The Court of Crusty Killings: A Captain Space Hardcore Adventure Read online

  The Court of Crusty Killings!

  A Captain Space Hardcore Adventure

  Michael Ronson

  Copyright 2015 © Michael Ronson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

  The information in this book is distributed on an “as is” basis, without warranty. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author nor the publisher shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Dedications

  To Robin Honeyman, for being a wellspring of great ideas, none of which you shall ever act upon yourself.

  To Mark Sandison, for your tolerance in the face of me reading this to you. Your grace and smugness never faltered.

  To Donald Lyall, for believing in this with the blind destructive faith of a religious zealot or a suicide bomber.

  To Terry Jethro Castle, for being an oasis of colonialism in the Orient and for always coming in like a wrecking ball.

  To my parents, for raising a son who could waste so much time on something so stupid for so little reason

  This is for each of you.

  Sorry

  Table of Contents

  What the Critics are Saying

  Foreword

  Part One: The Beginningest Part

  One- An Introduction, Of Sorts

  Two- A More Proper Introduction and a Royal Audience

  Three- Queens A Go-Go

  Four- The Game is Afoot

  Part Two: An Inspector Falls

  Five- First Steps and Subterfuge

  Six- Many Meetings and Meaty Matings

  Seven- Further Down the Rabid Hole

  Eight- Initiations and Interrogations

  Nine- Auspicious Meetings and New Heights

  Ten- Tea and Revolutions

  Eleven- The Straight Dope

  Twelve- Investigations and Meditations in the Rainstorm

  Thirteen- Clandestine Liberations and Personal Revelations

  Fourteen- Deadly Confrontations

  Fifteen- A Killer Revealed

  Part Three: Once Upon a Revolution

  Sixteen- A Storm of Fists and a Flurry of Feet

  Seventeen- An Ascent and a Combatant

  Eighteen- Even Deadlier Confrontations

  Nineteen – A Perilous Pursuit

  Twenty- Sky Battles

  Twenty-One- A Daring Balloon Assault

  Twenty-Two- A View to a Kill

  Twenty-Three- A Gassy Valediction

  Twenty-Four- Revelations of a Revolution

  Twenty-Five- Pieces of Peace in Some Summit

  Epilogue

  Appendix

  -About the Author

  -An Interview with Michael Ronson

  -Praise for the Author

  -Author Bibliography

  -Artwork

  -Follow Michael Ronson

  What the Critics Are Saying…

  An absolute Tour de France.

  Forest White-Acre, The Daily Review

  As gripping and well put together as the Stanley 189765 MaxSteel Multi-angle Vice.

  Jeff Delaney, Vices Ahoy! The Vice Lover’s Magazine

  Like if a young Stephen King met Shakespeare.

  Jeremy Holocaulfield, An Owner’s Guide to Beef

  If Ray Bradbury met Gordon DeChauncey, this book could conceivably be in his pocket.

  Jemimah Fountain, A Complete History of the Third Reich

  Like if a young Charles Dickens met an unaccountably furious Leo Tolstoy - on acid!

  Terence Trent D’Arby, Stop! Or my Mom Will Shoot a Minority

  Like a disillusioned Raymond Crackson meeting a semi-literate Romanian gymnast… on acid!

  Jeremy Clarkson, My Life in the Closet

  This one book makes all other sci-fi authors look, quite frankly, like obese toddlers scrawling misspelled curse words on the wall of an abandoned factory with a piece of dog excrement, taking breaks intermittently to kill and eat diseased vermin with shards of broken glass. In Doncaster.

  Philomena Trent, My Bloody Big Book of Book Reviews

  A chilling prophecy of our nearly certain atomic doom. Urgent, brave and utterly vital.

  Will Self, The Guardian (Reviewing Nick Cozlawalski’s Black is the Night, and Wet is the River)

  A heady mix of romance, eroticism, lurid descriptions and anatomically detailed pop-ups.

  Jeremy Flaxenham, The Spectator (Reviewing T.E Selwin’s Phantastical Phallus Phunground)

  Really long.

  Gary Tram, Living with Attention Deficit Dis-Oh, Look, a Shetland Pony!

  Foreword

  Hello and welcome to the book.

  If this is your first time reading a book, please remain calm. If the words on this page are transferring into voices and images in your head, do not be concerned. This is the author’s intention. Please proceed.

  If the words on the page are not transferring into voices and images, then please stop reading. Disregard this sentence, since you have no way of understanding it.

  In the rare possibility that the voices and images that the following book conjure pertain to the assassination of several highly placed Venezuelan political figures, we are legally obligated to ask you to please stop reading. As a side note, please do not read chapter fifteen backwards and do not read the first letter of every line on chapter seven.

  For those reading the text in electronic format (Kindle, SMS text message, jumbotron), if a speling error, grammatical_error’ or syntacticalal error is found, please report this immediately to your local police station or military barracks.

  Readers seeking a homeopathic reading experience are encouraged to cut out the phrase ‘unusually randy greengrocer’ from page 211, place the excerpt into a litre of water and drink within the hour.

  Any resemblance between the characters herein and the Swiss 1982 Women’s Winter Olympics bobsleigh team is almost entirely accidental.

  The author claims no liability in the event that any technologies, events or conflicts described herein occur in the future, with the exception of the ‘steam powered sexamatron’ mentioned in chapter 12, 13, 45 and in the appendix.

  Please read responsibly. Do not read and drive. Please do not operate heavy machinery under the influence of this book. Please do not ride, operate or look upon a rollercoaster while under the influence of this book.

  Please do not read this book while pregnant, while suffering a concussion, while suffering from mange, while suffering from Alzheimer’s or while receiving any form of major vascular surgery.

  Please be advised that possession of this book around certain feral animals (e.g. timber wolves, black bears, Spanish hornets) is strongly discouraged.

  Please do not read this book while suffering from Alzheimer’s.

  If the reader enjoys this piece of fiction, he or she is reminded that quoting the book to an unknown third party, recommending the book to an unknown
third party or leaving it within sight of any person who has not paid for it is a highly litigious action and will lead to the author pursuing legal recourse rashly and often.

  Part One:

  The Beginningest Part

  First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they ask you to put your shirt back on, then security throws you out of the restaurant, then you win.

  Guy Leaning

  Wet is my Valley, Tall be my Dog

  Hell? Hell is other people

  Poking you with tridents

  In a lake of fire.

  For eternity.

  Also, the devil’s there.

  Francois Blancmange

  Meaning Means Not Nothingness

  Chapter One!

  An Introduction, of Sorts

  In which we meet the courageous Captain Space Hardcore and his trusty aide Ebenezer Funkworthy. A ferocious beast is encountered, a plan is formed and derring-do is derring-done.

  Yes, it had been a grand Tuesday morning before I was nearly eaten.

  I had been feeling unusually fine.

  It is, after all, a fine thing to have the wind in your hair as you travel at 673 marks per second through the desert plains, feeling the purring of the twin engines of your land cruiser vibrating through your boots, like a big metal cat you can stand on.

  Finer still is the feeling of great accomplishment to accompany that lovely breed of windy vibrations. The kind of accomplishment you get from wiping out a dangerous cave of genetically ridiculous abominations using nothing but your wits, a little bit of ingenuity, a smidge of luck and seventeen tactical nuclear warheads.

  But finest of all is the special moist tingly feeling that comes with the anticipation of adulation. You know the one- or perhaps you don’t if you’re dreary—it’s the one you get once you’ve completed an adventure or eradicated a species (or both). Having wiped out a nest of monstrosities for the simple folk of Rachnock 13, I knew I was headed for a big heaping bucket of medals and probably a statue of me to be erected in whatever heroic or nakedly sexual pose I could choose.

  So all in all I’d say my morning had been going quite swimmingly up until that point. The point in question, of course, being the point when the beast exploded out of the desert floor below our speeding craft, in an eruption of sand, roars and swirling teeth. It came at me like an angry sentient drill torpedo (which were coincidentally outlawed after my ‘overzealous’ use of them in the Feraldoc Conflagration of ’97). It sheared through the side of our cruiser in a sudden thrashing jump from the previously serene sand. With one lunging chomp, it bit off one of our engines, two of our mirrors, a velour bucket seat and one of those smelly things shaped like a little pine tree. Not content with that, it pinwheeled in the sky above us as our cruiser skidded erratically, and then landed in a dune behind us, swished its tail about in the air and raced toward our suddenly crippled craft with murder in its heart and optional cupholders in its belly.

  “Looks like we have a survivor!” my first mate Ebenezer called to me through the flames with remarkable redundancy. I cursed my conservative use of seventeen missiles on the hive complex and swore never to skimp on firepower again.

  It was a Gammonshark. As it righted itself in the arid desert air I took a good look at the thing, a privilege afforded usually only to the daring or the damned. If you took the body of a great white shark and dipped it in a bucket of gravel and spikes and pumped it full of steroids you’d get one of these, alongside an angry letter from PETA and lifetime ban from the aquarium. Though it looked like a sea-shark it flew through the air like a bird or a hovercraft, a peculiarity of evolution that still stumped biologists and flummoxed evolution itself. It was named, of course, after its discoverer Arthur Penrose Gammon who found the creature and was bitten to death seven seconds later. His last exclamation of its name being at once a warning, a naming and a claiming of the beast. It was also a sad prophecy since seeing one and dying seconds later screaming its name were almost all anyone knew of the creature.

  “It’s coming after us.” Ebenezer cried.

  “Does it seem in a forgiving mood?” I enquired hopefully as I extinguished an electronic fire while nudging the craft into high gear with my foot to the pedal (and said pedal pressed to the metal).

  He looked at the creature, which was picking up speed in its flight. It burped out a fuel sump and half an armrest and gave a blood-curdling roar.

  “… Not entirely”, he admitted as our cruiser whined a retreat from the creature.

  “It still astounds me that these things can fly! Evolution truly is amazing, though it does seem to constantly be trying to kill me", I called over to my first mate as the beast accelerated after us with an alarmingly murderous and pine scented roar.

  Ebenezer looked back at me, then over my shoulder to the thirty-foot predator that was chomping on one of the rather important elements of our propulsion. He went a touch pale then, a little green around the gills as they say, though I do believe that Ebenezer’s people actually have green gills, which explains why he’s so good at swimming, tromboning and bobbing for apples. He certainly looked more terrified than usual and promptly turned back toward the skiff’s controls, throwing more power to the thrusters. The old T-22 roofless land cruiser whined a protest that sounded like the death cry of an old robotic horse. I would have been worried about the craft, but then it wasn’t strictly speaking mine. I had commandeered the craft from a remarkably reluctant cruiser salesman after the elderly robo-horse I had been riding had died.

  The roar of the gammonshark drowned out whatever my companion called to me next. The sound of fury had to compete with the whine of our struggling engines, the whine of Ebenezer and my own grumbling stomach (I had missed lunch due to being absolutely bloody knee deep in adventuring). I didn’t know which was the cause for most concern. I let fly with a barrage of sizzling laser bolts from my trusty sidearm that pranged off the stony hide of the shark as ineffectually as cream cakes, and supposed the prize should go to the flying predator with the mouth like an angry bayonet factory. It ignored my shots, and with a swish of its tail and its mighty dorsal fins, drew closer to the end of our fleeing craft, bits of hyper-titanium speckling its frothy mouth and an unholy hunger shining from its tiny red eyes - eyes which were pointed right at me.

  I needed a plan, and considering the circumstances, it was going to have to be a humdinger. My companion sprinted back from the control panel and started throwing all sundry items within reach at the immane prow of the beast. While ostensibly a good start, and certainly in an admirable spirit, something more was needed.

  The beleaguered engine block coughed, spluttered and gamely tried to zoom us across the seemingly endless salt flats under the twin suns of Rachnock 13 as I racked my brain for a solution. The gammonshark was closing the gap, climbing closer through the air using only its muscular fins and an apparent disdain for the laws of aviation. It seemed hopeless. There were none of the basic constituents of a plan to be found: no ropes, no pulleys, no levers, no wigs for impromptu disguises. Even my trusty pistol wouldn’t dent the stony hide of the beast, and Ebenezer’s plan of simply flinging old sandwiches and spanners at our pursuer was beginning to look more promising—rarely a good sign. To make matters worse, the supply of objects suited to hurling at our the beast was all but exhausted as the only things left on deck were my tambourines, a thermos of lunar moonshine and my collection of stylish new cravats.

  “You know, sir, I’m beginning to think we should have left these awakened primordial beasts to the proper authorities or maybe a COAR peacekeeping battalion. Or an orbital photon bombardment. Anything other than our own intervention”, remarked Ebenezer as he hurled one of his uniform shoes at the beast, either out of desperation or a sudden onset of fashion sense. “That thing seems to have taken a dislike to us.”

  “Nonsense”, I replied. “It’s just looking for some sport, probably thankful for some quarry that isn
’t another terrified colonist.”

  “Well, whatever its motive, we’d better think of something soon before our fuel cells run dry.” He cast an eye over to the control panel, where a plethora of lights blinked angry red warnings.

  Something sparked in my mind and I tried to home in on it. What had he just said? ‘Cells’? ‘Fuel’? ‘Dry’? ‘Run’? ‘Efore our fu’? Suddenly the plan came together like a massive jigsaw and the enormity of the task hit me like a lorry that transports jigsaws: the spare fuel cell! That was the answer! Suddenly our available arsenal had doubled. No—quadrupled, or even quadra-octupled. I shook my head. This was no time for accurate space-maths. I had to act.

  “Never fear, I’ve got a plan. Take the wheel”, I cried to Ebenezer.

  “A plan, sir?” Funkworthy enquired faithlessly as he moved into the empty driver’s seat.

  “On my command, slow us down, let it catch up—then I’ll convince it to give up its pursuit.”

  Ebenezer looked at me with an impetuously raised eyebrow. “That’s your plan, is it, sir?”

  “Don’t you know the first thing about gammonsharks? What did they teach you in that fancy academy of yours?”

  “Oh, you know”, he muttered, “navigation, piloting—”

  I interrupted his babbling before it got out of hand or became boring. “Calm yourself, man. Clearly your education has been grievously lacking. The one thing any first mate worth his salt should know is how to handle a rampaging gammonshark. However, now is not the time for a lecture. Slow us down and I’ll favour you with a demonstration.”