Galaxy of Heroes Read online

  “Mingus’s first name is Pulchritunia?”

  “Yes. You should know these things about your own crew.”

  “I’ve never known Brute to be the type to forgive and forget,” Spade said.

  “Captain Spade, I am about to attempt to negotiate a peace between the two most powerful and warlike empires in the galaxy. Resolving a human love triangle is trivial in comparison, and quite frankly, the least of our concerns. Now go to the cargo bay and retrieve the crate as per my instructions. We are pressed for time.”

  Spade entered the cargo bay and lifted the metal crate, steering it up the transport tube in the zero gravity. Professor Mahlis waited for him impatiently in the galley. “Hurry, hurry. We must hurry along.”

  Spade unlocked the inner hatch to the decompression chamber. He pushed open the outer hatch to see the cavernous docking bay of the command ship for the 17th Fleet, in which Brute had just landed the ship.

  Two armed Craaldan soldiers were standing on the deck, their magnetic boots holding them down in the zero gravity. One wore the silver rank of a lieutenant and the other wore the bars of a Craaldan sergeant first class.

  Craaldan soldiers hovered throughout the docking bay, maneuvering in the weightlessness with small air jets attached to their body armor. They supervised work crews of machines and enslaved species that were making minor repairs to the hulls of docked spacecraft. Spade thought he spotted a human or two in the work crews.

  Professor Mahlis pulled himself from the hatch and the two Craaldan soldiers clicked their heels and saluted. The lieutenant addressed Professor Mahlis in the sharp, gravelly tones of the Craaldan language.

  The professor responded. Spade gathered that orders were being given.

  “General Seb awaits,” the professor said. “The sergeant here will escort you to storage where your delivery will be sequestered until further notice,” Mahlis said. “Then he will return you to me in General Seb’s control room.”

  “Roger that,” Spade said.

  The lieutenant walked off guiding Mahlis by the arm. The sergeant grabbed Spade by the back of his flight suit and pulled him along. Spade held onto the metal crate and tried to keep it from banging against the bulkheads.

  They arrived at an armory. The sergeant barked out orders to a tiny clerk, who took the crate and placed it into a storage locker in the armory behind her. The clerk was a female of some conquered species. She was scaly, ashen and emaciated, but moved quickly without effort in the zero gravity.

  She pushed Spade’s head into a device that quickly scanned his eyeball. She tried to remove his eye patch.

  “I only have one eye,” Spade said, pointing to his eye patch.

  The clerk typed into a keyboard and then a computer translator said, “To retrieve your belongings, you will need to return with the same eyeball that was scanned.”

  “Roger that,” Spade said.

  The Craaldan sergeant pulled Spade onto a transport car and they sped through a maze of corridors until arriving at the general’s control room.

  The sergeant and Spade entered the room. General Seb and Professor Mahlis were seated across a small round table in the dark room. The only light in the darkness was a soft glow emanating upward from the table. The sergeant snapped to attention and saluted.

  The general barked an order without looking up, which Spade guessed translated to, “At ease.”

  General Seb was an enormous Craaldan whose gray skin looked as if it had the hardness of stone. The big general turned his yellow eyes to Spade, and then angrily addressed the Craaldan sergeant.

  Spade reached into a pocket and pulled out his language translator and set it to Craaldan. He placed the device on his ear.

  “You bring an unauthorized species into my command room, Sergeant?” General Seb said. “This is a serious breach of protocol.”

  “Sir, I was following orders from the Noctish!” the sergeant said, standing stiffly at attention.

  “It is okay, General,” Professor Mahlis said. “Captain Spade was vetted on Goff before he accepted this mission.”

  “A human survived vetting?” the general asked.

  “The captain has a primitive survival instinct that is quite robust,” Professor Mahlis said.

  “Sergeant, I want all movements of this human tracked and reported to Goff higher command. Confirm that this human was vetted. Do you copy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That is all, Sergeant,” General Seb said. “Dismissed.”

  The sergeant saluted and left the room.

  “Your distrust is disconcerting,” Mahlis said.

  “You know the procedure, professor,” the general said.

  “And we must never stray from procedure, isn’t that right, General?” Professor Mahlis said. “Captain Spade, please have a seat.”

  Spade took a seat in the dark behind the professor.

  Systems of a System

  General Seb looked like a typical Craaldan soldier, only far larger. On one leg was strapped the traditional executioner blade that was symbolic of the authority of a Craaldan officer.

  To Spade, the contrast between the giant, armored general and the tiny professor was jarring, yet Professor Mahlis showed no sign of being intimidated, and spoke to General Seb as an equal.

  “It goes against doctrine to withdraw from an engagement when we have superior numbers,” the general said.

  “We haven’t reached that point yet, General,” the professor said. “Now please, the battle update, if you will.”

  A representation of the Naos surface appeared on the table. Spade recognized the landscape as Zander’s Plain. Two jagged mountain ranges—the Bleak Range to the east and the Craggy Mountains to the west—were separated by a flat expanse of black rock and ice about 200 kilometers across. Running north to south and bisecting the plain was a thin ribbon of glowing red lava, known as the Naos Rift.

  The river of lava was about 100 meters wide at most points and stretched north to south from horizon to horizon.

  The two Craaldan brigades had dug into fighting positions where the plain met the Bleak Range. The mountains dropped abruptly like a black wall of stone. The center of gravity for the Craaldan defense was a half-bowl ingression into the mountains guarded by a battalion that faced across the plain toward the main enemy positions.

  Across the plain, the Diocon brigade had dug into defensive positions in the ruins of Zander City, which was situated in the foothills of the Craggy Mountains. The glowing Naos Rift marked the border between the two opposing forces.

  “The Diocons have improved the effectiveness of their missile shield,” General Seb said. “The fleet suffered severe losses once the shield came online. We underestimated its range.”

  The general explained that the Diocons were intermittently launching nukes at the fleet whenever it rounded the Roga orbit and came into sight of the Naos moon. To defend against the nukes, the Craaldans had emplaced a mine field 300 kilometers above Naos. When the missiles screamed upward from the Naos surface, the mines detonated and the nukes exploded in great blinding flashes before the missiles could reach the fleet. After each explosion, Craaldan mine layers zoomed in to reseed the fields before the next barrage of missiles could launch.

  “And what would happen if a missile got through the field?” the professor asked.

  “A direct hit would render the fleet combat ineffective,” General Seb answered. “That is why we keep our distance.”

  “Why not attack now with your brigades on the surface and finish them?” the professor asked.

  “You know as well as I that a three to one force ratio is standard for an attack. Until we land another brigade, an attack remains out of the question. That is, unless you are withholding intel that we are unaware of?”

  “No, no. Of course you are correct, General. The odds of success for an attack on a dug-in enemy is minimal with a two to one force ratio. Even at three to one, success is not assured. I know your rigid doctrine as well as you do and that you are loath to deviate from it. Tell me, how do you plan to land your reinforcements?”

  “At present, we await the jammer squadron,” the general said. “Once the jammers join the fleet, we will be able to breach their missile defenses and land as many as five additional brigades on the surface. Then victory will be certain.”

  “Any victory now would be Pyrrhic, General,” Mahlis said. “It would ignite the wider war with the Diocon Empire that we have been carefully avoiding for so long.”

  “So be it.”

  “No,” the professor said. “Your success will be determined by the outcome of my diplomatic mission. If I am able to convince the Diocons to allow your brigades on the surface safe passage to your fleet, then war can be avoided. Only then will this insanity cease, and you can turn the attention of your fleet to less mutually suicidal endeavors.”

  “You underestimate our chances against the Diocons,” General Seb said.

  The little professor slammed his tiny fist on the table. “And you underestimate the value of the intelligence the Noctish have provided the Craaldan Empire over the eons!”

  The general crossed his arms over his broad chest. His yellow eyes looked down coldly behind his gray, scabrous face. “The Noctish have been invaluable,” he said.

  “How do we get to the surface?” Professor Mahlis asked.

  “A narrow window of opportunity opens after each nuke volley,” the general said. “We were infiltrating small ships through the Diocon defenses by speeding for the surface immediately following the electromagnetic pulse from a nuke blast. But the enemy soon caught on, and began picking off our ships as we came into range of their laser cannons. We ceased attempting to infiltrate in this manner, and the Diocons now believe they have deterred our landings. To get you to the surface, we will wait for the next nuke blast. Then your human captain can dash for the surface within a formation of remotely piloted decoys. If you are lucky, their lasers will pick off the decoys and not you.”

  “Sounds risky if you ask me,” Spade said.

  The general’s cold gaze turned to Spade. Spade felt the full weight of his iron stare. “Don’t expect to live forever, human,” the general said.

  Professor Mahlis unhooked himself from his chair and pulled himself to Spade, grabbing onto Spade’s arm.

  “Until next time, General,” the professor said. He turned to Spade. “Take me to your ship.”

  Spade pulled himself along a rail and out of the general’s control room, with the professor clinging to his back. They boarded a transport car and then zipped through the ship’s narrow corridors.

  “What was in the crate?” Spade asked.

  “The crate?” the professor asked.

  “The crate I signed into storage,” Spade said. “What’s in it?”

  “Nothing you will miss,” the professor said.

  “If I die on Naos, you won’t be able to retrieve it.”

  “That is true,” the professor said. “True, indeed.”

  Do or Die

  The Red Wrath floated inside a V-formation of eight decoy spacecraft. Spade sat at the controls of his interceptor peering out at dark Naos. The moon was a black dot in front of the roiling clouds of enormous Roga.

  The decoy spacecraft looked predatory as they floated in formation in front of the Red Wrath. They were nothing more than unmanned engines built for speed and armed to the tooth—but merely targets on this mission meant to misdirect enemy fire.

  The entire crew was in the cockpit looking out at the little moon. Spade found it hard to concentrate. He had always found the swirling colors of Roga mesmerizing, and it had been ages since he had gazed upon them.

  “I don’t like this,” Brute said.

  “I know,” Spade said. “It sucks.”

  “Pessimism serves no purpose now,” the professor said. “Think only happy thoughts.”

  Tanaka let out a sarcastic laugh.

  “You know what would make me happy, professor?” Brute asked. “If we aborted this fool’s errand and bugged the hell out of here. I say let the Craaldans and the Diocons fight it out, and if the two of them kill each other off, the universe will be a better place for it.”

  “That would make me happy on the inside,” Tanaka said.

  “You humans do not comprehend the meaning of what you speak,” the professor said testily. “But this is expected from creatures on the lower end of the evolutionary ladder.”

  “Those aren’t happy thoughts, professor,” Mingus said.

  “Brute. Mingus,” Spade said. “I want you two down in the engine room for damage control until we get to the surface. Take the professor with you.”

  “Roger,” they said. Brute grabbed the professor by the back of his neck and pulled him from the cockpit.

  Spade contemplated calling off the mission. It was too risky. If the two empires got into a suicidal war, it would serve them right for all the suffering and pain they had inflicted on the galaxy.

  Tanaka completed a diagnostic check while monitoring communications traffic. “All systems good to go,” he said.

  “Roger that,” Spade said.

  These Craaldans live only for war, Spade thought. They had no use for comfort, luxury or civilization. They had turned over to the Noctish all the wealth of the civilizations they had smashed, only for actionable nuggets of intel that served their lust for victory. Battle and conquest was all the Craaldans wanted from life. When they conquered a world, they enslaved any survivors and placed them in work camps or on labor teams and then plundered the planet’s resources to feed their insatiable war machine. Within a few years, even the hardiest survivor of a Craaldan conquest would be reduced to an empty shell and would soon succumb under the heavy boot of Craaldan oppression.

  The Diocons, on the other hand, had no need for slaves. They fought wars of annihilation. Their aim whenever they encountered resistance was to eradicate every living thing. They would then occupy whatever world they had leveled only if it had strategic value or critical resources for the construction of armaments. Where the proper resources were present, the Diocons built huge automated factories that churned out weaponry, ships and soldiers to expand their capacity for the delivery of death.

  These two empires had been rampaging across the Inner Galaxy for eons. Spade would feel no sorrow if both Craaldan and Diocon were to destroy themselves and disappear forever from the galaxy. But now here he was with his crew caught between these two agents of destruction.

  “Here they come,” Tanaka said.

  A display panel tracked the blistering ascent of six missiles from the Naos surface.

  “The missiles are entering the mine field,” Tanaka said. “Hold on.”

  The black void of space flashed white. A blinding light flooded the cockpit.

  The flashes flickered and nuclear fireballs expanded in the vacuum above Naos.

  The first violent shock wave shook the ship—then five more in rapid and jarring succession.

  “Go, go, go!” Tanaka yelled.

  Spade fired the engines and the Red Wrath shot forward in unison with the decoy formation. They jetted for the fireballs above Naos. At the last second, the formation veered away and hurtled downward toward the Naos surface.

  The rugged, black topography of the moon came into sharp focus. Spade had seen these same rock formations and canyons countless times and knew them better than anyone.

  “We’re coming into range of their cannons,” Tanaka said.

  “They’re not picking us up,” Spade said. “The electromagnetic pulse blinded them.”

  The decoy ship in front of the Red Wrath erupted in an explosion of metal.

  “Kinetic laser,” Tanaka said. “They’ve found their range.”

  “These damn decoys are slowing us down,” Spade said. “I’m going to punch through.”

  “Don’t do it, fool,” Tanaka said. “If we’re out front, we’ll be an easy target.”

  Spade pulled the ship behind a decoy. In a flash, three decoys disintegrated, hit by rapid pulses from kinetic laser cannons.

  Spade shot the ship through the debris.

  “We’re not going to make it!” Tanaka yelled.

  Instantaneous pulses pulverized the remaining decoys in flashes of exploding metal.

  Spade shoved forward on the stick and dove straight for the surface.

  “They’ve got a lock!” Tanaka yelled. “This is it!”

  The moon’s jagged black surface rushed up toward them.

  Tanaka looked over at Spade through his glowing green lenses. The tendons and veins in his skinny neck were tense and pulsating. “I know I’ve been insolent and inconsiderate!” Tanaka yelled. He reached over and gripped Spade’s forearm, digging his bony fingertips into the muscle. “But I always loved you, Spade, you one eyed-bastard!”

  Spade yanked back on the stick, struggling to remain conscious under the weight of immense g-forces. The interceptor skimmed low over the Naos surface, then zoomed over jagged peaks before diving for cover behind them.

  Spade sighted a Craaldan reserve tank company encamped in a narrow valley below. He circled low over the tanks. The Red Wrath was now safely behind the mountain ridge and concealed from the Diocon laser cannons.

  He zoomed into a flat area and then opened his landing gear.

  “Now, that is what I call flying!” Spade said.

  “No, they held their fire,” Tanaka said. “I don’t know why, but they did.”

  Spade set the interceptor down on the black Naos surface inside the Craaldan camp.

  He looked over at Tanaka. “Did you say you love me?”

  Planet of Glass

  Craaldan infantry moved in around the ship outside on the atmosphere-less surface. The soldiers were equipped with fully contained mechanized body armor, and armed with the CX-649 weapon system.

  Their armor was shiny black, with yellow coloring at the joints. Their CX-649 assault weapons were held in their armored hands or slung around onto their backs.

  Tanaka was agitated. “Disregard what I said,” he said. “I was delirious.”