Eye of the Tiger: A Paranormal Space Opera Adventure (Star Justice Book 1)

by Michael-Scott Earle

  “What were we talking about?” The blonde woman looked around the elevator car with a bit of confusion.

  “You said you aren’t going to be able to fly this ship.”

  “Yeah. We need a pilot. Do you have training? I’m not talking about small stuff. This girl is a hundred and sixty meters of cutting edge super corp military technology. The specs said she can comfortably fit a hundred and twenty people on board. Do you have the skill to twist it through a dogfight?”

  “No,” I admitted. I understood that pilots had to go through advanced training, but a good chunk of that was just learning what commands to give the onboard computer so it could just execute the flight movements. All Z had to do was get the ship off Trappist - 1e and initiate the hyperdrives. She was the closest thing we had to an actual pilot, and I felt as if the hacker was underestimating her abilities.

  “Me either. Ha. Fuck, I’m tired.” She sighed heavily and leaned against the wall. “Yesterday I was figuring out how to spend all the money you were going to pay me. I was going to buy a cat. Ha. I really like them. I found this one with tiger stripes. I’ve always had a thing for the old Earth cats. Now I’m about to steal one of Elaka Nota’s hyperdrive ships with a man who is a giant walking tiger. This is the weirdest sex dream I’ve ever had.”

  The elevator dinged and saved me from a response. Z stepped off of the wall, and I caught her before she could collapse. Her head rolled down to her chest, and she sighed. I was about to pick her up again, but the hacker shook her head and then walked out of the elevator. There were two doors ahead of us, but Z turned around the corner of the elevator tube, and I found myself staring at the screen display from the ship’s sensors.

  The bridge of the strange ship was smaller than I actually expected. It was twenty-five meters long and six meters wide. Lining the edges of the room were ten workstations, each with a comfortable looking black leather chair sitting in front of a bay of a dozen screens. In the center of the long room was a raised map dais. The holographic image was currently on, and I could see it slowly circle around a slightly zoomed out view of Trappist -1e. There were hot red, yellow, orange, and green spots on the map of the planet's surface area, and I guessed that these were identified military locations.

  On the far side of the bridge, sitting beneath the display screens, were a cluster of eight padded leather chairs. Three of the chairs were sunk into a cockpit style of controls, and I had been on enough ships to know that they were for the pilot, copilot, and navigator. The other five chairs each had smaller terminals arranged into the armrests. These were the seats for the captain and other officers of the ship.

  “Ugh. Help me wipe my face off. I don’t want to bleed on this chair. That looks like real leather,” Z said as she tried to wipe her cheek.

  “It is. I can smell it.” I set Eve down on one of the other chairs and then rubbed the back of my paw over Z’s face and neck.

  “That tickles,” she giggled.

  I sighed and then helped the blonde girl get into the pilot’s chair. She was obviously in no condition to fly this thing, but I would do an even shittier job, and Eve wasn’t doing much of anything at the moment.

  “I’m opening the bay doors,” she said after she tapped on one of the input devices attached to her chair. “Ha! My code still works. I was kind of worried someone else would have come in while we were running and changed it.

  The entire front of the bridge was made of screens, and I saw the roof of the hangar above us begin to part as if someone was pulling open a citrus fruit.

  “Ugh. I need to figure out how to turn on this engine. Hmmmm.” Z plugged her skull cord into the dashboard of the cockpit and then wrapped her arms around her chest.

  “This is… weird,” she said after a few moments.

  “What?” I growled at her. I was starting to get angry. Why hadn’t she figured this out yet? I heard Eve begin to stir next to me and a bit of my anger fled.

  “It’s designed weird. Software wise. It’s almost like--”

  “Part of the code was written organically.” Eve finished for her.

  “Yeah. How did you know?” Z asked the vampire.

  “What does ‘written organically’ mean? Can you just get us out of here?” I asked with a grunt of hungry rage.

  “I’ll try to help,” Eve reached for my hand, and I helped her rise from her chair. Then the dark beauty descended the steps and sat in the copilot’s seat.

  “It means that it looks like the software wrote parts of its own code,” Z explained. Her eyes were closed, but I could see the eyelids twitch as if she was reading something. “Looks really clean.”

  “Like an AI?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” the hacker said. “I think I found the sequence. I also found some documentation that will probably take two months to read. This beauty is supposed to have a trained crew on board. We’ll be lucky if we can get out of this system without face planting into an asteroid.” Z hit a few buttons on her dashboard and then reached for the elaborate set of controls docked in front of her.

  “Engines are on! Wooooo!” the blonde woman shouted with one of her fists in the air. “Screw the countdown. Bays are open. Here we go. Hold on to your assholes.”

  Text began to scroll across the visual screen that showed the view out of the ship. The writing was mostly in English, but there were plenty of 1s and 0s mixed in with some of the phrases. It looked like techno jargon, and I was thankful again for Z’s help. There was no way Eve and I could have done this by ourselves.

  We would have hired a pilot, but yes, she is a blessing.

  Eve’s words came into my mind, and I saw the beautiful woman turn around in her chair to smile at me. The gesture helped with the rage in my stomach. We had made it this far, we were almost free. We just needed to get off the planet.

  Then they wouldn’t be able to catch us.

  The ship lurched forward across the bay. It was a jerking motion, and I was thrown out of my chair.

  “Fuck! Nooooo!” Z cried.

  “What’s wrong?” I growled as I picked myself off of the floor behind her chair.

  “There is a lock on the landing gear. I’m going to try to rip it off of the hanger.”

  “Didn’t you fix that in the control tower? Don’t the bay codes fix that?” I asked.

  “Yes and yes. This is just a manual lock for safety. Look.” She pressed a few buttons on her controls, and the camera view changed on the forward display so that we now saw the undercarriage of the craft. Our ship had eight pairs of multi-jointed landing gear so it could cling, or roll, off of virtually any surface. Two of those legs were encased with what looked like a three-meter tall metal wrap.

  “I can’t unlock them from down here. I think I’ll rip off the landing gear legs if I try to push forward,” Z explained.

  “I’ll go unlock them,” I said. My shotgun was hung over one of the chairs, but the rifle that Eve had carried was on the floor, and I picked it up.

  “Uhhh. Do you see the far right view camera? Twenty bad guys are running in this direction. You won’t make it.” The blonde woman pointed at the screen with a frantic gesture.

  “I know,” I grunted as I stepped around the captain’s chair.

  “Stop him!” I heard Z yell to Eve.

  “I can’t. He would die for us. His honor demands it.”

  The door to the elevator was already open, and I hit the button to go down to the cargo bay. I was sure there was another method to get out of the ship, but I didn’t have time to figure it out.

  “That sounds like a bunch of--” Z’s voice was cut off when the elevator doors closed, and I didn’t get to hear the rest of her words.

  I took a deep breath and tasted the scent of the new spacecraft. I was tired. My body ached everywhere. My brain felt scrambled by the screams of the creature who lived inside of me. My stomach wound was still a hot poker of agony, and my left arm still couldn’t work very well.

  Thinking this was going to be my l
ast few minutes of life made the beast inside of me screech. It didn’t want to die and I almost collapsed with the conflicting fight-or-flight desires. It wanted to flee as much as it wanted me to rush out the door and murder all the gunmen running toward the ship.

  Or maybe it was just my human brain telling the monster that the women I swore to protect wouldn’t be able to live unless I freed the legs of the starship. I kept relying on the animal they had put inside of me, but maybe it was the part of me that was human and wanted to save the people I cared about. My humanity was really what kept me going. The tiger was just a mindless killing machine, but my soul was the sight I used to aim the weapon.

  Maybe that was why I managed to live so long after all the other test subjects had either gone insane or died in battle.

  The elevator door parted, and I sprinted out to the hallway. The cargo hatch was already opening, and I guessed Z had commanded it so I wouldn’t have to spend precious seconds hitting the button. The ramp wasn’t all the way down yet, but I didn’t care. I jumped from its edge, dropped the five meters, rolled on the ground, came up with my rifle ready, and fixed my sights on the lead figure in the pack of gunmen.

  The group was still a hundred and fifty meters away, but they were running toward my position while I ran to their side. I almost didn’t expect to hit the man with our distance and movement variables, but my burst of bullets did connect, and he tumbled back as if I’d punched him in the chest with a sledgehammer. I guessed his armor soaked up most of the damage, but my accuracy did cause the rest of the group to either scatter, drop to the ground, or begin to return fire. It was the outcome I wanted since any of the three bought me a few more seconds to get the locks off.

  The bullets flew past me like angry wasps, and I forced my powerful tiger legs to run faster. The first lock was only thirty meters away, but the storm of bullets made the distance feel like thirty kilometers.

  A shot hit my armored back, but it did little more than push me forward. I gasped with surprise when I didn’t register any damage, and then I slid the last final meters to the landing gear.

  Bullets bounced off of the thick lock, and I moved around it so I would have some cover. The brace around the landing gear was attached to the ground with a set of thick metal hooks, and a circular lock mechanism driven by side hydraulics. I studied the contraption for a handful of seconds, got pissed off because I couldn’t figure it out, leaned out from behind the cover of the leg to shoot at the men, and then leaned back behind cover to study it again.

  I grabbed part of a cylinder piece that looked like it had a handle embedded in it. Sure enough, the grip popped out from the structure. I rotated the mechanism a full turn counterclockwise and the hydraulics began to hiss. Then the thick hunk of metal popped off the landing gear and came to rest on the floor.

  One more.

  I switched the grip of my rifle so I could pull the trigger with my left hand, and then I leaned out from the other side of the leg to shoot at the men. My left arm was still weak from the injury, so most of my shots missed. A few did hit, and the gunmen screamed something in the language I couldn’t understand.

  I darted out from behind the landing gear and ran toward the last lock. My burst of gunfire gave me three or four seconds of reprieve, but the men were soon shooting at me again. Instead of trying to push my legs to get there as quickly as possible in a straight line, I started to zig zag. First, I ran forward ten meters at full speed, and then I cut to my left and ran that way for a few seconds. I faked as if I was going to run toward the next leg, but then I circled back so that I was heading the wrong direction. The tactic made my beast scream at me, but the gunmen couldn’t figure out which direction I was heading, and all of their shots were going wide.

  Then I saw a spider drone, and I knew that my life was about to end.

  It dropped from the side of our ship like a real spider would have moved, and it hit the concrete with a thunderous boom. The thing had landed between the gunmen and my position, with the tank’s minigun pointed in my direction.

  There was no cover for me to hide behind except for the distant leg of the starcraft.

  I ran as hard as I could toward that last leg.

  The beast screeched for me to go faster and it poured its power into my limbs. The edges of my vision turned bright red with strange power. My heart pushed gallons of adrenaline through my system. The planet stopped spinning, and time became nothing but a frozen lake. It had captured me within its terrible grasp and I would never escape.

  The drone’s minigun began to spin.

  My furry hand closed around the lever of the lock.

  The bullets left the minigun. Their sound cut through the air like a thousand angry chainsaws.

  I twisted as hard as I could on the handle, but I couldn’t hear the hydraulic hiss over the spider’s gun.

  Goodbye Eve. Thanks for saving me.

  Goodbye Z. It was good knowing you.

  I had been through hundreds of near death experiences. My brain had stopped playing the visual summary of my life. All I wanted now was the sudden fiery death that the spray of bullets would bring me.

  But that death didn’t come.

  I opened my eyes when I heard the screams of the gunmen. The spider was shooting them instead of me, and the men were being ripped apart as if they were made of red colored glass. The guns stopped whirling after the last armored man turned into a puddle. Then the top part of the tank turned around to point its gun at me.

  Z is controlling the drone. Come back inside of the ship so that we may leave.

  I gasped with relief and nodded at the robot. The thing turned to its side, and I followed it toward the rear of the manta ray spacecraft. The gates closed as soon as we entered, and I made my way back to the elevator.

  “Get in your chair! We have to go!” Z shouted as soon as I stepped onto the bridge.

  “Confirmed.” I threw my ass in the leather seat. This time I remembered to buckle the harness around my chest. “Thanks for the save,” I said to the blonde woman.

  “Ha. I kind of like you. Would have been a shame to leave you behind. Here we go; stealing a priceless experimental starship from one of the most powerful corporations in the Trappist solar system: Take two.” The girl laughed and hit a button on her dash.

  Then we took to the sky and stars.

  Chapter 17

  “We are free,” Eve gasped as soon as we pulled into orbit around Trappist - 1e. “The stars look so beautiful.”

  “Yeah. I can’t believe we pulled this off. Damn.” Z let out a low whistle, and the two women stared at the display of stars on the view screens.

  I’d been in space more times than I could count, but this view did feel different. It wasn’t the alien arrangement of the stars; it was the feeling of freedom. Every other space journey I had made was either as a slave to the scientists that experimented on me, or as a Jupiter Marine. One might have argued I wasn’t actually a prisoner with the Marines, but my service left little decision about where I would be stationed, or what assignment I would be given. I had been good at my job, so my assignments had been many, and each of them had been dangerous.

  “Well, Captain, where are we going?” Z asked me.

  “Ha. I’m not the captain.” I nodded at the beautiful vampire women. “Ask Eve.”

  “This is a military vessel. Our missions will involve military strategy and combat. You are most fit to lead us,” the vampire woman said as she fixed her red eyes on me.

  “You say that Eve, but this was your idea. I didn’t know anything about this ship, or how to captain it. I am just a grunt.”

  “You are not just a grunt. You are a marine, and you have survived years of torture when those mad men changed your body. Most went insane from their transformation, but you became stronger. Your will is unbreakable, and your code of honor is even stronger. You need to be making the split second decisions when all our lives are on the line. I am fine to give you counsel and help plan our next
mission.”

  “Wait, who are these men that changed you? You weren’t born--” Z began to ask, but I interrupted her.

  “It’s a tale for another time.” I sighed and then felt a flare of anger slam into my body. It had been too long since I killed, and the animal inside of me hungered for violence. I needed to change out of this form quickly, even if it meant that I had to pass out for a few hours.

  “Eve, where should we go next?” I asked.

  “We need to leave this system. Elaka Nota will launch pursuit ships in less than a day.”

  “Not gonna happen,” Z said with a sigh.

  “They won’t launch the ships?” I asked her.

  “No, we can’t leave the system.”

  “Ahhh,” Eve also sighed, and she leaned into her copilot’s chair.

  “What am I missing, why can’t we leave?”

  “I haven’t looked to get a visual, but--”

  Alarms rang out across the bridge, and the three of us turned to the control deck at the front of the room. The bottom corner of the screen blurred and a trio of ships was displayed there. Each of them was instantly highlighted in a red outline, and a flurry of matching crimson text scrolled down the screen.

  Harrier Class Battle Sentry. HCS-78990-413-345.

  Manufactured by: Elaka Nota Corporation: Trappist - 1e

  Branding: Elaka Nota Corporation 3rd Fleet 1st Array

  Hyperdrive: EN - 5789TALLEY- 40 hours to 1 light year.

  Warpdrive: No

  Foldingdrive: No

  Length: 240 meters

  Minimum Crew: 50

  Estimated fighter craft: 8

  Estimated drone payload: 24

  Heavy plasma cannons: 4

  Light plasma guns: 8

  Laser arrays: 8

  Beagle Class Battle Sentry. BCS-89876-956-308.

  Manufactured by: Elaka Nota Corporation: Trappist - 1e

  Branding: Elaka Nota Corporation 3rd Fleet 1st Array

  Hyperdrive: EN - 5200TALLEY- 45 hours to 1 light year.

  Warpdrive: No

  Foldingdrive: No