Gamora made a face. “That’s disgusting.”
The companions made a point of going to each coffin and ensuring that it was empty, levering open the doors to reveal its contents. In some there was simply a head or a torso, unable to move and come out to attack. These they destroyed, not knowing whether they might grow into something more dangerous. Quill couldn’t help but feel a bit guilty at demolishing the helpless automatons, but he consoled himself with the thought that they weren’t really alive. It wasn’t that he was squeamish, it was just that killing was something you couldn’t take back, and he avoided it as best he could.
While they were finishing off the last of the robots, Rocket had been examining the machinery connected to the coffins. He let out a yelp of excitement and rushed over to Quill.
“Finally, some good news!” he exclaimed. “There are enough parts here for me to fabricate what we need and repair the ship! As long as you have that system backup and we can scavenge a crystal array, we could be heading home within a week.”
“And if there is no crystal array?” Quill asked.
“Then I’ll grow a new one. That will take months, though—maybe three or four.”
“Still better than years,” Gamora said.
“Before we go, we have some unfinished business,” Drax said. “We need to find out who is controlling this ship. We can’t just take what we want and leave—otherwise it might just start all over again.”
Quill had a terrible mental image of the castle in flames, dark riders swarming across the Empire.
“You’re right, Drax. We have to finish what we’ve started. We can’t leave our friends with the threat of another army hanging over their heads.”
The rest nodded. They had all made friends on this planet, and were determined to do the right thing by them.
Rocket pointed to the spiraling staircase in the center of the room. Like the one outside, it was made of wood, as if it hadn’t been part of the ship’s original design.
“That looks like it goes up to the control room, and I’m certain that’s where we’ll find some answers,” he said. “I’m just glad that whoever—or whatever—is up there hasn’t emerged yet to blow us full of holes. Anyone who owns a ship like this must have a blaster pistol or two.”
“Maybe they are waiting for us to stick our heads up so they can blow them off,” Gamora said.
“Or maybe they are huddled in the corner sobbing because they know that we are coming for them,” Drax rumbled. “They should be scared, too. I am going to have words with them. With my fists, I mean.”
“Thanks for clarifying that, Drax,” Quill said, winking at Gamora. “I don’t see what choice we have. We’ll just have to be cautious, like always.”
Gamora coughed, almost choking as she tried not laugh.
“Okay, let’s go,” Quill said.
They ascended the stairs as stealthily as possible, trying to avoid alerting whatever it was that might be waiting for them.
Chapter 19
The control room was almost as big as Quill’s entire ship. It had a number of comfortable-looking benches centered around a massive holo projector, and what looked like a conference table surrounded by luxurious chairs. The whole of what Quill had mentally assigned as the front half was taken up by the bridge. This was no single-pilot job, but a serious piece of spacecraft that would require a crew of about a dozen. In a pinch, Quill supposed that one person could have piloted it alone by assigning the crew functions to the ship’s computer, but there was always something lost with that approach—an indefinable quality that meant the difference between a passable voyage and a good one. Quill much preferred his own ship and didn’t have to rely on anyone else to fly it, though he had to admit that he had grown used to having someone to spell him when he wanted a break. But that was a luxury, not a necessity, like it came close to being here.
As he would have expected, the bridge was centered on the looming presence of the command chair, which looked out over the other stations and had the best view of the massive screen that ran all the way around the circular room. Directly in front of the bridge was a bank of controls, but Quill knew that each of the chairs would have its own console, and that the command chair would be able to override them all. Right now the screen was set to transparent, so the travelers could look out in a 360-degree angle over the Forbidden Lands—not that there was much to see. At least the stars were beautiful, glowing brighter than any Quill had seen on planets where industry polluted the sky and dimmed the heavens’ light. The two moons were both full, the smaller one just starting to overlap the larger.
The others were still checking out the lounge area. Groot stood sentry, watching out for any further surprises, while Gamora was lying back with her feet up. Rocket and Drax were playing a game that looked a lot like foosball, but that had weird alien creatures instead of football players, and a ball that looked like a tetrahedral crystal that, every so often, would move in ways that defied the laws of physics. Quill kept walking, past the chairs and up to the front of the room. The fact that the whole wall was perfectly transparent gave the disconcerting impression that you could walk right over the edge and fall from the ship to the ground far below. Quill walked up to it, and nerved himself to run his hands over the surface. He felt a bit of vertigo as he reached out, half expecting his hand to go right through, but instead, felt only the cool hardness of the screen.
He turned to join his friends and jumped backwards in shock, his back coming up hard against the screen and scaring the life out of him when his eyes gave him the message that he was leaning back against empty air. He straightened, heart hammering in his chest from both nasty shocks, as he took in the sight in front of him. From the back, the command chair had looked empty but now he could see that it, alone of all the seats on the bridge, still had an occupant. The desiccated corpse was slouched in its seat, which was why its head hadn’t been visible from behind. It was perfectly preserved, and Quill deduced that there must be an air filtering system still running that removed all bacteria from the ship. However, the dry air had sucked all the moisture from the corpse, and it was mummified and shrunken.
The corpse’s shriveled condition made it hard to assess how big it would have been when it was alive, but Quill guessed it would have been about his height and build—but that was where the similarities ended. Its face was a mass of tentacles that hung down over its chest. Some had snapped off and lay on the ground at the base of the chair, but most were still intact. It had one huge eye in the middle of its forehead, which looked like it was all pupil with just a narrow band of red iris around the edge. What could be seen of its skin was a dull, greenish color, and it had no nose—just nostrils set flush into its face. Its arms ended in more tentacles, ranging from the thickness of a pencil to one as thick as Quill’s wrist.
The cause of death wasn’t hard to determine—a terrible wound to its stomach had spilled its intestines onto its lap, and its left hand still clutched them in a desperate attempt to hold them in. Quill had a mental image of the creature—no, the person—in the chair facing some calamity, struggling to pilot a ship that was supposed to have dozens of crew members on his own, all the while in terrible agony and feeling his life slipping away. Or, Quill supposed, he could have been some tyrannical captain whose oppressed crew had mutinied, forced him to land here, and then killed him before slipping away. But Quill liked to give everyone the benefit of the doubt—even long-dead aliens who had sent killer robots to destroy neighboring civilizations. Some people saw it as a character flaw; he saw it as a virtue. Whatever had happened, he or she—or it—was not a direct threat. Or so he hoped.
“Guys, I think you need to come over here,” he called out.
“Hang on, I’ve got Drax on the ropes,” Rocket yelled.
“Ropes? There are no ropes,” Drax said. “And I will be victorious.”
“I think you should come over here, now,” Quill said.
He could hear them grumbling, but they came anyway. They gathered around him and stared at the alien corpse.
“Wow, someone wasn’t messing around,” Rocket said. “They wanted him dead.”
“That’s a bad way to die,” Drax said. “He might have lingered for hours, even days, if shock and blood loss didn’t kill him. I know, I have seen it.”
Quill didn’t ask whether Drax had inflicted it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.
“He has been dead a very long time,” Gamora said. “So, who’s been sending the robots and stirring up the nomads, then?”
“Very good question,” Quill said. “It’s a bit hard to stop someone who is already dead.”
“Let’s see whether they left any clues,” Rocket said.
He waddled over to the computer and started punching buttons, muttering as he worked his way through the alien command hierarchy. As always, Quill could only admire the raccoonoid’s intuitive genius when it came to technology, and the way he played it like an instrument rather than an unfeeling machine. After a few minutes, Rocket cursed under his breath and kicked the base of the screen. It must have hurt, because he started dancing around and cursing, this time not so much under his breath. When he had calmed down he turned back to the others.
“It’s locked down pretty tight. But I think there’s a way around it, though it’s not pretty,” he said. “Gamora, can you give me a hand, please?”
“Sure, what would you like me to do?”
“Sorry, I meant can you give me one of those hands?” She looked at him blankly, and then he clarified. “Tentacles! Can you take your knife and cut off one of those hands with the tentacles and give it to me?”
“Oh, gross, Rocket!” Quill said. “Is that really necessary?
“Well, unless you have another way to break this encryption without using the handprint scanner, yes, it’s necessary.”
Wordlessly, Gamora pulled out her knife and began to saw through the dead pilot’s wrist. In a few seconds she had cut the tentacle free, marched over to Rocket, and slapped it down in his outstretched paw.
“Thanks, Gamora,” he said cheerfully. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
When she didn’t answer, he shrugged and returned to the computer system. He placed the hand, palm down, on a sensor and with a soft chiming the screen came to life.
“Now, let’s see what we can find out.” After a few minutes he let out a soft whistle, and punched in another command, the alien symbols becoming recognizable to them all. “Well, well, well.”
“What is it, Rocket?” Quill asked.
“Whoever he or she or it was, they weren’t stupid,” Rocket said. “What would you do if you were on the run and needed to lay low?”
“I don’t know, find somewhere where no one could find me, or would even come looking for me?”
“Exactly, and that’s exactly what it did. It found a planet that wasn’t even on the charts, with no technology to speak of. That meant that no one on the planet would have any idea it was here, and the chances of Nova Corps or some scouting parting stumbling across it would be extremely low,” Rocket said. “But do you want know the really clever part?”
“I am sure you are going to tell us,” Drax said.
Rocket was so excited that he ignored the barb.
“This pilot is a member of a very long-lived race—I’m talking millennia. It was going to hole up here for a long time until the heat died down, but it didn’t want the locals progressing too far and doing things like sending out radio signals or space probes. That might have attracted attention, and it wasn’t going to allow that.”
“So, what, every time a civilization got close to a certain point, it would engineer something to set them back a few centuries?” Gamora asked. “That’s not clever, that’s evil.”
“True, but it’s also very elegant. Quill, didn’t the Duke say their histories were littered with societies that got to a certain point and then mysteriously collapsed?”
“Yes, and we saw signs of it ourselves in the mountains,” Quill said.
“Well, here’s your culprit. Kind of. Indirectly.”
“What do you mean by that?” Quill asked.
“Something went wrong with its getaway and it was injured. Badly, as you can see,” Rocket said. “Its last action was to set the ship on course here and program in the instructions for the ship’s computer. Any civilization that got to a certain point was to be destabilized, but no technology beyond them was to be used in case it attracted attention. That’s why we saw better bows, armor, and weaponry, but no blast rifles or attack aircraft. Even the fiery swords were likely some sort of illusion, and the robots were disguised. If the Nova Corps had landed here, they wouldn’t have found anything in the history books that would have given it away.”
“That’s genius,” Quill said, simultaneously admiring the plan and being horrified by it.
“Yeah, shame it didn’t make it to the cryonic healing chamber before the wound killed it,” Rocket said. “So, its body has been sitting there for two-and-a-half thousand years while the computer has been following its final order. No malice, no hatred, just cold obedience.”
“Can you shut it down?” Quill asked.
“Already done. Their long watch is over, and now the planet’s evolutionary progress can resume its rightful course.”
“To think all this was caused by an intergalactic fugitive who never even saw the damage he was doing,” Gamora said.
“There is one piece of good news, though,” Rocket said. “Really good news.”
He grinned at them all, waiting for someone to ask.
“I am Groot?”
“Well, big guy, this particular fugitive had a very big bounty on its head. Very big. And it’s the kind that doesn’t expire, because its race is still around—maybe even some of the ones who were after him. So when we get back to civilization, we’re all going to pocket a nice big piece of change.”
“How big?” Gamora asked.
Rocket named a figure and their eyes widened.
“It looks like I’m going to Sin after all,” Rocket gloated. “And I plan on breaking the bank while I’m there. I’ll certainly have myself a decent stake to get started.”
“Wow,” Quill said. “So, I guess in the end, my little adventure served the greater good. You’re all welcome.”
“What?!” Gamora said. “How do you figure that?”
“Well, if we hadn’t been fleeing an angry father, we wouldn’t have stumbled into that anomaly, and we wouldn’t have come here,” Quill said. “And it’s good that we did. After all, we not only saved a whole planet, but made some good money while doing it.” He smiled smugly. “This is why I am the leader.”
In retrospect, Quill decided he should have waited to make sure they didn’t have anything to throw at him before he laid out those home truths. It took weeks for the tetrahedral-shaped mark between his eyes to fade.
Epilogue
Quill sat in his pilot’s chair, looking out at the glittering nebula. The computer told him that in fifteen minutes the anomaly would be in the correct alignment to take them back to known space in a fraction of the time it would take to find the right coordinates for a warp-drive jump. But right now, he was enjoying simply relaxing for the first time in what seemed like an eternity. All was well with his world. Rocket had scavenged enough parts from the alien ship to not only completely repair his ship, but to put it in the best shape it had been in since he had . . . borrowed it. They’d also collected the evidence they needed to claim the bounty, so soon his bank balance would be in the black for the first time in years. It was a good feeling not to be worrying about his ship breaking down, or how he would pay for the repairs if it did. But that was only
part of his sense of complete satisfaction.
There was a movement next to him as Gamora slid into the copilot’s chair.
“You look very happy, Quill. What are you thinking about?”
He stayed silent for a moment, trying to work out how to put it into words.
“There’s an old Earth song that says you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. It’s a cliché, but it’s true. Sometimes you don’t appreciate what you have until you no longer have it,” he said. “I didn’t realize quite how much I’d come to rely on you all until you all left me. It’s made me think about things—the way I act sometimes.”
“I think we all do things, and say things, we regret later,” Gamora said. “But it’s good that you are thinking about that sort of thing. Self-awareness is sign of growing up.”
“I don’t want to grow up,” Quill laughed. “I’m having far too much fun the way I am. But, I’m happy that we’re all back together again. I missed you guys.”
She smiled at him and then stared out the window.
“Do you think they will be okay?” she asked. “Ansari, the sisters, Karyn, and the Duke. All of them?”
Quill thought about all of the people they had left behind.
“I don’t know, Gamora,” he said. “There are no guarantees in life—not for anybody. But now they’ll be able to live the lives they were meant to live, with no interference. I guess that’s all you can really ask for in this life.”
“I guess so,” she said.
The computer beeped, and Quill looked down at the display.
“Looks like it’s time to go,” he said. “Ready for the next adventure?”
“That’s not the question. Now that we’re back together, is the next adventure ready for us?”
Quill grinned and hit the button. There was a lurch, and then the ship disappeared from real space, on its way to its next destination.
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