But unlike previous high-risk encounters, today Quasar did not face this perilous situation alone. When his pilot shuttled him down to the train in a transport pod, matching its speed kilometer for kilometer, and when Quasar climbed out into winds strong enough to blow the fur off a full-grown Carpethrian, his courageous ship's engineer stood right beside him.
Clad in the same wind-resistant, skintight body suits with magnetic hand grips and foot stirrups, they leapt onto the roof of the Zephyr—a kilometer-long turbotrain moving faster than the speed of sound, blasting across a single electromagnetic rail laid into the desert moon's dusty hardpan. Fully prepared to save the day, both men paused a moment to hold on for dear life.
The mayor of Windfall, a prosperous mining town on Zeta Moon 3, had requested the Captain's aid for three reasons: firstly, the Effervescent Magnitude had been passing through this particular sector and was within hailing distance; secondly, the mayor had no means necessary to board the train while in transit; and thirdly, the mayor could not spare any of her resources or humanpower on what would likely be a suicide mission.
"I never shy away from a good suicide mission," Quasar had proclaimed to his bridge crew. He'd stood with fists clenched on his hips, chest inflated, boots spread shoulder-width apart. It was his favorite pose, one he liked to think of as the Confident Starfarer. There would be a statue made of him someday, he was certain. "Anybody want to tag along?"
His bridge crew had suddenly found other things to occupy themselves with. Monitors to stare at. Touchscreens to swipe.
Bill—the ship's engineer and former janitor who, for some reason, often found an excuse to be on the bridge instead of in engineering—was the only crewmember who grinned and raised his hand. Then he waved.
"Anyone else?" Quasar surveyed the other members of his crew. "No? Very well. Bill, you're with me."
Pumping his fist, Bill had danced in a little circle and then pointed at each of the crewmen and crewwomen in turn. "Ha! Suckas!"
At the time, the mayor of Windfall may have led Quasar to believe he would be up against only a hyperspeed train filled with explosives that would detonate as soon as the train reached the town of Parched, ten minutes away. The mayor may have neglected to mention that the terrorists who'd rigged the plasma charges in the turbotrain's engine were still on board. And they were well-armed.
Quasar clung to the roof, prostrate in an awkward spread-eagle, cringing as an Incinerator beam burned through the air millimeters above his head.
"Get out of here!" Quasar shouted into the comm link attached to his collar. The last thing he needed was for the transport pod to be struck by Incinerator fire, thus eliminating his only escape route—not to mention damaging a perfectly good transport pod. And potentially injuring the pilot, of course.
The pod veered out of harm's way, matching the train's speed beyond the range of those vexing Incinerator blasts. "Meet you at the extraction point," said the pilot.
There would be no need for any such extraction. Quasar had nine minutes left, after all, to subdue the unruly terrorists while Bill deactivated the plasma charges. Assuming Bill could deactivate plasma charges. Quasar certainly hoped he was up to the job. If not, then the transport pod would be close enough to rescue them and leave Parched to its unseemly fate.
Obviously not the most desirable outcome.
"This is freakin' awesome, Captain. My first away mission!" Bill hooted and hollered, sitting on the roof like a cowboy from the Ancient West astride a bucking bronco—one that weighed a few thousand tons. "Honored you took me along!"
"My options were limited," Quasar muttered under his breath. Then he cleared his throat and shouted, "We must make our way forward!"
Quasar started creeping across the roof of the train, careful to detach and reattach his magnetic grips with careful precision. Bill followed in like manner. The two of them may have resembled four-legged spiders moving centimeters at a time if they'd taken a moment to observe each other. Unfortunately, they had no time for such trivial pursuits. Moving while remaining attached to the train occupied their complete attention. Their destination lay fifty meters ahead, and that was where the terrorists' Incinerator blasts originated.
"Are the other cars empty, sir? Any passengers?"
"Not according to our scans." Quasar clenched his jaw. The muscle twitched on command. "These cars carry nothing but highly explosive, flammable, and toxic materials."
"Whoa..."
It was a dire situation indeed. And well-concocted, as far as malevolent acts of terror went.
"Those gunmen must not value their lives too much, Captain. What do they want, anyhow? Besides the obvious."
"The obvious?"
"Blowing up that town and killing everybody."
"What does any terrorist want, Bill? To inspire fear. But the good news for the people of Parched: Windfall's mayor warned them to get everyone out of town. So we'll be saving the slowpokes and the elderly from certain death, those who couldn't make it out in time. As well as millions of credits' worth of property from irreparable damage. Not to mention the train itself, which—by the looks of it—would be expensive to replace."
"Yeah, it's real fancy," Bill said. "But do you mean to say those folks shooting at us haven't made any sort of demands? Don't terrorists usually have a published manifesto or some such? An axe to grind?"
"We're here to stop a train, Bill, not to sympathize with the enemy. This moon is one of the oldest outposts of Earth—established back before our home planet became a smoldering ash heap. These Zeta colonists were humankind's first pioneers, scratching out a living on terraformed moons in what was thought to be the farthest reaches of space. We owe it to the memory of Earth to ensure that peace and justice prevail here today!"
"Well, I sure feel inspired," Bill said with genuine enthusiasm.
"Good. We have less than five minutes."
They made the most of those minutes, growing more confident in the use of their magnetic grips and sliding across the roof of the train like wolf spiders skimming the surface of a stagnant pond. With two minutes to spare, they dropped through a hatch in the forward car that Bill was able to open with his nifty multitool. Captain Quasar landed on top of the three gunmen who'd been tasked with ensuring the payload reached its destination in a blazing inferno. He set about disarming them posthaste—after beating them senseless, of course.
"Karate kick!" Bill cried, joining the fray. The nimble gunman easily dodged Bill's boot. "Judo chop!" Bill tried a different tactic, but the gunman ducked, avoiding Bill's strike.
"Best not to announce your tactics ahead of time," Quasar said, seizing the terrorist in a chokehold from behind and quickly throttling the husky fellow.
Bill nodded, watching like a wide-eyed kid at a Saturday matinee. Then his mouth hung open a bit as the captain tossed each of the incapacitated terrorists off the speeding train before they had a chance to explain themselves.
"Time for you to work your magic." Quasar nodded toward the plasma charges slaved to the engine's control panel. "We've got a minute before this thing blows."
"It sure does," Bill muttered, squinting as he surveyed the explosives before him. He frowned. Bit his lip. Murmured to himself. Then he sighed. "Never seen anything like it."
"What do you mean?" Quasar's pulse raced. He'd assumed his chief engineer would know how to diffuse a simple bomb. But then again, he should have remembered the old Earth adage about assuming things: it always makes an ass out of everyone involved.
"Sorry, Captain. I'm more familiar with rockets and reactor coils and such. This…" He shook his head and gestured lamely. "I have no idea how to save the day here."
Quasar checked the navigation console. They were now thirty kilometers outside of Parched.
"Bail out!" Quasar hit the emergency brake and jerked his head to activate the comm link. "Looks like we're going to need a ride out of here, Hank ol' buddy. AFAP!"
"AFAP?" Bill said.
"As fast as possible."
Quasar and Bill clambered up to the roof just as the transport pod swung alongside it. As the train shuddered and shrieked to a standstill, the captain and his engineer leapt aboard the pod and dropped through the roof hatch. Hank accelerated with a burst of speed, steering clear of the thunderous blast that erupted behind them in an apocalyptic display of pyrotechnics.
Almost instantly, the mayor of Windfall pinged the pod's comm channel.
"Looks like you were unsuccessful, Captain," she said grimly. "But I suppose it couldn't be helped. Those poor souls in Parched…I only wish I'd been able to warn them of their impending doom in time."
"Not to worry." Quasar struck his most favorite pose, even though only Bill and Hank were there to witness it. And they'd seen it many times before. "The people of Parched have been saved. We managed to stop the train in time for it to blow up without any casualties. Besides the three gunmen, that is. I'm afraid there isn't much left of them. But terrorists aren't worth the blood pumping through their veins, so there. That's my stance on the topic."
The mayor was strangely silent. Then the sound of her clearing her throat came through loud and clear. "So Parched is…completely unharmed?"
"You can thank me later. For now, take joy in the fact that the day has been saved!"
Silence. Bill frowned and glanced at Hank—the very hairy, four-armed Carpethrian who piloted the transport pod. Hank shrugged his superior set of shoulders and plotted their course to reach the Magnitude in orbit.
"Uh-right," the mayor said. "Of course." After an awkward pause, she ended the transmission.
"Didn't seem very happy about the recent turn of events, did she?" Bill said.
Hank cleared one of his twin throats, giving his gravelly voice an oddly harmonic quality. "Captain, do we know what sort of relationship these two towns have with each other?"
"Both are mining towns, tasked with supplying Space Command with all the ore and rare minerals they can dig out of this moon," Quasar said.
"Are they in direct competition with each other?"
Bill forgot to blink. "Whoa…You may be onto something there, Hank. That is, if you're implying what I think you're implying. Do you really think the people of Parched rigged that train full of explosives to blow up their own town, fake their deaths, and then start over on another terraformed moon without Windfall as a major competitor?"
Hank stared hard at Bill. "No," he said gruffly. "I think Windfall's mayor had something to do with it."
"Well, I for one am just happy to be alive." Quasar chuckled, slapping both of his crewmen on the back. "But if such were the case, Hank, then are you suggesting the good mayor assumed Bill and I would fail? Preposterous!"
"Humph," Hank grunted noncommittally.
The transport pod broke through the moon's atmosphere and headed straight for the captain's star cruiser—a sleek, gleaming sight to behold, one that seemed to say Well done today, heroes. That's what it said to Quasar, anyway. Probably not to Bill. He'd been fairly useless on the mission. But Quasar wouldn't be giving up on him anytime soon.
Captain Bartholomew Quasar never gave up on anybody. Unless they were terrorists, in which case he tossed such degenerates from hyperspeed trains to be dashed to pieces.
The Kolarii Kidnappers
Captain Bartholomew Quasar's eyes could have been playing tricks on him, but he doubted it. They were so seldom unreliable, after all.
"Tell me, Hank." He leaned over to his very hairy helmsman, tied as he was with his hands behind his back—only Hank, being a four-armed Carpethrian, had twice as many hands, all tied with a rough hemp rope. "They looked like human children, didn't they?"
"Silence!" commanded the tribal leader—a chief or a chieftess. Quasar couldn't be sure. He'd never met a Kolarii before. As a race, they resembled turtles but without the shells to slow them down. From what he'd seen since they captured him and his team, the Kolarii moved slowly enough as it was. "You have trespassed into our village and have no voice among our people until one has been granted to you. Which it has not. So you will keep silent, Human."
"I will not." Quasar raised his tanned, chiseled chin and narrowed his heroic gaze. "Those children don't belong to you. You stole them from the human settlers in Zeta Colony 6, and we're here in loco parentis to take them home. All twelve of them. No child left behind."
"Loco parentis..." Hank grunted quietly. "Their parents are crazy?"
"With worry, perhaps," Quasar said. "They wouldn't dare break the treaty by entering Kolarii lands. There is a strictly enforced boundary between what is human and what is Kolarii on this moon."
Scowling, the Kolarii chief motioned two spear-toting, muscular warriors toward Quasar. They wouldn't reach him for a minute or two, due to their sluggish speed. It was a wonder that the Captain, Hank, and Security Chief Gruber (also tied next to Quasar) had been overtaken by such slowpokes. But then again, the Kolarii had outnumbered them ten-to-one and had been well-armed with all manner of serrated and sharp projectile weapons, while Quasar and company had each carried only a nonlethal stunner.
"Well, Hank?" Quasar persisted, nudging the surly Carpethrian with an elbow. "Didn't they look human to you?"
"Humph," Hank grunted noncommittally.
"Big help you are." Quasar glanced at the two fierce Kolarii warriors headed his way, still a couple meters out. Then he turned his attention to Gruber, garbed as he and Hank were in Kolarii cloaks. They made everyone present look like spooky druids in the middle of a pagan, slow-motion ritual. "Back me up here."
"Yes indeed, Captain, they sure did look human to me." Gruber stared at the Kolarii and didn't blink. Afflicted with an unfortunate perspiration disorder, he was sweating so profusely that his soggy cloak made him look like a large drowned rat. The heat of the moon's twin suns didn't help matters. "You think we should maybe try to escape, sir? I'm almost certain we could outrun them."
"No need." Quasar met the Kolarii chief's stern gaze with steely confidence. "No harm will come to us. The Kolarii have a treaty set in stone—literally—with the human colonists. Our friendly chief here would not risk disturbing this moon's decades of peace by roughing us up."
"Chieftess!" the chief corrected.
"Fifty-fifty chance," Quasar muttered. "Glad we've got that straight now."
"It was the Humans who stole our children. We have brought them home, and now you threaten their safety—Human spies sent to sneak and steal from us. The treaty is null and void!"
The warriors were now upon Quasar and company, gripping hold of the Captain, Hank, and Gruber and shaking them in place. It was an odd sensation, akin to slow-dancing. But not nearly as romantic.
"I'm sorry." Quasar wagged his chin toward the collar of his uniform, mostly hidden by the cloak he wore. "Sometimes my translation device can be a little...off-target, shall we say? I'm sure I misunderstood. You could not have possibly said the treaty with the colonists is null and void. Because that would mean this situation has gone from bad to much, much worse."
"That's what she said, Captain." Hank's fur swayed as he was slowly shaken side to side by the Kolarii warrior. Quasar wasn't sure what a seasick Carpethrian looked like, but he had a pretty good idea.
"You came to us armed—" The chieftess held up the three stunners her warriors had confiscated from Quasar and his team. "—trod upon our land, and made threats against us. All of your actions violate the treaty. You will be punished for your dangerous trespasses and sins. Throw them into the pit!"
Warriors gradually surrounded Quasar, Hank, and Gruber and slowly escorted them toward the edge of a gaping hole in the ground a few meters away.
"I don't like the looks of this, Captain." Gruber struggled against the warriors who held him, but their collective grip was too strong for him. "What do you suppose is down there?"
"Something hungry. Or lethal. Probably both," replied Quasar. "But have no fear. This is all for show, trust me."
"You will die!" the chieftess shrilled. The Kolarii released a
terrifying tumult of war cries, laughter, and what sounded like off-key opera.
"Captain." Hank cleared one of his twin throats, giving his voice an oddly harmonic quality. "For argument's sake, what if they do plan to kill us?"
Quasar winked. "I've got everything under control."
Hank didn't look convinced. Neither did Gruber. Half an hour later when they finally reached the pit and the Kolarii warriors hurled Quasar headfirst into it, the Captain realized he'd been very wrong about the situation from the start.
"Wait a minute!" he hollered as he plummeted headlong into fetid darkness, stretching out both his legs in a full split. His boots dug into the opposite walls of the pit and halted his descent toward whatever hissed and snapped far below. He imagined python-sized sand snakes, but he hoped he was wrong about that. As much as he'd always been curious about what a sand snake looked like, and as much as he'd hoped to catch a glimpse of one, this was not how he'd imagined first contact with such exotic creatures. Dangling below his own legs, he struggled in vain against the bonds on his wrists. "You appear to be serious. I understand that now. And I respect it."
"Is he talking to himself down there?" said one of the Kolarii who'd tossed him in.
"Praying, more likely," said the other one.
"Tell your chieftess I will discuss terms!" Quasar raised his voice. "And be quick about it!" His boots slid unexpectedly, and he shoved them into the pit's earthen walls with all his might.
"What did he say?"
"He would like an audience with the chieftess."
"He is still alive?"
"Not for long, if you keep lollygagging!" Quasar grimaced and grunted. He'd always taken pride in his flexibility, but it had not been put to the test in such a fashion before. "She'll want to hear what I have to say."
Thankfully, the chieftess was nearby, and it didn't take more than ten minutes for her to make her way to the edge of the pit.
"Still alive, you say? I do not believe it. No one could survive such a fate," said the chieftess as she approached. "Human, are you down there? In one piece?"
Captain Bartholomew Quasar: Starfaring Adventures Page 6
