by Blaze Ward
“Rudy, wake up,” one of them said.
The man was too dead to say anything, and his wounds would have largely cauterized, so he wasn’t standing in a cloud of frozen blood droplets.
The two men walked up to the corpse. One of them punched the man.
“Damn, Rudy,” he said.
Gareth moved like lightning. Like Death itself.
He lifted the Lasweapon and shot the one in back. Again, a clean hit through the helmet, rupturing the man’s life. The second started to turn, for whatever reason, and unleashed a terrible scream across the radio channels as the beam collapsed his face inward and splashed his brains across the ruptured rear of his helmet.
Again, Gareth dropped his hands and moved back to his spot, just another empty suit.
This ship was haunted. Three of your men have already died, captain. Without a word being spoken.
“Johansson? Mills? What’s going on?” the lead boarder asked.
“What are you men doing over there?” a new voice broke in. Deeper. Authoritative. Probably a pirate captain.
Hopefully, a nervous one.
“Rudy, Johansson, and Mills aren’t responding,” the first man spoke. “We’re moving back to the cargo bay to see why not.”
“Move carefully,” the captain cautioned. “I don’t like this.”
None of them would.
Superstitious. Too many horror vids as kids, or even grownups.
“Mary, Mother of God!” Someone screamed over the radio. “What the hell happened to them?”
“What’s going on?” the captain demanded over the cries and sounds of revulsion.
Sounded like someone just threw up inside his helmet, too. That would be extra yucky, when all you had on was a fishbowl. Gareth could at least puke down into his chest cavity if he needed to.
Finally, the man in charge got the others sorted out.
“All three are dead,” he reported in a shaky voice. “Helmets crushed.”
Crushed? No, but if you refused to get too close, the starring would look like that, maybe.
Angry ghost, anyone?
“Get clear,” the captain ordered. “We’ll blow it out of space and that damned ghost with it. That’ll teach it.”
Gareth grimaced, but it couldn’t be helped. He had hoped more men would emerge and he could pick them off one at a time. Now, the pirate ship would be preparing to destroy the miner.
He only had one chance.
The three emerged, flying across the bay and past him as if the Devil himself was on their heels, the final one crawling almost sideways to see around the puke splattering his helmet. The last pirate was looking right at Gareth when the arms of the miner armor suddenly came up.
The pirate’s blood-curdling scream was the most terrifying thing Gareth had ever imagined might emerge from a human throat, but that didn’t stop him from shooting the man dead. The way it suddenly strangled into a gurgle probably unnerved the rest.
Gareth caught the second pirate with his next shot, even as the man tried to wriggle like a fish on the hook.
The boarding lead was a fish in a barrel, but Gareth had no mercy left in him. He shot the man in flight, watching his corpse bound bonelessly off the far end of the bay to lay crumpled in on the floor, held down by one magnetic boot.
He only had seconds until the captain ordered the other ship to open fire.
Gareth lurched upright and dove to the near corner of the open bay, torqueing the steel with his glove’s exostrength so hard it probably wouldn’t seal again until he cut the plate out and replaced it.
But it got him where he needed to be. He peeked out and saw the pirate vessel only one hundred yards away, slowly rolling away to put some distance between the ships.
If he had a bow gun, it would be facing the wrong way, but the sensors and cameras would show him. Gareth stowed his Lasweapon and threw himself across the space with a running start.
Just because, he opened the radio to transmit for the first time.
“You killed me, now I’ll kill you all,” he snarled over the line in the ugliest, angriest voice he could imagine. “You’ll all be coming to Hell with me.”
Someone left a line open at the other end.
“Captain,” the man screamed. “Oh My God, he’s coming for us!”
Gareth nearly laughed, but he was Sky Patrol and these men had chosen to be pirates. The miner they’d left for dead had probably been the least of their crimes.
The mining armor had compressed nitrogen gas to use for maneuvering. Gareth pushed hard on his thrusters, somersaulting forward until his powerful legs were forward. That ship could outrun him eventually, but they were at a dead stop right now, so they would have to accelerate.
He wasn’t about to allow that.
Instead, Gareth landed on the side of the hull with a terrific force that must have echoed through the pirate vessel like a demon trying to claw his way in. His magnetic boots locked him down and he was part of the pirate ship now.
Quickly, Gareth climbed around the side to the airlock. Most ships this size only had one, located well aft, with perhaps an emergency airlock forward.
Rather than try subtlety, Gareth just climbed inside and grabbed the door that the now-dead boarders had left open. Grunting with effort, and aided by exomuscles designed to lift heavy rocks, Gareth ripped it off its hinges and chucked it into deep space. They might use an emergency airlock, if it existed, but not for a while, and nobody was using this one until they rearranged the interior hatches so they could vent a large section of the ship to open space and not kill themselves and all their friends in the process.
Satisfied, Gareth crawled back out onto the hull and stomped aft until he got to the charge nozzles. Those were already running, starting to push the ship away, so Gareth pulled out his Lasweapon and shot each of the three in order.
A Choueiri Arcjet Ionic Drive was a fragile thing. Each nozzle shattered like a frozen bell dropped from the top of a tower.
Satisfied that the pirates couldn’t get far, Gareth stomped forward on the roof, making sure to slam each magnetic boot down hard as he did, so those men would know that the Devil himself had come for them.
He felt like Beowolf.
Forward, Gareth found the bow gun he had expected. It wasn’t much more rugged than the engine nozzles, but Gareth still used his fists to rip it bodily from the hull rather than just shooting it. Somewhere, a breach alarm would be added to the chaos, as the gunnery chamber was now vented to space, along with any men that hadn’t managed to get out fast enough before the hatches automatically sealed.
Then he went looking and found the emergency airlock. It was closed, which meant that desperate men might come flooding out to attack him. He had calculated the crew to be perhaps as many as two dozen, before the casualties he’d inflicted.
Gareth punched the door frame hard. Again. A third time. A seal gave. A fourth. The door began to surrender to his wrath. A fifth. It failed inward.
No massive breach emptied the ship, so they had sealed the inside.
He could just kill them all now. Rip the inner airlock apart and let all the air surge madly out of the ship. They deserved it.
But Auxiliary Agent Gareth St. John Dankworth was Earth Force Sky Patrol. The good guys.
He had done enough, for now.
He stomped around to where the bridge windows looked out. Inside, a half dozen men stared at him in utter terror, including one man who had to be the captain, better dressed than the others and seated at the rear of the chamber in a chair that reminded Gareth of a throne.
The man had watched too many pirate vids in his time. That, or the steel cutlass on his hip, balancing the flame pistol on the other side, was his signature.
Gareth could not think of a less useful thing to carry into space. But he also wasn’t a pirate.
“Are you ready to join me in hell?” he asked over the radio in a quieter voice.
The men on the bridge were silent, but Gar
eth could see their mouths open with screams. One even seemed to start foaming.
The captain snapped. Gareth could think of no other word to describe it. The man calmly drew his pistol and shot the two crewmen seated in front of him like a gunner and pilot. Then he shot the other three before they could react.
Finally, he raised the pistol and shot at the window, but Gareth had seen the pistol come up and ducked to one side.
Still, the plasteel window ruptured outward in a massive explosion of air and debris. Bodies raced out into space. Only one of them was still alive, but Gareth shot the captain as he went by, unwilling to risk that man surviving death pressure long enough to fire back.
The gust of snow went on too long.
Gareth realized that the internal hatches were open in the ship, and the whole thing was venting.
More bodies slammed into the window and then got ejected into eternity. Papers and anything light enough went with them.
When it finally died down, Gareth entered via the windows the captain had apparently shot out in his madness.
Inside the ship was a horror show. Every hatch was open, but many men had simply died at their stations, or trapped in their cabins.
It was a flying Dutchman. An abattoir.
They were pirates. Gareth would have found a yardarm for them, but it would have been done the right way. The legal way.
So he supposed that they had just chosen the die on their own terms, rather than at the hands of the law.
He connected a wire to his system and opened the radio.
“Patrol Cutter Bellerophon, this is Dankworth, come in,” he said.
“Gareth!” a friendly voice called back. “Thank God. What’s the situation?”
“Marc, is that you?” Gareth asked.
“Affirmative, my friend,” Auxiliary Agent Marc Sarzynski replied. He had been Gareth’s best friend since they met on the first day of the Academy. “The Commandant needed someone to take charge of your cutter, and I was handy. The rest of the squadron is vectoring in from all corners. What happened?”
“The pirate vessel has been neutralized,” Gareth replied.
“All by yourself?” Marc asked, but he would have done the same. That was the kind of man his best friend was.
“Affirmative, Bellerophon,” Gareth said. “Near the destination point Ferrie calculated. The pirate crew is all dead.”
“How did you manage that?”
“Ghosts frightened them to death, I suppose,” Gareth replied.
After that, he would say no more on the subject.
Birth of the Star Dragon
An Earth Force Sky Patrol File: Solar Year 2387
Part One
Criminals
Desperation
“You do realize that this is the stupidly, most completely-insane thing you’ve ever suggested, right?” his partner asked pedantically.
“So far,” Morty corrected sternly, focused on the long control console in front of him. “Only so far, Xiomber. I’m sure it’s going to get much worse before we’re done.”
“You truly believe that a human is the only being that can save galactic civilization from utter ruin?” Xiomber rattled on, leaning against the side of the control board but carefully not touching anything.
“Hey, a human’s going to destroy everything if nobody stops him,” Morty snapped. “And they even have a phrase for this, those folks: fighting fire with fire.”
“Aren’t two fires going to burn the house down twice as fast?” Xiomber sneered.
“We’ve got to find the right human,” Morty replied. “The one Sarzynski is always going on about. Would you talk that way about anybody if they weren’t your worst nemesis?”
“I talk about you that way all the time,” Xiomber reminded him.
Morty didn’t have a good response for that one. But he and Xiomber were egg-brothers, partners in science as well as in crime. And a lizard needed a friend watching his back. The galaxy was a big and dangerous place.
It had just grown bigger and more dangerous since the boss, the old boss, had decided that what he really needed was a human assassin as part of his team.
What other species could do violence without the slightest drop of empathy in them, after all? Humans weren’t part of the Accord of Souls. Hadn’t been Uplifted by the Elders, the grand and now long-vanished Chaa, and bound into a single, psionic whole as a way to bring peace between diverse solar tribes.
Hell, when the Chaa left, humans were still banging the rocks together, hoping someone was listening.
Who knew that they would suddenly evolve into an intelligent species and discover technology? It was all the Accord of Souls could do to keep humans isolated in their own home system and ignorant of everyone else. Safer that way, by far.
“You going to help or not?” Morty finally asked, looking up from the panel of knobs and gauges in front. “’Cause if not, then you need to go into the other room and not call the cops until I’m gone. That, or shoot me now, before I go and commit the worst crime imaginable on the books. Again.”
He looked over at Xiomber, waiting for the damned lizard to make up his mind. Most species had a hard time reading emotions in the Yuudixtl. The Warreth probably came closest, since they had feathers that could semaphore to communicate, so they had half a clue.
Yuudixtl just had scales. Stripes and blobs and patterns that didn’t really mean anything, since the Chaa had fixed their genetics when they uplifted the intelligent lizards to be one of the galactic custodians.
Xiomber was keeping his scales flat and starkly uncommunicative.
Like Morty, Xiomber was mostly kinda a gray-green somewhere a little darker than sage, but not down in that totally sexy range of a Terran crocodile. It was a shame that Yuudixtl couldn’t be upgraded any further. Crocodile would be freaking awesome.
And probably useful right now, since a renegade human assassin had already killed the boss and pretty much taken over the whole organization, murdering anybody who tried to stop him or even looked at him funny.
The Yuudixtl were the smallest intelligent species in space. And maybe the smartest. They followed the basic uplift design the Chaa had selected: symmetric biped with sense organs on the head and opposable thumbs. If they were only half the height of the Vanir, and a third their mass, they made up for it in smarts.
Or had, right up until he and Xiomber had listened to Cinnra, the old Boss, and built him an illegal wormhole generator to capture a human killer, one step ahead of the human cops catching the guy, back in the Earth system.
Probably the dumbest thing they’d done, but only so far.
Morty looked forward to topping it in about five minutes.
Xiomber’s dark green eyes slitted down hard and his scowl intensified.
“You’re nuts,” his partner repeated. “But what’s the worst they could do? Throw us both in prison for two lifetimes instead of one? Scoot over.”
“Me?” Marty razzed. “Why do I have to move?”
“Because you’ll probably screw it up and pull the wrong guy through again.”
“That was one time, and it was a chicken,” Morty defended himself. “And you’re the one who swore the machine was calibrated correctly.”
Still, he leaned back and let Xiomber kinda hip check him out of the way. Quickly, four green hands flashed over the long rows of dials, tweaking things down and refining the target zone. They would probably only get one shot at this, because the power surge when they tripped all the generators would get someone’s attention.
Maximus Sarzynski, wanna-be ultimate crime lord, would not take it well, him and his egg-brother digging up the guy’s worst enemy and pulling him halfway across the galaxy as an insurance policy.
And unlike the Uplifted Species in the Accord of Souls, Maximus could kill them without the slightest hesitation or provocation. Just what old Cinnra had wanted in an hired gun.
He had only really screwed up when he thought that he could control a huma
n afterwards.
“You figured out how we escape?” Xiomber asked out of the side of his mouth. “Those damned birds will roll over as soon as the new Boss yells boo. Then they’re coming after us. And we sure as hell can’t go to the cops with something like this.”
“Kinda planning on cheating,” Morty replied. “That’s why I wanted you in the other room if you weren’t going to help.”
“Oh, fardel,” Xiomber snapped. “Now what?”
“After we grab the human, I was going to redirect him right through another wormhole, and jump in after him,” Morty said carefully. “This controller is kinda programmed to overload and eat itself, so nobody can chase us, or figure out where we went.”
“Are you sure we came from the same egg batch?” Xiomber growled. “’Cause I don’t remember any of my siblings being that dumb. Where do you think they’ll look?”
“I’m not sending him to Yuudixtl,” Morty replied. “Like you figured, first place Maximus will look.”
“Where then, Morty?” his partner got serious. Way serious. Like maybe thinking-about-overcoming-the-empath-bond-so-he-could-kill him serious. “Where you are dumping us out?”
“Orgoth Vortai,” Morty said in a quiet, careful voice, expecting to get punched in the snout.
Instead, Xiomber turned and stared at him for several seconds, jaw agape. And then he started laughing.
Morty relaxed and zeroed down the last few gauges. The range was stupid long for a shot like this, doubly so on a bounce-tube, but they also had an exact match of the psionic coordinates that had located Maximus the killer in the first place. All Morty had needed to do was flip them end for end and find the man who was Sarzynski’s psionic opposite.
A good guy.
“You ready to do this?” Morty asked as Xiomber settled down.
“Why the hell not?” Xiomber said. “I always wanted to visit the world of the tentacle-heads. With any luck, they’ll look at the whole, damned thing as a monstrous art installation. Maybe a performance piece for the ages.”
