by Aaron Crash
Contents
Summary
Aaron Crash's Mailing List
ONE_
TWO_
THREE_
FOUR_
FIVE_
SIX_
SEVEN_
EIGHT_
NINE_
TEN_
ELEVEN_
TWELVE_
THIRTEEN_
FOURTEEN_
FIFTEEN_
SIXTEEN_
SEVENTEEN_
EIGHTEEN_
NINETEEN_
TWENTY_
TWENTY-ONE_
TWENTY-TWO_
TWENTY-THREE_
TWENTY-FOUR_
TWENTY-FIVE_
TWENTY-SIX_
TWENTY-SEVEN_
TWENTY-EIGHT_
TWENTY-NINE_
THIRTY_
Books, Mailing List, and Reviews
Other Works by Aaron Crash
Books from Shadow Alley Press
About the Author
Dedication
Special Thanks
Copyright
Summary
In an infinite universe, evil knows no limits …
When a black hole exploded, killing Blaze and Elle’s father and opening the demonic Onyx Gate, they had no idea how much their lives would change.
Now, thirty years later, Blaze is a highly trained astral Marine, and Elle is a powerful Onyx witch. Together, the siblings have formed an uneasy alliance with a misfit crew of aliens and monsters to track down demons, snare ghosts, and destroy hellish creatures bent on murder—all to discover how to close the Onyx Gate for good.
There’s just one problem. A demon-possessed robot has infiltrated their starship, the Lizzie Borden, and a vicious coven of stellar vampires have stranded them in a graveyard of ships at the edge of known space. All the while, an unimaginable evil is brewing—one they cannot possibly destroy.
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ONE_
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Gunnery Sergeant Ramon “Blaze” Ramirez gazed into the eyes of the sultry brunette. God, he loved the women out on the edges of the Americatus Quadrant. She smiled with full lips, her green eyes glittering. They lay on his bed, in the master suite of his starship. The lights from the docking arm flashed through the window above him.
The Fleabugger space station had been built on a moon swiss-cheesed by Clicker miners. Though its official name was the New Oberlin Docking and Supply Harbor, everyone called it Fleabugger. It was an ugly kind of place on the fringes of the Sargasso Expanse.
The gunnery sergeant could see the rock of the moon, the metal of the space station, and the sea of stars beyond—including the massive gas giant in the distance. His room wasn’t very well furnished since he used it mainly for his bed and his weapons. Next to an old desk sat Ugly Betty, his six-shot fusion shotgun. On his nightstand lay the haft of his ax, bladeless for now. Near the door, next to his polished cherry-wood wardrobe, was a flamethrower, since plasma, fusion, and projectile weapons played hell on a starship’s hull.
His room was old news. This brunette? Oh yeah, breaking news, film at eleven. Things were going well in Blaze’s life. He had survived his last relationship, which had tried to kill him. Literally. His crew was sleeping peacefully in their rooms below. And the new woman next to him was soft in all the right places.
Top it all off, they were about to turn a real evil asshole in for a huge bounty. The guy wasn’t possessed by a demon, but he was the type of sinister pendejo that Blaze loved to track down. They had thought he was hellspawn when they read the reports. Turns out, he was just a civilian who liked to kill and eat Meelah children.
One less monster in the galaxy. A job well done. And now, the spoils of victory. The brunette in his arms had been key in helping them capture their prey. The sparks hadn’t been there at first, but Blaze knew how to fan a flame.
“Kiss me again,” the woman whispered. The twin suns beamed off Decatur V, the giant gas planet filling the window. Since most of the swirling clouds were red, Blaze’s room was cast in a scarlet light.
Damn, she smelled good. She must’ve perfumed those hard abdominal muscles, so different from her soft, squeezable hips. Too bad he couldn’t remember her name. Not for the life of him.
He bent and kissed her, enjoying how soft and wet her lips were. She opened her mouth wider, offering him her tongue. Who was he to say no to a lady?
Something hard stabbed his tongue.
He jerked back.
“What in God’s good name was that?” The taste of blood filled his mouth.
No, couldn’t be.
The woman’s eyes widened, she let out a howl, and then those eyes disappeared as the long black legs of something ripped through her corneas. She didn’t howl for long. In a great choking gasp, a spider the size of a fist clambered out of her mouth. That was what had bitten him.
Her body shuddered, rising from his silk sheets, twisting, writhing.
Blaze leapt off the bed, backing away. He’d kept his jeans and boots on, but he was shirtless, his muscled skin wrecked by tattoos and scars. El Ojo de Horus ink took up most of the left side of his chest since it was the most important. The Eye of Horus pattern kept demons from possessing him.
On the bed was a horror show. The woman bucked and thrashed, flinging gore. The sheer dress she’d been wearing shredded as more spiders fought their way out of her skin in spurts of blood. Torn flesh mixed with the tatters of her clothing as the spiders crawled from her body. Every spider seemed different, from furry tarantulas to spindly smooth daddy longlegs.
The legs of the first spider still flailed from her eye sockets until a sickening crunch filled the room as her skull exploded. The biggest of the arachnids burst from her face, covered in brains.
Blaze cocked his head, a little smile twisting his lips. “Well, there’s nightmare material for a week.” And it would only be a week. He’d seen much worse.
This couldn’t be happening. He’d scanned her twice, searching for signs of the demonic Onyx energy which plagued the galaxy. And his witch sister’s guarding sigils should’ve gone off at the first sign of the demon’s presence. Top it all off, the Lizzie Borden had an Onyx detection system.
If the thing inside the brunette was powerful enough to hide so well, not only were Blaze and his crew in trouble, Fleabugger just might find itself royally screwed.
The woman was empty of organs now, a cast-off coat of Human flesh, and the spiders, hundreds of them, poured off the bed, coming for Blaze.
Clicking toward him, they were growing, feeding off Onyx energy, growing, growing, growing.
The skull spider sat on the bed, watching with a dozen black beady eyes. Its legs were small compared to the bulge of its body, like a Terran black widow. And it too was getting bigger. In seconds, it was the size of a small dog. Another second? A Rottweiler.
Blaze snatched up the flamethrower, flicked the starter to fire, and jacked propellant into the main tank from the compressed bottle of fuel in the stock.
He spewed fire onto the oncoming eight-legged bastards.
Shrieks filled the room as spiders were consumed in the blast. Others caught fire and swirled around, squealing until they curled up in little balls of dead demonic flesh. An instant later, new spiders broke free from the charred black husks.
“Breeders? Nombre de Dios!” Blaze blasted the newly spawned horrors as well as the remaining spiders from the first wave of terrors, which were now the size of poo
dles.
Breeder demons were the worst. He’d seen snake demons as well as scorpions and even a strange case of jellyfish. The horrific floating jellies had wiped out an entire continent on a planet over in the Afrique Quadrant. They’d had to nuke the site from orbit. Just to be sure.
Breeder demons could spawn over and over, endlessly, if the master demon wasn’t killed. And the master monster was obviously Mr. Eye Socket, covered in the brunette’s brains, watching Blaze from his bed. A little fire wasn’t going to hurt that bad boy. For him, Blaze would need his ax.
The skull spider opened its fangs at the front of its fat body and let out a spray of yellow-green poisonous acid. It struck the floor and opened a gaping, sizzling hole, first in the Turkish carpet, and then in the metal underneath.
While its hellspawn continued to rush toward Blaze, the skull spider dropped through the hole and disappeared, but not before shitting out other tiny spiders from a puckered hole in its back end.
Blaze figured it would take about ten minutes for the ship to be overrun. In an hour? All of Fleabugger would be battling the breeders. Give the skull spider a day? Every soul on the space station, Human, Clicker, and Meelah alike, would be hanging in webs being sucked dry. Well, that would be the case if the demons were like regular spiders. Maybe they only needed Onyx energy to survive, and they’d merely toy with the inhabitants of the station. Maybe they would burrow into people and then snack on their organs while their helpless hosts screamed. That was what happened to the millions living in Lagos Prime in the Afrique Quadrant when the demon jellies had hit them.
First things first. Blaze had to leave his room alive.
He needed his fusion weapons, though.
He leapt onto his dresser, bent and scooped up Ugly Betty, and threw the strap over his shoulder. His thrower puked fire into the room even as the emergency fire suppression system came online. From above, hidden spigots doused his bedroom in white foam. Helped with saving the ship. Didn’t help in killing spiders.
He jumped down and squashed two spiders under his boot and then snatched up his fusion ax off the nightstand along with a bandolier of hydrogen shells.
A spider sprang and latched onto his arm, fangs dripping acid or poison or both. Before it could bite him, he flung it off, but another dropped from above him. He caught it on the tip of his thrower and scorched it to cinders.
As it fell dead to the floor, two spiders climbed out of its burnt skin.
These he crushed between his fingers. The little ones were too small to spawn more. He wiped their greasy black spider guts on his jeans.
Blaze sped through the white foam and shrieking spiders, pushing through his door, but not before wrenching the wardrobe to the side. It blocked most of the doorway. But not all.
Out in the main corridor, he spun.
Spiders came flooding over the wardrobe.
He’d kill the kiddies and then take out their big daddy.
For that, he could use some help.
Blaze tapped behind his ear, and his implants came online. Ocular implants on the surface of his eyes showed him a battle schematic, linked to his body and his weapons. His flamethrower was about half empty, Ugly Betty was loaded completely with hydrogen shells, and his ax was fully charged. His VHI, or vitals and health index, was at a hundred percent, though his heart rate was elevated and his glucose levels a little depleted. He’d skipped dinner to have drinks with the brunette. Now she lay like someone’s cast-off bathrobe on his bed. Blaze felt terrible that he hadn’t remembered her name.
The implants near his eardrums and vocal chords allowed him to broadcast his speech and listen to his team.
Lizzie’s computer spoke in his ear. “There is a fire in the master suite, structural integrity in the floor of the suite has been compromised, and there might be demonic activity onboard.”
“Too late to get on my good side, puta. You blew it.” Blaze opened emergency comms to his crew and yelled, “We have a level-five infestation of breeder demons! Everybody wake up. Drop your dicks and grab your sticks.”
“I don’t have a dick,” Elle’s sleepy voice scratched in his ear. “And I’m officially not talking to you. But I guess I have to help. What kind of breeders and how bad is it?”
Fernando clicked, and his implants translated his insect language. Clickers spoke five times as fast as Humans, and so the translator really had to work to keep up. “Darling Elle, Blaze mentioned it is a level-five infestation. And they are spiders. Bill and I are engaged.” Bill was the other bug on board. While the stick insect race was sometimes called the Phasmida, most of the time everyone just called them Clickers.
Ling, their resident Meelah kung fu master, spoke next. “I am trying to get to the docking arm. If the spiders get to the station, Fleabugger will be…well…I believe you would use some kind of slang term for violent sexual intercourse. Perhaps even involving sodomy.”
Aw, his crew, quite the menagerie. If he had any sense, he’d trade them all in for new hunting partners. Even his sister. No, no, no, especially his sister.
Blaze ignored his team to yell to the computer, “Lizzie! Disengage fire suppression routines.”
He emptied the flamethrower into the hallway crawling with various shapes and sizes of spiders, all rushing toward him in a bizarre moving carpet of horror.
“Should we release Cali?” Fernando asked.
Sweat broke out across Blaze’s forehead, and fear staked his heart. “God, no. We can handle the breeder demon. No telling what Cali will do once she’s out. Let’s keep her caged.”
The flamethrower was empty. He dropped it and swung Ugly Betty around. He jacked a hydrogen shell into the chamber. The shotgun whined and warmed in his hands. Three seconds later, the indicator light on his combat display lit up green.
“Sorry, Lizzie, gonna have to put a few holes in you.” Blaze pressed the trigger of his fusion shotgun. A ball of blinding yellowish-white light burst from the muzzle and struck three of the biggest spiders, reducing them to dust.
“Breed that, putas,” Blaze growled. No new spiders emerged. He’d found a way to stop them from reproducing. It was gonna be hard on his ship, but oh well. “Use fusion weapons,” he told his crew. “It stops them from multiplying.”
“We need to get to the docking arm,” Elle said, gasping. She was running while she talked.
Blaze worked the action of his shotgun. It hummed as it powered up. “Blow it.” He grimaced. Destroying a docking arm would bring the wrath of the IPC on them, but there was no helping it. It was just too risky leaving them attached to the station.
“I can help with that,” Fernando said. The whole ship rocked at the force of the explosion. Then there was a belly-shaking sinking feeling as Fleabugger’s gravity field let go, and the ship drifted off. Then a bowel-watering sensation as Lizzie’s artificial gravity took over. Good ’ol Lizzie.
Blaze waited at the end of the corridor. Since the fire wasn’t helping, he said to the ship’s computer, “Okay, Lizzie, douse the fire.” The dampening foam sprayed through the hallway onto the oncoming spiders, which were increasing in size.
“Fire suppression routines back online,” the voice said mechanically in his ear. Blaze could’ve upgraded to a computer with more A.I., but he had enough trouble dealing with demons. Some kind of freaked-out Human-hating artificial intelligence was above his pay grade.
He waited as the remaining spiders streaked toward him, covered with white foam. They were so humongous now that they had to clump together to fit in the hall. He blew them into nothing with his highly illegal star-energy weapon.
One of the spiders stormed out of his scorched room. The thing had grown to the size of a fat man, filling the hallway. He let the shotgun fall and picked up his fusion ax. It was a piece of round metal about three feet long, like a small staff. A click of the button activated the hydrogen shell in the handle. The metal shivered with power as the fusion energy created two crescent-shaped ax blades.
The
entire hallway glowed first red, then orange, then yellow as the ax blades powered up.
He stepped forward, wielding the ax double-handed, and sank one of the blades into the big-boy spider. The thing curled up, rolled up its legs, and gripped itself as it stiffened in death. Other spiders met the same fate, their cells sealed shut by the fusion weapon so they couldn’t spawn.
The little ones met their fate under Blaze’s boots. The place stank of fried spider, which had a grilled pork kind of smell.
Blaze felt his mouth water. “I should never have skipped dinner.”
A howl filled the ship. It came from the cargo bay, where they were keeping their prisoner.
The skull spider was still about and causing mischief.
Damn breeders.
If their bounty was killed, they would get the “dead” price, which was twenty-five percent of the “alive” money.
Blaze couldn’t let that happen. He pushed through an airlock and started down the central spiral staircase at the heart of the ship. His crew blipped up on his combat display on the far right of his vision: Elle, Ling, Bill, and Fernando. He saw Cali’s name at the bottom, but she was offline. Thank God. Another shiver of fear swiped cold fingers down his spine. Cali wasn’t right. Not right at all.
So far, all of his people—a loose term for those he worked with—were alive and fighting. He watched their VHI percentages and their ammunition supply drop as they took damage and dealt it out.
How many of the spiders from the initial burst had become the size of monsters by now? Hell, the skull spider might grow so big it would burst out of his ship like a chicken out of its shell.
“Holy damn,” Elle’s voice broke through comms. “These things are hard to kill. We’re gonna have to do a flush.”
“No way!” The two words burst from his mouth. “No. With fusion weapons, we can take out the spawn, and once we get to the main spider, this will be over.”
“Where is that spider, brother dear? Do you know?”
“I hate it when you remind me we’re family.” Blaze descended the stairs two at a time.