiju had gotten lucky during her attack, and had crushed and mauled one entire section of the ship. That second just happened to contain almost a third of the colonists who had originally been meant for Alpha Centauri Prime. Over half the active crew was either dead or injured as well, but they followed the lead of their captain and continued to work through the pain and suffering that they all were dealing with.
He stood, staring out into the vastness of space on the repaired view screen before him. He knew that mankind’s destiny lay in the stars, had known this since he was a child. However, the Mother of All, as he had taken to thinking of her, had planted a tiny seed of doubt in his heart. He did not know where she would go, or what she would do. He knew that the Argo had hurt her badly. Would she find another planet to take over, or would she try to follow the Argo through space and time? He didn’t know. Nobody had ever been able to read the alien mind of a Kaiju. The best anyone could do was guess.
6,107 men, women and children.
That was all that was left of humanity. It was his job to find them a new home, and to keep them alive. It was a dangerously low number, one that concerned the scientists who were already creating breeding programs, much to his chagrin. He had thought that, as a species, humanity was above such things. He had never considered the potential disruptions that could arise if women were forced to bear children, or that computer models would have to be drafted in order to prevent any sort of inbreeding. He had been sure humanity would survive, once. Now? He was no longer sure of anything.
They were alive, for now. For how much longer, Nathan thought, was anybody’s guess.
“And all day long and all night, the wind bore the ship on, blowing fresh and strong,” Whitmire whispered as he stared into the dark abyss of space. He fiddled with the bandages of his shoulder with his mobile hand. “But when dawn rose, there was not even a breath of air. And they marked a beach jutting forth from a bend of the coast, very broad to behold, and by dint of rowing came to land at sunrise.”
Much like the Argo of old, only sheer determination would take them home.
Wherever that ended up being.
The End
Read on for a free Sample of Murder World: Kaiju Dawn
Interlude I
“Please state your name for the record.”
The man fumbled with the microphone for a moment before he spoke, his tone filled with nerves and fear. In the small, cramped room, there was barely enough space for him, the prosecutor who sat across from him, and the four armed Marines. The air was hot and humid. Between the armed guards and the way they continued to finger the triggers of their rifles, he was almost certain that he would not be walking out of the interrogation room alive.
“James Ambrose.”
“And what is your occupation, Mister Ambrose?”
“I’m the owner of Intergalactic Shipping and Freight, which consists of twelve for-hire merchant vessels. This includes the merchant vessel Fancy.”
“But you are not its captain?”
“No sir,” the pudgy businessman said as he wiped sweat from his brow. “I lease her out to other individuals on yearly contracts.”
“And to whom is the vessel Fancy currently leased?”
“Ah, that would be Captain Vincente Huerta, sir.”
“And have you had any contact with Captain Huerta in the past six months?”
“No,” Ambrose said as he continued to sweat profusely under the withering gaze of the Prosecutor. “He still has lease on the ship for another two months, and since he’s leased out the ship for five years n
ow, he usually just deposits the money he owes into my account.”
“You do realize that in a Court of Law, your business transactions come under the scrutiny of the Tax Revenue Service, and that all your transactions regarding Captain Huerta and the Fancy will be audited?”
“I do, sir.”
“Very well,” the Prosecutor flipped through his screen for a moment before he paused and looked back up at the man. “Mister Ambrose, what can you tell us about Captain Huerta? Something that wouldn’t be on financial records? Something that only his associates would know?”
James Ambrose thought for a moment before he answered, “Well, I can tell you one thing for certain, sir.”
“And that is?”
“He’s a goddamned lunatic, uh, sir.”
Chapter One
“Vincente!” A woman’s voice jarred him awake. He cracked open his eyes, rubbed away the filth and grime, and struggled to sit up in his bunk. He fumbled around for a moment as he searched for his comm unit. His hand smacked against the metal frame of his bunk and he yelped in pain. He blinked twice as he realized that he was on the floor, his bed was above him, and an empty bottle of booze was under his back.
For a moment, he wondered just how he had ended up there, until memories of the night before came back to him. He groaned and put his head back down on the cool floor, ignoring the bottle pressing into his sciatica. He’d slept on worse things in the past, though nothing so bad recently.
His gung-ho days of yore were long behind him.
“Way too much whiskey,” he muttered. “Can’t drink a fifth anymore without paying the price. Ugh. What was I thinking? Lights on.”
The overhead light of his room turned on, casting a harsh glare about. Vincente winced as his head began to throb. He pulled himself up off the floor and stumbled over to the small, steel mirror above his sink. Spitting in the sink, Vincente tried to clear his mouth of the foul taste. He glanced at himself and was appalled at who was looking back at him.
Unshaven cheeks with unkempt hair, he looked every part the scoundrel his first ex-wife’s family had called him from the moment they laid eyes on him long before. His eyes were bloodshot, and he felt an unpleasant and familiar fuzz over his teeth. He exhaled and gagged as the overwhelming stench of cheap booze hit him again.
“Jesus...” Vincente hissed, holding back the urge to vomit. If his breath was that bad, he was almost afraid of how much worse his clothes were.
“Vincente!”
“What?!” he roared back and winced as a fresh jolt of pain tore through him. “Ow. Shit, my head...”
“Comm call,” the reply came. “I think it’s for a job.”
“Damn it,” he muttered as his blue eyes inspected the rest of him in the mirror. “I look like shit. Can you stall?”
“I’ve been stalling for fifteen minutes, you fat old drunk!”
“Right,” he breathed. “Okay, be there in a minute. Get me a stim, will you?”
“I’m not your servant!”
“I’m still your boss. Stimulant. Now.”
“Old, fat bastard...” the voice trailed off as his pilot moved down the corridor.
He turned on the faucet and splashed a little water on his face. The cold shocked him awake, though it also made the sledgehammer pounding at his temples more evident. He toweled his face dry and turned off the water.
“I still look like hell,” he said before shrugging. “Screw it.”
He stumbled over to his hatch and popped it open. The oil-and-recycled oxygen smell nearly overwhelmed him as the new scents collided with the booze-soaked atmosphere of his room. He shook his head, struggling to regain his bearings. He glanced towards the cockpit, where his pilot was returning with a stim in her hand. He smiled as he saw the small medical device.
“Thanks, Jasmine.”
“Thank me later,” she said as she handed him the small injector. “When you’re in immense pain after this wears off and I’m mocking you. I’ll feel better about it then. I might even gloat some about how I’m always right and you’re always stupid.” He pressed it against his neck pulled the trigger. Immediately, the neural stimulators went to work, temporarily ridding him of any and all symptoms of his hangover. He sighed with great pleasure as the hangover disappeared and his brain was not as mushy as it had been.
“Ah, bliss,” he murmured. “Blessed light, this is good stuff for a hangover. So, what do we know about the potential client?”
“Sounds desperate,” Jasmine said as she flipped her long, braided hair over one shoulder. “Nice clothes, good haircut. Has had some minor cosmetic nanosurgery on his face to make him look slightly different, but nothing major, so he’s done some covert work or cheated on his wife recently with a younger woman. My guess is he’s either a spook or military.”
“Military, huh? Interesting,” Vincente said as he made his way to the cockpit. Once there, he plopped down into his seat and looked over at the comm. It was blinking yellow. He shot a questioning glance at Jasmine, who shook her head.
“They tried to lock our comms down when they came calling,” she explained. “I had to bypass the main sequencers just so they’d think they had locked us out. I think they didn’t want to leave any evidence of them calling. I’ve already made triplicates, and I’m recording it as well, just in case.”
“So they don’t know about the upgrades?”
“If they did, they’d have already hung up on us. No, we’re good.”
“Good girl,” he said. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Okay, I think I’m ready.”
“You look horrible, boss.”
“Can’t be helped,” he stated. “Let’s see who’s calling today, shall we?”
He activated his comm and the light turned green. Four seconds later, a face appeared on the screen. Vincente nodded. Jasmine had been correct about the potential client, as usual. He knew that there had been a reason he continued to tolerate her insolence.
“This is Captain Vincente Huerta of the Fancy. How can I help you today?”
“I’m looking for the individual who once transported fifty tons of uncut diamonds for the Mossdale Cartel from right under the noses of the Morathi State Security,” the man on the comm said. “Did I find the right person?”
“That’s somewhat private information you have there, mister,” Vincente said as he stared at the comm. Only seven people alive knew about that haul, and two of them were on his ship at that moment. Very shortly, he was going to have a talk with someone about how to keep secrets. If he ever did figure out precisely who that person was. “And you are?”
“You may call me Hines.”
“No rank, Mister Military Man?”
“Just... Hines.”
“So mysterious,” Vincente grunted. “Fine, have it your way. So how can I be of service to you?”
“We need you to retrieve vital, sensitive information from a research vessel which has crash-landed on a planet near a quarantine zone,” Hines said through the comm. The delay was down to a miniscule four seconds now, and Vincente was pleased with the comm unit upgrade he had purchased on the black market two months before. Granted, if Hines ever figured out that the Fancy had military grade hardware, Vincente would be looking at a few years in a labor camp. “The planet is coded as Gorgon IV, and we’ll pay you well for your troubles.”
“So send in the Marines,” Vincente said, his voice hoarse. He rubbed his face and tried to keep the smile off his face as credit signs bounced around in his head. Off to the side, he saw Jasmine make a face at him. He sighed. The woman just would not let his appearance be, apparently.
“It’s outside controlled space,” Hines replied.
“And Marines only go to fun, vacation resorts and never have to break things?”
“We have our reasons,” Hines said. Vincente finally grinned.
“You bastards were out in Zebulun space again, ‘researching’, and you lost a spy ship– I’m sorry, a ‘research vessel’– and y
ou can’t send in any sanctioned rescue involving military personnel, even black ops, because then, someone will know just how badly you fucked up, and you like your rank and pay, and really dislike failure. Am I right? Tell me I’m right. I know I’m right.”
“Will you take the job or not?” Hines growled, his pitch low and dangerous.
“Half a mil up front, five million upon delivery of the data banks of your,” he made quotations motions in the air with his fingers, “research vessel,” Vincente said.
“What?!”
“That’s strange. I didn’t stutter, and I know I didn’t speak in a language you’re unfamiliar with.”
“You’re out of your goddamned mind! I should just shoot you for cause and hire someone else!”
“You already tried that,” Vincente said, his grin widening. “Trying to hire someone else, I mean. They all told you to blow off. You only came to me as a last resort, which means I get to dictate the price. Sucks, don’t it?”
“I don’t have to take this–”
“Yes, you do,” Vicente said. “Keep arguing and the price doubles.”
“Fine! Half a million credits, wired into your personal account…”
“I have a numbered account available that I would prefer to use,” Vincente interrupted again as he began to type on the keyboard. He sent the information to Hines. “It’s on Kaymin.”
“That’s tax dodging!” Hines roared, his face beginning to turn red.
“That’s inadmissible in court,” Vincente said calmly. “Comm relays are unreliable and can be faked or corrupted. Besides, it’s not tax dodging at all. It’s simply the military transferring funds to an unknown entity in neutral space. You can’t tell me that it’s never been done before, Hines. The direct transfer avoids any... problems we might have Tax Revenue Service. I don’t want to break the law. I’m a law-abiding citizen, and tax dodging is a crime.”
Kaiju Apocalypse II Page 7
