by M. M. Perry
“AI, sir, not cyborgs.”
“What?”
“AI. Cyborgs are part man part mach…” before the messenger could finish he was pinned to the wall by the captain’s huge hands.
It was quite the feat, considering the stocky messenger wasn’t small by any measure.
“You think I care about that?”
The messenger couldn’t breathe. The captain began to squeeze the life out of him.
“Mike, put him down and come back to bed,” a sultry voice called out from the gloom further in the room.
One of the women had woken, and was posed seductively in the soft sheets. Mike loosened his grip and let the messenger drop to the ground. The man gasped for air.
“Alright, Maria, hold your horses,” he said, grinning at her as he moved toward the bed.
“It isn’t horses I want to hold,” she said lustily.
The messenger on the floor had to stifle a snort as he got up. He stumbled from the room as Mike called out.
“I’ll be on the bridge in an hour.”
A groan floated out of the room.
“Make that three.”
The door to the captain’s suite closed behind the messenger and he leaned against it, rubbing his sore neck.
“He got you pretty good, didn’t he?” another man said, laughing at the messenger.
The messenger ran his hand through his auburn hair and noisily scratched the reddish stubble on his face.
“I drew the short straw. Better to tell him now then have him throttle me worse if we waited until he was up.”
“You lived through it, Gerry. That’s better than the last guy could say.”
Gerard went back to his station on the bridge and resumed monitoring communications. He pulled up the message he’d just intercepted from the Magellan.
To the Nimoy. We’d like to open communications with you. As we come closer to Mission’s End, we find it prudent to reach out to our sister ships. Starting civilization anew is a big task, even for all of us. In the spirit of cooperation, we’d like to offer our aid in anything you may currently need, or should need over the next two years. We hope in that time we will all come together as one colony, to achieve what the builders set out to do. We know you’ve probably seen the destruction of the Tereshkova. It saddens us on the Magellan that we waited too long to reach out. Had we acted sooner, we could have arrived at Macha with the full fleet, hand in hand to begin this new journey together. We hope to hear your response.
Warmly,
Alphea of the Magellan
Gerard wished he could respond in kind. But that was impossible for him, or anyone on the Ericson. Cooperation was not their way - subjugation was. He tapped the name at the bottom of the message.
“Alphea,” he chuckled. “Imagine that,” he said, turning to look at the young girl sitting in the corner of the bridge by herself.
Her bright eyes shone fiercely at him.
“Looks like maybe you’ll get to meet one of your copies, girl.”
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to my editor, who makes sure all my names are proper and characters are essential. Thanks to Chrystal Lee Stevens, DingyDeb, Mark Gizmo and all the members of my Advance Review Team. You are essential to the process and help make me a better writer. Thanks to all the readers who encourage me every day with messages and kind words. And of course, thanks to my family and friends, who keep me going, even on days when everything isn’t rainbows and sunshine. You all rock!
Also by M.M. Perry
Of Gods and Mortals Trilogy
Whom the Gods Love (Book 1)
Whom the Gods Hate (Book 2)
Whom the Gods Fear (Book 3)
The Arbiter
The Dream Merchant
Mission’s End series
The 13
Coming Soon!
The 12
Charmed Legacy
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About the Author
M.M. Perry has published six books. By day, she is an expert cat and dog wrangler, a nacho connoisseur, and writer of fantasy, science fiction and horror. By night… she does the same things. She is hard at work getting her first science fiction series edited and published. She’s equally busy teaching her pug to sing along to the Muppets. She is known for saying, “No task involving a pug is impossible, just highly improbable.”
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