Chapter Five: In a Cave, with a box of Scraps.

Part Two: Long train Running

Prologue:

Quill groaned as he pulled himself upright on the third try, and, after a few false starts, managed to walk in the direction of his Walkman. As if the sun wasn't bad enough, the damn jet-fuel had soaked into the sand and was burning away merrily, turning the crash-site in to one huge brazier, and the problem was that stuff burnt with a fine, blue flame that was almost invisible in sunlight this bright.

But that's not the point though Quill, a little muzzily I'm not one to abandon my own he thought, walking unsteadily over. He could hear some faint sounds coming from the wreckage, and after a moment or two and a few near-misses with fire, he spotted a black-ringed tail sticking out of a nearby sand-drift. Ambling towards the source of the sound, he staggered and stumbled in pain, but he pressed on.

I'm not one to abandon my own he thought, as he pulled level with the tail, and then kept walking. His Walkman was about a meter beyond, and he picked it up, and brushed it off carefully, marvelling that other than a little damage to the foam, it was still all right.

Then again, all the upgrades I made to it over the years, it damn well should be. He thought, clipping it on. He then glanced at the tail and sighed. With an air of great reluctance he grabbed onto the grimy fur, and pulled. Rocket slid out, coughing weakly under his broken dust-googles and mask. The racoon mercenary groaned, and pulled off the mouth-cover. Quill noted that with the goggles and dust, he'd got raccoon-eyes on top of his racoon-eyes. He snorted with a wry amusement.

"You alive?" He asked. Rocket groaned and tried to sit up, managing to roll over on his belly and wheeze a little.

"Yeah." Said Rocket, feeling around in his mouth with his tongue and wincing as he found what he suspected was a cracked tooth.

"Pity." Said Quill.

"Pity? Hey hairless, next time you wanna pass on an escape plan, you go right ahead." Grumbled Rocket, looking around. "It's not like I need the extra weight dragin' me down. Things were going fine 'till you got involved."

"Fine? Fine!? You nearly got us all killed, I've got sand I places I didn't know I had, Drax's stuck in this goddam desert somewhere and as for Gamora-"

"Hey! Next time you can plan the escape then, and I'll do the bitching!" sad Rocket, searching for something that he could use as a weapon, before settling on a sharp splitter of metal that looked like the worlds-worse ski. "You can't deny that compared to where we were an hour ago, this is a monumental Frickin' improvement!"

Quill had to admit he had a point.

Nineteen hours earlier

The punch hit Quill square across the jaw, sending his head smacking into the back of the seat. If you could call it a seat: he'd ridden in a lot of military vehicles in his life since joining the Ravengers, but he had to admit that even my the standards of military transports the squad-space in the back of a necrocraft left a lot to be desired. Like padding, or a seat designer who hadn't gotten his ideas on ergonomics from Procrustes.

Then again, it could just be the punches He thought as another blow smacked his head around in the other direction. Somehow, blearily, he'd assumed that after the pummelling they'd given him to get him on the ship, the Sakaarans would take a break and wait until they got back to wherever they were going before laying into him again. Boy, was he wrong. Memo to self, Quill: Next time you punch someone off a dune whilst he's taking a leak, make sure it's not their sergeant. Or kill him before he can harbour thoughts of revenge, that works too.

It could be worse, though. Apparently the individual now covered in a patchwork tapestry of Racoon-bites was some sort of officer, with was why two Sakaarans seemed to be having an impromptu soccer match with an old sports-bag which contained either Rocket or the worlds sweariest gym-shorts. The back of the ship was still open, and whenever they got bored with kicking the bag about, they seemed to delight in dangling it over the drop to the desert below, a threat that might have had a bit more bite if Rocket could actually see out, Quill thought, but it seemed to make the guards happy and if it gave them something to do other than punch people, Quill would at that point have sincerely wished them luck.

Even so, Rocket was helpless in that bag, and tough as he was, if they kept that kicking up they'd kill him sooner or later. Quill took a deep breath, and, picking a moment in-between punches, yelled.

"Hey, Captain Crunch!" he yelled at the officer, who even by Sakaaran standards had a completion that only a mother or a dermatologist with an agenda could love. "Yeah you, Mr Accutane! You stick cereal to your face on purpose or are you just too dumb to find your mouth with the spoon? I mean, I guess I could understand the latter, you are Sakaaran and all, but you must be the ugliest grox- licker on the planet! Why don't you pick on someone your own siz-"

Rocket's bag bounced off his head, but then fell forgotten into a corner of the ship as every guard on the ship rushed him.

Truth be told, they weren't great at this, getting in each other's, way giving Quill far too much freedom of movement to turn his head and roll with the punches, but as a general rule if you're tied to a chair and getting pummelled, you captors don't have to be even half good to do you some serious damage, Quill thought, before passing out. I sure hope they leave-off Rocket now. And I hope Gamora's okay, wherever she might be He wondered vaguely, as he lost his tenuous grasp on consciousness.


Quill slipped in an out of wakefulness, with a splitting headache and a raging thirst, not sure where exactly he was.

Jesus, how much did I drink last night? He thought. What I wouldn't give for a glass of-

A thrown bucket drenched him in brackish water, the sudden shock jolting him back to reality. Oh right, captured. At least I don't have to worry about finding strange women in my ship or drunk-calling Yondu. He mused. Plus side to everything.

A guard leaned in, well, Quill guessed it was a guard because it was wearing a uniform and paint-stripers weren't usually independently mobile, he thought, turning his head to avoid the worst of the guy's spectacular halitosis. I was wrong, there is an uglier grox-licker. Who knew?

The guard snorted, giving Quill a blast of the galaxy's best advert for mouthwash, and then walked over and put the bucket under his chair with a clank and slouched off towards the door. Quill glanced around, he was on seat-less a metal chair bolted to the floor in a small rough-hewn space, either a squared-off cave or a completely artificial space hacked out of the living rock. There was heavy looking a steel door and not much else.

"I take it this means I'm not getting bathroom breaks?" asked Quill, as the door slammed.

"Thought not." Said Quill to himself in the dark.

"Given the amount of water you have in all likelihood lost, I doubt you will be able to urinate if you tried." Said a voice. "Although I could be mistaken: I am unfamiliar with both terran biology and as to why you persist on referring to urination as visiting the bathroom, when in fact neither the Milano or most of the bars we visit have baths."

"Drax?" Quill asked, before cursing himself: Who else spoke like that? "Are you okay?"

There was a pause, and even thought it was pitch dark and he couldn't hear a thing, Quill could feel Drax's confused frown.

"No, Of course I am not all right. I have been knocked unconscious and tied up."

"Yeah, stupid question really. Where are we?"

"In a cave. On Arrakis five."

"Of course. How silly of me." Said Quill, fighting down his rising temper. "Any other facts you feel would be helpful for me to know, feel free to say so big-guy." he snarled.

….

"Given the presence of Sakaaran mercenaries armed with Ker Industries weapons and the elaborate lengths taken to make this look like the local tribesmen, I have reason to believe that Benoit Ker might be involved in the attack on our convoy."

"…. Gee? Really? You think? We'll I'll be a monkey's uncle."

"Distant cousin, and only in very loose evolutionary terms, if my knowledge of terran xenobiology is accurate."

"Drax?"

"Yes?"

"Shut up." Drax shut up. Quill looked around trying to get some sense of the place he was in. "Any sign of … have you seen Rocket."

There was the sound of something shifting from another corner of the cave.

"You didn't have to do that, Quill." Said the voice, sounding pretty beat. "That was really, really dumb."

"You're telling me." Said Quill, blinking his left eye, it felt swollen, and he was willing to bet he'd have a real shiner.

"Yeah, well, next time you get the temptation to pull something like that, don't. I can look after myself. And I'm the one wearing a graphene body sock and with combat-reinforcements to all my bones."

"I'll try and remember that next time I save your furry ass. How long have we been here?" he asked, not unkindly. Rocket sounded pretty bad about what had happened, and Quill knew well enough that that was probably the closest to thanks that he was capable of giving.

There was a racoonish snort, pretty much the aural equivalent of a sarcastic shrug. "Fuck knows. Last thing I know I'm in a bag and some idiot mouth s off to his guards and they throw me at him. I'm half stunned and listening to ten full minuets of punching until baldylocks here starts to come round and fight against the stretcher he's tied to, and one of them decides to beat him unconscious using the first thing he can find which happens to be a sports bag and I wake up with a dislocated shoulder and the negative of one of his goddam hippie tattoos imprinted in my ass in burse-o-vison. I'd guess eight hours, you utter twats."

"How?" asked Quill. There was a silence, and then, as if it was the dumbest thing he'd ever asked. "Because it's night-time dummy."

"How could you know that given out chthonic confines?"

"It smells like night-time, inksplot. Seriously, was the tattoo dye lead based or something?" Rocket sneered at Drax, and if anyone could make sneering a purely vocal phenomenon, it was Rocket. "You guys do have senses other than sight, right?"

"Oh yeah, us terran's have a pretty good sense of touch and I'm getting some pretty bad feels coming from this chair-o-torture I'm tied to, so if you could smell or hear anything else useful, that'd be just swell."

There was a needlessly aggressive snort, and then a long pause. Quill wondered if he'd gone too far and was being given the silent treatment by Rascal Racoon, but when he tried to apologise Rocket shushed him

"Quiet! It's hard enough to focus as it is, I'm sharing a hole in the ground with an over-muscled thug and a frickin' Terran male, both havin' spent a day running around in a goddam desert. I'm in sweat central here. Not to mention all the other horrible crap I can smell has gone down in this cave over the years. As a long term jailbird I know when a place has seen its share of brutal romantic conquests, and I can tellya that stuff lingers. Give me some time to breathe and just try to control your involuntary skin-piss, willya?"

Quill forced himself to calm down and relax. Rocket was right, he guessed. Asking someone to fix a problem by sniffing stuff or listening, and then working yourself into a state of sweaty angst and shouting at him probably wasn't the best move. Quill closed his eyes, which lessened the pain from the swollen eye and made it easier to forget he was in a pitch-black cave. He relaxed his shoulders and tried to move into an almost comfortable position on the chair, and then sat silently and tried to think of songs in his head to make him relax.

I find that guy with my Walkman, I'm gonna beat him to death with it. Quill swore, before dismissing it. That was a horribly thought, and beneath him. And it might damage the plastic: probably safest to garrotte him with the headphones.

He got as far as the last verse of "ain't no mountain high enough" when Rocket, as calm and sure as if he was reading the weather from a news-filmy, said:

"80 odd of Sakaarans, two Xandaians. A few locals, dead. We're about 20 meters down. Night-flier cave in this system, judging by the guano-stench, not far off: they're just coming back to roost, so we're nearly at dawn. Industrial equipment, but the yacht and necroships aren't in scent range; given cool air sinks into these caves at night from the surrounding area they musta put the ships outside of this particular whadi. Lots of antique guns, lots of art."

"Art?" asked Quill, confused. Rocket took a deep, long breath, and then confirmed. "Yeah, art. I can smell paint and oils, canvas, damp marble, conservation-grade paraloid, parchment, inks… art. Don't ask me why, but it's defiantly art and it's defiantly here. Maybe this Ker bastard is a collector."

"Well I don't know about you two, but I think I've seen more than my fair share of insane billionaire collectors, thank you. Any sign of Gamora?"

"Notta sniff, and given she's the only one of her species and uses nearly as much hair product as you do, I can guarantee if she was here I could pick her out. They must not have picked her up."

"Oh thank god for that." Said Quill, there was an awkward pause

"Quill, that desert out there is deadly. Now I've seen Gamora in action, and I'd willingly back her against most anyone in the galaxy, but people just don't survive deserts like that without water and transport, and unless you know something I don't about that convoy, she won't be finding much of it there. You might have to accept that if she's not here… then she's gone."

"She's not dead."

"Quill, look."

"She's not dead. I could tell if she was, don't ask how, I'd… I'd just know, alight? And besides, all she needs to do is wait around until the Milano arrives: I called it before Ker captured us. It'll be there."

"Ker may have disabled the tracking beacon, or posted guards to apprehend her if she moved towards the ship. He is not foolish." Said Drax. Quill smiled.

"Yeah, but he's not Gamora either. She'll be okay." Quill examined the cell: his eyes hadn't adjusted yet, but he could feel the stifling heat and pick up something like the smell of blood and some deep god-awful funk that was noticeable even over the BO he was developing in this humid hell. "Not sure about us tho'. So… Any ideas? 'cause I'm strapped to a chair with the bottom cut out, and that's the furniture equivalent of assless chaps so I would kinda like to escape before the guards get any funny ideas."

"If it's any consolation, when they opened the door to throw the water on you, I saw the room reasonably well in the light, and you have little need to worry about sexual assault: I imagine the seatless chair is to facilitate the fitting of the electrodes I saw when the door opened."

"… thank you Drax, I was wondering when I'd need the bucket. Feel free to share any comments of that sort just the very second they come into your head, okay?"

"Meh, I'd not panic about that just yet Quill, if they were planning on fixing those electrodes to your junk, they'd have done it by now. The bucket of water smelt salty, so it's probably to make you clothes good and conductive for a full-body kind of-"

"NOT ! HELPING! ROCKET!" Yelled Quill. "Can't you do anything usefull, Mr twenty-three prisons? 'cause I feel a little escape artistry might be warranted just now."

"Ok, firstly, a prison is a system, it has lazy guards, scheduled activities, fixed meal times, other prisoners: things you can use to your advantage. This is a fucking cave, little different. Secondly, seen' as you were so keen to draw the guards attention to yourself, why don't you deal with it for a change? I'm in a corner of a room, Drax is in a corner of a room, you, you're in the centre in the seat next to the jump-leads. That little stunt on the necrocraft has got you singled out, Quill. Next time you feel like mouthing off to the guards you remember that there're usually consequences."

"I was trying to stop them kicking you."

"Yeah, and I'm grateful, but given Ker wanted us alive I was pretty sure they'd stop as soon as I stopped swearing and I went limp! I had my tial wrapped around my head for padding and the bag was taking most of the damage, I had everything under control!"

"Well if you were so sure they'd stop beating on you if you shut up and went limp, why didn't you! Why keep up the popple impression?"

"Because I was trying the same goddamed stupid thing you were, I didn't want them beating on you!" yelled Rocket. "Only difference was I had a plan to deal with it other than 'get pummeled senseless'. Sheesh, this is why I don't normally bother with altruism, it just ends up making everything worse than it would have been frickin' otherwise."

There was an awkward pause, and Drax Rocket and Quill stat in the stiffening silence.

"Sorry." Said Quill. "I thought-"

"No, you didn't. You responded." Said Rocket. "And it's, yanno, understandable and all, but it just weren't helpful." There was the sound of a small furred body shifting in a seat. "I never said your heart wasn't in the right place, Quill, just your brain. Trust me to know what I'm doing."

Quill sat a moment. "Yeah, Okay. It's just… I don't take well with bullies. Never have. Someone beating on someone smaller than them…" an image of a squashed frog rose unbidden in his mind. "That's never sat well with me, is all. I mean, yeah, I know you're smart and I know you're tough and if I'm completely honest there are times you fucking scare me, but you're three foot nothing and covered in fur. It's kind of hard to switch off those protective instincts."

"A fact Rocket has taken advantage of throughout a long criminal career." Said Drax. "The initial reluctance of others to use physical violence against him being doubtless how he survived long enough to develop the skill set he now lives by."

"Yeah." Said Rocket, sounding highly distracted. "Pretty much. I mean, lookin' out for each-other and all is good, but a little enlightened self-interest wouldn't go awry."

"That's a remarkably Objectivist viewpoint to expound given your well-documented and irrational hatred of the rich and selfish." said Drax.

"Hey, speaking as the poor and selfish I can hate the rich and still want to emulate them, okay? Just like I can hate Nova worlds but still use their free health care. Blatant hypocrisy is in no-way inconstant with objectivist thinking: it's practically required. And less of the irrational: I only hate people who are assholes and deserve it.

"Rocket, you hate everyone." Said Quill.

"Exactly! Besides, we're being held in a torture-basement of a billionaire industrialist: Unless someone wants to write a bad porn novel about it, I'd flag that up as a pretty rational reason to hate the galactic one percent right now." Rocket paused, and when he spoke again he sounded somewhat pained. "Although I've gotta say, Quill's all for one, one for all, take a beating for your teammates attitude has some advantages."

"Really?" said Quill, touched by the obvious pain the Rockets voice, and surprised to see that he would get so emotional about it. Then again, we might be about to get tortured to death, no point trying to hold it in now, may as well let it all out…

Quill screamed as something heavy and with tiny sharp claws jumped up onto his lap, and screamed again as a blinding light flared in front of his eyes. After a moment of pants-wetting fear and an amused snort that convinced him that Ker or one of his goons must have been in here with them the whole time messing with them, he felt the vague tickle against his face of what felt a lot like whiskers, and opened his eyes.

"Really." said Rocket. "If they hadn't thrown me at your head, I'd have had to dislocate my shoulder myself to slip that knot. Can you pop this back in for me?" asked Rocket, turning his body and raising a match to show his left arm. Quill almost fainted and had to hold down a gagging reflex at the sight of it hanging limply off him.

"Sure, my hands are tied and you're standing on my lap, I'll just pop it back in with my chin like Bruce Campbell, shall I?"

Rocket snorted, but hoped down and took the match with him. After a few seconds Quill flinched, as it became clear that Rocket couldn't untie the knot one-handed and was using the match to burn through the rope and, intermittently, his hands. Quill shifted his hands back and forth, feeling the rope fray and loosen. He smiled, grimly, just a few more seconds of this and he'd be free-

Rocket froze up, and Quill was about to ask why, when he heard the sound of approaching footsteps a moment after the Racoon, and saw a thin anaemic light start to seep around the doorframe. Rocket hesitated a second, and then swore and blew out the light. "Grab my shoulder and lift" he hissed. Quill felt a grimy body-sock get forced into one of his bound hands and a thin sheaf of grubby-feeling fur that felt way too fragile to be an arm get pressed into another. He could feel Rocket's racing heartbeat though the fur, and fast, panting breaths blowing into the small of his back and Rocket braced for the pain, Quill hesitated.

"You sure, I don't want to hurt you-"

"What did I say about trusting me? Lift my arm up and them push slightly away from you, and not too hard, Dummy: we don't all have ball and socket joints there, you know."

"You want me to do it on three?" he whispered, watching the light around the door get brighter and the footsteps louder.

"No, I want you to do it fast, idiot: if you give people warning when you're about to relocate a joint they tense up and you can't pop it back without serious tendon damage, you gotta take them by surpri- ARRRTCH!" Said Rocket, before dissolving into a high, bird-like twittering intermixed with snarls and the sort of swearing that would ensure Rocket would never get his own charming Canadian animated show, or at least not one shown before 10 pm (11 central) thought Quill. He felt Rocket flex his arm, testingly, and then let go of him. He heard a kea turn in the lock, and a brief patter of tiny paws, and then it was too bright to look at the door any more, and Quill was forced to look away. As he did, he just caught sight of Rocket leaping into a chair to his left (they'd been thoughtful torture-technicians and given him a booster seat, Quill noticed) and hurriedly sit with his hands behind his back, faking being tied, and slump forwards and drool in a pretty realistic act, all things considered. Then came the voice.

"Hey, no need to avert your eyes, it's just me. Ahhh, too soon for jokes?" said Ker, sauntering in with an assault rifle slung over one shoulder of a ridiculously expensive looking cream suit. "Don't get up." He added, smiling, as his bodyguard and two Sakaarans appeared hovering behind him like indecisive angels. Ker grinned, and pulled a chair over to just in front of Quill, which he flicked over and straddled sitting on it backwards with his arms crossed over the chair back, all sharp tailoring and winning smiles.

"So, Quill, Bubby". He said, gesturing to the two Sakaaran goons, one with a pair of pliers, and one with a length of chain. "Do you still want to take the beatings yourself, or should I have my people talk to your people?"


It was too damn hot.

Gamora pulled into the shade of a dune, and sat for a few moments to cool down. She took a deep pull on the canteen. She'd left four empty canteens in her trail already, and was half-way thought this one, she judged. Early on, she'd used a little water to damp-down the head-dress she'd made herself from strips of Sakaaran uniforms, hoping that cooling her head might go some way to alleviate the constant pain behind her eyes, and had mixed a little water with soot from the burnt-out landship to paint under her eyes to reduce the glare, but she'd now given up on both stratagems: the pain was still there, and it wasn't like she had the water to spare, anyway.

She had no way of judging how far Quill might be; only direction from his damaged com-unit. But she guessed he'd have to be close. And if he wasn't, well, it's wasn't like she could go on for much further anyway.

She'd moved mostly by night, the exercise keeping her from freezing, and slept a couple of hours in the day, when she found good shade, but it was barely an hour past dawn, and already the sun was in killing mode. She needed shade. Gamora sighed. Shade was looking like an increasingly scarce commodity out here.

Climbing to the top of the dune, Gamora scanned the horizon with a pair of oculars she'd scavenged from the fifth Sakaaran, who she guessed was some sort of officer. She guessed that counted as theft, but neither he nor he previous four skararaks had objected, it being difficult to be both wordy and dead, and the matter somehow didn't come up with the next four either. Shading the lenses to prevent a refection from giving away her position, she searched for any sign of either shade, or Quill. She paused.

There was am long low smudge on the horizon. She didn't know that it could be, but it looked either like or low cloudbank, in which case it would be the first clouds she'd seen on this planet, a sandstorm, not fun, or some sort of low cliffs. Or steep canyon casting shade. A whadi, perhaps. Gamora hesitated, uncertain.

She sat cross-legged in the shade, and watched for a long time.

After about an hour, she caught a glint. Not much, but a single flicker of light reflecting of something. Enough to show that someone was there.

She smiled, without humour. It was good to know that not everyone in the galaxy was as cautious as her.

Gamora kept walking.


"Whoa, Whoa." Said Quill, struggling against his bonds in a way that he hoped looked suitably helpless, but was in fact causing the weekend rope to fray even further. "I thought you were going to sip cocktails in a hot-tub with my Walkman, what happened to leaving us to your minions and not getting your hands dirty?" Quill paused for a second. "And why aren't you leaving is to stew and get all worried about what might happen to us, take us out of the room one at a time, and leave each of us imagining what you're doing to the others, the usual interrogation crap." Said Quill, who had a pretty good idea from both his run-ins with the law and with Yondu's stories to know how this worked. He grinned. "Why the big rush? You're hurrying this, aren't you?"

Ker sighed, and pinched the bridge of this nose.

"You know, you're not supposed to be the one asking questions here, that's pretty much how it works, but as it so happens, one of the factions in this stupid little civil conflict just applied for the protection of a Nova peace-keeping force, and given you're working for Nova I'm gonna refuse flat out to see that as a coincidence, so what I'd like you to do is tell me how to get that Nova Malware off my computer system before the Corps arrives on this hateful dust ball and makes it impossible to keep up the charade of this kidnapping."

"Whoa, Whoa, Whoa!" said Quill " Whoa! You think we'd get sent in to work undercover the day before Nova rocked-up legally and with good reason to poke around? We didn't know anything about this! Hell, you say that one of the factions here invited Nova in? I bet Nova didn't know this was going to happen before it did, you gotta believe me."

Ker stared at Quill for a long time, impassively. "Yeah, you're probably right. Nova would never send in agents when they could get a resolution and then send in lawyers. Must be a coincidence." He nodded to the Sakaaran with the pliers. "Hurt him."

"Hey, you said it was probably a coincidence, we don't know shit about this Nova deployment!" yelled Quill, flinching back as the Sakaaran grabbed him by the hair and tried to force ta filthy pair of pliers into his mouth.

"Probably." said Ker. "But why take the risk? Besides, I still want to get the bug out of my system, have you guys dead and get myself realistically tied to that chair when the rescue party comes, and now rather than a long hostage taking and negotiation, I'm going to have to go with body-parts from my hired guards sent to Illzo and the board to convince them to pay up swiftly, before Nova finds this little hidey hole." He saw the Sakaaran get a grip on Quill's tongue and start to pull, and sighed. "Really? We want him to be able to talk, and you start with the tongue? Hardly employee of the moth material"

The Sakaaran froze up, nervously. It stepped back and begun to shuffle its feet. "Sorry Mr Ker. Me never done this before, me get nervous. Go for tongue for effect. Please don't write bad report to temp-agency."

"Oaky, fair enough. Just what effect were you going for? Out of interest."

The Sakaaran screwed up its face in concentration as its two neurones ran rings around each other . "Sort off, gibbering horror… with lots of missing extremities?" he said, hoping that was the right answered. Ker nodded, understandingly.

"Okay babe, I follow. And, yanno, that shows initiative, an end goal, vison even, I like that in an evil hireling. You're doing good work!" he said, giving the Sakaaran a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder. "I mean, a pair of needle-nosed pliers, that's a classic. Just take a deep breath, that's it, hold it, conceptualize all that tension, and just breathe it away. There." said Ker, Kindly. "Feel better?"

The Sakaaran grinned, relief blowing of him like steam. "Yeah, loads, thanks boss."

"Hey, don't thank me, thank ten-thousand unit a pop corporate leadership seminars. Hey Bruce." he said, gesturing to his bodyguard. "Organize some trust-building exercises for all the guys in the kidnapping squad. A few moral boosters, laser tag, team t-shirts, something like that. So now, who's the Sakaaran?"

The goon thought about it for a monument, looking panicked by the advanced concepts of self and otherness on offer. "Me?" He hazarded.

"Exactly, you the Sakaaran. The big badass Saharan, so let's have less worrying about what the temp agency might think, and minds on the task at hand, okay?" he nodded to Quill. "Start with his fingernails, okay?"

The Sakaaran paused, wanting to look like he was making a contribution, but frightened to say anything that might sound stupid. "Can… can I make him eat them?"

Ker stared.

"You know, you're wasted in that temp agency. Yes, yes you can. Hey Quill look, the boy's a natural."

"You're completely deranged." Said Drax, as if he was commenting on the weather.

"Hey, big guy, you'll get your turn soon. The soon-to-be-gloves too. So, Quill let's talk shop. And remember, it's nothing personal." He said, resting a caring hand on the terrain's shoulder "It's just business."

"Hey, one thing first!" yelled Quill, as the goon leaned in with the pliers. The goon paused, and looked to Ker for instructions. Ker held out the hand that wasn't on Quill's shoulder, and see-sawed it, clenching his teeth in thought.

"Again, technically that's not how it works, but my stock options went up three points this morning, so eh, why not?"

"What's with all the art?"

Ker's smile froze and then he grinned and wiggled a finger under Quill's nose.

"Well Mr I'm all passed out when I'm brought in here. Were you peaking? When the war on this hateful planet started, the government of the southern alliance moved all its great art and historical items out of the main cities in case the enemy used carpet bombing. Protect their cultural heritage, and all that. Ker industries forgot the contracts to bomb-proof old mines and natural caverns all across the planet to hide the loot until the war was over. I thought it would add a frisson of delicious irony to my fake kidnapping if my captors held me in one off the abandoned facilities that I helped to build. Help sell copies of my autobiography, you know. We've got everything, paintings, sculpture, drawing, even a load of museum-pieces. Archaeological finds, hell, we've got a museum's worth of antiquated armaments and weaponry, which will be all off it, once my stuff hits the market. It'll be a paradigm shift in orbital tech, I tell you. It'll be as out of date as your little music player." Said Ker. He noticed Quill's facial spasm as he said that.

"Oh I'm sorry. Do you actually care about that cheap hunk of plastic?" he said, pulling the tape player out from under his suit jacket. Looking Quill dead in the eye, he popped out the cassette cover, took the magnetic tape in one hand, and pulled about an inch out of the cassette. "Woops." He said, throwing the Walkman into the corner, where it bounced off the generator for the electrodes, and the two fire-extinguishers next to it, presumably put there to control those unfortunate spontaneous body-hair ignitions.

Quill took a deep breath.

"Okay buddy, you just made two really bad mistakes. Firstly, you do not mess with someone's Walkman like that. All the other stuff I could kinda forgive. Well not forgive, but turn you over to Nova for, but that's just a step to far."

"And the second thing?" asked Ker, waving for the Two Sakaarans to start the beating in a bored manner. Quill grinned.

"Didn't you have the A-team where you're from? You never lock people in the tool-cupboard. Now!" he yelled, snapping the last of the rope, and divining for the floor. Ker had just enough time to look surprised, before Rocket, completely ignored by the goons the entire time Quill as talking, stepped out from behind the generator, and lobbed a foam fire-extinguisher underarm in an arch that brought it to a perfect head-height, as he aimed the CO2 fire extinguisher at it, the screw he'd removed for his chair and a little rope wadding visible in the nozzle, and fired.

Quill heard the extinguisher burst with a dull boom, showering the cave with foam and giving pliers something other than the tempt agency to worry about. Quill saw the Sakaaran with the chain come at him, and kicked the bucket into his legs. He tripped on it, and went down hard. Meanwhile Rocket ran at Ker's bodyguard with the jump-leads and attached then at, what for Rocket, was head height. The man screamed, and instantly wished he hadn't chosen to wear pants with a conductive metal fly that day.

Quill tied to ignore the smell of burning pubes and ran to untie Drax, as behind him Ker ran screaming down the corridor. Drax leapt up and grabbed the chain and swung hard, nearly taking the head off its former owner. Rocket gave up scrabbling in the foam to find Ker's riffle, and started to yell "Run!"

Drax and Quill ran. Then Quill froze up, and ran back. He reached into the corner, grabbed his Walkman, kicked Ker's bodyguard in the ribs for good measure, and then ran back out into the corridor, taking a pencil from his packet and re-spooling the cassette with the practiced ease of anyone who grew up in the 1980's.

It was then he looked up, and realised that he'd lost Rocket and Drax.


Gamora carefully inched her way along the roof-beam. There was no ceiling to this hut, and the Sakaaran below her would only have to glance up at the wrong moment to see her. The sentry with the oculars hadn't had any more water on him, so she'd followed her nose and headed for what smelt like the bathrooms in the small bandit camp in the whadi. She was hot and tired, and pissed off, and she really, really wanted to stick her head in the sink and drink until she sloshed as she walked, but there had been literally a dozen goons in the place when she arrived. Now there was just one, standing in front of a urinal of the old-fashioned "Build a wall with a gutter vaguely beneath it" type favoured in bars, school changing rooms, and anywhere else that realised that aiming was a lost art and just gave up and accepted it. Slowly, she lowered herself off the roofing bar, and touched down silently. Two steps, and he was hers. He was focused on his business. She tightened her grip on her sword as he …well, adjusted his. One step. She thought don't turn around, don't turn around don't-

Every alarm in the camp went off at once, and the Sakaaran jolted upright in shock, trying to both stop mid flow, grab his gun, and turn all at once. In addition to this, every door in the cubicles at the other side of the room burst open, and five guards poured out.

Gamora saw the expression of shock on the Sakaaran's face, and took an instinctive step back as he failed spectacularly at stopping mid flow. She sighed, and lowered her sword, listening to the sirens Quill. No one else makes people that angry, except perhaps Rocket or Drax. She smiled sweetly at the surprised guards.

"Sorry, I thought this was the ladies room." She said, hefting her sword.


Rocket ran like blazes, heading towards the scent of freedom. It was pitch black in the tunnels, but he could cope with that. Vision wasn't his best sense anyway. Just one more corner and I'm scot free he thought, starting to see the faintest light from the outside just one more…

And then every door on the corridor burst open and around fifty Sakaarans, armed to the teeth, poured out into the corridor. Rocket skidded to a holt hoping and then turned as fast as he could practically drifting around the corner and then ran aback in the direction he'd come from as fast as he's stumpy little legs would carry him, tail out behind him like a streamer. The hue and cry sounded behind him, punctuated with the traditional gunshots as ricochets sparked and pinged off the walls around him. Panting and cursing, Rocket ran for his life, trying to fight down the taste of fear in his mouth and the sudden, ridiculous thought of how Quill would break the news of his death to Groot who Rocket wasn't even sure had fucking object permanence yet.

Just as he trying to decide whether to keep running until he puked, or just give up and try to find a good spot for a last stand, Rocket caught a whiff of old gun oil, and, friction burning his feet on the rough floor, steered sideways into a room he now saw was marked "Historical weapons." Panting and shoving, he grabbed the steal blast-boor (thank fuck for Ker's bomb-proofing) and started to close it. Emphasis on started: Rocket was strong for his size, but the door was the best part of fifty pounds, and Rocket weighed about the amount of an obese housecat.

"Come on Come on Come on Come on!" he cursed, as the door inched closed, and shots stated to patter against it like gentle summer rain, except pointy and unpleasant. Rocket got a glimpse of a large Sakaaran barrelling down on him, and strained with one final effort, as he got the door to close and latch just a second before a satisfying thump indicated the Sakaaran had ran straight into it.

Rocket leaned against the door for a good few moments, listening to the sound of shots pinging off it, and panting as he waited for his heartbeat to return to its normal 114 beats per minute.

After a moment, Rocket looked around.

He was in a long, narrow cave, stuffed to the gunwales with, to his educated eye, useless crap.

Sighing, the stepped away from the door, and begun to examine the room. There was a louder thump behind him, and the acrid tang of non-smokeless higher-order explosives that suggested some had tried lobbing a grenade at the door. Good luck with that. Rocket gave them around twenty minutes before they found anything that would put a dent in that wall, and when they did, his ass was toast. Or possibly a stylish scarf.

After his initial scan of the room revelled nothing promising, save form some welding equipment abandoned by whoever had installed the steal blast-doors, he decided to call Quill. Maybe he was having better luck.

The com rung for a few minutes, leaving Rocket worried by how badly the signal would be attenuated by the stone walls, before Quill answered.

"Rocket- I-nt-re-ou!"

Rocket sighed. "Quill, you're com is busted from when they hit you in the helmet. Try clipping that audio-sync I gave you to your Walkman. It's synced to my laryngophone."

"?ful? - with a- Karan - Libertarian-"

Rocket signed. Great. Frickin' humies. Quill was too stupid to realise that he needed to use the toy to bypass his broken coms. Looked like he was fighting his own way out.

"Just you and me again, eh?" he said out-loud, before he remembered Groot wasn't there. He sighed. He hoped he'd make it back to Groot soon.

Dejectedly, he begun to grab random bits of weaponry and assessed them. Most were primitive as hell, not even real energy weapons or magnetic-launched kinetic units, but chemical driven slugs of the most primitive nurture, and pointy bits of metal that he guessed would be useful for Drax or Gamora, but for him… he might get two or three of them in the crotch, he guessed. They'd kill him slow for it, most like, but what the fuck. He'd go out fighting.

Rocket was just starting to weigh up the relative merits or two particularly evil looking knives, when suddenly:

"Oh hey Rocket! Can you hear me dude? I just tried hooking up that dongle you gave me to the Walkman and think I have a signal!"

"Yeah, you're a fucking genius, look listen can you-"

"Look, rocket, listen, I'm in a bad shape, got about a hundred Sakaarans after me. Can you rescue me?"

Rocket sighed. "Yeah, was about to ask that to you too. I'm going know-where fast here: I'm holed up in Historical weapons with a whole bunch of goons trying to break in."

"Wait, you're in a weapons store, Oh come on man, that must be like a candy shop to you! Man up and rescue me!"

"Hey, listen bub, these weapons are goddam ancient. There's nothing good. The only thing I've seen that even looks in good condition is their set of Asgardian weaponry! What do you expect me to do, stab them with a spear? I can't even lift that stuff. It's all shit! There are even repulsors, who uses that primitive crap anymore? No one thing in here is any good!" Said Rocket, throwing the repulsors to the ground in a fit of piqué. It' looked like some museum guy had been trying to rig up some sort of primitive arc-reactor to power them, and got bored half way and quit.

There was a pause, and don't you know it, Rocket could feel Quill thinking up some stupid hair-brained plan.

"No one thing, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, eh? You're just going to have to MacGyver it."

Rocket stared at the wall. He's finally flipped. "I'm gonna have to what?"

"MacGyver it. Fucking go A-team on them! Build something from what you have. Weld shit together. Come on man, I've seen you knock someone on their ass with a gun you made out of caffeine dispenser parts that you built when you were drunk."

"Yeah, you. It wasn't hard: you were drunk too. Nothing in here is any good!"

"Oh man up and build something Ranger Rick, you were complaining it should trust in you to deal with it on your own, deal with it on your own!"

"I'm in a cave! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS! What the fuck do you expect me to do!" yelled Rocket, spinning on the ball of his foot out of pure rage. Then he paused, and slowly turned back.

The half-finished arc-reactor and repulsors were lying in front of him, on top of some sort of primitive sledge-mounted Gatling-gun with hanging-out intestines of heavy ammo-belts. He looked from them, to the corner of the room. As he'd spun, he'd spotted in the corner a suit of half-finished powered armour, about his size, slumped across a vicious looking jet engine sitting in a tangle of steel piping. He looked from the corner of the cave, to the arc-reactor on the gun-sledge, and back again several times.

His mouth broke into a big, very toothy grin. "That might be just insane enough to work." He said.


Gamora leapt off the roof of the toilet block, combat rolled along the top of the guardhouse to kill her momentum safely, and came up swinging, taking a Sakaaran guard in the midriff and making two half Sakaaran guards. Snatching a grenade from his belt, she caught one thrown from a guard on the ground, and lobbed both though a convenient skylight, rewarded a second later by the thump from within as they took out half the garrison. She leapt of the roof just before a secondary explosion lifted it off the building, used the surprised grenade thrower to break her fall, and rolled into cover as the shooting intensified. Pausing a second in the cover of some crates, she wondered when the others would get here and take some of the pressure off her.

"Gamora!" yelled a voice. Thankful, she smiled. "Quill!" She yelled, standing up and wavering, glad he was there to help. Her expression froze. He was being chased from behind the last necrocraft by a dozen or so guards, all better armed than him, who seemed to have only got his Walkman for protection. He dived behind the crates, grining like an idiot and, fuming, she ducked down with him as bullets flew overhead.

"Gamora! You're okay!" he yelled. She kicked him in the ribs.

"Shut up and fight! Find a weapon!" she yelled, as a particularly brave or stupid guard leapt over the crates pistol in hand. She hacked off the hand and flicked it causally towards Quill, who after only the briefest of girly shrieks grabbed the pistol and begun to fight back. As Gamora begun to cleave into the latest guard, she asked. "Where are the others?"

"Fuck knows, got separated from them in those caves. Rocket's in some sort of weapons store, no sign of Drax. We need an exit plan!"

"It's okay!" yelled Gamora "We can steel their last necrocraft and make a get-away."

"We should take Ker's ship!" Quill insisted, Gamora shook her head.

"I didn't want him to make a get-away, so I sabotaged it!" she yelled. Quill looked shocked.

"I didn't want him to use the guns on the necrocraft, so I sabotaged it, that's were those dudes cornered me."

Quill and Gamora stared at each other for a moment, and then four more guards attacked them, and they had to fight them off back-to-back. Gamora snarled

"The necrocraft is faster and has weapons, why the hell did you think we should leave in the yacht!"

"It has a Jacuzzi!" yelled Quill, neatly head-shot-ing a Sakaaran. "Oh I sure hope Rocket gets here soon!" yelled Quill.

As he did, he became aware of a heavy, clanking footsteps. Frightened guards begun to flee from the cave's entrance, and form up to face whatever horror was in there, for a second, Quill though he saw a powerful upright figure striding towards the entrance like some mechanical avenging angel….

… and then the figure stepped out into the light, and it was Drax, the clanking being caused by the banging together of two Sakaaran combat helmets, each with a very unhappy looking Sakaaran still inside. Drax roared defiance at the awaiting Guards, throwing the two bodies down at them, and then charged thought them, making it to the same cover as Quill and Gamora after a few seconds. With a chill Quill realised that they now had them surrounded.

"Looks like this is it." He muttered to himself.

"Not if I can help it." Muttered a raccoonsish voice coming out of his Walkman now it was synced to the com. Quill became aware of a sudden whirring nose, getting louder and louder and-

There was a thump and a showered of powdered rock, and the thin side of the cave system collapsed burying half of the Sakaarans in an small landslide, and out of it ploughed something from Mad-Max's worst nightmares. A nightmarish figure in welding goggles sitting on top of the monstrosity pulled off an improvised dust mask and yelled "Get on! Now!" and that was when Quill realised it was Rocket, sitting on top of what was clearly an antique jet engine bolted onto the back of an even older sledge-mounted Gatling gun.

"That's the best you could build!" Yelled Quill, as Gamora squeezed inside the roll-cage of steal struts Rocket had put around it. Quill was worried to see that the back half mounted to the front on a pivot, and the engine was surrounded by crude skis made out of bent metal. Clearly Rocket was expecting to roll the thing a few times and wanted to keep it moving even upside down. Drax piled in at the front grabbing the gun, and Quill found himself forced to ride pillion behind Rocket on the old bike saddle he'd fitted as the only seat.

"Well it was this or some sort of arc-reactor powered suit!" yelled Rocket, stamping down on the jet-engines kick-start. "And that's just plain dumb!"

Quill suddenly found himself almost perpendicular to the vehicle, as the jet engine kicked in and it became too noisy to think. He looked back, and wished he hadn't. Ker and his bodyguard were following on far better made landspeeders, and more worryingly the jet intake was completely unguarded and only a few inches behind him. If he lost his tenuous grip on the saddle, he'd become the world's biggest birdstrike.

As if this wasn't bad enough, Drax tied to fire the Gatling gun at a few Sakaaran troops blocking there way, and reduced them to a gratifying green mist and a very unpleasant smell when they ran over the bodies a few seconds later, the kickback from the gun forcing the entire vehicle sideways worryingly.

"The weapon seems to produce a prodigious amount or recoil, we need to correct course!" Yelled Drax, heard only via the com over the roar of the engine. Quill nodded, and looked to Rocket. With horror, he saw that the handlebars in from of him were just there to give him something to cling on to. There didn't appear to be any steering.

"Rocket! There's no steering!" yelled Quill. Rocket grinned. "The weapon seems to produce a prodigious amount or recoil" he mimicked. Quill took a second to work this out.

"You steer using the recoil?" he paused, surely even Rocket wouldn't…. "You actually built a vehicle that you steer using Bullets!?" Rocket grinned under his goggles, and sweet crispy frosted Jesus, Quill had never seen him look so happy. Quill stared ahead. The whadi seemed to narrow into a steep sided gully that his brain mentally filed under Death Star Trench Run and it was crawling with armed Sakaarans. Drax took one, look, paled, and grabbed the twin pistol grips on the gun. Quill and Gamora just shared a glance, and then begun screaming. As he hugged Rocket to try not to fall off, Quill accidently hit play on his Walkman, and thanks to his dongle begun to blare it out on the com for them all to hear.

Awesome Mix tape Vol 2: Doobie brothers: long train running


Meanwhile:

"I don't know." said Bill. "It's just sometimes I feel that just because were happen to be Sakaarans, that people somehow automatically assume that were just generic hired guns who are there to get killed off fighting their battles for them." he said, arranging the Picnic table: they'd been given guard duty at a remote point of the Whadi, far out from the base, just in case any locals stumbled on it. Given the distance from their officers and the fact that nothing seemed likely to happen, they had decided to behave in a civilised manner, and brought a decent lunch.

"I know." Said Ben "But it could be worse. We could have ended up brainwashed like those poor coves who followed Ronan, and could very well have ended up getting ordered to crash ourselves into a city as a diversion." He took a water-tuber sandwich. "Just feel lucky we were hired as perimeter guards for a base in the middle of no-where." he said, waving one hand over the elegant desolation before them. "Of all the warring states in the galaxy, some barely even following a Westphalian model of statehood, we got off jolly lightly to work for a legitimate, respected company like Ker industries." He paused. "I mean it's a bit odd that Ker chap hiring us to kidnap himself, but I suppose it take all sorts, wot?"

"Quite." said Bill, leaning over. "More tea?" He said. He paused, and then frowned. "Can you hear something?" Bill started to say. But before he could finish the sound materialised into a wildly Doppler-ing jet engine and several voices, some shouting in anger, three screaming in bowl-loosening fear, and one cackling maniacally, and then the teapot exploded and there was a spray of dust from ricochet bullets all round them. Two of their own landspeeders shot past, chasing what looked a lot like a Jet engine with a gun bolted to the front and three people and one of those racoon-tail radio-areal mascots clinging to the top. But what was strangest, was that as it shot past them it made a sudden turn with a loud increase in bullet nose, and what sounded like someone shouting "What's with you and your music Quill?"

After a while the noise faded away

Bill looked down at the bullet holes that seemed to have appeared in his torso. He turned to Bob to mention them, and then Bob fell in two at the waist, cut in half neatly by the spray of bullets.

"Ah." Said Bill, suddenly thirsty. He looked down. They'd even shot the tea, too.

"Oh Bugger." He said, and then died.


"What do you mean?" asked Flees-from-killing-Sun. "Tell me again."

"I say, father, that I saw a convoy of offworlders attacked by Sakaaran mercenaries, but when they had killed all but six of the offworlders, they greeted the leader of the offworlders as a friend, and fell upon the others and took them away without mercy." Said Daughter-of-the-sands. "They used weapons of our tribe, not offworlders guns, and arranged the dead of the Singing-Dune tribe around the wreckage to frame them for this deed."

Flees-from-killing-Sun rubbed his thumbs to his head-fur in frustration. Year on year these wars brought more offworlders and their advanced weapons to his planet and soon natives like his tribe were just tools in their games, but this was the worst he had heard yet.

"Never mind daughter, put it from your mind. We do not involve ourselves in the struggles of the outsider, and so long as we don't we will be safe." He said, taking his daughter in his arms, and gesturing to their family heard. "So long as we have our herd-beast for milk and wool, we can survive anything this harsh land throws at us."

After a moment his daughter frowned. "Father, what's that noise?" she asked.

Suddenly, out of the nearby Whadi a strange vehicle rose with a terrible roar, and shot over the sands past them. As it passed, a smaller vehicle driven by a very well dressed individual in a cream suit tried to ram it, and to ram the smaller vehicle back, the driver or the larger vehicle, if that's what he was, swung a many-barrel device around, and pulled the triggers. There was a sound like ripping fabric multiplied a thousand times over, and a hail of bullets scythed thought their family herds, felling beast right left and centre, and turning the head of their prize ram inside-out and spraying Flees-from-killing-Sun with its brains. As the vehicle roared away again, a figure on the back in a long read trial coat yelled "Sorry dude!" and the two vehicles shot of into the distance, followed by a third. As the vehicle pulled away, Flees-from-killing-Sun thought he saw the driver of the larger vehicle roar with frustration and leap off onto the cream-suited man and punch him off his vehicle, before trying to control it and crashing his new mount into a dune.

Flees-from-killing-Sun stared for a moment at the desolation of his heard.

"Motherfucker." He said.


"… Did Drax just Jump off?" yelled Rocket.

He then shrugged and kicked Quill in the ear. "Meh, at least he hit Ker. Hey, boss, time for you to take your turn at the helm!" He yelled. Quill soon found his home-made remote control for the Milano thrust into his hands. "This fell out of Ker's coat when he rammed us, get to the guns and use the becon to steer for the ship!"

Quill looked up at the "helm" for this craft. He then looked back at the jet intake snapping at the hems of this greatcoat. He swallowed. Climbing hand over hand to the front meant releasing the hold he had on the saddle.

Or did it?

Quill grabbed Rocket by the tail, and as he yelped and howled, he still managed to keep control of the jet engine's power output somehow. Using Rocket as a lever, Quill managed to pull himself far enough to get a hold of the guns, and hang on the pistol grips for dear life, trying to find somewhere to put his foot that wasn't either a moving part or an angry Racoon's face. As he just about got a hold onto the gun the Bodyguard begin to pull level, and grabbed hold off the roll-bars. Gamora looked from him, to Quill, and then nodded.

"Go! I've got this, just keep heading for the Milano!" she said, drawing her sword and balancing on top of the vehicle as the Bodyguard pulled out a pair of vicious looking knuckle-dusters. Quill looked at where she was gesturing and smiled. The distinctive paintjob of a Ravengers ship was clear in the distance. Then he frowned. The beacon said they were still two miles out from the Milano. And the paint was all wrong.

"Oh no. it' can't be…"


"Dagnabit Kraglin." Spat Yondu. "I don't care how lucrative these arms deals are this is the last time I go to this ruttin' dust-bowl. Seems every time I go here, the place gets even hotter.

"Well captain, lest we got paid." Yondu nodded. They'd left the rest of the boys to get some much needed RnR: after that incident with Ronan he felt they deserved it, not getting that stone had been a blow to them, and a little time for them all to cool off would do them good.

Besides, he wanted some time alone to think. Kraglin had to come with him, watch his back, make the deals they needed to make, of course, but mostly it was time away from the boys to try to work out what to do about Quill. Gods-knows he was proud of the boy, in a way, it took brains and balls aplenty to do what he'd done, and Yondu liked to think he'd got more than a little of that from him. But the kid needed to learn some respect, pure and simple. Till he did, Yondu couldn't forgive him for ripping him off. It was the principle of the thing.

But that was problem for another day. He'd just made a good deal, recovering the fragments of ammo from the Ker industries weapons test to sell on to rival arms dealers for info on how it worked. That and a case of tachyon harpoons sold to a tribe that probably shouldn't have weaponry that advanced according to the letter of law, and he was well ahead on this deal. All they needed to do now as get back to his ship, grab a cold one, and forget that Peter Quill even existed.

Yondu and Kraglin crested the dune they'd hidden the ship behind, and stopped and stared.

The Zatoan was riddled with bullet holes, and the starboard power core looked like it had taken a direct hit. It wasn't beyond fixing, but it would take hours of work in this heat to get it space worthy again, and even then thousands of units of costs to get it battle-ready and up to the standard it was before.

Kraglin squinted at it in mute frustration for a full minute.

"What the hell." He eventual espoused. Yondu didn't even let his facial expression change for a full minute further as he stared at his beloved ship.

"Eyup. This was Quill." He said. "I don't know how, and I don't know why, but I know this was Peter."

"Oh come on cap'in" said Kraglin. "Don't that sound just a little unlikely…" he started, as Yondu drew an advance-scope from his belt, spotted a fast moving dust cloud on the horizon, glanced thought the scope at it for not even a second, and then handed it to Kraglin.

Kraglin stared. Through the scope, he could see some kind of crude rocket-sled doing donuts in the sand as it tried unsuccessfully to shoot someone off its own tail-end and the recoil forced it around and around in circles. To make matters even more ridiculous, two people seemed to be having some sort of martial-arts fight on the back of the moving vehicle. As he watched, the smaller one, with a sword, dropped the blade and launched themselves off the back onto the larger one, forcing them off into the sand. He then glanced up a fraction. The vehicles that they were heading for, if such a word as heading could be used for such a stupid form of transport, was unmistakeably the Milano. It was hovering and weaving badly in a way he associated with broken RC toys, but it was the Milano, he'd know it anywhere. Kraglin took the scope away from his eyes.

"Well son of a gun…"

Yondu stood by him and took the scope back. They watched the dots in the distance for a long moment. Yondu looked upwards, contemplatively.

"I'm gonna kill him." he said, quite calmly. He considered this for a second. "Yep, defiantly going to kill him."


"Oh man, Yondu's gonna kill me for wrecking his paint work." Said Quill. "He never even forgave me for scratching it with a belt-buckle when I was a kid and trying to Hawaii five-oh slide across the hood."

"I think I would worry more about the fact Gamora and Drax jumped of the sled fighting people!" yelled Rocket, glancing over his shoulder. "I think him and Gamora are still fighting. What's with these people?"

"I'd worry more that we're out of ammo: we can't turn." Said Quill. He looked forwards at the Milano, sideways at the Milano, backwards at the Milano…

"Rocket, we overshot our ride! Hit the brakes!" He looked ahead. A very large sand dune was blocking their way, and he hated to think of the air they'd catch if they hit that at this speed, or the catch afterwards. "Rocket, hit the brakes…. You did remember breaks, didn't you?"

"Sure, but I think they fell off a few miles back." said Rocket, tightening the goggles over his eyes and trying to crawl under the saddle for protection . Quill looked forwards again, just as they ramped off the dune dukes of hazard style. As they spun gently mid-air and Rocket fired the jet one last time to kill as much of their forwards speed as he could, he saw the Milano float gently in front of him.

Hey, I can see my house from here. He thought, before the jet-sled crashed into the sand, and everything went black…

the present.

Quill clipped on his Walkman, grabbed a heavy lump of wreckage he could use as a club, and him and Rocket ran up to the top of the dune. The Milano wobbled overhead, and Quill seemed to have lost the remote in the crash so he'd have to think of another way to tell it where to land, as he'd programed it not to land too close to life-signs unless given orders to: he didn't want to accidently squash any natives, it would weigh on his conscious and also he suspected Nova would get mad at him and refuse to pay. When he got to the top, he was not happy with the sight that greeted him.

The Bodyguard had a pistol out, and was grappling with Gamora. She was giving better than she got, tho,' and he couldn't get a shot. As he saw this he ran down to help, but as he did he slipped and fell, rolling down the dune and accidently kicking sand in her face. That was all the opening the bodyguard needed, and he smashed her arm back with the butt of the gun hard enough to snap bone, and Quill saw Gamora go pale as a long thin sliver of pale pinkish-green bone protruded from her fore-arm. As Quill tied to get up, he found the pistol leaved at him.

The bodyguard sneered. "It was just supposed to be a simple kidnapping. Why couldn't you just die? So now, I'm gonna shoot you, I'm gonna skin and eat your filthy little pet for what he did with those electrodes, and I'm going to take this woman." he said, grabbing Gamora by the back of the head "and I'm gonna make her wish she'd never been born!"

Gamora looked from Quill, to the bodyguard, to Quill again. And she took a deep breath, steeled herself, grabbed the back of the bodyguard's head with her good hand and she thrust her other arm into his face with an unpleasant squishing sound, and then she did it again and again using her other hand you guide her attacks and she yelled as she did so, not so much out of any particular feeling, but out of the simple need to expel air during physical exercise, and she did not stop until she was rewarded with the soft scrunch of the thin orbital bone at the back of the eye-socket crunching and the man stopped screaming suddenly and slumped to the ground leaking brain and vitreous humour. She then stumbled slightly, trembling with reaction until her mod's kicked in to stabilize her, and then turned to Quill.

"I am having a bad day." She said, cradling her arm. "Land the ship."

Quill stopped starring at the dead guard and said "What? Oh right. Ship Um sure, I'll get right on that. Um…" he flicked an errant hair out of his face absentmindedly.

"Um hey Gamora you, um, I don't want to make this sound weird an all but you just stabbed a man to death with a peace of sharp bone sticking out of your arm!" HOOOOLY SHIT what was that?!"

"Her radius I think. " said Rocket. "Maybe ulna, depends which side it's on. I always get those two confused." Said Rocket, looking at Gamora with a new-found respect as he energetically looted the bodyguard's corpse. Rocket considered spiting in the guy's face, but after an internal debate decided that with his mouth as dry as it was the guy wasn't worth the effort. Although his skull might make a nice plant-pot.

"I am having a bad day Peter." She repeated. "Just land the ship."

"Might be a teency bit hard without this." Said a voice behind them, and the sound of a rifle cocking rung out. Rocket tried to get the bodyguard's palm-print encoded gun to fire, and Quills swore "Oh for fucks sakes Ker, knock it off dude, you've lost okay: just give it up and piss off." He said, as Ker waved the remote control at them. He seemed to consider it.

"Nah." He said, throwing it over his shoulder as he aimed the rifle. "I'd rather just kill you all. You see, I'm smarter. I'm richer. You know why guys like me rise to the top? Because were ruthless, we're driven, we're clever and we don't take shit from small time moralizers and rejects like Nova or you so called Guardians of the-"

The Milano dropped out of the sky onto him, flattening him with a sickening crunch and spraying Quill, Rocket and Gamora with the mix of blood and shit that war-films describe as viscera because no-one knows what that word means and it sounds less horrible than actually pointing out the details of the phrase.

Quill had always thought that seeing something like that would make him throw up, but he was still trying to get over a woman he may or not have feelings for murdering someone with her own broken arm, and his brain was talking a while to catch up. Instead he stared stupidly at the Milano, and then with Gamora and Rocket looked to the right. Drax was holding the tiny joystick on the remote between finger and thumb with exaggerated delicacy, as if afraid to break it. He looked at the others.

"That man talked too much."

Epilogue:

The Guardians of the Galaxy sat numbly in the corridor of the Nova medical ship that had just arrived with the peacekeeping force, listening to the awful piped-in music, and all too tired to think. On the other side of the corridor was the capitol of this awful planet, just visible through the ships view-wall of transparent ceramic. In the foreground, Yondu stood opposite Quill, banging his fists on the glass and shouting threats. You couldn't actually hear anything other than the faint fishbowl thud thud thud of his fists on the glass, but you got the gist.

"Well, I think that went quite well." said Quill.

The team stared. Drax was picking at his stiches listlessly, Gamora was in a sling, and Rocket was actually trying to fold his 'you are number six in line' ticket into a shank. Peter pressed on, before he could finish making that shank.

"I mean sure, we nearly got tortured to death, and Nova prime went mental that we'd killed Ker and threatened to lock us all up, and what with her only paying half because we killed Ker, and with us losing money on medical fees, and having to buy that guy a new head of beasts and actually being poorer now and all, it wasn't ideal. But we got paid, and next time if we can get paid and have the amount of damage we do cost less that the amount we get paid, we're sorted for the future. So just because were all injured and filthy and in pain and covered in sand and starting to smell really, really bad, doesn't mean we shouldn't see the plus side of today." said Quill watching as two Nova officers dragged Yondu, still shouting and gesticulating, away.

The others stared. "You're an idiot". Said Rocket, getting up and walking out the door. Now that Yondu was gone, Quill flowed him back to the ship. "A frickin' idiot." Gamora and Dax nodded, and followed after. "Nothing, and I mean nothing today has gone well, this is one of the most miserable days of my entire frickin' life, and nothing anyone says will make that better!" shouted Rocket, glaring at Quill.

"I….. I…"

The team stopped, and stared.

In the corner, reaching out at Rocket with his little tendrils, Groot made a hugging gesture. "I…..am…grooooo…" he squeaked.

Rocket dropped his gun, open mouthed, and after a long moment broke down in tears and ran to Groot

"I miss talking to you too, buddy!" he yelled, and then lost it completely, and begun to cover the nearest person, Quill with an alloy of tears and saliva as he begun to shake with reaction and howl into his coat.

Quill panicked, and begun to pat him vaguely on the head as he wept uncontrollably and Drax watched. "Umm.. there there… there there big guy… Oh god someone help…"

Gamora smiled, and slumped off to the shower. They might be idiotic, but they were her idiots.