“Oh, nice infil,” says Rocket, impressed. “You intercept-docked at high warp? Niii-iice. Wait, how did you know where we were?”
“I didn’t know where you were,” says Gamora. She points at me. “I knew where that was.”
I am offended. I’ve gone from being a “dude” to a “that” in less than five minutes?
“I am Groot!” Groot exclaims.
“Exactly!” agrees Rocket. “How did you know where that was?”
Now he’s pointing to me also, in exactly the same “he’s not an actual person at all, just an object” way.
“I have ways,” says Gamora. She smiles. It is a smile that would kill small, fluffy things.
“Go on,” Rocket urges, undeterred.
Fireballs blossom around us in the roof of the compartment, scattering ash and debris. The walkway shudders. The crack extends.
“I don’t think this is really the time or place to scrutinize my methodology, is it?” Gamora asks.
Rocket sighs, frustrated.
“Okay, Gam,” he says. “Just clue me this. However you knew where Recorder-boy was, how did you manage to sneak into a Kree battle-flarking-warship at high warp without them noticing?”
“I distracted them,” she says. “I knew where Recorder-boy was…”
She glances at me, and suddenly I have an overwhelming impression that “Recorder-boy” is, on balance, a step up from “dude.”
“…so I told the Badoon. I knew those lizard bellies were hunting for him, too. I knew if I gave them his location, they would provide ample distraction, and keep the Kree so flarking busy I could slip right in unnoticed.”
“Ample distraction? Ample distraction?!” Rocket explodes, seeming quite distracted himself. “Ample distraction in the form of a War Brotherhood megadestroyer? Are you nuts?”
She semi-shrugs, as if this is a rhetorical question.
“You told the d’ast Badoon where we were?”
“No,” she replies carefully. “I told the d’ast Badoon where Recorder-boy was. I didn’t know where you were.”
“The, uhm, walkway is, in fact, cracking,” I venture.
“Recorder-boy is right,” says Rocket. Somehow, it doesn’t sound quite so alluring coming from him. “Beta-K is aft, right? Let’s find your jump-fighter, make like censors, and get the flark out of here!”
“Aft” means going back across the walkway toward the Chamber of Examination, following the sidestairs down, and re-entering the main body of the ship. As we turn, Sharnor the Accuser appears at the far end of the walkway. To say that she doesn’t look happy is like saying a battle tank doesn’t look convenient for town driving.
“You!” she booms along the walkway, in an accusing fashion. “You will pay!”
Gamora raises her swords.
“Forget it, Gam!” Rocket cries. “She’s uber-accusatory! She’ll hurt you bad!”
“I’ve known bad,” Gamora replies. She’s clearly ready to take on the Accuser, anyway. I think I might be a little bit in love.
“I am Groot!”
“Exactly! The other way! Run the other way!” Rocket cries. “Run really fast!”
We run. Gamora hesitates, then follows us. Screaming in rage, Sharnor thunders across the walkway after us. Rocket turns and fires two shots from his captured Uni-beam blaster.
The shots hit her and drop her to her knees. Then she gets up again. I am not quite sure what they make Accusers of, but they added extra when they made Sharnor.
We reach the hatch at the far end of the walkway. It is beginning to close, hazard lights flashing. The ship’s captain has finally decided to lock out the burning drive compartment and jettison it for fear of cascade damage. I hear the slunk of hull bolts disengaging, ready for jettison.
Rocket leaps through the closing hatch, pulling me after him. Groot and Gamora turn to face the charging Accuser. She is still several hundred meters away from us, but she is gaining fast.
Groot picks up the alarmed Gamora and virtually tosses her through the slowly closing hatch. Then he raises the hammer and brings it down on the walkway.
The shock wave blasts outward. The walkway shatters, falling away into the burning space below. Sharnor skids to a halt on the broken end of her side and howls in fury. Groot hurls the hammer at her, then turns and dives, with surprising agility, through the hatch as it closes. He leaves twigs behind him.
We are cheated of the sight of Sharnor the Accuser being struck in the face by her own power hammer.
The hatch slams with a heavy clank. We pick ourselves up and start running.
“You got a ship, too?” Gamora asks.
“Hey, of course we’ve got a ship,” Rocket replies. “Down in the main hangar.”
“How will we leave in it?” I ask. “I mean, given that the Nova craft was unable to escape the Kree tractor-beams before?”
Over his shoulder, he shoots me another withering look.
“We improvise, Recorder-boy!” he yells. “We improvise!”
We find ourselves having to improvise rather more suddenly. We are met by a fireteam of high-echelon Kree Warriors. Rocket starts ducking and firing, cutting two of them down. Groot punches another two so hard, they rebound off the ceiling. Gamora—
Well, gentle reader. I try to record everything, in total detail, but this may be too much for you. Gamora has two swords. That is all (apparently, though it turns out she is additionally armed). Two swords against an oncoming tide of Kree Warriors, armored and fully armed with Uni-beam blasters.
There should only be one way for this to go.
But it doesn’t.
I have failed, because of lacking information, to factor in one detail.
Gamora is the Deadliest Woman in the Universe.
What happens next is a blur. Rocket is yelling and shooting (with some effect). Groot is swinging and punching. The Kree Warriors are charging and firing. Uni-beam blasts are kissing the walls, ceiling and deck.
I am cowering and wailing.
{I must include all details in this record. I am sorely ashamed of myself}
Gamora…Gamora leaps. She comes down in the midst of them, toppling them, knocking them aside, rolling them back in dismay. She is the blur.
The Kree Warriors are some of the toughest and best-trained fighting humanoids in the quadrant, but she scythes through them. Her blades move so fast, they leave nothing but sprays of arterial blood in their wake. Limbs fly off, bodies truncate, heads tumble. Uni-beam blasters fall, the hands of their late owners still gripping them and firing. Kree blood hoses the corridor, repainting it.
Those she does not chop and slice, she kicks and punches. She smashes heads into walls, knees groins, breaks sternums, and snaps spines. Her swords dismember. The dead, dying, and no- longer-quite-as-complete-as-they-once-were fall in her murderous wake.
When her left-hand blade lodges in a skull so deeply she cannot yank it free, she lets go of it, ducks sidelong to avoid the crisping blasts of a Uni-beam weapon, and draws instead a Mobian ripper pistol. Barbed projectiles sing out of it, shredding six more of the Kree. Blood from the exit wounds spatters the wall and deck. Barbs slice clean through armored bodies and puncture the wall plating.
She fires until the clip is spent.
She finishes off the last ones with her remaining blade.
Then she looks back at us, feral and crouched. Droplets of blood decorate her face like jewels.
“Coming?” she asks.
“I love it when you’re on our side,” Rocket says, wiping back-splattered blood off his shiny pelt.
“I am Groot,” Groot says. He hands her the other sword, which he has retrieved with a sickening twist from the warrior in which it was lodged.
Gamora takes it with a nod.
“Let’s go!” Rocket urges.
I pause. Stupendous killing abilities notwithstanding, I fear we will need more to escape the Kree battleship. I bend down and, with reluctance, remove the helm from a dead Kree officer at
my feet. I put it on. Locating the correct channel, I am now connected to the Kree command level.
“Why are you doing that?” Rocket asks.
“Information, Rocket Raccoon,” I reply. “It pays to be informed. Especially if we wish to survive.”
“Okay, nice thinking,” he says. “Just for the record, you look real stupid wearing that hat.”
“For the record, so noted,” I reply. “Additionally, I hardly care. Let us now do as you insist, make like four fugitives trying to evade certain death, and get ourselves out of here.”
“Recorder-boy?” Rocket says. “Pal?”
“Yes?”
“Leave the banter to me. You truly suck at it.”
“As you wish.”
The ship is beginning to shake. This is not a good sign.
“Hey!” Gamora yells back at us. “Are we going or what?”
Groot picks me up and tucks me under his arm. He starts running.
Clearly, we are going.
• CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE •
FRY KREEDOM
I HAVE come to note, since first encountering Rocket Raccoon and Groot on Xarth Three, that their entire lives revolve around running. Either into trouble, or away from it.
Clearly they are rogues, renegades for whom the entire Universe is a source of unexpected difficulty that they are obliged to evade.
It takes us twenty minutes and two more appalling melees to reach the main hangar. Gamora has now proven, with more emphasis than was actually necessary, that she is the Deadliest Woman in the Universe. In fact, perhaps the Deadliest Non-Gender-Specific Individual in the Universe. She has left a trail of butchered Kree warriors in her wake, many of them with disappointed expressions on their faces suggesting that this wasn’t quite the way they had imagined getting to Yindor.
{“Yindor” is the Kree afterlife, as I understand it. Perhaps they were simply disappointed they had not pulled a different watch rotation, or that they had not been stationed in a different part of the battleship, or simply that they had not shown the sense to run screaming at the first sight of a maniacal green-skinned female with two swords.}
We reach the main hangar. Alarms are wailing, and the deck is shuddering from the impacts the shields are taking. Rocket guns down two Kree Warriors who attempt to block us. Gamora flings herself at three more and does swift and terrible things with her blades. Groot punches the hangar chief so hard he flies up into the rafters, sails over six parked Kree shuttlecraft, bounces painfully off an overhead hoist assembly, and drops like a stone into a tool cart.
Groot puts me down.
“The Kree ship captain fears the shields will shortly be overwhelmed,” I report, listening carefully to the com chatter in the helmet I am wearing. “He is considering the launch of fighter swarms to counterattack the Badoon megadestroyer. The ship is about to jettison the drive compartment that we, uhm, broke.”
The Nova prowl cruiser is parked where we left it.
“This is your ship?” asks Gamora.
“Yeah,” replies Rocket. “What’s the matter with it?”
“Nothing,” she shrugs.
We climb aboard.
“Hello,” says the automatic voice. “This vehicle is pleased to see you intact. This vehicle has detected an amount of jeopardy going on out there.”
“No kidding,” says Rocket, dropping into the pilot’s seat. Gamora takes the copilot station beside him.
“Far, far too much jeopardy,” Rocket continues, strapping in. “Maybe you’d be so kind as to get us away from it, ultra-fast?”
“This vehicle is afraid it can’t do that,” the automatic voice says.
“Huh?” says Rocket.
“This vehicle would love to, of course,” says the automatic voice. “And given the scale of the jeopardy outside, plus the fact that this vehicle is now aware of the threat posed by the previously cloaked Kree battleship, this vehicle believes it could easily outrun said battleship and evade its tractor-beam. Unfortunately, there is a space engagement under way. The Kree ship has raised its shields.”
“Fly through them!” Gamora snaps.
“Hello,” says the automatic voice. “This vehicle does not know you.”
“Gamora, this vehicle, this vehicle, Gamora,” snaps Rocket hastily. “Look, just do as she says, cruiser-pal. If we stay here much longer, we’ll experience terminal jeopardy overload.”
“I am Groot!”
“Yeah, and cross the Oh What the Flark Event Horizon—exactly!”
“This vehicle is sorry. Shields are shields. They are unbreakable on the inside just as much as the outside. And this vehicle is not coded or frequenced to pass through them like the Kree munitions. If this vehicle was to launch now, it would be like flying headlong into a wall. This vehicle is not down with that.”
“But the jeopardy! The jeopardy!” Rocket squeals.
“Flying into a wall is jeopardy. As far as this vehicle can evaluate, despite the high levels of jeopardy around us, flying into a wall currently represents greater actual jeopardy than sitting here on the deck.”
Rocket bangs his forehead against the pilot console in extreme frustration. The big red X appears.
“Command not recognized.”
“Perhaps if I was to insert a sword into its—” Gamora begins.
“Wait!” I cry.
“I am Groot!”
“Yes, Groot, I do have something,” I reply, listening to the helmet coms. “The ship’s captain…yes, it’s confirmed. The ship’s captain is about to launch fighter screens and simultaneously jettison the drive compartment. To do so, he will have to lower the battleship’s aft shields for ten seconds.”
“We got us a window!” Rocket exclaims gleefully.
“A brief one,” I remind him.
“Vehicle?” asks Gamora softly.
“Option verified. This vehicle concurs. Hold on to your golden hats, this is going to be tight.”
“Golden hats?” Rocket asks.
“Ah, old habits,” the automatic voice replies.
We launch. The acceleration is phenomenal. If I had a stomach, it would no longer be in the same place. I record that both Gamora and Rocket grin in delight at the surge of speed.
We exit the hangar and turn hard left, skimming along the length of the vast battleship’s hull toward the stern. The shields are still engaged, sheathing the battleship in an invisible field at less than a tenth of a distance unit. We are forced to hug the ridges, buttresses, and crenellations of the immense hull—for if we were to stray too far out, we would hit the shields. The ride, therefore, is like a roller coaster. Several times, we seem to be on the verge of striking a guntower, a vent gutter, or a power relay.
The prowl cruiser, moving like a rocket, dodges, rolls, and banks to avoid all the obstacles while keeping as close to the hull as is possible.
Through the ports, we see the sheer, thundering scale of the ship that captured us and witness, behind us, the blinding star-bright fury of the battle in which it is engaged. That’s jeopardy, indeed, and I am glad we are traveling away from it.
“Launch is ordered!” I call out, relaying what I have just heard via the coms. “The aft shields are dropping! We have ten seconds!”
The battleship’s fighter bays are situated at the stern, so that the fighter swarms can be launched safely while the battleship still has its forward shields raised to face an aggressor. Indicators on the prowl cruiser’s touchscreens notify us that the rear shields are indeed lowering. Far ahead of us, we see flurries of small, silver attack craft squirting out of the battleship’s stern, thrusters blazing blue.
“Faster! Faster!” Rocket urges, yanking on the joystick—though he is, in truth, not flying the ship at all. We pick up speed.
All of us cry out as a massive chunk of the battleship disengages in front of us, trailing debris and flame. The ship’s captain has jettisoned the burning drive section. It is the size of a shopping mall, and it is falling away from the battleship righ
t in our path.
Somehow the prowl cruiser avoids collision. It banks, corkscrews, and manages to fly between the burning compartment unit and the battleship itself. Vapor and energy exhaust envelop our window ports.
“That was too close,” whispers Rocket.
“The ship’s captain is ordering shields raised!” I yell.
Our window is about to close.
The prowl cruiser turns and burns away from the battleship into open space, the re-raised aft shields slamming shut like a fortress door behind it.
We are clear. I sense a “yahoo” about to come from Rocket.
But we are not out of the metaphoric woods.
The massive jettisoned drive compartment tumbles past us like a burning skyscraper falling off a cliff. Choppy beam fire and meson bursts come our way as the Badoon ship tries to target the launched Kree fighters.
“That way! Turn that way!” Rocket yells. The prowl cruiser does not. It banks back toward the battleship.
It has detected something.
Badoon fighters. A swarm of Badoon fighters. The megadestroyer had anticipated the Kree’s decision to launch tactical cover, and lofted attack craft of its own.
There are hundreds of them, and they bear down on us in formation. Where the Kree fighters are sleek missiles with stubby wings, these are squat and ugly things, like piranha fish. Their prows are heavily chinned, as if they have an underbite, and they open their mouths to activate their weapons bays. Bright-yellow plasmic bolts rip at us. Our own shields take several hits.
Behind us, the Kree fighter screens are already dogfighting furiously with the Badoon attack ships. But dozens of Badoon are on our tail.
“Not that way!” Rocket wails. “You’re taking us back toward the capital ships!”
“This vehicle is not sure…the jeopardy is—”
“Give me helm control!” Rocket orders.
“This vehicle—”
“Is gonna be wreckage if you don’t give me helm control right now!”
The automatic voice hesitates.