Starship Rogue series Box Set

by Chris Turner

  I winced as a new contingent of Melinar and Vendecki ships ignited and blinked out of existence. Long range fareon beams made mincemeat of the underpowered craft, firing at double strength.

  Our flagship rocked to gunfire, but Mong merely grunted. He knew that his shields, electro-juiced to the max and built for disaster, could dispel any threat. The rebel leader of the resistance, a large Melinarian cylindrical cone with wide brim and tapered stern, flared, its shields at capacity. A sudden red poof lit against the backdrop of stars and the ship disintegrated in a ruin of cinders and twisted metal.

  Mong’s men on the bridge howled in triumph.

  Mong forced me to watch that one-sided battle. The thousand ships he had assembled from lord knows where, all attacked in wide loops, evading fire or absorbing it with their electro-shielded armor, surrounding the relatively few dozen of remaining Melinarian craft. Nothing but wholesale slaughter. In his flagship Vulpin he oversaw the destruction, his muscled arms crossed on his barrel chest. As he barked orders to his crew, I saw a whole planet brought to its knees. Bombs fell on the cities of Jezuan and Narsilie—millions dead. Visuals showed green forests and parklands, tenements, roads, bridges, towers exploding in ruin. Suddenly I realized just why no one could defeat those armies, led by that madman. He knew his tactics, was meticulously informed, ruthless as an armored viper. No detail escaped his attention. Almost as if an inner angel whispered in his ear, or some inner sense guided him to victory, complemented with an unerring confidence in his invincibility, even when doom should be his reward, as the present glitch in detecting the jammers had demonstrated. Such sociopaths were beyond domination. Was it even possible to take down a monster as this? I knew without doubt, no one in this galaxy would have any peace or security until Mong was destroyed. Without him, his empire would crumble. His lieutenants did not have the nerve or the spark in them to keep such a bestial war machine alive—Balt, Hadruk, Verlioze, the lot. They were surely all evil, but not of the same stock as dear old Mong and his Machiavellian mind.

  The hours passed and were like blows to my senses. A ghastly blur of death toll and destruction. My aching hand was but insignificant compared to the losses suffered that day.

  Struggling shapes were at last brought to heel on the bridge and forced to their knees, to grovel before Mong.

  Hadruk, the security officer, announced in a triumphant tone that the resistance leaders were dead or being gathered up. “We tractored the remnants of their pitiful army aboard, lord. Caught them trying to escape our net.”

  “What a surprise,” said Mong. “Good work, Hadruk. What’s their story?”

  “Ambassador Zaud from the world, Melinar, meet Lord Mong, your new master,” he announced tonelessly. “And here is Lady Volia who was shuttled off to preserve the civil aristocracy. Some Baroness or Countess or some fool thing—queen or slut to the dead Prince Athrean.”

  While Zaud bowed his head in cowed defeat, Volia crouched. She was defiant, clad in her silver and red brocade. A limber woman with fiery, hazel eyes, red-gold hair spilling from under a diamond-encrusted tiara. A silver sickle was tattooed to her brow above an elegant face. That face, pinched with anguish and tear-stained, brought a pang of sadness to my heart.

  “You’ve killed our people, slaughtered my Prince and husband. What more do you want?”

  “Oh, everything, my lady,” said Mong.

  “You beast. You’ve destroyed—”

  “I know, destroyed your air defenses, knocked out your communications systems, laid waste to your beautiful planet.”

  She spat a gob in Mong’s face. “I curse you for the end of time!” she wailed.

  He wiped his cheek without haste. “You may do that if you wish, Lady Volia. Accomplishes nothing.”

  “We will not give up! We will never surrender to your crude domination and brutishness. Our people will fight in the streets, though they be broken. They will run guerrilla warfare in the cindered forests till the end of time. You will not last forever, Mong. Sooner or later you will fall!”

  “Where are your feckless allies now, Lady Volia?” Mong jeered. “The Vendecki? Who abandoned you at first sign of bloodshed?”

  She stiffened and a sullen scowl lit her strong features.

  “You can resist,” continued Mong, “but you will end up with buckets of blood on your hands. I urge you to speak to your surviving citizens. Advise them to surrender peacefully and these war tolls will stop. Maybe you can even spare some of the war hounds you have hiding in the hills painful deaths. We’ll ferret them out eventually.”

  She turned away, her glistening lips and mouth working. She lashed a contemptuous glance my way, as if I were one of Mong’s motley brood. I opened my mouth to protest, knowing the falseness of it and knowing any words would be useless in light of her despair. A wave of nausea and animosity blossomed in my chest, then remorse for her loss and her defenselessness. I realized the full weight of my impotence in this affair. A helplessness that shamed me, being as useless here as a trussed deer before hunters.

  “I will lay bare all your secrets, Lady Volia, like your puny jammer circuits. You will learn a new meaning of the word ‘invasion’.” Mong’s lips twisted in a sinister sneer. “Sift through the slave-prisoners, Balt. Bring me all their engineers. I want to know the secrets of this jamming technology. It may be a weapon I can use against other renegades like the Melinarians.”

  Balt croaked some words into the com.

  Mong went on, an explosive exclamation whistling through his teeth. “I have no time to waste on defiant females. You show a spark, Volia, that your husband didn’t, dead as he is in his metal coffin, but I think I will hand you over to my lieutenants. They will teach you a lesson in humility. My personal guards have been restless of late. Part of their training is to practice abstinence. Though they balk, it makes them stronger. The odd time I do throw them a bone, they light up like candles. Hadruk! See to it.”

  The security officer approached, nodding, grinning.

  Mong flourished. “Have Lady Volia taken to solitary. She will serve as a useful adjunct in the Temple of Light on Othwan.”

  Volia struggled but such efforts were useless in the hands of Mong’s guards. I surged forward, hurled my hard-muscled body at them, but brawny arms held me back. Fists smacked me down to the metal grates. Mong glanced my way, scoffing in passing amusement. “Rusco, you do have a chivalrous streak in you. Another weakness I must cure you of.” He sighed and dismissed me and the woman without a backward glance. Now that the bloody battle had been won, the Star Lord would land his warships at the capital city of Jezuan and secure his toehold, as he had so many other worlds across the galaxy before. Of the Vendecki, I had no clue as to their fate.

  “Set a course for Othwan,” Mong murmured. He had moved on to other matters, the testing of his amalgamator.

  Chapter 16

  Vulpin dropped out of hyperdrive and I looked out upon a green planet. A wide river flowed through a peaceful valley. An ordered colony, set straight out of a page from history—Old Earth? with its Oriental peaked roofs, red and white pigments, stucco and wood, set on the lush bank of the winding river? Rice paddies loomed farther back at the base of the hills from what I could see, dotted with workers in the fields, both men and women who clutched hoes and carried baskets.

  We banked low and settled on the wide tarmac at whose near end rose a complex control tower prickled with antennae. Several other Warhawks sat docked. A giant hangar loomed about a half mile away, likely harboring a fleet of warships of similar menace to Vulpin.

  We debarked and several figures met their leader on the landing ground. All wore curious helms of bronze and robes of various ornamental dress, reds, yellows and gold. He waved them off and strode on, beckoning his henchmen to take me and others from the ship, and what looked like several selected prisoners. Balt and Hadruk personally attended to the amalgamator, handling it with utmost care, under Mong’s critical, watchful eye.

  My step lande
d lighter here than on other worlds, so I assumed Othwan to be a smaller planet than the more earth-like worlds.

  We passed an armed gate and entered the colony, or whatever it might be, and strode past a towering bronze statue: of Mong with forbidding face and arms crossed on chest. We hustled down a main avenue of flawless asphalt flanked by transplanted palms and rare, ancient banyan trees then headed toward an edifice with a red-tiled roof of many dips and valleys mounted with turrets and spires.

  I blinked under the warm sunlight, not used to the stark dissonance cooped up in starships and space stations, to this ordered greenery of an unexpected oasis.

  What was this idyllic place? It seemed incongruous considering Mong’s brutish character. Could it be a haven of his?

  Mong seemed to read my mind. He turned his heavy smile of amusement on me. “Not what you expected, eh, Jet Rusco? This is the only settlement on this planet. I discovered it years ago, wild and pristine. Perhaps you’ll revise your opinion of me. Every man can have his many faces, and alter ego—mine is one of the aesthete.”

  I grunted and shrugged. I had no use for scum mass murderers like Mong.

  Othwan then, was a private planet he had made his own. An oasis amongst the stars. Lush forest on low-domed hills of green firs mixed with ancient yellow and rust-colored banyans, sheltering a temple community nestled along the banks of a slow-moving river. Odd and surreal. A haven too bucolic for warmaster Mong.

  We passed some rock-strewn gardens with fountains, trickling rivulets of water purling through a maze of exotic plants and flowers: cacti, succulents, azaleas, daffodils, bergamots, a myriad of unnameable wildflowers in yellows, reds, oranges, blues and whites. Several pagodas lurked off to the side, decorated in orange and white plaster and wood with eastern motifs patterned after Old Earth architecture. A quiet, hushed atmosphere ran among the trimmed lawns and the manicured bushes. Monkish figures, dressed in violet robes, some trimmed in brown, others in white, moved in respectful gaits. Some from building to building, carrying supplies, foodstuffs, or what looked like prayer books. All tuned to order and perfection, much like Mong’s military mind. Though I struggled, given the man’s barbaric proclivity, to comprehend how he had the aesthetic impulse to mastermind such a complex.

  We came upon another open iron gate, straddled by large sculpted heads, mean-looking, eighteen feet tall, staring down at us from the corners of what appeared to be a grand temple. Not Mong’s face, these heads, but some related figure, possibly an avatar, with a look of rapture in his big, bulging eyes.

  The temple, raised on low pillars, proved an awesome sight indeed. The mere gravity of it was enough to instill awe in the casual spectator. Perhaps a hundred and twenty feet high, speckled with stained-glass windows. The massive double doors were open. Mong marched up the steps and ushered me inside, as if I were an honored guest. I blinked, stared at him in cold contempt. I inquired about Blest but he ignored me.

  The peaked ceiling was eighty feet high, carved and paneled in what looked like rosewood. Pale light shone from both clear and stained-glass windows high above. White marble floors led across a great open space—an auditorium, I guessed, to a raised altar. Cushions for some audience to kneel or sit on and listen to discourse, ranged in piles to the sides. The massive stone altar near the back wall of the temple stood flanked by square columns rising high to support the peaked roof.

  Mong strode in with authority. I took reluctant steps after him, that or suffer the painful jabs of his guards.

  A fresh balmy air blew from artificial air circulators. Palm trees grew inside, along with other potted plants sporting green and yellow leaves. All in all, a pleasant environment, but the reek of depravity hung heavy. I could taste it, smell it, feel it in my bones, as I paused to absorb it all.

  “How do you like my victory shrine?” Mong inquired with a leer.

  I could only shrug. I saw men and women coming in through the door to bow before the altar, monks or nuns or some mindless worshipers.

  “Don’t look so surprised, Rusco. These residents are just showing their respect and allegiance to the new order—the Power of the Light of Ages. As custom dictates, they obey without question. In fact, it is customary for all visitors to bow before the great altar. I don’t recall you having genuflected yet.” He lanced a meaningful glance my way.

  I stood there, stone-faced.

  “Bow,” he said in a cold voice.

  I licked my lips. Coinciding with my better judgment, I gave a slight gesture of head, hating every moment of it.

  “Very good, Rusco. A grudging bow is better than none at all. Acceptable at this juncture, but in need of improvement. Ritualistic prayers and acts of devotion go on here daily in assurance of a better future.”

  “What is that exactly?” I growled.

  “A unified universe governed with strength, peace and order.”

  I snorted. “Under your rule.”

  “Of course—under who else’s rule? Strength must be wielded by the most capable man.”

  I had to admire Mong for his supreme arrogance. Not a shred of doubt in that feverish brain of his with its vision of manifest destiny. Lunacy at its most depraved. Insatiably cruel, but a mathematical beauty lay in its simplicity. I shook my head. Shut your mind off, Rusco, you don’t want to get brainwashed like these others.

  I looked above and saw alabaster statues raised on high amongst the columns flanking the altar—half man, half demigod with wings spread wide. Angels of doom? Avatars of destiny? They all had R6s clutched in enlarged hands and maniacal grins carved on angel faces. I shuddered. The rifles had barrels large as bassoons.

  Mong nudged me forward. I had to wipe my eyes to ensure I wasn’t hallucinating.

  Two glass tanks flanked the altar, each with a human male floating suspended in pale greenish liquid. Their eyes stared out from behind the glass, as if they were alive.

  “What the fuck are those?” I croaked.

  “Watch your language, Rusco. This is a hallowed place. Those tanks are the wave of the future. I’ve been collecting them, like curios and scientific curiosities. They are like nothing else in this universe! Strokes of genius from a dead race like no other. Once I discover how to harness their power, I’ll become supreme ruler of these jaded worlds while you and other dissidents will go to feed a nation.”

  “I have no doubt about your vision, Mong, and yet, I’m glad to know I will serve the empire in some small way.”

  He huffed at my sarcasm and breathed in a heady sigh. “Those two tanks I discovered in a remote, abandoned mine station, a Mentera factory, if you will, on Perseus. A rare find.”

  “No doubt.”

  “The grim, vacant-eyed fellow to the left is the Lord of Evenness. He defied me at Jaro. The one on the right is Vanxus, a skulking rogue if there ever was one. The blackguard betrayed me at the battle of Brog. Now the two are sacrifices to the Temple of Light.”

  I moved closer to study the victims and saw Vanxus’s lips move in a small curl as a fish might blow bubbles. I recoiled. The blond hair hung suspended and moved with the imperceptible currents in the pale green liquid.

  “Are they alive?” I asked in morbid wonder.

  “In a way, but perhaps it is better to be dead than grace the waters of the Mentera tanks.”

  It became clearer to me now Mong’s infatuation with the alien tech. These fucks worshiped the technology of the tanks. Maybe they worshiped the whole dead race of the Mentera. I’d heard of them. Mong and his crew must be one of these old Mentera cults still floating around the universe in fly-infested corners…which explained his obsessive fascination with relics, memorabilia and acquisitions of amalgamators.

  I stepped back to stop from reeling. He had made some ghastly shrine out of these pickled occupants in the tanks. The dazed cultists wandering about this temple worshiped them on their fancy daises near the altar like statues of Zeus, while their high priest, the mighty Mong, fed on the living within and became the all-powerful sorcer
er. It made twisted sense. In a skewed, monkey-brained world. My head ached.

  “Sorry to bust in on your parade, Mong, but what about my hand? Am I supposed to walk around with a bird’s claw for the rest of my life? It’s throbbing like a banshee. Some regen would be helpful. That or a basic medic.”

  He waved a palm. “Don’t sweat it, Jet. A minor wound, some small inconvenience in the overall order of the things. Distractions as these are fodder for disciplining an aspiring mind. Makes a man worthier to rise above a modicum of pain. You seem a bit squeamish about pain. I had my man Balt go through a heavy rigor on his journey to lieutenant-dom. Now he could care less if his balls were on fire.”

  “Very good to know. I’ll remember that next time I’m applying for position of lieutenant.”

  “Good rejoinder, Rusco. I like your quick mind. But your creeping cynicism, I don’t like. Speaking of which, seems you got your other hand back. Pity I didn’t blow the other one off back on Trellian. It would have had me devising more creative tortures than bent fingers to convince you to reveal the location of my amalgamator. But I have better plans for you. As much as you’ve sabotaged my plans, I’ve taken a shine to you. That last scheme you pulled off on Belisar One was a bit of genius. Oh, don’t think I didn’t know about your part in orchestrating poor Captain Baer’s demise. I was just fucking with you earlier, drawing you out, seeing what you knew, hoping you’d let something slip about my amalgamator. And you did. I see potential in your hustling and roguish mind that may serve my ends quite well—as much as I’d like to see your hide roasted and blown into a thousand fragments. I’d take as much pleasure in personally torturing you myself.”

  Mong’s true colors shining again. I knew his aesthetic side was too good to be true.