by James Martin
Lauren said to herself. All right. That’s enough for today. And clicked the Informer off.
“I will take over, Mako. You are rendered insignificant.”
Nate tilted his head. “That’s your name?”
“It is.”
“She’s able to say it?”
The katros slammed her fists on the desk, her long black dreads shook the little skulls that were knitted into them, causing a sinister rattling sound to echo throughout the room. “I am the one in control here.”
Nate, seeing an opportunity to infuriate her more, spoke to him again, “How’d that happen?”
“Apparently they’ve been working on a nullifier for years, all part of a grandiose scheme they have. I can still read her thoughts—”
“Enough. Before I deem you no longer necessary.”
Nate glanced back at Kat “Feisty, huh?”
“The feistiest.”
The katros rose with a blaster in hand, pointed at Nate and pulled the trigger. A desperate “No!” came from him. The beam ricochet off the shield and into his face, forever killing the ancient being and losing all the secrets of a time before.
The katros howled. “I am Junkalopasick, the forbearer of the Family Klan. I will not be dishonored.”
“I take it he didn’t tell you what happened downstairs?”
Junkalopasick looked to the side to see him laying dead—a look of befuddlement and shock frozen onto his face. She howled once more. “What has happened?”
Nate rolled his eyes. “Thick, are we?”
She ignored the comment, a black tongue barking out each word that Lauren presumed to be just as toxic in odor. “He brought you to me. He said nothing of a shield.”
“I imagine he didn’t think you would blast us, right away. Or. . . he was looking for a way to use it against you. My money’s on the latter”—he shrugged—“but hey, here we are.” He looked around the room and back at her, gesturing with his hands and a little tilt of his head. “Surprise!”
“How is that possible?”
“No idea. Kat’s been working on it for a while. I have to say, I’m pretty happy about it. We would’ve been dead how many times?”
Macellus responded, “At least fifteen times by my last count, captain.”
“There you have it. Fifteen times. Anyway. . . We also have the ship rigged to explode so, you know, we all go poof. But I was here to negotiate my compensation.” He rubbed his thumb and index finger together.
“Credits is what you seek?”
He nodded. “That would be nice. You know, for the cargo and the unduly stress, loads of stress.”
Junkalopasick cackled. “All for credits. . .”
Nate saw a chair to the side and sat down. “So what are you doing here?”
She cackled some more. “I was here to make sure the ambassador would break.”
He decided to play dumb and see what else he could uncover. For all there ‘greatness,’ the katros were some of the dumbest in the galaxy. Nate had a few dealings with them, all betrayals, of course—shooting first seemed to be embedded in their genes. “Ambassador?”
“Yes, of the planet, Geitaro. It would be very profitable for us if they should break.”
“Why’s that?”
Junkalopasick shook her head. “Why am I telling an inferior such plans?”
“Shield. Explosion. Those sort of things.”
“Your only interest is credits.”
“Which you’ve neglected to give me.”
“I am going to tell you where they are.”
“Hmmm?”
Junkalopasick laughed to herself. “Yes, yes, the credits are on my ship.”
“This ship?”
Her mouth became a slit which represented glee for her species. “Come.”
Nate came over, and looked out the window facing a nebula, close-by was a battlecruiser.
He took a deep breath and frowned. Damn. This one is slightly clever. “Let me guess. You have a teleporter.”
She nodded.
“Do you think we could shoot you before you’re able to get off?”
A boisterous laugh came from her mouth. “You would have to disable your shield, pull out your gun and shoot me.” She waved the controller that would teleport her off the ship. “A simple button gets me out of here.” Hmmm. Peculiar. There’s an actual plan here. Maybe not all of them are complete idiots. . . I guess.
“A simple button does not destroy.”
“No. You are right. It will take a few shots.”
“You better get going.”
Junkalopasick grinned, sharp canines prominently displayed. She clicked her teleporter and exploded into molecules which decayed into particles then vanished and materialized aboard her battlecruiser.
Nate said, “Not exactly as planned. . . meet us back at Mariah, Astraos. I think we should hurry.”
Lauren stood there eyes wide and mouth even wider. What the fuck was that?
∞∞∞∞∞∞
“Looks like you’re clean, Jaziel.” Astraos squinted, envisioning himself roaming his mind. I see no monsters. Well, no more than usual.
“You will not be offended if I still don’t trust you.”
“Not in the least, time to fly.”
Astraos took a deep breath and was about to explode out of his restraints when the door opened. He gave Pilox a perplexed look which was useless because Pilox donned his usual blank stare back. He was endlessly unsurprised by everything—at least, that was the traditional cover each cheshir gave the galaxy.
A guard stepped inside, wearing a haggard look. His silver helmet and visor gone. What stood before them was once a chiman, but now he appeared frail, delusional, haunted. . . psychotic.
“He’s gone. He’s gone.” The chiman shook violently. His head was vibrating the way the ground shakes and water ripples—just as a interstellar ship lowers itself into an atmosphere. He laid their weapons on the ground.
Astraos tried to soothe the chiman. “You should come with us.”
“Absolutely not.” He continued to shake vehemently; he walked behind Astraos and unlocked his restraints. Astraos nodded to Pilox, who allowed the guard to do the same for him. The ambassador was never cuffed, never deemed a physical threat; there were many on Geitaro (and other planets) who would disagree with such a statement—given her voluptuous, seductive assets.
“Thanks—” Before Astraos could say more, the chiman fell down onto his knees, crying and screeching for the end; the sentiment echoed through the halls. Astraos felt a twinge of pain, like he had never felt before. He was witnessing it firsthand, watching as the sins of the past berated their minds, guilt choking their lives away, making each wish they never existed.
Astraos saw the chiman unholster his blaster.
“I have to end this. I—I—I—I can’t live knowing it all.”
A damaged life like this was the reason to fight evil, to survive and try to better the galaxy. Astraos wanted to save him, desperately. “We can get through this. Please, don’t it.”
“He had me. He had me.” He sniffled, shaking his head more. “No. No. No. No. No.” He pointed the blaster at his face, pulled the trigger and his nightmare ceased.
Astraos’s head went down. “Damn.”
Jaziel whispered, “You were a fool to think you could save him.”
Astraos was not listening—absorbed in the horror—or Jaziel may have uttered her last words. He said, “That’s who needs to be saved.” He put his hands through his hair and turned toward the door. “Fuck.”
As they made their escape, they saw heaps of bodies strewn about—bludgeoned and cut, any and every possible way to end themselves. The halls were decorated with fresh blood, and still, the old set of names hung above, damning them into eternity with him—a stain on the galaxy that could never be scrubbed away.
Astraos looked back at the long hallway and thought, could I have saved them? Any of them?
And as if answering
this question, a guard stepped slowly backwards, wailing. “I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I don’t want to!” She pointed her blaster at her face, her trigger finger steadily pulsating, perilously close to issuing the final note.
Astraos ran at her, trying to do so before she noticed him. Right as he put his hand on her shoulder, poof, the blaster went off and her lights went out.
“No,” he yelled, rushing to the side of the hallway, then dropping down on his knees and punching the floor, making the distinct impression of his fist forever on the ship. “Ah!” He bellowed, pouring his emotions out with each fist aimed at it, creating a fist-size hole—mirroring the one in his heart.
Astraos, I guess you’re seeing what we are out here. I am sorry. We cannot save them, but you must take care of that ambassador. We have minutes before that battlecruiser will scrap this place.
Astraos took a deep-seeded inhale. He saw Lauren in his mind and knew what he had to get back to.
He looked back. “Let’s run it. Pilox, grab her.”
“Yes, my prince.”
“I am perfectly capable of—”
“Running too slow. We’ll be faster this way.”
Pilox grabbed her arms as she struggled to break free; he lifted her by them, launching her body up and then catching her. He held her by the waist and off they ran towards the ship as she pounded on his back, wailing obscenities.
∞∞∞∞∞∞
“Can we make it out after they blow this bird up?”
“Ship’s off. The drive needs some time to warm up,” Kat responded, jumping over a dead guard.
“What happens if we don’t wait?”
“There are two possibilities: We blow up from the drive malfunctioning, or we end up stranded somewhere, trying to get to a gate from wherever we are.”
“What are the chances of us blowing up?”
Macellus said breathlessly, “I can evade them until it’s ready.”
Nate said, “There is nothing but space around here. They’ll hammer us out of the sky. . . our only shot is warping.”
Kat did some mental calculations in her head. “I can rig something. Get it down to fifteen percent.”
“Fifteen percent?”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you say so? I’ll take that any day.”
It took all of Lauren’s energy to keep up with them. And thank goodness for that, she thought. She could barely focus on the mass horrors and suicides.
A door started to close on them. “Slide!” The word snapped her back to reality.
Nate jumped up from the slide into a fighting stance, legs set wide apart, holding his blaster in both hands. Out of another door to his right came Astraos with Pilox trailing behind, and who Nate assumed to be the ambassador in his arms.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
Astraos pushed past to Lauren, grabbing her by both shoulders. “You all right?”
She looked up at him with despair in her eyes and nodded.
He shook her vigorously. “Good. Good.” He gulped, grabbed her hand and squeezed, then let go. She felt her breath catch in her throat and smiled at his back.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Nate.
Once they got to the ship, one guard barred their way: a velida. They are a short, furry humanoid species characterized by their large globular eyes, a small nose and a slit for a mouth. This particular velida had black fur with gray fringes.
Pilox put Jaziel down as the guard handed her a pad.
Nate came over and asked, “What is it?”
“Coordinates.”
“Where?”
“It looks like Station XI.”
”What about it?”
“I think its to the owner.”
“Looks like he, or Mako rather, felt the need to stick it to the katros. We’ll talk later. . . We got to go. You moving aside, guard?”
The guard nodded and pulled out his blaster. Nate rolled his eyes. “Not again.” Those exasperated words were the final ones the guard heard.
Astraos said, “I fucking hate this place.” He looked to Lauren who gave him a faint smile in return. All he could think about was screwing her to obliterate the memory of this endeavor.
It was hard for Lauren to process what had happened around her. Death and blood and insanity engulfed the ship, she had never seen anything like it, never entertained a thought that she would. And whether this mattered any longer or not, it turned her off the path of medicine. She had seen enough death in one day to realize that a morbid atmosphere would whittle away at her soul—her mother’s voice spoke to her beneath the layer of conscious, live.
Nate, seeing everyone had stopped, snapped out of his own trance. “Let’s go. Let’s go.”
They ran inside their ship and straight to the bridge. Everyone in. Pilox grabbed Jaziel and placed her on top of him. “You will have to ride with me.”
She smirked, having warmed up to the situation and Pilox, at the moment. “Not the worst place to be.”
Nate helped hit the take-off switches and remove the brakes for Macellus, plugging in Station XI as he did so.
Boom. The ship rocked and everyone was jarred in their seats. “Kat, best estimates?”
“Two more blasts, Nate.”
He grinned back at Astraos as they lifted off. “With you around, we have to cut it close.”
“Just get us out of this awful place.”
“Aye Aye,” responded Macellus, “Here we go.”
Another blast came ripping through the ship, right in front of them. “Hit it.”
They shot through the glass area of the ship’s bay, saying goodbye to the macabre of blood art and all the gruesome deaths. An explosion followed in their wake, looking to consume them.
“Go. Go. Go!”
Kat was working hastily, tearing wires and reattaching others, disabling mechanisms and initiating others with the fervor of a rat at a baseboard. “Wait. Wait. Wait.”
“We can’t—”
“Now!”
They entered warp as the explosion expanded and rippled behind them, and just as space folded on itself around them, a finger of the explosion reached out and glanced the ship with enough power to slam everyone on the bridge.
Macellus hit the controls to punch out. “We’re bending back, can’t stay in. We’ll be folded into the space around us.”
“Do it.”
The calculation that they did not run was: if knocked out of warp, what were the chances of ending up inside a planet, star, or black hole, or near enough any of them to be pulled by gravity to a destined death? That probability was relatively high. There are millions of black holes, billions of stars, trillions of asteroids and somewhere in-between those numbers were planets that called The Milky Way home.
They jumped out of warp. The ship jolted and shuddered, red lights and emergency sounds blaring, an intense red filled the crew’s field of vision; they felt an extreme heat envelope them.
“Reverse thrust. Reverse!”
“I am trying, captain.”
Nate looked at Kat. “You have to do something.”
Astraos said, “Is that what I think it is?”
Nate answered, “Yeah, it is. Red death. Ships now have a backup reserve to dump and boost you out of a supergiant star’s pull.”
“And us?”
“That’s why I said now. Mariah doesn’t have that shit.”
I am sorry.
“We’re going to die?” Lauren’s voice was resigned to the fact. The power and ferocity from the chemical reactions on the surface of the star made her tremble. She envisioned them all turning to ash as a dark red star spot came into view. “What if a solar flare comes out?”
“We’re fucked. That’s what.”
Her mouth agape, she took a deep breath, anxiety approaching and finding herself again as its victim.
Nate unbuckled and went to help Kat. He put a hand on Lauren’s shoulder before leaving. “I don’t lose crew
members. I’m not starting today.” Lauren nodded, unaware of doing so.
Astraos waited for her to make eye contact and tried to console her. “We’ve been in worse situations.”
“You have?”
He thought about it for a moment. “No”—he laughed—“but it’ll be a good story when we get out.”
Nate arrived at the core of Mariah. “What do you need?”
“Input your codes. We have to eject the drive.”
Nate put both hands on his head. “You know how much that costs?”
“How much is your life worth?”
“If you asked the tanzarians, they’d probably say sixty thousand credits.”
Kat pressed, “Put the code in, you fool. You’re wasting time. You know that every second that goes by amplifies the pull. It’s exponential—” She made an explosion with her hands. “Toast.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” He punched in his code. He smiled to himself. What she doesn’t know is the code is her name.
Mariah, like all ships throughout the galaxy, was equipped with an ejection capability for the warp drive in case the enclosure gets cracked or suffers some other ailment. This is humorous among engineers because when a warp drive gets hit directly, space folds the vessel into it, annihilating everything.
Kat laughed to herself.
“What’s up?”
“A joke is about to save our lives.”
“Huh?”
“Get someone to shoot the drive.”
The captain requests Astraos to pull up the firing controls. Be prepared to shoot a small, spinning canister that may blend in with the surface of the red supergiant.
Astraos said, “Was that last part needed? And I can hear you still, Nate.” He grabbed the ear bud and threw it on the ground. I’m done with that.
Lauren shocked herself by speaking, “Maybe it was to preemptively prepare your eyes to look for a spec in a vastness of red.”
Astraos winked at Lauren. “I’m glad you’re around.”
“If I am to die right now, I should at least have the opportunity to be satisfied by this warrior.” Jaziel arched her head and looked at Pilox. “If you will do me the honor. . .?”
Pilox grunted. Pilox’s grunts had a variety of meanings, this one was filled with uncertainty. He, also realizing his grunt to be audible to his master, took out the ear bud and smashed it underfoot.