Trailblazer

by Michelle Diener

  Trailblazer

  Michelle Diener

  Copyright © 2019 by Michelle Diener

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  The Verdant String Series

  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

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Excerpt: Sky Raiders

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Also by Michelle Diener

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  The Verdant String Series

  The seven planets of the Verdant String, the green, fecund sources of life spanning five solar systems, comprise the Verdant String Coalition.

  This is the setting for a new science fiction romance series from award-winning science fiction romance novelist Michelle Diener.

  While the people of the Verdant String know they have a common ancestor, a group of explorers who colonised the planets at the same time thousands of years ago, the mysteries of who they were, and where they came from, persist.

  Each book in the series can be read as a standalone.

  Books in the Verdant String series:

  Interference & Insurgency Box Set

  Breakaway

  Breakeven

  Trailblazer

  Chapter 1

  Tally came awake standing in the dark.

  She flinched, but she was getting better at coping with finding herself far from where she went to sleep. It happened almost every night, and while the terror of not knowing how she got here, or where on the abandoned spaceship she was had not abated, her acceptance of the fact that this was her life now helped her keep calm.

  Calmer.

  That is what her life had narrowed to. A series of fine distinctions.

  If the pattern of the last ten days ran true, she had woken here for a reason--just like every other time this had happened to her. And that reason was there was something nearby that would be useful to her.

  She had gained blankets and even a heating unit in previous forays. Been shown bedrooms she'd been too afraid to sleep in, and given cups, bowls, and even a pillow. She didn't know if she'd ever been to a place twice--whether she'd returned to the places she'd been led to in the beginning, when panic and fear had caused her to run.

  Slowly, she crouched down and carefully extended her hands, batting gently at the air and the ground in front of her. She almost knocked whatever it was over, but she was able to grab it before it toppled.

  She picked it up, and tried to guess what it was by feel, frustrated by the true lack of any light in this part of the ship.

  It wasn't a familiar shape, and she sank down, cross-legged, and put it in front of her.

  A sensation came over her, as if something was trying to take control of her hands, and she fought it, but she was tired, and she was weak. Her food had run out two days ago, and she was rationing her water.

  If she could see--impossible in the pitch darkness--she would have watched her hands manipulating the device she was holding with horror. As it was, she simply had to endure the feel of her hands behaving as if they didn't belong to her.

  A light blossomed, suddenly and with a warm glow that wasn't too harsh on her eyes, although after so long in the darkness, she blinked away the lights dancing in front of her vision.

  She had control of her hands back, and she lifted the item, saw it was a lantern of some kind, and when she looked at the controls, realized that her hands had been hijacked in order to switch it on.

  She set it down on the floor and looked at her right palm for the first time since this nightmare began with the benefit of a good, strong light, not the low-intensity lights of the old engine room she'd made into her base.

  Her skin looked normal.

  She bent to look more closely, rubbed it with the fingers of her other hand, but she couldn't see or feel anything wrong.

  Fear of what was becoming of her, what she may be turning into, choked her, and she rubbed her hand on her bent knee, and felt the familiar sensation of being forcibly calmed. Of something like medication being injected into her system.

  “No! No, I'm fine, I will calm myself.”

  The sensation halted, and she breathed deeply.

  It listened to her. At least it listened to her.

  Sometimes.

  Unless it thought her safety or comfort would be better off if it didn't. Then it did what it wanted to do.

  So far, she had to grudgingly admit, it hadn't been wrong.

  And so far, everything it did was to protect her. Help her. Make this terrible situation better.

  She didn't understand it, but she was grateful that it was an ally, even if its methods and the seemingly all-powerful control it had over her frightened her sick.

  She had lived with it from the second day she'd been onboard this floating ghost ship, and while she didn't feel the constant panic she had at the start, sometimes, like now, it blindsided her, and her mind jumped to thoughts of parasites, or symbionts or even some kind of mind trick. She'd even considered that she was maybe lying in a coma somewhere, and none of this was real.

  Maybe she'd been hit along with Rew, and was lying, dying, somewhere next to his decomposing body.

  The breath she sucked in was ragged, and she leaned forward, tried to get a grip.

  The floor beneath her hands was cool and very real. The light helped to convince her she was alive and well and in her right mind, even if she was temporarily sharing it with something . . . else.

  Rew was still dead, though. She'd found herself checking on his body a few times, much to her shame, when the creaks and groans in the ship had made her too jumpy.

  She hadn't been able to shake the thought that if she was being manipulated after she went to sleep, what was to say Rew wasn't lurching around, a reanimated corpse.

  She had always had a very active imagination.

  She shuddered, pulled herself together. Rew had been exactly where she'd left him, every single time.

  And since the Caruso had stopped towing the ship, the creaks and groans had ceased. She'd woken one morning to the silence, and had braced for the Caruso to board and come looking for her. She'd almost hoped they would, because by then, she'd been alone with Rew and whatever was interfering with her mind for five days, and she would have given anything to see another face. Even a Caruson.

  But they never came, and she had eve
ntually had to assume they'd released the ship and left it floating in space.

  She didn't know if that would make it harder for her team to find her or not.

  The look on Bertie's face as they'd come under fire from the Caruso, as the emergency doors had closed Bertie off inside the small cruiser, was imprinted on Tally's brain.

  Bertie wouldn't leave her out here. She knew Tally was alive.

  She would push for them to look for Tally, even though the Caruso had clamped the strange, floating ghost ship and raced away. Why they'd done that and then abandoned it was just one more mystery on top of a pile of them when it came to this ship.

  If the ghost ship was still broadcasting its distress signal, maybe the team would be able to find her again.

  If they didn't do it soon, it would be too late.

  Her own rations, and Rew's, were long gone. Food and water were fundamentally more important than a light.

  Whatever was helping her would have led her to more if it had been available.

  There had been a lot of food on this ship at one time, though. That was clear from the cold store she'd found one night, waking up in front of it to discover, with horror, that she'd been dragging Rew's body with her on the thin blanket they all carried in their packs. It was the third night she'd been onboard, and Rew had started to decompose.

  She had been so worried about what to do with his body. Had wanted to preserve it for the sake of his family.

  And whoever was now pulling her strings had delivered a solution.

  That was the night she'd stopped letting her fear incapacitate her. She'd put him inside the cold room, closed the heavy door, and then wandered for hours to find her way back to her little nest in the engine room.

  It had taken her a few days to find her way back to the cold store, but now she knew the way as well as she did any route on the ship, using her screen as her light source.

  The screen was dead now. Had died three days back, even with her careful usage, and the lack of any light had worried her more than even the food situation.

  Which is why whatever was helping her had found her a light tonight, she suddenly realized.

  The more she thought or worried about something, the more likely it was that it would lead her to a solution.

  “My wish is your command, huh?” She tried to make the comment a light one. Wasn't sure she quite carried it off.

  Her voice sounded thin and insubstantial, and she cleared her throat.

  She stood, lifting the light up, and saw a corridor stretching in either direction, giving her a perspective she hadn't had before. Up 'til now she'd moved about this ship in small increments, learning it more by feel and by a circumference of light that didn't extend much beyond her own feet.

  In the last few days, she had done it in total darkness.

  She took a deep breath and realized she felt better than she had in a while, despite the gnawing in her belly. It was good to see where she was going.

  She began moving forward, light raised, and after about a minute of walking, the walls on either side of her dropped away, and she stood at one end of a walkway with railings on either side.

  Cautiously, she stepped onto it and raised the light even higher, looking over the railing to see what was below.

  Dead gardens, she realized. Beds of what had once been plants, possibly edible plants, and a few trees that were now nothing more than twisted, rotting trunks.

  The space was massive, and it was also the first real sign that this had been an explorer ship, looking for new life.

  It had occurred to her more than once that this ship was very much to her own proportions. That everything she'd found was built for hands like hers.

  Could this be a lost Verdant String ship, from before the eight planets of the Verdant String had found each other? From those first centuries of space exploration?

  Or even--her mind reeled at the implications--from another Verdant String planet, one they had yet to find?

  Whatever it was, it was a major historical find.

  She reached the halfway point across the walkway, and looked over the other side. It was more of the same, although there was also tanks that looked as if they'd once held liquid, now long dried up.

  She shivered, her sense of isolation and insignificance seemed amplified in this massive space, and she moved a little faster as she headed for the other side of the walkway.

  A door blocked her way. She stepped close to it, but it didn't open automatically. She looked around for a button or handle, but there was nothing except a screen attached to one side.

  She hesitated, then touched it, and it flickered on, an outline of a hand showing in pale gray.

  A hand exactly the shape of her own.

  Cautiously, she pressed her palm against it, and with a gasp that startled her, the door slid to one side.

  She stepped into the room, and knew immediately it was the bridge, the center of the ship.

  She lifted the light, but there was nothing in here, just chairs and machines.

  There was one light, throbbing a dull red rather than glowing, and she walked up to it. She couldn't understand the label written above it, but she accepted what she was going to do.

  She pressed the button.

  Chapter 2

  Three days later, she had come to the conclusion that the button had no effect whatsoever.

  She had moved her little nest onto the bridge, and she'd stopped wandering the ship.

  Her water was gone, she hadn't eaten in five days, and she knew she would die soon unless help came.

  She hadn't woken up standing in some strange corner of the ship since the time she'd found the light and the bridge, and she guessed there was nothing more to find.

  Whatever had helped her to this point had run out of useful gifts to lead her to.

  She heard a clang, so faint it was almost an echo, and struggled to sit up from where she was lying, head cocked. It came a second time, equally faint, and she drew her legs up and hugged them close.

  It could be space rocks, hitting them, but it could also be a inter-ship vessel locking on.

  She didn't have the energy to go look. But if she did have visitors, they'd come to her.

  Even if it was the Caruso coming back, she'd probably be better off. She'd be a useful bargaining chip with the Verdant String, at the very least.

  She hadn't realized she'd dozed off until the sound of banging on the bridge door jerked her awake.

  She stood, grimly cataloguing how unsteady she was on her feet, and she walked to the door.

  The banging came again, and she stood in front of the door and wondered why they didn't simply put their hands to the screen plate and open it.

  The voices on the other side were indistinct, but there was something familiar enough about the tone and pitch that had her heart skipping in excitement.

  She touched the plate on her side of the door and it slid open.

  Bertie's tight, worried face was the first thing she saw.

  * * *

  “So something was helping you.” Dr. Vetna watched her with calm, intelligent eyes.

  Tally felt her throat tighten, and wished she'd never said anything about it. “That's what it felt like.”

  “You never saw anything, though?” Commander Hopl was leaning against the counter in the med bay, and he was less calm, his thin, lanky frame seemed unable to stay still.

  She shook her head. “I was mostly in the dark, though.”

  “Your eyes have adjusted very well to full light, I'm pleased to say,” Dr. Vetna said, looking small and round next to Hopl. “Sometimes they can take a while, but you've bounced back incredibly well. Given your lack of food and water in the last five days of your time aboard, I'm also impressed with your vitals. You're one of the healthiest individuals I've ever seen.”

  Tally sent a nervous, sidelong look at her. “And the blood tests . . .?”

  “Nothing concerning. Obviously you had very low blood sugar,
were clearly dehydrated, but it took you very little time to bounce back to normal levels.”

  There had been nothing in her blood.

  She slumped back on the raised bed, and closed her eyes. Nothing in her blood.

  She had worried . . .

  And then she went still.

  When she worried, whatever it was that had wormed its way into her made a plan to appease that worry.

  Nothing in her blood meant nothing, other than whatever it was was able to hide itself from Dr. Vetna.

  “What is it? What have you remembered?” Commander Hopl's tone forced her eyes open again.

  “Nothing.” She cleared her throat. “There was a bead. It felt like a metal bead. Or a ball bearing.” She paused, unsure if she should say this.

  Would it make things better, or worse?

  Hopl lost interest immediately. Vetna kept her steady gaze on Tally's face.

  “What about the bead?”

  “It felt like it sank into my palm when I picked it up.”

  “Could you have dropped it?” Vetna asked gently.

  Tally paused, then nodded. “I was disoriented. Dragging Rew's body around with me, so I didn't lose him. It was before I found the engine room, which had some ambient light.”

  “Which palm?”

  She held out her right palm, and Vetna took her hand, studied it.