Starship Rogue series Box Set

by Chris Turner

  My feeling now was not much different.

  We took stealthy steps through deep gloom, keeping our eyes off the ancient corpses. Blest kicked at some moldered bones. “Are these for real?” A clattering echo rebounded through the dimness. I waved him to silence. We threaded our way among the hulking shapes of the weird mechnobots, robots of some savage origin, some as high as a second story apartment with pincers for arms and strange metallic outerbodies and turret-like heads. Others materialized in the gloom, as short as midgets only knee high, human, animal, a mixture of the two. The cavernous ceiling rose more stories above than I cared to guess and seemed to exude a maroon-purplish glow from somewhere high above, almost phosphorescent. Whatever these hulking shapes were, they constituted an intimidating rack of armory, scaring the crap out of us all in the eerie light that filtered through the opaque dome.

  Chapter 12

  I felt a shudder pass along my spine as I threaded by those inert goliaths looming in the eerie darkness. They’d been spawned in a day when technology far outmatched our current science. Now only shadowy hints lingered of the dark age humankind had lapsed into since the last alien war centuries ago. I swallowed the lump in my throat, wondering about that violent, bio-mechanical heritage we’d evolved out of, and of which we remembered little.

  Cyber Corp had been messing with robotic experiments, prototypes of weird and wonderful kinds. Aggressive ones, judging from the weapons and guns, the flamethrowers and ray sprayers mounted on the turrets, also the size of those dinosaur shapes and the quality of their armor.

  So many mysteries and relics of the forgotten past...The only common thread, invariably, was war and its cruel aftermath—the glue holding it all together.

  Here a garden sprawled, as if a horticulture or greenhouse experiment of loose soil and potted plants, there a shattered glass bin of shriveled ferns, long browned with striped leaves and stigmas of curled proboscises. I couldn’t help but shiver, almost forgetting our Skug menace.

  I tapped on the glass of a certain rectangular glass lab cage, eighteen feet long. Inside was what looked like withered ferns clinging to chunks of dry soil. It appeared as if the vessel had been hurled from a distance; from one of the labs spread along the side walls. Uncannily, the tempered-glass had not shattered.

  I tapped on the glass again. Nothing…And yet, I detected a small flutter of movement within.

  I gave a hollow laugh. Impossible, Rusco, you’re a lunatic. I breathed through my mask. I chuckled, attributing my imagination to the Myscol I’d tongued.

  Yet that primitive awareness that lurks at the back the mind and knows something is watching it, tingled my spine. I knew it was something not quite arguably human. So did the others. We all watched in a kind of glazed horror as a monstrous hulk, some twenty-foot-high half-armored ape and scorpion, came to sudden life, a bluish-grey pilot light beaming from its turret-like head. Ridiculous, of course. Not even possible to hallucinate such a thing, but we were the fools striding through a forsaken, molder-ridden mausoleum of the haunted past, and evidently a living vessel for things that should have been left alone.

  No time to ponder the chilling horrors of the past. The first gunfire came at us in green energy beams from the wings where we had come. I hissed out a curse and beckoned Follee forward who hunched behind a shoulder-high, four-legged mechnobot with a hideous oversized head and downturned sloping back.

  We slunk like panthers to a place where three giant mechnos stood poised on human-like legs, poised in the violet gloom like grim guardians of a tortured past. We hunkered down behind them, taking up ambush positions.

  Figures moved in the murk. They came upon us like wildfire, flanking us in a wide semicircle. A small army of horned heads, mummy-wrapped figures with tusked noses came lumbering like stalkers out of screaming nightmare. So, the tales of Skugs were true.

  Their sawed off R6s spat blue fire at us.

  Fire flare was all around, shredding glass cases, sending bright streaks off the tough armor of the standing mechnobots.

  The Skugs grunted through their nosepieces like wild hogs. I saw bits of plant and earth flying up as their fire flares shredded the aquarium next to me. Were those plants moving, or hissing? No, a stupid trick of the mind, amid the sudden carnage and chaos.

  I dove for deeper cover, missing a spray that would have ended me.

  I gained my feet and stood back to back with Wren emptying fire into moving shapes. Noss and Blest worked in a similar manner. I didn’t know where the fuck Follee had gone. Had he fled? Was he dead?

  These mutants were going to flank us and take us down in minutes. My head struggled to make sense of it. A flurry of thoughts coursed through my mind. Primitive cannibals these headhunting Skugs, drinking blood from carved goblets of skulls. Up to this point, I’d assumed these freaks were just raiders seeking plunder, not the bloodthirsty savages of local legends passed down through the ages.

  That illusion was shattered with the rush of a seven-foot giant from my right. He bowled me over, snorting like a bison, and reached out a deformed paw to hurl me against the mechnobot to my left. I let out a wild grunt. My gun slipped from my grasp as I slid down on my haunches. I shook the daze from my skull, rolling and reaching for my weapon. Fingers gripped the stock. Brain hoped he didn’t grab and toss me again. I brought the butt end up, whistling steel for a Skug crown. He reached out to catch it in his tatter-wrapped fingers, but the barrel snapped past and clipped him in the skull. For a second he teetered. I caught the whiff of meaty breath and almost gagged. Bloody teeth showed through an oxygen mask. The creature staggered back and shook out the daze, grunting obscenities. I plugged his rat-bastard ass full of holes and he fell face first in a pool of blood.

  I looked to the others. Wren and Blest fought tooth and nail to repel a swarm of the mutants. In the flash bursts, I caught glimpses of blood and guts flying. Amidst animal roars and the rat-a-tat action of multiple fire, I plugged death into the backs of two freaks trying to take down Wren. They fell, hands reaching high over their shoulders.

  Blest turned, looking like a wounded, feral animal in the dimness. Noss was hunched behind him, making use of the cover of an arching mechnobot. His hands were too shaky to aim and his gunfire sprayed uselessly in the fray. They’d die soon. As would we all, if we didn’t—

  A sudden thought intruded on my mind. The thing had tried to catch me, not kill me—so, capture was their game—They were preparing to gather us for their stew pots or some deeper evil which chilled me even more.

  The mechanical monster that had come to life flashed fire from its twin guns sticking from its mouth. The thing scorched a mob of running figures. They disintegrated in a burst of legs, twirling arms and shredded masses of flesh. Into the carnage the mechno moved on its armored legs. It killed, trampled and sprayed fire. For whatever reasons I could not fathom. Powered by some mysterious force? My jaw hung on its hinges. Was the thing killing our enemies because it liked us? No. Perhaps it was an automated angel of mercy?

  One of the Skugs went racing back to the hangar. Others followed. A surcease?

  A group came loping back, how long later I don’t know, carrying long, tube-like weapons: RPGs? Barrel-blasters?

  A blast from one of the weapons rocked the mechnobot from the side. The metal thing toppled backward and smashed into another of the glass aquariums housing more of those eerie plants. My hope died.

  I gaped in wonder. Some bug-like creature emerged from the shattered ruin of the turret, spreading iridescent wings. A majestic creature, with at least a foot-long wingspan. It was some wondrous dragonfly, or moth, boasting wings of all colors of the spectrum. Had it been hiding in the armored shell all along? Perhaps it had been commanding the armored shell? That was impossible. It sprang aloft, made tentative motions of flight, as if disturbed from its ancient slumber.

  Without warning, another new, weird creature emerged from the ruin of the glass aquarium. Part dragon, or flying snake. An eelish lizard was as close
as I could peg it. It took to the air with wings of its own—alien, freakish, of a design a stroke of majesty. The creature was much larger than the dragonfly.

  The dragonfly and eel seemed to be allies, if such a word could be applied. Within hairs’ breadths they flew past each other, crisscrossing without causing each other injury.

  I marveled at the aerodynamics, but gazed in horror as the eel-thing swooped over our company. It settled nearby, wrapped its swordfish-like body around a skulking Skug and twisted its head off. The flower-shaped, petal-ringed mouth snatched at the mutant’s spinning head and gulped it down in midair, as if such were a juicy snack. The serpentish body convulsed. The lump moved like a blob under the iridescent skin as did a python digest fresh meat. Yet the greedy, fanged-toothed mouth ignored the rest of the carcass.

  Something, in the meantime, had affixed itself to Blest’s left leg. He shrieked. One of those narrow, striped, petal-like leaves from the nearby glass case. It had ripped through his suit. Cursing and moaning, Blest tried to pull it off with his fingers, but the effort only made it worse.

  “Agh!” he howled in anguish. “Get it off!”

  Follee and I tried, but we shied back at Blest’s next gruesome howl. Wren watched in horror as it curled tighter around Blest’s shin. The harder he tugged, the more it clutched, to the point that he grimaced in agony.

  “Don’t try to rip it off,” I cried.

  “Easier for you to say, Rusco,” Blest moaned. “It’s not suctioned to your leg!”

  “What the fuck is it?” Wren hissed.

  “Don’t know.” I scuttled away. Something similar tried to latch onto my own leg. I squinted in the gloom, as quivering plants stood on root ends and leaped to attack as do aggressive leeches spring from trees in monsoon season. Something warned me not to vaporize the plants as the Skugs had done. The poor bastards were now getting slaughtered in numbers! “Quick, get away from them!”

  Wren shuttled Blest hobbling along to safety, toward the smoking mechnobots.

  The dragonfly swooped and slashed at the Skugs with its razor-edged wings. Skug gunfire blasted up at it, but the rays seemed to glance off its wings or be absorbed by its body as a lightning rod channels electricity.

  I could not in any way figure out this scene. Perhaps nothing more terrifying than watching a primitive force unfold before your eyes. Magic and terror of the unknown rolled up in one—an alien species flying with prehistoric fervor feet above your head, doing the imaginable.

  Wren was uttering a warrior’s cry. She aimed a spray of death at a gang of Skugs creeping up on us from behind. I climbed the back of one of the intact mechnobots and dove into the broken window of the cabin, using it as a shelter to peg off raiders.

  The bullet-proof armor saved me from becoming a charred crust. Hero Rusco to the rescue. All the while the crazy dragonfly veered around us like some colorful kite out of a nightmare. The creature slashed down on the Skugs again with its razor wings, spraying blood and guts everywhere. A trail of carnage painted the ground in a way that would make a war vet weep. Nothing could kill the insect. It wheeled around, regrouped, slaughtering Skugs right, left, and center. What did the Skugs want with us? A sick feeling came over my gut, as a grisly thought surfaced again. Suddenly it all began to make sense. I gritted my teeth.

  “Die, you fucking mutants!” I peppered the approaching raiders with R4 fire, watching a bunch of them drop, their heads exploding in clouds of crimson. I kept them away from Wren and the others—for now.

  Whatever it was, the dragonfly didn’t like its habitat disturbed. But how had it survived? The place had floated derelict for centuries. No one had disturbed it. Why?

  I watched spellbound, aghast as the dragonfly creature tucked in its wings, plunged through the throat of a Skug and emerged out his back, somewhere at the same level as the kidney. The mutant split into two pieces in a glistening spray of guts. That Skug had been skulking up the feet of my perch to get at me.

  That butterfly, moth, bat, dragonfly—what the hell was it? I could only guess that whatever CEO Dezmin had done, he had delved too deep and the creatures had nuked this operation, turning it into a ghost station which nobody would touch for eons. Except maybe some desperate travelers like stupid old us. Question was, how could an obscure alien life live that long? I mean, this was some centuries ago, right? Like what were the chances? Had the plants spawned that dragonfly thing an age ago and it had gestated to life just now? Unlikely. A better question was, how had it powered that mechno?

  Or even better: what had it eaten during all those years? The hapless flesh of raiders? I shuddered. Maybe it didn’t need to eat? Maybe it could get its nourishment from anything? Even darkness.

  I shook my head. Conjectures like this meant jack shit now. Jet Rusco had stumbled onto one of the mysteries of the universe, an archaeological goldmine, and here he was blasting everything to shit.

  One of the Skugs had the sense to launch a flash bomb at the titanium base of my mechno tower. The metal hulk shook and shimmered with heat then began to topple. Red fire rose around me in the turret. “Shit!” I loosed a long wail of agony as the tower came crashing to the ground. Whump! The impact reverberated through every bone in my body, cracking my helmet, whooshing the wind out of my lungs. I crawled out of my hole, gasping, choking on the dry, tomb-like air. But it was at least breathable. Young Noss or somebody ran out, dragged me to safety behind the other mechnos. I wheezed out another gasp, looked up into a masked face with black hair behind the faceplate. “Not time to die yet,” the figure croaked.

  “Getting too old for this shit, Wren.” The com was staticky, but still legible.

  I felt myself slipping, my mind tumbling as I danced with a tribe of Skugs around an ancient fire… The Skugs who were once human. Skugs come to kill us now, saw off our heads and drink blood from our skulls.

  I snapped out of my daze. I punched through my faceplate and pulled away the glass fragments. The two alien creatures buzzed about the chamber, twin horrors from another dimension. The Skugs peppered them with fire: blaster burls, ion-fire, heat sinks. This time a flare caught the eel-lizard’s wing and ignited it. The creature gave a mournful hiss then tumbled out of the air like a crippled bomber, skidding to the metal grates. It flapped around like some demented squid out of water.

  I winced as a bunch of white-grey effluvia gushed from its side, along with a half dozen, strange, fist-sized bulbs, as if the thing were giving birth to a premature spawn, like a phoenix reverse birthing from a worm. I almost heaved. The dragonfly seemed to go berserk at the fall of its comrade. The winged horror dove over to the mangled, sizzling husk and careened into the killer Skugs with fury. A whistling shriek issued from its nostrils and it chopped and slayed with its razor-sharp wings.

  A hunched figure stepped out to study the unusual ruin. The figure ran curious eyes over the twitching carcass and the otherworldly bulbs. Follee? Was this for real? The man wasn’t dead. He’d been hiding somewhere; hadn’t even fired his weapon. In a trance Follee stooped to poke at the eel-like body.

  What was with the sod? The fool must be in shock. “Get the hell out of there!” I called.

  I saw Follee’s hand flick to his suit’s belt. Why? I had more important things to do than babysit the fuck. I hustled Blest along who was in a bad way with that thing wrapped around his leg. Follee lumbered after us with a crazy grin carved on his face, as if to touch a dead alien was some novelty. Loony, dumb, loser idiot.

  “This place is a robotic glass menagerie of death,” Wren rasped at me. “We’re better off taking our chances in the ships.”

  I gave a grimace of defeat, seeing the chaos around us.

  Follee croaked, “What about you and Blest? You can’t go out there in vacuum with screwed-up suits.”

  “We’ll use the extra ones back at the airlock.”

  “Think they’ll be any good after all this time?”

  “They’d better be.” I turned to Blest and wheezed out an apology.
“You were right, Blest. Bad idea coming in here.”

  “Thanks a fuck of a lot. Now I’ve got Mr. Friendly clinging to my leg.”

  “Could be worse. You could have Mr. Follee pawing at it. We’ll get it off,” I grunted at him.

  “Yeah, with what, Rusco? Your handy-dandy crowbar back on Bantam that has no warp drive?”

  “Shut up! Move.” I shouldered him ahead with a rough hand and he gave a howl of pain as the thing gripped his leg tighter. I shoved Follee along also who’d caught up with us.

  We hustled our way back through the corridors to that airlock adjoining the hangar. I smashed the glass housing the spare suits. We pulled down two black, durable sets of space gear at random and tested the breathing apparatus. The flow of cool air on my skin indicated they were operational. I gave a sigh of relief. Blest and I struggled into the sleek coveralls while Wren and Follee helped Blest into his, taking care not to get near the plant thing which seemed to ever tighten around his leg. We entered the airlock, crouched by the exit door with our guns on the ready, not knowing what to expect.

  We came charging out, blasting full out. Two Skug guards went down in bloody heaps, caught by surprise. Wren and Noss ran ahead to Bantam.