As he buckled on the gun belt, Karen Reeves’s voice came through the ship’s intercom. “If anyone is still listening, I want you to know that your performance reviews will reflect your negative behavior on this project, and I will be recommending disciplinary action in the form of punitive fines for the lot of you.
“As for you, Star Warden… I want you to know you haven’t won. I’ve activated the siphoning drive. The Kleppin star may kill the SS1, but it will be a pyrrhic victory, and all your precious little Undocs will live out the remainder of their limited days on a freezing planet in the dwindling glow of a dying star.”
The Warden lowered his head and took a deep breath. He hadn’t counted on Reeves’s hatred driving her to this. Leaving the office, he grabbed the first crewmember he saw and demanded directions to the siphoning drive control room.
---
Karen eased into the command chair of her private shuttle and flicked on the communication monitor, linking it directly to the siphoning control room. She was not disappointed. By the time her tiny ship had powered up and begun its departure protocols, she saw the Star Warden run into the empty room on the SS1.
“There you are,” she said, smiling. She knew her value to SuperCorp would be devastated by this debacle. She would at least have the small satisfaction of watching the man responsible for it die. “I knew you’d make it.”
The Warden scanned the room for an instant before replying. “You don’t have to do this, Miss Reeves. Tell me how to shut this thing down, and you can save thousands of lives. You can be the savior of entire worlds.”
She laughed, remembering a history lesson from long ago. “What was it Oppenheimer said when humanity first harnessed the power of the atom? ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ Well, I, Karen Fran Reeves, have trumped him. I am the destroyer of entire star systems.
“And apparently I have accomplished what no one has been able to do for over a hundred years: I have also destroyed the last of the Star Wardens.”
The Warden spared her a crooked smile as his head swiveled, taking in the massive banks of controls and generators that were coming to life. She watched the room fill with an electric blue glow as the siphoning engines acquired full power.
The Warden looked out of the monitor as if she were there, face to face.
“I’ve gotten out of worse,” he said before blasting the camera and robbing her of her final victory.
She cursed and jerked at the controls as her shuttle left the titanic Star Sequencer 1. The action caused one of the craft’s wings to clip an antenna array. The shuttle spiraled out of control, and Karen was hurled from her chair.
In the haste to savor her revenge, she had not buckled in.
---
The Warden stood at the control panel, trying to make sense of the power levels and range figures scrolling across the screen. He pushed several buttons, knowing he would get the flashing red “User Not Recognized” response. He picked up the SuperCorp carbine and headed into the workings of the star siphoning engine.
“I may not know how to access this modern technology, but I still know how to gum up a machine.”
The chamber was enormous, at least as big as the orbital shipyard facility that had built the Ranger-class ships back in his day. A ship-sized cylinder running through the middle of the chamber, supported by struts and buttresses connecting to the surrounding walls, occupied most of this cavernous space. Massive banks of cooling units ran along this gargantuan tube at regular intervals, indicating the inordinate amount of heat the device would generate. And it indicated the Achilles’ heel of the entire setup.
The Warden blasted the first of these cooling units into Freon-spraying scrap.
Alarms turned the blue-infused room red and filled the entire chamber with a deafening clarion when the unit went up in smoke. The Warden blasted more coolant systems. But the siphoning engine continued to power up. Reeves had apparently countermanded any fail-safes the engineers may have put in place.
Coughing against the poisonous gas slowly filling the chamber, the Warden continued his endless and hopeless battle against the enormous sun-destroying machine’s cooling units. A hundred meters into the tunnel surrounding the device, he spotted a possible weak link. The siphoning engine narrowed like the pinch point in an hourglass before widening again to colossal proportions. This pinch point was about the size of a stateroom on a vacation liner, but the Warden reasoned it would be the easiest portion of the behemoth to damage.
He raised the carbine and pulled the trigger.
The weapon made a dry click. It was empty.
The machine began to hum, filling the entire chamber with sound as well as a nauseating heat. Within seconds, sweat covered the Warden and he could barely catch his breath.
Dropping the SuperCorp blaster, he drew his Comets and opened fire on the bottleneck chamber. It exploded on the second shot.
The Warden sailed through the burning, poisonous air. He slammed hard into a bulkhead, reigniting the agony in his ribs. The pain cleared his thoughts. Taking advantage of the dwindling gravity, he propelled himself down the shaft to the control room—just ahead of the conflagration filling the tunnel surrounding the siphoning engine.
Singed and gasping for breath, the Warden’s tear-blurred vision fell on the emergency airlock. He dived through the blast door and sealed it. A second later, flame consumed the control room. Snatching a GlasSteel helmet and oxygen pack from the wall, he donned the gear and hit the airlock release.
Surrounded by crushing silence, the Star Warden was flushed into open space. Though the violence of his ejection carried him almost a kilometer away from the dying Sun Smasher, the ship filled his vision. From his perspective, the ship seemed larger than the moons surrounding Kleppin 3, even larger than the Undoc world itself.
This illusion lasted for several minutes before the massive ship’s velocity carried it deeper into the system. And though the Warden knew an inferno raged within the leviathan’s belly, no visible sign shone along its outer hull. The Sun Smasher seemed wholly intact right up to the moment it entered the star’s corona. Any explosion on the ship was obscured by the sun’s brightness.
The Star Warden took a deep breath and let everything settle in as he hung suspended in open space. He had succeeded in saving Kleppin 3 and the families now calling it home, but he had failed to save Karen Reeves from the hatred that had consumed and twisted her.
He touched the com on his wrist chrono. “Quantum, can you hear me?”
“Good to know you are still among the living.” His friend’s voice was staticky but audible. “Watching that ship come into this system caused an almost religious fervor among the locals. I thought you might become the first martyr of this nascent faith.”
The Warden smiled. “So everything’s okay down there?”
“As far as I can tell. We do have a new visitor. A SuperCorp shuttle crash-landed nearby. The only occupant, a human woman of some apparent importance was badly injured. But the Halums have taken her in and are tending her wounds along with the pilot of the first crash.”
The Warden’s smile widened. “Who knows? Maybe Frontier hospitality will prevail where Frontier justice failed.”
“Meaning?”
“Never mind. Just come and get me if it’s not too much of an inconvenience. It’s been a long day.”
The Haunted Station
The Last Star Warden stared into the infinite beauty of the cosmos, wondering if in all that limitless space there might be a way to get back to his own time. The longer he remained in this new era, he found it harder and harder to stare into the void without feeling a growing sense of soul-numbing loneliness. He did not like this new sensation, as his entire life had been spent looking to the stars and finding nothing but hope and inspiration.
He sat at the helm of the Ranger VII, guiding the silvery sleek deep-patrol ship farther into the wild reaches of Frontier Space. Though the Star Wardens had ceased to exist decades be
fore, he continued their mission of maintaining the peace, the mission for which he had been trained. It was the only thing he knew how to do. It was the only thing that made sense to him in this modern, morally ambiguous era. The mission was his purpose.
The mission was his identity.
An automated distress signal sounded over the coms. “To any ship within range, this is CRS-T 33 in the HPL-37 system. We need your help. Please respond as soon as possible… To any ship…”
“Quantum,” the Warden called down to the crew compartment. “Looks like someone out there needs our help.”
“Someone always does.” The tall, slender blue alien climbed onto the bridge, his short antennae flicking atop his elongated skull. His oversized black eyes rarely blinked, and his small mouth seemed forever locked in a patronizing grin, as if silently judging this dimension.
Like the Warden, Quantum was a veteran of the Continuum War that had raged but for a few horrific weeks over a hundred years ago. A war waged between the Mechtechan, Quantum’s own interdimensional race of conquerors, and the Star Wardens, the United Planetary Council’s first deep-space security agency. That war had saved this plane of existence from the Mechtechan at great cost. It had also hurled the Warden and Quantum out of their own time and space, placing them in an unlikely partnership which had grown into genuine friendship over the past several months.
The Warden gave a square-jawed smile. “It’s not like we have anything better to do.” He set a course for the signal’s origin. “Whoever is in trouble is way out on their own. The system doesn’t even have a name, just a designation: HPL-37. I don’t think too many Undocs have made it this far yet, and I doubt if any Star Cav patrols come this way very often.”
“I would surmise smugglers or pirates, then.” Quantum slipped into the navigator’s chair. “Or perhaps another rogue corporate experiment? Most likely a trap of some sort.”
The Warden frowned at that thought. “Let’s hope not.”
Within a few hours, the Ranger VII’s three atomic engines carried the Warden and Quantum through the nearest Einstein-Rosen bridge. Passing through the controlled wormhole network, they emerged into the isolated HPL-37 system at the extreme edge of the Milky Way’s core. It was a desolate system, to be sure. Two barren, moonless worlds orbiting a white dwarf. A perpetual dust shroud from a long-disintegrated comet hung over the system like heavy fog. Apart from the communication buoys and the ERB at the system’s edge, there was very little else.
Or so it first appeared.
“Look.” Quantum pulled up an image and magnified it on the visual display. “There, hidden in the shadow of the inner world, almost invisible to scans. A space station.”
The foreboding structure loomed above the planet, looking like nothing so much as a gothic tower ripped from some ancient fortification and hurled into the firmament by a terrible and demonic force. The long, black cylinder of CRS-T 33 bristled with barbed antennae and sensor arrays, as well as a handful of railguns and rocket batteries as it slowly twisted in its orbit. A fitful electric light from within its darkened portholes flashed in places along its outer hull.
The Warden nodded. “Whoever is on that thing didn’t want any casual observers to notice them. Or to be pestered if they were. Let’s hail them and see what’s what.”
There was no response to the hail, only the continued automated request for help.
“There is something wrong with our long-range sensors,” Quantum said. “Readouts are fluctuating between one and fifty-nine lifeforms on that station. The irregular readings must be caused by a multi-spectrum interference. There appears to be some form of energy distortion surrounding the station, but I cannot identify it yet.”
“Well, we are using salvaged parts on a ship that was technically obsolete some seventy or eighty years ago… I’ll take us closer.”
“The station’s automated defense systems are locking onto us.” There was no emotion in Quantum’s observation. “They are powering up to fire.”
The Warden shrugged. “I don’t know if this’ll work, but it’s worth a shot.” He sent a Star Warden jurisdictional authorization code to the station. “Who knows how old this thing is?”
Quantum’s large, childlike eyes narrowed. “It appears to have worked. This is far newer technology than was used by your people in the time of our war. However, from what I have gathered, the U.P.C.’s advancements have moved at such a rapid pace that they simply overwrite the older systems rather than deleting them. I surmise that your access codes are still buried deep in this facility’s operating systems.”
“Well, at least we’ve got that much going for us. What about those energy distortions? Dangerous?”
“Negative. Most of the power seems to be contained within the facility. I am detecting nothing that would be harmful to your biology as far as radiation is concerned.”
Docking the Ranger VII to the station, the Warden pulled his suit’s skullcap over his head so that the black HUD visor concealed the upper half of his face. “Then let’s see if we can get to the bottom of this mystery.”
Quantum said, “If we can trust our sensors at all, the energy distortion does not seem to be affecting the radiant temperature. As if the energy is going somewhere… else. Strange.”
The Warden and Quantum donned their GlasSteel helmets and oxygen tanks. As always, the Warden wore his twin Comet blasters, and Quantum carried his long particle-beam rifle. There were too many questions surrounding the station not to play it safe. Who had built the isolated and remote station, and why? What had befallen the facility to necessitate a distress signal? What was the source of the strange energy, and where was it going? Possibly of more importance, what were the station’s uncommunicative crew—or whoever was on the thing—willing to do to keep it secret?
Passing through the airlock and into the station, the Warden recognized the interior design. The rectangular walls and horizontal walkways with a clearly defined sense of up-and-down, along with the word-symbols emblazoned on emergency and control panels, were the telltale earmarks of human construction. “Definitely built by folks from the Sol system.”
Flickering overhead florescent panels lit the corridor leading away from the airlock, though the far end faded into darkness. A low, creaking groan thrummed mechanically through the metal walls and deck plating.
Quantum stepped to a control panel beside the sealed airlock. “According to this readout, atmospherics are at optimal level. Artificial gravity is set to Earthman standards. As I suspected, no indication of toxins or other biohazards.”
“Okay. Looks like we can shed the helmets and Ox.”
Only a few steps down the corridor, the overhead light panels went completely dark. Before the Warden could change the spectrum of his visor, a low, mournful wail echoed from somewhere deep inside the station. The voice sent a cold chill creeping up his spine.
“Did you hear that?” The Warden turned to Quantum as his visor switched to night vision. “Sounded like someone in pain.”
“Or someone dying.” In tones of emerald and jade, his friend’s face was even less expressive than usual. “We should be careful.”
“Come on.” The Warden headed to the end of the corridor. The automated door opened at their approach. “Well, at least not everything is out of order.”
They stepped into another corridor, this one much wider with gently sloping walls to indicate a spiraling, circular path. It was also fully lit.
Switching back to normal vision, the Warden noted other doors lining this central hallway. There was an unsettling stillness, something akin to the sensation of entering a large and unfamiliar building and knowing with absolute certainty that no other living being is anywhere inside it.
A grey toolbox lay overturned on the deck, spilled wrenches and drivers scattered on the rubberized floor. Shards of broken fluorescent bulbs surrounded it. The Warden knelt to look at these, then turned to the door through which they had come. He rubbed his chin. “Someone was
on their way to repair the lights in that corridor when… something happened.”
“But what?” Quantum scanned the immediate surroundings. “Other than this disarray, I see no sign of a struggle. No biological tissue, no scuff marks. Nothing.”
The Warden looked in both directions of the circular corridor, noting the security cameras set in the ceiling panels. “Let’s look for the command center. I’m sure we’ll find some answers there.”
As they set off to the right, that disquieting moan sounded from somewhere on a deck high above them. A moment or two after its last echo had faded, it was answered by a fearsome shriek far below.
---
The Magpie 6 emerged from the comet fog, a hunched, rugged ship built to survive the dangers of asteroid-belt mining and Sargasso salvage operations. It had once been painted a rich scarlet and gold, but now looked to be covered in rust. Only the blue fire of its fusion drive and amber running lights gave it the impression of modern technology. It did not glide through space so much as crawled over it.
“Is that a Ranger-class ship?” Ramirez touched the display screen, magnifying the silver craft docked with the darkened station. Looking up from the image, she asked, “How old is this place, Rook?”
Rook, the salvage ship’s captain, shook his head. “Not that old.” Rubbing the stubble on his chin, he looked at the antique ship. “Looks like somebody beat us to the party…”
Ramirez, the first mate, pulled her long dark curls back and looped them into a tail. “You don’t think it could really be… him, do you? I didn’t think…”
“The Phantom Lawman?” Rook scoffed, returned to his command chair. “You know anybody else flying a mint-condition Ranger in the Frontier? This complicates things… Send the access code and initiate docking procedures.”
Taking his seat, Rook flipped the intercom switch and announced to his crew, “All right boys and girls, we’ve got a hot date with some prime salvage. There may be some legal entanglements, so let’s play nice for the time being. Suit up and prepare to board.”
The Last Star Warden - Tales of Adventure and Mystery from Frontier Space - Volume 1 Page 4