by Dan Abnett
“Excuse me,” says the Badoon leader from behind them. Rocket stiffens. He thinks soothing, calming thoughts. Slowly, he and Groot swivel their bar stools to face the Badoon.
“War Brotherhood Commander Droook,” says the Badoon leader by way of introduction. “Sorry to bother you. Have you by any chance seen a Rigellian Recorder?”
“A Rigellian Recorder?” Rocket replies. “I don’t believe so.”
“We have a scan image,” says the leader. His forked tongue dances and flickers. “Warrior Lorg, show the scan image on your War Brotherhood tactical display.”
One of the lizard warriors steps up and holds out a data tablet on which glows the image of what is almost definitely a Rigellian Recorder unit.
“Face doesn’t ring any bells,” says Rocket.
“The Recorder is a fugitive,” says the Badoon leader. “He has absconded with sensitive data. We believe he has come to this establishment in search of a starpilot or freetrader prepared to offer him passage off-world. Are you a starpilot or freetrader?”
“Hey, I can offer you a sweet deal on forty-eight tons of zunks,” says Rocket, “but beyond that…”
The Badoon leader hesitates and considers Rocket closely. Badoon are not easy to like. They are aggressive, cruel, and self- important. They have, in the course of their long and bloody history, conquered and oppressed great swathes of the Milky Way Galaxy. Their cultural development is such that very early on, certain traits such as social grace, good humor, patience, and sympathy became—like their tails—firstly evolutionarily redundant, then vestigial, and then gone entirely.
But even that doesn’t properly explain the mutual dislike between Rocket and the Badoon. It’s a primordial thing, the animosity that exists, and has always existed, between small mammals and large snakes. It’s instinctive, hereditary, a cobra-mongoose dynamic. They just make each other uncomfortable.
So it is with great self-control that the Badoon leader says, “Sorry to have troubled you,” and with equally great self-control that Rocket replies, “No problem whatsoever,” and turns back to his Timothy.
“Phew,” says Rocket to Groot as the Badoon move away. “That was close.”
It is at this point that one of the Badoon warriors’ War Brotherhood tactical scanners detects Rigellian technology in the crawlspace under the bandstand.
“War Brotherhood Commander! Sir! I have found something!” the warrior cries. The Badoon close in, drawing their War Brotherhood laser disruptors and War Brotherhood combat swords. The Badoon believe that there are no words or phrases in the Galaxy that can’t be improved by the addition of the prefixes “War” or “Brotherhood,” or preferably both.
The Badoon’s unlucky quarry, which is now revealed to indeed be a Rigellian Recorder unit—a robotic humanoid device designed and mass-manufactured by the Rigellians for data-gathering and galactic surveying—emerges from the crawlspace under the bandstand and tries to flee.
There is alarm and consternation. The Badoon rush the Recorder. The Recorder emits an electronic squeal of dismay. It was built for neither combat nor speed. Many patrons of Leery’s scatter; others jeer at the Badoon. Bouncers close in. Behind the bar, Nrrsh yells, “Oy!” and points with his one Skrull arm to a sign on the wall that reads, “Please do not draw or discharge firearms or energy-disruption devices on these premises as a Skrullian punch dagger in the kidneys often offends.”
Rocket just keeps staring at his still-untouched Timothy.
“I am Groot,” says Groot.
“Yes, I know it’s kicking off,” Rocket sighs.
“I am Groot.”
“Yes, I know the right thing to do would be to help that poor robot guy and stick up for him against the Badoon, because if we don’t, who will? We just…have to ignore it. We want to stay out of trouble, don’t we?”
“I am Groot.”
“Yeah, I am well aware that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Behind them, the fracas is escalating. The Recorder has run headlong into a waitress and sent three trays of glasses crashing to the floor. The Badoon leader has drawn his War Brotherhood plasma exterminatron. Customers are screaming and shouting. The Recorder is trying to get back onto his feet, apologizing to the waitress. The Badoon leader has a clear shot. One squeeze of the War Brotherhood trigger will send a supercharged bolt of War Brotherhood laser-jacketed plasma spitting across the bar. It will fuse and burn out the base of the Recorder’s spine, preserving the data in his memory banks but preventing him from running ever again.
The Badoon leader fires.
An odd thing happens. Its dramatic significance will only become apparent much later, loyal reader—along with its causal relationship to the rest of space-time, and destiny, and fate.
Suffice to say for now that there is a sudden flash of de-mat energy swathed in a halo of cracking light, and what appears to be a Galadoran Spaceknight in unusual matte-black battle armor appears in the middle of Leery’s bar. He appears, in fact, directly in the firing line between the Badoon leader and the flailing Recorder at the split-second the War Brotherhood plasma exterminatron discharges.
The Spaceknight takes the full force of the deadly blast. The Spaceknight’s advanced null-shields absorb the worst of it and deflect the rest. But even so the impact sends the warrior flying across the bar, demolishing the lower rails of the bandstand.
The deflected plasma bolt, robbed of most of its lethal charge, whines sidelong across the bar area, missing the Recorder and striking, instead, a glass standing on a napkin, destroying it entirely.
“That does it,” snarls Rocket Raccoon, leaping up and drawing his unfeasibly large blaster cannon. “Flarking Badoon spilled my drink! Lock and flarkin’ load!”
• CHAPTER THREE •
THROWDOWN
ROCKET RACCOON’s current unfeasibly large gun of choice is a Nitro Weapons System Model 66 B.P.B. (“being-portable blaster”). It has a number of attractive, user-friendly features—including ergonomic hand-grips (useful for those with disconcertingly human-like hands), a reflexive auto-targeting system, an inertially buffered stabilization system, and a patented recoil minimizer.
However, its most immediately appealing feature is the “KZZWARK” sound it makes when it blasts out a pulse of blue-white death ray.
KZZWARK! says Rocket Raccoon’s unfeasibly large gun. Rocket is standing on the seat of his barstool as he shoots; despite the recoil minimizer, the rifle’s back-slap causes him and the seat to spin around three times.
The pulse of blue-white energy streaks across Leery’s and hits the Badoon leader in the face. The Badoon leader is, as befits a high-status cadre commander, equipped with an automatic bodyshield, a personal force field that snaps on when it pre-senses incoming energized or ballistic munitions. The bodyshield saves his life, if not his dignity. It stops the shot’s explosive force, but it cannot deal with the overwhelming kinetic hammerblow delivered by such an unfeasibly large weapon.
Knocked off his feet, Droook, War Brotherhood Commander of the elite War Brotherhood Devastation Cadre, leaves the main saloon area, clears the fantail stage, and ends up facedown in the salad bar.
His men do not react to this well. Uttering a War Brotherhood battle-howl, they rush the area of the bar where, until a few seconds earlier, Rocket and Groot had been furiously trying to mind their own business. The first to reach them is a burly Badoon warrior with a War Brotherhood combat sword and steel-reinforced War Brotherhood battle teeth.
He swings his sword at Rocket. Rocket exclaims, “Yip!” and dives out of the way. The sword, a superb piece of Moordian steel with a quantum-sharp edge, slices Rocket’s barstool in half.
Then Groot punches the Badoon warrior.
The warrior reels across the room and collides with a party of Kree businessmen who were simply hoping for a nice night out where no one would end up accusing anyone of anything. The combat sword, knocked from the Badoon warrior’s nerveles
s hand, spins twice in the air and ends up embedded and quivering, tip-down, in Leery’s well-carpeted floor.
A certain amount of what might be described as “pandemonium” has now broken out. The bar was pretty crowded, and there’s a lot of general screaming and running around in progress—what with the discharge of two major power weapons, bisected barstools, and trees punching things.
Rocket Raccoon is a tactical genius. The primary reason you might know this about him is that he freely tells everyone he meets that he is.
However, his track record speaks for itself. He has guarded, not to mention saved, the Galaxy on several occasions. He reads a fight like very few practitioners of warfare. And he’s a flarking good shot.
Rocket uses both the pandemonium and his stature. He is effectively screened by the patrons fleeing around him. The Badoon can’t draw a bead on him. Wild shots ring out. A chandelier explodes. The dancing girls shriek and stampede toward the dressing room in a cloud of ostrich-feather fibers.
Rocket rolls into the cover of an ornamental pot-plant, and fires his Nitro 66 again.
Oh, that satisfying KZZWARK!
The shot hits one of the Badoon attackers. Unlike his War Brotherhood Commander, this Badoon was not high-status enough to warrant an automatic bodyshield. The Badoon warrior takes a brief moment to reflect on the inherent unfairness of the perks afforded to the officer classes, and how it’s always the common fighting Badoon who end up paying in the long run. Then he glances down wistfully at the haze of vapor previously occupied by his torso, and he topples over.
{Death will stalk this tale, loyal and gentle reader. I make no excuses for it. The Universe is a cruel place; life and death go, if not hand in hand, then at least chained together, like Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones. Yes, it is entirely my pleasure to tailor the thematic references of this story to your Human Culture. The Badoon are warriors. Rocket and Groot are warriors. The fate of the Universe is a life-or-death matter, and sometimes it is decided by the speed of a trigger finger, or the unfeasible largeness of a gun and its owner’s willingness to use it. It is worth relating that one of the other attractive, user-friendly features of the Nitro Weapons System Model 66 B.P.B. (being-portable blaster) is the toggle that allows the owner to select a nonlethal “stun” setting. Rocket had owned the Nitro 66 for eight months before Groot pointed this feature out to him. When he did so, Rocket laughed for nine minutes, then asked, “Why would you need that?”}
First blood—proper blood—to Rocket Raccoon. A line has been crossed. Rocket refers to this line as the “Oh What the Flark Event Horizon.”
There is no going back now.
“Groot, ol’ buddy, ol’ tree!” he yells. “We’ve crossed the Oh What the Flark Event Horizon! The gloves are off!”
Groot is puzzled, because he was not wearing any gloves in the first place. With a simple nod to his tiny mammalian friend, he turns and delivers an uppercut that sends another of the Badoon out of Leery’s through a hole in the roof not previously there.
Groot is an example of the rare genus flora colossus, indigenous to a planet known as X. He is a surprisingly complex individual and only ever punches things out of necessity—and because he is extremely good at it.
Groot reels, struck by a blow of immense force. Nrrsh, the bar owner, has attacked him from behind. Nrrsh is wielding the ugly cyber-cudgel that he reserves for particularly boisterous and uncooperative patrons at closing time.
“No one starts a flarking firefight in my bar!” he snarls.
“I am Groot!” Groot tells him.
Nrrsh hits him again. The energized cudgel shatters bark and draws sap.
This annoys Groot. Groot slugs Nrrsh, and the Skrull performs an entirely involuntary flick-flack over the bar and brings down six shelves of bottles.
Nrrsh has, however, employed a number of highly skilled bouncers to police his establishment. They are huge fighting Cyberneticons from the Raxus war zones. As they close on Groot, they switch to ogre-mode, bulking up and armoring themselves with overlapping sheets of dense alloy and subcutaneous force fields.
The first ogre-mode punches Groot. The second lays another solid fist home. Groot staggers, hurt, then lashes back, slamming one ogre-mode over the bar and another back into the wall. The third and fourth close in, fists balled.
“I am Groot,” Groot decides.
Meanwhile, Rocket has become the focus of the Badoon’s wrath. They are firing multiple War Brotherhood laser guns at him. The bombardment has blown holes in the floor, the wall, the side of the bar, and the bandstand, and has come very close to scorching the tip of Rocket’s silky and wonderfully voluminous tail.
He dives, rolling and firing his gun. Part of the ceiling explodes and falls in. The Badoon scatter for cover. One Badoon finds entirely inadequate shelter behind a dessert trolley and spends far too much time trying to mimic the shape of a three-tiered gateau.
Rocket scurries for cover. Ducking under a table, he hears a voice say, “I do appreciate the help.”
He looks around and finds himself face-to-face with the Rigellian Recorder, who has chosen the same table to hide beneath.
“I am a Recorder,” the Recorder says. “I am Recorder 172, built by the Colonizers of Rigel to travel the spaceways until the end of all time, and survey and record the known Universe. I fear I am in a great deal of trouble.”
“Why the flark do these d’ast Badoon want you so bad?” Rocket asks.
“I do not know, sir,” the Recorder replies. He is an aesthetically pleasing, sleek humanoid android finished in green and gold. His face is the sad side of impassive.
“I have been damaged in some way,” he says. “My recollection is impaired. I am not entirely sure what is happening, except that I wish it wasn’t.”
“Well, Recorder ol’ buddy,” Rocket says, “we’ve already crossed the Oh What the Flark Event Horizon.”
“Query? Meaning?”
“Meaning I was trying to stay out of trouble tonight—but seeing as that didn’t happen, I may as well make my trouble count for something.”
“Query? Meaning?”
“You want protection from these Badoons, Rigel-boy, you got it.”
“I am gratified. I do not mean to be a burden.”
Rocket bares his teeth. Badoon laser shots are skimming the top of the table they are cowering beneath. He slams a fresh powermag into his unfeasibly large gun.
Then he glances at the Recorder.
“I don’t suppose,” he inquires sadly, “that you happen to know any zunk traders looking for a little action?”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t.”
Rocket shrugs.
“Had to ask. Okay, keep low and follow me.”
With that, Rocket Raccoon leaps out from under the table, un-feasibly large gun blazing, and performs the most savage and effective twenty seconds of sustained anti-Badoon warfare I have ever witnessed.
And that, gentle and loyal reader, is how we met.
I am a Recorder.
I am Recorder 127 of the Rigellian Intergalactic Survey.
• CHAPTER FOUR •
EXIT STRATEGY
THEY start to run. I should say, we start to run. The nature of this narrative has shifted in the telling. You, loyal reader, are now aware that I am one of the three individuals at the epicenter of this mayhem.
“That way!” Rocket Raccoon bellows.
“I am Groot!” his brave comrade responds.
Rocket Raccoon hesitates. He has now seen the armored ogre-modes that Groot has drawn his attention to—and the fact that Nrrsh is getting back onto his artificial feet and racking a cut-down ion shotgun. It does not take a tactical genius to see that “that way” is not a promising exit route.
I have certainly noticed this.
“That way is blocked by at least seven dangerous combatants,” I point out. “That way does not seem a way that should be considered, especially if one is evaluating options based on concerns suc
h as health, safety, success, our continued vital function, the avoidance of dismemberment—”
“From you, not so much of the talking,” Rocket Raccoon advises me. I suspend speech functions immediately.
Rocket Raccoon turns.
“This way!” he orders.
Sadly, “this way” is also not overburdened with positive advantages. Several of the Badoon have been felled, but a support squad has arrived. War Brotherhood weapons are drawn and firing. The air is filled with a blizzard of laser rounds and exterminatron bolts. From his forward command point behind the salad bar, War Brotherhood Commander Droook is yelling orders and expletives in equal measure.
“Okay, okay!” Rocket Raccoon concedes. “Not this way, either!”
He slams off two more shots to keep the Badoon troopers ducking, then aims his unfeasibly large gun at the floor. The blast, almost point blank, blows a large hole clean through the deck of the bar level. The edges of the hole crackle and glow with molten metal, dissipating superheat.
There is a void below.
“Groot!” Rocket yells. “We’re going the other way instead! Cover my tail, pal!”
Groot is still slugging it out with the enraged ogre-modes. Each punch and impact makes the air ripple, as if from a sonic boom. Groot puts an ogre-mode through a window, then sends another sprawling onto its side—its alloy armor dented, and its subcutaneous force shields fritzing and misfiring. But there are too many of them. Twigs snap off. Bark cracks. Sap leaks. Groot looks like a prizefighter on the ropes in a final, grueling round.
“Groot!” Rocket yelps. He hoists his unfeasibly large gun up above his ears with both of his disconcertingly human-like hands and hurls it across the bar. Groot catches it. He wields it as a club at first, knocking aside the immediate threat of the nearest ogre-mode, then starts firing from the hip. The Nitro Weapons System Model 66 B.P.B. does not seem so unfeasibly large in his massive grip. It seems like a toy: a submunition gun or a carbine. He does not aim with any special care. He hoses, quick-fire. Ogre-modes fly backward like struck bowling pins. Nrrsh utters something quite un-Skrullian and seeks urgent cover.