Bad Bargain: A Space Rules Adventure Part 1

by Ian Cannon

  Rogan, still cuffed to his torture table, lay supine, upside down with gravity trying to pull him into a free fall, save the cuffs that held him in place. He sniffled and snuffled, everything desperately hanging on to the moment.

  Then, with the sound of bending metal and crunching steel, everything started tilting. Ben reached for a bulkhead—something to hold on to—as his body weight began swinging back toward negative space. The entire room teetered at the edge of collapse and settled, just sitting in position like a big leaning tower, balancing at its zenith.

  Everything fell silent, tense.

  One of the suspension rods overhead shivered under extreme tension, the cable being stretched to its fullest capacity. And then—SNAP! The cable broke, sprung back like a whip and slew the table in half next to Rogan’s. He flinched. The tension rod shot across the full length of the room faster than a bullet, its kinetic energy fully released. Zelit gasped, still dangling. It was going to guillotine him. He saw it coming. No time to react. Nothing he could do.

  The rod jammed against the wall severing his arms. Without his hands, he began his fall, screaming as he did. His body bounced off the first stationary torture bed, flipped into the nearside wall, banged back toward the center, cartwheeled over Rogan, ping-ponged off several other structures. He screamed like—ook-aak-eek-gak—and thundered down like a big bag of guts next to Ben. He covered himself defensively, then lowered his arms and looked over. Zelit’s eyes stared at him half open. Everything else was blank. Dude was dead.

  Flump!

  Something fell in Ben’s lap. He glanced down. It was Zelit’s arm from the elbow down. Ben yelled, “Yeesh!” and batted it away.

  Then, the zenith broke. Everything tipped over, started falling again. This wasn’t over yet. Ben held his breath as the entire structure went crashing down to the lunar surface on its top, everything inside suspended upside down. Ben fell to the floor, which was technically the ceiling, and came to rest.

  REX returned to the site of the complex. Everything was dark under the cosmic, lunar sky.

  “Flood lights, REX,” Tawny said, anxious of what she might find. Light beams kicked on flooding the area with visibility. It made her frown.

  The complex had sheered away from the mountain and tumbled several hundred feet downhill breaking apart along the way. A huge trail of twisted debris littered the mountainside. Pieces steamed and sparked. Superstructure had been strewn everywhere. The place was a wreck.

  A big piece of it rested way below at the foot of the mountain. It looked to be intact, for the most part.

  “Get down there, REX.”

  REX lowered under his gentle maglev pivoting around to keep the mountainside through his viewport. They descended until they reached the base where the flatlands began. What was left of the complex appeared to be laying butt-end up with broken spires and steel embankments all jagged and ripped apart. One part had a long viewport that had miraculously remained intact. It was too dim to see inside. If Benji was here, and if he was alive, that’s where he’d be.

  “REX,” she said, “soft land and fire up the ATV. I’m going out there.”

  “You got it, Boss. There’s one thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m getting some activity. Check it out.”

  His sensor readings displayed on the 3-D pad. The battle overhead was thinning out. Faction battle cruisers were zipping away in retreat. Part of the Orbin fleet was left up there mopping it up. But a group of bomber cruisers were moving into position over the complex. She knew exactly what that meant. They were going to strike bomb the whole area from above.

  “We don’t have much time,” she said.

  “Nope,” REX agreed.

  “Okay, stay ready.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Ben shook his head, had to gather his senses. Everything was upside down. The whole world was flipped over. He looked up to the ceiling, now the floor. The row of torture tables, which would have been bolted to the floor under normal circumstances, now hung from above. Rogan was still cuffed to one of them facing directly down and whimpering like a child. His hair dangled around his face. The scythe weapon now lay directly below him.

  Speaking of the scythe weapon, where was Ravekk? Where was that big narse-hole?

  A noise to the left yanked Ben’s attention toward the corner. A pile of debris sat there, pealing itself away one big chunk at a time. Ben squinted at it.

  It turned out to be Ravekk unburying himself.

  “Awe, jeez—” he grumbled, preparing himself for the worst. He got to his feet, poised.

  Ravekk sloughed the wreckage off and stood over the pile, heaving. His shoulders rose and fell, lacerations left little rivers of green blood falling down his body, two-toning his pale, beryl-colored lizard skin. His eyes lazered onto Ben with the look of crazed anger. “You. Worm. Dog.” He growled, and charged forward.

  “What? I didn’t do—glak!”

  Ravekk snatched him up, flung him down like a doll. The man-thing straddled him, both hands around his neck, strangling the life out of him. Ben couldn’t fight him off. The thing was too strong for any humanoid.

  Mind. Use your mind, Ben.

  He scanned the room through desperate eyes. Couldn’t breathe. Needed a weapon.

  There!

  The scythe. It was way across the room sitting beneath Rogan.

  Ravekk released him. Ben inhaled big. The man-thing grinned, showing exaggeratedly large teeth. “You like dying, wormdog?”

  Ben thrust his hand to the side saying, “Particularly, no.” He felt something soft and squishy. He grabbed it. It was Zelit’s arm—elbow, wrist and all. It included Zelit’s cuff release bracelet.

  Yes! Now free Rogan!

  He smashed the button, looked over at Rogan. The cuffs didn’t release.

  Whaaa?

  Ravekk clenched down on Ben’s throat again—Gluk!

  Ben clawed at Ravekk’s thick arm with one hand and mashed the cuff release button with his other hand desperately. Again. Again. The cuffs still wouldn’t release.

  Gah!

  A thought!

  The device was programmed to react to Zelit’s finger, not his own.

  Ravekk let his throat go making him gasp for breath. The man-thing was teasing Ben with his own death. He leaned down close, and whispered, “Now …”

  Ben jammed Zelit’s severed hand into his own mouth, found the narrowest knuckle with his teeth and chomped like a crusher machine. The finger snapped off resting on his tongue.

  “You…”

  He spit the finger out. It landed next to his free hand.

  “Die.”

  He yelled with hardly any breath, “Rogan, get the damn scythe—gluk!”

  Ravekk squeezed down on his throat one. Last. Time.

  Rogan looked over blind as a bat, his hair still dangling around his face, and said, “Huh?”

  Ben articulated Zelit’s severed finger into his hand, found the button on the cuff and mashed it as his eyes bulged out of their sockets.

  Rogan’s cuffs released. He dropped straight down, landed hard—fwump! He shook his head, felt the weapon, grabbed it and got to his feet saying, “Oh, got it!” He couldn’t see. He was blind. He felt around the room with his free hand, stumbling over loose debris. He swung the blade at nothing. Ironically, he hit his mark perfectly. Nothing. He swung again. Another successful strike.

  Ben closed his eyes feeling death encroach upon him. His final thought was—Why, bi-gods, does Rogan have to be such a bumbling idiot?

  There was the sudden sound of a melon being reared in half, and Ravekk’s hands released his throat. Ben gasped, looked up. Ravekk’s head dropped heavily to one side, then his body slumped to the other.

  Ben pulled one huge gulp of breath after another. He filled his body with beautiful, re-processed, life-giving oxygen and sat up rubbing his throat. Rogan blindly swung the scythe again clanging the blade off a piece of equipment, stumbling around on his feet.


  “Rogan!” Ben yelled.

  Rogan froze at his own name, turned toward the sound of Ben’s voice. “Huh?”

  “You got him—hack, cough—you can stop swinging now.”

  Ben found his plasma pistols, strapped them back on. He looked at Rogan who was still floundering around, blind as a bat. He started to say something, perhaps a thank you, but he was interrupted.

  In a sudden, explosive bang, the entire viewport erupted into pieces. Ben hit the deck, looked over. Rogan screamed. The oxygen atmosphere evacuated in a single, violent gush blowing all around them like a swirl of wind. It seemed loud enough to make the ears bleed. Then, silence.

  Ben sat up blinking. REX was parked outside looking at him from a hundred meters away. A pair of headlights beamed into the room. It was Tawny in the ATV. She’d used the winch with its electro-suction device to yank the viewport out of its frame. Now, Ben sat there heaving on helium.

  “What in the hells was that!” Rogan screamed. The terror in his voice was made even more comical as the helium pitched his words up a few octaves. He sounded remarkably like a four-year-old.

  Ben couldn’t celebrate. No time. The helium content was way too high to sustain life. They’d be dead in minutes. He sprinted over to Rogan, grabbed him by the collar and barked, “Let’s go, Rogan!” shocked at the pitch of his own voice. He hauled him from the wreckage through the open viewport. Rogan tried to keep up. He stumbled, hit his knees, got up, took a few blind steps, fell again. Ben kept yanking him toward the ATV like a man on a leash.

  Tawny was on her way forward dressed in a bio-suit, her exo-leg whining with each step. They met eyes.

  “Tawny!” Ben cried out in that baby crib call.

  “Babe!” she called back, but stopped and whipped her blaster up. “Look out!”

  Ben waved both hands wildly, dropping Rogan in a puff of dust. “No, no, no. Not this time. He’s with us.”

  “That’s Rogan!” she screamed, a snarl in her words.

  “Yeah, I know. I’ll explain later.”

  They came together throwing each other into an embrace. She looked up into him. His face was battered like a punching bag—swollen here, swollen there, swollen everywhere. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay.” He hated that he sounded like a talking infant. He looked down, recognized the battle-mech exo-suit. “You okay?”

  “I am now,” she said.

  “Gods, I missed you,” and he wrapped her into a tight hug.

  She pulled away. “C’mon, there’s no time.” She headed to the ATV and saddled up. She spun the vehicle around kicking up a cloud of moon dust and rock and pulled next to them. “This whole place is about to get blown straight to Wi’ahr.”

  “By who?”

  “The Orbinii.”

  Ben flinched in disbelief and cried, “Who?”

  “I’ll explain later. Let’s get back to REX. You fly. I shoot.”

  “Yeah— I’m getting dizzy out here.”

  She regarded Rogan. “And he gets cuffed like a dog, whether he likes it or…” she noticed he was missing a few things. Namely eyeballs. “Bi-gods, what happened to him?”

  “Explain later. Let’s go!”

  Ben dumped Rogan onto the flatbed and stumbled drunkenly into the passenger seat. All together, they skid out, spitting gravel back toward REX’s cargo bay door.

  The ATV roared to a stop in the cargo bay dumping Rogan gruffly onto the floor. He grunted like a baby. The door lifted shut and a blast of atmo flushed into the room. Ben heaved in the new air shaking his head, trying to bring himself back. This was go time. No time for blacking out. He felt his head start to clear as he stumbled toward the exit, already on his way to the cockpit.

  Tawny hopped out of the vehicle, went to the armory and returned with a pair of cuffs. She slapped them around Rogan’s wrists and hissed angrily, “Move, Rogan. I dare you.” She got up, kicked him once in the gut—hard—and followed her husband out.

  “Cap, you’re back!” REX said.

  “Yep, and you know the drill, pal,” he responded sliding down into the flight chair. Tawny shot down through the bubble turret passageway.

  “We’re fired up. Control is yours,” REX said.

  Ben gripped his guidance gear, looked up. Distantly, bright red streamer bombs rained down from space. Splatter explosions churned the ground headed toward them in a wall of rising earth. Here they came, getting close.

  REX lifted vertically.

  Now they could hear the bombs.

  He spun around.

  Feel the impact blasts.

  And rocketed forward.

  The complex exploded behind them. Clouds of debris spread out. Huge oxygen tanks blew up. Explosions created explosions. The fire ball expanded up and out until it swallowed the entire mountain—and just above it all, tiny little REX hauled serious narse up and up toward the lunar sky.

  Ben was already getting multiple readings just above the atmosphere. It looked like a space battle. He blenched at the console, looked up through the viewport. Explosions blinked and twinkled way out there. It was a space battle.

  “Oh, this is going to be fun…”

  He kicked on the retro burners breaking through the atmosphere. As he approached, he saw several huge Orbinii cruisers concentrating their fire on a massive Faction battle cruiser—a type of mother ship. Several other Faction vessels warped away. They were getting the hells out of there with their bright white inner-warp trails stretching toward infinitum.

  REX sped toward the battle.

  A sudden blast of blue energy emanated from the Faction mother ship’s topside cannon with a bandwidth far greater than the average cannonade. It had as much power as an entire battle wing. It incinerated one Orbinii vessel into particles and ripped another into halves. Ben jerked back, squinting against the sharp, sudden brilliance of the beam.

  “Tawny!” he yelled.

  “I see it,” she said from the bubble turret.

  “Okay—we’re strafing.”

  He hit the mother ship’s upper deck at barely twenty feet, rising and dipping with its terraced design. Tawny’s bubble turret laid twin trails of laser blasts stitching across the vessel and pock marking it with blossoming explosions. The cannon tower approached. She concentrated her spinner barrels on it, searing it in half as they sped toward it. The thing broke apart and ruptured, sending a ball of flame across the ship’s upper quadrant. The cannon, now ejected from its body, blew apart like a mini-sun.

  Ben jerked his vessel away, veered at tremendous speed between two Orbinii battle cruisers and hit inner-warp. He figured the Orbin armada could wipe up the rest. They’d done their part.

  BOOM—gone.

  Everything fell peaceful. He shook his head. The last two days had been quite a ride. He’d been captured, beaten up, dismantled, kicked around. He’d faced torture and death. But worst of all, he’d lost his wife.

  Tawny. What had she been through? What trials had she faced without him?

  Bi-gods, he could never let that happen again.

  She emerged from the bubble turret, both looking at each other. Her eyes said a thousand words. His eyes said the same.

  Thank you for saving my life.

  Thank you for being there for me.

  Thank you for making me better.

  Thank you for loving me.

  Thank you for trusting me.

  Thank you for being my husband.

  Thank you for being my wife.

  Now… let’s do it like colliding stars.

  They were in each other’s arms in the next moment violently and needfully, becoming a piece of each other’s body, being in love like this quadrant of the cosmos rarely knew.

  Chapter Twenty

  REX had seen better days. He’d been bruised and battered over the ordeal at Mortus. He’d even lost his mag-spire attachment. But Ben and Tawny had returned to Orbin to honor their agreement. To that end, the Orbinii had gotten right to work affecting repair
s. They’d even set out to retrieve REX’s great mag-spires from the Mortus moon.

  As Ben and Tawny moved away, they took a hesitant glance back at their home sitting under Orbiter 1’s vessel repair platforms. Vacuum crews worked on him diligently. Repair bots hovered around him like little, silver bees. He looked to be in good hands. They could only hope.

  The Royal Council had been called for an immediate congress. It was the second time they’d done so in as many days, both on the Dash’s behalf. They were beginning to get impatient.

  Ben stood precisely where Tawny had the day before. They were now side by side looking up at the great dais panel where the Royal Council sat glaring down at them.

  The opening orator proclaimed, “Benjar and Tawny Dash, you have come before us to resolve the agreement made in confidence concerning the Menuit-B resolution. Are you ready to begin?”

  They looked at each other and both declared, “Yes.”

  The king said, “Our resolve toward you has only grown. You were merely vigilantes before. Now, you are indebted to us. To that end, you are prisoners, until such time as your servitude is complete.”

  Ben said back, “We made a deal. We’ll see it through.”

  The Administrator of Military Commerce gave his characteristic, one-sided scowl and murmured, “You did not make the deal.” He pointed a slow finger at Tawny. “She did.”

  “We,” Ben said sharply, “made the deal.”

  He snuffled. “Where once before you failed.”

  Ben turned his gaze to King Oto offering a humble grin. “It was different circumstances, your Highness—ness.”

  The king took a big breath and said, “You have this chance and this chance alone, Benjar and Tawny Dash, to earn our good graces.”

  Ben agreed, “Fair enough.”

  Tawny added, “Yeah. Fair. Right.”

  “One point of warning,” King Oto said. “If you betray your word again, your names will be put to the interplanetary death list. You will not only be an enemy to the Orbin state. You will be an enemy to the whole of the Imperium. Even the Guild will hunt you down. For mercy on yourselves, do not fail again.”