“Rocket Raccoon is the best starpilot I know,” says Gamora directly. “And the best tactician. Just give him helm control. Or we’re, you know, flarked.”
“Helm control authorized,” says the automatic voice.
Rocket grins sidelong at Gamora, gives her an impulsive peck on the cheek that makes her recoil, and grabs the stick.
We turn with a great lack of subtlety.
And start to fly directly back at the shoal of Badoon attack ships chasing us.
“This vehicle,” says the automatic voice, “is not entirely convinced that you know how to fly anything, despite your companion’s assertion. You are flying this vehicle at the jeopardy.”
“Yeah,” says Rocket, jockeying the stick.
“You are flying this vehicle into their fire pattern.”
“I am well aware what I’m doing,” replies Rocket, concentrating harder than I have ever seen him concentrate before.
“Amp up the gravimetric thrust, this vehicle,” he orders. “Front shields on max. And gimme weapon control.”
“It would be singularly inappropriate and beyond this vehicle’s remit to grant you, a criminal detainee, access to the fire-control system. This vehicle cannot arm a suspect.”
“You’re in trouble with the law again, aren’t you?” Gamora asks casually.
“It was a misunderstanding,” Rocket replies, eyes on the tac screen. “This vehicle?”
“Yes?” replies the automatic voice.
“Guns, pal. Guns now. Or inappropriate is gonna look a flark of a lot like us and you turning into an expanding superheated cloud of whizzing debris.”
“Fire control authorized.”
Rocket beams.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” he chuckles.
He is accelerating hard, banking and dodging to evade the deadly plasmic blasts of the oncoming Badoon ships.
He takes us into their midst. He is heaving on the stick with finesse, punching touchscreen controls with his disconcertingly human-like hand to alter shield settings and compute targets. With the disconcertingly human-like thumb of his hand on the stick, he flips off the cover of the fire-control trigger, a fat black button.
“The thing is,” he narrates calmly as he does all this, “the thing of it is, out in open space between the warships, well, boy, that’s your real jeopardy. They’re letting fly with heavy batteries designed to chop a capital ship in half, so we’d just be sitting Howards out there. I mean, they’d matter-annihilate us in an instant, and probably not even deliberately. You don’t fly into the battery exchange of two supermassives, no matter what’s on your bushy and ever-so-gorgeous tail. You just don’t.
“This jeopardy,” he adds, “this jeopardy is much more my kinda thing. The Badoon and the Kree won’t shoot main batteries at us because they can’t risk hitting their own fighters. And fighters… well, I can do fighters. I may be a Raccoonoid, but I know how to dogfight.”
He barrel-rolls and hits the fire-control trigger. Lances of gravimetric energy spit from the prowl cruiser’s gunports, and a Badoon attack ship comes apart in a cloud of scintillating dust. Rocket curves us hard through the blast wake and takes out two more with rapid bursts—crippling one so badly that it tumbles, engines gone, and atomizing the other.
We take hits on the starboard shields. Rocket banks left, inverts us, and then comes up fast with guns blazing. He hits a Badoon attack ship, ripping it open in a tatter of debris, causing it to lurch aside and collide with another of its kind. The ships explode.
“Getting tight,” Gamora warns.
“I know.”
“I am Groot.”
“I see it, okay?”
He banks. He dives hard, a Badoon chasing him. He shakes off the pursuit, rallies hard to port, and then takes out another attack ship with three firm presses of the fire-control trigger.
“You have now tallied six Badoon warcraft,” the automatic voice says. “This vehicle is impressed by your skills. However, there are eight hundred and forty-nine Badoon attack craft around us, not to mention the Kree fighters. Statistically—”
“I am Groot,” says Groot.
“You heard him,” says Rocket. “Never tell me the odds. I’ve shown you my flyboy skills. Now I’m about to demonstrate my tactical genius. Get ready, everyone. Put your heads between your knees and kiss your asses goodbye. Oh, and this vehicle?”
“Yes?”
“I’m gonna need maximum shields and maximum drive—so switch power from everything else, even the guns? You read me?”
“Yes.”
“But only when I say ‘now.’ I’m gonna need one last shot.”
“Understood.”
We wrench hard, slaloming between two Badoon attack ships and a pair of Kree fighters. Rocket is nursing every mass unit of power and maneuverability he can from the ultra-fast, ultra-agile Xandarian ship. Because of its speed and fluency, it appears to be the ship he was born to fly. Not for the first time, I realize that he is loving every minute of the experience.
The colossal burning bulk of the ejected drive compartment is suddenly ahead of us. We are closing fast. The ejected compartment is falling through the massed small-ship engagement, causing Kree and Badoon alike to dodge and swerve.
“That Kree captain was smart to jettison,” remarks Rocket. “Looks like that thing is going critical.
“But not fast enough,” he adds in a tone I do not like.
He skims past it, opening the throttle, firing six bursts with the gravimetric cannons. The slicing bolts rip into the compartment’s side plating, melting holes like hot wire through butter. I glimpse infernal light leaking out through the rapidly expanding wounds in the plating.
The ejected drive compartment, pushed over the brink by the last shots, reaches critical collapse.
• CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR •
THE EVENTS OF THE NEXT TEN SECONDS
It explodes.
“Now!” he orders.
THE ejected drive compartment detonated.
Because of the Nega-energies involved, it lit up—not like a star, but like a black hole—ripping out and then collapsing in upon itself again, briefly cracking reality.
The shock wave was brutal.
Eighty Badoon attack craft and thirty-two Kree fighters were caught in the collapse. They were either immolated or sucked into the energetic whirlpool and annihilated. All the other small ships were tossed and scattered like leaves in the wind, thrown heedlessly by the blast-rip. Many collided terminally.
The shock wave was so severe it disrupted the capital ships, too. The Pride of Pama was knocked sidelong and began to spin, its starboard shields failing altogether. The Brotherhood of War recoiled as if punched, and its forward shields collapsed.
It tried to turn. It tried to reignite its defenses. It had stopped firing, all its weapon systems down.
Ship Captain Kris-Gar was a determined Kree. He knew it might take several minutes to stabilize his battleship, and possibly hours more to repair its war systems. But he saw a slender opportunity, the sort of opportunity that a great commander takes advantage of—and becomes famous for. In point of fact, Kris-Gar was later decorated for his command choices and was awarded the Distinguished Sentry Star of Hala with two ribbon citations.
Most of his bridge crew were sprawled on the deck, hurt, thrown from their restraints. Kris-Gar struggled to the primary console. He made no effort to correct the yaw of his battleship or restore shields, but instead punched the controls that poured all his available power into the primary Uni-beam projector.
One chance.
He fired, manually.
The projector retched and spat. The single, burning pulse shot away from the ailing battleship, arced around on the trajectory Kris-Gar had set, and entered the yawning mouth of the shieldless, toadlike megadestroyer.
It was a critical hit. The massive Badoon warship exploded, a rippling series of internal blasts that first swelled and then split the skin of its hull.
/> It came apart. It was annihilated. Its drive systems and energy reservoirs ignited, and it went off like a bomb. The vast vessel simply vanished in a burst of light.
The death of its opponent shook the Kree battleship. It took serious structural damage from the blast and from the lethal, whizzing debris.
Kris-Gar sagged over his console. His ship would be forced to limp home at sublight. He had lost many, many valued crewmen.
But he had won. The Badoon aggressors were, as common vernacular has it across many parts of the Galaxy, akin to sliced yeast-and-flour savory food-loaf that has been exposed to a heating element and subsequently turned crispy brown.
And the Nova prowl cruiser?
It had accelerated after firing the decisive shots—and spectacularly, too. As it hit jump-speed, the bow-wave of the explosion caught it—but its gravimetric shields, set to full, merely collected that momentum and converted it to a boost that sped it on.
All the way into the chapter after next…
• CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE •
MEANWHILE
[THREE HOURS LATER ON ADJUFAR…]
THERE were probably many locales on the wild and ragged world of Adjufar that didn’t reek of corruption, but the dingy lanes and crowded alleys of the main souk in Adjufara City weren’t among them.
Ebon of the vaunted and feared Shi’ar Imperial Guard wrinkled her nose with displeasure. Adjufar was a cruddy assignment. She was a relatively new recruit to the hallowed ranks of the Guard, so she knew it wasn’t her place to complain, nor her right to request more glamorous duties. A junior Guardsman just did as he or she was told, without objection, for the service of Chandilar and the glory of the Shi’ar Empire.
Adjufar was a nonaligned world, and its capital Adjufara City was a freeport. It was frequented by the sorts of delinquent spacers and merchants whose lines of work or criminal records made them unwelcome on other, more civilized trading worlds. There were black market and contraband bazaars on planets and station habitats all through the sector, but none of them matched either Adjufar’s reputation or its sheer scale. It stank, it literally stank of corruption.
The lanes and byways of the souk were teeming with buyers, sellers, and browsers. In a ten-second period, Ebon identified forty-two different species, many of whom would have been at war with each other in another setting. There was a sleazy neutrality to Adjufar. No one wanted trouble—they just wanted to come and get their business done, no questions asked. With that sleazy neutrality came a simmering undercurrent of tension. Trouble did often break out in the market quarter, usually in an underhanded and vicious stabbing manner in the deep shadows of a back alley.
Ebon moved along the cobbled street, passing vendor carts, hover-stalls, and the beaded or force-screened doorways of emporia. The air smelled of spice, of herbs, of oils and balms, of smoke, of street food, of body odor and liquor.
Ebon was a tall, young, athletic female, her slate-gray skin almost as black as the tight bodysuit she was wearing. Apart from the delicate silver tracery of inlaid circuits on both her skin and her suit, the only distinctive marking on her was the unmistakable inverted triangular icon of the Shi’ar Imperial Guard that she wore at her throat in the form of a silver brooch. Everyone pretended not to notice her, but she knew they were casting her wary sidelong glances. She was a super-mortal, a force of order and authority, and a representative of one of the most powerful civilizations in space. No one wanted to draw her attention.
That was fine with her. In return, she turned a blind eye to the endless criminal dealings she saw going on around her: the cheating, the swindling, the racketeering, the illegal trade in weapons and prohibited substances, even the cutpurses who trolled the darker streets.
The assignment given to her watch team was specific: Locate and close down any individual or operation buying, selling, or moving blisser.
Blisser was a new narco-form. In its raw state, it was the small, air-dried seed pods of a lowland plant. But it was more usually found in the form of a ground-up powder, or made into capsules, where it was cut and mixed with boosting agents and soft tranqs. It washed the user with a sense of utter well-being—hence its street name—but it was addictive and often lethal. And when poorly mixed with other psychoactive ingredients, it could trigger murderous rages.
The foul stuff was beginning to seep into the outer worlds of the Empire, causing significant social problems. The Imperial Guard had been ordered to track the lines of supply and close down the source. Anti-drug enforcement was one of the many roles undertaken by the Guard in peacetime.
Ebon had no problem with that. She was happy to help close down the movement of a pernicious substance like blisser. And Adjufar, with all its corrupt trade dealings, seemed like a very likely supply route.
But she was becoming frustrated. Her team had been on Adjufar for six days. They hadn’t found so much as a hint of the drug. Her team leader, a veteran Guardsman called Crusher, had begun to suggest that maybe Adjufar was not a supply center, after all. Either that, or his team was doing a bad job.
Ebon suspected that there were other reasons.
She turned and looked back to make sure she hadn’t left her troop support too far behind. There were four of them assigned to her, Shi’ar soldiers of the elite Metal Wing Cadre—big males in gleaming silver body armor with short blue capes, Tafstehl 190 laser rifles clamped across their chests, and regal silver helms with proud lateral crests shaped like segmented arrowheads.
The troopers were part of the problem. So was the d’ast logo she wore at her throat. In her opinion, the assignment should have been executed undercover. But Crusher was old school, and he had insisted they present a show of strength and authority.
No wonder they weren’t finding anything: four Imperial Guardsmen in full uniform, trawling the streets, each one trailed by a Metal Wing fireteam. Sharra and K’ythri! Like that wasn’t going to make the blisser dealers hide themselves as deep as possible in the foul-smelling depths of the city.
Her link beeped. It was Crusher.
“Sir?”
“Report,” he said. He was a gruff, unfriendly soul.
“Just finishing a sweep of the western souk around the Kawa Temple. Nothing.”
“Get back to Juva Parade,” said Crusher. “We’ll regroup.”
Again, she thought.
“Understood, sir.”
As she turned to beckon the troopers, she glimpsed a pair of individuals moving through the crowd behind her. Though they were unusual to say the least, they hardly stood out among the great variety of life-forms present.
She only had them in her sights for a second, but there was something. Something flagged in her mind. Ebon was smart, intelligent, and ambitious. She kept her eyes on the Shi’ar watch lists all the time, just to stay briefed. Mentally, a red flag had just gone up.
She took the small data tablet off her belt, entered her retina print, and then punched in a brief description.
“Searching,” the device told her, the word pulsing on its screen.
JAVA Parade was the main market square in the souk—a vast, thronging area packed with stalls, emporia, and dining houses. It was flanked on one side by the crumbling colonnades of the Juva Palace—once the seat of government, when Adjufar had bothered to maintain a government—and by the old barracks on the other. Both structures had been taken over by traders and merchants. Carpets and rugs were on display under one arch, holo-sculptures under another. The main doorway of the barracks was a cookhouse, with roast meat turning on spits and dried insect savories hanging from strings.
The others had assembled: Crusher, heavy-set and gray haired, his uniform gold and black; Warstar 34, one of many such units serving in the guard, a hulking, dark-green robo-form that actually housed two individuals working the armor together in symbiotic union; and Dragoon, an older female with a tight red bodysuit who sported a white mohawk hairstyle. Like Ebon, each one of them was accompanied by four Metal Wing soldiers.
“Another day, another nothing,” grumbled Crusher. “I’ll be frank: This failure of results is not going to look good when I write it up.”
Ebon bit back the desire to tell him what she thought his report should say. Crusher was the commanding officer. He called the shots.
“What about one more sweep of the riverside?” asked Dragoon softly. “Before we call it a diurnal period? They say most of the narc business happens there.”
“What about if we raid one of the main dealers?” suggested Warstar, his voice an electronic rasp. “I mean, kick in some hatches? If someone’s dealing one thing, he might be dealing blisser, too. Or he might be happy to give up some dirt in exchange for us leaving him alone.”
Crusher shook his head.
“Nothing provocative. You know what kind of powder keg this place is.”
Nothing provocative? Ebon wondered, almost amused. What, like walking up and down the lanes with fireteams of battletroopers?
“Something on your mind?” Crusher asked her.
“No, sir.”
“You smiled.”
“Probably not actually, sir,” she said.
“Spit it out,” he growled. “You were either going to smart-mouth me or make a joke.”
She was about to reply when her tablet beeped. She unclipped it
• CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX •
HIDE AND SOUK
and checked the screen. It had completed its search and was displaying a “be aware” bulletin from the constantly updating Shi’ar Watch List.
“I think I might have found something, sir,” she said. “Not what we were looking for. Not blisser. But something we probably shouldn’t ignore…”
“AHHHH, Adjufar!” says Rocket Raccoon, grinning widely, his eyes closed, sniffing the air. He is stepping out of the prowl cruiser onto the landing pad of the main city docks—a crowded, busy place. It is open to the sky—a ruddy, angry sky scudded with white clouds. Two wispy moons are visible in the daylight.