by S E Zbasnik
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First in Series
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DWARVES IN SPACE Copyright © 2015 by S.E. Zbasnik.
ASIN: B00TBW2GGO
All rights reserved. No part of this book my be used or reproduced in any manner without explicit permission of the author except in the case of quotations embedded in critical reviews. Any resemblance to people, creatures, or rather tasty pies is purely coincidental. I tried to form my own parallel universe where it did exist, but the chipmunks kept catching on fire and exploding. Chipmunks are not team players.
~For More Information About Dwarves in Space~
www.dwarvesinspace.com
A Moment of Thanks
I’d like to take this blank space to thank my husband, for putting up with me losing months creating this tale, and all my awesome beta readers: Adam, Grapeman, Dawn, and Mandaray.
Please forward all complaints to them.
Candy is hidden inside this book.
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
PREVIEW
DWARVES IN SPACE 2: Family Matters
PROLOGUE
Sulfur winds tossed vestiges of the colony across barren soil. After canceling the distress call, only two of the scouting party remained. With the rest of the team back on the ship, the rescue operation quickly turned to salvage. A man's armored boot kicked into a teetering gate, the plastic of the pre-fab homes grimy from the continual sandstorms of a planet that should never have been colonized.
Gods, what was anyone even doing here? Aside from dying.
The Knight-Captain smacked her fist against his hazmat suit. Even the bright orange rubber bore the crest of the enraged Bear lest anyone confuse them for common scavengers. He turned to face her and shrugged, not bothering to offer an apology over the partially functioning comm line. Terrwyn would have reprimanded him, but the little shit must have deep connections to rise this far up the ranks. If it weren't for the war, she'd probably be stuck saluting him.
"We make one final sweep, then arm the detonator," she ordered, staggering from another burst of wind. Her rubbery arm rose above her facemask as she stared into the horizon, the red giant of a sun slipping behind a set of MGC rich mountain ranges. The only reason anyone would bother putting down roots in soil that couldn't support a sapling was to mine all the MGC before the Corps got their connected tendrils in. And everyone, young men and women with gold in their eyes as well as the older ones selling the shovels, paid for it with their lives.
Purchase up the colonizing rights on some dust ball a salesman assures is full of energy-rich compounds and fail to pay the extra coin for a proper detox scan. A tale written across gravestones and in report footnotes that no one ever learned from. Normally, they'd find a few people clinging to life before someone wised up and sent out a distress signal, lack of nutrition or clean water being the major culprits. Once there was a pernicious strain of strangling vines that did not take kindly to being hacked away for the sake of a jousting court.
But this was quick. A virus or some alien virus simulacrum hidden deep in the soil, virulent enough to knock back every colonist within twelve hours. By the time the ship arrived, most of the skeletons were sand blasted clean of flesh from the tumultuous weather. The ship's resident field doctor poked his head out at the carnage, declared them "Dead, Jim," and hustled back inside the shuttle before anyone could argue.
It'd have been left as a warning for anyone trying to colonize planet P3-507, a few images encoded in a buoy, had it not been for the ministry official "accompanying" them on a final sweep through this backwater half of the galaxy before a necessary furlough. She ordered samples, evidence, data, all things that take time and risk other officers to whatever alien bug ate through these dead colonists. Knight-Captain Terrwyn Yates was thanked for her input, the best way of saying "fuck you" to someone who spent her life heavily armed, and sent back to the planet with one final order; destroy everything left.
She picked Lieutenant Dacre as her second, and blamed her choice on exhaustion the moment the atmoshuttle sunk deep into the shifting sands. He savored in the dead's final moments, poking and prodding about their hopeful homes like a child stumbling upon an ant to torment. A final sweep for any survivors, those were the regs, and a second to sign off on the lack of life.
"Dacre," her voice reverberated across the echo in her hood, "search through the few standing walls to the compound's west edge."
"Why bother?" His voice lilted with each vowel, a thick accent he'd have to smooth out before getting any higher up the chain unless his mommy or daddy paid for it.
"Because I gave you an order." Her voice didn't tremble, didn't hold any anger or rage. It was as immobile as stone.
Anyone without connections would have slunk back, maybe saluted, but Dacre merely shrugged again, "Very 'ell," and he slunk off towards the few standing walls. Terrwyn lifted a downed pipe from a stack, never inserted into the sewage system before disaster struck. Using the pipe as a walking stick, she measured her footsteps. The dying could not have made it far out of the compound; but there'd be a dump, close enough to make the trek easy, yet distant enough to hide the smell of human existence. Possibly, someone could have run before the bug got to her.
Her feet left half tracks in the shifting sands dancing in a mixture of gases their sensors assured them was breathable. She refused to believe a person could live in this; if the buffeting winds of sand didn't scourge your skin, the rising sulfur and ammonia levels would burn the lungs. Even implants wouldn't salve it all. Dacre's voice momentarily flared through her helmet, but the planet's high MGC levels wreaked havoc on their communications. She shut off the line rather than face endless static punctuated by "can you....me now?"
She paused before a crater, dug either by the colonists or a lost asteroid millennia ago. Their refuse only coated the bottom layer. They hadn't been living here long before the virus came a'calling. The walls lying upon the ground most likely were never even raised. A pathetic example of the entrepreneurially human spirit.
The Knight-Captain turned to leave, nothing could be hiding amongst the thin layer of garbage, when a light flared in the distance. She wiped off the film coating her helmet and stared across the crater at a dark figure. Its skin was thick as a cliffside with broken fissures that flared as if intermittent fires roared inside its guts. "Who are you?" she called out into the alien world, but the figure either didn't understand or couldn't hear. It raised its own arm slowly and placed a hand overtop its eyes as if to spy back upon the invader of its planet. Turning to look behind, two more lumbering rock monsters rose beside it, one far shorter than the others.
Terrwyn clicked open her comm, "Dacre, abort. Abort the mission. There's still life here. Dacre? Damn it!"
She turned from her new friend and raced back to the compound, unaware she was being followed. "Dacre! I swear if you don't pick up this comm line I'll strap you to the hood of the ship and parade your ass past the next station's embassy deck."
Her limbs grew weary with each step, the suit's scrubbers failing against the challenge of the environment. Cheap pieces of shit. That's military cutbacks for you. If they didn't get to the last shuttle soon, they may not get back at all. As her line of sight crested above the fallen scraps of what the colonists dubbed "New Avar," she spotted the Lieutenant hunched overtop the incendiary device. Burn everything to over a thousand
degrees and scrap what remains for someone else's failed colony, those were the orders.
The Knight-Captain waved her arms, trying to catch Dacre's attention. He momentarily glanced up from his number punching and rose unsteadily. Patches of his voice clipped across the comm line, "Couldn't find...getting too hard...gonna blow it now before we lose sterility."
"Stand down, Lieutenant," she said, finally falling into comm range, "the orders have changed."
His weasel eyes slipped down to the bomb happily blinking away, and back to his commanding officer, "Sir?"
"There's people alive on this rock."
Dacre snorted, "I find that high'y doubtful. I get it, you'd prefer to find someone a'ive and play the big hero again, but your weary eyes are playing tricks upon you...Sir."
"You little, sniveling shit," Terrwyn cursed, her anger punctuating through the military fog.
A hissing sound, like water poured over burning coals, broke through their fight, and Dacre glanced past his fuming commanding officer to the rock monster breaking into the compound. His side arm slipped into his fumbling hands as he aimed upon its chest. Luckily, the bastard was a terrible shot. The quartermaster kept all of Dacre's weapons at a half charge just in case he accidentally shot at their side.
"There are more," the Knight-Captain said calmly, her mind flipping through the list of recognized aliens. This definitely fell into the miscellaneous category, but she was certain she'd seen something like this before. An alien with fire for veins and a suit of rocks...Gods she was terrible at this diplomacy shit.
"How many more?!" Dacre panicked, as if the little xenophobe never saw an alien before. Then again, the Crests did draw upon both the professional bigoted and terrified as much as those who wanted someone else to pay for their education or give them a bed at night.
"Enough."
Dacre's teeth chattered as he weighed his options, his gun waving about like a sapling twisting in the wind, "No one else knows they're here. We set the timer, head back to the shuttle, and let the planet blow."
"Let the planet blow? What are you talking about?" Regs were strict, they were to detonate the colony, not the entire rock.
Dacre rolled his eyes so hard the helmet slipped over his face. He took his balancing hand off his gun to try and get the rock monster back in his line of sight, "This planet is lined with MGC, the bomb's a fuel catalyst, not some old fashioned inferno. It starts a chain reaction and the entire planet blows. Sir."
"Then the plans have changed. There are clearly life forms, sentient and intelligent, living upon this rock. Setting off that bomb would be against the Accord of the Twelve Stars."
Dacre snorted again, "No offense, Sir, but if that Ministry official went to that much trouble to get a catalyst bomb drilled into the veins of this rock, she's not gonna give a shit about some musty old Accord and a walking island statue."
Terrwyn gritted her teeth and looked back at her new friend, the holes where eyes would be burned a staggering red. It seemed to know what was being discussed despite not responding. "Stand down, Lieutenant."
"Sir?" Dacre asked, uncertain. Surely she wasn't stupid enough to go against Ministry orders. They could make entire systems disappear.
"You heard me, stand down. I'll not destroy these people because some fat arsehole in Antilla says so."
"Those fat aresholes could toss both of us in the dungeon for the rest of our lives without anyone the wiser," Dacre's weapon shifted over to his commanding officer.
Terrwyn didn't flinch, her fingers slipping the catch upon her gun loose and arming in a single beat, "I said, stand down, Lieutenant. I will not say it again."
Dacre's gun bobbled, the barrel bouncing from her head then to her navel, but he wouldn't back down. He spent his life butting up close to the Ministry, rubbing elbows with people who'd keep things in their basements that would make most warlords vomit in disgust. He wasn't about to wind up like them. "No, Sir."
Terrwyn blinked once, "Fine," and she opened fire. The bullets smashed into the bomb's outer casing, kicking up sparks as the number pad crumpled into debris.
"You fucking moro..." was as far as Dacre got before the sparks caught and the bomb casing exploded, tossing the Lieutenant into the no longer standing walls and Terrwyn and the rock monster down the colony's hill.
High above orbit, the ship acknowledged the bomb's fire and slipped through the waiting wyrmpinch before it'd be caught in the planet's explosion. It did not care that one shuttle failed to return.
CHAPTER ONE
Five Years Later....
"Station Eclipse 5... Eclipse 5, come in." The line popped and hissed as if someone pushed on the respond button before closing his side. Amateurs. "Coming in is code for answering the line, in case you forgot. If you can hear me, respond with absolute silence." Orn paused for a moment before smugly sliding open the comm line, "Good, glad that's all settled."
Orn leaned back into his chair, a highly sought after lower lumbar support system that could tip to nearly 105˚ before you'd find dwarf all across the bulkheads. Pilots were notorious sticklers when it came to their chairs and only their chairs, some even turning down vaunted positions on the most luxurious star cruisers because the chairs weren't customizable.
He thudded his right boot upon the excessive glass console, missing partially vital controls. Whatever idiot thought people would love seeing all the wires, diodes, and other electronic doodads to keep them from flying straight into a sun hopefully was tossed into one himself. Orn tried painting sections, but the shit always scraped off or melted when they dropped through a pinch. To remedy that situation, he took to "borrowing" the old-timey posters for acts on whatever floating hunk of rock the ol' girl set herself down on. A session of "Gabbing with Godot" hovered over the impulse drive he was supposed to be watching, but the traffic around the station was calm for once. It was the perfect time to sit back and...
"What's the situation?"
In the old days, Orn would have sat straight up and pushed a few of the less important buttons to look busy, but he'd been on this bird for nearing three (or was it four?) years now. The cap'n would see straight through it anyway. Instead, he swiveled slowly to her, unraveling the last of his stash of rope candy into a slightly stubbly mouth. "Not much," he slurped through the red goo.
The captain, as she hated being called, shifted back on her bare feet, more than likely roused from a nap by the proximity alarm. Orn preferred to do most of his dealings in the middle of the night. The graveyard shift asked few questions aside from "Where's the coffee and when will it be in me?" Her lip curled up, pulling with it the deep scar running down her right cheek; a landmark she refused to ruminate upon.
"Pull the other one, Orn. I can see the blighted station out the windows," Variel pointed out their too numerous windows at the orbiting waylay station, one of five above Samudra's ample coastlines.
Orn's excessive brows crocheted as he stared out the windows. They graced them with a near panoramic view of whatever existed outside the bridge; which for about 99.999% of the trip amounted to blackness, stars, then -- for a change of pace -- more stars and blackness. The things bothered him. Someone who spent more than a three hour cruise on a ship knew how easily a high powered nub of grit could shatter right through one...assuming the shields were down, backups were dead, and you smashed your noodle on the way to sealing the hole. Still, the mere possibility unnerved anyone with stardust in their veins.
"The station's out," the dwarf informed her, slurping down the last of his treat and reaching under his swivel chair for a drink of something other than thrice recycled "don't ask where it's been" water. His black gloves scattered around a few empty bottles of a drink decorated with fizzy bubbles.
Variel placed her hands upon a playbill about a dryad who thinks it's actually a man. She leaned out, staring into the carousel-like station rotating above the crystal blue planet. Most of the strip was dark, long since silenced for the families sleeping off their busy days a
head or behind them. Lights only burned on the lower maintenance deck and the top floors for those who think they're more important than maintenance.
"Flip the comm," the captain ordered, her voice all business despite the cottony pair of pajamas she'd waltzed onto the bridge in. Orn half expected to find an embroidered bunny.
"A'right, but it won't do you any good. They must have their gnomes in charge of docking." Despite his protesting, the dwarf pulled the switch, his right hand flickering momentarily over the blue tab covered in a fruit sticker.
"Eclipse 5, this is the Elation-Cru looking for a docking number. Please respond," Variel rolled her neck back, trying to blink away the last of her sleep. If this weren't the heart of "the safest ports in the galaxy" she'd probably be nervous about the quiet comms.
"Eclipse 5?" She continued before turning back to Orn, who lifted his massive shoulders and slipped another boot overtop his first. He'd pull out his PALM and start playing Spacecolony if the boss wasn't staring right at him. "I say, is anyone there?"
"We have coin?" Orn threw out.
The static popped and a voice, higher pitched than was typical for most organics, screeched across the flight deck, "This is Eclipse 5, oh bloody hell! Who let those little brats in here to dick with the controls?" some shuffling drifted across the space, a few pops answered back, and the voice returned much less like a rodent freebasing helium, "We have you on sensors, Elation-Cru."
"Sensors," Orn snorted, "look out a bleedin' window and we'll wave back at ya."
"Docking port 75-C is open. You'll be in the Happy Jellyfish lot," reported the man who was probably wiping sticky chocolate off his control panels.
