by Stuart Moore
“A gun?”
“Yeah, you know. A gun! You always got a lot of… of guns?”
“A gun. Yeah.” Rocket turned back to the holo. “Why didn’t I think of that? A gamma explosion strong enough to take out a solar system – just fire a flarking gun at it. ARE YOU AN IDIOT?”
“Now you’re just being… no bad ideas, remember?”
Quill turned away, his eyes wide. Focus, he thought. You’re Star-Lord. You’ve got to be Star-Lord. Your people, the inhabitants of that poor planet… they’re all depending on you.
“You know what our problem is?” he asked.
Rocket gestured at the energy strands, which looked thicker and angrier than ever. “Impending planetary extinction?” he offered.
“Mission creep.”
The raccoonoid’s eyes narrowed. “What did you call me?”
“What? No no – not you. Mission creep.”
“I don’t have to take that.” Rocket flung his metal pointer to the floor with a sharp clang. “I might not be the prettiest creature in this sector. I know I ain’t the Deadliest Woman in the Galaxy or Mister Muscles with the sharp scary knives. But nobody calls me a creep. Not even you.”
“Dude! It’s an Earth term.” Quill crouched down before the hologram, placing himself at Rocket’s level. “A Terran term. It means we’re trying to do too many things at once. Stop the explosion and evacuate the planet. We’re dividing our efforts.”
“Huh. You know, that actually makes sense.” Rocket stared at Quill as if the Earthman had done something totally unexpected, like sprouting wings or breathing underwater.
Quill pointed at the hologram. “How long do we have?”
“I ain’t no physicist either. But I’d say minutes. Half hour at most.”
“Which means…”
“Yeah. Stopping the explosion probably ain’t gonna happen.”
“Then we’ve gotta concentrate on the evacuation.” He slapped the comm button on his collar. “Gam, listen. We’re running out of time. Just get as many of those people off-planet as you can and get out of there. We’re coming to pick you up.”
Silence.
“Gam? Gamora?” He crossed back to the dashboard and began flipping switches. “She’s not answering.”
He turned to the small viewscreen. Out on the spaceport, a second evacuation ship prepared to take off, dark smoke rumbling all around it. The tide of refugees formed two streams, one heading toward each of the remaining evac ships. There were so many refugees, Quill could barely see the ground.
“Gam?” he repeated. He couldn’t make her out in the tide of green and white uniforms. “Agh! I can’t find her.”
“Is that all you want?” Rocket brushed past him, reaching for the copilot’s controls. “I planted a camera on her before the mission started.”
“You planted a…”
“Just a sec.” As Rocket fiddled with the controls, the small screen blurred to static. “Interference from all this gamma schmutz…”
“Did you…” Quill frowned. “Did you plant a camera on me?”
“That’s, you know, that’s a real good question. Hey, I got one for you. Why do people ask things when they know they won’t like the answer?”
Quill peered at the screen. Shapes began to take form… people, running…
Rocket held up both freakishly human-like hands in triumph. “Voy-lay!”
“For the eightieth time, it’s pronounced ‘wah-lah’…”
The screen shifted again, resolving into Gamora’s point of view. Hordes of Kree, rushing past in a panic. A huge chunk of mining equipment crashed to the ground, shaking the image.
“It looks like she’s running…” He frowned. “Against the stream of Kree. Away from the spaceport.”
“Yeah. And look what she’s running toward.”
The image tipped up, revealing the pockmarked dome at the center of the settlement. It glowed brighter than before, towering four stories high above the chaos.
“The dome. The power tap.” Quill hissed in a breath. “She’s gonna try and stop the reaction.”
“I never bet against that lady.” Rocket made a matching hiss, eerily similar in pitch to Quill’s. “But I don’t think a sword is gonna do any better than a gun here.”
The dome loomed larger as Gamora drew close to its tall, central entrance. A few panicked Kree slipped out the door, lugging travel bags over their shoulders.
“Mission creep,” Quill whispered.
“That creep is gonna get her killed.” Rocket strapped himself in. “We gotta get down there.”
“Roger,” Quill agreed. He reached up, gave the fuzzy dice a good slap, and flicked a built-in cassette player to life. “Let’s hit it.”
Thruster rockets roared to life; gravity compensators kicked in hard. And as the little ship tipped its nose down, speeding into the atmosphere, the falsetto tones of Journey’s Greatest Hits filled the cockpit like a battle anthem.
Chapter 3
Gamora ripped the heavy plasteel door off the dome with one savage yank. The old rusty hinges snapped like twigs – another sign that the Kree had neglected Praeterus for a long time.
Peter’s voice was chattering in her ear. Something about a pickup, about running out of time. She slapped her comm, switching it off.
Inside, a long corridor with moss-colored stone walls stretched straight ahead, ending in another plasteel security door. Lockers lined the walls, many of them left open, abandoned. The workers had fled this facility in a hurry.
Gamora tensed and started forward, just as a robot dropped down from the ceiling, blocking her way.
“HALT,” it said.
She snarled, studying the thing. It was a miniature Sentry, the standard Kree design with thick limbs, reinforced torso armor, and a headpiece that bizarrely resembled a mushroom. Battle Sentries towered twenty, sometimes thirty feet high; this model was human-sized, intended only for light guard work.
“ONLY – KREE – ALLOWED IN – THIS FACILITY,” the robot said. “COMMENCING – ID SCAN.”
A large blinking light on its chest began to strobe from red to green and back again. Gamora rolled her eyes and placed a hand on her sword.
“SCANNING,” the robot continued. “WHEN WE ARE – FINISHED – WOULD YOU BE WILLING TO TAKE A – SHORT SURVEY ON MY – PERFORMANCE?”
She was considering several choice replies when the robot’s chest-light settled down to a deep, glowing red. “SCAN – FAILURE. ANALYSIS: ALIEN – MOST LIKELY SKRULL. PLEASE – REMAIN STILL WHILE – SECURITY FORCES ARE AWWWWWK.”
Her sword slashed into the robot’s stomach, knocking the thing backward in a shower of sparks. It sputtered, said something that might have been “SKRULL TRICKEREEEEEY,” and then fell to the floor, shattering its eye-lens on the bare stone. Gamora stabbed it a few more times for good measure. Its limbs spasmed, then went still.
“Don’t call me a Skrull,” she said.
She walked past it, beginning to holster her sword. Then she stopped and looked down. The light on the Sentry’s chest was blinking again, red-green green-red.
She crouched down, raised her sword, and sliced into the robot’s chest. Then she sawed the sword up and down in an even, rectangular pattern around the blinking light. When the mechanism came loose, she reached down, yanked the Kree detector free, and held it up to the dim light.
“Rocket’s birthday is coming up,” she said, and tucked the thing into her pack.
She didn’t really know when Rocket’s birthday was. No one did; he’d been created in a laboratory. But he loved gadgets, especially stolen ones.
She continued down the corridor, staying quiet and alert for further security measures. But the facility seemed deserted. She forced open a door and found herself in a longer, narrower corridor, with no doors or windows along its walls. Up ahe
ad, she could see yet another door – and this one was glowing slightly.
A tremor struck, shaking the hard stone beneath her feet. She picked up speed, sprinting toward the glowing door. Her path was taking her to the center of the dome, which doubled as a munitions factory and power plant. According to Rocket’s scans, the source of the planet’s instability could be found there.
But what, she wondered, was really happening? Was someone deliberately trying to blow up this sad, hopeless planet on the edge of Kree space? Or was it all just some terrible, random accident?
She thought of the little girl up on the surface. Where was that girl now? Safely aboard one of the evacuation ships, or trampled beneath the boots of her fellow Kree? For that matter, were the ships even spaceworthy? Were they leaving now, engines straining to clear the atmosphere of this doomed world? Or had they already sputtered, failed, and caught fire on the launch pads?
As she reached the glowing door, a wave of despair washed over her, a feeling of utter helplessness. As if this mission, this crisis, were so far beyond her abilities, there was no point in going on.
But Gamora had learned, at the lash of Thanos, to keep fighting until all hope was gone. So she wrenched open the door and stopped short at the sight beyond.
She entered a high-ceilinged chamber filled with machines. Matter replicators and huge computers led to creaky conveyor belts, only a few of them still in motion. Partially assembled laser rifles and photon cannons were everywhere, stacked haphazardly in piles and stuffed into crates. The curve of the domed roof could be seen above, arcing down at an angle.
This was the main assembly line for the munitions factory. The place where the Kree of Praeterus had sweated and toiled, while their merciless rulers sat a thousand light-years away drinking wine from the skulls of conquered peoples.
And a few of those workers – a few Praeterans – were still here.
They turned toward Gamora, regarding her with dull, resigned expressions. A middle-aged woman in a wheelchair, seated at a conveyor-belt control panel. An old man on crutches, bracing himself against a crate of rifles. A blue man with three prosthetic limbs – one of the few blue-skinned Kree she’d seen on Praeterus.
“What…” Gamora paused, shaking her head. “What are you all still doing here?”
The wheelchair-bound woman clucked her tongue and pressed a control button. The conveyor belt wheezed briefly to life, depositing a single proton rifle in a hopper basket.
“Where’s there to go?” she asked.
“After the war,” the blue man said, “I came here. Wanted to retire, just be with my family.” He sighed. “But they never let you retire.”
“The Empire took everything from us,” the woman said. “Soon it will take our lives.”
“Unless…” the old man hobbled his way toward Gamora, hope lighting up his eyes. “Did they send you? The Empire?”
Gamora grimaced, avoiding the man’s gaze. Beyond the conveyor belts, past rows of machinery, the far wall was glowing. The source of the reaction, whatever it was, lay on the other side of that wall, in the very center of the dome.
She started to answer the man, but the words caught in her throat as she noticed a fourth Kree. A young woman with withered arms and legs sat in a permanent chair-station. A hundred or more glowing cables stretched from implants in her dull green helmet into the surrounding computers. Her eyes flicked from side to side, wholly focused on the glowing screen before her.
She doesn’t even know I’m here, Gamora realized. All these people – they’re veterans. Casualties of the Kree-Skrull War, of a thousand other campaigns their Empire has waged. Cannon fodder, living shells spent on the battlefield and dumped here to die.
They’re already dead, she thought. Whatever happens to this world, their lives ended long ago.
She felt a stab of pity, followed by a rush of anger and regret. These were pointless emotions. If she’d learned anything in life since her escape from Thanos, it was to keep moving forward.
With an obvious effort, the old man staggered up to her and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Are you here to save us?” he asked.
On the far wall, the glow pulsed brighter.
“No,” she said, and pushed him gently aside.
She sprinted toward the far wall – dodging machinery, leaping over heaps of weapons. The eyes of the Kree workers followed her, but she ignored them. There was no time to comfort these people, no time for mercy. Any possible salvation for them lay beyond that wall.
The wall was thick wood, reinforced with plasteel crossbars. Energy seeped through the seams, leaking out from the chamber beyond. Gamora scanned for a door, but there was no way through. Just a ladder leading up to a high, dark alcove.
She leaped up and grabbed hold of the ladder. As she climbed, spiderlike, three rungs at a time, she thought of the Kree rulers a hundred star-systems away. They live for war, she mused; they made that decision a long time ago. Did I make a decision, to become… this? To be an assassin, or a Guardian of the Galaxy?
She couldn’t remember.
The ladder ended at a narrow metal catwalk. She scrambled up onto it and stared down into Hell.
The catwalk looked down on a complex of machinery. She recognized a few standard-issue power accumulators, the type used in sublight engines on older starships. At the center, she knew, was the power tap leading down into the planet’s core. But that equipment was lost in the blinding light that filled the chamber, radiating up and out like a star.
She shielded her eyes, squinting into the light. Thick liquid spurted up in geysers, wrenched from the molten core of Praeterus, flashing into view at the edge of the glow and evaporating in the unimaginable heat of the chamber. As she watched, that glow seemed to transform into a living flame, an unnatural fire consuming everything in its path. A fire that would soon reduce this world to ash and dust.
And at its center, barely visible within the white-hot brilliance, she could just barely make out a human figure. It raised its arms to summon the power, drawing the energies into its small, frail form.
Heat and radiation burned into Gamora, raising a hot rage inside her. Who was this? How dare they take the lives of so many people, so quickly, so thoughtlessly? What dark power commanded them, what monstrous master?
And what power had brought Gamora here, at this exact moment, to bear witness to this horror?
It didn’t matter, she realized. She was what she was: a Guardian. She might not be able to stop this force, whatever it was. She would probably perish here, with the remaining citizens of Praeterus. With people who, like her, had never had the luxury to choose their fates.
But she had to try.
The energy surged brighter, obscuring the figure within, shaking the catwalk beneath Gamora’s feet. She tensed and scrambled up onto the railing. She reached down to her waist and drew her sword, feeling its hard, comforting hasp in her clenched fist.
Then she let out a cry and jumped.
The fire, the radiation, stabbed into her like a thousand tiny knives. The figure turned to look up in surprise – and as it did, the rage burned again within Gamora. It’s their rage, she realized, not mine. A hatred that could snuff out the stars; could reduce worlds, whole galaxies, even universes to smoldering embers.
Gamora landed in a crouch, shielding her eyes from the blinding glow. She raised her sword, knowing it was useless, that even the deadliest woman in the galaxy was no match for this elemental power.
The figure turned to face her, and for just a moment she saw its face.
But before she could strike, the unearthly fire washed over her one last time and she screamed in agony. As her mind shut down, she saw her father again, and winced at the look on his face as he prepared to die. Then that face exploded into atoms, and Gamora saw nothing at all.
Chapter 4
Winds howled and roared
. Tectonic plates shifted and clashed, ripping open fissures across the planet’s surface. Long-dormant volcanoes roared to life, covering land and sea alike with the blood-lava of a dying world.
The planet called Praeterus had only minutes left to live.
A hundred miles above, the Guardians’ ship screamed downward. Peter Quill peered forward, studying the planet through the front viewport. From this altitude, he could make out the small, primitive towns surrounding the munitions installation – clusters of tents, small wooden buildings. A sea of people flowed out of them, toward the spaceport miles away. The remaining Kree of Praeterus: eighty thousand souls, all dressed in simple beige and green garb, hoping against hope that they might secure one of the precious seats on the evacuation ships.
“Those poor bastards,” Quill hissed. He frowned, reached up, and clicked the music off. “Hold on. What’s Gam doing?”
On the screen, the Guardian’s body cam showed a bright glow with a human figure at the center of it. The figure’s features were obscured, but it wavered and wobbled with Gamora’s every move.
Rocket unstrapped himself and leaned over to look. “I ain’t sure…”
“She’s looking down on that glowy thing, whatever it is. Right?”
“I think so.” Rocket frowned. “She was climbin’ a ladder before.”
“Now it looks like she’s leaning over… oh. Oh no. Don’t do it, Gam.”
“Oh, man. She’s gonna jump!”
“I can see that!” Quill yelled. “I can see she’s gonna jump!”
“Don’t get excited.” The raccoonoid cocked his head. “Hey, whadda you think are her chances of survival?”
“Not… not good.”
“No, I mean numerically. You wanna put some money on it?”
Before Quill could come up with a suitably horrified response, the ship screeched and shuddered to a stop in midair. Rocket tumbled back into his chair.
“What was that?” Quill asked.
“Ah.” Rocket consulted some instruments. “We just hit the Kármán Line.”