“Forward me what you found. I’ll take a look after I lose that ship on our tail.”
A smile tugged at her lips. “I know what you’re thinking. And the Kree will not like it.”
“Why? Because those poor activists never made it to the Kyln? They must’ve been left behind on Levet to die, unbeknownst to us. It’s tragic, you’re right, but what could we have done about it?”
“Very tragic.” She followed Quill in silence, glad to be back in the ship: Metal support beams recessed into the walls at her side, the ground under her feet was firm with the occasional bolt or crooked floor plate pressing into her soles. The mild smell of rust and sweat was a lot better than the swamp.
It didn’t look like Quill was planning to bring up what had happened with Groot. Gamora had caught enough on comms—and from Rocket’s ranting as he boarded—to have a rough idea of the events, though.
“Groot?” she prompted.
“Maybe it’s nothing,” Quill said immediately, so fast that he must’ve been waiting for the question. He didn’t face her as he talked.
Coward, Gamora thought, not unkindly.
“It’s not nothing,” she said. “Groot is too smart to fall for a booby trap twice. Especially immediately after it was pointed out to him. And he’s taking too long to recover. Same as last week, after that dustup with the Badoon.”
He didn’t respond. The door to the bridge slid open. Rocket came up from behind and burst past them, but Quill lingered in the doorway, turning to Gamora.
“Go…do your thing,” she said, the words she’d borrowed from Quill feeling alien on her tongue. “I’ll check on the prisoners and Groot.” Especially Groot, she thought.
Quill cracked his neck. “Time to pick a fight.”
WHAT’RE they doing?” Rocket bolted to the pilot’s seat, leaning over the screens to see what Drax and their new Kree friends had been up to. He tapped the sensor output with a clawed finger. “Ha! Scanning us. Trying to identify bio-signatures, I bet. Good luck with that, losers.”
“Do not encourage our enemies, Rocket.” Drax, sitting in the navigator’s seat, was shifting between possible courses projected in front of him.
“You want me to make a run for it, Quill?” Rocket asked. It had been ages since he’d had a good space chase. Well, days. In any case, he could use this opportunity to try out a new maneuver he’d come up with.
“Would there be any point?” Quill grabbed a ceiling cord to steady himself as he leaned over Rocket’s shoulder and studied the screens.
“Speed-wise, no.” The Guardians’ ship was fast. The Kree ship was faster. It was a Perennian A-TH2—nimble, swift, and sharp. It wasn’t much in the weapons department—a couple of lousy serin blasters, with only the dual-focus laser as an actual threat—but it was agile enough in a fight to land a dozen shots before it ever got hit itself. “Challenge-wise, though…”
“Slow us down. Let’s stick around. You’re in my seat, by the way.”
“You want me to pilot, I’m sitting in the pilot’s seat.” He flashed a sharp-toothed smile. “Want to make something of it, co-pilot?”
“My team, my ship, my seats, all I’m saying. Drax? Go help Gamora—I’ll take over.” A moment later, Quill slid into the vacated seat. “Oh, look. They tried to say hi again. Open her up.”
The projector between them sprang to life, the lower half fizzling amid the plastic fighter-pilot toys Quill had glued onto the dash. A blue Kree face glared at the both of them. “This is Lieutenant An-Kell, speaking from ship X-A Supremor. You are in Kree territory, Guardians.” The word dripped with skepticism.
“Oh, good, at least you know us,” Quill said. “I was getting a complex after what happened with Blondie.”
Rocket perked up. He’d suspected Quill would pull a “Blondie” after he suggested they slow down, but it might’ve been a “Joplin” instead, or he might even have wanted to try—gross—boring diplomacy without any kind of secret maneuvers, code words, or violence involved.
It wasn’t up to the ranks of pulling a “Jackson Five,” but still: This could get fun.
“You did not have permission to access Levet. State your business.”
“We were just passing by—we’re in Kree territory? Really?” He turned to Rocket. “Did you know that? Wow, I am so sorry, man. We’ll be right out of your hair.”
An-Kell let out an irritated sigh. “I’m scanning 19 life-forms on board, and you’ve suspiciously activated a bio-scrambler preventing us from identifying the signatures. Unless you can prove otherwise, we’ve determined you’re carrying our prisoners, in addition to entering a registered banishment planet without permission. We hereby arrest you—”
“Whoa, hold on now.” Quill leaned in. “Let’s say we were carrying prisoners. Hypothetically. Maybe we’d only drop them off at Kree-Pama like you should’ve done—since otherwise they would, you know, die. You want to explain why you half-assed your evacuation?”
“We don’t owe you an explanation.”
Rocket half-listened to the conversation. He was moments from positioning the ship correctly—beneath the X-A Supremor, a couple yards farther starboard, at just the right angle—but he’d need more time to do it without the Kree noticing anything funny.
Twenty seconds, he signaled, flashing his fingers by his side where only Quill could see.
“Let me guess, An-Kell—”
“Lieutenant An-Kell.”
“—the other day, your colleagues landed on Levet and put out an emergency alert, and anyone who didn’t hear it or didn’t make it to the designated meeting spots on time was out of luck. Your colleagues tripped over themselves to get out because the big bad space debris was coming—which, for the record, you probably could’ve stopped in the first damn place. Here’s what I’m scratching my head over, though: What are you doing here now? I thought you’d all stay safe and far away.”
An-Kell bristled. “We’re here to arrest you, Star-Lord.”
“Which is apparently more important,” Quill spat, “than sending a ship to evacuate the remaining prisoners? You could’ve been doing your actual job instead of having us pick up your leftovers! I mean, hypothetically!”
“We are not set up to transport prisoners,” An-Kell said stiffly.
Rocket gave a thumbs-up.
Quill’s eyes flicked over, but he didn’t give the go-ahead yet. “So to be clear: You’re arresting us for doing your job. Hypothetically.”
“We’re arresting you for carrying our prisoners and for entering a registered—”
Quill thumped back in his seat, disgusted. “Go for it,” he told Rocket.
“Pew.” Rocket hit the button.
Quill waved his hand through the projection. It fizzled out.
“Hit!” Rocket crowed as the blast connected smack-dab in the triangular area on the bottom of the Perennian’s forward wing. That was the thing about the Perennian line. For all their agility in battle, the ships were so narrow that their weak spots were close to the surface. And that agility wouldn’t do any good with a damaged equibrilator.
“All right, let’s zip it—” Rocket started. Then the ship jolted, slamming him back into his seat. “What the heck?”
Quill gaped. “Did they just—?”
“They just chained our fricking ship!” Rocket yelled. “Chain! What is this? Did we slip through time again? Is it three thousand years ago? A chain! A physical! Metal! Chain!”
“Can you—?”
“What do you think I’m trying to do?” He furiously tugged at the controls and tried to get a clear shot at either the Kree ship or the chains. One of the chains had half-wrapped around their primary blasters. If they fired, they’d be close to blowing up their own ship.
“The equibrilator hit made them spin too far overhead…I can’t—”
Without their equibrilator, the Kree couldn’t dodge or navigate properly—but now, neither could the Guardians. Worse: Nothing was wrong with the Kree weapons. Even a patheti
c serin blast was a threat when you had to absorb a couple dozen of them.
And the first of those had already landed. Rocket buckled in before launching back at the controls. Maybe if he shut off the tertiary engines and double-timed the portside thrusters, the ship would tilt enough to slacken the chains and put the target back within reach…
“Stay on comms.” Quill sprinted off the bridge. “We’re going out there.”
3
DRAX would have preferred to guard the prisoners rather than leave the ship. That tall, purple one looked especially shifty. He had made sure to inform Gamora, however, and he trusted her impressive capacity for murder.
“Drax, tail end,” Quill instructed as they floated out beneath the ship. The red lights of his helmet glowed. “Stay out of sight. Groot, with me. We’re taking the wings.” He signaled—Groot did not have the benefit of a linked-up helmet—and pulled himself toward the wings, floating over.
Drax kicked off the side of the ship to propel himself toward the tail end. Overhead, a few lights blinked. Far to his left and right, the wings of the Guardians’ ship were sharply lit against the dark of space—they were high enough over Levet that the sun, which had been close to setting when they were on Levet’s surface, now struck their ship from below with relentless brightness.
Drax could not see the Kree ship that hovered above—their own ship blocked it from sight. Good. It meant the three of them were out of sight from the Kree, as well.
“We’re taking damage,” Rocket shouted over the comms. “Gam! Gamora! Engine room, now!”
The ship strained against the chains with every Kree blast. The metal links were stark white, almost glowing, the chain as thick as Drax’s wrist. Three or four were wrapped around the ship at different locations. Drax grabbed one, pulling himself to a stop. Even through his suit, the metal was hot to the touch—a result of time in the sun without the benefit of an atmosphere.
There was just enough slack to grab hold of the chain with both hands. His fingers wound into the links. He spun himself around in a slow somersault, letting his feet find the ship, and planted himself for leverage. He pulled.
He clenched his jaw.
He pulled harder.
The metal didn’t even move.
“Drax, any luck?” Quill asked.
He tried again, yanking the chain this way and that. He felt the ship shift under him. When he looked down, he saw two dents where he had planted his feet.
“I am not experiencing luck,” he admitted darkly.
“Must be some Kree alloy. The cutter and my element blaster aren’t doing much, either.”
Drax had been about to take his own cutter from his belt, but he abandoned that plan. He narrowed his eyes at the chain before him. It was wound around the ship twice, the lines criss-crossing. As hard as he pulled, it gave him no slack, and the ship’s tail was too irregular to simply slide the chains off.
“Are you having fun picking your noses out there?” Rocket growled over comms. “I need my blasters, guys!”
“Rocket. Quill. I am going to break the ship.”
“What? Don’t break my ship!” Quill said.
“Don’t break the ship, you idiot!” Rocket agreed. “Negative! Don’t break the ship! What’s the matter with you?”
“If I break off this triangular object, I can slide off the chains.”
“Don’t—break—” Rocket snarled. “Actually, never mind. Break it. Have fun.”
“What? No!” Quill said. “My ship!”
“A stabilizer wing is easy to fix, Quill, and we need to move,” Rocket said. “Our shields won’t hold much longer. The Kree are taunting us, by the way. You want me to patch you in? They’re real smug.”
“Drax, I have an idea. Get close to their ship. Break the winches,” Quill said. “I’ll distract them. Groot will keep trying the chains.”
“Understood,” Drax said.
“Destroy those serin blasters while you’re at it,” Rocket added.
“Understood.”
“And their ugly faces!”
“Understood.”
“Groot is saying something, too,” Quill offered. “I think it’s ‘I am Groot.’”
Drax couldn’t see Groot or Quill from his position. He moved toward the edge of the ship, looking over for the first time. The Kree ship hovered overhead—sleek, narrow, smaller than the Guardians’. The sun cast the stark shadow of the Guardians’ ship across part of its hull.
Several lines of chain stood tautly between the two ships, spanning at least 40, 50 feet. A blob of mud hurtled upward, following the same path as the chains, splashing on the Kree ship a hair’s breadth from one of the blasters protruding from its hull.
Quill’s element gun, no doubt. It would be a sufficient distraction. Within seconds, Quill had changed modes, and a hail of ice rained up.
The nearest Kree weapon shifted position to focus on Quill.
Drax used the moment to pull himself over the edge of the Guardians’ ship. He hunched low against the hull, and leapt up. Twenty feet, fifteen, ten… He twisted in zero gravity, landing on the Kree ship in a crouch. He looked up to scan for Groot—there, working to loosen a chain on the wing—and Quill—there, firing another shot as his boot thrusters flared brightly.
Drax clambered across the Kree ship, finding handholds and pulling himself along, going straight for the nearest chain.
The Kree inside had detected him. A serin blaster twisted to take aim. Drax pressed close enough to the Kree hull that the blaster could not hit him without risking damage to their own ship.
“They stopped with the taunting,” Rocket informed him. “I think they’re coming out.”
There: The chain disappeared into a funnel-like opening in the hull, its controlling winch hidden inside. Drax made his way closer.
“Yoo-hoo,” Quill sang. “Focus on me, you big, blue babies. Let Drax work in peace.”
Drax aimed the cutter at the funnel, right where the chain exited. The metal bubbled and blackened, but did not budge. It did not matter. He only needed to weaken it. He pounded a fist against the ship. Again. Again. The metal dented, then cracked. Again. He laughed, feeling the structure weaken under his strikes.
He could make a hole large enough to climb inside and disable the winch—but it would take too long. Their ship would suffer heavy damage.
Drax waved to catch Groot’s attention, then pointed at the twisted metal.
As Groot made his way over, wooden hands and fingers already extending to reach inside the gap Drax had made, Drax surveyed the situation. Groot had worked one chain loose. Another two—the one on the tail end and the one around the ship’s body—remained. The Guardians’ ship’s blaster, which had been twisted aside by one chain, was free and aiming at the Kree ship. Nearby, Quill was keeping two suited-up Kree busy.
Make that one.
Make that—
What was he doing?
“Quill?” Drax asked. “I do not think this is the time for dancing.”
“They’re shooting at my boots!” Quill’s voice yelled into his ears.
Quill struggled to keep still as his one functional boot sent him veering left and right and up and down. He barely managed to keep the remaining Kree attacker at a distance with his element gun. “Wait, I can fix this. I just need to turn off my—”
His functioning boot thruster cut out.
The other sputtered. Flashed bright flame. Sputtered again.
The functional one sprang back to life, but weakly.
Quill spiraled and cartwheeled, spinning away from both ships. “Guys! A little help!”
“Remove your boot,” Drax instructed. “Use the functioning boot to propel back.”
“That’ll compromise my suit!”
“Most likely.”
“I’ll die!”
“Ah. Yes. I forgot how fragile humans are.”
“Half human!”
“Human enough,” Rocket pitched in. “Don’t make excuse
s.”
Drax grabbed hold of Groot and pushed off from the Kree ship. The winch came with them, pulling free from the damaged hull.
Once near the Guardians’ bridge, Drax released Groot, who latched onto a rim of the Guardians’ ship with one hand to hold himself steady. His other hand reached for Quill, vines stretching from his fingers.
Drax landed in a crouch on the hull outside the Guardians’ bridge. He looked up. Another Kree had exited the enemy ship, aiming a weapon at Groot. Eyes narrowing, Drax took a blade from his belt and flung it. It hit the Kree’s hand. The Kree jolted away, the gun slipping from his grip.
Drax was momentarily disappointed to have to miss out on the screams of his enemies. The vacuum of space had its drawbacks.
Air and blood flushed from the rip in the Kree’s glove. Within a moment, the Kree had slapped a patch on the tear, sealing himself back up.
By that time, Drax had launched himself at the Kree. He wanted his knife back.
Drax against a single Kree was not a fair fight.
Nor was it a long one.
“Drax!” Rocket and Quill yelled at the same time.
He looked up. Quill was whirling farther away; worse, Groot floated nearby, also untethered. Shards of wood drifted near the rim of the ship. His hand had splintered.
“Mind helping out?” Quill’s voice went higher.
“We’ve got all power diverted to shields,” Rocket said. “We fly, shields go down. With that d’ast Kree ship still attached, they could blow us to tiny bits from up close. They’re”—the Guardians’ ship trembled as another shot hit—“working on it already.”
“Groot loosened the chain on the wing,” Drax said. He left the unconscious Kree floating for his colleagues to retrieve and pushed himself toward the Guardians’ ship. “If I remove the stabilizer on the tail, we should be able to escape.”
“If you remove the stabilizer, we can’t steer ourselves close enough to Quill and Groot to grab ’em. We’d smush ’em trying.”
“Do not smush us!” Quill said. “That’s an order!”
Guardians of the Galaxy: Collect Them All Page 2