Star-Lord, page 2
part #1 of Marvel Wastelanders Series
DOOM!
Quill’s nerves were frayed to the point of snapping, and he held up his hands in a placatory gesture. “Keep it down, Rocket, you’re getting them excited! Focus on getting this ship online. I don’t know about you, but I do not want to be the prime rib special at today’s Brood buffet.”
Rocket resumed his task, muttering just loudly enough for Quill to hear him suggest that the Brood would skip his bloated torso and go straight for the meaty thighs. Then he tore off another panel and resumed cussing and swearing.
The recorder looked at Quill expectantly. He found another line of questioning. “So… um… how can you help us?”
“How can I help you?”
Quill was entirely unsure if her response was a question or an offer. Behind them, Rocket swore outrageously as two wires shorted close to his muzzle, burning a patch of fur clean off. Quill focused on the synth.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got… I dunno. Missile launchers hidden in your hands? A master of kung fu perhaps?”
“No,” came the reply he’d expected. “But I record.”
“You record? What?”
“Everything. Audio, visual, heat and chemical signatures. Also, localized digital and radio transmissions. I am recording you right now.”
That made him oddly uncomfortable, and Quill tried a different tactic.
“Why are you on this mining vessel?”
“It was bound for the third planet of this solar system.”
Quill’s brow furrowed. “But why were you…”
She interrupted him to continue her statement. “It is my understanding that Earth offers many wealthy possibilities for my research.”
“Can you transmit? Are you transmitting anywhere right now? Could you maybe call in a rescue?”
“I have been aboard this vessel long enough that the Rigellians have listed me as lost. Therefore, they have cut off my communication relay.”
“But… when… I’m sorry…” Quill was foundering now, confused by her words, puzzled as to why it… she… had been bound for Earth, frustrated that now was not the time to ask.
“Oh, for the love of… Quill! Stop with the dumb questions! Ask smart ones. Figure out what happened!”
“Rocket, please! I am asking what happened, but I’m doing it my way! You know. I like to… massage my way into conversations.”
“Uh-huh, sure. Hey. You. Skinbot! What happ…”
“Commencing audio reference.”
What then came from the recorder’s mouth was nothing short of horrific. Sounds of chaos and panic, screaming and yelling. The impact of running feet and the louder impact of bodies hitting the floor. The horribly visceral and disturbingly wet sounds of bodies being torn apart. All the while, the rhythm of the Brood at the door kept up their ever-present counterpoint.
As the last sounds died away, Quill stared at her. “What… What was that terrible noise that just came out of your mouth?”
“You asked what happened,” she said. “I played an audio segment from my archives.”
“I don’t want to hear that,” said Quill, shaking his head vigorously. “Nobody wants to hear that!”
“Would you like to see the video of the merciless slaughter of the…”
“No!”
Rocket shook his head. Clearly even he had found the noise disturbing – not that he’d admit it. “What happened to this ship?”
The recorder turned to face Rocket. “The Prosperity was asteroid mining along the outskirts of Alpha Centauri.”
“See, Quill? That’s how you do it.”
“They came for platinum, rhodium, gold, and silver. But one of the asteroids they mined turned out to be a Brood hive. Unfortunately, nobody realized this until after the hull was loaded.”
“You know what I hate about the Brood?” Quill interjected. “Other than their unrelenting need to multiply and feast on anything they encounter, obviously.”
“No,” said the recorder. “I do not know what you hate about the Brood.”
“They look disgusting,” affirmed Quill. “Like what would happen if a wasp boned a cockroach. I hate bugs. D’you know, there was this one time I woke up and I swore there was a spider in my ear and…”
“OK, Quill,” snapped Rocket. “So hey, skinbot. How long has this ship been adrift?”
“…I don’t know how the spider got there…” Quill trailed off, his story thwarted. He waved a hand vaguely. “What he said.”
“Thirty-two years,” said the recorder sweetly. “Thirty-two years, twenty-six days, five hours, two minutes and forty-seven seconds.”
There was a heavy pause and Quill shifted his gaze to his companion. “Nobody came to save the people here? Or to salvage the ship? In all that time?”
“A few salvagers have attempted to board the Prosperity,” replied the recorder. “They were eaten.”
“No,” said Quill, firmly. “No. Earth would never let this happen.”
“Are you implying that Earthlings are driven to do moral good at their own risk?”
“No. Yes. No. Look! What I’m getting at is that this ship… there’s a fortune in minerals and precious metals in the hold. It’s owned by Stark Industries for God’s sake…” Rocket waved a hand dismissively and shrugged. “Must’ve decided to cut their losses. Too risky with the Brood on board. Who are still here, in case it’s escaped your notice.”
“No,” said Quill, mostly to himself. “Tony Stark would never…”
“Tony Stark would never what?” The recorder’s question was curious. An expression of discomfort and pain flickered across Quill’s face as he replied.
“He would never leave his crew behind.”
“Enough, Quill.” Rocket’s low voice held a private warning and Quill nodded, absently. Rocket directed his question back at the recorder. “So you’ve just been sitting around here all that time?”
“Sometimes I have been standing,” she replied. “But yes, mostly I have been sitting. There was some lying on the floor, and…”
“For thirty years?” Quill was incredulous.
“For thirty-two years, twenty-six days, five hours, three minutes and fifty-one seconds.”
Quill rubbed at his upper arm, more than a little worried by the situation. He was struggling to reconcile the concept of Stark abandoning his people with what he knew of the man. Fortunately, the recorder offered up a new distraction.
“If I may,” she said, “what are your titles?”
“What are our what-nows?” He was pulled from his reverie by the question.
“How should I address you?”
“Oh. I’m Peter Quill, but…” He brightened.
Rocket groaned, looking up from his work. “Don’t you dare. Don’t!”
“You can call me… Star-Lord.” Oh, man, it felt so good to say it. He said it with what he hoped was a brightness in his voice, a confidence remembered and re-applied with all the care and love of someone slapping a strip of duct tape over a broken window and hoping nobody would notice.
“Let me tell you something,” said Rocket, his tone aggressive. “The only throne this lord sits on is the latrine. For a half hour after every meal.”
“Star-Lord is my official title. It’s true!”
“Does this mean you are nobility?” the recorder asked.
Quill beamed and tried to ignore the sound from outside that suggested some of the Brood had fallen to fighting among themselves.
“What it means is you are in luck. Because me and Rocket over there – we are the Guardians of the Galaxy!”
“Is this equal to being space police?”
“Not exact…”
“Space knights, then?”
“Nah, those guys suck. I guess you could call us… space cowboys. Or the Gangsters of Love. Heh.”
The reference fell on deaf ears.
There was a clatter as Rocket dropped one of his tools to the ground. He picked up another. “You want the truth, lady? Here it is. I kick the mighty Star-Lord over there awake every morning. Then he whines and zombies his way through whatever work we gotta do… then we do it all over again. His hobbies include… eating, napping, playing terrible music. Not to mention his newest pastime of talking endlessly and pathetically about his long-gone glory days.”
“That does not sound very impressive,” said the recorder.
“And you know what?” Rocket was relentless in his attack and Quill knew that nothing would stop him. “You know why he really wanted to board this vessel? Because he figured he could salvage it for parts and then sell them…”
“Aw, c’mon, man.” Quill was moved to interrupt, part embarrassed, part annoyed – but Rocket was unstoppable.
“A long time ago, a long, long time ago, we were the Guardians of the Galaxy. But that, my friend, was before. This is now.”
“What happened?”
All Quill could manage was a faint noise of discomfort. Rocket relented, shaking his head. “We don’t talk about it. Now, we’re just a couple of work-for-hire mercs. Smugglers, for the most part.” He sighed, Quill felt a little over-theatrically. “Not exactly where I thought we were gonna end up, but there you go.”
He turned back to his work and there was a loud hiss as the bridge doors ratcheted back a few centimeters. The commotion from the corridor, which had faded into muffled background, suddenly became loud and immediate. “Oh geez! Son of a flarkin’…”
“What did you do, Rocket?”
“I… must’ve hit the wrong button…”
“You’ve opened the door, man!”
“Only a little! Settle down. I got this!” He grabbed the ends of two sparking wires, twisting them back together. There was a pause of three heartbeats and the door slid shut. “See? I got this.”
“They bent the door, Rocket,” said Quill, unable to keep the faint hysteria from his voice. “They cracked the door!”
“Everything’s under control.”
“How much longer is this gonna take?”
“Let me see. How long to juice up a carbon-scored, rusted-out, iced-over ship that’s been adrift for thirty…”
“Thirty-two years, twenty-six days…”
“For over thirty years? I’m sorry I can’t do it in fifteen seconds, O great and mighty Star-Lord!”
The recorder shifted her position, clearly not detecting any hint of sarcasm, or perhaps simply ignorant of what sarcasm was. “I would like to hear the story of the great and mighty Star-Lord.”
“No,” said Rocket, bitterly. “You wouldn’t.”
“Hang on,” said Quill. “Hang on…”
“Will you please tell me your story?”
“My story?”
“Oh, man,” muttered Rocket. “This is gonna be rich.”
“What part, sweetheart?” said Quill, adopting a casual stance and moving a few feet to show off a suddenly affected swagger. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
“Well, I don’t really know where to start. There’s so much to tell! All the romance, the intrigue… death-defying heroism. And dancing, of course, there’s always the…”
“If I may,” said the recorder, interrupting Quill mid-flow, “how about you begin with the story of how you came to save me… Star-Lord.”
A slow grin spread over Quill’s face.
“Oh, yeah,” he replied.
“Oh, no,” said Rocket.
Outside, the shrieking continued.
“You see,” began Quill, “it’s like this…”
Chapter One
Out of the Frying Pan
The Indeterminable Past
(A few days ago)
Rocket had scored the job and Quill had not been in any position to turn down the lure of work. They were mercenaries, after all, and credits were running exceptionally low. So that was why they had found themselves aboard an unusual spaceship taking on a job that was absolutely unlike anything either of them could recall.
“What made it unusual?” The recorder broke into Quill’s recollection, and he looked up, startled.
“For starters, we didn’t know who our contact was and that was different. All we had were the rendezvous coordinates for the ship and I’ll tell you what was different about that as well,” he said. “If you let me carry on.”
“Apologies. Please continue, Star-Lord.”
“Sure. So. There’s me and Rocket there, in the hangar of a ship that looked like a haunted castle. You know what that is, honey?”
“Castle,” she replied and thought for a moment. “Yes, I have enough references in my internal databanks to understand what you mean.”
“It was like being in an episode of Scooby-Doo. A voice comes over an intercom, ‘Peter Quill and Rocket Raccoon’, it says. Female voice. Loud.”
“Just Rocket, for your records, synthskin,” Rocket growled.
Quill charged on, heedless of the underlying warning. The recorder paid close attention to the story and as he spoke there were faint sounds of whirring as she took everything down for posterity.
•••
“Peter Quill and Rocket Raccoon!”
The voice reverberated through the hangar. The suddenness of it startled both Quill and Rocket into momentary silence, a state of affairs that never lasted long. Their surroundings were far from normal for a ship’s hangar: there was a baroque feel to the décor and while perhaps it was less “haunted castle” and more “Halloween decoration”, it was definitely unusual.
Quill had to assume that the thin, spindly things he occasionally spotted moving in the darkest corners were spiders. Imagining otherwise was the path to madness.
“Who’s that?” Quill’s voice was equally loud, but infinitely less imposing. “Sounds a bit like the Great and Powerful Oz to me…” His voice didn’t reverberate anywhere near as impressively, but still echoed throughout the hangar. Rocket shifted uncomfortably.
“I don’t like this, Quill,” muttered Rocket. “When I don’t like things, I itch. I am real itchy right now, you know what I mean?” He shifted from paw to paw, clearly uncomfortable. As he spoke, a door opened with a soft swoosh in front of them, seamlessly retracting into the metal of the hull. Neither of them had noticed it until that moment.
“Rocket?”
“Yeah, Quill?”
“Do you think we’re supposed to… y’know. Just walk on through? Into the glowy chamber beyond? Into the great unkn…”
“Proceed into the chamber.” The female voice boomed around them as though responding directly to Quill’s question.
He swallowed, nervously. “Guess that answers that question.” He glanced at Rocket. “I suppose ‘after you’ isn’t gonna cut it here?”
A brief tussle ensued as they jostled for the right to be the second person through the door. In the end, Quill took the lead and although he would never have admitted it, was grateful that Rocket remained close. They left the empty hangar space behind, passing into something very different. Within this part of the ship, someone had gone to great pains to build what Quill could only describe as a chapel. Not that it was particularly holy. There was a lot less iconography and considerably less musty smell of old parchment for starters. High, vaulted ceilings arched away above him and the sound of fluid bubbling in tanks loaned its own uniqueness to the environment.
Maybe less like a church, Quill thought as he studied his environs more carefully. More like a museum. He remembered a school trip to a museum when he’d been a kid. He recalled a faint sense of reverence around some of the exhibits. Mostly, there had been seeing what he and his friends could steal from the gift shop, but when their harassed teacher had finally corralled the class enough to pay attention, Quill had felt that sense of awe and wonder that came with seeing antiquities in-situ.
Those had been far less interesting exhibits than this, though. One of the tanks burbling away contained something that resembled a freakish cross between the head of the Hulk and an octopus. Another tank was filled with inky, black water, making it impossible to guess the actual depth – but if you looked closely enough, you could see the shine of a billion stars. An entire galaxy, contained within a glass case, floating within the dark liquid.
“Were you and Rocket there to make great discoveries? To find rare artifacts?” The recorder interrupted the flow of the story again, but Quill found it less jarring this time. A slow smile spread across his lips.
“Far be it from me to shatter your obviously accurate opinion of me as a hero, but no. Rocket and I were there to make a huge, stinking pile of cash. Discovering new adventures, ethics, and morality are all wonderful things, but they don’t pay debts and they don’t buy fuel or food. It’s all about the credits. Sometimes, it’s about the glory. But mostly, it’s the credits.”
Rocket nodded his agreement.
“Do you ever do anything that is not for credits? Say, for the greater good?”
Quill’s eyes narrowed and he studied the recorder, attempting to determine if she was mocking him or not. Then he let out a hollow laugh. “Nah,” he said. “The greater good can take care of itself. It’s the money. That’s all that matters nowadays.”
“Was it not always that way?”
He didn’t like the discomfort he felt at the recorder’s question. Fortunately for him, any answer he might have made was put on hold as a new round of howling and thumping came from the Brood beyond the door. It reminded him starkly of their current situation. Quill and Rocket exchanged a look, the latter shaking his head and returning to the work on the console.
Quill pushed the sounds of the Brood out of his thoughts for now. They were trapped regardless so he may as well continue. “We were in this display room, or whatever it was,” he said. “Rocket made a discovery.”
•••
“Hey, Quill, check these out!” Rocket had found a series of pedestals, each topped with a variety of items. Weapons, masks, jewelry – each was unique and fascinating. Quill tore himself away from the Hulk-topus to go see what Rocket had found.
A strange feeling passed over him and he swore blind that he heard distant, angelic music. The sound of harp strings sounded real, and he blinked.
“Do you hear that?”
“What? Use your words, Quill. Be more specific.”
