大电影双语阅读. Guardians of the Galaxy 银河护卫队(赠英文音频、电子书及核心词讲解)(txt+pdf+epub+mobi电子书下载)

作者：美国漫威公司

出版社：华东理工大学出版社有限公司

格式: AZW3, DOCX, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, TXT

大电影双语阅读. Guardians of the Galaxy 银河护卫队(赠英文音频、电子书及核心词讲解)试读：

Prologue

It was very cold on Peter Quill’s last day on planet Earth. It was so cold that the nine-year-old could almost see his breath indoors.

Sitting on a hard plastic bench listening to his Awesome Mix Tape Vol.

1

But now the family was gathered in the room, Gramps and Peter’s aunts, and Peter knew things were much worse. He tried to sink away into the music and not think about it.

“Peter, your mama wants to speak with you.”

Peter looked up to see Gramps kneeling in front of him. How long had he been there? Peter didn’t move. He knew what would happen if he stopped listening to the music. It was the only thing that stood between him and ...

“Come on, Pete. Let’s take these fool things off,” Gramps said, removing Peter’s headphones. His voice was firm but warm. He stopped the tape and put the player and headphones in Peter’s backpack as he walked Peter into his mother’s room. He couldn’t see his mother from the door. All he could see was the bed and the beeping machines and the worried women clustered around the bed.

Gramps stood back as Peter walked around the bed and stood where his mother could see him. He could hear her breathing, slow and wheezy. She tried to lift up her head and greet him. Her hair was gone from one of the treatments the doctors had given her, and her skin was pale.

Peter could see the shapes of her bones under the skin. She had some trouble focusing her eyes, but when she looked at him she smiled a little. He saw her looking at his face, and her smile slipped a little when she noticed the bruise under his eye.

She frowned at the welt and asked, “Why have you been fighting with the other boys again, baby?” Her voice was barely above a whisper.

Peter shrugged.

“Peter?” she prompted. He didn’t want to say anything to worry her, but Peter had never been able to keep anything from his mother. They were a team, especially since his father wasn’t around.

“They hurt a little frog that ain’t done nothing,” Peter said, trying to explain about the bullies in his neighborhood. He looked down and away from her, embarrassed and scared and unsure of what to do. “They smushed it with a stick.”

“You’re so like your daddy,” Mama whispered. “You even look like him.” Her eyes drifted up toward the skies, a dreamy expression crossing her face. “And he was an angel composed out of pure light.”

Peter didn’t know what she meant. He didn’t know what his daddy looked like because he’d never seen him—but deep inside he was glad to hear it. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Gramps exchange a quick look with one of Peter’s aunts, a look that said, She’s getting “confused” again.

“Meredith,” Gramps said, trying to bring her back. “You’ve got a present there for Peter, don’t you?”

She looked dazed for a moment as her vision of angels faded away, but then Mama looked down at the present sitting on the bedsheets.

Mama stared down into her lap as if seeing the present for the first time. “Of course,” she said. She tried to pick up the package, but she didn’t have the strength.

Peter took it in his hands and looked at the sloppy packaging and crooked bow. “I got you covered, Pete,” Gramps said as he picked up the present and stuck it in Peter’s open backpack.

“You open it up when I’m gone, okay?” she whispered. Peter was trying to be brave, but when she said that he felt his eyes start to get hot and sting with tears. He didn’t want to cry in front of her. Not now.

“Your grandpa is gonna take such good care of you, at least until your daddy comes back to get you.”

She swallowed deeply and then held out her hand to Peter. “Take my hand, baby.”

Peter looked at Mama’s hand, turned palm up on the blanket. He wanted to take it, he wanted to touch her one last time, but he knew if he touched her it would make everything real. If he could hold back, maybe that would stop it all from happening. He turned his face away, tears rolling down his cheeks.

“Pete, come on,” Gramps said.

“Take my hand, baby,” Mama said once again. Peter was trying to work himself up to do it when she hitched her breath and then let out a long sigh. The beeping sound from the machine next to her bed turned into a steady drone and Mama’s eyes drifted shut.

“No,” he said. “No.” He kept saying it over and over again, building up until he was screaming. No, he should have taken her hand. No, she couldn’t be gone. She couldn’t be dead. She couldn’t have left him all alone. No.

Gramps picked him up and Peter thrashed, still screaming as Gramps carried him back out into the hallway. A doctor rushed into the room past them. Gramps set him down, and Peter saw that Gramps was crying, too. “Pete,” he said. “Just stay here. Okay? Please?”

Gramps turned and walked slowly back into Mama’s room—no, not Mama’s room. The room where Mama had been before she died.

No, Peter thought. It couldn’t be real. None of it could be real.

That’s when Peter ran.

He didn’t think about running. He just did. No one stopped him.

He burst through the hospital’s outside door and ran across the parking lot. When he got to the field on the other side of the parking lot, he kept running. A cold fog swirled around him, and his shoes were soon soaked from the wet grass, but he continued. When he finally was out of breath, he dropped to his knees and sobbed. No one came looking for him. He was alone.

A deep groan came from above him and the wind kicked up, blowing the fog away. A brilliant light shone down on him, too bright to look at directly. He squinted through the wind and his tears, seeing the outline of something incredible.

It was a giant spaceship, the size of a jet plane or even bigger, hovering in the air over him. Its wings spread out to cover most of the field, and it was tipped down so its nose pointed directly at Peter. Astonished, he froze there, unable to believe what he was seeing. Lights pulsed on the outside of the craft.

The beam of light tightened its focus on Peter and began to swirl in a storm of color. He cried out, but the light picked him up and stole him away.1

The planet Morag was once home to a great civilization. For centuries, the citizens worked together to develop commerce, build monuments, and advance the arts. But at the height of its culture, Morag’s environment went through a terrible shift.

Violent storms of unimaginable power blasted the globe. Mega-earthquakes struck, sea levels rose and continents flooded, and the planet’s crust shifted and became so unstable that nothing could live there anymore. The inhabitants evacuated the planet, scattering across the galaxy to whatever new homes they could find. They left behind everything they had built. Over the centuries, cities fell into ruins, flooded and destroyed by surging oceans and catastrophic earthquakes. The only visitors were adventurers or archaeologists who could brave Morag’s turbulent oceans ... and the occasional unfortunate survivor of a spacefaring accident.

But over time, the planet’s upheaval lessened. Its seas receded again, exposing long submerged ruins. Those ruins brought a different kind of visitor. Anyone who came to Morag still had to be brave and tough, but the ability to breathe water was no longer required. Now the planet’s abandoned riches were there for the taking.

A ship curved down through Morag’s stormy atmosphere and braked into a landing at the edge of a canyon. It locked itself down with heavy pins shot into the rock, holding the ship steady against the howling winds. Its ramp lowered and the pilot emerged into the storm, walking down the remains of an ancient road. He wore a face mask, its red eyes gleaming through the storm. When he reached the edge of a ruined city, he pulled out a handheld device with a rectangular lens that glowed a bright blue.

He tried to activate it, but it sputtered and turned itself off. He shook it and tapped it, and it popped back to life, shooting out a bright field of blue light against the rain. The pilot swept the cone back and forth across the ruin, and dozens of blue pinpoints glowed along the devastated city’s edge. Then the holo mapping device fed those dots into its processor and created a hologram of what the city had looked like during its last days before the planet had destroyed it. Grainy projections of streets and buildings hung in the air, glowing red ghosts of a great city now centuries gone.

In front of the pilot snaked a road that led directly to a building near the edge of the hologram projection. On that building a tracking beacon lit up. It looked like a target, and that’s exactly what it was: the target of this expedition.

The pilot followed the road, passing through the hologram ghosts of Morag’s citizens. People went about their business. A little girl played with a dog. The pilot was a little surprised to learn that Morag’s inhabitants had been human.

He reached the ruined building and stepped inside, getting out of the rain. The wind still blew, but not nearly as hard in the enclosed space. Part of the roof had fallen in, and shafts of dim light shone down onto the rubble-strewn floor. The interior of the building was large, with thirty-foot ceilings and pillars supporting them. The pilot looked over the scene, and when he seemed satisfied that he was safe, he touched the side of his mask.

With a crackle, it disappeared, leaving only an earpiece, and Peter Quill got down to business.

The first thing he did was put on his headphones and crank up Awesome Mix Tape Vol. 1. He couldn’t do anything without his music. Then he started to tap one foot, and pretty soon he was dancing, grooving his way through the ruin and into an open plaza beyond. The rain had stopped, and he kept right on jamming, moving across the open plaza to the familiar rhythms of the songs that had kept him company for twenty-six years. He splashed through mud puddles, chased away a small pack of aggressive little lizard-like animals, and reached the edge of a huge crack in the ground. Still keeping the rhythm, he fired up the rockets in his boots and spanned the gap in a long, rocket-assisted step. On the other side, he came to a sealed door. He inserted a key into the lock, which spun with a squeal. The door opened, revealing a smaller chamber with a glowing blue containment tube sitting on a pedestal at its center.

He took a transparent globe out of his coat pocket. When he shook it, bright light glowed from within, illuminating the room. He was alone. Good. He set the globe down and unhooked a triangular metal device from his belt.

In the years since he was abducted from Earth, Peter had seen a lot. He’d seen a planet made of fire with a moon made of ice. He’d seen an army of shape-shifting aliens attack a space whale. He’d even watched as twin suns went supernova together. It had been a pretty amazing couple of decades.

He’d worked his way through the ranks on the Ravager outlaw ship that had picked him up. He had started as the space equivalent of a deckhand and risen all the way to being his captain’s second in command. It was a pretty good life. Lots of adventure, always something new to see and do ... but in all these years, there was one thing he’d never been. He’d never been rich.

If things worked out here in the ruins of this ancient Morag temple, though, that would change.

Inside the glowing blue containment field was a metallic Orb, its surface carved in a complex pattern. Peter had done a little research—well, more than a little—on this item, and although he didn’t know exactly what it was, he knew a couple of things about it.

One, the Broker would pay him a lot of money for it.

Two, it was well protected. The containment field would pretty much disintegrate anything that touched it from the outside, and he didn’t know how to turn it off. So he’d flipped the problem on its head and decided that if he couldn’t reach in and get it, he’d just have to convince the Orb to come out on its own.

That was where the triangular device came into play. It was designed to electromagnetically attract certain kinds of metal alloys, and the Orb was made of just such an alloy. Beyond that, Peter had no idea what it was for. He didn’t care, either. He just knew the Orb would make him rich, so he had come to Morag to get it.

He turned on the attractor. It snapped into an open position, with three sides of the pyramid turning into legs that braced it on the floor. The fourth side was the electromagnetic field generator. It started to hum.

Inside the containment field, the Orb moved. It pressed slowly through the containment field, shedding tendrils of plasma as it pushed through each layer. Peter watched, ready to make a break for a good hiding place if there was another layer of security he hadn’t noticed. You saw all kinds of weird things in these old ruins. His time with the Ravagers had taught him that, along with a lot of other things.

Nothing went wrong, though. The Orb slowly emerged through the outer layer of the containment field, then popped free and floated down to clink into place on the attractor. Behind it, the containment field went dark.

“Ha-ha!” Peter shouted happily as he turned off the attractor and picked up the Orb. He was so happy to have his hands on the artifact that he wanted to kiss it, and he might have done just that ... except that was when he heard an all too familiar voice growl, “Drop it!”

Oops. He wasn’t alone after all.

Peter spun to see the Sakaaran mercenary known as Korath, flanked by several of his favorite goons. All of them held weapons leveled at him. They were big and bad—especially Korath, who had some kind of machine grafted into his skull that amped up his strength and reflexes. They had him at a real disadvantage. The solution? Play it cool.

“Uh, hey,” he said, trying to keep his voice even.

“Drop it now!” Korath shouted. The other Sakaarans were shouting, too, but they didn’t speak English and Peter didn’t know any Sakaaran, so he didn’t worry about what they were saying.

“Hey, cool, man, no problem.” Peter let the Orb fall to the floor and roll until it clinked up against a stone block fallen from the roof. “No problem at all.”

Korath picked up the Orb and brandished it at Peter. “How did you know about this?”

“I don’t even know what that is! I’m just a junker, man,” explained Peter. “I was just checking stuff out.”

Korath took a moment to look Peter over from top to bottom. Peter had a bad feeling about what he was going to say next.

“You don’t look like a junker,” Korath grunted. “You’re wearing Ravager gear.”

That was the problem with uniforms. The Ravagers were a gang of criminals that pulled off jobs in this sector, and if you crossed them, you usually weren’t heard from again. Peter was, in fact, a Ravager, wearing Ravager gear. He’d been hoping Korath and the Sakaarans wouldn’t recognize it.

“You better stop poking me,” Peter growled at one of the mercenaries who kept prodding him with a gun every time Korath spoke.

“What is your name?” Korath demanded.

“My name is Peter Quill, okay? Dude, chill out.”

“Move!” Korath commanded. His soldiers echoed the command in Sakaaran, shoving at Peter.

“Why?”

“Ronan might have some questions for you.”

Ronan. That was bad news. Peter didn’t know a lot about Ronan, but what he did know made him want to steer way clear. Like light years away. Ronan was Kree, and angry, and had a tendency to kill a lot of people. Peter did not want to be in a position where Ronan was asking him questions.

What the heck, he thought. They know about the Ravagers. No point in keeping any other secrets. “Hey, you know what?” Peter asked. “There is another name you might know me by ...”

Korath paused in the temple doorway. “What is that?”

Peter looked him right in the eyes and prepared to enjoy the impact his revelation would make. “Star-Lord,” he said. Korath looked confused. “Who?” “Star-Lord, man!” Peter couldn’t believe Korath hadn’t heard of him. Didn’t he have any kind of reputation? “The legendary outlaw!” he added, hoping to prod Korath’s memory ... and also he was already starting to formulate the outlines of a plan.

Korath spread his arms, looking confused. His soldiers muttered among themselves. Peter turned to them. “Guys?”

They just stared at him.

Korath lost interest and ran out of patience at the same time. “Move!” he commanded again, with a gesture toward the door. “Ahh, forget this,” Peter said. What did a guy have to do to get a little galactic notoriety? Right at the moment when the Sakaarans had completely fallen for his wounded pride act, Peter kicked the glowing globe into the soldiers’ midst. It shattered, splashing hot white plasma over them.

They screamed and thrashed as Peter drew his blasters and dropped Korath just as he was turning around in the doorway. The Orb bounced out of Korath’s hand and Peter picked it up. He took a moment to savor the success of his ruse. The Sakaarans had been completely fooled!

Although, he admitted to himself, he was a little irritated that they hadn’t known who he was.

He heard a moan from the doorway and looked up just as Korath staggered to his feet and leveled his rifle at Peter.

The energy bolt from the rifle would have disintegrated most of Peter’s torso ... if he hadn’t thrown himself straight down onto the floor, landing hard enough to knock the wind out of him. Instead it blew a five-foot hole in the wall behind Peter.

Hey, he thought. An emergency exit!

He triggered his boots’ rocket thrusters and blasted out through the hole as a second shot from Korath hit the edge of the hole. That got him a head start, but Peter’s problems weren’t over yet. The boot thrusters were designed to fire against the ground. When they shot him out at a shallow angle through the hole in the temple wall, he completely lost his equilibrium and ended up crashing hard on the wet, rocky ground outside.

Peter scrambled to his feet and ran for his ship. Korath had gotten to the hole in the wall, screaming at the top of his lungs. Peter glanced back and saw the Sakaaran commander leap an incredible distance after him. Yikes, he thought, and ran faster. If he could get to the ship before Korath ...

Uh-oh. Peter skidded to a halt, seeing five more Sakaarans standing guard between him and his ship, the good old Milano, built along the lines of a bird of prey, with a sharp nose and hooked wings that gave it maneuverability in atmospheres but also kept its engines mounted far apart for nimble piloting in space. She was a beauty, and clearly Korath had spotted her on the way in. He was no dummy. He’d made sure he had a backup plan.

But hey, so had Peter. Sort of. In fact, he’d just thought of it! He saw that the Sakaaran mercenaries wore metallic armor, and he started running again. Toward them.

They shouted and raised their rifles, but before they could draw a bead on him Peter threw the attractor into their midst. It glowed and powered up, and in a split second they crashed together over it, held fast by the immense power of its electromagnetic field.

A geyser erupted in the shattered landscape as Peter jumped past the magnetically stuck Sakaarans. Another blast from Korath’s rifle sizzled through the rain, which was falling harder again. While he was in the air, Peter hit the control that opened the Milano’s cockpit. He landed at the base of one wing and skidded through the open hatch, landing a lot harder than he’d meant to.

With a groan he sat up and started closing the hatch. While he got the engines fired up, Korath’s pals finally broke the hold of the attractor and stood up. With Korath shouting over them, they started to set up some kind of heavy mounted gun. Peter knew he did not want to be around when it was ready.

He got off the ground and rolled the ship hard to the right as Korath’s crew fired the first shot from their cannon. It crackled under the wing and destroyed a rocky spire. Peter hauled the Milano around in a tight turn and wound its main thrusters all the way up. More blasts from Korath’s cannon tore through the storm as Peter accelerated out of range, laughing like he’d just won the lottery. Which he sort of had! Escaping from a dozen Sakaaran soldiers with a lost treasure he’d dug out of a Moragian tomb—man, if that didn’t add to the legend of “Star-Lord the Outlaw,” nothing would.

But he’d started congratulating himself a little too soon. A huge geyser, maybe ten thousand times the size of the one that he’d run past a minute before, erupted straight under the Milano and snuffed out the ship’s engines. Ah, geez, Peter thought. In atmospheres he had to use air intakes, and the geyser had turned them into water intakes.

试读结束[说明：试读内容隐藏了图片]

下载完整电子书