Two person Job: Isha and the Controller's Night.
Drax hit the gravely hardscrabble of the roof hard, rocking on his side as the blood and sweat filled his eyes, and the ringing in his head resolved itself into the Furred one's voice.
"Drax, stay down! I'm thirty seconds away from the next rooftop, just stay down and I'll have a shot! Don't do anything-"
And just past that, somewhere beyond the pain, he heard the shuffling crunch of gravel and the ragged breathing from Sandhurst, and his paint panting voice."
"Just… just stay down, damn you. Just lie down and die. It's pointless to fight it I'm, stronger than you. You know it.
Drax grunted, and got up swinging.
The way he saw it, He didn't have much choice.
Awesome Mix Tap Vol2: Simon and Garfunkel The Boxer.
One hour earlier…
Quill reached out to steady himself on a bulkhead with his good arm as he eased himself into the co-pilots seat and Rocket gunned the engine and tilted the bow down to maximize the ships angle of attack into the rapidly cooling air and they shot off after Isha and the controller.
Or at least, he hoped they did.
"Dammit! That cloud of drones is frickin' invisible on scanners! Oh he's good, I'll give him that, he musta made their dimensions exactly divisible by the wavelength of standard radars!"
"So?" asked Co'. Feeling nauseous as the ship rapidly pitched and dived trying to get a lock on where the cloud of drones had gone.
"So it's scattering the signal! I know you're just a cop, but if you could engage your brain at some point in your life-"
"Right that's it you little bastard, you're under arrest-" she yelled, grabbing Quill's caffeine mug from the pilots cup-holder and leaning in to beat Rocket over the head with it.
Rocket yelled "Oh! Oh now we see the violence inherent in the frickin' system!" and Groot "I am Groot"-ed and pitched forwards to help Rocket, Inadvertently squashing Quill between the co-pilots chair and some dude that Groot seemed to be holding, while Drax tried to lean over the chair to look for the Controller out the windshield and Gamora berated both the Cop and Rocket.
"Woah Woah Woah!" said Quill, flailing arms frantically enough to get everyone to back up an inch.
"Can everyone just chill the fuck down and focus on the issue at hand and not attack the dude who is currently flying the fucking ship?! And give me my mug back! Geez!"
"Thank you!" said Rocket, smugly as Co' backed down.
"Even if he really, really deserves it." Said Quill. " Now, I've been a little out of it because someone drugged me-" he said, glaring. "-so if people could just fill me in on what the fuck is happening and where all those flying dinner-plates came from, then that would be just swell."
"It turns out that ERI are researching infinity stones-"
"That treacherous woman Isha has once again meddled in forces she should not-"
"I aaaaam Groot."
"-and when I tried to call it in to central there was this weird signal on the com's network-"
"-and them baldy here chased off after the broad and I got frickin' swamped by, like, a million living-statures-"
"I am Groot!"
"Help help! I've been kidnapped by a tree! I don't want to be a cop anymore, I should have become an orthodontist like mom wanted and-"
"I am Groot?"
"ONE AT A TIME!" yelled Quill. "Okay first things first, who the hell is this dude, and why does he have wet pants?" asked Quill, pointing to Gil who had been rammed right up against him so that they were practically cheek to cheek.
"That's Gil." Said Gamora.
"Oh. Okay, that's fine then. Who the Fuck is Gil?" he asked in a stage whisper, leaning past Gil as Groot re-gagged him.
"He's my partner." Said Co', handing back Quill's mug with bad grace.
"Wait, you're dating pissy pants here?" asked Quill. He looked Co' up and down. "You could do better."
Co' glared. "My partner on the force!" she snarled.
"He is the police officer that Rocket kidnapped." Said Drax, staring intently out of the window.
"Wait, you kidnapped a Cop, why?"
"Hey! Why do I get blamed for every single kidnap we get involved in? This was entirely Groot's doing! For once in my miserable Frickin' life I'm in the clear!" he snarled, spinning the ship and turning to get a sight of the drones with his thermal sensors. "All I did was shoot the other cop! Why is she here?"
"I needed someone to help fly the ship! I didn't know you shot her Rocket!"
"It was only a stunner… she did try and shoot Drax!"
"Only to stun! He was armed and dangerous!" she said. "We were answering reports of a knife-wielding lunatic stalking the streets, shooting him would have been a perfectly reasonable response!" she glances sideways to Drax, inches from her. "No offence."
He barely even looked away from the sky outside while answering. "None taken. I am sorry to have inconvenienced you and your lover."
"I'm not his lover!" she protested. "I'm married!"
"You have a husband? Does he know about wet-pants here?"
"I have a wife and yes, she knows about Gil, he was best man at our wedding!" said Co'.
Quill glanced over. "You're gay?"
"Bisexual. But I don't see how that has any relevance on the situation."
"Bi, really?" asked Quill, suddenly very interested. "I don't suppose-Owww!" he said, as Gamora cuffed him around the back of his head.
"Quill, we have a dangerous lunatic on the loose, try and keep your mind out of the gutter and focus on the task at hand."
"What? Oh come on, do you really think I was thinking about hitting on-"
"Yes." chorused Gamora, Rocket and Drax. Gamora turned to apologise. "You'll have to forgive Quill, he's Terran; their males evolved brains and genitals, but not enough blood to run both at once."
Co' snorted. "So just like Kylarians then?"se said. Gamora nodded, deciding she liked Co'.
"I know someplace where we could get him spayed, no questions asked." Said Rocket, steering in on a promising thermal signal.
"No, I think we should focus on getting him house-trained and socialised first." Said Gamora.
"Anytime you ever want to say anything nice about your leader you just go ahead." Muttered Quill, leaning in and helping Rocket with his scans. "So Gamora what happened inside ERI?"
"They had Sandhurst and Isha working for them, and at least two of the security team. They killed or mind controlled the rest. I took out one of their security guys and some mind-controlled scientists, but I couldn't find their transmitter. I don't think it's in the ERI building. Quill… they had a conference room just decorated with pictures of infinity stones, I think that these guys were interested in more than just mind control, they were really, really into their stones, and someone fed them information on how to go about it."
"What? You think a front for Thanos?" asked Quill.
She shook her head. "Not his style. He'd never involve that many people or tell them openly what they were looking for; it's too much of a security risk."
"Yeah well, he's not the only one with an interest, is he?" said Rocket. "I mean, going via the corporate route, with a shady company researching it, just throwing money at the problem. Thanos abducted Sandhurst and Isha using Ronan, this time someone sponsored them. That's not how a warlord approaches a problem, that how a billionaire with no day job does it. Add an unhealthy interest in controlling other life-forms and a wonton disregard for the rights of the sentient… Sound like anyone we know?"
Quill frowned. "The Collector?"
"We never did confirm he was dead." Said Gamora, sounding thoughtful. "and Rocket is right, it's far more his style…"
"Great. We can add him to the list of hugely powerful sociopath's we've somehow pissed off more than once: I think we've got an opening between Thanos, Yondu and Oprah." Said Quill. He noticed the look Rocket and Gamora gave him. "I don't know about you two, but I've got a past."
"Join the club." Muttered Rocket. "We have nice little slumber-party moments."
"There!" yelled Drax, pointing out the window. "There!"
Rocket spun the ship around, sending everyone bar Groot flying into the person next to them as he fought for control trying to turn far faster than the Milano should. After a brief flurry of swearing, the worst of it from Co' to everyone's surprise, and the blaze of the general alarm, the crew righted themselves and stared out of the armour-crys blister of the cockpit. Co' groaned.
"He's descending on the main shopping drag, right where the high-end shops hit the central mall. Last shopping weekend before life-day, it'll be packed."
"Not to mention that com's launch." Said Gamora, grimly testing her sword and re-sheathing it. "If he can hack that, who knows how many people he can mind control? How long before the Nova ships get here?"
"Too long." Muttered Rocket. "According to the latest com-check, they just decoupled from the station. Presuming a full retrograde burn, it'll still take them nearly half an hour before they even enter the atmosphere, maybe close to an hour before they can do squat to help." He glanced up at Co'. "I don't suppose you guys have a plan on how to deal with tens of thousands of people suddenly getting mind-controlled by a psychotic whackjob?"
"You're kidding right? This time of year, we barely have a plan for the drunk office-parties." She said, grimly. "The worst I was expecting tonight was having to wrestle some pissed-up lawyer into the back of the van as he threatened to sue me for excessive force in-between vomits: you know, the usual police holiday activities!"
"So it's on us." muttered Quill. "Okay, Rocket, can you rig up that remote control for the Milano to my cast? Mould it to the hard-cast to I can reach it with the arm in the sling?"
"Yeah, but what's that gonna do?"
"On its own? Not a lot. I also want you to rig the ships fire control to my helmet's HUD and program the ships autopilot to circle her above the buildings whenever I'm not moving the joystick. We want the Milano in the air and able to call in a strike in case find this transmitter. Until we do, we go after the Controller and we nail him to the dammed ground: keep him in one spot, take him out if we can but at least keep him busy and focused on us." he turned to Co' "There's a good chance that he'll try to mind control any Cops he sees, and unlike us you won't be immune if you want to sit this out-"
"Not a chance. Not while he does this to my city. Just give me my gun back, and I'll take the chance." Quill watched her for a second, and then nodded, Rocket glanced up from re-programing eh ship to sync it to Quill's HUD for a moment, and then tossed the gun over to her.
"You point that think at me, you're losing it again. Understood?"
"Bite me, fuzzbucket." She said, snapping in the power cell with practiced movements.
Rocket Grinned. "Hey Quill, I'm starting to like her. Ya wanna keep her close to you, seen' as you're about as useless as it gets in a fight right now and we'll have other stuff to do 'sides watch your crippled ass?"
"What you saying I need a babysitter?" asked Quill, offended, as they zoomed in on their final approach of The Controller's position. He wasn't sure, but he thought, that just for a moment, Gamora was struck by an idea when he said babysitter, and the look she shared with Rocket was far from re-assuring . But them Rocket was climbing up onto his chest and started fixing the remote to him with a hot glue gun and the pain was enough to distract him for a moment. But as the Milano dived in on an attack vector, he couldn't quite shake the thought that they were planning something.
The holiday shoppers clustered around the Tech-shop on the corner. Like so many moths around a flame. Beat, little wings, against the futility of your own desires: soon I will have you all. Flutter away, carrion flies around society's cadaver, I am coming for you. Thought The Controller, because if you've gone the full hog and built the suit and picked a codename then you've pretty much got license to think in sentences like that. It's basically the one perk of the job.
Isha was thinking about how they were going to clean up the mess after this, but that because someone in every relationship has to be the sensible one, even if it's on a rota in the Guardian's case. The shopping street was a wide, flat pedestrianised strip of concrete, raised up ten meters over the actual road to maximise the about of space for people to mill about buying things and to give two-stories of shopping, one from the sidewalk at ground level, and a second on the raised thoroughfare above it. It was quite a nice space, in a bleak, sell-out sort of way: edged with plants and concrete benches colonized by tired and bored husbands and sons abandoned to the tides of shopping like so much jetsam, but the festive light display was good, bright against the encroaching night, and there were stalls selling hot spiced wine, so that was a thing.
This was why, when the Controller kicked open the door to the biggest tech store on the planet in the height of a must-have com's launch, with Isha, an armed guard and a dozen drones in tow, both Isha and Carlos were drinking out of insulated aerogel cups; there was being dramatic and ensuring the right look for the thing, but there was also a lot to be said for being able to feel your fingers.
"Be not afraid!" announced the controller, loudly, stepping up onto a glass toped table to get the suitable dramatic vantage point. "Feart naught, people of Altair four. Fear naught, for you are no longer bound to the petty and mercurial tries of this world. You're liberation is upon you, for in this night-time of the world is kindled a new light, a light come to free you from freedom and end endings, to make simple the swirling and sickening clutches of your needs and desires, to cut clean thought the miasma of your lives grown stale with repetition and tedium to…"
"Excuse me! Excuse me!" The Controller faltered, and looked down. "Yes, what is it?" he hissed at the peeved a bookish looking Xandarian that had interrupted him. The man glared back, affronted.
"There is a queue you know!" he squawked, gesturing back out the shop. "Go to the back, please!"
This lead to a chorus of agreement from the other shoppers.
"Hey buddy, we all want that com upgrade, but wait your fricking turn!"
"Some of us have been waiting for hours!"
"I camped out!" yelled one spotty teenager eagerly, as if proud of the fact. He held up a grubby sleeping bag and waved it around in front of the Controller's face, as is feeling the need to provide supporting evidence for so great an endeavour.
The Controller watched blankly for a moment, before taking the peeved man's head in both hands and crushing his skull like a grape, not taking his eyes off the camping teen. There was a momentary pause as the squeaky-voiced teen went cross-eyed, trying to out-stare the eyeball now slithering down his acne-riddled forehead, before he started screaming and ran out of the shop failing his arms. There was a moment of balance as the rest of the shoppers seemed to consider following him out, or usurping his abandoned position at the front of the line. A few moments later Carlos began shooting wildly into the ceiling one-handed, slurping from his cup with his other hand, and the tide turned and shoppers begun to stream form the shop, yelling and fighting…well… more so than usual holiday shoppers. Baz sighed, and wiped his hands on the discarded sleeping bag as the people around him panicked.
"Honestly. People now-a-days. I'm sure when I was a child interrupting the megalomaniac mid-speech was considered rude."
"Standards are slipping everywhere dear." Said Isha, stepping over the dead shopper and sipping at her wine daintily. "Do you think this will be enough to get the guardians' attention?"
Baz Sandhurst glanced out of the glass front wall of the building, and smiled.
"I'm sure of it." He said, watching the Milano dive right for the window, tangling itself in strings of life-day lights and scattering panicked shoppers as it roared overhead.
There was a hollow boom as the ship hit the safety glass, and showered everyone with tiny, sharp stars of crystal and carved a v-shaped hole in the wall, wide at the top and barely a meter and a half at the bottom. Isha and Carlos dived for cover, cups abandoned, but Baz Sandhurst, the Controller, just smiled, and raised a hand as if in greeting, and a hundred drones slammed into it, robbing it of forward momentum. Even so, the Ravengers ship hit the steel and glass balustrades and balconies that hung within the shop making up most of its retail space, ploughing a furrow thought them and halting just off the concrete of the floor as it's repulsors fired and it pulled up suddenly, truing around in the shop and nearly knocking Baz of his perch with the foul red-hot wash from the engines like the breath of hell. The Milano shuddered, and then flew back out of the shop, unsteadily, as if lacking direction, and as sparks and glass cascaded down like a waterfall of lights, and Isha and Carlos stood back up, another set of figure could be seen standing up thought the clouds of dust, six avenging shapes, standing tall.
Seven if you counted Gil.
The Controller nodded, cordially. "Starlord. How nice of you to drop in. Could I interest you in a new com-unit? I think at this point you could get quite a discount. "
"Controller, dude, Drop in? Not even a good pun man. Come on, give it up. Don't make us shoot you lots." Said Quill, leaning heavily on both Groot and a plastic crutch.
Sandhurst laughed. "And what makes you think that would be any more effective than the last time you're little friends tried that?"
Quill paused, his face a picture, and then leaned down and whispered to Rocket. "Bullet's don't get thought that suit?"
"Nope. Nor lasers. Nada."
"Geez, well thanks' for saying." Muttered Quill. "I look like a complete idiot now." He said, three limbs in casts and a joystick glued to his hand. He straitened up and addressed The Controller again.
"Well, that's why this time we have bigger guns." He said, as the Milano hovered outside and the covers on her missile pods slid back to reveal her full firepower, and Groot half-turned to reveal Gil, still very much bound and gagged, but now holding the Hadron enforcer in two hands poking through the vines and glaring like he meant business. Rocket cocked his gun and snarled, partly in pain from cocking his gun, but they weren't to know that, and Gamora drew her sword as Co' aimed a blaster at Carlos, and Drax glared evilly at Isha. "Give it up." Said Quill, nodding to the flashing light outside as police begun to turn up and herd the panicked shoppers away. "Turn yourself in."
The Controller shrugged. "Fair enough. I suppose the situation is somewhat hopeless." He said, "We surrender." He intoned mockingly, rising his arms. There was a loud whirring noise form outside, and from the road level below the raised shopping precinct, thousands upon thousands of drones rose up hovering into view.
Quill and the others looked around: the tech store occupied a prime location where six raised shopping streets met, so there ware drones on all sides, as well as streets packed with shoppers all around them. Mostly shoppers who had just bought a coms-upgrade from ERI. Suddenly, about half of the shoppers and cops, at least a few thousand, stopped dead, and as one turned on their heels to face the tech-store, eyes blank.
"Oh god." Quill muttered. Sandhurst laughed.
"Not quite, but I may as well be." He said, dropping his arms.
As one the shoppers charged, and then the drones begun to wheel and swarm, seeking new targets to control.
Rocket and Co' begun pumping rounds into Sandhurst pretty much on instinct, until the Drones around him formed a shield for him and Isha. Drax sprinted forwards after Isha, leading to a muffled objection and an a "I am Groot!" as he blocked Gil's shot with the Hadron Enforcer and Gil lowered the weapon again, when Carlos hesitated, and ran back down he stars towards Drax, as Baz and Isha sprinted up to the upper floor and out a service door onto the roof. As they did, Isha out-paced her shield for just a moment, and gave Rocket a clean shot. He held his aim on her head for a fraction, and then dropped it, switching his ammo-feed and plunging a shot into the meat of her thigh. She stumbled with a yell, and Baz bellowed and scooped her up, rushing her to safety.
"Yeah, you better run, Controller, you can't protect your family!" yelled Rocket, before turning sideways and ducking the Drone that spun at his head. He destroyed it with a quick burst on the rebound as it spun away, and then he looked sideways as the wave of seasonal shoppers surged down the street towards the shop.
"Oh crap!" He yelled, as he scurried over to the nearest door and slammed it shut. Co' and Gamora were there an instant later, barricading it with a table just before the tide of people slammed into it, pressing an unhealthy looking spotty teen up glass the glass in an unflattering manner. Rocket sighed with relief.
"That should hold them for a bit." He said to Gamora.
She nodded. "But for how long?"
"Um guys." Said Quill. "Little help!" he yelled, as the group of flesh-drones just went round to where the Milano had punched a huge hole in the shops wall. They all swore and Co' and Gamora grabbed a two-thousand unit hardwood desk with built in holo-projector and rushed at the mob using it sideways, as a battering ram, knocking Quill down and running over him and just managing to force them back thought the hole, for a moment, and then a grim tug-o-war started as the controlled outside tied to push and pull the table out the way. Rocket jumped up onto the display behind them, and started to shoot into the crowd to thin them out a bit.
"Hey!" yelled Quill, waving a crutch from floor level "Knock it off, they're still people!"
"People who are trying to kill us!" he riposte, swinging his gun side to side from the hip and letting out short bursts. "It's not like you've never shot people dead before!"
"Yeah but usually they're trying to kill me!"
"And these guys ain't?" snarled the Racoon.
"But they can't help themselves, they don't know what they're doing!"
"Animal's don't know what they're doing, I'm pretty sure I've seen to shoot lizard-rats!" said Rocket, while Co' and Gamora started battling with the crowd.
"But they were attacking me! Bedside's they're just vermin!"
"Hey!"
"Oh for god's sakes Rocket, that wasn't directed at you and you know it!" Quill snarled, grabbing onto Groot as he surged past to help barricade the hole, and pulling himself up on Gil's rather damp exposed leg. "I mean, They've got implants in their brain against their will forcing them to do this, they ain't responsible! You can't expect someone to be right after that!"
"So what exactly is wrong with people after they've had implants put in against their will, Peter?" asked Gamora icily, pushing with one shoulder and lashing out with her sword in the other hand, trying to knock drones off skulls. "You made that sound as it were something inherently defiling, and it's attitudes like that that make it very hard for cyborgs to get accepted for what we are and re-integrate into society."
"You frickin' tell him sister! Boom! Shot ya' dead!"
"Oh for fuck's sakes! One, Rocket, stop shooting people, and two, come on Gamora you know that wasn't about you, you're one of the smartest and most ethical people I know," he said, putting his baster on stun and shooting one-handed over the table "But we just can't kill them! They have no idea what they're doing: You can't hold them to the same moral standards as us when they're under the influence of something some lunatic cooked up in a lab!"
"Hey, speaking as someone cooked up in a lab, why do they get a free ride but when I shoot them it's my fault?" asked Rocket.
"Morality is hard!" yelled Quill. "If it was easy everyone would be doing it, and I didn't' expect to get sucked into an ethical debate in the middle of a fucking Romero apocalypse!"
"Do you guys ever stop arguing?" asked Co', stunning a retiree who was reaching over the table and attempting to claw her eyes out. "And where's the big guy? These guys are starting to push us back, and I for one do not want to get killed by a heavy-handed metaphor for consumerism!"
Quill glanced up. "Yeah… he might take a moment."
Drax rushed up the stairs after Isha, and even before Rocket hit her and she stumbled he was gaining. Or would have been had the security guard Carlos not tried to stand before him.
Foolish man, to stand before my Wrath. He thought, feinting high and then slashing low with his knives. Drax then grunted with surprise as the man moved his legs out of the way of the artery-splitting blow and lashed out with a quick lab that connected with his eyebrow before stepping forwards inside his guard and sending him flying down the steps with a swivel of his hips. Drax stopped and picked himself up at the bottom of the stairs, surprised: this man had clearly had some serious close-combat training.
Drax picked himself up, brandishing both his knives and walking up the stairs appraisingly, watching the man. He slicked his long hair out of his eyes to watch Drax, and stood with his weight properly grounded, holding the high ground and making no move to either approach or use his gun. At this, Drax held up his knifes dramatically, and then in full view of the man sheathed them. The man, Carlos, hesitated, and then held out his gun by the barrel, and dropped it over the edge of the stairs. It clattered to a halt on top of a display of merchandise twenty feet below.
"Fine. No weapons. We do it like real men, yeah?" asked Carlos, flexing his shoulders and hoping around on the spot like a boxer.
Drax considered this.
"No." he said, rushing and drawing his knives. Carlos had just enough time to look surprised and them stepped sideways smartly as Drax came at him managing to deliver a cracking kick to Drax's knee that delayed him for long enough for Carlos to spin out of the range of his knives and grab a shattered length of tubular steel from a ruined balcony next to the stair. Drax cursed inwardly. The man had just doubled the reach advantage he had in this fight.
He feigned an injury, panting, but the man wasn't interested in giving up his higher ground to press the advantage, and Drax realised he'd have to rely on brute strength and not fearing injury to best him. So he surged forwards again, keeping his knives high to deflect the blows ringing around his head from the metal bar, and just as Drax was about to push into grappling range with the man, he hopped backwards and stuck the bar between Drax's legs, tangling his feet and sending him tumbling down the stair again. This time he pressed on, following Drax down and sending hit after hit from his longer weapon cracking into him, using the full force of the leverage to do his worse. He's driving me back down again. Drax realised, glancing sideways at the display cases rising around them. He's almost in reach of his gun again.
The man noticed his glance, and snorted, mockingly. "Oh yeah, I got you baldy!"
Drax looked perplexed. "My lack of body hair is entirely intentional and culturally mandated for males. It is very rude of you to mention it! I do not mock your girlish locks!"
Carlos, glared, affronted. "Hey!" he hissed, between swings of the bar too fast to follow up, down, right, right, left, down… "In a lot of cultures long hair is manly, most warrior cultures see it as a mark of martial prowess!"
Drax considered this, in between heavy blows to limbs and jarring strikes to his blades, still shielding his head.
"True." He grunted, conceding the point. "But only because it requires prowess to overcome the obvious disadvantage of long hair." He said. At that point the bar knocked one blade spinning out of his hand, and the man suddenly pressed close, using the rod like a pry-bar to try and lever him off the edge of the stairs. Curse these planets that don't believe in banisters!"
"Obvious disadvantage?" hissed the man into Drax's face, as he begun to force him back. "What's that?" said Carlos, as Drax felt the edge of his back foot go over the edge.
Drax stared into the man's face for a second, dumbstruck, before grabbing him by the hair and pulling him in. There was a soft crunchy noise as Drax's forehead flattened his nose, and then as he stumbled in pain Drax side-stepped him and threw him boldly of the staircase by his hair. He crashed screaming though several glass display cases, before coming to a halt in a tangle of twisted limbs and broken glass at the foot of one. Drax stared for a moment, and then the man's arm flopped lifelessly and jolted the last case. It rocked, and his blaster-rifle fell off the top onto him. Drax paused for a second, vaguely aware of Quill and the others calling him before he stormed off up the stairs after Isha, grabbing his knife as he went.
"Shoot, I think he just stormed up the stairs after Isha." Muttered Quill, trying to see past Rocket, who seemed to have decided that as Quill wasn't moving much then he made a good vantage point to stand on and shoot stuff. He looked up at Rocket, getting the weirdest possible view of seeing the shortest person he knew from below. "You sure this is going to work?"
"Not as sure as I was ten seconds ago, but go for it. If he can spare the biomass to sew up my chest wound, he can spare this." He said, reaching over the barricade and blazing away, to give himself some space. At Quill's insistence he'd switched to less lethal rounds, and still felt sour about it; some of the guys he'd shot a minute ago had got back up and were attacking again.
"This goes wrong, you shoot me, okay? That's an angry group out there and the whole arms and legs ripped off with bear hands thing is kinda horrifying, and unlike the holo-flicks, it's not easy to do on someone your own size." said Rocket.
"Sure, okay." said Quill, a second after Co' and Gamora gave affirmatives. Rocket pulled a face. "Yeah, good to see ya all lining up to take the shot. Eeeesh, the things I do for ya freaking bald-bodies. Groot, you go when I give the signal, okay?"
"I am Groot!" he said, straining to force the table back until it was fully in the hole in the wall.
Rocket put his gun down, and looked up nervously. The walls of the building were sheer glass, no handholds. But then someone had decked them in festive lights… he swallowed nervously, trying not to look at the angry mob of mind-controlled people, attacking with no regard to their own life and in a freaky silence. He twitched his whiskers distractedly, eyes narrowing as he judged distances with his usual uncanny precision, calculating, planning, hoping, and then wiped two sweaty paws on the pants of his body glove nervously.
"Showtime…" he muttered, before running up Gamora's back and up her arm as she thrust her sword out over the barricade, as high as she could. He skittered up the flat of her blade panting and then at the apex leapt back towards the wall, all four legs wide and tail behind him like a furry streamer, and he just, just brushed the trailing edge of the lights cable with the tips of his claws.
It was enough, and after a heart-stopping moment where the string of light started to fall down as he climbed up it, with the controlled's grasping hands inches from him, he got traction and shot up the wall, out of reach, kicking away a drone that slammed into the wall next to him, he begun to climb monkey-like sideways along the wall, drawing away a mob of the controlled with him.
As the mob pulled back a moment to chase Rocket, Groot saw his chance and pushed forwards. He had to be fast: the Controller had no shortage of flesh-puppets, and another wave had spotted the gap and was rushing them. Timbers creaking and face contorting, he looked up and saw the drones perusing Rocket, nipping at his heals, trying to bring him down for that mob.
He didn't like that. He didn't like that one bit.
There was a great, slow movement forwards of his leg, and a hollow crunch as he brought it down and begun to drill his roots into the concrete floor, anchoring himself. He snarled, forced back a second by the mob, and then, properly anchored, he begun to push back, as slow and strong as a tide.
"IIIIIIII AM GROOOOOOOOOOT!" he roared, thorns subconsciously sprouting from his shoulders as he slammed the table forwards into the hole with a grinding crunch, extending the wooden fingers that gripped the table-edges deep into the raw exposed concrete of the pillars that held the roof up, sewing the table to the wall in half a hundred places before ripping away his fingers, leaving the wooden staples in place.
Gamora and Co' blew out sighs of relief, relaxing for the first time in what felt like and age, but was only a few minutes really, and leaning on each other for support as they both tried to work massive pains out of their backs. Co' picked up a cloth from the ground, one of those micro-fibre jobs you use to clean screens without scratching them, and wiped her hands so she could get a grip on her gun without it slipping. She noticed her hands shaking, and saw that Gamora had seen. She chuckled, without humour, and re-holstered her gun, handing Gamora the cloth. She took it and wiped down her brow to stop sweat getting in her eyes. "You okay?" she asked Co'. Co' shivered, in a way that may have had nothing to do with the dropping temperature on the planet.
"Fine. I just watched a talking rat gun down a dozen people, and then they came for me and I was shooting them too. Never better.
"Hey." said Gamora, putting both hands on her shoulders comfortingly. "You did great, just great. It's not easy, but if we want to help these people, help save your world, we need to find and kill either The Controller, that transmitter or both. Just remember that; you're helping to save un-countable people, just focus on that, okay?" she said, leading Co' gently away from the carnage. "Just think of your family, your parents, your wife, how you're going to get thought this and back to them. You're doing well. We couldn't have held that barricade without you. Right Quill?" she said, trying to get him to back her up: Co' had a thousand yard stare that just wouldn't shake, and it worried Gamora.
Quill nodded. "Yeah, we make a pretty good threesome. Team! I meant team! Oh god…. Freudian slip! Sorry!"
"Quill!"
"Hey, if she's angry at me for being a sexist pig, at least it give her something to focus on other than the PTSD, right?" he said, wiggling his eyebrows at her like a child's imitation of Groucho Marx.
Co' sated blankly at him for a long moment, and then cracked up laughing.
"Ahhhhhhh! Oh gods, you're all mad." she said. "Gamora, I can't tell if he's a lecherous idiot or an actual genius!"
"Meh, the jury's still out on that one." said Quill, leaning on Groot for support as they begun to hobble thought the shop, looking for another exit. There were plenty, but unfortunately all were blocked with controller-puppets.
"Yeah… Not happening." Said Gamora, staring out another glass door with thousands of dead-eyed killers outside. There was a noise behind her and she spun around.
It was Drax, on the stairs. She lowered her sword. "The Controller?" she asked.
"Got away, flew of the roof with drones, carrying Isha. I did not see in which direction they went" he added, forestalling her next question.
"I am Groot." suggested Groot, as Quill begun to use the remote control to bring the Milano in.
"I'm bringing the ship in, we can escape of the roof just like the baddies did. Just hope Rocket shows up."
"I am Groot!"
"Yeah… not sure what that means. How may syllables? Is it a book?" he asked, pressing his hands together and opening them, nearly crashing the Milano in the process.
"It means up here, moron." Said a familiar voice, accompanied by a tap-tapping of claws on the windows from well above head height. They all looked up.
Rocket was clinging desperately to the side of the building as drones took it in turns to charge at him.
"Little help?" he asked, scrabbling for purchase. "And if it helps, I think I know where the controller has gone."
Gamora pulled out her target laser-pistol, and begun to neatly melt thought the glass about a foot to Rocket's side. Once it was neatly perforated and had had a moment to cool, Rocket punched the glass out and, ass wiggling like a cat, braced on the edge of the glass with all four paws before leaping down and into Groot's outstretched arms.
"I am Groot!" yelled Groot, spinning Rocket around happily and hugging him, much to Gil's motion-sickened groans.
"Yeah, ya dummy, you done good! You got my gun? Ahhh, I've missed you baby."
"Is, is he talking to the Tree or to the gun?" asked Co', as Groot hugged Rocket and Rocket hugged the gun.
"Safest not to ask." Said Quill. "So what's this about knowing where douche-finder general has gone to? 'Cause finding him before it gets all 'Day of the Dead' would be kinda handy."
"Yeah well, me and Gamora kinda had a plan, I think. Didn't mention it to you 'cause it was a little dark." said Rocket.
"What?" asked Quill. He then remembered the look of understanding that had passed between Gamora and the racoon back on the ship, and cursed inwardly. He'd always suspected that the two of them were better at this wordless communication shit than he was, but it rankled to the reminded that between Gamora's subtlety and Rocket's sneakiness he was left out in the cold.
"And?" he asked. Gamora shrugged. "Well, it was when you asked if you needed a babysitter. It just reminded me, when I was in ERI headquarters he called his babysitter… he's got a kid Quill."
Quill stared. "Wait, you were planning on going after his kid?"
Gamora blanched. "Not exactly, just bearing it in mind; you don't discard tactical data." They both looked to Rocket, snapping a magazine into his gun. He noticed them looking. "Me? Oh yeah, I was totally up for going after the kid." He noticed Quills look. "Only to abduct him! Even I'm not going to hurt a kid! Hell, I got blamed for one kidnapping today, so I may as well do one."
"Yeah, because being kidnapped by aliens won't mess you up."
"Quit projecting, frickin' whiney terran's. But yeah, think about it: you have a young child, but you're planning a megalomaniacal take-over. You can't bring your kid along. There's no 'bring your kid to work day' for the lunatic brigade, so what do you do?"
Quill shrugged. "I dunno. Find somewhere safe to put him."
"Yeah, and you're building a big transmitter you don't want found. So where do you put it?"
"I dunno somewhere… somewhere safe." He paused. "You think he's put his kid the same place as this transmitter?"
"Stands to reason don't it?" said Rocket, pulling out his info-glass and booting it up. "And if your wife suddenly got shot in the leg, and you can't call an ambulance because you've clogged the com's net with a signal to control people, then what can you do? Where can you take her?" said Rocket, pulling up a tracking program on his glass and waving it, showing a pinging dot moving across the city. "You take her someplace you feel safe."
Quill nodded, grabbing the joystick on his wrist. "Okay, I'm bringing the Milano in. We give them time to get wherever it is they're going, and we keep Nova informed so they know where we're at." He heard the glass behind him shatter as one of the doors started to give way. "But right now we get on the roof fast." He said, turning. Co' and the Guardians had already disappeared up the stairs. Quill let out a little panicked gasp and begun to hobble after the others as the mob begun to kick the door down. "Hey! Wait up!"
The Milano hovered over a typical area of mixed commercial on the edge of the CBD, a few blocks over from the seafront. Rocket and Gamora peered out the cockpit bubble, and Co' looked up and groaned.
"This is one of the most densely populated areas of the planet, if you can't narrow down the tracking signal to closer than this, then how are you going to find him?"
Rocket shrugged, and snorted. "Well, it's a big freaking transmitter and unless he's got more funds than we thought, he's not taking over any of those office units. They're all multi-million unit HQ's for big corporations, none owned by ERI or the T'van group, just in case he's involved. That leaves two possibilities: he's bought some space in that shopping mall and has it hidden behind an 'opening soon' front, or it's on a ship, and he's parked up in that multi-park." He said, nodding towards a huge commercial unit by the sea, where the city's well-healed could park up their space-vessels and swap them for aquatic yachts.
"Which do you propose is more likely?" asked Drax, hefting a knife experimentally. Rocket shrugged.
"No clue. They had ship back on that agri-world, but I don't see it here, so either they're in the mall, or they swapped ships to try and keep us off the scent."
"The mall it is." Said Quill. "We can't plan on the basis that they've changed vehicles. Huh, what's that on the roof?" he said, pointing at the tall mast and tangle of cables rising of the mall's roof.
"Anti-ship measures." Said Gamora, without pause. "Stop anyone landing on the roof. You get too close and you'll tangle in the cable dangling from that antenna."
"From the war with the Kree." Said Co'. "The mall used to house a major Nova recruiting centre, one of the few on non-nova worlds: it was seen as a high-priority target for someone like Ronan."
"Looks like you could add a transmitter to all that shit on the roof and no-one would notice." Said Quill, thoughtfully. "Okay, we can't land on the roof, so we Drop in-front of the mall, hope Nova can get here to save our butts if he is in there."
"Bad call: the forecourt to the mall is over-looked by two of those frickin' raised pedestrian streets, one each side, see? Enfilade fire from one of those and we're toast." Said Rocket. "Drop me on one, Gamora on the other and we can cover you. Groot Drax and the cop can go in the front. You stay in the ship: ya' can't walk proper."
"Well neither can you, short-legs. You waddle." Said Quill. "And I can control the ship with the remote: me on the ground gives us an extra pair of eyes that can't be mind controlled if those drones turn up. It sucks, but what can we do?" he said. "Set us down, Ranger Rick."
Quill staggered out of the Milano backed by Drax and Groot, while Co' ran around and tried to get everyone to stop what they were doing now and not be there, please, Don't ask questions, in the best tradition of police and school teachers everywhere. Gil's frantic attempts to escape from Groot and his muffled shouts of help to passers by adding a certain hollowness to the claim of "Nothing to see here! Move along! Move along now!"
"Why are there so many people here in the face of a clear cut disaster?" asked Drax. "Is their desire to shop sufficient to overcome fear of permanent mindless enslavement?"
"Have you been to a mall in the holidays?" asked Quill, limping forwards, surprised to find he could still outpace some of the more overburdened shoppers.
"The drones haven't reached here yet, and no-one seems to be controlled by the com-network. He hasn't attacked this sector of the city yet. Do I look like a fucking postal worker!" yelled Co' as a shopper tried to get her to post his cards. "Evacuate you moron. No, it's not a drill. When has an armed officer standing in the street covered in rubble and screaming ever been a drill?! Ignore the tree! The tree is immaterial. The most they might have noticed is the com's network is down. Hey buddy! Outta the way! So for them it's just another shopping day." There was a flash from the cliffs overlooking the city as a secondary explosion levelled quite a lot of the burning ERI lab as the fire hit the bottled gas in the lab.
"With some exceptions." She said, grimly, shouldering past shoppers as she sprinted at the mall: Groot had given up on Quill and was now running with him tucked under one arm. A man watched, scandalised as they pulled up outside the entrance of the mall, panting and sweating.
"So what's the plan when we're in there?" she asked Quill.
"Oh my gods… are you a police officer?" asked the man. "Shouldn't someone be doing something about that building? The ERI headquarters is on fire!"
"Be not afraid; everyone in that building is already dead." Said Drax, laying a re-assuring hand on his shoulder."
"What? No, it's not that: I designed that building! That was my first job after I graduated as an architect. That was my opus magnum!"
Drax watched the man for a moment with his hand still on the shoulder, and then slammed the man's head into the glass doors on the mall, spider-webbing the pane and leaving the man to slide down with a meaty squeak. Quill and Co' paused for a second.
"So what's the plan when we're in there?" Co' asked Quill again. Quill peered thought the shattered pane and said.
"Well, we need to get an idea of the layout, rip a fire-evacuation plan or one of those 'You are here.' Signs off the wall-"
"Ideo locator" said Drax.
"What?"
"The 'you are here' arrow on a map. It is correctly named an ideo locator." He said.
"I am Groot!"
Co' stared, mentally derailed just as she was readying her gun for a hard and fast entrance.
"You never said he was a talking thesaurus!"
"I am not a thesaurus!"
"I am Groot!"
"Oh god not this again." Muttered Quill, facepalming.
Meanwhile Rocket, checking lines of sight and making sure he could cover Quill if he needed to, felt a very faint vibration thought the concrete of the walkway. He froze up. His whiskers twitched. It was a familiar vibration, like a ships engines.
He turned his head.
"Oh no."
He turned and begun to run back thought the crowd, struggling thought the knees and elbows that blocked his way, the small indignities, the countless people too burdened with shopping or busy trying to work out why their com-signal was down and their cat pictures wouldn't load. The people to whom it never even occurred to take time out of their important days to keep an eye out for someone three foot nothing and in a hurry, none of it helped by the crowded walkways and this planets phobia of banisters.
Spitting and snarling, Rocket tried to elbow his way into a position where he could see what was going on. He tried calling Quill, but of course the com's network was down and he hadn't re-programed his C2 system to use the Milano and not the local net. He spotted an illuminator poll that would make a good vantage point, but there was a cluster of people all around it. An elderly Xandarian with grey hair, glasses and a moustache was trying to chat up two female Kylarians a quarter of his age. Rockets enhanced memory kicked in and he cursed his luck. You again?
"Outta my way, pervert! It didn't work on Xandar and it's not working here!" he said, shoving the Xandarian ladies' man to one side and scrambling up the poll, ignoring the surprised yelp and subsequent screaming, splashing and thrashing as he went over the unprotected side and into a fountain. Rocket attained his vantage point atop the poll, and promptly wished he hadn't. His whiskers sunk and his extensive vocabulary of swear-words suddenly failed him.
"Oh Darn."
Quill, however, had just got the conversation back under control. "Look, we need to find a fire-point in the mall, set off the alarm: it will give away our approach but at least it'll get the civilians out of there, and we can steal our You Are – steal our ideo locator while where are there, and then we can begin to go through systematically and-"
"Murrrmmmpph! Muuuurrmp murrmph murrrmph!" said Gil, as Groot also expressed his concern as a matter of some urgency with style and articulation.
"I am Groot! I am Groot! I am Grooooooot!"
"Uh… Quill." said Rocket, his voice flattened by distance. "We gotta problem!"
Quill turned, spotting the racoon standing on a street-illuminator to get extra height and waving both arms over his head, just as the noise from the crown of shoppers soured from the usual low mutter into screams.
As he turned, the shadow covered the forecourt to the mall and swept up him, foot to face as something big eclipsed the moon. Quill turned his face upwards.
"Oh Darn." He said.
One of the ships from the yacht club rose up like something out of a Tennyson poem, hovering over the moonlit clouds like a galley tossed on rough seas, with a huge transmitter pointing out of the front like a Bowsprit. A huge, fat-bellied cog of a thing trailing spilling wisps of drones behind it like bees from a ruptured hive. There were thousands of them, and they began to dive at the shoppers, taking them in a series of athletic stoops. To make matters worse, just as the shoppers scattered and begun to break into groups too small for the drones to target, there was a noticeable pulse that ran thought the crowd: a wave of stiffening, freezing gestures as shoppers stopped running for their lives, and stopped wherever they were, the ones nearest the ship first and then the sudden attacks of motionless spread out from the ship like ripples in a pond until everyone was still and silent in the frigid night air.
Then, as one, the crowd turned to Quill, blank eyed and staring just as the first snow started to fall.
"Any ideas?" said Co', nervously eyeing a woman about thirty feet from her who hefted the wine-bottle from her shopping like a club as the Drone haloed her head.
"Not… not as such. If anyone has a plan for how to deal with this, now would be a great time."
There was a low groaning from Quill's side, and then a solid wump as Gil fired the Hadron Enforcer right at the ship. There was a blue-purple streak of light racing out, and then an metallic groaning as it hit the ship, and then the ship burst, rending in two and flopping to the deck with a terrible slowness as the crowd on controlled civilians parted like the red sea before Johana's whale, thought Quill, who despite his mother's best efforts had never really paid attention at Sunday school.
His relief that they weren't getting crushed was cut short as they turned and as one begun to charge his position, the controller soring high over the top of them riding on a swarm of drones as a shuttle craft ejected itself from the crippled ship and soured off into the sky: Isha and her child no-doubt getting out while the getting out was good. As the crowed attacked Quill panicked and raised his blaster, when a drone slammed into it and disabled the lower, secondary projector: the one he needed to fire stunner rounds. As Co' took out the wine-bottle wielding woman and Drax and Groot laid into the crowd with fists and vines, being driven back into the doorway of the mall, Quill realised that he had the option on shoot lethal rounds, or not shoot. He panicked, and begun to back towards the door as fast as he could shuffle, and fell over on his ass. The crowd then surged at them, and Taser rounds from Rocket begun to pour in and it descended into a melee, when a little kid, maybe six or seven, picked up a shattered shard of the now unconscious woman's wine bottle, the festive light glittering of the shard but not the matt-black drone.
Quill swallowed. "Hey kid… put it down. Don't do anything stupid." He said, as Rocket lost sight of Quill in the scrum and his shots begun coming in in a far more random pattern.
The child marched forwards, robotically coming at Quill's vulnerable trailing leg "Come on kid… put it down… put it down!" he screamed, as the kid rushed at him, shard raised like a switchblade. Quill aimed at the kid's centre-mass, right under his knitted jumper, and then closed his eyes and threw his arm over his eyes as the child closed in.
I there was a soft Thock noise, and the stench of burnt hair and Quill felt a small body fall onto his legs. His eyes snapped open, repulsed, and he saw the dead child and begun to scrabble back spider-like in horror, as shots begun to rain down from the opposite pedestrian overpass as well as verticaly out of the sky. Quill glanced sideways.
A Kree he didn't recognise was directing a squad of Kree troopers wearing elaborate uniforms and a dozen local police officers to fire into the crowd. As he watched the Kree leapt off the walkway, cracking the paving of the forecourt beneath him as he landed, and began to stride thought the crowd, hammer slung over his shoulder and drones bouncing off the armoured cowl of his Accusers robe.
"Baz Sandurst!" he called, his amplified voice boomed out from his armour. "You stand accused on assaulting an officer of the Kree diplomatic corp. and I, Ro'aath, have come to visit Kree justice on you!" he said, glancing up. "And for the first time in a thousand years, Kree and Xandarian justice appears to be accord." He said, as the Nova Starfighters swilled overhead, duelling drones.
"Where the fuck did he come from?" muttered Quill, as the Kree strode past. Drax spotted him and snarled. " Accuser!" The man paused as he heard this, and glanced over. As he did, a small group of drones identified him as the main threat and began to fly hard at his head.
The Kree smiled, grimly. "Did you think that you would be the only ones to respond after the drones attached ERI, Guardian?" he said, idly thrusting out his hammer and turning the universal weapon casually though 90 degrees without looking. A force-field pulsed out and smashed the drones behind him aside. "I reported back to my embassy and returned with a full security detail. I also took the time to discover the identity of the people I had met there Drax the destroyer… Groot…Starlord." He glanced over to where the Nova ships were linking up to form a force-field around the plaza, containing the situation. He turned on his feet, and smacked a drone out of the sky with his hammer as it came at Co'.
"These people will not be freed from their mental slavery while the Controller lives, although destroying the transmitter will have severely limited his range. Go, Starlord. We will deal with this. Find the man, and visit justice upon him." He said, nodding to Drax who glared briefly and then nodded back and spirited up into the mall, while the Kree helped Quill to his feet. "ummm… thanks?" he said, staggering away and into the waiting arms of Groot, who promptly grew an extra tendril to support him.
"And Starlord…" Quill turned.
Ro'aath gave him a long, slow look. "If the meet again, do not attempt to conceal your true purpose from me next time. Had your followers reported their suspicious to me, we may have acted sooner. Ronan was a renegade, but he was one of us. Stand not before the Kree empire, Terran. We work with Nova now, but we will rise again. Stay on the right side of us when we do." He said, grabbing a drone-controlled mall-cop who ran at him with a shock prod and snapping his neck without taking his eyes of Quill.
Peter Jason Quill couldn't quite suppress the shudder than ran through him at that.
The Controller was standing with his back to the staircase when Drax came though. He was looking down, watching the destruction of his drones as his ship burnt and the snow settled on his shoulders.
"I put Isha on the life-raft, with our son, a copy of the research and two-thousand drones. You won't get to her, Destroyer." He said, without looking around. "You won't stop my work."
"I do not care about your work."
"You won't get your vengeance." He added, and to that Drax had no response.
The Controller sighed. "All I wanted was to exert a measure of control. Order in a chaotic world, was that too much? When my brother caused the laboratory accident that crippled me…"
"I did not come here to talk with you." Drax added, drawing his knifes.
"No." said the Controller, gritting his teeth, frustrated by his refusal to let him monologue. "I suppose you didn't. You came here to DIE!" he yelled, turning suddenly and throwing the pair of drones.
Drax ducked neatly under the pair, but as he did, he heard a small Shinggg as a set of blades deployed from each of the two drones. Drax noted they were larger and heavier than the others. As he turned to strike at the drones with his knives, the heard The Controller's footsteps as he sprung at him. Drax was forced to sidestep one drone he could have taken out in order to avoid the man splitting his skull with a heavy blow. The other drone hit his knife-thrust with a spark and both drone and knife flew off into the dark.
Drax slashed at Sandhurst, but he caught the blade on his armour and it skittered off in-effectually. The Controller shoved him roughly, and he staggered on the snow-covered gravel and the tarry surface underneath. The drone caught him on the shoulder, and cut him to the bone. Drax turned and lashed out with his other hand, punching him hard in the solar plexus. Baz reeled back, snorting.
His armour. Fibrous. Tough. Electro-muscular fibres and combat weave. Bullet-proof. Knife proof. Not well padded against blunt-force. He thought. I wonder… He kneed Sandhurst hard in the crotch, and dodged the last drone. As Sandhurst reeled back, he kicked him in the head. He moved in to finish him off, and then the drone slashed at his back, and in the momentary respite it bought him The Controller stood up, and punched Drax with all the force of his powered exoskeleton, cracking a rib and sending his last knife flying. He caught Drax a backhand with his other hand that knocked out a tooth, knocking Drax back.
Sandhurst began to cackle maniacally, and aimed a Drone at Drax from behind, blades spinning.
He promptly stopped laughing when Drax ducked it, and it slammed into Baz's face, scarring him horribly. As he screamed and flailed, Drax begun punching him repeatedly in the gut, until the Controller drove an elbow into the side of this head, and he hit the deck.
As his head spun and he lay there looking up at the stars, he thought he heard a voice.
"Drax, stay down! I'm thirty seconds away from the next rooftop, just stay down and I'll have a shot! Don't do anything-"
And just past that, somewhere beyond the pain, he heard the shuffling crunch of gravel and the ragged breathing from Sandhurst, and his faint panting voice."
"Just… just stay down, damn you. Just lie down and die. It's pointless to fight it I'm, stronger than you. You know it.
Drax grunted, and got up swinging.
The way he saw it, He didn't have much choice.
He got one good punch on The Controller's ravenged face before Sandhurst caught the second one and threw him.
"Give up. I'm stronger, faster, smarter…."
"Drax, ya' hear me? His transmitter's down, we've got com's back. Stay down!"
Drax stood up and feigned, getting a blow in his gut while he raised his hands to guard his face, before Baz shoved him away, punching him hard as he fell.
"You never learn, do you? What was that little display supposed to gain you?" the Controller asked, as Drax panted and bled on the roof.
Drax wiped at the blood from his mouth. "Gain me? Around thirty seconds." He said, as he heard the distinctive sound of a gun-cock from the roof opposite, and The Controller looked up.
"I learn." Drax said.
The sting of shots bounced of his armour, but the force from them sent him stumbling back to within a pace of the edge. Drax was up before the sting of shots had stopped, and was in there as Sandhurst rocked back. Three punches to the head, in quick succession. One. Two. Three.
The Controller slummed back, on the ropes.
Or at least he would have been on the ropes, if it weren't for the fact that this was one of those inconvenient sci-fi planets that doesn't believe in railings.
The controller had a look of mild surprise, no more, as he pitched off the roof. After a second there was a crash and a yelp of not-mild surprise that sounded like Quill, as well as a chorus of "I am Groot"s.
The drones begun to fall out of the air like dead things.
Drax looked to Rocket, exhausted.
"He landed on Groot, but I think he's fine. Sandhurst…not so much. I don't think that spines are supposed to bend that way."
Drax nodded, and sat on the roof. He glanced over. "I believe I require a medic."
"Join the club. But fair enough, I'll call you one." Said Rocket, leaning to pick something up. It was flat and heavy, about the size of an Olympic discus. He wiped some of the dust off, and stared at it. The keyhole logo stared back.
He looked up, at the ruins of the Controller's ship.
"Give me a moment, willya? I just, just want to check something out." He said, tucking the dead drone's main processor into his pants. He'd need to look at that later.
He guessed a lot of folk would have uncomfortable questions to ask tonight…
Epilogue One.
The shattered servos on the ship dripped sparks like slashed veins.
The vehicle was canted over at a 45 degree angle, turning the wall into the floor for some sections where the hull had buckled. Rocket moved over the ruins easily enough. The ship seemed pretty well automated and he'd discovered no bodies.
No organic ones, he corrected. Experimental and half-built Drones stood in several places like silent sentinels, or lay in disrepair where the ship had crashed half-way though some sort of maintenance, their innards scatted over tables and floor, shells glaring acidly like debutants interrupted half-way into ball gowns.
Fizz. A spark fell down through the gloom. Rocket paid it no heed, his only response to the gathering dark the increasing twitch of whisker and ear. With his night vision, he could see just fine.
He wasn't entirely sure he wanted to, not if…
No smell, as yet, just usual spaceship things: electronics, hot metal, hot plastic, disinfectant, old food, dirty laundry. More electronics than usual, but that was it.
More disinfectant. Odd.
He came to a pressure door, wedged part open by the crash. Just a narrow slit.
He paused, and lit up the light fitting on the end of his gun. It was dark enough out here, but past that there'd be no light at all.
Wincing slightly, his ribs had had more than enough today, the climbed up and wiggled though, keeping control of the gun with long practice.
And there it was.
His eyes went wide, and his ears back, and his mouth opened slightly, heart racing.
There it was, just like before. His spot lamp on the gun picked out details: the triple lock, the deadman's switch, the felid generator, the Gleet bio-filters. The bars. The Boxes.
Breath trapped in his chest, he leaned in the check the boxes. He opened his mouth to speak, and then stopped. What the hell would I say? He thought.
He reached out to take the panel off the Deadman's switch, and then paused.
If he had designed the containment system, would he have kept the system the same after what had happed back on keystone?
Cautiously, fearfully even, he leaned around, and shone the light on the back of the cabinet that housed the Deadman's switch. There were seven cables in ports at the back: before there were only six. He traced that extra cable into the main power buffers. He sat and stared at it for some time.
It took him half an hour before he felt confident enough to actually look inside the power buffer mounting. Another hour before he found the explosive behind the relay.
It took him a long time to cut the power to the containment field, and when he did he wasn't sure what he wanted to do next.
The first thing, he guessed, was to check the boxes. They were a wipe-clean grey plastic, and a little under a meter square on each side, unmarked saved for a barcode and the keystone logo.
"Hello?" he said, before immediately cursing himself. Hello? What sort of weaksauce shit was that? That's something Quill might come out with.
"Hey, you. I'm out here, and I don't want to hurt you. I'm… I'm gonna open the box, okay? If… hell… if you need to take a moment, I understand. This'll suck, I'm sorry. Just… Just… It's gonna be okay, okay?" he said nervously. He took a deep breath, not wanting to do this, but afraid not to.
He broke the seal on the box, and popped both the latches.
The side of the box swung down, and he reflexively leapt a step back, aiming his lamp directly into the box.
The box was empty. The plastic recently cleaned and sanded down. It smelt of nothing but disinfectant.
All the tension in him boiled over, and Rocket just broke down there. Curled up into a ball next to the box trying to choke down the feelings and sobs wracking his body. He'd never felt so relieved, so guilty, so alone. His whole body shook.
Except for his hands. His hands never shook.
Epilogue two.
Gamora finished making her initial report to Nova Prime Rael, and then hung up. Their long day had made them a just shy of sixty grand richer, and a lot more tired and nervous. As she wearily trailed her way down the steps from the cockpit, she paused in the main living area of the ship. Rocket was perched on a box, his back to her, polishing wire contacts for something or other.
She paused. Quill had finished his report to Nova an hour ago and crashed into unconsciousness even before she'd made it up the steps to the holo. He was dead to the world, Drax was in hospital, Groot resting under his sunlamp, trying to recover the biomass where they'd had to cut the catatonic policeman away from him. It was just them.
"How's Groot?" she asked, pulling up a box next to him .
"Messed up, but going to be taller than me next week, taller than Drax week after. He'll be fine. Quill?"
"Messed up, but you know him, he can recover from anything." She sat there and watched for a moment, as Rocket worked the steel wool methodically, like it was the only thing in the worlds.
"Are you drunk?" she asked.
"Yep. Not as drunk as I'm gonna need to be to sleep."
"You want to tell me where you snuck off to for so long after that fight-"
"No." he said. "No I don't."
They sat there without talking for some time, as Rocket polished up his contacts and began to lay his wire out in neat rows, sorted perfectly by length.
"You want to spit it out and ask, you may as well." Said Rocket, taking up the next spool of wire and cutting off lengths with his tiny pliers.
Gamora glared, colour rising to her cheeks. "Oh, so you know exactly what it is I was going to ask?" she said, angry.
Rocket didn't look away from his work or answer her, taking his time to cut his lengths.
Snip.
"Quill's a hell of a guy." He said, just at the point that the silence was getting agonising. He noticed Gamora's surprised look, and made eye contact for just a second before looking away.
"And yeah, I'm not kidding. He's… he's something special. Most people, most people would rather take an easy lie than a hard truth, would take the easy path though life. He don't. He refuses to make a comforting lie about the way the world is, he gets just how astronomically shitty this universe is, which most folk don't, they make believe like it ain't, but he don't get beaten down by how bad it is. He still tries to help. 'most of the time, the universe takes more that it gives, but now it's our chance.' We both like to joke that he's an idiot, but he ain't. He likes people to think that he is, but that's because he's embarrassed to look too much like what he is: a moral person, star's help us."
He looked to Gamora. "I ain't a moral person. I'm loyal, to Groot and I guess to you guys now, but that's it. I… I ain't a nice guy. You ain't either. You're trying to be, and you're good at it. You're always the one to tell Quill when he's being greedy of selfish or just plain a jerk. You have a moral code, and you stick to it. You work hard at being a good person, and it shows. But it don't come natural to it. You've been round the block a few times, like me, right? You're good, but you ain't necessarily nice, when it comes to it. Cut you to the core and you'd see steel. You're an idealist, but you've decided to be. Before that you were something else. You're playing at being the idealist, and Quill's playing at being the realist in our little set, and maybe it's a mask the two of you need or whathaveyou. But he's got something you've not had for a long time."
"And what's that?"
Rocket shrugged. "Faith. When Quill says something good, he means it. He really sees the world as saveable, you just want to. It's like those folks today, being mind controlled. He wouldn't shoot them. He… he feels that everyone is worth saving. "He looked down at his paws. "Hell, even folk like us."
"So what are you saying? That he's our conscience, the soul of our group?"
"No: we all knew that already. What I'm saying is this: it's going to get him killed. You refuse to pull the trigger on an innocent, the innocent will pull the trigger on you. That's just life. He keeps his world view, with the sort of people we're going up against now, it'll get him killed. He loses that world view, it'll kill the group. Or worse. We.. we'll lose what makes us a family. We'll lose our soul. So in answered to the question that you're too honourable to ask, then yes. I'll do it."
He turned, and looked her in the eye. "A kid comes at him with a broken bottle, I'll shoot the kid, so he doesn't have to. I'll be the bad guy, so he can be the good guy: make the call's he can't make, the things he can't do. The things than need to be done behind his back to keep him alive without crushing his spirit. I'll do it. Be the poisonous friend in the group. I don't wanna, and I won't like it, but I'm broken goods as it is. A malfunctioning prototype. What's a little more blood mater, on hands as black as these?"
"Red."
"Huh?"
"Most mammalian blood is red. Not black."
Rocket paused, and then scratched behind his ear with a wire. "You're shitting me? Even mine?"
"Yes, even yours. You don't see colours too well, do you?"
"Meh, I can manage green, blue and yellow. I can tell what colour the sky is on most planets, tell that grass is green. That's enough. Way I reckon it's better than nothing. The rest of it… Just shades of grey." he said, staring into space "And they're getting darker all the time."
Gamora stood up. "You're wrong."
"Oh great. What colour is grass then? If it's fuchsia or some bullshit colour like that I'm refusing to walk on it."
"Not about that. About what I came to ask." She said. "About what I meant."
"What, you think that I was wrong about Quill needing someone to protect him from himself?"
"No." she said, leaning in. "I'm offended that you think I'd get someone else to do the dirty work for me." she said. "If someone's got to take the hit to save Quill's soul, two someone's would be better. If a normal person needs someone to watch his back, then Quill needs at least two."
Rocket glared, but only for a moment, and then nodded. Gamora got up to leave.
"You don't have to do this." Rocket said, not looking up from his wires. "You want me to do the wetwork, I will."
Gamora paused at the top of the stairs, "No. I do my own wetwork."
"Even when it's Quill's?"
"Especially when it's Quills." She said, walking down the stairs.
She paused at the bottom, and looked to Quill. She watched for some time. He was out cold; she could tell. She had been trained as an assassin, after all.
She pulled the curtain shut, separating her half of the room from his, and opened the locker at the foot of her bunk. She dropped her target pistol, carefully cleaned after the day's work, into the locker, and shut it again.
She sat on the bed for some time.
After a while she put her head in her hands, and tried to convince herself that when that kid had come at Quill with the bottle, she'd aimed to hit the drone on its head, not its head itself. Perhaps she could ask Rocket. She'd not thought he'd seen, but clearly he had.
She was almost sure she'd aimed for the drone, but Quill was about to die and it had happened so fast, and on the spur of the moment instinct and muscle memory and training had taken over.
And she had been trained as an assassin, after all.
Epilogue Three.
Nova Prime Rael sat with her head in her hands, trying to work out how everything had started to come crashing down so quickly.
Altair Four's capitol had been hit by an attack unprecedented in the Nova Corps. history, and were it not for the Guardian's, the might have lost the entire planet to The Controller. She'd paid then triple, no questions asked. And once they worked out a suitable bounty for Sandhurst and the research data they had found there, she'd pay them again. The damage was in the billions, and hundreds were dead: that it wasn't worse was down to them.
That Sandhurst had survived was a testament to the power of his armour, but it was still a close-run thing. His back was broken, utterly. Paralysed and unconscious, in a vegetative state, but alive. They were still trying to work out how to get the suit off him. It was possible that the suit was all that was keeping him alive.
Without him to ask, and with the research data from ERI so heavily encrypted, it might take them years to work out how the mind control had worked.
Given that Ro'aath had taken a dozen drones back to the embassy for study, working it out before the Kree empire would be vital.
Then again, it looked like Nova had a head start.
"Denarian Dey your preliminary report?" she asked the com, tired as hell.
"Um, yeah well. It's hard to tell, the infinity stone angle is confusing the hell out of the science department, and they're saying that it could be several months before they get any results... "
"Dey… give it to me straight."
"Its… it's direct neural stimulation, to the Kessler targeted regions. It's Project Alcyone technology. We don't know how, but it is."
"And it's on the open market…Gods help us."
Dey waited awkwardly, until Rael hung up.
"Computer, review file X1E, start at the beginning." She said. Her predecessor may have wiped all evidence of Project Alcyone from Nova records, but it turned out that a young Nova officer had kept her own records of several parts of it, completely illegally and without any authorisation, and she'd make sure that any underlings that tried it on one of her projects went to gaol for the rest of their life, but she'd fished it out the other day, and it had been invaluable.
As the holo ran, it showed a recorded interview from a Nova Science division project, some sixteen years before. She had watched it a dozen times in the last few days, and she checked the papers for Alcyone, only half listening as the recording played.
"Hi Kassy, glad to see you could make it." Said a young female voice. "Take a seat."
"Thank you Dernarian. Or should I say Centurion?"
"Please, Kassy, there's no need for that." Said the voice, perky, friendly, but still with a steely, worryingly keen sense of business. "You've met Doctor Kessler?"
"Only briefly, at the phase one roll-out, the steady-hands launch."
Nova Prime checked her records. Subject #6. Officer Kassindra I'vell. 22 years of age. Volunteered for phase two Alcyone trial. Neural enhancement begun immediately -
"Well this will be a lot more… involved… than the steady-hands mod." Said the young man with the wavy hair and the lab-coat. "Has the centurion explained the risks to you?"
Kassy smiled. "Oh yes, she tired her best to talk me out of it. But I'm afraid I'm either stubborn or stupid. I've read the data, I understand the risks."
-subjects began to complain of headaches and extreme light sensitivity between 42 and 58 hours after enhancement. Secondary symptoms did not manifest until between two and three weeks after the procedure, but which point weapons training had resumed as per the schedule, which was not modified to investigate symptoms. In the initial investigation, this was flagged as an immediate point of error, contributing to the preventable-
"And you understand that the procedures are not… not as well grounded as the steady hands mod? Similar brain-electrode stimulation packages to that have been used for a number of years to treat epilepsy and degenerative neurological conditions on many worlds, but this is based on entirely novel techniques?" said the young man. "The results may vary to a greater degree than Phase one."
-nausea, micro-sleep parasomnia and short-term memory loss, loss of dietary and sexual appetite were also reported with the first six weeks of the trial, but with the exception of the nausea the side-effects were discounted as semi-desirable effects of the unihemispheric mod and/or emotional load modification-
"Yes, but it'll be worth it, wont it?" she said. "If we beat the Kree. I mean, you said they were working on a similar project. We need to beat them too it and besides," she smiled. "It's not like I need to sleep that much anyways. Always a bit on an insomniac."
The first psychotic episode of the project occurred eight weeks post-surgery, although in hindsight the reports of phantom lights or noises heard by other subjects could be seen as problems arising from damage caused by the introduction of the unihemispheric slow-wave sleep pattern. The subject, Thom Shwartserr (#8), suffered a minor psychotic break during the sporting practice he had adopted in lue of sleep. As it occurred outside of hours, it was not properly reported, although the duty nurse did note it. His second break, however, occurred during weapons training, resulting in the needless-
"And you understand the process is irreversible?" asked the smiling young man. "Both the sleep patterns and the Combat Emotional Load Optimisation. You'll never sleep again ,and you emotional state will be modified, geared for combat."
"I understand, but hey. Being able to switch it all off in a firefight? Guaranteed no PTSD? It's got to be worth a go. And besides-"
-once the first break occurred, security was increased. However due to the C.E.L.O. mod, the programing to resist coercion by an armed enemy, and the ability to plan 24-7, no sooner than they were confined to barracks, the subjects began plotting an escape. It is assumed that the plan was initially hypothetical: a joke by bored officers awaiting the resumption of the training program. But as more and more delays were caused by the subjects neural degeneration, and their paranoia and mass hysteria built up, the plan was put into action in earnest resulting in the death of four medical staff, eight researchers and two guards-
"-if it can end this war a day earlier, prevent one more needless death-"
-Subject #1, suicide by corps-person: seven bystander casualties. Subject #2, suicide by corps-person: four bystander casualties, two of them minors. Subject #3-
"-then it's got to be worth a try, don't you agree Centurion?"
The young woman opposite her smiled. "Come on Kassy, we've known each other since the academy. Call me Irani."
-Leading to the explosion that killed all 27 passengers. Subject #6 suicide by corps-person: zero bystander casualties: shot by centurion supervising the project. Subject #7-
Nova Prime's eyes skidded away from that line, as if it were too painful for her, and skipped to the bottom.
-on the basis of the above evidence, and despite the objections of many of my fellow officers, I am forced to agree with the chief medical examiner: the brain modifications attempted were too involved for an already sentient mind to withstand, the psychological damage crushing, sudden, and total. Despite his objections to the contrary to the council, Dr Kessler has privately admitted to me that the mod may never work in a neurologically developed host, and suggests implantation in either a child, which is clearly unconscionable, or a non-sapient animal that could then be raised to sapience, something that raises a whole slew of other moral questions. The casting vote is mine, and with a heavy heart, I must as supervising officer of the project move to discontinue. I also recommend the arrest of Dr Kessler, and the use of eminent domain to suppress his work. I would also like the council to consider this my resignation from the science division, and I request a return to a front-line posting.
Irani Rael, centurion supervising, Project Alcyone
She slammed the report down, cursing. "Stupid girl." She said. That said, she was still glad she'd kept the reports.
She glanced back to the holo. Her younger self stood up to shake hands with her best friend and welcome her to the program, unaware that in two months time she'd have to blow her brains out to save half the academy. Unaware not only that she'd be crying as she did it, but so would Kassy. Unaware of her forthcoming death with the sure and certain immortality of youth, Kassy turned to shake the hand of the man next to her.
"And doctor…. Kessler, is it?" she said, mangling the pronunciation. "That's not a Xandarian name, is it?" He smiled, warmly and kindly. His accent was clipped and precise.
"Unfortunately, no. I was taken from my home as a child, it's a Terran name. And we're all friends here, Kassy." He said, flinging his wavy hair out of his eyes with a winning smile. "Please, call me Joseph."
