Killer Be Killed

  KILLER BE KILLED

  Book One o fTHE FRONTIER

  *

  TRAVIS E. HUGHES

  Copyright © 2017

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher in unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property.

  First Edition: June 2017

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  To my incredible family.

  Special thanks: Cover design: Kyle Delso. Cover consultant Brandon Grode. Matt Savage for moral support. Theateresque.

  Special thanks to cover model: Amy Appleton Dreyer

  Photo by Paul Versluis Photography. Visit www.versluisphoto.com

  “Those Who Fail to Learn From History Are Doomed to Repeat It.” – Winston Churchill.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Planet Danaus (Southern Hemisphere)

  This was Roslyn Fink’s second visit to Danaus, the first earthlike planet. She’d been to Mars as well, but that didn’t count much for space travel. And unlike Mars, this dusty red ball had a thick atmosphere and large salty oceans.

  Approaching, after leaving the mouth of the bridge and warping space into the system, Roslyn marveled at how it resembled a reddish-brown marble with blue streaks across the belly, dividing two major continents below and above the equator.

  The southern one, Annabellus, had been where all the major colonies first settled. From space it was clearly much greener than the north. The larger northern hemisphere, North Vader, named after an ancient mythology about space wars, consisted mostly of mountains, volcanoes and vast, red deserts. North Vader had yet to be fully explored. But there were rumors of treasures to be had in those badlands.

  Roslyn and her former college roommate, now partner, Hattie Su were on their way to another planet after Danaus. This was only a stopover to collect a bounty. It would be their first job. They’d recently graduated from college with criminal justice degrees and had consequently joined up with the Interstellar Peace Keepers Agency. A clean capture would paint a solid first impression.

  So far, with more luck than skill, they had managed to do just that, but the heat and the alien moisture only made the bounty’s complaints that much more grating.

  “I’m in no mood to listen to the whining and moaning of some dumbass hillbilly who doesn’t understand why killing a fifteen-year old girl is wrong.” Roslyn pointed to the horse-faced prisoner, knocked out cold on the hover sled. Da’akvine bound his wrists; a local vine that grew tighter the more the person struggled. “Keep his ass out, please.”

  Hattie raised her sword in agreement, both letting Roslyn know she heard, and that she would use the poison on her dulled katana blade to accomplish the task.

  “Scrimchi,” Hattie said softly. It was one of her made up words. It took on many meanings. In college and even before, her friends had made up new terms for things.

  “I couldn’t have ever imagined this place to be like this. I’ve seen it in films but being here in actual nature…” Hattie said, looking all around her. “Can’t you feel that? We’re communing with the divine. It’s down right palpable.”

  “I can taste it, if that’s what you mean,” Roslyn said in her driest tone.

  “I cannot wait to commune with the Whisker Trees on Shiva,” said Hattie in her high clipped, chipper voice. “They say the Holy Avians draw their wisdom from their ancient trees.”

  “I’ve read that, yeah,” Roslyn said, stepping around a reddish brown puddle.

  “There are some Whisker Trees there that are tens of thousands of years old,” Hattie continued. “If you learn how to meditate properly beneath one, they say it will communicate with you and give you ancient wisdom. To the highest perch we ascend.”

  “Yep,” Roslyn said, pursing her lips to keep from saying something cantankerous and unpleasant.

  Aside from Central Park in New York, Roslyn never been fully immersed in anything resembling nature. Earth had become one large city for the most part. Here stretched open space and fresh, albeit fungal air. It was a bit disorienting. Added to that she’d been cooped up in the F-Class passenger bridge jumper for over a year and a half.

  At ten-point-seven parsecs, or thirty-five light years from Earth, Danaus was the closest of the four habitable planets. It was the first truly earthlike planet humans had found and subsequently reached. The bridge between Earth and Danaus had been the greatest technological achievement mankind had ever accomplished, until they reached even further, peaked out and then took several steps backwards in the matter of a few generations. Had the Golden Generation, led by one of the greatest minds in human history, Sir Leonard Vincent, only known what would become of their great frontier, collective groans of sorrow and shame would sweep across time and space.

  The Birds claimed Sir Leonard Vincent had once lived as a man named Leonardo da Vinci in a former lifetime. They were impressed by him and had hope for humanity once. But that had waned in only a few generations.

  Unlike Hattie, who joyfully marveled at every new sight, irritation flared in Roslyn. She tried to remind herself to appreciate the moment, but that proved frustrating. Not only was she irritated with the funky stench of the slime forest, that threatened to gag her to vomit at any moment, she considered the piece of crap rental truck they could barely afford, and the way her father was squandering his legacy and therefore her legacy. Roslyn’s inheritance was dwindling down to either jack or squat with each passing day. It was time to put an end to the bleeding. So after a life of mischief in New York, Roslyn got her life together, went to college to study criminal justice, with a minor in business, and headed out to the former colonies to join her father’s agency. It was time to modernize his dying firm.

  Roslyn pulled her golden blonde hair up into a tighter ponytail. Her big clumsy thumbs kept getting in her way. She was too frustrated to form a proper ponytail and too hot to leave her hair down.

  “I heard there are dragons,” Hattie said, scanning the sky, mouth agape.

  “That’s just what we’ve called them,” Roslyn tried to explain. “Not real dragons that breathe fire.”

  “What if we foresaw them?” Hattie asked, winking at her. Some tiny, furry insect skidded across her brownish green eye. She blinked it out.

  “What do you mean?” Roslyn asked, immediately regretting it.

  “We made up stories about dragons long ago in our past because the shaman or whatever, the story tellers of old had tapped into the Akashic records. The Birds say we’re all connected through it. Consciousness created the universe and all living things are from the same--”

  “Yeah, but,” Roslyn cut her off. She’d listened to the Bird crap for way too long on the journey to stomach it any further. “It’s like the Amazons on Athena. They’re not real Amazons. We didn’t find the Amazons of folklore when we got there. That’s just what humans called them when they first encountered them. It’s just because the females are so big and ferocious. They don’t…”

  Roslyn stopped and had to blink to discern what she was seeing. One of the sapling trees slithered along the forest floor; it’s roots resembling squid’s tentacles, pushing it along.

  “They failed to mention that in the goddamn guide book,” Roslyn spat, shaking her head. The crisp, organic smells on the wind threatened to cause her to wretch. Her mouth had turned watery.

  “That’s because there is no guide book, Roslyn,” said Hattie, her jet-black hair shimmering in the slightly brighter than our sun’s starlight. “It’s amazing. Just amazing.”

  She craned her n
eck to see if any more saplings moved. Most of the trees were older and had already taken root. A few slithered here and there.

  Roslyn had grown up on Earth, and though she never made it down to the planet on her first visit, she’d been close enough to act like she’d been there before. She’d been a teenager, visiting her father on the orbiting base, during the war. Mother and her had made the long trip. It was the last time she’d seen the old man. And now she was coming back out to see him again, now as an adult.

  “Check our little murdering bastard again,” Roslyn said as she looked one last time around them. Four more miles, let them be good for four more miles.

  Hattie checked the prisoner. He slept soundly after the latest blow an hour before.

  Midway through the changing of the guard, the forest took on an entirely different sound, smell and general atmosphere. Roslyn spat because the air that filled her mouth tasted acrid and bitter.

  From behind various walking trees stepped half a dozen armed men and women. They were a pack of tattooed, heavily pierced loggers. They’d used the moving trees to skulk through the forest undetected toward them.

  Roslyn, sensing the danger, dove behind a felled tree analogue, or was it a giant vegetable? The rotting tree-vegetable was hollowed and Roslyn crawled inside of it. She found a hole to look out and watched as Hattie confronted the posse. That bitch is going to think I totally bailed on her ass, she presumed.

  Hattie, thanks to all her training, was ready for a fight. She pulled her blunted sword from over her shoulder and knelt into the warrior’s stance. This was for close quarter fighting if it came to that. She then pulled her pistol with the other hand. This was for more long-range combat. Either way, training was over. Now was her true final exam.

  Roslyn scurried along the gooey, leafy underbrush, trying to find the high ground. She frequently paused to hear the conversation between Hattie and the posse. The only thing Roslyn could hear came when Hattie’s voice rose.

  “The Holy Avians require justice…” said Hattie, her devotion dripping from every word. To Roslyn, it sounded rehearsed, because she knew it was. Roslyn shook her head, the precious little sheep, gotta love her.

  She crawled to another position. She could make out the loudest inbred geek, covered in tattoos. She aimed her cable at Tattoo’s legs. The geek dropped.

  Using the walking trees for cover, Roslyn quickly blustered onto the scene, stun guns blazing pulses of energy at the posse. Hattie twirled and struck Tattoos across the back of the head with her sword. He fell and was out cold before he hit the ground. Sparkling, red dust, full of fools gold, rose and settled as the girls rolled and shot and dove for cover.

  “We got to get the hells out of here, Hat!” Roslyn said, shooting a woman who’d turned over on her side and blinked. “Stay down, bitch!”

  The ladies ran, pushing the hover sled along in front of them. After about five minutes of running, there came shouts in the distance. Roslyn assumed more posse members had caught up to the first party.

  They ran until they couldn’t. Sweat drenched and huffing, they pushed onward.

  They found the over-priced rust heap parked where they’d left it two days before. When she first moved to New York, when she told her mother that she refused to go to college because she just needed to define herself first, her and her friends attempted to find the word for that feeling of being swept up in the cosmic momentum, or karmic rhythm. But there wasn’t one strong enough. They invented the term: karythm. Seeing that rust heap of a hover truck unmolested was one big happy karythm. This gave Roslyn the kick in the ass she needed and she hurried to unlock it and open the bed’s hatch door. She’d been lacking desperately in the karythm department of late.

  “They’re gonna get you,” said the prisoner with a wry grin. Hattie tapped his forehead with her sword and his eyes rolled back in his head and his mouth fell open.

  “Don’t you wish that was socially acceptable in normal life?” Roslyn said as she pushed the hover sled up the truck’s ramp and dispensed the prisoner into the cage they’d brought along. The celebration came to a crashing halt as the truck rocked from a loud explosion. Someone shot the side of it with a shotgun blast.

  “Come on out and bring Klitty!” shouted a voice outside.

  Hattie unsheathed her sword and drew her gun pistol. She strode to the bed’s door and opened them, using her foot to kick the button. Roslyn flipped switches and pressed pedals with growing agitation and utter shock. We don’t owe these jackanapes any explanation other than what we’ve already given.

  “We ain’t lettin’ ya’ll take Klitty,” Tattoo said, raising his rifle. It wasn’t a gun set to stun as Hattie became all too aware. She dove just as the laser bolt burned into the metal wall behind her, cutting a quarter-sized hole clean through it. She felt the heat on her cheek. In mid flight she shot, but missed just over Tattoos’ shoulder.

  Now was the time, Roslyn told herself. A combination of genuine concern and high annoyance swirled inside of her. They’d need to have a serious talk after this shit.

  She raised the truck and turned it to hover between Hattie and the posse. As she spun the nose around she lit up the high-powered Gatlin guns. They’d cost quite a bit extra, but Roslyn decided at that moment they were well worth it. What was the cost of their lives? The cannons mounted below the grill blasted the entire forest. Walking trees and humans exploded before her eyes. No simulation could have prepared her for such horror.

  “NO!” shouted Hattie as she climbed onboard. The bed doors ground to a close and Hattie hurried to the passenger seat to strap in.

  “You killed them,” she said in shock and horror. The reality of it had yet to sink in to Roslyn who focused solely on getting them the hells out of there. She’d panicked. She’d done what needed to be done. She rented the Gatlin guns out of inexperience and trepidation. She’d used them out of basic fear.

  They rode along through the giant vegetable-trees in silence. Roslyn tried to erase the gore and mayhem from her mind. She’d killed all those people in an instant. Suddenly she grabbed a trash bag and vomited into it.

  Hattie buried herself in her sketchbook, drawing the walking trees in rich detail with her pencil. It was her place to crawl into. She’d been an art major once upon a time, before switching to criminal justice of all things. When Roslyn first met her, she was a graffiti artist from the Bronx.

  “It was us or them, Hat,” justified Roslyn after a few more moments of silence passed between them. Her entire body felt numb and cold. A falling sensation washed over her.

  “The Avians won’t be happy,” said Hattie, fighting tears.

  “No,” whispered Roslyn. “They sure the fuck won’t.”

  *

  Planet Athena:

  Devil Bill Talbert

  Planet Athena orbited a sub-giant star fifty light years from Earth. But also visible in the sky was the sub-giant’s red dwarf sister. While the coastlands of the large continents were made up of very tall forests, a bristly type of grass that proved very nutritious to livestock from Earth dominated the inlands. The grass turned out to be preternaturally healthy to cattle in particular. So many humans settled there to farm. Before the war, Athena fed most of the colonies. After the war, the infrastructure that helped move all that beef and milk and cheese had collapsed. There was still a market for beef, but transporting it was much riskier. After the indigenous Amazons began to ambush the corporate transports, the booming cattle industry collapsed. The few farmers left had treaties with their local Amazonian tribes. They were mostly men and woman who supported the rebellion; the locals who’d grown up on Athena and fought against Earth and her corporate interests. Now these locals were rich cattle barons with far less competition. They had a famous slogan on Athena: Taxes Are For Asses!

  A passenger shuttle zoomed along a mountain pass above a lush grassy valley.

  Nervously, a porter strode up the aisle and extended his hand to shake a sleeping man’s shoulder. The shoulder
belonged to William “Devil Bill” Talbert, a ruggedly handsome man in his mid thirties. He was tall, lean, and ropy strong with a premature greying at the temples of his otherwise brown hair. The stubble on his face outlined his square, hardened jawline. His natural expression was a deadly scowl.

  The porter’s wrist was caught before it reached the curved ball of his shoulder.

  “You told me to wake you, sir?” stammered the porter, intimidated by the steely blue eyes that grimaced up at him. “We’re within half a mile from New Shanghai, sir. Or Shanglo if you worship the Birds.”

  Talbert grunted and sat up. His head swirled a bit from the bug juice he’d drowned in the night before. He hacked as per usual when first waking. Nothing some coffee and a splash of water to the face couldn’t handle.

  Straddling the magnetic hitch between two speeding shuttle cars, Talbert checked his pearl handled laser pistols. Fully charged, check.

  He bent his knees and leapt. Flaps opened on his leather jacket that glided him toward a forest and then suddenly below him appeared a steep ridge. Son of a…

  Talbert head over heeled it down the embankment, eventually skidding to a halt in the dust. His jacket’s elbows had ripped and his arms were bloody, as were his hip and knees. But he stood and dusted himself off as if he’d simply tripped on his porch.

  Shielding the bright sun with both hands, he could make out the town in the next valley. His fall had given him a considerable head start on the shuttle. He’d beat it to the station.

  Four bandits lingered around the station as the shuttle sat down on the pad. Shotguns concealed but cocked and fully charged. They watched from various angles as people disembarked. The bandits exchanged glances and shrugs as the crowd thinned and dispersed. A general sense of confusion followed.