Gamora and nebula, p.1
Gamora and Nebula, page 1
© 2021 MARVEL
All rights reserved. Published by Marvel Press, an imprint of Buena Vista Books, Inc. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Marvel Press, 77 West 66th Street, New York, New York 10023.
First Edition, June 2021
Designed by Kurt D. Hartman
Cover art by Jenny Frison
Cover design by Kurt Hartman
ISBN 978-1-368-05670-0
Visit www.DisneyBooks.com
and www.Marvel.com
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
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
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
About the Author
For Dad
We Are Groot.
TRANSCRIPT—SECURITY FOOTAGE
THE GRANDMASTER’S COSMIC GAME ROOM
19:00 HOURS 90-190-294874
[THE GRANDMASTER IS SEATED ON HIS THRONE. HIS HAIR IS PERFECT. HIS CLOTHES, TAILORED. HIS MAKEUP, FLAWLESS. ALL CAMERAS HAVE BEEN PLACED IN THIS ROOM ACCORDING TO HIS SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS TO CAPTURE HIS BEST ANGLES.]
[A GUEST ENTERS THE FRAME OF THE SECURITY CAMERA.]
[ID CHECK: ERROR. FACIAL RECOGNITION: ERROR. BODY SCAN AND VOICE CHECK INDICATE MALE. AFFILIATIONS UNKNOWN. SECURITY TEAMS ON STANDBY.]
GRANDMASTER: So the rumors are true.
GUEST: What rumors?
GRANDMASTER: I heard you were in my neighborhood. Though I was expecting an entourage. You usually have an entourage. Or at least your girlfriend. What’s her name again?
GUEST: You know who she is.
GRANDMASTER: I dooooo. It’s so weird. Can I tempt you with a libation?
[THE GRANDMASTER STANDS AND CROSSES TO THE BAR.]
GRANDMASTER: Is the Fizzy Minion shooter still your poison? Do you take it chilled or gargled?
[THE GRANDMASTER POWERS UP THE BARTENDER, THEN ACCEPTS THE TWO GLASSES HE PREPARES. THE GRANDMASTER WOULD LIKE A NOTE ADDED TO THE OFFICIAL RECORD OF THIS MEETING THAT THE NEW WAY HE HAS SWOOPED HIS HAIR IS VERY SEXY.]
[THE GRANDMASTER GENEROUSLY EXTENDS THE SHOT GLASS OF VERY EXPENSIVE LIQUOR TO HIS GUEST. THE GUEST DOES NOT TAKE THE DRINK.]
GUEST: I have business to discuss with you. Private business.
GRANDMASTER: My third-favorite kind of business, after public business and not-my-business business.
[THE GRANDMASTER DOES THE SHOT HIMSELF, THEN POWERS DOWN THE BARTENDER.]
GRANDMASTER: Did you come for a rematch?
GUEST: I don’t have time for games.
GRANDMASTER: Oh, sweetheart, then you’re on the wrong station. You should know by now—only visit my Game Room if you’re ready to play.
GUEST: I have come to ask you for a favor.
GRANDMASTER: Ooooh, groveling. Yes, I love being groveled to. It makes me feel shiny. Hold on, let me put on my sunglasses.
[THE GRANDMASTER PUTS ON HIS SUNGLASSES. THEY ARE, AS THE EARTHLINGS SAY, ON FLEEK.]
GRANDMASTER: All right, go on, kiss my ass. Tell me I’m pretty.
[PAUSE. THE GRANDMASTER TAKES OFF HIS SUNGLASSES.]
GRANDMASTER: Fine. What’s this [AIR QUOTES] “favor” you need so badly from me?
GUEST: There is an item in your possession that I seek.
GRANDMASTER: You know I just don’t give things away. I don’t believe in gifts.
GUEST: I know.
GRANDMASTER: Is this an item you’re willing to barter for?
GUEST: I am.
GRANDMASTER: Beg?
GUEST: Yes.
GRANDMASTER: Betray your friends? Do you have any left that you haven’t already? You could fill an arsenal with the knives you’ve used to stab people in the back.
[PAUSE.]
GRANDMASTER: So. This item in my possession. What will you give me for it?
[PAUSE.]
GUEST: Anything.
Her father sees Death everywhere.
Not in the metaphorical way of poetry and songs, nor of kings who hire decoys and food tasters, squandering their fortunes on protection from an enemy that exists only in their heads. He is not the paranoid sort, who peers around corners and checks rooftops for snipers, convinced the galaxy is conspiring against him from end to end.
Instead, Death calls upon him.
Her father has conversations with Death. Brings her flowers and embroidered sashes and rare fruits with jeweled skin from exotic planets whose locations are not marked on any charts. Sometimes he invites her to their table for meals and sits her at his right hand. Serves her first, refills her glass before his own. He plays Vigirdian dice games with Death, and when she throws a winning hand, he playfully accuses her of cheating, like she is any other woman he has brought into his company and not a mistress of the universe at whose touch more than dice fall in line.
Her father courts Death. He pulls her close and kisses her hair as he breathes deep her woody perfume. He writes her love songs, his scarred face softening when he looks upon her as it does for no one else. If Death loves him, when his chips are finally down, she will spare his life. That was what he must have thought. The love of Death would spare him from her hand—that was what he had told her when he first brought Death home to his daughters. It was a business arrangement, just like so many others he had with so many beings far stranger than the long-haired lady on his arm.
Now she suspects he loves Death more than anything else.
Death was once his only friend, when he was young and abandoned and outcast. Now she is his closest, her presence in his court a reminder that she is a stranger to no one. She is everywhere.
One day, his daughter thinks, her father’s friendship with Death will be to her advantage. Death will recognize her on the battlefield and pull her punches. She will remember the girl who sometimes sat at her feet and listened to her stories of the heroes she’d known in her time. But when she does see Death, whatever and wherever and however that meeting occurs, she hopes her father will not be there. For though she lives for him, fights for him, trains for him, bleeds for him, serves him, and has long known she will likely someday die for him, she does not want to witness the moment her father chooses Lady Death.
She does not ever want to know just how much her father loves Death more than he loves her.
Thirty-six seconds after Gamora landed on Station Rango-15’s only public docking bay, her ship was being stripped for parts. Vagrants wrapped in dusty clothes, their faces covered with sheer scarves being used as makeshift filters to keep the Crowmikite dust from their lungs, leaped from their hiding places and swarmed before the landing gear had had a chance to fully engage, climbing onto the nose of her ship and hacking at the paneling to get to the wires beneath.
Gamora sighed, already regretting taking a job on such a garbage pit of a planet. She hadn’t even reached the surface, and they were already trying to rip her to shreds. She unclipped the safety restraints crossing her chest and kicked the button to release the hatch. As it opened with a low hiss, she stood, pulling her blaster from its holster, and took aim at the closest of the scrappers. She flipped the setting to stun with her thumb, then fired twice. The scrapper flew off the prow of the ship, limbs flailing. The rest scattered at once, shrieking like they had been shot too. Half of them dropped the broken mining tools they had been using to pick apart her ship, leaving Gamora standing amid what looked like the galaxy’s most useless rummage sale.
She replaced her blaster in its holster on her hip. At least one lousy stun blast was enough to scare them.
Gamora jumped down from the cockpit, the smell of the station’s artificial atmosphere so stale that she pulled her scarf up over her mouth and nose. She had fastened her hair in a loose knot at the back of her head, and she could already feel the oily air starting to coat it. She had bleached the ends white before she left, and she knew they’d be dingy and vomit-colored from the dust here by the time she returned to Sanctuary II. She should have learned by now: never wear white to a fight. And everything was a fight.
A harried-looking dock attendant came bustling over from the other side of the landing bay, the bottom half of her face obscured by a green-tubed ventilator. Gamora had a newer model, but she’d been told she wouldn’t need it until she arrived planetside. There was enough artificial atmosphere on the tenement stations to breathe without the need of a ventilator to first filter the Crow from the air. But the medic on Sanctuary II who cleared her for this mission had given her such a thorough list of side effects from exposure to Crowmikite that Gamora almost pulled the mask out of her pack preemptively.
The sound of the dock attendant’s mechanized breathing was accompanied by the metallic rattling of the mining spurs around her ankles. She kept shifting from foot to foot as she tapped the screen clutched in the crook of one arm. It was cuffed to her wrist to keep it from being stolen. “Greet—” the attendant began, but she was drowned out by the rasping engine of the shuttle that was breaching the milky film of the pumped atmosphere overhead. The sky rippled, and a cloud of black exhaust expelled from the shuttle’s underside enveloped the platform. Gamora felt her regret for the bleached ends go even deeper.
The dock attendant watched the shuttle through narrowed eyes as it stuttered downward, its engine finally wheezing itself into silence, then turned back to Gamora. “Greetings, friend,” she tried again. Her voice was warbled and electronic through the dying speakers in her mask, and she reached up to fiddle with a dial on the side. There was a squeal of feedback that made them both wince, then the attendant finished, without any noticeable improvement: “Welcome to Rango-15. It’s one hundred units a night to park your cruiser there.”
“I’m here on business.” Gamora flashed her ID card from the holoscreen on her wrist. Technically, she wasn’t on this particular assignment for her father, and technically it wasn’t an enormous pain to pay the one hundred units, but it was the principle of the thing. No daughter of Thanos was going to pay a docking tax on a tenement station of a strip-mining planet.
The dock attendant hardly glanced at the credentials before looking back to her own screen. “You’re outside the realm of the Black Order here, friend.”
“I’m not your friend.”
The dock attendant glanced up, and this time, Gamora watched as her eyes flicked to the blaster holstered on Gamora’s hip. “You a gunfighter?”
“No.” Not technically a lie. She preferred her swords.
“There’s a fifty-unit fee for gunfights,” the dock attendant said. “Plus funeral costs. But I’ll only charge you forty if you pay now, in anticipation of any firearms-related altercations you’re planning on engaging in while here.”
“I’m not a gunfighter,” Gamora said. “And I can go to another station.”
The dock attendant poked her screen vigorously, trying to get the cracked surface to respond. “Same fee everywhere. You can pay now for the entirety of your stay, or take it day to day, though there’s an additional ten-percent surcharge.”
“And what if I don’t pay?” Gamora asked.
The dock attendant glanced up at her, like she wasn’t sure if Gamora was joking. Then she said flatly, “We boot your ship.”
Behind the dock attendant, the doors of the just-arrived shuttle clanked open, and the scrappers that had fallen on Gamora’s cruiser immediately swarmed the disembarking passengers, begging for favors with their heads bent and their hands clasped before them.
“You’ll keep the scavengers off it?” Gamora asked.
“You have my word,” the dock attendant replied. “There’s a three-hundred-unit fee for scavenging in the public docking bay.”
Gamora resisted a pointed look over her shoulder at the ripped-up nose of her ship.
“Fine.” She tapped the holoscreen on her wrist, transferring units. The dock attendant checked her own screen, then nodded, confirming the transfer. She slapped a magnetic barcode on the front of Gamora’s ship, the tarnished plate standing out like an oil stain on the pristine reflective surface. “Welcome to Torndune,” she said, powering down her holoscreen. “Don’t drink the water.”
As the attendant bustled away, Gamora crossed to the edge of the docking bay and peered down at the surface of the planet below.
This place was once green, she thought as she scanned the skeletal remains of what used to be a jungle planet before Crowmikite veins were discovered beneath its forest floors. Now the surface was rust-colored and pocked with trenches. The mines were deep craters amid the peaks of smokestacks and artificial-gravity generators. Lights along the tops of the refineries blinked red, mapping bloody constellations across the terrain. The low chorus of the machinery was audible even over the protective fields that surrounded the tenement station where the miners lived, a rumble she felt in the soles of her feet. Above the surface, hundreds of stations the same as Rango-15 crowded the air, smudgy dots against the dark sky. A miles-long elevator shaft connected each station to the surface of the planet, tethering them above the now poisonous atmosphere of Torndune, so choked with the runoff fumes from the Crowmikite that there was nowhere left where breathing wouldn’t kill you.
Gamora pulled a pair of binocs from her pack and raised them to her eyes for a better look at the surface. As she scanned the planet, stats rolled out in green type before her eyes, crowding her view of long trains of miners going up and down the scaffolding, hauling canisters full of raw Crowmikite. The stats were temporarily disrupted as one of the enormous pointy-nosed dig rigs broke across it. Gamora shifted her gaze to the end of the trench just below the station, where most of the miners who lived on Rango-15 worked. The surface-depth statistics flickered for a moment, calibrating, then flashed: 3,897 km.
She turned off the lens and tossed the binocs back into her pack.
Only 3,897 kilometers to the center of the planet. Should be easy.
“Howdy, friend,” someone said behind her, and she turned to see another being holding an enormous holoscreen and wearing goggles walking quickly toward her, waving in a way that seemed friendly until they said, “It’s two hundred units to park your ship on the public dock.”
Gamora sighed. At least the cheaper grifter had gotten to her first.
The station town was dusty and colorless, and the Crow that clung to the miners’ clothes and boots wafted in muzzy clouds that turned gold when the light struck them. Speeders with missing parts were outside sagging shop fronts, locked between troughs of dingy liquid for the miners to wash with. There were more beings than ships, and the streets were crowded. Miners still in their coveralls, the imprints of goggles and ventilators fading from their skin, were lined up outside ration stands, trading tokens for meals and blankets and new boot laces. A medical bay was swamped with others showing off bloody knees and smashed hands as they begged to be seen. The ones with the decayed joints from Crow exposure lurked at the back of the crowd, their gray flesh worn away to the bone not enough to earn them attention.
Even on this small station, the miners were a diverse array of beings from all over the galaxy. Gamora remembered reading that when the Crowmikite had first been mined, the planet had been flooded with off-worlders who joined the locals in cashing in their life savings in hopes of striking a vein and staking a claim. The lucky few who had found a deposit had been bought out by the Mining Corps: the ones who cooperated were offered stock in the Corps in exchange for their surrender, while the ones who fought had had the treads of their diggers slashed in the night, their food stolen, and the tunnels they labored over collapsed mysteriously while they slept. When they finally threw up their hands, they were forced into the same indenture as the other miners who worked for the Corps, and sent to these station tenements.
On the scaffolding assembled around a burned-out husk of a building, a group of missionaries from the Universal Church of Truth chanted hymns as they washed the feet of their converts in baptism. One missionary wearing the face paint of a priestess stood on an empty box marked DANGER: EXPLOSIVE, reading from a ragged book of scripture. “‘And it came to pass, they did find in the land a garden, and they called the garden Cibel, a word meaning the origins of life, and from its soil all things in the galaxy grow.’” As she passed the acolytes, Gamora glanced beyond them, down the street at the shoddy dwellings crowded there, assembled from spare parts and mining trash, some no more than foil sheets draped over scaffolding supports. Fires were lit between them for cooking, and the light was amber and liquid against the ruddy sky.
The stations above the planet weren’t all like this, dilapidated orbital tenements lousy with beings driven from their homes, with no option but to strip-mine their own planet in order to afford the taxes they were charged to live there. On her way to the Rango network, Gamora had flown past some of the white-walled city stations that floated higher above the surface, where clean air was pumped in and fresh flowers bloomed in front of gated houses. That was where the Mining Corps executives lived, the ones who had stripped Torndune for its incomparably powerful energy source and now took the station-habitation fees straight out of their miners’ paychecks.
