“I am not.”
“You intend to sell me to your client, who exists in the Negative
Zone.”
Gamora stiffens suddenly.
“What do you know about that?”
Ah, the moment. Gone forever.
“Why else would you be asking the barman about a device that would allow communication with the Negative Zone?”
“You listened in?” she spits.
“No, actually,” I reply. “But I was warned. The master of the Negative Zone is an evil godlike entity called Annihilus. Is he your client?”
“I’m not saying anything,” Gamora replies, knocking back a considerable quantity of her Timothy.
“Is he your client?” I ask again. “If he is, what gives you the right to deliver me to him? I do not know what knowledge I possess, or how it might be used for right or wrong. It is clear, however, that the knowledge within me has fundamental universal value. It could reshape reality as we know it. I am, in many regards, a cosmic weapon. Do you really wish to place that power in the hands of an evil god who could crush our Universe?”
“Flark you,” she says, leaning forward and stabbing at me with a finger. “It’s a paying job. I’ll work for whoever I want. You’re the merchandise. I’ll deliver you to whoever I like, no questions asked. Finish your drink, then we’re out of here.”
“I do not drink,” I reply, pushing the bottle away from me. “Truly, Gamora, you would betray your friends like this? Betray me? Betray your whole Universe?”
“I’m not betraying my whole Universe,” she snaps.
“You were a Guardian of the Galaxy. You fought for what is right.”
“Yeah, and no one ever appreciated it!” she replies. “I go where the money is! I don’t ask questions!”
“You should. Annihilus is an abhorrent evil who has proved time and again that he will stop at nothing to conquer the Positive Universe. If I am a weapon, or possess the data-resource to build a weapon, or even if I contain records that would enable some cosmic control or influence…wouldn’t it be prudent to find out what that is, and who could benefit from it, before handing me to a counter- versal nemesis like Annihilus? No matter the paycheck?”
She doesn’t reply.
“Also, there is the matter of betraying your friends.”
“I don’t have friends!” she growls.
“I think that you do. I think that Rocket and Groot, despite their obvious flaws, are your very true friends. I think they would give their lives for you.” She looks up at me.
“Well, maybe not Rocket,” I agree, “but Groot would.”
She laughs. Then her face drops, serious again.
“What do I do?” she asks.
“Work with us. Find the answers. Then make your best choice.”
She sighs and toys with her half-finished Timothy.
“I’m not used to this, you know?”
“To what?”
“I’m a killer and a villain. All this trust and friendship and loyalty flark. It doesn’t come naturally. It’s alien to me.”
She is suddenly so open and vulnerable I feel like reaching out and taking her hand. This is hard for her.
We are having a moment. It is not as romantic as I had originally hoped, but it is fundamentally more important.
She sits up and shakes her head. She is so beautiful.
“Let’s find the boys,” she declares. “We’ll do this your way.”
“Good,” I say.
She leans forward and points at me. Her hand might as well be holding a sword.
“You never tell them about this, okay? Never. Not ever.”
“Agreed.”
“If they knew, there’d be—”
“You’d kill them. You couldn’t handle their disappointment. I understand. I don’t want them dead.”
“Okay. We’re understood. Let’s go then.”
Our moment has passed once again. I appreciate this. She is Gamora once more, and the hard rules of her life have taken over.
Then reality blinks and flickers. In a haze of reconnecting causality membranes, the matte-black Galadoran Spaceknight materializes, standing on a circular Gramosian salvage bench in the far corner of the bar.
He is armed. He looks across the bar with his piercing dead-sun eyes and sees me.
“Not him again!” I cry.
“You’ve met him before?” asks Gamora.
“Yes!” I reply.
She finishes her Timothy in one gulp, rises, and draws her swords.
“You’re not going to meet him again,” she promises.
• CHAPTER THIRTY •
WHICH CONTAINS A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF DISAGREEABLE VIOLENCE
GAMORA strides across the bar toward the Spaceknight. The bar was not full to begin with, but it is now clearing rapidly. Even the hulking Pheragot barman is ducking back in alarm.
“I don’t know who you are or what your intention is,” Gamora states, “so I’ll keep it simple. Get. The. Flark. Out. Now.”
The Spaceknight looks down at the approaching Zen-Whoberian female. He pays particular regard to the swords she is dangling at her sides.
He has rearmed since I last saw him. He has a Galadoran broadsword sheathed across his back, the two-handed grip extending above his left shoulder. In his mailed right hand, he holds a Spartoi fusion beamer, an elegantly raked pistol with a cylindrical power cell clamped beneath the fluted barrel.
“Get out of my way,” he says. He seems slightly puzzled.
“You got a name?” she asks, coming to a defiant halt in front of him.
“I am Roamer,” he replies. “Once of Galador. You?”
“Gamora,” she says, as if this is sufficient. I imagine it probably is.
“Your reputation precedes you,” he says. “But it does not scare me. However, I…I don’t understand one thing. You did not appear to be threatening the Recorder unit.”
“I was not.”
“Then…how is this a moment of dramatic significance?”
“I have no idea what you’re high on, Spaceknight,” Gamora says, “but you’re going to leave here now. Voluntarily, or zipped in a bag. The choice is yours.”
I do not understand, either. Why is the Spaceknight—this Roamer, as he calls himself—preoccupied with dramatic significance? Unquestionably, his two previous appearances have been smack in the middle of threats to my person, but why should that concern him?
“Perhaps the device is working now,” he says, enigmatically. He looks back at Gamora. “Stand aside, or I will go through you.”
“If that’s how you want it—” Gamora begins.
“Lose the blades and blasters,” calls a voice from the bar door. A new figure enters, her arms raised, hands aimed at the Spaceknight and Gamora. She is a tall, lithe young woman, her dark gray skin covered from head to foot in a jet-black, form-fitting suit. She wears a distinctive silver-triangle emblem at her throat.
“I said lose them,” she repeats, stepping forward slowly and covering them. “I am Ebon of the Shi’ar Imperial Guard. One dumb move, and I drop you where you stand.”
“Ah,” the Spaceknight rumbles. “Not working, after all.”
The Shi’ar Guardsman looks around and spots me. “Ebon to Crusher,” she links, maintaining her aim. “Just picked up a big swirl of demat energy in Pandubundy’s Bar & Tech on Kefu Square. Looks like I’ve found that hot Recorder unit. Backup, now.”
The Shi’ar are a highly advanced and civilized culture, gentle reader. Their empire is one of the most powerful in known space, rivaling that of the Kree and the Badoon in scale. They maintain a vast standing army and war fleet, but their fighting elite are the Imperial Guard—a legion of super-mortal individuals recruited from the Shi’ar’s many client worlds and races, each one handpicked for his or her unique powerset. As a military force, the Imperial Guard is immensely effective, for its members are not uniform in their powers or weapons like a conventional army: To combat them en masse, one
must combat hundreds of different and specialized offensive capabilities. Ebon appears to be an augmented Eclipsian. I do not know what her particular forte is.
I am unwilling to find out.
Roamer looks at the Imperial Guardsman.
“This is none of your affair,” he says. “Or yours,” he adds, glancing back at Gamora. “Both of you get out of my way.”
“Oh, you just said the magic words,” says Ebon. She shudders, and a globular beam of dark-matter blazes from her right hand and streaks toward the Spaceknight. Ah, I think, dark-matter manipulation/projection. Well, now I know what her power is.
The beam is intense. It strikes Roamer in the hip and hurls him off the bench into the booth wall, which he dents. Glasses shatter. Even as he falls, he is turning, blasting back with his Spartoi beamer. The sizzling fusion shots retch across the bar at Ebon. She crosses her forearms in front of her, shuddering again, and projects a thin disk-shield of dark-matter in front of her that soaks up the blasts. They vanish into the disk like beams of sunlight into a black hole. Then she dives forward, rising silently into the air via a flight implant.
Gamora is suddenly in her way. Gamora’s blades strike at the same time, but each one is blocked by a small dark-matter shield. Ebon is fast. Gamora is faster. She chops again with both blades to keep the Guardsman’s arms busy manufacturing shield disks, then rotates her entire body in a dynamic, upward scissor kick that smashes Ebon back to the ground.
Ebon rolls and comes back up, her body trembling as she fires another dark, globular beam. Gamora snaps her head sideways, so that the beam passes over her left shoulder, then forward-rolls and clamps Ebon’s neck between her thighs. Ebon goes back down, strangling, Gamora on top of her. Gamora tries to stab down with one of her swords, but a disk of dark-matter drives the tip aside. Ebon arches up from the floor, Gamora’s weight on her, boosting the considerable power of her feet with her flight implant. This move throws Gamora sideways, sweeping her over so that she strikes the side of her head on the floor.
Gamora grunts and rolls clear. Ebon is back up, hunched over with her hands ready, in a fighting stance. Gamora moves in, swinging her blades. They are surgically precise strikes, but Ebon’s dark-matter shield blocks are equally exact. The speed of the traded blows is dazzling.
As she blocks the sixth strike, Ebon sidesteps and executes a reverse spin kick that catches Gamora’s shoulder. Gamora staggers, then comes back again, slashing with her swords and kicking. Ebon’s ankle deflects one of the kicks. A dark-matter disk stops a sword edge. Gamora jabs the capped toe of her right boot into Ebon’s ribs. Ebon gasps, staggers, and rolls hard to avoid the whistling sword blow that follows.
She is not fast enough to contain what comes after it. Gamora’s right fist, clutching the weight of her sword, connects with the side of Ebon’s face. The force of fist and hilt together hurls the Guardsman aside. Ebon demolishes a Landlak card table and some Kodabak gravity chairs and sprawls in the broken debris, dazed, unable to rise.
Gamora steps toward her. One of her swords rises.
“Don’t kill her!” I cry. “The last thing we need is a Shi’ar death warrant on our heads!”
Gamora hesitates.
“Besides,” I add. “Look out!”
Gamora swings around instantly. The Spaceknight is back on his feet. He aims his beamer at Gamora and fires. Gamora’s blades spin and twist. They deflect the first three shots, sending fusion bolts through a window, into the floor, and into the ceiling.
The fourth shot hits her in the stomach.
She is thrown across the room and hits the bar, shattering it and exploding all the optics overhead. Clean glasses and bottles tumble and smash.
“Gamora!” I cry, rushing to her.
She is twisted on her back in the wreckage. There is blood everywhere. The fusion shot has blown a terrible hole through her torso. I reach down, my hands flapping helplessly, looking for a bar towel or cloth I can use to staunch the profuse bleeding.
A steely hand grips me by the right shoulder and lifts me off the ground.
“You’re coming with me,” Roamer tells me.
“She’s dying!” I cry.
“Her choice.”
“Flark you!” I exclaim, beating at him with my hands. “She is my friend! I won’t see her die!”
My blows are utterly ineffectual against his matte-black armor.
“You won’t have to,” Roamer replies. “Because you’re coming with me.”
I sense a power surge. The Spaceknight is activating his exotic transmat device.
From somewhere, I get strength. In truth, I have never so much as harmed a tiny insect. I have certainly never thrown a punch. But I have seen a lot of violence during the last few days, gentle reader, and I have recorded and analyzed the form and function of it.
So I throw a punch. It is not a fine one, though it is well-aimed. I break the gearing mechanisms of three fingers doing it. In fact, gentle reader, it’s probably more of a slap than a punch.
But it causes Roamer to flinch back in surprise and let me go.
I cower back. He straightens, glowering. He reaches his left hand behind him to the hilt of his broadsword and draws it with one sinuous sweep.
“According to my brief,” he says, “your head is all I actually need.”
The broadsword is immense. I doubt I could lift it. The edges of the milk-white blade crackle with electric-blue plasma. Powered up, the sword could cleave through a stone column like a dairy solid.
A globular beam of dark-matter hits Roamer in the face and smashes him back across the bar.
“Run!” Ebon cries, rising behind me. “Sharra and K’ythri, move, for the love of Chandilar! Get out of the bar before that maniac gets back on his feet!”
“But Gamora—”
“I’ll help her, though praetor knows why,” she replies. “Go on! Get out! I’ll take care of your friend as soon as I’m done with this crazy! Get out! My support squad is moving in! They’ll look after you!”
I hesitate. Gamora is bleeding out. I do not like the sound of being “looked after” by Ebon’s support squad, either.
Roamer is back up. There is an ugly, scorched dent in the jawline of his helmet. He starts striding toward us, firing his fusion beamer straight-armed as he comes.
Ebon blocks the fusillade of shots with energy disks. Stray blasts rip into the fixtures and fittings around us, exploding them. I realize she’s right. No one can help Gamora while I remain the object of the relentless Spaceknight’s attention.
I run for the exit. Shots follow me, but so do the floating disks of dark-matter that swallow them.
I reach the door and rush out into the ruddy sunlight of the square.
The stalls in Kefu Square are abandoned. All the traders and customers have fled at the sounds of the fighting in Pandubundy’s. I see some of them cowering, scared, in the shadows of the ancient colonnades around the Kefu marketplace.
“Help me, someone!” I wail. “She’s dying!”
There are figures approaching me fast between the brightly covered awnings of the stall. A huge, grim, gray-haired male in a gold-and-black bodysuit, followed by a massive dark-green automoid. It is a Warstar-class battle assembly, a highly effective war machine typical of the Shi’ar Imperial Guard. Behind them come sixteen gleaming Shi’ar battletroopers of the Metal Wing Cadre.
“Get down!” the gray-haired male yells at me. “Get down on your face now!”
“I don’t think you understand,” I begin.
“I’m Crusher, Shi’ar Imperial Guard,” he snarls back. “I understand all I want to understand! Get your nose in the dirt, or by Sharra and K’ythri, I’ll crank up my exo-link and frag you to hell!”
Behind him, the looming Warstar unit raises its mighty gauntlets and target-locks me. The Metal Wing soldiers shoulder and aim their Tafstehl 190 rifles with a resounding clatter.
I am about to drop to my knees, arms raised. There is sustained blasting and shout
ing from Pandubundy’s behind me. We all turn to look.
Ebon comes flying out of the bar through a window, which shatters in a spray of glass chips, and her flying body crashes into a market stall. She rolls over, unconscious or dead.
• CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE •
DEAD OR ALIVE
Crusher exclaims a highly unrepeatable curse word. He starts to move forward, accelerating to super-mortal speed.
Roamer apelooks at me, then looks around. pars in the bar doorway and shoots Crusher in the face, blowing him backward into the market square, disintegrating several more trade stands.
“The Recorder unit,” Roamer says, “is mine.”
I duck.
Warstar and the Metal Wing warriors start shooting. So does Roamer.
Once again, gentle reader—and not for the first or, sadly, the last time in this narrative—the superficially simple word “mayhem” suddenly requires a significant definition upgrade.
I START to crawl, head down, wishing fervently I was somewhere else. Anywhere else. My pico-processors, spontaneously trying to reassure me, flood my mind with images of the one point two million places I have been, most of which were much safer. Except for Xarth. And Xandar. And the Kree battleship Pride of Pama.
A pattern emerges. I have consistently been in much greater jeopardy, gentle reader, ever since I met Rocket Raccoon and Groot, two individuals who seem to have been doing their level best to save me—
From the jeopardy that seems to follow them like a wake.
The crossfire in the market square is intense and dazzling. Roamer is crouched under cover in the doorway of Pandubundy’s, fusion shots blazing from his beamer. The neon sign above the arched door has now suffered several more letter failures.
In the square, the Shi’ar are firing back. Metal Wing elite troopers are raining laser bolts at the doorway from their Tafstehl 190 rifles. Warstar is unleashing huge columnated beams of kinetic power from his gauntlets. The air is stitched by white-hot darts of light from the rifles, thick beams of purple energy from the gauntlets, and super-rapid yellow fusion blasts from the Spaceknight’s pistol. A blizzard of crossfire.