Star Conqueror: Recompense: An Epic Space Harem Adventure

by J. A. Cipriano

  The little burst of suit power as the credits transferred added a bit of pep to my step as the last standing Quib decided that discretion was the better part of valor. He dropped his lash and turned tail to run, with me hot on his heels, Thorax raised and ready to take his head off. Still, as much as I wanted to lop him in half, I realized he might just have a chance to get away. His armor was far lighter than mine, he had a good ten-foot head start, and he was fresher, having not just sprinted two kilometers straight and pulled an airlock door open.

  But I couldn’t let that happen … and I wasn’t the only one who thought the same. I was about to just hurl the ax right into the runner’s back as the grunt looked back at me in fear. He had to have been surprised when I suddenly arrested my throw, maybe curious as to why I seemed to be showing him mercy.

  I wasn’t, of course. I just didn’t want to have a chance of hitting the two battered slaves who cut the guy off, something the Quib missed in his fear of imminent ax murder. Weakened and bloodied as they were, the two men were still able to block the guard’s flight. I was almost on top of them when the desperate grunt, instead of doing the sensible thing and surrendering, popped a knife free from a hidden holster in his gauntlet and took a stab at one of the slaves.

  That did it. Even though the soldier only managed to graze the leathery-skinned hairless man, the fact that the Quib would rather kill an unarmed person than give up made me see red. The dragon roaring in my ears, I matched it with a battle cry as I brought the impossible sharp ax down in a glittering arc over my head. Like a true coward, the Quib died with the ax plunged deep into the center of his back, the mono-molecular edge parting his light armor like the Red Sea. The slaves jumped back, letting the corpse drop like so much dead weight to the rough-hewn stone.

  Prying the weapon free, I spun to face the last living Quib. He had recovered from his shocking whip sting but had sat up only to come face-to-face with a very angry giant panther and a seething ex-Matriarch with an enchanted dagger. Unlike his cruel and stupid buddy, this grunt pushed himself against the mine wall, holding up his hands pleadingly.

  “I surrender,” he shouted. “Mercy, please!”

  There was a deep growl in the back of Tulip’s throat as her form melted and shifted, back to her normal catwoman shape. “Mercy, huh? Do you want the same mercy you were showing these miners here?” She kicked the end of the dropped whip at her feet away with disgust. “Or are you going to tell me they got those wounds on their own?”

  The Quib shook his head frantically. “No, but … please! I was just following orders. If I didn’t do what the Matriarch commanded, she’d kill me the same as you’re about to!”

  Tulip looked unconvinced, and I couldn’t wholly blame her. As the slaves started to gather behind us, I shouldered the ax and stepped between her and Alyra, the shorter woman sagging in pain and exhaustion against my side. “They have a saying on my planet, Quib, that all it takes for evil men to win is for good men to do nothing. Bowing down to do the work of evil people for them is even worse.”

  The grunt’s helmeted head wavered, his shoulders heaving with despair. He dropped his hands and let out a long sigh. “I don’t know where you hail from, dragon, but you’re … you’re right. If you must, kill me. I no doubt deserve it.”

  There was a tug on my armor, and I could feel Alyra’s steady gaze up at me. I glanced sidelong at her, saw the worry on her face, something beyond the mere physical pain she was feeling, and I flashed her a reassuring smile. She no doubt saw herself in this poor bastard … and she wasn’t wrong. I glanced at Tulip as well, and our eyes locked for a long moment.

  The Quib’s shaken voice broke the silence. “Uh, you are going to kill me, right?”

  Tulip rolled her eyes and answered my unspoken question with a nod, and I looked back down at the surrendering soldier. “No. We’re not going to kill you.”

  “You are not the only one who has made the wrong decision,” Alyra said in slow, careful words. “If you truly wish to repent for the evil you have done, how could we in good conscience kill you?”

  “By inserting a mono-wire knife up through the second and third ribs,” Tulip helpfully pointed out, but I nudged her with my elbow. She let out a bit of growl and a sigh before adding, “But, yes, if David and Alyra are willing to vouch for you, then we can see how it goes. But if you do just one thing wrong …” She made a neck-cutting motion with her thumb, and that was more than enough to make our prisoner shudder.

  The slaves, having now finally found their courage, stepped up around us, one of them, the wounded, leathery-skinned man, spoke up, even as Tulip stepped forward to search the Quib. “Thank you for saving us, but … do you know the price of ground stanium in Alpha Centauri?”

  We all started at that. Not because it was a flat-out ridiculous thing to ask for an enslaved miner. No, it was because that was a Resistance code phrase, one of a full dozen question-and-answer sets that had been drilled into our heads over days of briefings at Resistance command. While our luck hadn’t been the best, were we about to have our first big break, stepping right into Resistance members so quickly?

  I turned towards the miner, his hand pressed to the bleeding graze in his side and nodded slowly. “I do. It’s a hundred and seventy-seven credits by the pound, but only if you visit Uncle Ravi’s emporium.”

  His large, milky eyes seemed to brighten, and a look of hope joined the wash of relief across all the miners. He stepped forward, offering a large, webbed hand out to me. “You came. You really came. Draconis has returned and offers us salvation.” I blinked at that, but my faint surprise didn’t keep me from taking that offered hand warmly. “Come with us. You’ve been expected.”

  15

  “Expected?” It was one thing to think that Lady Luck had given us a break, but what I had just heard sounded far stranger. “You need to explain that, but not here.”

  Our surrendered Quib chimed in, as his power suit dearmored, the shiny black shell evaporating just like one of our own, “The dragon’s right. Overseer Krug sent out a priority signal when you three broke in. Illuminator Lilana will be sending reinforcements as quickly as possible!”

  Without his armor and weapons, it was hard to tell the difference between the Quib and the motley crew of miners, each from a different species culled from across Matriarchy-controlled space. Considering the legions of Quibs were formed the same way, just with more voluntary service and fewer whips and chains, it made sense. He had pale blue skin, with a sheen that made me think there was some kind of clear coating, maybe an exoskeleton, over his skin. The top of his head was adorned with rounded spikes, and his four eyes blinked in succession.

  “Of course,” the Resistance man agreed. “We can lose the pursuers in the old tunnels, but we must gather what we can.”

  He nodded to the others, who began to do what was a time-honored tradition among our squad, and that was to loot. Three of the miners began to strip the Quibs, then power down their suits to see if they could be salvaged, while our contact and another brought the hover sled around, loading weapons and the like atop what we had already brought. The last ran off after something in the darkness while Tulip kept a collar on our new friend.

  We’d make introductions later. For the moment, I clamped the Thorax to my pack, the double-bladed head collapsing into the heavy head, and knelt beside Alyra, one hand on her good shoulder while the other gingerly held her injured arm. “We don’t have a lot of time, but are you going to be okay? How bad are you hurt?”

  She bit back a wince and a hiss. “My arm is dislocated. My suit is telling me that I have also sprained the joint. Otherwise, I am merely drained. I can walk, and if need be, I can fight.” Alyra’s eyes burned into me as I did my own examination of her injury. “I will not fail you, my dragon.”

  “I never thought you would.” I smiled, my fingers passing through her glowing armor with strange ease. Yep, Alyra’s shoulder was definitely swelling. The med-kit’s auto-doc could handle it ea
sily, but she’d have to hold still for it, and we couldn’t do that at the moment. “Okay, I’m going to relocate it, and we’ll fix it when we get to safety.” Looking her eye-to-eye, I frowned a bit in concentration as I got my grip ready. “Ready?”

  Alyra nodded bravely, and the moment she did so, I popped her shoulder back into the socket with one swift move. She clenched her jaw against the momentary pain, then let out a low, long sigh. “Thank you, David.”

  As I stood up, nodding at her, Tulip had finished stripping our prisoner down to his utilitarian black boxers, adding his damaged power suit to the two other mostly intact ones the miners had salvaged, coiling one of the electrified whips in her hands. “I’m just glad you two are both safe,” she said softly before glancing at the slaves if it was even right to think of them like that now. In essence, they were the first of our newly liberated army. “Felinus and Draconis were really watching out for us in the end, it looks like.”

  “I could have wished for an easier landing,” I admitted, Alyra nodding in agreement beside me. “That storm in and of itself has me concerned, but we’ll figure it out.”

  The miner that had run off into the dark, one of the younger, slighter ones, came back, cradling my abused Arclight Double in his arms, just as the others seemed ready to move. The young man stepped up to me, holding out the weapon to me. “Here, dragon. I only wish it were in better shape.”

  I took the rifle from him and smiled. “Thanks, and don’t worry about it. At the end of the day, it’s just a weapon. Better it than any of us.”

  Glancing over the blaster quickly, I didn’t need my HUD to report that it’d been badly damaged. The split-tip and hard-edged segments of those whips had proven capable of cutting through power armor, after all, and the electrical shocks could momentarily disrupt hardened suit systems. The Arclight was sturdy, but it wasn’t as sturdy as our power suits.

  The miner’s answer was a noncommittal grunt as he scurried to get into line with the others. Our Resistance member waved us forward with his webbed hand. “Come. We are only safe because of our distance from the main veins. We must move now.”

  I nodded, holstering the ravaged rifle on my spare back clamp, and got to marching with the rest, Tulip and Alyra sticking close to either side of me. Milky-eyes led the way, with two of the burlier miners, while the rest followed behind us, surrounding the Quib as he pulled the cart along, the spare axes, whips, and sundry weapons the workers had stripped from the dead. None of us let our guards down, especially Tulip, her cat ears flicking at every errant sound as we pressed onward, while Alyra still greatly favored her good arm, keeping the other held close to her body.

  Now that the danger wasn’t screaming in our faces, I got the chance to really take in the twisting tunnels we found ourselves moving through. Dim lighting reflected off the glittering crystals that ran in veiny lines all around us, shining down from irregularly aligned strips mounted to the ceiling. That irregularity was matched by the shape and size of the tunnels themselves, and it was obvious to me that these hadn’t been carved by any sort of machine like a modern mine. No, these had all been cut out by hand tools, inch by laborious inch, and unlike the normally structured Matriarchy layouts, they wove, split, and merged like running rivers. My best guess was that they were cut out to follow the veins of raw phasic crystal.

  Fortunately, our internal maps were functioning properly, and everything was matching up with what Resistance intel had put together for us.

  We moved in relative silence for a good ten minutes, with Milky-eyes occasionally signaling a sudden stop with a raised fist at a suspicious sound or occasionally nothing at all, at least from what I could tell. Better to be paranoid than not in this case, I told myself, but for all the stops, nothing happened. Finally, the tension seemed to melt away, and our guide glanced back as we turned a corner into a larger chamber with a myriad of smaller tunnels branching out like a web.

  “It is safe to speak now, I think, but I do not think I need to remind you all to stay aware,” he said in a deep, gravelly voice. “I regret to say that we must keep moving though. We will rest and tend to wounds when we arrive at the camp.”

  The three of us nodded in understanding, the entire little caravan moving onward towards one of the side tunnels. “Then let’s get some questions answered,” I said, keeping my voice low.

  “Of course, dragon.” Milky-eyes dropped back a few steps to walk closer to me. “I am Quar, former crew boss of the 2nd Synatan Miners Corps, and now, I suppose, former slave. Do you know of Synata Minor?”

  “We do,” Alyra said softly, something that seemed to make Quar really look at her for the first time. He let out a loud grunt after a moment’s hard glare, snapping his attention back to me.

  “Then you know we still resist.” He gestured to the other miners behind him. “Though most of my new crew knows nothing of Synata, they are all like me. Torn from their homes and forced to work on pain of death by the Matriarchs.” Shaking his head, he let out a strange, whuffing laugh, like a wheezing old dog. “But let us focus on the present.”

  “That’s what’s important,” I agreed, finding myself stepping a little closer to Alyra as my dragon fumed in the back of my mind. I wasn’t alone in my protective instincts, as Tulip stepped around behind us both to walk on Alyra’s other side, stroking her shoulder comfortingly. “You said we were expected. Considering even we weren’t sure where we would make our entry at, I’m having a little trouble with that one.”

  Quar nodded, two sets of eyelids blinking at me. “I’ll explain what I know. Some of it is unknown to me. As Null-K knows, we pass only the most essential information to a task between cells.”

  Tulip grinned a bit at that. “I do love being recognized. He’s right. It’s standard insurgent cell tactics.” Her tail swished a little as I nodded in understanding. “So, what do you know?”

  “That I was told by my superior via secret message that the Resistance was finally making its move on Leonis IV,” he recounted as we moved into a tighter, narrower tunnel. The lighting was erratic at best, and the crystalline veins were rarer and rarer. These must be completely mined-out sections. “Given an approximate time frame, I looked at the maps of the mine sections we worked through and tried to puzzle out the best approach. In this sector, that emergency airlock access adjacent to a mostly played-out crystal vein, well, it made the most logical sense to watch.”

  He shrugged. “There was no way to be sure if you would go for this part of the mines, but I can only imagine there are cells like mine working throughout the planet, all keeping watch for your arrival.”

  Our prisoner spoke up right then, his warbling voice carrying a bit in the close quarters, “Uh, and, uh, that’s where we came in. The Matriarch put out a high alert based on reports the dragon of tyranny was coming to Leonis, and when the supervisor found out that one of our work crews had gone missing, we tracked them to that airlock.” The miners surrounding the Quib gave him a dark look, something that made him quiet his voice. “Uh, my name is Kritik, uh, by the way.”

  I nodded slowly. “Thank you for being open about that, Kirtik. The more you offer what you know like that, the less likely it’ll be that the people you hurt will want your head on a pike.”

  Dragon of tyranny, well, that was what the beliefs of the Matriarchs were, the name for me written in their holy books. It was like the Bizzaro World version of the book of Draconis, the prophecies passed around by the Resistance. I shook my head to myself. The dragon inside of me didn’t seem to rise up to roar at either implication and that only added to my own growing beliefs that the whole notion of prophecy from either side was wrong.

  Quar didn’t decide to comment on my words, instead glancing between Tulip and me, still a bit hesitant to look for long at Alyra. “Now that we have made contact, my orders were to take you to my master’s hidden meeting grounds. From there, I do not know what will happen, but as the Quib says, Xara is agitated, and we have seen evidence that, in the past
day, a courier ship from the heart of Matriarch space arrived.” He turned his attention back towards the tunnels ahead. “Things have changed here, dragon. I can taste it in the back of my throat flaps.”

  “You’re not wrong,” Tulip murmured, her feline eyes darting around. “Considering there was a massive storm to greet us in a world that barely has an atmosphere, yeah, things are different now.”

  “I have been pondering that, now that we have had time to think,” Alyra began, hugging her hurt arm to herself with her good hand. “Though I do not know of any Matriarchs that possess the magic to do so, at least in our current generation, I read reports right before my … defection … that Professor Pan had produced a mutated Quib, who could manipulate air, winds, weather patterns, all of that kind of thing.”

  I thought back to what Clara had told Tulip and me about the mad geneticist, one of the Matriarchy’s researchers who searched for the genetic source of magic, something that Quibs never seemed to have. In the light of what I saw now, that Quibs were just indoctrinated soldiers from a variety of species, I had to wonder exactly why Quibs didn’t have magic? And why had every magic-user outside of myself and the other mutant Quib we had fought was a woman?

  It was Kritik’s voice that snapped me out of my thoughts. “We were warned not to go to the surface or take any mining crews to other camps via the above-ground routes period until further notice.” He paused a moment, then added, his four eyes going wide. “Oh! And I’m sure in that transmission, there was this big, three armed Quib in funny armor standing next to her!” He looked around at the former slaves around him, grinning like an idiot. “That’s, uh, helpful, right? I’m doing good, huh?”

  “Well, it’s information we previously didn’t have,” Quar admitted begrudgingly. With a faint backward nod to his crew, the disgruntled miners gave the prisoner a little bit of space.