The Last Star Warden - Tales of Adventure and Mystery from Frontier Space - Volume 1

by Jason McCuiston

  Assigned to the same ship’s crew, King had instantly admired Jericho’s devotion to order, discipline, and particularly his religious zeal for punishing whatever he perceived to be wrongful activity. Naturally, when King had parted ways with Star Cav, he had brought his subordinate with him into his new vocation in private corrections.

  “Very good. Let us greet our new guests.” He led Jericho and Braun down the gangway to the bay floor where the Ranger VII was docked in a horizontal position, its thrusters and fins secured in gigantic magnetic locks. Four squads of heavily armored men wielding blast-proof riot shields and stun cannons surrounded the ship.

  A hatch opened on the ship’s underside and a muscular man in a form-fitting blue spacesuit dropped gracefully to the deck. Though he wore twin blasters on his gun belt, he made no move to draw. He was followed a moment later by the tall, lanky form of the blue-skinned Mechtechan.

  Again, King gasped at these legends become reality. Though, in all honesty, he had expected the Last Star Warden to be taller.

  “What’s the meaning of all this? Who’s in charge here? I’ve got a bone to pick with you.” The Warden’s voice boomed through the landing bay, filled with all the authority and presence King might have expected.

  “I am Commandant Stanislaus King. This is my first officer, Ilsa Braun, and my head of security, Jericho. I welcome you to the Hulk 13, Star Warden.” He stepped forward, Braun and Jericho at his back. King smiled, genuinely pleased to meet these two strangers. He found himself hoping that they would peacefully accede to his plans, and there would be absolutely no need for the unpleasantness of which he and his staff were more than capable. The unpleasantness for which they had already meticulously prepared.

  However, if this man’s reputation was based on fact, King knew there was small chance of that ever happening.

  “Keep your welcome, King. You brought us here under false pretenses, so what do you want?” The Warden kept his hands loose at his side, close to his holstered weapons, but not close enough to provoke an attack. Though his head didn’t move, King suspected the Warden’s unseen eyes were assessing the tactical situation behind his visor.

  Nor did the alien move save for the tiny antennae wiggling on his high forehead like hungry worms. King kept glancing at the tall creature, awed and unsettled by the unblinking black eyes, the expressionless mouth on the nose-less face. He was utterly fascinated by the last of the Mechtechan in this dimension.

  “I have a business proposition, Warden. If you and your friend would care to join me for dinner, we can discuss the particulars.”

  The Star Warden raised his square jaw. “Just ate, thanks. Let’s hear your spiel now, if you don’t mind. That way we can be on our way as soon as possible.”

  King bristled. “Very well. I want your friend, here, to help me develop new technology based on that possessed by the Mechtechan. I have connections in various… fringe retail markets where such technology would command a very high price. We could all become ridiculously wealthy with very little effort.”

  The Warden glanced at the alien. When the Mechtechan slowly shook his head, the Warden said, “There you have it, King. We’re not interested. But thanks for the ‘invite.’ Maybe just give us a call next time.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t take no for an answer, Warden.”

  “And I was afraid you’d say that.” The man’s blasters cleared their holsters before the sentence was finished.

  King blinked as Jericho grabbed him and hauled him behind a blast shield. He heard the sizzle of blaster bolts and stun rays and the cries of wounded men.

  “Don’t kill them!”

  Regaining his composure as Braun held him behind the shield and provided cover with her own sidearm, King looked up to see Jericho lead a rush on the retreating Warden and alien. Before, the two were overwhelmed by the swarm of armored guards; now, almost a dozen wounded men lay stretched out on the deck.

  “You should have had two detachments ready, sir,” Braun offered.

  He glared at her. “I should have pumped their damn ship full of gas as soon as they landed.”

  ---

  The Warden shook his head, trying to fight off the weakening, nauseating effects of the stun rays. He looked around, realized he was being carried between a pair of armored guards, his hands shackled behind his back. They followed a huge, hulking figure down a long, dark corridor. It was Jericho, the big guy who had led the charge that had clobbered Quantum and himself before they could reach the Ranger VII. The Warden thought he had hit the bruiser in center mass with at least one blaster shot, and yet there he was. Not even limping.

  “Where’s… my friend…? Where’s… Quan… tum?” The Warden’s speech was slurred, his face hurt. He had a feeling not all that pain was the result of a stun ray.

  Jericho turned and sneered as they reached a heavy PermaSteel door. “You should worry about yourself, Warden. We’re putting you in with Hogan for the night. Hogan don’t like roommates, so you’ll most likely be dead come morning.”

  The guards laughed as the door opened onto a pungent darkness. They tossed him in without ceremony, and without undoing his shackles.

  When the door closed again, the Warden was all but blind. His visor had been removed from his cowl, so all he had to rely on were his senses of sound, touch, and smell. The last of these being punished by an overwhelming stench.

  Someone moved in the darkness to his left. Someone big.

  “Well. Look’ee here,” a deep, guttural voice said. A small light flicked on. “Sorry ’bout the smell. I don’t get facility privileges until next month.”

  The Warden blinked at the sudden glare, studying the big, middle-aged man in the ratty jumpsuit sitting on a filthy bunk—the only one in the cell. The man’s hair and beard were long and braided, and had probably once been blond or light brown, but were now a dun color streaked with iron grey. A spider’s web of deep lines surrounded dark eyes set in a leathery face.

  But what drew the Warden’s immediate attention was the tattoo on the man’s big left deltoid. It depicted a single silver world silhouetted against a bright gold star, the planet’s orbit balanced by six golden sunrays. It was the emblem of the Star Wardens.

  “I take it you’re Hogan,” the Warden said with a grin. “Think you could give me a hand with these shackles?”

  Hogan returned the grin with a mouth full of broken, discolored teeth.

  ---

  King smiled as he entered the dark, sterile interrogation room. Jericho had just finished securing the Mechtechan to the PlaSteel Y-shaped upright gurney. Braun stood at the control panel, checking the power levels and bio-connections.

  The bound alien watched the entire process with inscrutable detachment.

  “As I understand it…” King rubbed his hands together and stepped to face the subject. This Mechtechan was the only one left in this universe, and he now belonged to Stanislaus King. “The Warden calls you ‘Quantum.’ A human affectation, I take it?”

  “It is. My language vibrates on a soundwave barely tolerable to most lifeforms of this dimension.”

  King shook his head in fascination. “I did not know that, and I know more about the Mechtechan than anyone else in the galaxy.”

  “A false supposition.” The blue alien seemed to study King rather than the other way around. “As I am clearly in this galaxy, it is an obvious deduction that I know more about my own kind than do you.”

  King chuckled and waved the observation aside. “I know, for example, about the spies your people first sent into this dimension. I know about the scouts who infiltrated and took over the agricultural colony on Tau Gamma Six, utilizing a mechanical means of mind control far more subtle and effective than anything the Tuatha ever developed.

  “If it hadn’t been for a pair of Star Wardens stopping in the colony for repairs and stumbling onto the plot, the Mechtechan invasion would have been well underway in the Frontier long before the U.P.C. could have mounted a suitable resp
onse.”

  The alien finished the story without emotion. “Instead, the Star Wardens were able to locate the breach from our dimension and strike while our Armada was in a bottleneck situation.”

  The unblinking black eyes turned to the control panel, then to the connections on its wrists and abdomen. “I assume you mean to torture me. Might I ask the reason?”

  “Your technology. That mind-control device I just mentioned, for example. Do you know how useful that would be to humans? Why, I could ensure absolute obedience on this ship, planetary governments could secure their regimes in peaceful perpetuity, and corporations could vastly increase the productivity and compliance of their workforces.

  “That invention alone would be as good as printing my own credits.” King leaned close to the suspended Mechtechan. “Just help me build something like that, and there will be no torture. I promise. Then, once we’re done, you and the Warden can go on about your business, or stay here as my partners. It is all up to you… Quantum.”

  “I was a science officer in the Mechtechan Armada. Not an engineer. It was my duty to collect, analyze, and process data, and to use that information to produce hypotheses and calculated projections. I am skilled in normal technical assembly and repair, but the design and production of the devices you seek are not within my skillset… Again, you have made a false supposition. I am no more capable of giving you what you want than you are of producing healthy offspring.”

  King stiffened. He’d learned from transcripts that some of the veterans of the Continuum War believed the Mechtechan possessed uncanny senses, able to see, hear, smell, and even taste on a much wider spectrum than most inhabitants of this dimension. Some of the veterans even believed their enemy had been psychic. Had this Mechtechan prisoner somehow sensed the deficiency in King’s body, or was he merely referring to the fact that King was not a woman?

  King turned to Braun and nodded. “Begin the data collection.”

  As his first officer activated the scans, King glared at the alien. “Well, this is not a ‘false supposition,’ my friend. I know that you have remarkable regenerative qualities that put most of our modern nanotech meds to shame. This means two things to me at the moment.” He raised a finger to the impassive blue face. “One, your harvested bio matter will fetch a high price on several black markets.”

  King smiled, his voice high and shrill as he raised the second finger. “And two, I can take my time with you… Jericho, fetch my kit…”

  ---

  “How do you live like this?” The Warden asked Hogan as the cell block’s lighting came up. Hogan’s contraband penlight had revealed only a fraction of the squalor and filth of the tiny room. “This is inhumane.”

  Hogan shrugged as he stood and stretched. “You get used to it… Still better than Tartarus.”

  The Warden raised an eyebrow. “Tartarus?”

  “The lowest decks, the original prison wings. About a year after King took over operations, he shut them off from all contact, left them with nothing but bare minimal life support.”

  Hogan ran a gnarled hand through his filthy hair. “You ever read old Christian religious scripture, Warden? Jesus talks about a place of ‘outer darkness with weeping and the gnashing of teeth’ quite a few times. I reckon that’s what Tartarus must be like, but nobody knows for sure...

  “If you get tossed down there—for insubordination, fighting, too many demerits, or just because King or Jericho are having a bad day—you never come back.”

  Hogan turned to the door as a muffled loudspeaker announced breakfast. “Well, the screws’ll be damn sure surprised to see you alive and well this morning. Worth not killing you in your sleep just to see the looks on their faces when they have to unshackle you.”

  Though the inmate had said this last with a playful wink, the Warden was not reassured.

  During the night, Hogan had told him that he had once been a Star Warden in his youth, decades after the Battle of Draconus Prime. But, seeing the writing on the wall and knowing that the agency was soon to be replaced by the new Star Cav, he had opted to use his position and authority to feather his own nest before the end came. But when that end arrived, and the growing corruption of the Star Wardens was exposed, scapegoats had been required. As luck would have it, Kal Hogan, Star Warden Second Class, had been tapped for the chopping block.

  The onetime lawman had spent almost thirty years locked up in Hulk 13, about as many years as he had lived free. The Warden may have felt sympathy for Hogan, even gratitude for the man not taking advantage of his injuries and fetters during their initial meeting, but he knew he could not trust him.

  “You losing your touch, Hogan, or just getting lonely?” One of the guards asked when the cell was opened. “Figured for sure you’d have painted this cesspit with the new guy’s guts.”

  Hogan laughed as they undid the Warden’s shackles. “I’m still thinking about it.”

  They were marched out to stand in a line with the other inmates, most of whom kept craning their necks to get a look at the newcomer in the relatively clean blue spacesuit. Unlike the correctional facilities of the Warden’s time, there was no uniform attire for the prisoners. Each man looked as if he still wore the filthy remnants of whatever clothes he had had on his back the first day of his incarceration. Any attempt at hygiene appeared to be undertaken solely by the individual, and this only on a limited basis. It was clear to the Warden that whatever funds the U.P.C. allocated to Hulk 13 for the care of its inmates were being misappropriated.

  As the line marched to the mess hall, the Warden wondered how much medicine and clean clothing could have been purchased for what King had paid the mercenaries to capture him and Quantum. The thought of his missing friend filled the Warden with guilt. If he had followed Quantum’s suggestion to fight the disguised bounty hunters, they may have avoided this mess.

  And now there was no telling what the corrupt and merciless King was doing to get what he wanted from the Warden’s friend. He needed to discover where Quantum had been taken and find a way to free him.

  The mess hall was an open area with rows of PlaSteel tables and connected stools spiraling out from a central guard tower. This was occupied by four men behind shatterproof GlasSteel windows. These presumably operated the surveillance cameras and automated stun cannons mounted in the upper corners of the big room. Two mezzanines encircled the mess hall, patrolled by a dozen armed men in riot gear.

  The Warden noted that these guards did not carry stun weapons, but lethal blasters.

  “If you’re planning something,” Hogan whispered as they got into the chow line. “This ain’t the place to try it. All the common areas are designed to be meat grinders. There was a riot the first month after King took over. The Silver Knuckles; maybe you’ve heard of ’em? Cutthroat pirates. Anyway, they were the gang who used to run this place, and they decided to test the new commandant.”

  “What happened?”

  Hogan held up his tray for a splash of greenish slop that looked like algae that had gone bad. “Well, let me put it to you this way. There ain’t no living Silver Knuckles in this prison anymore. In fact, there ain’t no gangs at all. King ain’t big on inmate fraternization. If it looks like three guys are getting it in their heads to start up a club, the next thing you know, two of ’em are banished to Tartarus.”

  The Warden accepted this information with the same zeal as he accepted his helping of rancid proto-nutrition. The only thing that kept him from slipping into a dark mood was the sight of a tall, blue-skinned figure entering the mess hall from the opposite side of the room.

  He motioned for Quantum to join him and Hogan, but when his friend sat down at the table without a tray, the Warden’s rage threatened to boil over.

  Quantum’s eyes, usually a shiny black, were a charcoal grey. His pale blue skin was marred by several big purple bruises. And his left antenna was missing.

  “What in the Sam Hill…?” the Warden said through gnashed teeth. “Are you okay?”
/>
  He thought Quantum smiled. “It is nothing, my friend. Commandant King and I have been discussing military history and theoretical mechanics. Nothing with which to concern yourself. As you know, I am quite resilient.”

  The Warden pushed his tray in front of Quantum. “At least eat something to keep up your strength. As I’m guessing you didn’t give him what he wanted, I doubt he’s through with you.”

  The nostrils on the top of Quantum’s head puckered, his remaining antenna flicked back. “I believe this might do more harm than the Commandant’s ministrations.”

  It took a moment for the Warden to realize his friend was joking.

  ---

  King stood in his office, watching the live feeds from the cafeteria on his holo monitors. He was surprisingly grateful that the inmate Hogan had not killed the Warden as expected. It gave him an opportunity to see the Mechtechan subject converse in a more natural manner. He hoped it would give him some insight into the alien’s mindset.

  Of course, he was no fool and had little patience for playing patronizing games. He would get what he wanted from this Quantum, or both he and the Last Star Warden would be wiped from existence.

  A chirp at the office door alerted King to Braun’s arrival. “Come.”

  “Good morning, sir. The night shift has finished their scan of the Star Warden’s ship.”

  King frowned, turned to see the smiling woman holding a data pad at her side. He really did wish he could find a young man with her devotion to duty and intelligent skill set. “Very good. What did they discover?”

  Braun glanced at the pad’s screen and flipped through the readout. “Aside from the vehicle being in excellent condition despite its age, it has been modified to a vast degree. The engines and weapons are now on par with modern technology, as are most of the sensor arrays and shielding. From what the chief engineer says, it appears these modifications are above even his level of skill.”