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  Androids and Aliens

  (Book #3 of the Star Runner Trilogy)

  by

  B. V. Larson

  Star Runner Trilogy:

  Star Runner

  Fire Fight

  Androids and Aliens

  Illustration © Tom Edwards TomEdwardsDesign.com

  Copyright © 2022 by Iron Tower Press, Inc.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.

  Chapter One

  After chasing the alien horde away from Vindar, my crew needed a break. Even more important was the simple fact that we’d committed a considerable list of crimes in our efforts to save the Conclave. The long, slow arms of the law were catching up to us.

  We made it back to Baron Trask’s planet, Gladius, without much trouble. Trask gathered his fully human brothers among the Sword World planets and moved to destroy those who were Tulk-infested. Over time, he won the day.

  With all that conflict going on, one would think a lowly smuggler could scoot by the androids in their patrol vessels unnoticed. But even as a struggle that amounted to a civil war between the human and Tulk-infested pirates raged, they kept a lookout for me, my crew, and our tiny ship.

  Once we left the Sword Worlds, things went from worrisome to outright alarming.

  “Captain, we’re getting pinged again,” Sosa told me as we entered Tranquility’s stellar zone. She was studying a very sensitive and highly illegal set of sniffer algorithms. They were hacks, really, software tools that searched the local planetary grid for anything that was looking for us.

  “The Conclave patrols are still looking for us?” I asked. “What about our latest identity edits?”

  “You would think we’d be in the clear… but we aren’t. Maybe we didn’t get the best identity work from the pirates of the Sword Worlds.”

  I grumbled aloud. She was probably right. Baron Trask had offered to help us out for free—but he’d probably farmed the work to a low-bidding hacker. Who knew what new fake identity he’d bought and stapled onto my ship? For all I knew, I was Brak the Child-thief now, according to the law.

  “All right… I guess we have to forget about a vacation on Tranquility.”

  My crew groaned aloud. Tranquility was a pleasure planet and everyone’s favorite destination.

  I ignored their complaints. The longer I looked at the warnings coming in from our software, the bigger my frown became. Coming to a fateful decision, I touched my microphone and addressed everyone aboard my small ship.

  “Crew of the Royal Fortune,” I said, “our plans have changed. This ship and everyone aboard are too hot to be visible right now. We’re going to have to go to ground. The crew will disperse, and the ship will go into hiding.”

  “For how long?” Rose asked, her voice alarmed and upset. She was the sweetest member of my team and also my current bunkmate.

  “Hmm…” I said, thinking it over. “Six months. Maybe a year. Until the Conclave cops forget about us.”

  “William, they’re androids. They’ll never forget.”

  “No, that’s not exactly true. They won’t forget us, but they’ll lower the priority of our capture over time. They’ll move on to more important targets, and we’ll be able to travel around openly again.”

  “What about our shares?” Jort complained loudly. He was the most outspoken of my pirates, and the most laser-focused on the bottom line—his bottom line.

  “You’ll get your payouts—with a fifty-percent reduction. That’s standard for ship maintenance and all the costs we’ve incurred over this last mission.”

  There was a lot of squawking after that, but I referred them back to their contracts. Vindar officials had paid us with tons of refined Rhodium, and we’d managed to sell off most of the stuff, but overall our paychecks had become somewhat thin.

  Jort complained the loudest, but after I pointed out that he’d put a lot of holes in the hull with antipersonnel cannon ricochets, he eventually shut up.

  Looking over the roster of planets where we could expect a cooler welcome, I chose Scorpii, Jort’s home star system. They were half-criminal out there, as well as poor and a bit slow-witted. If a group of people could slip in and out of any system easily, it would be this one.

  Jort was overjoyed about this, naturally, as it left him with no need to pay for a fare home. We dropped him off at the spaceport and saw no more of him.

  “This is awful,” Rose said. Her narrow shoulders sagged under the punishing gravity. “I can’t believe anyone can live here. Just standing still and breathing is exhausting.”

  She was suffering the most due to the high gravity field, which pulled at every inch of your body at about double the normal rate. She walked in a stagger, and I cautioned her not to let her balance get off-center, or she’d fall hard. It wasn’t uncommon for someone who wasn’t accustomed to high gravity worlds to stumble and break bones when they hit the floor.

  As quickly as she could, she found her way to a ticket booth and scanned her fake identity implants. They let her board a transport and just like that—she was gone.

  Sosa sidled up to me and stood near. I glanced at her. “Where are you headed?”

  She looked kind of shy. “I don’t know. I… I don’t really have a home. Kerson is dead and his satellite is abandoned, remember? I was planning on taking a vacation on Tranquility, but that’s out of the question now.”

  “Right…” I said, realizing she really didn’t have anywhere to go. She certainly didn’t want to sit around on Scorpii. And nearby Prospero? That place was as dull as dishwater, and they hated outsiders there. “Hmm…”

  Then I noticed the approach of another enigmatic figure from my small crew. He was a half-machine, half-man hybrid known as Huan. He was a bounty-hunter from the Faustian Chain. He’d sort of attached himself to me after I’d passed up killing him and gave him a bigger mission instead.

  “What about you, Huan?”

  “What about me, sir?”

  “I mean, what are you going to do while we all rest up between missions?”

  He blinked at me with his one flesh eye. The other one was a camera, and it never blinked. “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, we normally take breaks between missions, see? We’ve just finished with Vindar, and—”

  Huan raised one claw-like metal hand. “But Captain, we haven’t finished our mission. We must not rest. There is no time for such frivolities.”

  “Uh… what? What do you mean we haven’t, ‘finished?’ Vindar is clean—no aliens! Even the Tulk have gone into hiding.”

  Huan studied me with his two very different, very
disturbing eyes. “Cleansing Vindar was never my mission. Or at least, it was only a very small part of it.”

  Sosa and I studied him.

  “What do you think our mission is, Huan?” Sosa asked reasonably.

  “We must erase the Skaintz from the cosmos, of course. This requires locating and destroying every one of them.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “It’s a difficult task, admittedly.”

  I began to speak, but Sosa raised her hand before I could give him a dose of reality. “Huan, how do you think we should go about destroying all these aliens? There must be billions of them running around on a dozen different planets by now.”

  “Probably trillions. And there are nearly a hundred colony worlds in the Faustian Chain alone.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “We’re not done with the entire job. But such a struggle will likely take the rest of our lives and require the help of every human in the Conclave.”

  “Exactly. Under such circumstances I see no room in our mission description for hiding and creating delays.”

  Sosa threw up her hands. “We’ve already done more than our part, you crazy half-robot. Saving everyone isn’t our job.”

  Huan studied her for a moment, then turned to me. “It seems that Sosa has resigned from our crew, Captain. We should seek new members.”

  “You know what?” I said, pointing a finger at him. “I know who you should serve with.”

  “Who?”

  “That tall fellow, Lucas Droad. The guy who claimed to be a governor from the Chain.”

  “Droad was once the planetary governor of the colony world known as Garm.”

  “Whatever, whatever. That’s your man. He’ll never quit, and he’ll never take a break. If I’d known that you were going to be this dogmatic, I would have left you on Vindar with him.”

  Huan thought this over for a minute, and he finally nodded. “Very well. I will take my wealth and seek Droad. I’ll return to Vindar as quickly as I can.”

  I smiled and offered him my hand to shake, but he only studied it vaguely with his artificial eye until I dropped it.

  He left us standing there in the spaceport and moved away rapidly.

  Sosa laughed when he was gone. “You dodged him fast.”

  “He’s a good guy, but he kind of grates on you after a while.”

  “Did you see the way he studied your hand? He reminded me of a dog wondering where his treat was.”

  We both laughed, and we headed for a canteen. There we enjoyed drinks and sandwiches and a good view of the blast-pans. After a few beers, I started to think maybe Sosa wouldn’t be such a bad sort to be left with. She was the last of my crew, and—

  “Captain?” Sosa asked me. “Is that…? Oh no… you don’t think…?”

  She was pointing out the window toward the spaceport fields. There, a ship was taking off.

  It was a small, sleek vessel. The engines were too big for the craft, jetting out a plume of exhaust that dwarfed the ship. In a few seconds, that gush of heat and fire was only a distant spark.

  Sosa and I looked at one another in astonishment. Both of us were left with our mouths hanging open.

  “That was the Royal Fortune,” Sosa said when she could breathe again. “Did Jort steal it?”

  “No,” I said, downing the rest of my beer. It had a bitter taste in it that I hadn’t noticed before. “It was Huan… He’s a zealot—and I’m an idiot. I should have seen it coming. He wanted nothing more than to go fight the aliens.”

  Sosa nodded slowly. “What was it he said? That he was going to go back to Vindar as quickly as possible?”

  I sighed. “It looks like he meant what he said.”

  Chapter Two

  It wasn’t the first time I’d been left marooned on a backwater planet with no ship and few prospects. Fortunately, I had some cash with me this time.

  Royal Fortune really had cost me in repairs—but nowhere near at levels I’d represented to my crew. My misrepresentation of the expenses had turned into wisdom now that I had fallen from grace. Perhaps this was all for the better. Maybe I’d have my vacation, and I might even find my ship again when I decided to go looking for her. After all, Huan hadn’t said he was stealing it permanently—he’d only indicated a strong desire to return to the front lines out at Vindar.

  “Captain, we have to stop that thief!” Sosa said.

  I shrugged. The pinpoint of flame had vanished in the sky. Huan and my ship were both gone. “Are you seriously suggesting that we should report our own ship as stolen? Let’s say, by some miracle, the patrolmen manage to capture Royal Fortune. Do you think it might show up as suspicious in some database or another?”

  “Of course it will…”

  “Yes. Then we’ll never get the ship back.”

  “We should never have trusted that bounty hunter. He’s half-machine and half-crazy.”

  I agreed with her there, but then the conversation died. We weren’t in a strong position.

  “Look,” I said after a quiet minute had passed. “I can get another ship. That one isn’t my first, and she won’t be my last. I’ve got money and time. We might even be able to buy passage out there and recover the vessel.”

  Sosa didn’t meet my eye. Unfortunately, I suspected she was seeing today’s events in a very negative light.

  Finally, she raised her head and gazed at me evenly. She lifted her hand to me, and her fingers trembled a bit. I wasn’t sure if that was due to emotion or the powerful tug of Scorpii’s gravity.

  “Captain… I’ll be leaving your service now.”

  “Really?” I said. “Even you, Sosa?”

  She shrugged. “You said you wanted to break everyone up and lie low. This is our chance to do exactly that.”

  I thought it over, and I immediately understood. Moments ago, I’d been the captain of a smuggling ship. Now, I was a fugitive with a bit of cash in my pocket—and not much else.

  Accordingly, I shook her hand and faked a smile. “You’re right. This is exactly what I wanted. When this all blows over, we’ll get our ship back and pull the old crew together. You’ll still be interested in joining up again when that day comes, right?”

  She studied the table between us and nodded. “I will be. I… I actually enjoyed much of my time spent with you.”

  Our meal ended, and I stood up to pay the check. I hugged her, and she left quickly. Was that rapid retreat due to regret, or to an urgency to escape this hot, heavy world? I wasn’t sure, but I decided to believe she was full of sorrow and private yearning.

  I left a pitiful tip and headed for the streets. Taking stock of things, I found I’d ended up with a spacers’ bag half-full of personal belongings—almost none of which meant anything to me. My accounts—I checked them just to be sure—were entirely whole and filled with virtual cash. That was as safe as you could get when the Conclave patrolmen were looking for you.

  The rest of the day was spent with my usual efforts to throw off any possible pursuers, real or imagined. I created several identities and discarded them rapidly. My best move came when I paid several parolees to take these identities and exit the star system under assumed names. Jort’s people were unimaginative, so I only had to give these parolees some funds and small packets of potting soil. I claimed these packets contained a powerful hallucinogenic and gave the men instructions to smuggle them off-planet on my behalf.

  One and all of these small-time criminals took the bait. Each wore a variation of my own name or some other alias that might be deemed suspicious. Believing they were transporting a tiny quantity of contraband, they took their missions seriously.

  Once I was out of sight, most of them discarded the packets into handy receptacles before boarding their flights. A few kept theirs, possibly planning to partake of the mysterious substance on the trip. I had no way of knowing, nor did I care. I just wanted them to travel far and wide as red herrings to anyone who was on my trail.

  It was odd doing this sort of thing
out of reflex. Usually, it was an utter waste of time and resources. Upon occasion, however, I knew the practice yielded big dividends—mostly by keeping me out of prison.

  Secure in my obscurity, I rented a jungle bungalow down near the beaches. This was never done by visiting tourists. As Scorpii was a high gravity world, it went without saying that the air pressure at sea level was nearly unbearable. Being from a world that also had a higher-than-average gravitational tug helped me to adapt.

  I lived in my rented cabin for weeks, walking the beaches and wearing next to nothing in the way of clothing. I took frequent swims in the ocean to cool off. As a side effect, the natural buoyancy of sea water was an excellent relief from the gravity, so I spent hours snorkeling and trolling the bottom for free sources of food.

  After approximately three weeks of this “vacation” I came out of the waves dripping wet and tanned the color of old bronze. To my utter surprise, a man stood on the beach just beyond the reach of the waves. He appeared to be waiting for me.

  Some men might have dived back in and swam deep. Others might have attacked him. I took a different approach.

  “Hullo!” I said, waving a wet arm in his direction. “We don’t get many visitors out here on the beach!”

  The man stood still. He didn’t speak. He didn’t move at all.

  I approached him anyway, faking a big smile. “Are you my landlord?” I asked. “I hope there isn’t any trouble with my bill, I just—”

  “Captain Gorman…” the man began, and as soon as I heard him speak, I knew the truth.

  He was an android. A Q-class, if I didn’t miss my guess. They were the most sophisticated types, able to appear almost human in their manners and speech-patterns.

  A less charitable man would have attacked for certain, now that this stranger had made several critical errors. He’d identified himself as a robot, which meant he was almost certainly connected to the Conclave government. Sure, there were crews and servants who were androids, but most of them were cops.