Imperatrix of the Galaxy

by Tristan Vick

  Jegra grinned sardonically. “I think not.”

  “Actually,” Ishtar sneered, “you don’t really have a choice in the matter.”

  “Oh, there’s always a choice.” Jegra reached over and grabbed Tamoran by his collar and reeled him in to her. Holding his head in a deathlike grip, ready to snap his neck at the slightest misstep, she slowly backed away from the group.

  The security personnel all raised their blasters again. This prompted Novac Tamoran to finally speak up.

  “Hold your fire!” he wheezed. “There’s no need for senseless violence.”

  “And here I thought you couldn’t be reasoned with, Tamoran,” Jegra said. She then shoved Tamoran into Ishtar, lunged across the room, and caught a fleeing Dakroth by his wrist. She then flung him into the group of guards, toppling them over like bowling pins.

  Ishtar, jumping into action, retrieved a flash grenade from her belt and threw it at Jegra. The device exploded just next to Jegra’s face.

  Disoriented and blinded by the blast, Jegra stumbled over to the wall. Leaning against the cold metal plating, she felt her way toward the exit when out of the bleariness, the stiff muzzle of a blaster pressed against her forehead.

  “That’s far enough, Queen of Thessalonica!” Tamoran barked angrily. Waving the gun, he gestured to her to return to the center of the room. She complied.

  “You can’t blame a girl for trying,” Jegra said.

  “Bind her,” Tamoran said, looking at Ishtar.

  Ishtar shot him a hard look but he ignored it.

  “There’ll be time for your fun another day. For now, secure the prisoner.”

  She grumbled as she fetched the magnetic shackles, the same shackles that Jegra had worn when she was first abducted by aliens and sold to the Intergalactic Gladiatorial Syndicate.

  Jegra held out her wrists for Ishtar to shackle her, but the magnetic binders simply slipped through Jegra’s arms.

  “What’s this?” Ishtar gasped.

  Jegra grinned. “It’s called being one step ahead, sweetheart.”

  Just then, the empress’s ship, along with the transmitted facsimile of her, disappeared. At the other end of the deck, a pile of cargo containers phased away to reveal Jegra’s real ship. Safely inside the cockpit, she had already initiated the takeoff protocols.

  “But how?” Dakroth asked.

  “When the flash grenade went off,” Tamoran said. “She must have evaded our detection.”

  Ishtar threw the shackles onto the deck and roared out in anger. She glared at Jegra, who looked at her from the cockpit of her shuttle and shot her a mocking wink.

  The vessel’s turbines whined to full throttle and Jegra’s ship rose off the flight deck. Turning the ship about, she brought its nose in line with the hangar doors.

  “Wait!” Dakroth cried out, raising a hand. “You can’t just leave me here.”

  “I’m sorry, but I thought you said we were separated,” Jegra replied through the ship’s comm. Her voice echoed in the shuttle bay as though addressing an anxious crowd.

  “There’s no escaping,” Ishtar Bantu hollered above the whine of the shuttle’s turbines. She jutted a finger out toward the shuttle bay doors, which were sealed shut.

  Jegra hit the comm and broadcast wide. “Ladies, if you’d be so kind.”

  A sudden explosion blasted right through the shuttle bay doors, opening up a giant, gaping hole. Novac Tamoran, Ishtar Bantu, and Dakroth all flew back from the force of the blast and tumbled to the unforgiving metal floor. Then, as atmosphere began to vent, they scrambled to grab onto something latched down. A few of Tamoran’s thugs were sucked out into the vacuum of space.

  Once the shuttle bay doors’ energy barrier came online and the atmosphere stabilized, Ishtar Bantu was the first to get back onto her feet and she whipped out a pistol. Firing a flurry of shots at Jegra’s shuttle as it made its escape proved futile. The small blaster didn’t even singe the paint of the glossy white ship. Nonetheless, she continued pulling the trigger until the blaster overheated and automatically shut off, steam rising from its muzzle.

  Novac Tamoran turned his head sharply toward Dakroth and scowled. “You do realize that if she escapes you’ll have lost your only leverage. Then all bets are off.”

  Dakroth grinned. “I underestimated you, Tamoran. You are as ruthless as I am.” Raising a red-tipped glowing finger, Dakroth took careful aim at the fleeing shuttle, which had already safely exited the ship’s hull and was making ready to break away from Tamoran’s freighter. As the charge grew bright pink with a buildup of plasma energy, Dakroth let go and launched the bolt of energy. It streaked out of the ship and impacted Jegra’s shuttle.

  There was a minor explosion and the shuttle jolted violently to the side as the right engine blew out. Spinning off into space, a tail of smoke coiled around Jegra’s shuttle as it tumbled away into deep space.

  Dakroth began a second charge. His long, silvery hair whipped around in the breeze of the coolant leak somewhere overhead, and he stepped up to the cusp of the gaping hole and looked out into space at the hapless shuttle. “A pity it has to end like this, my dear,” he said in a hushed tone.

  Inside the shuttle, Jegra tried to get on the comm and send out a mayday, but the explosion had killed that system, too. The thrusters were also shot, and she couldn’t get the ship under control.

  Jegra slammed her fists down on the console in frustration and screamed.

  Dakroth steadied his hand and grinned. “Goodbye, my luv,” he whispered, and then fired off a second blast.

  This time it was a direct hit. The shuttle sparked and flamed as the laser blast cut through its hull.

  Back inside the cockpit, Jegra watched as half of the back of the ship tore away and flew off into space. Her hair violently whipped about as the oxygen was sucked out and she gripped her chair tightly, thinking this might be the end.

  [*Hull breach detected,*] the computer voice said. [*Initializing emergency shields.*] Immediately, a blue veil spread like liquid glass across the gaping opening at the back of the ship and the atmosphere inside the shuttle returned to normal.

  Jegra sighed in relief that she’d narrowly avoided getting sucked into the infinite blackness. Just then, a flap to a cubby in the mid-section of the ship rattled and fell open. She looked over to find golden light pouring from the opening. Surprised by the unexpected visitor, Jegra watched the baby space squid slide out from his cozy sleeping area.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” she said in a chastising yet affectionate manner. Getting up and rushing over to the squid, she quickly took the creature’s glowing body in her arms and cradled him like her own infant. Without warning, another blast hit the ship and Jegra screamed out as a field of debris exploded all around her. For some reason, however, it all seemed to slow incrementally until the motion had completely ceased. She was able to move, but everything around her seemed as though it were frozen in time.

  That’s when she noticed something even more peculiar. All of space seemed to be folding in all around her. Flowing into a central point, like the lip of a waterfall streaming away into an abyss, the closer you approached. And, at the center of this attraction, was little squidy, La’Garren. He was glowing so bright that he looked like a roman candle lit in the middle of a vast, dark void. Fearsome though it was, his light did not burn her.

  Soon he was glowing so hot that she feared he’d explode. Jegra reached out to touch him, and just as her fingers brushed one of his tentacles, there was a bright flash of light.

  Jegra opened her eyes to find herself in the middle of a freefall, plummeting toward an unknown planet. A green and gray sky stretched all around her as bits and pieces of flaming debris went streaking by at a forty-five-degree angle toward the drab rocky surface below.

  She squinted against the force of cool air and searched for the baby squid, but couldn’t find him. She cut through thin wisps of cirrus clouds and, after a whirling freefall, finally managed to stabilize he
rself. Looking down, she saw the jagged rock formations rising up fast to meet her and clenched her jaw.

  This is gonna hurt, she thought to herself, bracing for impact. It was going to be a rough landing.

  Jegra tightened into a ball, gripping her knees, and closed her eyes. From a distance, there was a great clap of thunder. But it wasn’t thunder.

  The impact of her crash was so fierce it kicked up a massive cloud and an explosion of rock and earth that sounded as though a bunker penetrator bomb had gone off. As the dust dissipated, Jegra lay at the center of a gigantic crater, approximately twenty feet deep and sixty feet around. She stared up at the muted green sky. In the distance, a bird, or birdlike creature, screeched like a roving hawk and Jegra blinked.

  7

  Commander Blackstar and Danica Valencia watched helplessly as the flash of radiant light and energy engulfed Jegra’s shuttle. Throttling their thrusters to full, they raced toward her position in a desperate rescue attempt.

  “What the hell was that?” Lianica said, shielding her eyes with her gloved hand. When she looked again, the ship, along with the strange light anomaly, was gone. It had vanished along with all the surrounding debris, and the only thing remaining was an empty pocket of space.

  “I’m not getting any readings,” Danica said, her voice fluxing with panic. “No life signs. No ship responder. Nothing.”

  Lianica brought her split-wing fighter up alongside Danica and looked out of the canopy to find Danica gazing back at her with a dismayed look. Bringing her attention back to her scanner readouts, she studied the display, looking for a clue as to what had just happened. But there wasn’t anything in the database she could identify. At least, not in the known realm of physics. The anomaly was just that…an anomaly. “It’s as if they simply—”

  A fiery bolt of pink energy scorched Lianica’s bow and she pulled hard to starboard, then brought the ship around to see Lord Dakroth standing at the edge of a sparking bulkhead, framed in the fractured opening where their missiles had blasted through, aiming a hot, glowing pink finger at her.

  The escaping atmosphere from inside the ship whipped Dakroth’s hair wildly as he stood poised, his finger slowly tracking the trajectory of the fighter. A subtle grin formed on Dakroth’s lips and she imagined she could almost see him mouth the word, “Farewell.”

  A roaring scream filled the comm and Lianica snapped her head around just in time to see Danica’s fighter streak by at a reckless speed, all blasters firing on the pirate vessel.

  “Pull back, Dani!” Lianica shouted. “You’re closing in too fast. You’re not gonna be able to pull out in time!” But her warning was drowned out by the primal scream blaring over the comm.

  Thrusters burning hot, Danica plowed her way through the opening of the pirate ship and crashed her vessel onto the deck of the freighter in an attempt to take Dakroth out kamikaze style. Sparks erupted from the collision as metal scraped metal and the small, split-wing fighter hit the deck with a hard screech and scraped across the hangar floor. A trail of flaming sparks shot up behind the vessel as it gouged the hangar deck with its reinforced korridium wings.

  Dakroth leapt out of the way of the fighter and rolled to a stop, watching it crash into the aft wall of the hangar deck. He was busy pushing himself up off the floor when he caught the pirate king, Novac Tamoran, and the double-dealing Ishtar Bantu, exiting the hangar with haste. Almost as soon as they disappeared out the sliding doors, a massive section of the bulkhead crashed down from above, sealing off the entrance, and blocking off any potential escape route. Dakroth was trapped on the hangar deck.

  Just then, a panel flew off from the wrecked fighter and clanged against the floor, rattling to a halt when a violet skinned beauty, her flight suit in tatters, landed on top of it.

  Danica crouched beneath the battered and flaming hull of her fighter and honed in on Dakroth. Her eyes were filled with a rage Dakroth recognized all too well. A rage he’d seen a thousand times in the faces of his countless victims. The rage of a someone who’d witnessed a cherished loved one cut down before them. A face with the desire for vengeance etched upon every angry crease in its brow.

  “Dakroth!” Danica shouted across the hangar, her eyes burning with rage as they locked onto him like heat-seeking missiles.

  He raised his hands, giving a notably mendacious apology, and then cautiously backed away. With the doors to the hangar entrance clamped shut and blocked by debris, Dakroth raised his finger and blasted a hole in the wall next to him. Nodding at Danica, as if to bid her adieu, he quickly dashed through the smoldering exit and disappeared into a thick haze of dark gray smoke.

  Danica ran toward the exit but was tossed into the air by a sudden explosion. More paneling came down, a massive sheet of korridium blocked the hole and prevented her from following after the emperor. She slammed a fist onto it and screamed, “Coward!” Banging her fists against the plating, she screamed from frustration and rage.

  Her voice raw from all her screaming, Danica’s vocal protest faded into sobs and she collapsed to her knees with an overwhelming sense of defeat. Resting her head against the cold surface of the metal plate, she took a deep breath and exhaled again, letting out the last of her pent-up rage.

  Numb from the shock of losing Jegra, and exhausted from the adrenaline spike that was now quickly fading, she slid back against the metal sheet and slumped to the ground. Staring despondently out across the burning hangar deck, she replayed the terrible incident in her mind, each time with the same conclusion: Jegra was gone.

  Another explosion sounded in the bowels of the ship and the artificial grav-generators gave out. Danica felt herself become weightless and slowly float into the air. Feet rising off the ground, she began to tilt backward, as though she were doing a slow-motion backflip, and summersaulted toward the ragged hull breach in the side of the ship.

  Caught up in the current of escaping gases, she was pulled toward the gaping hole, unable to slow herself. Drifting past a broken pipe, she reached out and tried to take hold, but she was already passing too quickly and her fingers merely slipped away from the pipe as she was dragged out of reach.

  Without anything else to latch on to, she looked up in time to see the breach looming above her like a giant yawning mouth. Passing through, she was swallowed up by the breach and, her body spinning out of control, she was spat into the vacuum of outer space.

  Ice crystals began to form on her face from the absolute cold, their crystalline trails tracing the bulging veins that ran across her marbling skin. She exhaled everything in her lungs, as the force of the depressurization threatened to burst them, and fought off the terrible urge to inhale.

  A vast, glittering sky opened up before her and Danica watched with a deep sense of awe as she waited to lose consciousness. Her vision began to blur when, all of a sudden, a small fighter pulled up alongside her. The fighter’s thrusters spurted as it moved into position above her, and just before she blacked out, she saw the canopy open.

  Commander Lianica Blackstar, wearing her flight spacesuit, stood up and extended a hand toward Danica. Her fingers brushed Danica’s fingers in a close pass, but she missed. Hopping up onto the edge of her craft, one hand gripping the edge of the canopy, she tried again. This time her hand clutched Danica’s with full force and she pulled her back down into the ship.

  Relieved, Lianica took a deep breath and exhaled again, trying to refocus her mind on the task at hand. Stowing Danica’s unconscious body in the copilot’s seat, she strapped her in and quickly closed the canopy.

  Once the cockpit re-pressurized, Lianica took off her helmet and let out a pent-up sigh. As a shadow crawled across her cockpit, blotting out the starry sky above her, she looked up in time to see Novac Tamoran’s vessel pulling away, aft thruster flaring bright as the ship accelerated away from her.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Lianica snarled under her breath. She flipped up the trigger guard on her joystick and activated the hyper-sonic, mag-guided Viper missiles
.

  With a press of the red button, two angry Viper missiles launched off the tips of her wings and sped toward Tamoran’s ship. Their after burn looked like a couple of volcanic flares streaking through the night sky as they honed in on the bulky freighter. But before the warheads could hit their mark, three massive ships jumped into the system–three Dagon Imperial battlecruisers.

  The first cruiser absorbed the blast of the two missiles, their detonations flaring bright yellow against the vessel’s hull and then dissipating just as swiftly.

  Barely a scorch mark was left on the korridium alloy plating of the Dagon battlecruiser. Even so, the powerful blast certainly caught their attention. Before Lianica knew it, the battlecruiser’s side-mounted disruptor cannons swiveled around and targeted her small, split-wing fighter.

  “Oh, shit,” Lianica yelled, pulling back on the throttle and hitting full reverse on all thrusters.

  The battlecruiser’s cannons erupted with red plasma bolts that streaked across the black void and lit up the surrounding ships with a menacing red glow. The first few shots missed, but the cannons quickly auto-corrected. With a brilliant explosion, the disruptor blast tore through her wing and sent the small fighter into a whirling tailspin.

  She fought to regain control and, finally, corrected the zero-G rotation. Just then, another blast bombarded her forward shielding and, subsequently, knocked out all main power. One more hit and she’d be a goner.

  Lianica looked up to see the battlecruiser come full about, all cannons trained on her. She gulped hard, realizing this might be the end of the line for her and Danica.

  She flinched when a blinding flash of silver light engulfed her ship. To her surprise, however, it wasn’t an attack. It was the Shard. The streamlined vessel manifested directly in front of her, its silver hull deflecting the battlecruiser’s cannon blasts like a mirror redirecting a laser. Disruptor fire glanced off its reflective hull in every direction and lit up the dark like a laser-light show.