Cosmic savior a space op.., p.1
Cosmic Savior: (A Space Opera Adventure) (Interstellar Gunrunner Book 3), page 1
INTERSTELLAR GUNRUNNER
©2021 JAMES WOLANYK
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ALSO IN THE SERIES
INTERSTELLAR GUNRUNNER
TIME BREAKER
COSMIC SAVIOR
Contents
Our Story So Far
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
Thank you for reading Cosmic Savior
More In Sci-Fi
ABOUT JAMES WOLANYK
Our Story So Far
As most of you will surely recall, my name is Bodhi Drezek, and I’m a force of nature. An arms dealer, romantic, purveyor of fine narcotics, art collector… why, the list goes on and on. But enough about that. You picked up the third volume of my memoir (which I insist my eventual patron entitles Memoirs of an Interstellar Gunrunner) to learn more about my universe-saving exploits.
A lot has happened thus far, and there are surely many other books on your reading list, so I don’t blame you if you’ve forgotten some of the preceding events. (Unless you have a neurogenic memory-boosting implant—in which case, read more carefully.) Anyhow, I’ve opted to be gracious and include a brief summary of the previous two volumes.
Our story began with me deep, deep in debt through zero fault of my own. Eager to settle up, I took on a job to help a gang of unruly insurgents steal a “valuable object” from the Halcius Hegemony, whom you may also know as cosmic tyrants. Things went a bit sideways when my crew and I discovered that the loot was none other than an ancient, apocalyptic creature.
Or so we thought.
See, the creature wasn’t what I’d been told. It turns out (and this is where things get bonkers) that the creature was part of a larger plot related to the real apocalyptic problem. Put shortly, the creature was transported forward from the past to help some truly terrible people send a god-turned-bioweapon into the future. And by future, I mean our present reality.
My brave crew and I embarked on a hair-raising chase to prevent this bioweapon from being unleashed on the universe. Along the way, we picked up a beautiful yet psychopathic alien named Amodari (who had a crush on me, mind you), a crazed madman from the past named Seeker Palamar, and a few other nasties. And my, what a chase it was! Unfortunately, after much trickery and double-crossing, we discovered that we had a traitor in our midst.
Seeker Palamar, the man we assumed was capable of disarming the bioweapon, was actually one of the aforementioned terrible people trying to unleash said bioweapon. And he succeeded. As a result, this bioweapon (henceforth known as Kruthara) began spreading and assimilating new bodies to build an army. An unstoppable, unkillable army.
And what did I get for my role in trying to stop Kruthara from being unleashed? A lengthy imprisonment. Yes, you heard that right. I did the noblest thing possible, and I still got shafted for it.
Which is why our story begins with me in captivity, held against my will by the Halcius Hegemony and my least favorite femme fatale, Amodari.
Prologue
Let the record show that I would rather be stabbed, skinned, and buried alive than spend one day in the Contrition. At least with my chosen series of events, you suffer once and die. Not so in the Contrition.
If you’ve never heard of such a place, consider yourself lucky. The Contrition was the euphemistic title of the Hegemony’s darkest, most depraved circle of hell. Think I’m being my typical overdramatic self? Well, consider this. Every criminal worth their salt was known to carry, at a minimum, three or four ways to off themselves in the event they were facing a stint in that place. Whatever wicked afterlife you received was surely better than spending one minute inside the Contrition’s confines. And no, one minute is not hyperbole.
That was the real kicker about the Hegemony’s prison-slash-torture funhouse. Inside it, there was no sense of time. Literally. The bastards had found and implemented every conceivable way to break the fragile mind of a humanoid.
Now, by this point you’re probably thinking, “Get on with the damn story, Bodhi. Feed us the action!”
Hold your proverbial horses.
There’s a reason I’m offering you some context on the Contrition rather than dropping you into a real-time scene. There is no proper place to begin. Not really, anyway. The entire facility was engineered to undermine any sense of normal perception. You had a constant deluge of sights, sounds, shapes, odors—but were they real or just a hallucination? A memory or a dream? Had you been in there for a decade or a day? It was—and still is—nearly impossible to cobble together the facts of what happened during my stay in that five-star palace of madness.
So, with that disclaimer out of the way, we’ll begin with the first moment I know to be real. Or, at least, the one I am most certain is real.
I’d just vomited stomach acid on the concrete floor. This is an important detail—through some stroke of insight, I’d realized that I never vomited in the hallucinations. Seeing and smelling that putrid pool gave me a flicker of joy I hope to never experience again. It may be hard for you to understand, but when you’ve just fallen down the rabbit hole of being hunted, tortured, and castrated in sixteen consecutive (and lifelike) virtual nightmares, it is a rare treat to be existing in reality.
At that moment, the Hegemony’s intermittent memory-blanker flickered off and allowed me to put the pieces together—again. I was in the Contrition. Naked. Shivering.
I also realized, much to my dismay, that the Hegemony had once again flipped one of the neural scramblers embedded in the walls. In essence, this caused my brain to perceive my hands as my feet and vice versa. Very hard to walk on your hands, let me tell you. Especially when your brain has also been tricked into thinking that the floor is made of superheated rusty needles.
Thankfully, they’d turned off the floor illusion. For the time being. Hope and pray that you never get so excited to see real stomach acid on a real concrete floor.
Slowly, painfully, I slotted more pieces together. Stomach acid meant I hadn’t eaten food in considerable time. This, in turn, meant they’d resumed one of their favorite treatments: supplying me with water-and-glucose sculptures that resembled delicious meals. A piping-hot noodle bowl with braised meat? Nope, just water and glucose. Curry flatbread? Surprise! Water and glucose.
This was just one of the many wondrous ways the Hegemony chipped away at sanity. The real name of the game was to break a sentient being down to nothing more than a blubbering, helpless mess. This was often achieved by a process known as “gaslighting.” My torturers would often claim they had never directly harmed me. This was true, after a fashion. The Contrition’s torture cycles never did leave any physical marks. Instead, they relied on simulated torture that flirted with the line between real and imagined.
By this point in my stay, I’d been disemboweled, drowned, burnt to a crisp, smothered, crushed, shredded, and de-nailed hundreds of thousands of times. Virtually, of course. But I ask you this—what is the line between virtual and actual when you don’t know you’re in a dream? That was precisely how it worked. You felt every needle piercing your eyeball and every scalpel gutting you like a fish, but while inside the virtual agony, you had no access to memories of the “real world.” All you knew was pain and fear.
Believe it or not, if you asked any Hegemony tor
Yes, that’s right. This was all done to “reform” the prisoner. The logic, as I understand it now, is that subjecting one to extreme virtual torment and reality-twisting illusions drives one toward what is actually real. And to the Halcius Hegemony, nothing was real except their god.
This might explain why the only decoration in my cell was a massive green circle painted on one wall. This green circle, obviously, represented Halcius, the one and true creator of reality.
“Give in to his will,” a flowery voice instructed me via hidden surround-sound speakers. “Go to him and profess your love. Feel him enter your heart.”
Much as I wanted to scowl at that mysterious voice, I knew it was my only way out. Well, a way to get out faster, anyhow. More worship, less time in the cell. Resigned, I dragged my broken sack of skin over to the green circle and plopped painfully onto my knees. Then I gazed up at the circle and began the performance.
“Oh, glorious Halcius, creator of all that is and shall ever be…”
You might assume I said these words in a mocking, ironic tone to spite my captors. Nope. I said them with all the passion and sincerity of a diehard Hegemony cultist. I believe I even had a few tears running down my sunken cheeks.
“Blessed Halcius, forgive my transgressions… may your divine intellect reign supreme!”
But here’s the thing about forced worship—no matter how badly you want to be genuine, you just can’t.
“You resist his love,” the same flowery voice said in a weary, rebuking tone. “Your neural waves indicate that you are falsifying your devotion.”
It took all my mental energy to resist screaming and tearing my hair out. I’d tried, day in and day out, to love Halcius. But each time I got close to anything even remotely resembling love, my higher brain functions kicked in and whispered something like, “Gee, Halcius sure is a prick.” Don’t get me wrong—I’d had far lewder and more suggestive thoughts before. But by this point in my ordeal, I was past being spiteful. I just wanted to get the hell out.
Anyway, the point is, the Hegemony could tell when I wasn’t really devoted to Halcius. The damned implant they’d popped into my head ensured that. Somewhere beyond my concrete cell, some low-ranking technician or artificial intelligence was surely monitoring my neural readings. The minute even a flicker of doubt passed through my mind (against my wishes, no less), my attempts to submit to Halcius were deemed inauthentic.
Thus, I was caught in a wicked cycle: Try to love Halcius. Remember I’m being tortured in the name of Halcius. Resent Halcius. Get told I’m a nonbeliever who needs to love Halcius.
Rinse and repeat, ad insanitium.
Upon opening my eyes, I was met with another unpleasant yet familiar sight: the holographic body of Amodari Halnok. She was leaning up against the nearby wall, folding one seductively long leg over the other.
“Is your mind still intact, my love?”
I smiled at her digitally rendered form. “Enough to request another pardon.”
“Oh, sweet Bodhi,” she cooed. “You know I’m hard at work trying to secure that.”
In case you’ve forgotten, Amodari Halnok was one of the few people with the clout to get me out of the Contrition. Her mother was Illuminated Preserver Tanu Halnok, one of the most powerful figures in the Hegemony. Unfortunately, Amodari was also an inustrazan—a consciousness-devouring creature capable of molding her appearance to suit my deepest desires. Oh, and she was madly, madly in love with me.
This last fact would’ve served me well, if not for the fact that inustrazans could also read minds. Similar to my “worship Halcius” dilemma, Amodari was able to sense when I wasn’t truly reciprocating her feelings.
“Just let me out,” I told her. “I promise that we’ll be a fantastic couple.”
She smirked. “You say that time and time again, yet your mind suggests otherwise… you would try to run from me.”
“Release me, and we’ll find out together.”
“If only it were possible.” She moved to my side and crouched down, then began stroking my hair. Or trying to. Her holographic hand passed right through my skull. “My mother’s conditions were very strict, Bodhi. If you want to be transferred to our hive-world, your heart must be in the right place. Is it there yet?”
“… Yes.”
Her lips scrunched. “Why do you insist on lying, Bodhi? My love for you is everlasting. Yet you play these games…”
“But I do love you! Come visit me in the flesh and find out!”
“No need,” she said wearily. “You see, I have the same interface as the Contrition’s wardens. Each time you lie to me, I know it. We both know it. If you spent less time trying to dream up escape plans, and more time opening your heart to me, you would be out by now.”
“I haven’t thought about escaping in weeks. Months? How long have I been in here?”
“A clever attempt, my darling, but you know I’m not allowed to disclose that sort of information.” She gave me a patronizing smile and a virtual boop on my nose. “Between you and me, I’d tell you everything if I could. But alas, our contact is monitored by”—she looked away for a moment, presumably at whoever was in the room with her—“disagreeable individuals.”
Amodari’s thinly veiled distaste wasn’t lost on me. I knew precisely which “individuals” were responsible for my continued confinement here. Foremost among them was Grand Mediator Kemedis, who had personally recommended that I be sentenced to the Contrition for an indeterminate length of time.
No surprise to me, of course. The woman had been after my head for years. And she had, in fact, promised me a cool one thousand years in this place. In Contrition time, that was eternity.
Now, if you’re familiar with Hegemony leadership ranks, you might be surprised here. How was a lowly grand mediator able to overrule the appeal of Amodari’s mother, an illuminated preserver? Well, in simple terms, not even the Avatar of Halcius himself could’ve prevented my punishment. That’s what happens when you’re wrongfully accused of unleashing an ancient alien bioweapon. If anything, it was the Hegemony itself that had cocked that one up. But hey, what do I know? I was just their scapegoat.
So far as I could tell, my only way out of the Contrition in the near future was to convince Amodari that I did, in fact, love her. Don’t ask me to explain the mechanics behind that. All I know is that within the Hegemony, inustrazans were just shy of royalty, and they didn’t choose human mates often—almost never, in truth. Still, the Hegemony loved inustrazans. Loved them so much, in fact, that there was an archaic law allowing inustrazan matriarchs to legally take Hegemony prisoners as concubines. The catch, however, was one that I currently faced—their love had to be mutual and neurologically recorded.
This all probably sounds complicated and insane. And yes, yes it was. But I didn’t write the rulebooks.
The point is, if I managed to “fall in love” with Amodari, her mother could use some obscure legal loophole to get me out. And by “out,” I mean transferred to the inustrazan hive-world, where I’d be branded a literal mating slave for the rest of my life.
Terrible choices, right? Such are your options when stranded in the Contrition.
“How are things outside?” I asked.
It’s strange, thinking back on it, but imagining the universe beyond the Contrition probably kept me sane. It was all I had.
“Bodhi, you know my tongue is rather tied,” Amodari said. “All those worries would be better spent as fuel for learning to trust me.”
“Just give me something. Please.”
She squinted at me, then drew up to her full height with a cold stare. “You’re worrying about that harlot on your ship, aren’t you? Precious Chaska?”
