Bad Bargain: A Space Rules Adventure Part 1

by Ian Cannon

  Take the shot, or don’t take the shot? She wondered. Preserve my final two or three pulses, or kill while I got the chance?

  “Screw it,” she snarled and joined her targeting device with her weapon. “Firing!”

  Another plasma ball lit up like a bubble of light streaking through the dark until it struck its target. An explosion blinked across the distance. They halted.

  She tucked the cannon away and picked her way up the incline hissing painfully as her weight shifted from right…

  … Then screaming and trying not to faint…

  … as it shifted to the left.

  She could feel tears hot and moist on her cheeks, feel the fatigue wracking her body. She pulled herself the final pace toward the tunnel and looked in. It was small, dark and long. Perfect. She reached in, pulled herself up, pivoted her body, clenched her teeth, squirmed forward, made it with a groan. Once she was inside, she went limp and laid there, heaving deep and hard, each breath like a kick to her ribs. Eventually she’d have to get out of this, get back to Benji.

  She would have to get to REX-sub first.

  She said, “Please tell me I can still comm with REX.”

  “Your communication system is operable. Lots of interference from the terrain. Might be difficult getting a signal out.”

  Hope. There was hope. If only.

  She’d take it.

  She turned over, looked ahead. The tunnel wound away to the right. Only darkness met her. “Map,” she said, hauling herself a pace forward.

  The map illuminated. She could see her position—a flickering blip broken by the surrounding rock. Her pursuers still approached, now alerted to her location. They were getting closer with each passing minute.

  The map showed the tunnel jigging and winding through the mountain, joining with others, all creating a hive under the tonnage. “Scroll north,” she said, pain clear in her words. The map scrolled north showing a main thoroughfare stabbing deeper and deeper through stone… straight to a mountain shaft. Oh, thank Wi’ahr. If she could get to that shaft she’d have open sky to get a signal through. She’d have to move. It was a hundred meters ahead.

  She picked herself up, moving forward on her right knee, dragging that mangled left leg behind, one lurch at a time. Yet she scrambled, haste growing inside her. She wound around the bend in the tunnel having to squeeze through in some areas, others broadening in the tunnel making passage easier.

  She sat down taking a breath, checked the map. They were still coming. Getting closer. A thought struck her. “What’s the air composition?”

  “Mostly methane. Maybe a few trace elements of ethane, heptane and…”

  “Fine,” she gasped. Methane. She’d take methane.

  She reached down and palmed one of her oxygen cylinders from her hip. All she needed was a crag or a hole to hide it.

  “Tawny,” her bio-suit said.

  “I know,” she groaned and forced herself forward. Her good knee was beginning to throb with each motion. It sent fiery hot stitches of pain up her thigh, into her hip, yet it hardly dampened the agony of her other leg. The deadener was beginning to fade. Nerves were exposed to injury. Her brain kept telling her to faint. Her mind said—no, bi-gods!

  She needed a place to conceal her canister. A gap, a hole—anything! Frustration building, she had to wonder how a tunnel in such a jagged, tortuous landscape could be so even-textured. There were ripples and cracks throughout, but no gaps, no holes.

  “We’re about to have company, Tawny,” her bio-suit said. She shot a look back, squinted her eyes. The curvature was way back in the tunnel. Then darkness.

  And then there were lights. They were bio-suits getting closer.

  “Power down,” she whispered.

  “Tawny…” her suit rebuked.

  “Power down!”

  Everything in her suit shut down. Her external operation lights blinked away. The automated breather unit feeding oxygen to her mask wound into silence, the tiny hum falling silent. She still had breathable air in her helmet, left in her feed tubes. It would be enough, she hoped. Her M-209 whirred down, went to sleep, its lights blinking off. She couldn’t let them see her in the tunnel. Without her lights, if they looked ahead they’d see only darkness. Of course, so would she. But she had the head start. And she knew where she was going.

  She looked forward again. The exit to the tunnel was visible ahead, but only barely. It was a nighttime-dim hole surrounded by the pitch-blackness of the tunnel. And it was still way up ahead. She could make it, if her body held out.

  She reached forward and felt something that shot a ray of hope into her. A divot in the stone, deep enough to grab hold. She thrust her hand into it.

  Yes!

  It was elbow deep; deep enough for one of her oxygen canisters.

  She slid it from its thigh harness and finger-felt for the nozzle at its top. She twisted and felt the tiny rush of oxygen flow against her gloved hand. There were several cubic feet pressurized inside, enough to burn this whole tunnel. This place was a methane lung. Mix it with pure O and light it up—kaboom.

  She looked back at her pursuers one more time. They were still a good distance behind, but yep—just as she suspected. They were coming. They knew she was in the tunnel. Perfect.

  Must keep going…

  Growling into her helmet she heaved herself forward. Her breath was coming deep and fast. She had to conserve her oxygen mix, make it last. She shook her head. This was a survival situation. Fight or flight. Forget conservation. This was reckless-time.

  Thrusting herself forward on her one good leg and dragging the other behind, ignoring the sheer agony of each bump, each draw, each little motion, she came to the end of the tunnel. She looked back. They were still coming. It was hard to tell how many. They were single file, crawling toward her, still a hundred feet back. She hoped there was a dozen. A hundred. With what she had in store for them, the more the merrier.

  She pulled her head out from the cave exit and inspected. Just as she thought. Her little tunnel opened into a mountain shaft—a huge, round cavern, like a well carved out by Wi’ahr himself, perfectly vertical, two hundred feet in circumference. Looking up, she could see a star-speckled night sky way overhead as the well opened up at the top of the mountain. That was her chance to get a signal out to REX-sub.

  Then she looked down and sank back. The fall would be a hundred feet, easy, into a pool of shimmering hydrogen and oxygen. Liquid water. Methane gas escaped through the surface in bubbles giving it a boiling affect and filling the whole mountain with fart-smelling explosive gas.

  She groaned. This was probably where she would die, in this cavernous, lonely, back-vac hellhole in space where no one knew her.

  Oh well. Had to happen somewhere.

  All she knew was that she was going to take some of these jackwads with her.

  She looked back into the tunnel. They were still coming, only eighty feet behind her now, getting closer. Without injury, they’d made far better progress than she had. But now she was exposed.

  Be patient, girl. Wait. Wait a few seconds longer.

  The guy in front hesitated. He looked down, curious. She perked. That was it.

  There!

  That guy had just discovered the oxygen canister pumping fuel for her fire into the tunnel. He picked it up in his hand, was probably inspecting it thinking something like—what is this, oxygen?

  She said, “Power up!”

  What has that little Guilder wormdog got in store now?

  Her suit lights blinked on. The M-209 hummed, its power indicator light booting up, iridescent green in a pitch-black tunnel. Their attention was caught. She could see them jerk, looking toward her suddenly.

  Oh, holy bi-gods, she’s going to…

  “That’s right, scumbags,” she said, and pulled the trigger. “You’re dead.”

  … blow us back to Wi’ahr!

  The cannon kicked in her hands sending a lightning fast plasma ball, blindingly bright,
straight back at them through the tunnel. A few superheated particles of flaming death met with a few stagnant particles of methane, which met with a few bouncy particles of oxygen, which became a tunnel full of combustible gas, and the chain reaction began with a…

  BOOM!

  A very big

  BOOM!

  The fireball blew toward her in a blinding, hot rage.

  Tawny rolled backwards out of the tunnel and began her plummet toward the pool below. Gravity took her and down she went, falling, falling, falling.

  Above her, the tunnel spit a rush of flame out into the cavern and, much to her surprise, everything turned to fire. The explosion never stopped expanding. It began engulfing the whole mountain shaft above her. Golden red fire rolled and boiled in huge plumes, one after the other, bloating toward her in her plummet, expanding closer and closer as she fell.

  The boom shook her insides. It rocked her very guts.

  Methane wasn’t the only gas seeping up from the pool of water. Apparently, oxygen had too, turning the whole mountain into a sitting bomb, waiting eons for some arse-poo to come along and shoot off a fiery plasma ball from a sniper cannon. The following explosion threatened the very mountain itself.

  Tumbling further down, picking up speed in her fall and staring up at the sun-like eruption she’d caused, she grinned and thought—Wow. It’s stunning. It’s gorgeous. It’s absolutely beauti…

  SPLASH!

  The landing kicked the air out of her as she plunged into the pool. The fire above her rippled through the water’s surface, licking the lake and withdrawing back up through the shaft. The entire fireball dissipated. Darkness enfolded her and the water seemed remarkably depthless. She sank down into a bottomless void unsure when it would stop, unsure if she wouldn’t reach the lunar core.

  “REX,” she groaned fading in and out of consciousness, “can you see me?”

  Nothing came back. No voice. No response. The fear of never being found struck her hard and cold.

  “REX,” she said.

  A voice filtered through her mask’s comm. It was broken, fighting for a signal. “I hear you, Boss. Oh dear, is that you blowing up a mountain?”

  “Yes. Help.”

  Out in the eternal night, the drop ship’s RX-111 sub-A.I.-personality blinked on as the control board fired up. Its scanners spotted her immediately. She was across a deep valley where a column of flame rose up and up into the sky igniting the planetary band of methane. The whole sector of atmosphere was crawling with fire. It looked alive, eating the sky in great vesicles of searing flame. It was brilliant.

  No time to sit in awe. The drop ship boosted up from its mountain perch, nosed down and jetted off. In only seconds it reached the mountain shaft where the flames had usurped the entire area of atmo, and raced down into the well. It hovered over the pool of water and fired its underside tow cables powerfully. They splashed beneath the surface and began inspecting the murk for their pilot.

  She’d sunk a hundred feet below the surface, maybe more. But she could see the blipping cable sensors come snaking toward her through the dark. She reached for them as they came. They connected to her bio-suit’s mag couplers and she stopped sinking. She felt her direction reverse as they began reeling her back up.

  As she broke back up through the surface limp as a doll, the drop ship was already ascending the shaft. Its belly doors folded open, pulled her inside and closed, laying her onto the floor. A rush of atmosphere enfolded her and the interior airlock thudded open.

  The helmet unfolded and she breathed in the refreshing, cool, filtrated and re-processed air of her drop ship. Thank Wi’ahr.

  She was home.

  It was then that the pain of her busted body occurred to her. Everything hurt. Her back had been compressed. Knee ripped apart. Tendons stretched gossamer thin. Bone shattered. Ribs bruised. She couldn’t stand, couldn’t crawl. Couldn’t hardly breathe.

  “Awe gee, Boss, what went wrong?” REX-sub asked.

  “Everything,” she groaned through gritted teeth. “They got Benji. We have to go back.”

  “I don’t think that would be very smart, Boss.”

  “REX!”

  “I’m not armed. You can’t even stand.”

  “They have Benji!” she croaked.

  “We have time, Tawny. They want both of you. Going back now would be suicide … for both of us.”

  He was right. She couldn’t even pull herself to the pilot’s seat. How was she going to argue? She had to cool her jets, think. “Okay—get us back to the ship.”

  “Uh, yeah that’s another situation.”

  “What do you mean?”

  REX-sub’s recall sensor bleeped in rapid succession as it searched out REX-prime’s location. It came up with nothing.

  “He’s out of range,” REX-sub suggested. “But I know where he is.”

  Tawny made an irritated face. Something smelled like another betrayal. Not REX too. No bi-gods, not REX.

  Pushed by anger, she clawed her way to the pilot’s chair and hoisted herself into it, growling and fuming with agony. They were rocketing skyward, leaving the moon below. “Why did he break orbit?”

  “Well,” REX-sub said, “there was a problem.”

  “What?” she demanded.

  “It looks like we may be running a blockade.”

  “What do you—” Her eyes expanded as the space-drop greeted them above. “Oh no…”

  Those twittering objects way out there weren’t stars. They were too big, too close. And they were in convoy column. Those were warships.

  She squinted, studying them with the sudden, quick clarity of a warrior. She couldn’t recognize them.

  “Those aren’t Cabal. Are they Imperium?”

  “That’s a fat negative, Boss.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Whoever owns this moon.”

  They raced toward them watching them grow through the viewport. A thousand questions darted through her mind. What were their capabilities? What kind of armaments did they have? Could they be outrun? But only one question mattered. She cried, “Can we make it?”

  “Without inner-warp chances are slim, and that’s only if they don’t have single-craft fighters,” he said.

  “Maximum speed, REX, maximum boost, maximum everything. We have to try.”

  “You got it, Boss. Hang on.”

  The accelerator control screen buzzed into life. It showed thrust, booster control, fuel feed. Everything maxed out, little upload bars glowing red. They rocketed forward picking up speed, fast.

  The blockade approached with the warships coming into clearer view—big, garishly designed cruisers, each tool-crafted in some private hangar, not stamped and assembled like the massive armada factories of the Solar Twin War. This was definitely from some outlier group.

  An alarm sounded.

  “Did they spot us?”

  “Yeah,” REX-sub gasped. “I was hoping to close our proximity first.”

  Defensive targeting screens buzzed.

  “They’re tracking,” REX-sub said. “Uh… They’re firing!”

  A trail of laser blasts came at them from the distance. Tawny yelped, ducked in the seat. They streaked over the bow.

  “I think it was a warning shot,” REX-sub said.

  “Don’t stop. Don’t slow down.”

  “Ohhh—this might hurt.”

  The ships zoomed up coming closer at speed, each vessel painted with a broad center stripe—some red, some green—denoting their vessel class. More buzzers sounded.

  “We’re being tracked. They got us locked.”

  Tawny held her breath. She needed her husband. This was his wheelhouse. He’d know what to do. Without him, there wouldn’t be any spinning the monkey this time. She looked up. The squadron approached. The lead battle cruiser came into view. It was the biggest one. It had a blue stripe. Her eyes widened. An idea hit her straight from Benji’s brain.

  Tickle the snake, sweetheart!

  S
he giggled lightly. She didn’t mean to, but she did.

  “That one, the big one!” she screamed pointing it out.

  “Yeah?”

  “Get in close. As close as you can.”

  “Closer?” REX-sub cried.

  “Skim them. Skim the surface. It’ll screw their tracking. Now, now!”

  More laser blasts came at them. REX-sub bucked over, slid right up next to the mother ship. The blasts zipped by, exploded against the bigger vessel. Pieces of her outer decking blew into shards and flame. REX-sub could feel the heat.

  “Oh, nice!” he yelled.

  “Go over, go over!” Tawny barked.

  REX-sub rolled up over the cruiser’s upper deck, viewports and terraced cannonades zipping by, more blasts raining at them, more strikes exploding against the ship. It was blinding, made Tawny wince, turn her head. They were hitting their own lead vessel. Morons!

  REX-sub slipped quickly away and back into open space leaving the blockade behind.

  “Give it all you got, REX, go go!”

  REX-sub emitted a snarl pushing his engines. An overload klaxon wailed out.

  “We’re gonna—”

  “Forget it!” she cried. “Keep pushing!”

  In seconds they had all but faded away.

  “Are they pursuing?” she said.

  “Doesn’t look like it. I think they knocked out their own tracking systems—Hahaha!” he laughed. “Nice move, Boss. I bet the squadron commander’s really irked off about that one.”

  Tawny exhaled feeling the agony of her body return, and sank into the chair. “Well, don’t slow down, REX. The further away … we can get ... the better off … we’ll …” Her eyes fluttered, rolled up into her head, closed. She went out like a light.

  “Agreed,” he said and continued beating a path for the stars.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The man showed patience, standing rigid at the window. He turned around to face Ben. As he did, out in that black, starlit distance, a tiny tower of flame went up from a mountain peak and began crawling in fingers across the far sky, silent and brilliant. Even horrifying. The man never saw, his attention attuned to his captor.