“Yeah. Let’s wrap this up,” Oran replied, though with far less enthusiasm than me.
I practically had to pull Oran along. I think the talk of the area being haunted concerned him more than the steep, rocky terrain we were descending. After all, if the ship we were looking for had a split reactor, that could be the source of superstition for Ryx’s villagers.
We pressed through thick foliage. More than once thorns and branches snared my sleeves and pants. I kept quiet about it, but Oran complained. “This place is terrible,” he said. “We should’ve waited for Tolby to finish working on your ship. Could’ve saved us a lot of walking.”
“She’s due for her thousand-hour maintenance,” I replied. “You don’t want to skip that kind of stuff unless the idea of breaking down between system jumps appeals to you.”
Oran snorted. “Yeah, but waiting a few more hours wouldn’t have killed you. It’s not like this crash site is going anywhere.”
“There’s no room to land around here,” I explained as I hacked away at the Yubjub bushes with my nanomachete. They’d gotten so dense that I’d have given my first born for a flamethrower or a herd of vegetarian land piranhas. “And if we wait much longer, it’ll be twenty-nine hours since we’ve been on this world.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
I stopped. “I don’t like twenty-nine. It…makes me feel uneasy.” I couldn’t explain it other than that. It’s not because it’s a prime number. There are some I like (like the numbers three and eleven), but certain numbers are wrong, four especially. Four is scratchy and sounds like a faster-than-light drive when it’s about to go supercritical and scatter your atoms across the galaxy. Twenty-nine isn’t that bad, but it smells like musty socks and is lime green. If you’re not a synesthete, this sounds kooky, but if you are, you know what I’m talking about.
I pushed on, not wanting to think about bad numbers anymore. “God, these trees are huge. No wonder I couldn’t see anything from orbit.”
Oran let the conversation die. A few hacks later, we broke through the brush and found ourselves at the edge of a small river. It moved at a fast clip, and I paused to wash my face. Once cleaned and refreshed, I checked my datapad to see how much farther we had to go. That’s when I realized it said we were less than fifty meters downstream of where we wanted to be.
I looked up and my breath left me. Ahead there was an exhaust port as tall as I was. I couldn’t see the rest of the ship, but what I saw looked intact. Thankfully, the crash was on our side of the river. Trying to cross such a swift body of water wasn’t appealing.
I wondered how long the ship had been there. Given the forest growth around it, it’d probably crashed hundreds of years ago. Thousands maybe. Millions? Was it Progenitor?
I chuckled, knowing I was getting carried away. It was a human ship, five hundred years old at the most. As I drew closer, I could see the engines were original Pratt & Taiki FTL drives. They had the company’s signature egg-shaped design that early engineers erroneously thought were more reliable. It also had slanted, atmospheric stabilizing fins made from a plasti-titanium compound (the goldish sheen was a dead giveaway) that only saw limited production in the early- to mid-first-century AHS.
The ship itself was lying on its belly, sunken a couple of meters into the ground. That said, it was still two stories tall, so I was mostly looking up at it.
“This is amazing,” Oran said. The awe in his voice was palpable.
I touched the micro-button on the side of my thin-rimmed glasses and opened a communication line back to my ship. “Tolby? We scored.”
“Great One guides us! I knew it!” His deep, rough voice was filled with energy. “What did we find?”
“It’s—”
“A Porellian battle cruiser?”
“No a—”
“A Weyani medship?”
“No, it’s—”
“By the Plancks!” Tolby boomed. “Tell me it’s a Progenitor! It is right? No…don’t tell me. The gods will smite me for the amount of blaspheme I’ll utter if I’m stuck here working on this bucket of bolts of yours.”
My face soured. “Hey!”
“Sorry,” he apologized. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I’m centered now. You may inform me of this Progenitor ship you’ve discovered.”
At the time, I could picture the serious, slightly adorable look on his tiger-like face and couldn’t stay mad at him for calling my ship a piece of crap. “Human origins. Looks like an old exploration ship. Early Odyssey? Still walking up to it.”
Tolby grunted. “That’s…disappointing. Perhaps it’ll have something good inside? I mean salvage on just the ship…”
“Will barely cover costs getting out here, but there’s no telling what it was carrying,” I said. Remains of ships this old weren’t worth much. It would be like expecting the rotting wood of a sunken Spanish galleon to fetch a prime price to a carpenter. No, what we needed to find was some rare cargo.
“Inform me of your progress as things develop,” he said. “I’m going to take our ship out for a test flight and make sure everything’s running smoothly before we head home.”
“Of course,” I said. “Hey, rub my elephant for good luck.”
Tolby grumbled over the line. “Really?”
“Yes, really!” I said. “He’s part of the reason we got this lucky!”
“He’s a piece of plastic suction-cupped to your dashboard,” Tolby replied. “He can’t do anything but decrease warpcore efficiency by 0.00002%, rounded of course, due to his minimal mass.”
“Remember what happened last time you didn’t rub the elephant? We had that strut malfunction, and it nearly ruined my landing gear.”
“That had nothing to—” Tolby stopped midsentence and cursed (knowing I was right). “Fine. There. Happy now? I rubbed your elephant, just how he likes it.”
“Perfect. Thanks. Talk to you soon.”
“Dakota?” Oran said, drawing my attention. He stood near the aft of the ship, inspecting a large identification plate welded on the side. “This isn’t an Odyssey. It’s the colony ship of the NTS Vela.”
I squealed without shame and bolted to where he was to get a look. The fifteen meters that separated us felt like a kilometer. But once I was there, it read as he’d said: COLONY SHIP – NTS VELA.
Tales about the Vela had been spun for centuries. No one knew what had happened to it half a millennium ago, but every legend said it had been on its way to unearth a treasure trove of Progenitor technology before vanishing. And while this wasn’t the Vela, obviously, it was the colony ship that would detach from the Vela to land on a planet and well, like the name says, colonize it, since the Vela wasn’t meant for anything but pure space travel.
My heart pounded against my chest, and I hopped around with unbridled excitement. Technology from the first spacefaring race was at my fingertips! Technology that could power a galaxy or jump ship halfway across the known universe in the blink of an eye! Technology that would firmly write me into all the history books from here till the end of time!
I playfully punched Oran in the arm and smiled brighter than I’d ever before.
“What the hell are we waiting for then? Let’s get in there!”
(End of Sample)
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Love Greek Mythology? Be Sure to Check Out The Gorgon Bride!
THE GODS ARE FUNNY.
Except when you piss them off.
Then they suck.
They really, really suck.
(Really).
Alexander Weiss discovers this tidbit when he inadvertently insults Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, and she casts him away on a forgotten isle filled with statues.
Being marooned is bad enough, but the fact that the island is also the home of Euryale, elder sister to Medusa, makes the situation a touch worse. The only thing keeping Alex from being petrified is the fact that Euryale has taken a liking to the blundering mortal.
For n
ow.
What follows next is a wild, adventurous tale filled with heroes, gods, monsters, love, and war that is nothing short of legendary.
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But if you’re still in the mood for funny, sci-fi, check out Little Computer People!
When Gabe created the world’s first sentient program, Pi, he thought things couldn’t get better. Now he’s pretty sure things couldn’t get worse.
After a colossal error on Gabe’s part, Pi turns into a binary monster along the lines of HAL, GLaDOS, and SHODAN. The only thing rendering her mostly harmless is the fact that she doesn’t fully understand the physical world...yet.
But she’s learning.
And unless Gabe quickly finds a way to rein her in or shut her down, the next time Pi starts a fire, it won’t just be his empty house that goes up in flames.
If you’re a fan of Douglas Adams or Christopher Moore then this is a novel for you.
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Acknowledgements
To all the zombies who generously donated their time so I could understand how their brains work…
To my slew of readers who went over countless drafts and helped shape Death & Taxes into a fun romp…
And most of all, to my wife, Mary Beth, who keeps reading my stuff at my request and somehow hasn’t been driven away.
About the Author
When not writing, Galen Surlak-Ramsey has been known to throw himself out of an airplane, teach others how to throw themselves out of an airplane, take pictures of the deep space, and wrangle his four children somewhere in Southwest Florida.
He also manages to pay the bills as a chaplain for a local hospice.
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Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Apocalypse How
Chapter One
Chapter Two
The Gorgon Bride
Little Computer People
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher (and other stuff)
Death and Taxes Page 22
