Jazz, Monster Collector in: Crash Down (Season one, Episode One)

Jazz, Monster Collector in:

  Crash Down

  season one, episode one

  RyFT Brand

  Copyright 2010

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to

  persons living or dead are purely coincidental.

  107 AWM, the abbreviation stood for, After Worlds Merge, merge—ha! But that’s what they called it, they meaning just about every human but me. I called it as I saw it, an inter-dimensional hostile takeover, but then few were left that remembered the ID war. Most of my race’s survivors had willingly succumbed to a mass memory manipulation—the jerks. I remembered and I’m no jerk. I was called Jazz then, and worked as a ‘deferred species bond collector,’ that meant I collected monsters and I was all too happy to do it. Merth, as the dimensionally linked planets had been renamed, had become a Zion filled with idol, lazy, and easily manipulated masses, the masses were mindless because they wanted to believe the utopian lie they’d swallowed. But they were going to spit it out, it was going to hurt, and I was the one who was going to make them do it. This is how it started.

  JAZZ, Monster Collector

  Season One: Earth’s Lament

  RyFT Brand

  Episode-1: Crash Down

  “This is a waste of time,” my voice echoed inside the small cockpit. What I was really wasting was my breath, and not just because I was speaking to a single seat flycraft. But if I sat quiet for too long I’d end up falling asleep and I didn’t trust my companion. Besides, I really wanted to talk myself out of this job.

  The cabin remained unusually quiet but for the hum and hiss of the twin avi-star thrusters to either side of me.

  “Even if we collect, I don’t see any profit in it.” My flycraft had the singular distinction of being host to a demon’s soul, so I wasn’t wasting my breath by speaking to an inanimate object; I was wasting my breath because of the particular demon soul I was speaking to.

  The com-speaker crackled.

  “I’ve told Perry, no orcs, no lawyers, and no hoi-polloi clients, but he doesn’t listen, he just goes on and on about our lack of clients and our subsequent lack of funds and fails to consider that I have to deal with these people. Man, this isn’t even a monster job. How can I call myself a deferred species bondsman if I don’t collect monsters? Remind me to fire my secretary when we get back.”

  I detected the faintest huff from the speaker.

  “Besides, what could be more boring, self-effacing, and eventless than tracking a lost dog for one of the Welmont elite?” No sooner had the question dribbled off my lips than the first plasma bolt ripped past Ship, crackling with potential death and destruction.

  “Scrud!” I felt the scorching heat through the length of the floor to ceiling canopy and saw black-striped yellow wing paint bubble. My hands shot instinctively to the flight control yoke. “That was way too close. Evasive maneuvers, cycle six!”

  Another bolt crossed the port wing. Ship barely managed to tip below the sun-hot blast. “You didn’t tell me we were being tailed, and you didn’t tell me their weapons were hot!”

  “Ahem,” Ship made a sound as if he were clearing a nonexistent throat. “You also told me to shut down my voice modulator.”

  I saw three small, triangular dots on the imager closing on us but fast. Cranks, had to be. “Curse me for an amateur.”

  “Grack, you’re an amateur,” Ship said in his affected, lilting voice. If he had a hip his hand would have been resting on it, but then he didn’t have a hand either.

  Oh sure, just cut across the between lands, save ten minutes—me and my stupid short-cuts. Cranks, a gang of thugs that had garnered government sanctions that turned them into the airborne equivalent of privateers because no one else dared to patrol the wilds, they were legalized pirates and they were not to be trifled with. I should have thought more carefully about my course. Still, blasting a few Cranks out of the sky could turn my day around.

  I swung my head left and right, trying for a visual. One of them, a stub-wing fighter, was hot on my seven-o’clock. “Ship, shake this Crank or we’ll be dust.” I ducked instinctively as another plasma bolt rumbled past us.

  Ship dropped three meters, narrowly avoiding a direct hit. “Oh Jazz, you’re so smart, I would never have thought of losing them,” he said in the basso tone used to express sarcasm, which meant he pretty much used it all the time.

  I tried looking down as much as Ship’s low-mounted wings allowed. “Where are the other two—whoa!” I shouted as I spotted the big lizard lazily flapping through our flight path. “Bank left! Bank left!”

  “Fine.” Ship rolled ninety degrees, pointing one stubby wing to sky and the other to Mirth so abruptly my leather helmet banged into the canopy.

  “Oh scrud.” I gasped as the dragon’s dinner-plate sized belly scales filled Ship’s canopy, blocking my view of anything else. She was a big one; I didn’t recognize her. Maybe she’d just crossed over, but I hadn’t heard of any dragons being granted Intra-Dimensional Bridge access. I’d have to look into it as soon as I got back to my office—if I made it back to my office.

  Narrowly clearing the big reptile, Ship leveled off, never straying from our easterly course. But there were no more shots and no signs of our pursuers on the imager. “Where’d they go?”

  “I see what you see. Besides, you’re supposed to be the expert,” Ship said, then, with sticky-wet venom practically seeping from its speaker, added, “Milady.”

  “You can stick the milady up your aft thruster port. Switch to manual controls,” I said, rotating the targeting sight down into fight position.

  “What?” Ship cried, his effected exclamation reaching a screeching pitch. Then, in a voice as slow and smooth as molasses, added. “No.”

  I kept my tone calm by forcing it through gritted teeth; now was not the time for an argument. “Ship, I’m ordering you to switch to manual control.”

  “Absolutely not; you’ll get us both killed.”

  “You’re all ready dead, remember? Now switch the controls,” I was no longer trying to keep the anger out of my voice.

  “Sorry, can’t hear you; must be something wrong with my cabin microphone.”

  “You can hear me just fine,” my voice was growing louder as I was barely holding my temper in check, but time was wasting and I was loosing my pursuers. I drew my macdaddy revolver, set the barrel against the vid screen and cocked the hammer back with a loud click and ratchet of moving steel. “I bet you heard that.”

  I took Ship’s response for a gulp.

  “Now switch the controls you tailless son of a hover demon.”

  “You…you won’t do it. You’d die too.”

  I tried to hide my sneer, but I’m pretty sure I failed. I’d lost everyone that mattered to me, including myself, long before the ID war destroyed everything I loved. Since then I’d dedicated myself to making things right. And if I died in the process, so be it.

  I started to apply pressure to the trigger.

  Ship’s voice came in an all too eager to please, hurried tone, “Now switching to manual controls.”

  The lights on the yoke flashed, flickered, and then burst to life. I slipped the revolver back in my shoulder holster as I took the control. “Thank you Ship.”

  “Just following orders milady…I mean Jazz.”

  “Yeah, yeah, if we crash it’s all my fault. Hang on.” I got my feet under the three-sixty pedal straps and gave the control yoke a half turn, applying a little starboard throttle. Ship flat-spun one hundred and eighty degrees within his own wingspan, and, with a draw of the thumb th
rottles, shot with great force back along our own vapor trail. Ship was lazy, and cowardly, and annoying, but he was also fast if you knew how to coax it out of him.

  In a second and a half I’d covered the ground I’d lost since last seeing the Cranks, then eased the throttles back. There was no sign of them, just the big dragon flying on her way to wherever. Her eyes were half-lidded and ignored us completely. Dragons were virtually immortal. They possessed a vast intelligence and even vaster egos. We were just sheep to them—most of the time. “Where’d they go?”

  “Why don’t you check the vid screen, Capt—”

  “Never call me that!” erupted like hot lava from my mouth before I even knew I was thinking the words. I swallowed some of my anger. “I’d rather be called milady.”

  “Then why don’t you check the vid screen, milady?”

  “And don’t call me milady; I hate that pompous crap. And stop telling me to check the color-coded vid screen when you know darn well that I’m perfectly color