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  GALATIC MENACE

  Timothy J. Meyer

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2014 Timothy J. Meyer

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  BAD SPACE TRILOGY

  HULL DAMAGE (2012)

  GALACTIC MENACE (2014)

  UNCONSTANT LOVE

  www.badspacebooks.com

  To Dan,

  the original Mastermind

  "Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge."

  – Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

  Table of Contents

  PART I: A Suspicious Shore Leave

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  First Interlude

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Second Interlude

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  PART II: The Freebooter Fleet

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Third Interlude

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Fourth Interlude

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  PART III: The Pirate King And All His Crooked Court

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Fifth Interlude

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Final Interlude

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Moira's out of her cell.

  In the space of the next three seconds, she's strode into the harsh light of the corridor proper, straddled the corpse of her first felled foe and fully extended the stolen electrobaton with a vicious snap of her wrist. Between Moira's bare feet, the first prison guard and his open head wound stain the floorplates cyan.

  The second prison guard apparently favors his own chances against Moira. Rather than raising the cry or sounding any alarms, her still-standing adversary snaps open his own baton and charges her.

  Moira allows herself a flinty smile.

  She slipped out of her magnetic cuffs. She flattened her body into an upside-down Cotor Clutch against the ceiling of her cell for a quarter of an hour. She incapacitated the first guard stupid enough to investigate her inexplicable disappearance – with her bare hands.

  Moira's more than earned this.

  Like his fallen friend, this prison guard's a Gantor, a six-foot-six nightmare of snow white skin stretched to its absolute limit over ridged alien bones. He instantly closes the gap on unearthly, elongated shanks.

  He strikes first, swinging the bludgeon in a wild, left-handed clobber. Moira parries neatly and scrapes his baton aside, both weapons fizzing as their electrical charges kiss and clash. Her skewering thrust to his stomach is blunted by the Gantor's thick layer of riot armor. Instead, he doubles hard over, weapon spilling from his gauntlet, helmet spilling off his head and his exposed scalp presented before Moira as though he awaited her to oblige him a knighthood. Moira christens him unconscious instead, spinning the electrobaton once and cracking its micne-capped tip hard upon his cranium.

  He screams in shock and agony on his two-foot fall to the floor, a scream she muffles by stooping and planting a hand over his mouth to ease him onto the deck.

  After ten seconds of chaos, silence once again reigns supreme across the Twenty-Sixth Deck of the TFS 283 Mercy-class Prisoner Transport Vessel Surimiah. Moira Quicksilver crouches motionless, the very picture of vigilance, before the deactivated door of her agape cell. To either side lay the slumped forms of two prone Gantorese prison guards, one dead and the other out cold. The corrugated corridor, its curvature stretching beyond her vision in both directions, is still and silent, save the hum of shipborne systems and the occasional snore of an unseen detainee.

  Moira had calculated the immediate hour of her escape attempt very precisely. She'd attempted to coincide with the regulated sleeping patterns of her fellow captives, to minimize the chances of some dimwitted or spiteful prisoner spoiling everything with a squawk.

  Her calculations also surmised that she'd need to neutralize at least another two prison guards before she reached the service elevator that could take her off this deck. Neither the corpse to her left nor the drooler to her right had wielded anything but humble electrobatons. From this, Moira could reasonably expect both the remaining guards on this deck to be packing much more serious heat. The standard issue Imperium assault rife, the tried-and-true SV7, seemed likely.

  Before all that, however, came the looting.

  She's dismayed to discover them relatively rich, as far as prison guards go, after rifling through all four pockets in question. Both boast fat stacks of tender Moira's woefully unable to pocket in her pocketless jailbird's jumpsuit. She does, however, make meaningful prizes of one Gantor's insulated deflection glove, the other Gantor's remote cell-door activator and both their electrobatons.

  With her right hand strapped uncomfortably into the oversized gauntlet, an electrobaton in each hand and the remote activator in her teeth, Moira gives each end of the corridor a cursory sweep. With nothing untoward in sight, she slinks off in search of escape.

  Forward progress is painfully slow. Between waits of arduous length and total stillness, she dares short sprints from cover to cover. She cowers in any available corner, often with an ear pressed hard to the teltriton of the floor or walls, in rapt attention for any sound or signal of her discovery.

  Nothing quite raises Moira's hackles like an ardent need for stealth. When encountering literally anyone could quickly spell her own destruction, Moira wholeheartedly favors discretion as the better part of valor.

  One quarter of a rotation around this layer of the detainment column passes uneventfully, save one steely scowl to quiet an awake Diraaqi prisoner in a passing cell. When Moira does stumble upon her quarry, she manages to sidle into the shadow of a bracing beam before they can take notice.

  Standing an aimless vigil at the foot of the elevator's embarkation platform and with both backs turned mercifully away from her position are the predicted pair of prison guards. One, a female humanoid sporting Moira's pre-prison shaved-head haircut, passes the time with a ThumbSmash handheld console. The other, a third Gantor, leans heavily over her shoulder and offers the odd word of ignored advise.

  Slung carelessly over each of their shoulders dangle the sought-after SV7s.

  Moira stalks up behind on callused feet. A workable strategy, a simultaneous smacking of each unaware guard on their respective temples, is summarily dashed to pieces. Her weapons loose in her hands, her sweaty finger slips and quite accidentally extends her left electrobaton with a ratcheting sound and an energizing sizzle. Both guards, expecting to see an unheard peer simply fiddling with their weapon, glance over their shoulders.

  Imagine their surprise to spot guilty Moira five feet behind, in a half-squat, with one massive black glove, one live electrobaton and one remote starter, clenched in stunned teeth.

  The tinny melody emanating from the ThumbSmash game underscores this supremely tense moment, a reverie Moira interrupts three seconds later by activating her other baton.

  All the parties
explode into motion at once. Moira launches forward in a leap. The startled guards shuffle backwards in unison. Two assault rifles are hurriedly unslung. The ThumbSmash lives up to its name against the teltriton as it's dropped.

  Cursed with significantly shorter legs, the humanoid guard straggles a second behind her partner and subsequently earns Moira's unforgiving headlock. She thrashes, flails and makes every attempt to wrest herself free from Moira's grasp. The hardened fibers of Moira's stolen deflection glove more than adequately squash the guard's windpipe beyond anything but a gurgle.

  Confident in the strength of her right arm's stranglehold, Moira employs her other electrobaton to whip the Gantor brutally in the kneecap. He stumbles, losing his grip on his assault rifle and purchasing much needed time for Moira to wheel her impromptu hostage around. By the time the Gantor's regained both his footing and his firearm, Moira's positioned the humanoid woman advantageously between herself and the SV7's snub.

  Both women simultaneously pray to all the moons that the employee manual issued to each Imperium prison guard frowned upon shooting one's comrades in cold blood.

  The gamble pays off as, when faced with Moira's hasty humanoid shield, the Gantor hesitates. Moira returns the favor by introducing his balls to blunt force and electricity. As he reels in pain, she gambles again, tightening her grip around the humanoid's throat and inching a step backward, a step closer to the opposite wall of the corridor.

  Again, he takes the bait, wincing while he limps forward and still struggling to bring the rifle to bear. This impulse Moira rewards with a shocking swat across the chin, followed by another step back. Soon, she's sufficiently goaded him and it's a dance, each participant exchanging as many injuries as steps, until Moira's an arm's length from the intended wall and the Gantor's a bruised, burnt and bloodied mess.

  Finally, the haymaker moment arrives. Moira does her level best to counterbalance herself, sucks in an anticipatory breath and, using the unwilling guard as a point of pivot, takes her third and certainly not final gamble of the evening. She performs a flying wall kick off the teltriton behind her and into the Gantor's creepy, emaciated face.

  This chain of events the Gantor takes understandably poorly. Slapped senseless more from surprise than impact, he flops listlessly to the deck. Alighting awkwardly on the floor behind the discombobulated humanoid, Moira renders final judgment by seizing the woman's jaw and promptly snapping her neck. In response, the guard performs a lopsided half-pirouette and joins her partner in a heap on the floor.

  Moira stands, panting, amid her second prison guard pile-up. The corridor is now clear of any more obvious hostiles; all without a single shot fired from either weapon.

  After summoning down the elevator to the Twenty-Sixth deck, Moira hunkers to the floor to collect her winnings. She collects an ammunition belt, an SV7 and spends a moment to further lament this accursed jumpsuit in the face of more useless pocket change.

  As if on cue, the service elevator dings obligingly behind her.

  The Moira Quicksilver that rises and gives each arm of the corridor a cautionary glance – a suspicious pedestrian about to cross an empty intersection – is that much more stacked than the one who first knelt over both vanquished foes. A soon-to-be-disassembled assault rifle is slung over her shoulder, a belt to clip both batons to is cinched around the waist of her neon yellow onesie and the remote activator is twirled around her right pointer finger. So armed, Moira darts into the service elevator's opening doors.

  Once inside, she dials coordinates for the Seventeenth Deck and drops back to her knees to dismantle the SV7. At that moment, the elevator disengages from its present clamps and shoots directly upward.

  The HIN Surimiah, like all Mercy-class prison haulers, had a queer design. In order to readily retrieve, transport and deposit all nine hundred of its potential prisoners, the Surimiah made use of a three-hundred foot cylinder, jutting straight out of the ship's underbelly, called a detainment column.

  Ostensibly a thirty story building and a free-standing tower in its own right, the detainment column allowed the Endless Imperium the peerless ability to transfer entire wings of their planetary prisons to and fro across the civilized reaches of the galaxy. With relative ease, the Surimiah had charted a checkered course throughout the Midworlds, collecting the very créme de la créme of convicts, Moira Quicksilver included, from holding cells and provincial prisons along the way.

  Her coffers full, she cut canvas now for the fifth planet of the Prash system, freezing and lifeless Vorse. There, she'd detach the column, the Seventeenth Deck would become the Seventeenth Floor and the Surimiah, thus unburdened, would depart for Medroteria or Jotor or wherever empty, idle prison ships go.

  Moira, on the other hand, harbored other plans for the HIN Surimiah, plans one wouldn't find on any official Imperium manifest or procedural.

  She's scarce enough time to wrest loose the SV7's percussion cap before the service elevator clangs into place on the Seventeenth Deck. As the doors grind open before her, Moira's forced to abandon her handiwork to a clatter on the elevator floor.

  Both her electrobatons unsheathe and extend before either standing sentry can even register the elevator's sudden appearance behind them. With one concluding motion, she claps both their skulls together with fierce strikes to their corresponding temples. They collapse comically together, their bodies propped against one another in an unconscious canoodle before the yawning elevator doors.

  After confirming a clear coast and recovering the assault rifle's component parts from behind her, Moira weaves around the two toppled prison guards on her way. She notes the Surimiah's continued prevalence of Gantorese personnel and wonders vaguely if Gant is the ship's original port of call before busying herself with the elevator's nearby motor control box.

  Prying the main panel free certainly wasn't Moira's definition of easy, nor her definition of silent. It offers shrill, teltriton protest, echoing down the hall, when she swats it aside with her electrobaton. Within the next two minutes, she anticipates the arrival of re-enforcements.

  Luckily for Moira, the call request transponder is simply located within the control box. A little manual surgery later and she's successfully extracted the transponder and all its attendant cords and wiring. With the remote cell-door activator and the SV7's percussion cap to keep it company, the call request transponder was the final ingredient in the strange cocktail of mismatched mechanisms so integral to Moira's escape.

  How exactly any of these random pieces of technical apocrypha intended to spring her from this supremely secure prison hauler mid-warp, Moira deliberately had no idea.

  The Seventeenth Deck of the HIN Surimiah is more or less identical to its Twenty-Sixth Deck. The black teltriton corridor is cast in a gentle curve and outlined in wavering pink light from the individual cell doors. Her destination is halfway around the column's circuit and Moira dares it openly, trio of disjointed machine parts in one gloved fist, electrified baton in the other.

  She fails to run afoul of any more guards along the way. She does earn the semi-occasional hoot or catcall from an awake prisoner, a form of attention Moira's habitually deaf to.

  She lingers before the deflection door of Cell 17P. Each cell was protected by a shimmering membrane of projected pink energy, entirely impermeable to anything but the insulated gloves worn by the Surimiah's guards and now Moira. The door's reflective light only manages to spike the eyes of the cell's sole occupant a dim pink color. Whomever may lurk in the cramped chamber's furthest corner, they don't so much as shift their weight or stir themselves at all in reaction to Moira's arrival.

  Dropping calmly to a knee before the scintillating barrier, Moira, after waiting a beat, extends her gloved hand through the membrane. Despite the deflection glove, her skin beneath still crawls and creeps unnervingly.

  Moira deposits each nonsensical item in a neat little procession on the prisoner's side of the door; remote activator first, percussion cap second and call request tran
sponder third. This done, Moira withdraws her right hand, locks eyes as best she can with the pink pinpricks within the cell and makes a single stipulation.

  “Get busy.”

  A gruff noise, either a grunt or a growl, signals an acceptance and heralds the next and least pleasant of Moira's tasks.

  Moira Quicksilver now intended to run down the nearest gaggle of guards, preferably armed, and pick the nastiest, noisiest fight possible. She rises to her feet, banishes any remaining thoughts of stealth and suddenly stomps out of sight of Cell 17P and its wordless occupant.

  Moira dashes further down the hallway at full tilt. With both electrobatons extended and armed, she's visibly unafraid but inwardly anxious about the upcoming life-or-death calculations she'd need to pull off. Her most conservative estimate assumed another pair of guards, standing watch over the the opposite service elevator. The possibility of another two remained worryingly distinct, however.

  To date, Moira had never engaged more than three individual combatants at once and emerged victorious. Considering that any resistance she's likely to encounter would almost certainly be armed with more than electrified sticks, she doesn't necessarily like her odds.

  As always, Moira's afforded precious little time to fully contemplate these odds as she rounds a sloping corner onto, she guessed it, four individual prison guards.

  All four loiter about the corridor in various states of repose, their bored conversation immediately interrupted and each only too happy to leap off their laurels to meet the unspoken challenge of an escaped prisoner.

  She spends a second counting distances, extrapolating each enemy's entrance and praying to all the moons she knows what she's doing.

  Two batons, delivered as one directly to the side of his Gantorese head, is more than sufficient motivation to cave-in the skull of the first prison guard to reach Moira. Her introductions made, the two guards furthest away unsling and cock their respective SV7s.