by Marc Stevens
I was going to give the Scrun a chance to return any beings they might have taken for slaves back to their home planet. I had Justice send a message to them. It stated that if they harmed any of the beings they took as slaves or tried to use them as hostages, I would show no mercy and kill them all. It really didn’t matter if they believed I would show them mercy or not. I had already proven I was capable of delivering on the final part of the message. It did not take but a few seconds for the commander of the ship to reply with a message that almost made me laugh. Almost. The message stated they had no slaves aboard and were here to aid the primitive lifeforms that lived in tunnels below the ice on the surface. I suspected the next thing the prick would try to do was sell me oceanfront property in Arizona. The frowns on my crew’s faces turned to sinister smiles when I told Justice to park the Legacy right over the bridge of the slave hauler.
“Armor up. We are going to go over and see if that Throgg is telling the truth.”
Tria cocked an eyebrow at me but was right on my heels when I jogged down the corridor to the lift tubes. I thought she might comment on how reckless of an idea it was to go aboard the slave ship with only a four-member strike team. She never uttered a peep. It’s not like we had not done this before. We had intimate knowledge of the ship’s layout and what weapons we would face. This time around, our portal device would give us an extra edge. They would never in a million years expect us to walk right onto the bridge. We were going to bring the boom before these guys could figure out what was happening.
When we got to the ready room, Coonts and Klutch were already geared up. Klutch stunk the place up because I made him leave his prized plasma caster behind. We had mission goals that I wanted to accomplish, and they would be infinitely easier if the ship was not burning down around us. One of those goals would be to gather intel from the ship’s navigation computers. I wanted to know where the ship had been and possibly where it was going. Tria and I slipped out of our uniforms and put on the specialized suit liners. I asked her if we could access the Scrun NAV computers without input from them. The answer was no, we would need command-level access. As usual, I would have to wing it and hope for the best once we were on the bridge.
Tria smiled at me. It was like she was doing the mind reading thing again.
“I am sure you will think of some way to get the information we seek.”
It was almost strange seeing Tria’s armor with only two appendages. I hoped like hell we would not miss the extra launchers she used to have at her disposal. I pulled my shotgun from its rack and inserted the twin magazines. Charging the barrels, I pulled the mags and put two more rounds from my ammo pouch into them. I looked around at my team and gave them a thumbs up. They returned the gesture. We were topped off and ready to roll.
“Justice, what are the Scrun assault shuttles doing?”
“They landed in a crevasse and shut down their drives. The location appears to be a makeshift staging area. They have abandoned the shuttles, and I believe they are attempting to hide in a bunker deep under the ice.”
We would take care of those fools when we were done with the mothership. We went to the hangar, and Justice had the hatch open and waiting. Looking down on the massive mothership below us, I pointed to the protruding bridge structure. There was a large open area in between the sensor arrays on the antenna farm. Directly below was the bridge.
“Klutch, when we touch down, I want you to port a hole right between those antennas. Tria, Coonts, and I will drop in first, and then you follow. I want you to use your own judgment, but I want the commander alive. Everyone else is expendable.”
I got three more thumbs up and then I jumped. I engaged my gravity drives and dove to the hull of the ship, righting myself before touching down. We stepped back to let Klutch do his thing. He got a good hole first try, and we jumped into it with the deadliest of intentions. The first thing that greeted us was the low urgent tone of alarms. The ship was crying out its distress to its masters. We hovered above the deck and opened fire on the stunned crew standing at control consoles. Klutch came dropping through but went right by us. He landed in the lap of some hapless fool. The Scrun squalled out in pain as his legs were crushed by Klutch’s mass. The Troop Master silenced him with a blast from his shotgun and dove on another who was trying to draw a pistol. Another blast from Klutch’s shotgun ended all resistance in the control room. In less than thirty seconds, we had control of the bridge. There were seven Scrun officers permanently down and out. The commander and two of his staff sat in their chairs with arms extended and fingers splayed upward. They seemed to be in shock at our entrance.
Coonts and Klutch took up positions at the two entrances to the bridge. Tria stood by me with her weapon pointed at the two officers sitting in front of their commander’s chair. There are a handful of things I could think of that truly disgusted me. Right at the moment, I could only think of twenty-two such things, and they adorned the head slaver’s atmospheric suit. I stepped up on the commander’s raised pedestal and rapped my shotgun against his face plate. Each strike threatened to dislodge the offending award trinkets. My translator grunted out the Scrun language.
“I am going to give you another chance to tell me what you are doing here. For your sake, you better get it right the first time.”
I stood, expecting a quick reply, but the Scrun sat there staring at me with his crazy big eyeball and his grotesque hairy-lipped mouth hanging open. I was going to need a little more cooperation than that. I gripped my shotgun like a bat and brought it down just above his faceplate. It was not a killing blow by any means. It was more of a wake-up call. The blow laid the big bastard out on top of his two underlings and set him to screeching out unintelligible nonsense. I expected sentences that were more coherent than that. I jerked him back into his chair for another Q&A session but got interrupted. The hatch next to Coonts swished open, and a Scrun soldier ran through hollering something that sounded like the Scrun word for fire, which is exactly what Coonts gave him. I wished he would have used something besides an explosive penetrator slug. Tria and I, along with our three captives, were now wearing various pieces of the deceased.
Coonts probably already knew the looks he was getting from behind our war faces. Rather than wait and see if I would comment on his decorating skills, he called to Klutch and then jerked a thumb over his shoulder to the corridor. They both stepped out and closed the hatches behind them. My sensors picked up the faint sound of gunfire, and then I felt the thump of an explosion. When I got no report from my teammates, Tria ran to the hatch and opened it, taking a quick look. She turned back and shrugged. I guess that meant they were fine and just taking care of business.
I turned my attention back to the commander. “Do you have slaves aboard?”
“No, they were on the shuttles that returned to the surface.”
“Call the shuttles and tell your people to release the slaves and return to the ship.”
“They witnessed what you did to my ship,” the commander said. “They are not likely to follow my orders.”
It wasn’t the answer I was looking for. My sensors again picked up gunfire from the corridor and a couple more thumps from explosions. We had been dicking around for more than fifteen minutes, and my patience was wearing thin. Coonts called and stated that he and Klutch had cleared the cargo hold control room. They now controlled the lifts to the bridge.
“Can you see any occupied slave crates on the monitors?”
“Negative, Commander. All I see is a lot of Scrun down there. It may be an evacuation point for those escaping from the aft part of the ship. Judging by the open crate count, I believe they were getting ready to receive at least a hundred slaves, maybe more.”
“Decompress the hold and use the security turrets on anyone that doesn’t get blown out.”
“Roger that.”
I felt a slight rumble under my feet when the hold violently flushed into the void. The Scrun commander’s face looked a little paler. He k
new his future was in doubt.
“Recall the shuttles now!” I demanded.
He jumped up and went to a console and started grunting out orders. He stood there waiting for a reply. When it never came, he started yelling and repeating himself. It was obvious the shuttle crews had no intention of answering. He again held his hands out, fingers splayed upward in the Scrun sign of surrender.
“They refuse to answer and will not comply. We know of you and what you do to our people!”
It was nice that the word was getting around that someone was taking a stand against the slavers. The indignant tone of the Scrun’s voice seemed to insinuate I was doing it for no reason.
I looked the commander in his big cyclops eyeball. “So, you think it is a crime for me to defend those who cannot defend themselves against the technologically superior races?”
The fool realized his comment might not have been in his best interest. His eyeball grew a little larger, and his tongue started flicking in and out of his mouth, trying to wet his hairy lips. One of his officers suddenly stood. I guess he was trying to impress me with Scrun logic in hopes it would deflect my anger from his commander.
“It is an honor for the lesser races to serve their masters! We bring order and duty to their primitive irrelevance,” the Scrun officer said. “We save them from the perpetual ignorance of their primal ways and raise their awareness to what the future may hold for them.”
The clown must have been the commander’s political officer or possibly the guy in charge of inducting new recruits. The way he spewed his bullshit had me thinking the moron believed every word of it. He did succeed in turning my anger from his commanding officer. Unfortunately for him, he was now the target of my derision. Tria must have decided her scat filter was at capacity and saved me the trouble of expending any additional munitions. She raised the Scrun officer’s awareness to the overhead and several consoles with a blast of explosive buckshot.
“We have wasted enough time on this filth,” she said. “We need to get back to our primary mission.”
She was right. We needed to wrap this up and move on. Her unexpected response to the Scrun’s oration had their leader on the verge of a mental breakdown. I would throw him a lifeline. I wouldn’t let on that it was going to be a temporary one at best.
“I want the data files from your navigation computers,” I told him. “The information is the only bargaining chip you have left that will convince me to spare your life. You have ten seconds to comply.”
I pointed the twin barrels of my shotgun at him. He jumped from his chair and went to a console. He worked it like he was playing a piano. In less than a minute, he extended a hand to me with a data cube in it. Tria stepped forward and snatched it from him and stowed it in her ammo pouch. She swung her shotgun around and put a couple of slugs into the comms station. The Scrun dove to the deck, avoiding the flying debris. We went to the exit hatch and stepped into the corridor. Tria made it a point to extract a grenade from her kit and show it to the Scrun commander. She then tossed it to the overhead in the corridor and closed the hatch. We called to Coonts and Klutch, alerting them we were on our way to the hold control room. When we arrived, they were sitting with their feet up on the consoles like they had nothing better to do. I waved the wise guys over and pointed at the large cargo hold view screen.
“We are not taking the lifts.”
I blew the screen out with a blast of buckshot, decompressing the corridor to the bridge. We were sucked out of the opening and into the vacuum of the hold. I heard Klutch laughing at Coonts, saying he knew I wouldn’t use the lifts. I assumed the conversation involved a wager Coonts had just lost.
“Justice, we are ready for extraction and will be exiting the cargo hold.”
“Affirmative, Commander. Tow beam is on standby.”
“Is the motherships orbit decaying?”
“Yes, Commander, it will enter the planet’s atmosphere in five hours and three minutes.”
“Any chance the Scrun can correct that problem?”
“Negative. The damage to their drives was critical. They ejected the antimatter power cells to prevent catastrophic detonation. The odds of a maintenance tug arriving before the ship burns up in the planet’s atmosphere is currently less than two percent.”
We boosted from the hold and were snatched up by Justice. He pulled us into the Legacy’s hangar and moved away from the Scrun mothership. My teammates retracted their helmets and stood waiting for additional orders. I could tell they were wondering what I was going to do about the shuttles. I answered the inquiring looks by ordering Justice to take us down to the crevasse where the Scrun shuttles were sheltering. It made Klutch’s day when I told him to bring his plasma caster.
22
The scene that greeted us when we arrived over the crevasse brought my blood back to a boil. The beast in me that for the most part had remained silent was now rattling the bars of its cage. The slaughtered remains of more than forty of the centaur-like creatures that inhabited the planet were scattered about the site. They were the size of a pony and had the heavy fur coat of a yak. The two short arms on the upper bodies were scaly and had large cord-like muscles. The four-fingered hands had thick, sharp claws, as did the four feet of the creatures. It wasn’t hard to guess how the many caves that lined the crevasse’s icy walls were excavated.
Justice highlighted the entrance to the bunker the Scrun had taken refuge in. I thought about using the Legacy’s weapons to annihilate the Scrun, bunker and all. Cooler heads prevailed, and Tria suggested I choose a method that would not harm the surrounding tunnels or stress the inhabitants any more. We jumped from the hangar and touched down next to the shuttles. The hold doors were open and the cargo areas empty. The tracks in the snow and ice went from the shuttles to several of the caves lining the walls of the crevasse. The inhabitants of the planet wasted no time leaving the area. I thought about trying to get information from the flight computers on the shuttles but nixed the idea. If I had to abandon my only ride off the planet, I would set booby traps in hopes of getting a little revenge for being stranded. I went to the tunnel that led to the Scrun bunker. It was a fairly recent excavation, and I assumed it was built to protect the teams of slavers from the frigid conditions. They probably had all the comforts of home down there. It was an indication that this was an ongoing operation that wasn’t intended to end any time soon. That was about to change.
“Klutch! The slaver pieces of scat might be getting cold sitting down there in that bunker,” I said. “You have my permission to rectify the problem any way you see fit!”
Coonts and Tria started backing away from the Troop Master. It looked like the smart thing to do, and I joined them as they boosted up out of the trench and took shelter in the hangar of the Legacy. A pink glow lit the crevasse as Klutch poured shot after shot of plasma down the bunker shaft. Huge jets of steam screamed up from the frozen ice-covered ground, obscuring our view. I was wondering what was taking so long. I stepped to the edge of the hangar door and looked down at the glowing steam cloud. I was relieved when the Troop Master finally popped up out of the cloud bank and landed in the hangar.
“Mission accomplished, Commander.”
“What about the shuttles?”
“I thought they might explode and collapse the crevasse if I set them on fire. I decided to put a couple of grenades in the drive nozzles. I put a tamper delay on them. If someone engages the drives or climbs into the nozzles to inspect them, they are in for a big surprise.”
I knew the Tibor was an expert when it came to mayhem. If it was good enough for him, it was good enough for me. I doubted if the creatures that lived on the planet would get anywhere near the shuttles. The experiences they associated with the Scrun spacecraft had to be horrific.
“Justice, get us back on course for the Prule base.”
“Initiating prejump scans, Commander. We will jump to the next programed waypoint in four minutes thirty seconds.”
We we
nt to the ready room to get out of our armor, but it turned out to be premature.
“Commander, I have detected a transition into this system, and the drive emanation is of Scrun origin. The target is making a course change that will align it with the planet we have designated as X-Ray One.”
“Please tell me it is not a service tug.”
“Negative, Commander. The drive signature matches that of a Scrun mothership.”