by Dan Abnett
We are going to fall. It is going to lose its grip, and we are going to plunge together to our doom.
Sentry #212 issues an electronic groan. Straining, the grip of its right hand rapidly failing, it slowly raises its left arm and me along with it. It is trying to hoist me to the walkway.
“I really do appreciate this,” I say as it raises me past its face.
It rumbles.
The lip of the walkway is in reach. I grab it with both hands and cling on, dangling.
The Sentry’s right hand loses its grip. It falls, releasing me with its left hand as it does so.
Hanging from the walkway with both hands, I look down and see the Sentry falling backward away from me, expressionless. The drop is so great, Sentry #212 has enough time and downward momentum to turn over and over twice before it hits.
And, boy, it hits.
It hits number seventeen drive unit square on, smashing the crystoplex core-cover like a wrecking ball dropped on a greenhouse.
Drive-containment fields fail at once, and there is a rapid, explosive release of Nega-energy that immolates the Sentry and rips out sideways, incinerating all the dust-mite engineers close by. The
• CHAPTER TWENTY •
DEADLIEST
blast-shock rips into the neighboring drive units, causing two more to rupture and explode.
I can barely hold on. The entire chamber, the ship itself, rocks with a force greater than anything the impending Badoon attack could unleash.
Fiery clouds of venting Nega-energy gas, billowing and incandescent, sweep up from below and engulf my clinging, swinging form. The shock wave hits me.
I lose my grip.
I FALL.
I stop falling with a lurch.
This is painful.
A hand has gripped my wrist at the last moment and caught me. Slowly, slowly, it hauls me back over the lip onto the walkway. Below me, the drive chamber is on fire. Explosions and sub- explosions kick off through system after system.
I lay on my front on the walkway, my feet dangling over the edge, trying to regain my composure. I do not, now that I have looked it in the eye, like certain death.
“Thank you,” I gasp. “Thank you, Groot. Thank you.”
“Groot?” says a hard voice. “I am not Groot.”
I could think of no one, loyal reader, who could have saved me that way at the very last minute apart from Groot. I mean, Rocket might have tried (though I doubt it), but even with his disconcertingly human-like hands, he would not have had the upper-body strength to pull me clear.
I roll over, look up, and see the most strikingly beautiful female humanoid I have ever recorded staring back down at me.
“Did you just say…Groot?” she asks.
“Yes,” I reply. “Yes, I believe I did.”
“I am not Groot.”
“You are certainly not.”
“He’s…here?” she asks. She has drawn two swords, one in each hand. I often think one sword is superfluous. Two seems excessive. How many enemies did this hooded, cloaked, and gorgeous green-skinned woman think she was going to have to fight at once?
I get to my feet beside her.
We are lit from below by the furious blaze of the engine room. She regards me with suspicion. Her skin is green. Her long hair is jetblack, and her haunting pupil-less eyes are shaded yellow around the sockets. She is clad in a figure-hugging armor suit of black leather trimmed in steel, long boots, and a saucy hint of fishnet around her arms and thighs. Does anyone really go into combat dressed like that? I presume she does—unless this is some kind of disguise, or a sexyassassin-a-gram sent to the wrong address. She is undoubtedly beautiful, almost breathtakingly so {and I did check, gentle reader, several times against my Comparative Aesthetic Quality Assay Scale. Possibly many more times than was technically necessary}, but she also seems quite…what is the word? Capable? Determined? Lethal? A psycho nutbag deranged zook-loop handful? {More than one word, I concede}
Rocket and Groot rush out onto the walkway and skid to a halt at the sight of her. They seem more horrified to see her than to see the combusting and chain-reacting fury of the drive chamber below us.
“What are you doing here?” Rocket asks.
“It’s a paying job,” she snaps back. “What are you doing here?”
“Stuff!” he replies. “Guarding the Galaxy stuff. You?”
“I told you,” she growls. “D’ast! D’ast! This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go! You’re with him?”
She asks this, indicating me.
“Actually, they’re with me,” I begin, suavely.
“Yes, the robot’s with us!” Rocket cries. “Suppose you tell me what the flark you’re doing here, Gamora, 'cause it doesn’t look like any Galaxy guarding I know!”
“Oh, right, and I’m sure you’re here for purely altruistic, non-financial reasons!” she retorts.
“I knew we shouldn’t have broken up the team!” Rocket cries. “We’re the only things that keep each other from flarking things up!”
“The Guardians of the Galaxy is not ‘broken up,’” she declares. “It’s on hiatus!”
“I am Groot!” Groot announces.
“Did he just say “Hiatus shm-iatus?’” the female, Gamora, asks acidly.
“No, actually what he said was ‘What hiatus?’” I point out helpfully.
She looks at me. She has two swords. I shut up.
Far below us, something really important explodes.
“Flark,” she says. “Flark, flark, flark. Why did you have to be involved?”
At first, I think there’s an echo. Then I realize that Rocket Raccoon was saying precisely the same thing at the same time.
There is a long, meaningful pause. A seething pall of venting Nega-energy, blazing like a nuclear mushroom cloud, expands in the upper parts of the drive chamber on either side of the walkway, showering us with sparks. Cinders land on the walkway, fizzling.
“I have come for this Recorder unit,” she says.
“You can’t have him,” replies Rocket. “He’s ours.”
“I am Groot,” says Groot.
“A good question,” Rocket agrees. “Who are you working for?”
The female, Gamora, hesitates.
“That’s confidential.”
“So’s this blaster,” declares Rocket ambitiously.
She laughs at him, mocking. He has a blaster, she has swords. Two of them, admittedly, but even so. No contest, surely? I cannot explain her confidence. Or the genuine wariness of her that I detect in the eyes of my two friends.
“Well, we could stand here all day catching up,” I remark, “but we would perish from exposure to Nega-radiation fallout. That’s presuming this ship doesn’t explode first.”
Rocket and Gamora both look at me viciously, like targeting systems.
“I am just saying,” I demur with a passive wave of my hand. “We seem to be on, if not the same page, then at least not more than a
• CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE •
THIS IS WHAT A SPACE WAR LOOKS LIKE
chapter apart. You clearly know each other. Could you not, I don’t know, work together, so we might extract ourselves from this…”
I glance over the edge of the walkway at the inferno below. I get giddy and look away.
“…certain death?” I finish.
“Dude’s got a point,” says Rocket. I feel inward bliss: I am considered a dude. I secretly hope the female will be impressed.
“I am Groot,” says Groot.
“All right,” says Gamora. “For now. Just for now.”
And that is how the three of us became the four of us.
For a while, at least.
THE Kree Stellar Empire battleship Pride of Pama swung slowly into sublight space, firing its positional thrusters. It was a vast thing—a giant, blocky arrowhead with flaring drive vents at the stern and a battering-ram combat buttress at the prow. It possessed two broad, backswept wings that supported its huge ancilla
ry jump nacelles. It was built for deep space. There was nothing streamlined or atmospheric about it. It was, in both scale and design, as airworthy as a city. It was more than three distance units long and possessed a draft of eight billion mass units.
It was also there and not there. Its cloaking shield—the aura of negativity—flickered on and off, revealing it sporadically in part or whole. Shortly, it failed altogether. The battleship had been damaged by the antimatter torpedoes of its enemy, and one of its drive chambers was experiencing unexpected catastrophic failure. The Kree ship’s captain, an experienced noble by the name of Kris-Gar, was on his feet on the vast bridge, yelling orders and trying to stabilize his vessel. He knew he was hurt, and that his power was compromised. He was trying to shut down the damaged drive, and channel available power into the shields and weapons.
Uni-beam batteries came to bear, the gun crews struggling frantically to cut reaction times. Sirens blared. The automatic magazines loaded the forward tubes with Nega-missiles. The battleship’s primary weapon—a vast mega-scale Uni-beam projector that fired from a glowing, grilled vent under the prow—glittered as it came up to power.
The ship raised its shields.
Just in time.
The Badoon megadestroyer Brotherhood of War dropped from jump to face it, blistering out of a writhing halo of dumped jump energy. It had a displacement of six billion mass units, and it resembled a streamlined toad, polished and gleaming, with warp-engine nacelles in place of limbs. Its gunports popped up like warts from its hull-skin. The toad opened its mouth—the principal forward gunnery bay—and began to spit antimatter torpedoes and pulses of explosive plasma.
The barrage began as a flurry of yellow plasmic bolts and a few squirting missiles, then the megadestroyer increased its rate of fire until it was spitting a blinding, wholesale storm of warheads and plasma bursts at the Kree battleship. The onslaught was torrential. The light bloom lit up the front portions of both mighty vessels and threw their rear sections into stark shadow.
This was, of course, all utterly silent in the void of space.
The Kree ship’s shields held. Invisible screens of potent Nega-energy buckled and shuddered, revealing visible ripples from the impacts as if space were water. But Nega-energy is a potent force, and the shields did not rupture.
The toadlike Badoon ship popped thousands of secondary batteries from its forward hull like blisters. These began firing, too—lancing out long, dazzling beams of red meson fire. Where the continuous beams struck the Kree shields, they raked and scratched, probing like red-hot spears, searching for an energetic weakness or a crucial shield overlap.
Captain Kris-Gar managed to stabilize his ship. Robotic crews were still battling to control the fire in the damaged drive compartment and achieve containment. But engineering had succeeded in shutting down the compartment’s transmission links to the other main drive chambers, allowing the remaining drive units to resync and operate in harmony without the crippling disruption of a damaged link in their chain. Though down one entire drive assembly, Kris-Gar had the other five back up and operating, in concert, at peak efficiency.
It was time for the Kree Stellar Empire to strike back.
Kris-Gar told the communications officers to cease the warning broadcasts that demanded the Badoon should desist and break off. The Badoon had made it very clear they would not.
He shouted a series of commands to the Captains of Ordnance. At the big targeting stations in the forward part of the battleship’s immense bridge, Kree Navy officers in black uniforms and glossy black helmets authorized the target vectors they had already computed.
The Pride of Pama began to return fire.
Its primary battery, the mega-scale Uni-beam projector, belched and started to pulse. It fired massive, slow-moving bolts of energy that were negatively frequenced to pass through the battleship’s shields. Alongside these huge blasts, the Kree battleship launched six spreads of Nega-bomb missiles, squadrons of quicksilver darts. These, too, were negatively coded to pass without interference through the Nega-shields. Secondary Uni-beam batteries began to fire, multiple discharge flashes lighting up the battleship’s hull like twinkling Christmas lights.
The Kree counterbombardment ripped out at the Badoon megadestroyer. The Brotherhood of War had raised its own shields, an invisible armor of interlocking quark pulses that permitted its weapons to discharge successfully by means of pico-second synchronization between firing and shield pulse.
When the Kree blasts hit the Badoon shields, the shields did not ripple like water. They flared and crazed like shattered mirrors, instantly repairing themselves. The Uni-beam bolts scorched across the shield surfaces—their energy dissipating fruitlessly like the liquid, living flame of almighty backdrafts.
Where the tiny quicksilver darts struck, immense blooms of energy erupted as mass-yield Nega-bomb warheads detonated. These explosions lit up and lingered like small suns, bubbling together in bright clusters. The megadestroyer shivered as its shields soaked up the hammering.
Both vessels were unloading their entire firepower at each other at less than eight thousand distance units. In terms of a space war, they were gunfighters—face-to-face, firing point blank. In the first twenty seconds of combat, the two immense warships had expended energy equivalent to the entire annual industrial output of planet Earth.
They sustained fire. It was battle by attrition. There was no space or time for subtlety or deft maneuvering, no chance of tactically outplaying each other. This fight was as full-on and grueling as two armies of ancient warriors crashing into one another on a rainy field, hitting each other relentlessly without quarter until one side simply broke.
One side would break. It was impossible to know which one, or to predict whether the end would come in seconds or hours. It was a matter of power-output efficiency, sustainability of energetics, shield reliability, and ordnance reserve.
And willpower.
And luck.
One tiny thing, one tiny fault, was going to make the difference. A small mechanical failure. A miscalculation. A computer error. A minuscule crack or flaw in a shield. A lucky angle or a lucky shot.
And when the end came, for one or both, it would be sudden and disastrous.
THE COMBAT was intense enough to generate a photonic value equivalent to that of a small supernova. The combat was also close enough to a number of civilized worlds for them, as fast as light speed would allow, to observe the display in their skies or through their astronomic telescopes or listening arrays. Several species experienced mass public panic and rioting, fearing the new star heralded the coming of some massive cosmic threat like the Great Devourer or signaled a pending alien invasion. Others watched and waited, fearful, prepared for the worst. The superstitious Habinax of Quelta Minor were so certain that the new star was an omen portending their doom, they evacuated their planet into hive ships, fled, and never returned home.
The equally superstitious but more optimistic Gangarthans of Gangarthid Tri observed the new star and smiled. It happened to appear in a particularly providential house of their heavenly zodiac, on an auspicious date, and just six days after the coronation of their new King, Hosux. The Gangarthans were at a preindustrial level of advancement and had not yet achieved such technological wonders as spaceflight, teleportation, or Facebook. They saw the light of the deadly warfare as a good omen. Thus, exuberant and elated, they were inspired to begin a new era of peace and civilized advancement that saw more splendid temples, monoliths, and pyramids constructed in Hosux’s long, benevolent reign than in any previous period, laying the cultural foundations that, by the late 24th century (Earth scale) would see them rise to become one of the most powerful, civilized, and altogether great-to-know races of the Galaxy.
So, sometimes, utterly horrific, utterly deadly, hyperintense space war has an upside.
Especially if you’re a reasonable distance away from it.
If you’re in the middle of it, however…
• C
HAPTER TWENTY-TWO •
MEANWHILE
[PRECISELY NOW ON THE KREE BATTLESHIP PRIDE OF PAMA…]
“WELL, okay, first,” says Rocket Raccoon, “I think we should run.”
This seems to all of us, even Gamora, to be a good idea. The drive compartment below us is ablaze in the most comprehensive way. We can feel the intensity, and I swear Rocket’s fur is beginning to experience heat-damage curling. Also, the walkway we are standing on—which I believe, gentle reader, I have previously indicated is utterly without handrails—is beginning to tremble.
A crack appears in its surface. I try very hard not to record the crack, nor to record how it is spreading. But, you know, once you’ve seen something…
“Question is, which way,” says Rocket. He looks at Gamora. “You got in here? How’d you plan on getting out?”
“I have a small jump-fighter,” she says. “I landed it in hangar Beta-K.”
That statement alone begs so many questions. How did she sneak a ship aboard without the Kree noticing? How did she do it while the battleship was at high warp? What kind of pilot could manage that feat? And even if they could manage to intercept and sneak into a battleship traveling at high warp without being seen, how in the name of flark did she even know where the battleship was, given that it was shrouded, incognito, in an aura of negativity?
How did she know where to find me?
{A point of order, gentle reader. I do not mean to use bad language. I merely report it, inter alia, as it comes out of the mouths of my companions in this tale. I do so simply to maintain the accuracy and authenticity of my record. I have no wish to offend, merely to record the absolute truth of my experiences. However, I note with some disappointment that I casually used the word “flark” in the paragraph above. This was a slip. I will chastise myself later, if I am still alive and functional. I believe, though the time period has been brief, I have been in the company of Rocket Raccoon for too long and have picked up some bad habits.}
