4

“What’s the closest habitable planet?” Peter called out.

Gamora consulted the star chart. “It’s called Berhert.”

“How many jumps?”

“Only one, but the access point is forty-seven klicks away...and you have to go through that quantum asteroid field.” Peter looked ahead and saw the flashes of colliding asteroids. A quantum asteroid field was like a regular asteroid field, except the asteroids flashed randomly in and out of existence. It was some kind of anomaly in the fabric of space-time. Peter wasn’t sure how it worked, but it was no easy thing to survive flying through a place where an asteroid might appear randomly right in front of you at any moment.

“Quill. To make it through that, you would have to be the greatest pilot in the universe,” Drax said.

“Lucky for us...” Peter began.

“I am,” Rocket said before Peter could finish his sentence. Rocket switched the Milano to his controls and put it into a spiraling dive through the outer edges of the field. An asteroid appeared just ahead and he barely dodged it. Behind them, the Sovereign drones followed. Asteroids smashed many of them to flaming bits, but the rest kept coming.

Annoyed, Peter stabbed the console and took back control of the ship. Rocket slammed his steering column back and forth. “What are you doing?”

“I’ve been flying this ship since I was ten years old.”

“I was cybernetically engineered to fly a spacecraft!”

They wrestled over the controls, switching them back and forth as the Milano jerked crazily, missing asteroids by sheer luck. “Stop it,” Gamora said.

“Later on tonight,” Rocket said, “you’re going to be lying down in your bed and there’s going to be something squishy in your pillowcase, and you’re going to go, ‘What’s this?’ and it’s gonna be because I put a turd in there.”

“You put your turd in my bed, I shave you,” Peter threatened. He took control again.

“Oh, it won’t be my turd,” Rocket shot back. “It’ll be Drax’s.”

Drax burst out laughing. “I have famously huge turds.”

Gamora looked at the three of them, one after another, disbelief plain on her face. “We’re about to die and this is what we’re discussing?”

Rocket took back control.

“Dude, seriously,” Peter said, and they both stabbed at their control buttons. While they were fighting, an asteroid appeared close enough to crash into the rear of the Milano, sending the ship into an uncontrolled spin. Pieces of its hull broke away, exposing the passenger compartment to the vacuum of space. Nebula was nearly sucked out into the void. The only things holding her were the shackles. She kicked and screamed, though nobody could hear her.

Up in the cockpit, Groot went flying toward the back. Peter reached out and caught him, then tossed him to Drax. Then he touched a series of screens that activated emergency shielding. The hull breach sealed and Nebula crashed back to the floor.

“Idiots!” she screamed.

“Well,” Rocket said, “that’s what you get when Quill flies.”

Gamora threw a loose piece of junk at him, hitting him in the back of the head. “We still have a Sovereign craft behind us.” She read the navigator’s heads-up display as the Milano dodged the fire from the last Sovereign drone.

“Our weapons are down,” Peter said.

Gamora got a read on the jump portal. “Twenty klicks to the jump!” Drax handed Groot to her and she looked down at him. “Hold on,” she told him.

They were most of the way through the quantum asteroid field. The jump portal glowed ahead, like a hole in space-time filled with multicolored energy. But they couldn’t shake the last drone.

Drax went to the rear. He had an idea. Nebula was at full stretch on the floor, reaching for a piece of the fruit that had spilled out of the basket. Drax kicked it away. “It’s not ripe.”

He hooked a heavy cable to his belt and stood in front of the rear airlock. Set into the wall was a rack of small discs. Below them a sign said spacesuits in case of emergency. Below that, someone had made a handwritten addition: or for fun.

Drax slapped one of the discs on his back and a force field surrounded his body. It would protect him against the vacuum and supply him with air for as long as he needed.

He stepped into the airlock and punched the button to open the outside hatch.

On Sovereign, the pilots of the destroyed drones gathered around the last remaining pilot as he leaned into his simulator. “Come on, Zylak, you can do this,” one of them encouraged.

Zylak stayed tight to the fleeing ship, firing nonstop. The Sovereign pilot was good and Zylak scored a few direct hits. But he was getting the range, and the ship had no rear-mounted guns, so he didn’t have to worry about incoming fire.

Then he saw something incredible. One of the Guardians jumped out of the ship’s airlock attached to a cable. He jerked to a violent stop as the cable reached its full length. It was the bald, muscular Guardian, his body surrounded by the glimmer of a space suit...and he had a heavy gun in his hands. He raised the gun.

“Die, spaceship!” Drax roared into space. He got a bead on the drone and blew it away with a single shot.

In the Sovereign pilots’ chamber, there was a brief silence. Zylak stared into the empty simulator. 3LoJ8Mr2eGMZqmQzbySXJP1SmsKN3dw/4WA1cAa0PFLZH0W1kb0Dt560cQfbW5cE