by Ian Cannon
Bad Bargain
A Space Rules Adventure Part 1
Ian Cannon
First published 2019
By NKBooks/IanCannonBooks
DFW, TX, U.S.A.
All Rights Reserved
© Copyright 2019
www.IanCannonAuthor.com
This book is sold subject to the condition that no part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author or authors, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it was published and without a similar condition being imposed on the publisher or subsequent purchaser.
Cover design by www.DerangedDoctorDesign.com
Edited by www.FadingStreet.com
Created with Vellum
Acknowledgments
O Captain! My Captain!
our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack,
the prize we sought is won.
~ Walt Whitman ~
Thank you Captain James. T. Kirk,
Captain Solo, and Captain Malcolm Reynolds
for turning reality
magically into dreams
And Captain Scot C. Morgan,
Captain Cebilius, and Captain Luke Everhart
for turning dreams
back into reality.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Thank You For Reading!
Enjoy this opening excerpt from Doomed Cargo: A Space Rules Adventure Part 2
Now Available On Pre-Order
Coming Soon!
Get the Origin Story
Chapter One
“He’s behind you, babe, six o’clock.” Her voice came through his headset.
“I can’t get a visual.”
“Of course you can’t. I said he’s behind you.”
“Very funny. You tracking him?”
“Just keep moving. He’s coming fast.”
“Yeah, but are you tracking him?”
There was a giggle in Ben’s ear. A giggle. Made him snarl. She said, “You still don’t trust me, do you, babe?”
What a ridiculous question. He trusted her with his life, with his very soul. She was just razzing him now. Not a good time for razzing. “Of course I trust you. I just…” The jump booster on his atmo gear hit full charge with a…
Beep.
Boom! He blasted off.
The ground dropped from under his feet very quickly. Weightlessness became inertia, made him grit his teeth. He tapped the toggle pad in his gloved hand and a secondary vent in his bio-suit hissed spinning him around. He could see the asteroid drop away beneath him.
And there he was. Rogan. His pursuer. What a bastard. Not too bright, either.
Tawny had been right. He was close. Now the man stood below looking up helplessly angry. Made Ben laugh. “See you, sucker.”
His automated suit voiced in his ear, “Ben, your trajectory is deteriorating. I would suggest…”
“Yeah yeah,” he said spinning himself back around in mid-flight. The overlay showed on his visor, green optics targeting flicking to red, the target asteroid slipping to the left. Yep, he was off by several meters. “Adjusting.” He toggled gently. Vents hissed. He felt his vacuum flight adjust. The asteroid came up quick. His pre-calculated landing zone centered making him grin. But his velocity was too high.
“Babe, you’re coming in hot!” Tawny called in his headset.
“I know!” he said through held breath jerking the toggle up and reversing the jumper vents. Too late. The preordained landing zone—a nice, safe, comfortably smooth spot between crater impacts—went by below. He watched it forlornly through his visor. He totally missed it. Then he looked up. A stone spire approached, coming fast. His eyes went big. “Oh, this is going to—”
From Tawny’s position several vacuum miles away perched on her own little asteroid, Ben’s impact looked like a tiny puff of dust ejected into space from the vertical side of a stone tower. But she knew better. That was a man colliding with an asteroid. That was her husband. Her heart stopped, mouth dropped, eyes went doughy. “Babe?” she whispered, and waited. Nothing returned. “Benji!”
A bearish groan issued through her headset. “I’m okay. I’m… okay.”
She sighed relief, half pissed off and half overjoyed.
“You copy, sweetheart?” he said.
“Yeah, I copy,” she finally said, “you big dummy!”
“What’s his position?”
She swung her M-209 solar collection plasma weapon back down toward the previous asteroid, zoomed up on the visor overlay. The weapon was a body-mounted, long-barreled sniper cannon—a beast with a charge pack connected to her back. A digital reticle narrowed in on her target. Her eyes became slits.
There he was. Rogan. Dumbest man in the system.
He was toggling switches of his own and lowering into a squatting position.
“He’s preparing a jump, Benji.”
“Figured that. He’s welcome to join me if he wants. But it’s going to hurt. What’s his distance?”
“Three hundred meters.”
“Copy. I’m on the move.”
She swiveled her weapon further downward, adjusting her view. Another asteroid showed. It was a big one. Huge. A small moon. This was the primary. Every asteroid field had a mother—a worldlet from which the others broke away in their endless pirouetting. This field was ancient, creating a sea of debris that trailed off into the star-speckled fjord. But the rock she viewed through her visor overlay known as Hominus IV was by far the biggest, taking up the entire lower periphery.
“Your destination is straight below you.”
“Preparing to drop. How far is…”
“Oh babe, he just jumped!”
Ben, clinging to the side of his tower, twisted around searching for his pursuer with the naked eye. He caught him, a man-shaped dot in the distance arcing silently through space, zipping from one asteroid to the other. He was coming up quick, going to land below him, cut him off. “Oh hells!”
He kicked way out from the side of his mountain tower and punched his toggle control. Jets boosted him into a straight-down nosedive. He watched Rogan get nearer and nearer. Collision course.
“Benji!” she called in his ear.
“I know!”
“You’re going to…”
“I know!”
Ben whipped his dual pistols out, held them at arm’s length. Rogan did the same, unleashing his own blaster, the two human projectiles closing the distance fast, one coming from below, one coming from above. Their paths crossed in a heartbeat, barely missing. Ben spun around, keeping Rogan in his gun sights. The man rasped his free hand at him trying to grab him, but their velocities were way too fast, and just like that, Ben watched Rogan go shrinking away, once again looking down at him helplessly furious. Ben snickered. “See you, sucker.”
“That was close, babe.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Why can’t we just shoot this moron and put him out of his misery?”
“Rules, baby.”
&n
bsp; “Oh yeah—like he follows the rules.”
“He didn’t shoot me, either. We got to give him that.”
“That’s only because he knows I’m out here tracking him.”
“Then maybe he’s not as dumb as I thought. You’re probably right, though. Landing.” The surface of Hominus IV zoomed up at him. He reversed his jets, came down hard. The surface declined and he slid along kicking up loess, not from gravity, but the inertia of his landing. He growled, grinding himself to a stop. Once on stable footing, he moved his way up the incline and stood at the edge of a canyon bowl. The place was enormous—like a moonscape below, the night sky speckled with rotating tonnage above.
“Can you see it?” she asked. “It’s located at the bottom.”
Ben’s visual instrumentation sought out his target destination, found it, zoomed it in. There was a vacuum shack at the bottom of the canyon, a gray building sealed against the vacuum of space. Four hundred meters. “Yeah, I see it. Making my approach. What’s REX telling you?”
“Activity. Ten guards.”
“Great.”
“Be careful.”
“That’s why I got you,” he said.
He heard her groan through his headset. His life was in her hands now. Her expertise would be the only thing to save him, especially once the hermetic door opened on the garage below and a trio of moon vehicles emerged, each with two operators—a driver, a gunner—kicking up moon dust. Here they came. Headed straight for him.
The first plasma bolt came raining down from the dark sky like a streak of orange light burning a stripe from above. Tawny’s salvo. It pounded the surface. The explosion down in the bowl was brilliant, a shower of searing debris bursting like a fountain into space, and the first moon vehicle was gone. After a moment, Ben could feel the impact blast strike him. At this distance it was tiny, but he could imagine the lives below being shaken to their core. “Nice one, hot shot,” he said.
“Re-charging. Get moving.”
Time to go. He went bounding down the decline in great, sweeping strides, the gravity here being a smidgen above weightless. Laser fire came his way from down in the bowl. They were shooting at him. He could see the shots approach, light streaks zipping toward him, whip-quick. He nose-dived into the ashy moon surface. The rock before him blew apart into chunks. “Tawny!”
“Firing!”
Another bolt came down from her asteroid hideout, just a speck among the specks. Another salvo from his wife. KABOOM! Another moon vehicle blew into trans-axels and big, bouncy tires. Ben peeked up. The other buggie spun around, bugged out.
Four guards out of comish.
Two more fleeing for the hills.
That’s six.
Four left in the shed. Bad odds. But he’d faced worse. Much worse. “Nice job, honey.”
“Just get moving.”
“Roger that.” He was up again making headway toward the vacuum hut. As he approached he kept his visor readout scanning the building’s top, around its sides. No movement. Yet.
He reached the door already having unzipped his disable unit. The plug went in. A series of digital symbols flashed. His device read the pad lock’s system language. Ben gave it a curious look. He didn’t recognize the language.
The symbols stopped flashing.
A thunk. A click. The door scooted open.
He stepped back, gun up.
A hallway with lights.
Stairs at the end.
No one home.
He sprinted forward, checked the stairwell, went to the first landing. Still no one. He made it to the bottom level. There were no technicians. No workstations. No nothing. This wasn’t a headquarters. Not even a control hut. This place was here for one reason. And that reason was behind door number one at the end of the hall. He was certain.
“Outside secure?” he asked.
“So far,” Tawny responded. “Did you find her?”
“Think so.” Ben went to the door, inspected his surroundings. Had to move quick. There was no lock pad. It was old school—good old bolt lock. He unsheathed a plasma cutter, lit it up with a tiny yellow plasma blade, jammed it into the doorjamb, started working it. The surrounding alloy pulsed red. Something gave and the door jiggled. Ben stepped back and kicked hard. The door swung open.
There she was standing in the corner, tall, chiseled, late teens, a powdery blue tint to her skin, dressed in the Orbinii casual attire she’d been kidnapped in. The look on her face was of a young woman ripped from a life of exotic pampering and thrown into the alien confines of her cell. Horrified. Shocked. Pissed off at everything. A seasoning of arrogant annoyance, as if she’d been wondering for the last several day cycles exactly who her captors thought they were, and now who the hells the bio-dressed Ben thought he was as he looked at her through a mirrored visor.
This was the second heiress and fifth in line to the Orbin throne.
Target acquired.
Ben zipped the mirror finish on his helmet away showing his face. “I’m here for you, your Highness. Get in the vacuum coffin. I’m getting you out of here.”
She flashed a look to the capsule sitting on its grav cushion—an atmo transport tube. “I will not!” she barked. “I am Heiress Orona, and I will not get back in that thing!”
Ben looked behind. The passage was empty. “Your Highness, I’m rescuing you. Get in the capsule.”
“I—” she stuttered, “I do not fit.”
This was true, to a point. The Orbin were tallish, comparatively speaking, having grown on the nineteenth planet from Ae’ahm and being less affected by the sun’s gravitation than their inner-solar kin. This one was six feet tall, plus. Nevertheless, there was no time.
“Curl up,” Ben shouted. “I’m leaving with or without you.”
She gave him an incensed look, which quickly turned to horror. Ben noted this. Some one was behind him. He drew his gun and spun around as something came down hard across his forearm. A lance with a curved blade at its end, like a scythe. His weapon dropped, slid across the floor and came to a rest by Orona’s feet. She reacted only by screaming in an odd Orbinii dual tone.
Ben’s attacker was bigger than him, and he lifted him off his feet by his scruff. He flashed a knife in his free hand. Ben reached down, engaged the creature’s arm. The knife deflected. His attacker growled, reeling him back and throwing him across the cell. He smashed the wall, but was free. Back on the attack, Ben came in low, wrapped the guy up and took him down. The man-thing was too strong, though. Ben was thrown off him and sailed back across the cell, landing flat on his butt. He smashed Orona off balance. She wheeled toward the vacuum coffin still screaming, caught a leg on the edge and went crashing inside.
For the first time, Ben observed his attacker. The thing was a hulking green-skin from Malybur, a no-necked lizard creature with nothing but muscle, dressed in vacuum armor with reticulating pauldrons that ran down both arms, a paneled breastplate and space helmet with a straight visor. The smooth crown showed an insignia, the mark of its affiliation—a red square with three dots placed in a non-linear fashion. Ben jerked back. He’d never seen this marking. This was something new.
The man-thing drew its scythe back, the tip of it glowing with some menacing combat technology. “Before I kill you, you will know my name. I am Ravekk, you Guilder wormdog, and I will end you,” it snarled.
Ben’s plasma pistol sat between his legs. Lucky lucky. He snatched it and fired in quick succession. His attacker blew back through the doorway flat on its back, unconscious.
There were footsteps in the corridor. The others were coming fast.
Ben sprang to the capsule and slapped the close button. The thing sealed in a flash turning Orona’s screams into angry muffles. He wrenched the thing fully around, weightless on its grav cushion, and shoved it into the corridor, charging forward. Three men faced him, and they were armed. Ben roared, firing like mad. Tracer rounds lit the passage, throwing sparks in blinding showers. They all ducked, hitting the floor
. Ben plowed them over with Orona’s capsule, smashing one to the wall and shouldering past another. He hit the stairs jamming the capsule along banging it off walls and railing, jolting the heiress inside.
She was certain to find such treatment utterly intolerable, rescue or no.
On the upper level Ben slid the capsule through the exit way with one mighty heave and out into the vacuum. He came to the exterior lock pad, punched the button and slammed the door down, then shot it in a rain of sparks that died in the vacuum. Catching back up to the capsule, he slapped a mag tether on it harnessing it to his person. The wrist panel on his arm showed a full jump charge. “REX, you reading?”
“I got you, Cap. I’ll guide you in.”
“Here goes noth—”
Tawny’s voice screamed in his helmet, “Benji, look out!”
Something landed only feet behind. He could feel the vibration through his boots. He spun around and everything froze, shoulders dropped in disbelief. He said, “Rogan…”
Rogan had him dead to rites, gun poised for a kill shot. With his free hand he tossed a small comm disc. It went thump against Ben’s visor attaching itself and patching in an audio signal. “Hand over the goods, fly boy.”
Ben said, “What?”
“Huh?”
“You called me fly boy.”
“What do you mean?”
“You said the words fly boy.”
“Yeah?”
“Then I said what?”
“Yeah, so!”
“That’s the best you can do—fly boy?”
