The Space Needle (League of Cosmic Justice Book 2) Read online

  The Space Needle

  (Galactic Justice League, Episode 2)

  By Sam Sea

  Copyright © 2016 by Sam Sea

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  Table of Contents:

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 The Longest Night Hunt

  Chapter 2 Mikka’s Anger

  Chapter 3 The Thirst

  Chapter 4 Going Underground

  Chapter 5 The ECI Call

  Chapter 6 The New Investigator

  Chapter 7 At the Station

  Chapter 8 Selling Humans

  Chapter 9 The Pawnshop Owner

  Chapter 10 ECI’s Job

  Chapter 11 Mikka’s Job

  Chapter 12 The Becoming of Irkoniss

  Chapter 13 - The Grieving Sister

  Chapter 14 – One Beer Too Many

  Chapter 15 – Morning in the Office

  Chapter 16 – The Professor

  Chapter 17 – The Clan

  Chapter 18 – The Answers

  Chapter 19 – Settling the Score

  About the Author

  Prologue

  “It’s here!” Val lifted his head up from a document he was going through to see his butler at the doorway of his study, looking all excited, his one hand nervously striking a long white beard that came down almost to his belly as he gave him the news. “They are landing it in right now!”

  Val glanced at one of the displays decorating the curved study wall opposite of him, and with a flick of his finger brought up different views from estate’s security cameras.

  The aerial one showed a pair of heavy-duty air freighters, hovering fifty feet above his backyard hanger and carry what appeared to be one very massive load which was dangling below them on an awfully thin, almost invisible wires. The delivery object was wrapped all around in a dark green tarpaulin and was already being slowly brought down.

  Val jumped from the chair, unable to hide both relief and excitement. “Did you open up the roof for them?”

  “Yes, sir! Of course I did.” Mr. Vartax nodded his head, his old eyes dancing with an excitement of a child.

  “Well, let’s go and see it then.”

  As soon as they stepped out of the house, they could hear the pouring sound of transporters engines. But before they made it to the five-hundred feet long hanger, the transporters had already deposited their load inside and the carrying cables were being rolled back. The cockpit pilot in the freighter closest to them had waved his hand to salute them as he took his bird up and followed the other one off the estate’s boundaries.

  As Val inspected the object with owe, Mr. Vartax made his fingers dance on his communicator, putting back up the estate’s security fence and starting the hanger’s ceiling to roll back out and close itself.

  Val walked slowly through the hanger’s door toward it.

  It stood two story tall, and about hundred feet long, staring at him as some omnipotent semi-god. He wanted to see it that very second, but taking the tarpaulin off was not as easy as he expected even as he diced its one side with his laser knife. It took two of them and a final pull from his power fork lifter to get it all off.

  Below it, uncovered was a space ship. Old, obviously neglected and unkempt. He touched, caressed and then knocked on its brownish hull, the banging sound of a think composite alloy responding to his knuckles. He will check later how much titanium and how much gold was in it, obviously enough for scraping companies to be ready to pay dear credits for it. But he would not let them have it.

  “Well, it’s a space bird, that’s for sure…”

  “But can it make ways across the empire, sir?”

  Val sighed, not yet ready to take his hands of its hull, the thick coat of dust and dirt covering his fingertips. “It’s the best thing they had at the impound. The record shows it could fly a year ago… It’s my best chance…”

  As run down as it seemed, it still looked so much more impressive in person than in video files. Val walked around it once, examining its long tubal fuselage. Except for one small rectangular window, there were no interruptions to slick lines of the hull, no bays for torpedoes, no gun posts or electro-blaster antennas. Half of the ship was the engine itself, menacing, big enough for a whole house to be placed inside its thruster exhaust.

  If Val had an implant, he could lock into it and check out ships controls and all of its functions right away. But he hated having chips inside his body, his high ranking allowing him a privilege of being unchipped and still being able to keep his citizenship.

  But that’s why he carried his communication pod everywhere with him, and as he took it out, he found the ship already registered under his name and number. Logging into it and starting its ship-maintenance power was just a command away.

  “Maybe I should connect it to the power grid and have it juiced up first?” his butler asked him, seeing the smallest of lights starting to blink irregularly inside the ship.

  “Yes, you can do that… I just want to see if there is enough power to open the hull door.” The ship creaked, the rusted metal separating from each other, and then the hydraulic system took over revealing the door wide enough to drive his forklift inside. It flipped slowly down, opening the walk-over ramp and the smell of stale air that came from its inside.

  “Perfect,” Val said and stepped up on the opened ramp. He carefully examined the composite of a foot-thick wall, and wondered if it was still good enough to soak in and neutralize all the space radiation as well as the heat from the friction during planetary landings.

  The inside of the ship did not fare much better than the outside. The walls were uneventfully bare, the floor dirty enough to leave footprints anywhere Val stepped. It seemed that everything inside the ship was stripped to a bone. There was no central command bridge or separate quarters, just a single storage space that stretched from the ship’s nose to the engine quarter. There was not even a bathroom, and Val wondered if the previous owners of the vessel expected any travelers to go out on a cable and piss out in space.

  “Well, it makes sense,” Val said out loud, remembering that this used by smugglers’ vessel, used to ferry contraband throughout the galaxy and run through planetary immigration controls. “I guess we will have to put in a modular bathroom with a molecular decomposer.”

  “It should not be that hard. The door is big enough. I can do that rather fast,” his butler confirmed it behind him.

  Val knew perfectly well that no manufacturer was bothering to produce this kind of vessel anymore. Its walls were too thick and expensive to produce, its powerful engine almost too complex to maintain. Since for the last sixty years, every inhabited planet had constructed space elevators, the use for vessels like this one, the ones that could safely land and depart from the planet’s surface, became limited. The most of the few that remained had illegal annotations to them.

  “A can… This is just a giant space can. Nothing more than that.” Val told himself. “Good isolated can with attacked powerful engine that could move an entire building, cause an earthquake.”

  “Yes, antimatter drive that is installed in that engine has enough thrust that could move this entire estate to space, let alone whatever is inside the ship.”

  “If it still works…” Val remembered in a cautious tone. “I will need some instruments… I need to measure how exactly strong the engine is, but fi
rst, we need it connected to the power and all juiced up.”

  They found the power connecting cord right next to the door leading to the engine block. As Mr. Vartax took the three inches thick cable out, Val opened the door and walked in.

  For a second, he had hard time breathing, and darkness of the place not going on his eyes easy as well. But then he lighted to room with his communicator and automatically started fan begun to recycle soggy air.

  Four hundred some years ago, when he was still young in his mind and heart, he used to be a passionate engine engineer, creating some of the similar models that lay before him. With a nostalgic sensation, he walked besides power storage units, fuel converters, power relies, heat dispensers and tens of other objects which were enclosed in metallic casings he could not recognize at his first glance.

  The very heart of the engine drive was in the middle of the room, encircled by a metallic oval block measuring six feet in diameter and twelve feet in height. He was not too worried if it worked. Anti-matter drives usually last longer than a metal that enclosures them, and he doubted not in its functionality. Yet he would really like to know its limits, and how such a big engine attacked on a relatively small vessel would perform. Those will be fun tests to run.

  “What would had been your limits now if you were always maintained properly and optimized by a skilled mechanic to do your best?” he started to talk to the engine with a lot of ideas how to tweak its functions already running through his brain, and bring it all back to life, to make it better than it had ever been before.

  “The cord has been connected, sir, but… it would be wise for the life support to be rechecked first, especially if it had not been hauling humans as it seems.” Mr. Vartax voice coming somewhere from the distance, brought him back.

  “Yes you are right - air recycling, oxygen production, radiation controls… all of that has to be checked. But first, we need to run the test about its energy capacity and storage… and for that, we need this bird fueled. We’ll give it a few hours.”

  “Sir, I do not see how you think we can get this ready in a matter of days.”

  Being a high-ranked ECI had a few benefits, a minor offsets to always carrying a mark on his forehead, and being one of the most hated and feared person in the entire empire. One of those benefits was certainly that he had at his disposal equipment most of the citizens did not even knew existed. “We’ll get proper tools, and some help… it won’t be that bad…”

  “Sir, I can get the bots to wash and clean inside and out of it… before I install anything inside…”

  “Don’t worry about it too much… I want the hull painted… maybe with something experimental…”

  “Do you have an exact recipe for the paint?” The old butler knew where this was going. He did quite a few rare jobs like that for his boss from time to time.

  “I did some research a bit… there is this special blend of materials that deflect normal signals… I want to get some equipment and test it first before we spray it over the ship… see what it does…”

  “How about the inside?”

  “Well, the most important thing about the inside is its artificial gravity generator… I want that thing working. As I said before, we need to run the full diagnostics and see if it is operational, and how sound is the integrity of the hull structure. I may be needing to land and lift-off a lot during the next year. So schedule someone who knows about them to look it over, but it has to be done today… Use my credentials if you have to. Also, I am expecting to get some high-powering equipment tomorrow. It should be delivered here, so I would really prefer if we can finish with all the work before then.”

  Mr. Vartax knew how much work all of that would require, but not a hint of a complained would ever leave his lips. “The inside of the ship does not have any…” Mr. Vartax groped hard for the proper word to express his displeasure of the ship “…appeal to it. I can install some entertainment unit, some 3d projectors around its walls, hook it up to cameras around the estate. That way, if you are in space and you feel homesick…”

  “Maybe…” Val was not very sure of that.

  “We need to create a place in which you will live…” his butler was not giving up on his idea. “I mean, Master Val, you will live in it… from what you are telling me, it will not be just a few weeks trip on a transport cruiser…”

  Val curiously looked at the old man. Maybe he should make the inside of it nice, make it as pleasant as possible. After all, the ship might become his home for a long time, depending on how well his self-appointed mission will go. Was he crazy to be leaving the Capital? He walked back and looked through the hanger’s giant doors at his estate, green lawns and trees, tall and full crusted, majestically moving in the early morning breeze. He was to change all of that for the darkness of space, cold, cruel and constantly threatening. That ship might really become his new home for a long while. He just hoped that it does not become his coffin.

  “Sure, indulge me… but only if you have spare time…” he muttered as his communicator rang and he tapped it to answer the incoming call.

  Chapter 1 - The Longest Night Hunt

  Eight Hours Earlier…

  Ikroniss was circled by complete darkness, waiting. A few minutes ago, the help he hired had logged into the local power grid and knocked out all the electricity, just for a few moments, moments long enough for him to jump out of the sewer and run across the street to the three story stone-covered mansion. It was supposed to be an easy job. But now he had to hide. He waited patiently, closing his eyes, his mind unintentionally drifting toward a similar night that happened almost twenty years ago…

  It was on the Planet Ertovax V which to this date remained listed as nothing more than a nature reserve in almost all of the imperial galactic maps.

  The waste north woods, thick evergreen trees that had never been cut down was a home to the people he called his tribe.

  And that night, twenty years ago, the blood had to be spilled. It was The Longest Night Hunt and it was the first time Irkoniss was to make a kill. He was already of the age with thirteen winters behind him. And many of his friends, some even a year younger than him, had already made their first kill and became men.

  But he, for a long time, was in no rush at all. He still preferred to play with a ball, or even to help his mom gutting and chopping fish, the task she liked to do the least. Irkoniss might not have publicly wanted to admit it, but chopping fish wasn’t the only job that he didn’t mind helping his mom around. Ever since his only sister disappeared two winters ago, he saw too much pain and sadness in her mother’s eyes, and having him around, he knew, was mellowing those wounds. So, being the youngest one, he decided to stick around and bring the water to the house, feed the chicken, skin a deer, and do other ‘unmanly’ duties.

  It was worth even the most teasing he had to endure. Dantkar, his older brother, was the worst, often saying that it would be better for him to let his hair grow, learn how to cook and marry a brave warrior one day than to venture into the forest with a bow and arrows.

  He tried hard for such talk not to bother him. But sometimes it was just too much. Sometimes it would make him blood-boiling upset, so much that he would disappear to the forest for a whole day, shooting arrows and fighting tree trunks far away from the village, away where nobody could see him.

  “Hey, Dantkar, don’t upset your brother…” his father once overheard the taunting and decided to get involve. “You do not want your brother to leave the village and be gone for days in the forest… don’t want him to come back after the next moon, you know.”

  Everyone present, sitting around the long, wooden dining table, including Irkoniss’s uncle and two older cousins, laughed.

  “…because if he does, you know, you will be fetching water in his place.” His father words raised even more laughter in the household. Even Dantkar himself tried to push out a laugh although a sound seemed stuck inside his throat.

  But the time for laughter was no mo
re. The time for the hunt was on. And Irkoniss just wanted to get it over with, for all the teasing to stop.

  He knew the hunt that was to decide the rest of his life was not a few hour stroll through the forest. It took more than a single day to complete all the preparations for they were to be gone at least seven days.

  The night before, as all the bags laid ready by the front door, his father called him to his side. He put both of his hands on his shoulders, and gave him a long stare that was supposed to brand into Irkoniss’s mind for as long as he lived.

  “Whatever happens during the hunt, whatever you do…just don’t embarrass me.”

  ‘Don’t worry, father, I won’t embarrass you,’ Irkoniss wished he could had said those words out loud, but under his father’s iron gaze, they got lost on a way out.

  The six of them would make the hunt that year, two of Irkoniss’s friends, Leaf and Sono, and all of their fathers.

  They all gathered by the water well early in the morning even before the light of the day could show the way. The stars and two moons could not light their way as they walked in the darkness of the trees, and torches were lid.

  As they approached the river, Irkoniss suddenly stopped and turned around, stood on the path looking toward the home he could not see, wondering if he will ever see it again, still feeling the embrace of his mother and her tears she left on his cheek.

  His father nudged him forward, and he didn’t dare to turn around again.

  They uncovered two canoes buried under the moss blanket of nearby trees, and pushed them in the river. As they made the first band of the river, the first light of the day started to fight off the darkness, and in less than an hour, the rays of the frosty morning sun danced across the rushing water. Irkoniss could almost find the peace in it.

  For the next two days they stayed peddling in their canoes downstream toward the ocean, only pulling over to sleep for a few hours of darkness. The river, the place often visited by other tribes, seemed completely deserted. No human or animal could be seen.