Galen's Way: A Starquest 4th Age Adventure

by Richard Paolinelli

  “We’ll get you a new paint job to make it all better,” Galen cracked.

  “Oooh, something red this time,” she cooed. “Or a nice hot pink!”

  Galen shook his head. If the impact had been serious, several alarms would be sounding right now. He suspected he’d find a nice gouge in the paint, but that would be the extent of the damage; his ship’s hide was reinforced to take much harder hits than that.

  Picking his way through the rest of the field, he managed to maneuver the Tempest enough to not even come close to any more impacts. Once or twice, he spotted a sensor array attached to one of the asteroids. He gave a wide berth to what looked like a mine hitching a ride on one of the smaller rocks.

  He heaved a sigh of relief, which almost sounded explosive in the quiet of the command deck, when his ship finally cleared the field and began its descent into the thick atmosphere. They were on the opposite side, currently the dayside, of the planet from Vedastus’ keep. He risked the Nav sensors in the atmosphere, trusting Vedastus would never consider any ship getting past his line of defense. He needed the Navs on this world. Finding the horizon between the dark sky and the dark water with hazy clouds adding to the visual confusion was a task he’d rather not undertake.

  Dropping down to an altitude barely a thousand feet above the waves, he guided the Tempest toward the terminator. With luck, he’d land at the keep late in the Nammunian night and be able to enter it before Vedastus became aware that he’d been invaded.

  * * * * *

  A heavy rain was falling on the keep when the Tempest arrived. That suited Galen just fine. He had Cassandra run a scan while he brought the ship down on a flat ledge below the keep’s occupied landing pad. He recognized the bug-shaped outline of Vedastus’ ship. His quarry was definitely at home.

  “I read one life sign within the entire structure, Galen,” Cassandra reported as the Tempest’s landing struts settled onto the ledge. That brought Galen up short.

  “Just one, Cass? Are you certain?”

  “Quite,” she replied. “And I already ran the scan twice. There is only one living being up there. The DNA scanner confirms it’s Vedastus. Nothing else showed up and I was able to scan the entire planet before we arrived here.”

  “So, either he’s holding her somewhere else,” Galen muttered. “Or…”

  “He’s already killed her and we’re out twenty million aurox bars,” Cassandra finished.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Galen said as he got out of the pilot’s seat. “If she’s dead, he’s dead before the next sunrise. If she’s being held somewhere else, he’ll die a little slower until he tells me where to find her.”

  He slipped on his long coat, checked the charge on his blaster before holstering it, and slipped his sabre into the special pocket sewn into the coat’s interior for it. The reader was secured in another pocket. He placed the communication bud into his right ear then flipped the hood over his head to fend off the downpour outside as he stepped up to the hatch. Cassandra had already lowered the ramp as he punched the code to open the hatch.

  “I’ll call you if I need you,” he said as he stepped out into the rainy night.

  “Be careful,” Cassandra replied, and he thought he heard a hint of worry in her tone. He smiled slightly but said nothing as he tapped the control to shut the hatch and walked down the ramp.

  “Hot pink,” he said softly and chuckled at the thought of his ship painted in that gaudy color as he checked the damage from the earlier impact. It wouldn’t take much time or effort to repaint it.

  There was no path up to the landing pad from the ledge, nor did he intend to climb up to the pad in the first place. There might not be any alarms, but he was certain Vedastus would have cameras on every key area of his keep. Looking up through the rain, he estimated a climb of roughly one thousand yards from the ledge to a window near the base of the keep. He studied the rock face carefully then chose his spot to begin the climb.

  Back in his Academy days, the trainees were forced to climb all manner of surfaces, some even more sheer than the one he was about to ascend now, and in much worse weather than this. Nor were they permitted ropes or climbing aides. At least half of the cadet losses at the Academy were attributed to climbing accidents. Most were actually accidents while the others were instructors weeding out the unworthy who were too stubborn, or too stupid, to quit while they could.

  His eyes had been true as he easily found and used natural hand and toe holds to quickly scale the wall. A sloping, natural ledge presented itself about halfway up that led to a point a mere twenty feet directly below the target window. Within minutes, Galen was stepping through the open window into a storage room and pulling out the reader to scan the interior.

  After committing the layout of the keep to memory, he shut the reader off, returned it to its pocket and walked out of the storage room and entered what passed for a kitchen. Vedastus clearly didn’t employ a maid service or any kind of staff. The place was a pigsty no matter where he looked.

  Galen’s military upbringing demanded the Tempest be kept in good order, and he found the condition of the keep abhorrent. The smell wasn’t much better. He wouldn’t touch a scrap of food kept here even if he were starving. Some of it looked like it had been left out for weeks.

  Leaving the mess behind, he slipped out into an open, darkened room. Flashing red lights dotted the walls on each side. Curious, he bent over one and discovered a field charge, wired up and ready to explode when the controlling key was pushed. It looked like at least six such charges had been set in the room.

  He pressed on into a lightly lit great room and immediately spotted several more charges, some wired up, others still waiting to be connected. He stepped further into the room carefully looking around for more charges when his eyes were drawn to an alcove in the far wall. Glowing blue light streamed out of that alcove along with a murmur of bubbling water.

  Drawing out his blaster, he made his way around a few crates piled up in the middle of the room and a couple of pieces of worn out furniture that looked less clean than the kitchen. He stepped into the alcove, his eyes scanning for Vedastus but finding no one in the room.

  Then he looked at the source of the glowing blue light and murmuring water. Suddenly he completely understood why Cassandra had only been able to detect one life sign even as he felt his blood begin to boil.

  Against the wall of the alcove, lined up next to one another and each with its own set of wired charges at their bases, were four sleep pods. They were each currently occupied. He recognized Princess Rhiannon from the vids he’d called up on the flight here. She was floating in blue-lit fluid softly bubbling around her, in the pod nearest to him in a medically-induced hibernation. Her dark brown hair flowed in gentle waves through the fluid. The lone article of clothing she was wearing was sheer, leaving nothing to the imagination.

  The same could be said of the other three women, all around the same age as the Princess, whom he easily identified. The gossip sheets were the best way for any merc to be in the right place at the right time to provide certain “services” to the rich and famous. All four women were daughters of planetary leaders and occasional subjects of the gossip mongers. Vedastus seemed to have discovered a new low and was no doubt ransoming the other three in the same fashion as the Princess.

  He could overlook the kidnapping for ransom. Even a worthless pile of excrement like Vedastus had to make a buck. And keeping the women in hibernation was likely easier that allowing them to attempt escape. But what set Galen’s blood on fire was the devices attached to each woman’s head, and the wires that led to an ominous-looking console next to a reclining chair in the middle of the room.

  The Jakamal was an outlawed device in the Alliance with good reason. The controller of said device could slip into the mind of the person hooked up on the other end. It had been invented as a medical device to help heal the mentally ill. It hadn’t taken long for the abuses to surface. The Alliance had made the devices illegal to o
wn or operate dozens of cycles before. That didn’t mean they weren’t still out there though and still in use.

  The Bata’vans still used it to train their cadets in resisting other forms of torture. Galen shuddered as he recalled his own sessions with the demon device and fought to keep the old nightmares from resurfacing.

  Looking at some of the other items scattered around the recliner he divined what vile purpose Vedastus had been using the device for here on Nammu. He checked the settings on the control device, saw that Vedastus had recorded his “sessions” and immediately erased each and every one of them. Galen knew the individual pods also recorded the sessions, but those he did not erase. Those would be needed by the medicos when the women were freed from their prison. They would need to know what memories needed to be tracked down in each woman’s brain and deleted. If they were left in place, these four women would be haunted by them for the rest of their lives.

  He expertly disconnected the Jakamal from the pods and disabled the charges set around them. He’d have Cassandra bring the Tempest up to the landing pad later, so he could load all four pods into the ship when he was ready to leave. Having found the Princess he’d been sent to recover, he could now attend to the business he’d come to Nammu to conduct. He’d been planning on a quick death for Vedastus before his arrival. As he departed the alcove, his reader out and scanning for the location of the lone life sign in the keep besides his, he decided that Vedastus was not going to get off quite so easy.

  * * * * *

  He found his quarry asleep in a warm bedchamber near the top of the keep. He’d passed dozens of crates, packed with all manner of stolen loot along the way. There were also more than few field charges in various states of readiness. Vedastus was clearly getting ready to flee his hiding hole. Almost as if he’d been warned someone was coming, Galen thought grimly, very much wanting to know exactly who had tipped his quarry off.

  Slipping into the room, blaster in one hand, reader in the other, Galen located the trigger for the field charges and two formidable-looking weapons close enough to be grabbed by the sleeping man. Disabling all three took only a few moments. The three useless weapons served a better purpose—as a somewhat rude alarm clock—when they landed heavily on the sleeper’s bare chest. The man looked even more like a pig half-naked, Galen observed, as he watched Vedastus flail around wildly.

  Reaching for the weapons where he’d left them, before realizing they had been the source of impact to begin with, Vedastus picked up each one. He tried them all and discovered they were no longer of any use before he registered the man standing at the foot of his bed with a blaster aimed at him. Then he registered who the man standing at the foot of his bed was and began to sweat profusely, blood draining from his face. Vedastus’ raised his hands in front of head as he fell back into his pillows in a half-seated position.

  “Please don’t kill me, Galen, I…”

  Galen fired two shots, one to each side of Vedastus’ head, sending fluff and feathers flying throughout the room from the destroyed pillows.

  “Who told you that you could address me by my given name?”

  “I..I’m sorry, Mr. Dwyn,” Vedastus stammered, and Galen detected the acrid odor of fresh urine. “Please don’t kill me. I didn’t know about the ambush I swe…”

  Another blast tore a hole in the headboard just inches above the pleading man’s head, eliciting a screech of terror.

  “Who told you that you could lie to me, Dunstan?”

  “Okay, okay, but I didn’t have any choice,” Vedastus pleaded. “They were going to put me away in Quaxi Prison. I told them where you’d be in exchange for letting me go. I didn’t know Dragonsong would be there instead of you.”

  “So your ignorance is supposed to make it okay that you sold him out instead of me?” He leveled the blaster at Vedastus’ head.

  “No, no, no!” He put his arms up directly between himself and the blaster, turning his face away in a useless gesture of defense. “I figured you’d easily shoot your way out of any trap like you always do.”

  Galen knew it to be another lie, but he had more pressing matters to attend to so he let that one slide. For the moment, at any rate.

  “That’s quite an art collection you have downstairs,” he said. It didn’t take long for Vedastus to figure out which “art” it was that Galen was referring to. “I never tabbed you as a kidnapper or someone who smuggled people, Dunstan. When did that happen?”

  “I didn’t kidnap them, Dwyn, I’m just holding them in safe keeping for a while.”

  “Safe keeping,” Galen repeated letting the sarcasm drip from every syllable. “Is that what you call that down there? Safe keeping?”

  “It’s just harmless fun…” Vedastus yelped as the next blast blew open the mattress uncomfortably close to his very-exposed crotch. When his voice returned, it was up at least two octaves. “They won’t remember a thing, and I never physically touched them.”

  “That makes it alright, Dunstan? Physical rape is punishable by death in the Alliance. I don’t know if there is a suitable punishment for what you’ve been doing down there.”

  Vedastus swallowed hard, knowing now, without a doubt or hope of talking his way out of it, that he was looking at the face of his executioner.

  “But right now,” Galen said. “I want to know who you are ‘keeping’ them for? Who hired you? Who kidnapped them and is really holding them for ransom?”

  “I was approached about a month ago by man looking for someone who ‘brokers’ in stolen goods,” Dunstan said. “He wanted to stash four items where no one could get to them. I took the job before I knew what I was getting into.

  “Then he arrived with the four items,” Vedastus continued. “And he offered me one hundred million aurox bars to keep them here until a rescue attempt was made.”

  “And then what were you supposed to do?” Galen had a good idea already; but he was recording the man’s confession, and he needed to hear it from him.

  “I was to blow everything up, the girls, the keep, the rescuer, everything,” Vedastus explained. “Leaving just enough behind to show that all five had died in the blast.”

  “That’s why you’ve been packing up,” Galen stated. “You were going to load up your loot and be waiting outside your little hole-in-the-wall here until the rescue attempt was made and then go cash in your one hundred million?”

  “Yes, that was the plan, only you arrived two days before you were supposed to,” Vedastus replied. And with that reply, with terrible suddenness, Galen knew the identity of the man who’d hired Vedastus.

  “Harmool,” the name burst from Galen’s mouth. “Adalwin Harmool hired you?”

  “Yeah,” Vedastus admitted. “Paid me twenty million up front with a chip containing the other eighty to be delivered after the failed rescue attempt.”

  “He knew Princess Rhiannon was going to be killed?”

  “He did and he didn’t seem that upset about it. I asked him what would happen if his King ever found out. You know what he said?”

  “Tell me.”

  “He said, ‘Who do you think arranged to have all four of these women kidnapped to begin with?’” Vedastus replied. “Her own father. I’ve done some things in my line of work that were twisted, but that right there is downright cold.”

  “Did he happen to share the reason why he wanted them dead?”

  “He didn’t come right out and tell me, but I got the impression they wanted to blame the whole thing on Chancellor Napat. He said the rescuer would be connected back to Napat, which is what they wanted to accomplish.”

  Galen lowered the blaster, putting the pieces together. He would be blamed for the kidnapping and his former service in the Bata’vans would be the tie to Napat. Several ex-members of that service were known to have formed a “Special Section”, a private group of mercs, available to do certain jobs “unofficially” when the Chancellor needed such work done.

  Finally seeing an opening to save his life, Veda
stus made his best sales pitch.

  “Look, Galen,” he waited but got no reaction to the usage of the name, “I’ve got a lot more stuff here than I can take with me. What do you say we split it fifty-fifty? We’ll even split the ‘collection’ downstairs. I’ve got what they had on them in storage in the next room, we can leave that behind and the scanners will find enough of their DNA to match to them. They’ll think they all died in the blast. They’ll find my DNA and think the same thing with the added bonus that they’ll think the kidnapper went up with them.”

  Galen remained silent, trying to sort out what his options were now that he knew what was really going on. Vedastus took the silence to mean his proposal had caught Dwyn’s interest and plowed on.

  “You have to admit,” he added with a sly grin. “What those Royals don’t have naturally their fathers have the money to give them. You’ve seen them. You see what I mean? And let me tell you, they live repressed lives in those ivory towers, my friend. You should check out some of the recordings. Why the things they’ll do…”

  Vedastus’ monologue abruptly ended when Galen blew his head off.

  “I thought we were going to make him die a very slow, painful death?” Cassandra asked, no longer needing to maintain radio silence.

  “I changed my mind,” Galen snarled and even an AI knew to shut up when Dwyn’s blood was up. Leaving the gory mess behind, Galen stepped into the next room and confirmed that the clothing and other possessions belong to the four captives was there. He scanned the pile, saw there was just enough DNA left to be traced after a massive explosion.

  “Bring the Tempest up to the landing pad,” he ordered Cassandra, “and open the cargo hatch. We’ll be taking on cargo.”

  “You may have forgotten this,” she pointed out carefully, “but the pad is currently occupied.”

  “Shoot that ship off the pad then, but be out there and ready to take on cargo in thirty minutes.”

  Most of what Vedastus had packed was cheap junk, he discovered after a quick search. But there were three crates that could bring in a tidy sum. He loaded them onto a cart and rolled it out to the ship. The rain had let up slightly but was still coming down in buckets. Stashing them in the starboard hold, Galen returned to the keep and, one by one, hauled each of the four sleep pods with their sleepers inside out to his ship. Once they were secured, he gathered up some of his clothing.