by Alex Irvine
“There are two types of beings in the universe,” Drax said. “Those who dance and those who do not.” Peter nodded, humoring him. He wasn’t about to take romantic advice from Drax. “I first met my beloved at a war rally. Everyone in the village flailed about, dancing, except one woman: my Ovette. I knew immediately she was the one for me. The most melodic song in the world could be playing and she wouldn’t even tap her foot. Wouldn’t move a muscle. One might assume she was dead.”
“I get it. I’m a dancer; Gamora is not,” Peter said.
“You just need to find a woman who is pathetic. Like you.” Somehow, Peter didn’t feel any better.
Gamora started locking Nebula to a beam toward the rear of the Milano’s passenger compartment. Nearby was a bowl of fruit. Nebula reached for it but Gamora jerked her arm back and locked her in place with the bowl just out of reach. “I’m hungry,” Nebula said.
“No,” Gamora said. “It’s not ripe yet.”
Nebula didn’t believe her. “I hate you,” she said.
“You hate me,” Gamora echoed, starting to return to the bridge.
“You left me there while you stole that stone for yourself,” Nebula said. “And yet here you stand, a hero. I will be free of these shackles soon enough and I will kill you. I swear.” Hate shone in her black eyes even though she never raised her voice.
Gamora turned back to her. “No. You’re going to live out the rest of your days in a prison on Xandar, wishing you could.”
Suddenly, alarms sounded throughout the ship. Gamora left Nebula to head for the cockpit and see what was happening.
“This is weird,” Peter said. “We’ve got a Sovereign fleet approaching from the rear.”
Rocket was in the other pilot’s seat. Drax stood behind them. “Why would they do that?” Gamora asked as she got settled in the navigator’s seat behind Peter and Rocket.
“Probably because Rocket stole some of the batteries,” Drax said.
Rocket spun in his seat. “Dude!”
“Right,” Drax said more quietly. “He didn’t steal some of those. I don’t know why they’re out there. What a mystery this is.” His expression barely changed—Drax was a terrible liar.
The Sovereign ships opened fire all at once. Blasts of energy rocked the Milano and streaked through space on all sides. Peter threw the ship into a series of twisting evasive maneuvers, speeding away toward a jump point. There had to be one nearby.
“What were you thinking?!” Peter shouted over the impacts.
“Dude, they were really easy to steal!”
“That’s your defense?” Gamora was incredulous.
“Come on, you saw how that high priestess talked down to us. Now I’m teaching her a lesson.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize your motivation was altruism,” Peter said. “It’s really a shame the Sovereign have mistaken your intentions and are trying to kill us.”
“Exactly!”
“I was being sarcastic!”
“Oh no, you’re supposed to use your sarcastic voice! Now I look foolish!”
“Can we put the bickering on hold until we survive this massive space battle?” Gamora snapped.
“More incoming,” Peter warned.
“Good,” Rocket snarled. “I’m gonna kill some guys.” He roared and blazed away at the Sovereign ships, destroying several of them. The rest dipped and swerved, coming around for another pass at the Milano.
“You’re not killing anyone,” Gamora said. “All those ships are remotely piloted.”
Ayesha watched everything unfold from a balcony overlooking a huge space full of simulator rigs. Dozens of Sovereign were piloting the drones, shouting in frustration when their craft were destroyed.
“Admiral,” Ayesha said to the official standing next to her. “What is the delay?”
“High Priestess—the batteries,” the admiral said carefully. “They are exceptionally combustible and could destroy our entire fleet.” The admiral had told his pilots to use extreme caution for this reason. They might not be manned, but the Soverign Fleet was still extremely valuable.
“Our concern is their slight against our people. We hire them and they steal from us?” Ayesha hissed. “This is heresy of the highest order.”
The admiral nodded and spoke into a microphone linked to every remote pilot. “All command modules. Fire with the intent to kill.”
CHAPTER 4
What’s the closest habitable planet?” Peter called out.
Gamora consulted the star chart. “It’s called Berhert.”
“How many jumps?”
“Only one, but the access point is forty-seven klicks away…and you have to go through that quantum asteroid field.” Peter looked ahead and saw the flashes of colliding asteroids. A quantum asteroid field was like a regular asteroid field, except the asteroids flashed randomly in and out of existence. It was some kind of anomaly in the fabric of space-time. Peter wasn’t sure how it worked, but it was no easy thing to survive flying through a place where an asteroid might appear randomly right in front of you at any moment.
“Quill. To make it through that, you would have to be the greatest pilot in the universe,” Drax said.
“Lucky for us…” Peter began.
“I am,” Rocket said before Peter could finish his sentence. Rocket switched the Milano to his controls and put it into a spiraling dive through the outer edges of the field. An asteroid appeared just ahead and he barely dodged it. Behind them, the Sovereign drones followed. Asteroids smashed many of them to flaming bits, but the rest kept coming.
Annoyed, Peter stabbed the console and took back control of the ship. Rocket slammed his steering column back and forth. “What are you doing?”
“I’ve been flying this ship since I was ten years old.”
“I was cybernetically engineered to fly a spacecraft!”
They wrestled over the controls, switching them back and forth as the Milano jerked crazily, missing asteroids by sheer luck. “Stop it,” Gamora said.
“Later on tonight,” Rocket said, “you’re going to be lying down in your bed and there’s going to be something squishy in your pillowcase, and you’re going to go, ‘What’s this?’ and it’s gonna be because I put a turd in there.”
“You put your turd in my bed, I shave you,” Peter threatened. He took control again.
“Oh, it won’t be my turd,” Rocket shot back. “It’ll be Drax’s.”
Drax burst out laughing. “I have famously huge turds.”
Gamora looked at the three of them, one after another, disbelief plain on her face. “We’re about to die and this is what we’re discussing?”
Rocket took back control.
“Dude, seriously,” Peter said, and they both stabbed at their control buttons. While they were fighting, an asteroid appeared close enough to crash into the rear of the Milano, sending the ship into an uncontrolled spin. Pieces of its hull broke away, exposing the passenger compartment to the vacuum of space. Nebula was nearly sucked out into the void. The only things holding her were the shackles. She kicked and screamed, though nobody could hear her.
Up in the cockpit, Groot went flying toward the back. Peter reached out and caught him, then tossed him to Drax. Then he touched a series of screens that activated emergency shielding. The hull breach sealed and Nebula crashed back to the floor.
“Idiots!” she screamed.
“Well,” Rocket said, “that’s what you get when Quill flies.”
Gamora threw a loose piece of junk at him, hitting him in the back of the head. “We still have a Sovereign craft behind us.” She read the navigator’s heads-up display as the Milano dodged the fire from the last Sovereign drone.
“Our weapons are down,” Peter said.
Gamora got a read on the jump portal. “Twenty klicks to the jump!” Drax handed Groot to her and she looked down at him. “Hold on,” she told him.
They were most of the way through the quantum asteroid field. The jump portal glowed ahea
d, like a hole in space-time filled with multicolored energy. But they couldn’t shake the last drone.
Drax went to the rear. He had an idea. Nebula was at full stretch on the floor, reaching for a piece of the fruit that had spilled out of the basket. Drax kicked it away. “It’s not ripe.”
He hooked a heavy cable to his belt and stood in front of the rear airlock. Set into the wall was a rack of small discs. Below them a sign said SPACESUITS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. Below that, someone had made a handwritten addition: OR FOR FUN.
Drax slapped one of the discs on his back and a force field surrounded his body. It would protect him against the vacuum and supply him with air for as long as he needed.
He stepped into the airlock and punched the button to open the outside hatch.
On Sovereign, the pilots of the destroyed drones gathered around the last remaining pilot as he leaned into his simulator. “Come on, Zylak, you can do this,” one of them encouraged.
Zylak stayed tight to the fleeing ship, firing nonstop. The Sovereign pilot was good and Zylak scored a few direct hits. But he was getting the range, and the ship had no rear-mounted guns, so he didn’t have to worry about incoming fire.
Then he saw something incredible. One of the Guardians jumped out of the ship’s airlock attached to a cable. He jerked to a violent stop as the cable reached its full length. It was the bald, muscular Guardian, his body surrounded by the glimmer of a space suit…and he had a heavy gun in his hands. He raised the gun.
“Die, spaceship!” Drax roared into space. He got a bead on the drone and blew it away with a single shot.
In the Sovereign pilots’ chamber, there was a brief silence. Zylak stared into the empty simulator.
CHAPTER 5
Approaching jump point,” Gamora said. Peter locked in the coordinates and gunned the Milano forward…and a new swarm of Sovereign drones appeared.
“Son of a…they went around the field!” exclaimed Peter.
The drones raked the Milano with their combined fire, rocking the ship as it tried to cover the last distance to the portal. Peter wasn’t sure they were going to make it in one piece.
Then, in a single instant, the entire Sovereign fleet disappeared in a huge cluster of fireballs. When the afterimage cleared, a single spacecraft hung by itself in the void.
Shock silenced the Sovereign pilots’ chamber. They had been sure their ambush would work. “Someone destroyed all our ships!” the admiral exclaimed.
Ayesha pierced him with an ice-cold glare. “Who?”
“One klick!” Gamora yelled. Sparks showered from overloaded circuits in the cockpit.
Rocket looked out the window at the ship that had just annihilated the Sovereign drones. “What is that?” he wondered. It didn’t look like any ship he’d ever seen before.
“Who cares?” Peter was focused on one thing and one thing only. “That’s the jump point!”
“It’s a guy,” Rocket said, amazed. An egg-shaped spacecraft, gleaming silvery white, flashed by them. A single humanoid form stood on top of it, holding a pair of glimmering cables as if they were the reins of a horse-drawn chariot. The figure raised a hand and waved.
Peter didn’t care. He aimed the Milano at the jump portal and shot through it. The shock of the jump overloaded parts of the hull and the ship started spewing fire as it passed into Berhert’s upper atmosphere. Pieces of it tumbled away, and the temporary shielding failed. Wind tore through the passenger compartment, sucking out debris and spewing it directly at Drax, still dangling at the end of his cable.
“Oh my God,” Gamora said. “He’s still out there.”
She dashed back to the rear and caught the cable’s spool just before it broke free of the wall. Nebula flailed in the wind, held in place by her manacles. The suction dragged Gamora out of the ship, but she caught hold of the edge of the hole and held on for dear life, the cable fixture in her other hand—and Drax still bouncing at the end of the cable. The friction of reentry started to burn around them, and soon they were trailing fire just like the rest of the ship.
Only then did Peter notice that both Drax and Gamora were outside the ship. He looked over his shoulder and saw Groot sitting in Drax’s seat, calmly having a snack. “Groot, put your seat belt on. Prepare for a really bad landing!”
Peter kept the landing angle as shallow as he could, but they were going in fast and headed for a dense forest. The Milano tore through the canopy and then snapped off tree trunks for a mile or more before plowing into the ground and coming to rest in a cloud of dust. A final shower of shattered branches and drifting leaves fell around the crash site, and with a groan, the Milano’s right wing broke off and crashed to the ground. A startled flock of birds flew up into the sky.
Behind the ship, Drax pushed himself up and started laughing. “That was awesome! Yes!”
Gamora stood closer to the ship, still holding the other end of Drax’s cable. She flung it to the ground. “Look at this!” she screamed as Peter and Rocket emerged from the wreck. They brought Nebula out, too, not wanting her to be trapped inside the ship if it collapsed any further. She might have been a prisoner, but she was still Gamora’s sister.
“Where’s the other half of our ship?! Either one of you could have gotten us through that field!” Gamora said. “Peter,” she snapped, “we almost died because of your arrogance.”
“No, because he stole the Anulax batteries!” Peter pointed at Rocket.
“They’re called Harbulary batteries,” Drax said.
“No, they’re not!” Peter yelled.
“You know why I did it, Star-Munch?” Rocket said.
Offended, Peter looked away. “I’m not gonna answer to ‘Star-Munch.’”
“I did it because I wanted to! What are we even talking about this for? We just had a little man save us by blowing up fifty ships!”
“How little?” Drax asked.
“I don’t know,” Rocket said. He held up his left hand with thumb and forefinger maybe an inch apart. “Like…this?”
Gamora was obviously skeptical. “A little one-inch man saved us?”
“Well, if he got closer, I’m sure he’d be much larger.”
“Yeah, that’s how eyesight works, you stupid raccoon,” Peter said.
“Don’t call me a raccoon!” Rocket yelled, furious. Peter knew he hated that word.
“I’m sorry,” Peter said seriously. “I took it too far. I meant ‘trash panda.’”
Rocket looked around, confused. “Is that better?”
“I don’t know,” Drax said.
Peter couldn’t help himself. He started to laugh. “It’s worse. It’s so much worse.”
“You son of a—” Rocket launched himself at Peter, but before they could really fight, all the Guardians looked up, hearing the thrum of a spaceship’s engine.
“Someone followed you through the jump point,” Nebula said. “Set me free. You’ll need my help.”
“You’re a fool, Nebula,” Gamora scoffed.
“You’re a fool to deprive yourself of my talent in combat.”
“You’d attack me the moment I let you go.”
“No, I won’t,” Nebula said quickly, looking around at the group and trying to appear earnest.
“You’d think an evil supervillain would be better at lying,” Peter commented.
The ship came into view, the same pale, egg-shaped craft Rocket had seen near the jump point on the edge of the quantum asteroid field. The Guardians clustered together, ready to fight if they had to. Groot was behind them, just then climbing down out of the ship. “I bet it’s the one-inch man,” Drax said.
Yellow lights blazed powerfully from the craft’s windows as it settled among the trees near where the Milano had crashed. After it came to rest, two figures appeared from a large, eye-shaped portal in its side. One was a slim humanoid alien in green and black, with large black eyes and a pair of small antennae pointing up from her forehead. The other was a human male in a long cloak, his bearded face
alight with a smile as he looked the Guardians over. “After all these years, I’ve found you,” he said to Peter.
“And who are you?” Peter shot back.
“I figured my rugged good looks would make that obvious,” the man said. “My name is Ego…and I’m your dad, Peter.”
CHAPTER 6
The world of Contraxia was one of the galaxy’s most notorious places for bad behavior, and Yondu Udonta felt right at home there…at least, usually. But right then he was uneasy, because Contraxia was a well-known Ravager hangout, and Yondu was in more than a little trouble with the Ravagers. He had done some work that, to the other Ravagers, looked like kidnapping—which was a serious violation of the Ravager code. They might have been pirates and killers, but they had rules.
It was up to Yondu to explain himself, and he’d been brooding over how to do it since some of his fellow Ravagers had let him know that Stakar Ogord, the top chief of the Ravagers, was visiting Contraxia. Now some of Yondu’s shipmates were calling to him, letting him know that Stakar was in this same part of town. He got himself ready and came down the stairs into the open hall. Flanked by two loyal Ravagers, Wretch and Halfnut, he worked his way through the crowd to see Stakar with one of his top lieutenants, Martinex. “Stakar,” he said, and thumped a fist against his chest twice in the Ravager salute. “It’s been some time.”
“Seems like this establishment is the wrong kind of disreputable,” Stakar sneered after a long, disdainful look at Yondu. He turned and walked away.
“Stakar!” Yondu called after him. He’d known he would be in trouble after word got around about him and Peter Quill, but this was worse than he’d expected.
“There are a hundred factions of Ravagers,” Stakar said to the owner of the bar. “You just lost the business of ninety-nine by serving one.”
