by Maren Smith
BINDING BRINLEY
Captives of Pra’kir, Book 1
By
MAREN SMITH
Binding Brinley
Captives of Pra’kir, Book 1
by
Maren Smith
All rights reserved.
Copyright 2017 © by Maren Smith
This book may not be reproduced, in whole
or part, by mimeograph or any other means,
without permission of the author.
[email protected]
This book is a work of fiction.
Any resemblance to actual persons,
places and events are purely coincidental.
Edited by: Rose Lipscomb at Flawless Fiction
Cover Artist: Alyssa Hart
Also by Maren Smith:
Masters of the Castle Series:
Holding Hannah
Kaylee’s Keeper
Saving Sara
Sweet Sinclair
Chasing Chelsea
Owning O
Maddy Mine
The Red Petticoat Saloon Series:
Jade’s Dragon
Warming Emerald
Corbin’s Bend Series:
Last Dance for Cadence
Have Paddle, Will Travel
Other Titles:
Angel of Hawkhaven
B-Flick
Black Sheep
Daughter of the Strong
The Diva
Enemies
The Great Prank
Kindred Spirits
The Locket
Morogh the Demon
The Mountain Man
My Lady Robin Hood
The Next Ex
Varden’s Lady
PROLOGUE
The acrid smoke of insulation and electrical wires burning somewhere within the inner panels of the spacecraft walls stung her nose and burned her eyes. It hung thickly throughout the ship, a wispy curtain of gray that twined about her fingers as Brinley careened weightlessly from one sterile shuttle wall to the next, searching desperately for either the source of that fire or the hole through which their now critically limited air was hemorrhaging.
“Oxygen, twelve percent!” Mira yelled through the forward cabin’s hatch.
“Controls unresponsive,” Blythe said, panic held at bay only through sheer will. Trust Blythe. The most disciplined and logical of them all, she already had the flight manual open in her lap and was rapidly flipping pages. “We have to shut down the system and hope it reboots.”
“If it doesn’t, we can’t fly this thing!” Lily protested.
“We can’t fly it now!” Blythe shot back.
“Brinley, get your ass back up here!” Sarai bellowed over her shoulder. The rasp of her friend’s normally calm voice was rough from all the smoke and the coughing, not to mention the growing panic. Only barely in control of her own fear, Brinley couldn’t blame her.
Sarai had been the first of them to react when the pebble-sized whatever punched through their hull, drilling through the control panel, fuel and life-support tanks, and Commander Hollister’s cryo-sleeper—not to mention the commander himself. Setting off every deafening alarm on the shuttle, he became a lifeless human pinball spewing long streams of floating crimson globules as he drifted through the Medi-Bay, bouncing off the equipment and walls and even the other cryo-sleepers, fourteen of which were still occupied. Why the computer had only awakened five of them, Brinley didn’t know, but it was like they’d won the Cast-Away Lottery. The jackpot prize? One fiery crash-landing on an alien planet that, according to the failing computers, wasn’t supposed to be there.
It was a hell of a way to wake up. One that grew more complicated by the zero gravity, the deafening alarms, and a hundred flashing buttons that continued to light up every time a new system abruptly failed. Added to that, the dizzying effects of the cryo-sickness they had been warned about had begun to settle in. So far, Mira had thrown up twice. Brinley had lost count of how many retching spasms had wracked her, but they weren’t stopping, and all she could do was try her best to avoid colliding with those floating vomit balls as she leapt from one hatch to the next in a vain attempt to find the damaged panel that hid the fire and the source of the escaping air.
Her head was killing her, and they were all going to die. It was not a good day.
“Brin-ley!” Sarai shouted. The shuttle bucked and shuddered so violently that for a moment, Brinley was sure it was about to break. The massive unknown planet—all blue seas, green and brown continents, and drifting white clouds currently filling the front flight-windows—had caught them in its gravitational pull, adjusting their trajectory, just not enough to keep them from crashing. “We are going down!”
“Jesus!” Lily exclaimed, her blue gaze whipping from one readout to the next. “A-am I reading this right? Oxygen, ten percent!”
“I can’t re-route the power. Nothing’s working!”
“Somebody do something!”
“I’m a communications specialist, not a goddamn pilot!”
“Brinley Lawson, Goddamn it! Get back up here!”
Without their suits or enough air in the forward cabin to land, they would all be just as dead. So Brinley kept going, touching every panel, feeling for the heat of a hidden fire until beyond the hatch immediately ahead, she glimpsed yellow sparks flashing through the smoke. Her stomach rolled; she was almost sick all over again. The fire was in the life-support panel. They really were going to die.
“Lawson!”
“I found it!” Brinley shouted back. Doing so made the burn of the thickening smoke hit the back of her throat, igniting another coughing fit. She couldn’t breathe, but she couldn’t afford to stop either. Scrambling through the next hatch, she shoved with both arms, kicked with her feet, and used the zero gravity to fly all the way to the affected system. Stopping was a different matter. She crashed into the searing hot panel, the heat of the unseen fire penetrating right through the sweats and t-shirt she’d gone to her cryo-tube in. She’d swear about it later. Right now, pain lanced her fingers as she hooked the red-hot handholds, but she held on and didn’t let go until after she’d yanked the panel off the wall. It was hard to let go gently, but there was already enough blood and puke in the air; she didn’t need another projectile. She shook her seared hands as it drifted away.
“Interior temperature rising,” Blythe said from the forward compartment. Brinley knew Blythe’s fingers had to be flying every bit as rapidly over unresponsive keys, as hers were pulling at smoldering wires. Both of them frantically trying to find some combination that worked. She was both disconnecting and manually re-connecting fuses to re-route all the air and power they had left to the forward compartment.
“I’ve got stick controls!”
“Fuel storage cells are overheating. If we don’t dump them now, we are going to blow up with them!”
“We have to disengage! We have to disengage now!”
“Brinley fucking Lawson!” Sarai bellowed down the length of the smoke-filled shuttle. “We are leaving!”
A sharp electric snap within the panel made Brinley jump and yelp, but then she heard it—the slow hiss as the wire she’d just switched made the right connection, re-routing all remaining air supplies.
“She did it.” Mira laughed, high-pitched with relief but no less panicked. “We’ve got oxygen. Not a lot, but maybe enough—”
“Enough to ignite when we crash?” Blythe snapped. “I’m dumping the ass-end of this unresponsive bitch in ten… nine…”
“Law-son!” Sarai’s voice cracked, probably on another cough, but then the entire shuttle shook, a violent vibration that
tested the endurance of every rivet and seam. It was the beginning of their impending end.
Brinley shoved off the panel, flying to the opposite side of the narrow room where their exterior mobility suits were strapped down. She ripped them off the wall, fingers hooking multiple chest straps.
“Six…”
“Brinley!”
“Five…”
Shoving off the wall, Brinley flew to the door hatch. As she shoved through it, kicking with her legs to fly to the next hatch, she could see Sarai in the distance of the forward cabin. She was silhouetted against the backdrop of the main window, the fire of re-entry licking off the nose of the shuttle before them. Coughing, she was fighting to free herself from her seat harness, as if coming back to help was even an option.
“Four…”
Their eyes met from three shuttle sections away.
“Wait! I see her!” Sarai told the others. “She’s coming!”
“Three…”
Brinley hooked through the lip of the next hatch, shoving with both arms and leaping off the rim to soar weightlessly up to the next circular door. She wasn’t going to make it. But, if she could just get close enough.
“I see her, goddamn it! She’s right there!”
“We can’t wait,” Blythe replied. Her back was stiff. She never looked back, but she was right, and they all knew it. “Two…”
Brinley reached the next hatch, the next to last. Only one left—the one that accessed the forward cabin, but an impossible twenty feet away; she was out of time. Brinley braced herself within the opening. With all the strength she could muster, one after the other, she threw the suits. The last bounced off the rim of the hatch, but four made it through into Sarai’s reflexive catch just as the alarm lights above the forward cabin hatch turned from orange to red.
Blythe never said the last number aloud. She simply hit the button that shut the hatch to the main cabin.
It was sheer reflex on Brinley’s part too, that involuntary jump that flew her across the room to crash against the locked hatch door. The rectangular square of shatter-and-fireproof glass in the hatch door was not quite head-sized but was, nevertheless, big enough to show the devastation on Sarai’s face. Her mouth opened and closed, crying Brinley’s name, though she couldn’t hear it through the sealed hatch. Not over the scream of the alarms belting out an unstoppable countdown of their own.
“I’m sorry,” Sarai was mouthing, beating her hands on either side of that tiny window. In the smoky haze around her when she moved, Brinley caught only half-second glimpses of the others. Mira, twisted as far around in her chair as the safety harness would allow. She was crying. Blythe, her head bowed. She might have been crying too, but she still didn’t turn around. Lily was struggling to fly the shuttle.
“I’m sorry.” Sarai’s wail was eerily soundless beneath the blaring scream of the alarms.
Brinley pressed her hand against the window—absolute forgiveness—and held it there for as long as she dared, all of perhaps one long second. Maybe it was two. “Good luck,” she whispered and then launched herself back off the hatch just as she heard the first ominous click of the locks preparing to disengage.
She ignored the twirling mobility suit as she shot by it; it would be useless to her now anyway. Her only goal was to get as many hatches between herself and the forward compartment as she could before it detached, leaving a gaping hole in the front of the shuttle. In space, nothing happened quickly and that was the only reason she made it all the way back to the life-support panel. The fire had reignited from the smoldering wires. That could only be a friend to her now. The fuel cells were directly beneath her here, located all around the lower half of the shuttle’s exterior. That was why she’d come to this point of the failing ship. She ripped the last mobility suit from its tie downs and crawled into the straps left hanging from the wall. She fastened herself into the ties as best she could, because being blown up in a fuel explosion would be fast, painless and probably over before she could process it had started. The same would not hold true if she got sucked out into the fires of re-entry… or worse, if those same flames rushed up through the shuttle interior after her.
Brinley screamed when the vacuum force and air—not hot as hellfire, but glacial-cold—ripped through the shuttle. The straps cut brutally into her flesh as the suction yanked her off the wall, but, at least, they held. Faster than she could suck in a breath, everything drifting loose in the ship was sucked out through the opening where the main cabin used to be.
Blood, puke, smoke, the very air itself, in a blink—it was all gone. The life-support panel she had removed while trying to get the air re-routed, careened wildly off the walls, nearly hitting her. It was followed by every other detachable panel, one by one ripped from the walls by the furious pressure, and then Captain Hollister himself, banging and breaking at backwards angles through each narrow hatch until he too was gone, swallowed up in a fog of clouds and the roar of failing engines and falling spacecraft. Whatever angle trajectory Blythe had managed before detaching, it had been just enough to ensure Brinley didn’t burn alive.
Great. She was going to crash instead.
Mercifully, between the lack of air and the overwhelming pressure, Brinley Lawson, Bio-Tech Engineer of the SS Reconnaissance passed out.
CHAPTER ONE
Her neck hurt.
The scream of the alarms was as deafening as the rush of wind whipping her long mahogany hair across her own face. It stung. She couldn’t breathe. Could barely open her eyes. It was blindingly white. Instead of sterile shuttle walls directly ahead of her, when Brinley peeled open her eyes, she saw nothing but open sky. Blue. With clouds.
How did she get back to Earth?
Where was the shuttle?
She looked down at the straps still hugging her waist, arms, and thighs, noting the broken section of free-falling wall she was secured against and nothing but blue sky cut with the smoke from her fall. She was upside down.
She looked left. Towering skyscrapers grew up like mirrored stalagmites among the smaller buildings that lined a pale stretch of sandy beach.
Last of all, Brinley looked up, recognizing blue-green oceanic waves just before the section of wall she was strapped to hit the water and her head hit the wall as it snapped back from the impact. She lost consciousness again.
* * * * *
The slow rhythmic blip of a heart monitor and the light taps of someone slapping her cheek woke Brinley. Her mouth was dry and tasted like yesterday’s used socks. It took effort to peel her eyelids open, and when she did, all she saw was the glare of a lot of bright artificial lights. She blinked, gradually bringing into focus a sterile ceiling, attached to sterile walls, no windows, no ornamental decoration, not even a plant. Just herself, her bed, and a giant of a man dressed in black trousers and a gray med coat. He nudged her cheek again, impatient now, especially when she closed her eyes to let sleep again overwhelm her.
He growled at her, a strange garble of words she couldn’t begin to understand. When she didn’t answer, he snapped at her, but not all the slow-eyed blinks she could manage brought those rough consonants and syllables into a speech she recognized. Certain other things, however, were starting to come into focus.
She was naked, lying on a thinly padded metal gurney of a bed with wireless sensors stuck to her chest, tubes sticking out of her legs, belly, and ribs, and a fluid-drip plugged into her right forearm. Her left leg was elevated, partially obscured by the tubes and wires that wove in and out of her dreadfully bruised flesh. The protruding thighbone was, gradually disappearing back under the cover of her swollen, discolored skin.
She’d been drugged, too. She tried to lick her dry lips, but moisture refused to come. What had they given her? Some kind of steroid or antibiotic maybe. A metric butt-ton of painkillers, certainly. The room swam.
“Wha’d oo gi’ me?” she slurred, fighting now to stay awake and losing.
Frowning, the doctor glanced back over his shoulder
and that’s when she noticed the second man, seated quietly on the only chair in the very corner of the room. From shoes to trousers, to the stern cut of his strange but recognizable business coat, he was dressed in the same color gray as the walls. She blinked, forcing him into focus.
Black hair, cool black stare, the man studied her just as intently. His long legs were crossed at the knee, elbows braced on the arms of his chair and his chin was propped on both thumbs, while his fingers obscured his unsmiling mouth. At last, he spoke. His voice was just as low, just as growly as the doctor’s had been, and his words were just as incomprehensible.
“I doon un’nerstan,” she mumbled, struggling to keep him in focus. Her eyes kept wanting to close as the darkness inside her swelled to overtake her. The doctor snapped his fingers right off the end of her nose and she forced them open again.
The man behind him said something and the doctor frowned, first at her, then away. He seemed not to have the nerve to aim that sour look directly at the man behind him before he abandoned her bedside and walked away.
Brinley’s eyes managed to follow him as far as the door where another man she hadn’t even noticed was standing guard. The door swished open, disappearing into the wall when he neared it, then swished closed again once he walked through.
The monitor on the wall above her kept time, its soft beeps slow and steady and as regular as a heartbeat. More confused than scared (she’d be that once the drugs wore off), Brinley looked at her leg again. She tried, but her toes refused to flex on command. Not even just a wiggle. The fingers of the hand manacled to her bedrail, also refused to move. “Wher’m I?”
The man on the chair said nothing.
A moment later, the door swished open, and the doctor returned with a female assistant bearing a tray. A sterile swab in a plain white wrapper and a cylindrical hypodermic injector were all the tray carried.
