The Star Traders: The Star Traders Series Volume One
Page 39
“Bob. You stay with the shuttle. We’ll be back soon. Keep the motor running.” Jacob Musashi said. “Let’s go, people.”
Piper and two others followed Jacob Masashi on the starboard side of the corridor, while three others followed Sister Josie on the port side. The shuttle had landed close to what they believed was the alien bridge or at least that had been the plan. The corridor lead to a pair of large doors. Four armed Lorkiiz stood guard in front of the door.
“Now Sister Josie!” Jacob Musashi shouted at the sergeant/nun.
Sister Josie tossed a couple of grenades and Jacob Musashi did the same. Everyone ducked, except for the surprised guards. The Lorkiiz guards were blasted into various sized bloody hunks of meat. One of which hit Piper’s leg. It was burned. “Shit!” That’s hot! What kind of grenades did they use?
“Let’s go!” Jacob Musashi hollered. He led the way to the huge door. “Mitch!” Jacob Musashi waved for everyone else to stay where they were.
A monk behind Piper came forward with some kind of soft pink clay that stuck on a square box on the door. He pushed a small metal cylinder into the clay. He turned and raced back to them. “Fire in the hole!” Brother Mitch yelled. Everyone ducked.
Piper heard an explosion. Afterward she looked up to see a hole where the box had been. The doors slide open.
“Let’s go!” Jacob Musashi sped into the bridge. He moved faster than anyone could. Except maybe someone wearing a military grade battle armor.
“Follow me, maggots! You want to live forever!” Sister Josie followed him into the bridge. She wasn’t running as fast as she could.
Piper fired her blaster rifle at the first Lorkiiz she saw. The blaster bolt took off an alien leg. Her second shot killed it. The room looked different from the one that Alberta had described to Piper. A Lorkiiz with a red sphere on its head held Jessica in its elephant trunk-like arms. Two other Lorkiiz wore a red sphere on their heads, but three had no spheres. And one in the center of the room had a green sphere on top of its head. This one also had a bright green cloth covering its torso and a shiny orange cloth covering its tail. Most of the aliens wore clothes of dull brown and shiny yellow.
“Jessica!” Piper aimed at the alien holding her daughter, but didn’t shoot. The alien was too close. Piper almost tripped over Brother Mitch after he was shot down by one of the aliens. Human and alien blaster bolts flew back and forth across the room. Fuck! Jessica! Jacob Musashi’s team killed alien after alien. Piper was amazed at their skill.
“Mom!” Jessica screamed. A dozen more humans sat around the bridge with Lorkiiz nearby. Jacob Musashi appeared and snapped the neck of the alien holding Jessica. It fell.
Sister Josie smacked a Lorkiiz aside that was probably the admiral’s bodyguard. Next grabbed the admiral with the green sphere hat. She shoved the muzzle of her blaster rifle into the side of his head. “Surrender! Surrender or die!”
The admiral screamed out a series of alien words. The Lorkiiz on the bridge dropped their weapons and surrendered.
“Good work, Sister Josie!” Jacob Musashi yelled.
“Thanks, Brother Jacob.” She nodded.
Piper raced forward and grabbed her daughter. She engulfed her in hugs and kisses.
“Mom, stop! Everyone is looking. Goddess, Mom. That’s embarrassing.” Jessica blushed.
“Sorry, kiddo.” Piper felt a blush of her own. Then she gave her daughter one last hug and let her go. She noticed her daughter’s abnormally skinny body. “Didn’t they feed you anything?”
“No.”
“Bastards!”
“We need to get out of here!” Jacob Musashi shouted at Piper.
“Of course.”
They gathered up Jessica and the other humans. Piper stayed by her daughter’s side as they raced back to the shuttle. Brother Bob was happy to see them. They had two wounded and dead member of the team. Poor Brother Mitch. Piper handed her blaster rifle to Sister Josie and strapped herself into a launch chair. Aside from Jessica there were eight other kidnapped humans. All of them Williams family members from Guinevere. There were just enough launch chairs to fit into the shuttle.
“Come on Bob! Time to go!” Jacob Musashi ordered.
“Right, sir.” Bob said and the shuttle launched. I hate this part!
CHAPTER ONE HUNDREDTHIRTY-TWO
Liar!
“Liar! Liar! Liar!” the Lorkiiz admiral screamed at him from visual screen one.
Alberta laughed with a glance at visual screen two where she saw the shuttle with her wife and youngest daughter landing in the flight deck. “Fuck you! Now Tiffany!”
“Yes, captain!” Tiffany Williams got to work on her tactical station with the plan they’d devised.
Alberta’s map screen showed the main laser fire upon the Lorkiiz starship. It slashed into the larger vessel and then the missiles came. Two slammed into the wound that the laser had made. The rocketship fired its reverse engines. She pulled backward and two more missile were launched. The Lorkiiz starship fired a couple missiles of their own, but Tiffany’s counter-missiles took them out.
“Captain, we need to move! This things going to explode!” Fiona shouted. “I don’t know what they’re using over there but my sensors are showing the beginnings of a matter/antimatter explosion!”
“Donna! Go!” Alberta yelled.
“Main engines at maximum speed!” Donna replied.
Guinevere’s Daughter burst away from the damaged alien vessel. Alberta glanced at a data screen that showed the increased levels of radiation emanating from the Lorkiiz starship. She checked the distance between them and aliens. Then the map screen showed an explosion. A massive explosion of gamma rays was shown coming out of the vessel in a circle in all directions. The aliens starship burned like a sun. It also came toward with a vengeance. “More speed, Donna!”
“The engines are at full power!”
“Tiffany, shut down the forward shields and raise the rear shielding as high as you can get it!”
“Yes, captain!”
Even with all of the safe guards added the rocketship shook like a small rowboat in a tsunami. Ten minutes later Alberta opened her eyes. We’re still alive! We’re still alive!
“Damage report?” Alberta called out.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDREDTHIRTY-THREE
Searching for Spirit
Guinevere’s Daughter docked at the main spacestation that orbited the planet Shigaraki second from the sun called Takeda. After some rest Alberta called a meeting of the department heads in the conference room again.
“We got some of our people back, but not all of them.” Alberta said. She looked at all of her tired women, who had done so much to get Jessica and then other women back. She also smiled at Jacob Musashi who lost one of his friends in the attack on the alien bridge. “We know that the starship Spirit is out there looking for us. We need to find them. We can’t do this along, though we’ve done a lot so far. We need them.”
Everyone nodded.
“But we are going to do this.” Alberta said. “Together we are going to get all of our family back and our starship! No damn aliens are going to stop us! We are the Williams clan! Family is starship! Starship is family!”
Traders traveling through space for profit and adventure.
In Star Wars IV: A New Hope we meet a trader/smuggler captain and his co-pilot. Before I fell in love with the tv show Firefly, I had already read the Solar Queen books by Andre Norton. These cool books start with Sargasso of Space. Have you read C.J. Cherryh’s books on space traders like Downbelow Station, Merchanter’s Luck, and The Pride of Chanur. One common theme is independent space traders, who don’t work for one of the large corporations. Usually the corporations have a fleet of fancy new starships, while our heroes starship is old and rusty. All of which make for great stories.
I’m also influenced by Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Imagine a world where humans are genderless, except when it’s mating season. Your body becomes male or
female. The catch is that one year you could be male and the next year you could be female.
There’s been plenty of stories of ships full of only men, from Moby Dick by Herman Melville to Sargasso of Space. So why not a ship full of only women? Though these women are not all actually what modern day humans would call women. Their ancestors traveled from Earth in generation spaceships and genetically engineered their children to be female. Only they created two types of females. O-female and T-female. O is for ovary and T is for testicles. Both look female and have breasts that are capable of producing milk. Only the O-females came give birth and have female genitals, while the T-females have male genitals.
In my novel you meet Erica, who is T-female. She has two mothers. Alberta and Piper. Alberta is T-female and Piper is O-female. You could also say that Piper is Erica’s O-mother or birth mother, while Alberta is Erica’s T-mother.
Another thing you will notice is that Erica has a very large family. This is an idea I borrowed from C.J. Cherryh’s books, where ships were run by families or clans. Where ship crews would marry other ship crews, so as not to get too inbred. I was also influenced by my own family. I grew up on a farm where my family worked together to get everyone’s crops planted and harvested. Back then it was my dad, my uncle, my brothers, and cousins all helping out. The Feather clan working together.
I had a lot of influences that went into creating this book and the books that will come in this series. But when it comes down to it all of these crazy ideas come from my own weird mind.
The third book in this series will be called Mutiny on the Guinevere. It will be out in February 2017.
I hope you enjoy them.
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Now I’m going to explain a few things about my six part Star Trader novella series. I currently have two books out of the series. I'm working on a third book. Once the series is done it will be six books long. I thought that I would write some blogs explaining this series to people in a way that may help my readers, who would want to know more about it. The first book is STARSHIP GUINEVERE. The second is SPACE ASSASSINS. The third book is MUTINY ON THE GUINEVERE.
An important aspect of my Star Trader series is gender and genetic engineering. In modern human society there is traditionally believed that we have two genders. Male. Female. We also have different names for them when it comes to age, such as women and girls. But there are also lots of people in modern society and the past, who don't conform perfectly to these two genders. This brings to mind terms like hermaphrodite, androgyny, transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, bigender, and many more that have used in the past and present by human beings. My six part book series takes place thousands of years in the future where humanity have journeyed to the star and created many colonies that have developed into interstellar nations. One of these interstellar nations is the Yin Confederation, which originated on the planet Yin. Yin Humans are the product of genetic engineered that was done when the colony was first founded by human colonists from Earth. These human colonists had a radical idea. They wanted to do a genetic and social experiment, where all the colonist children would female. There are many theories on how to do this, such as cloning. Instead they chose to redefine the word female. Yin females are born either O-female or T-female. These terms refer to their gonads and genitals. O-females have ovaries (ova), womb, and vulva. T-females have testicles (testes) and penis. Both females are born with breasts of various sizes, colors, and shapes. Unlike human males, human T-females have milk glands and are able to produce milk out of their breasts to feed their babies. Naturally with modern human females and Yin O-females the breasts produce milk due to pregnancy that causes the release of hormones. But this can be induced artificially today for women who want to nurse their adopted baby. This is also done to T-females in Yin society, usually when a married couple decide to have a child; either naturally or artificially. Another aspect of Yin female biology is that a T-female can impregnate a O-female in much they same way as a male impregnates a female.
What is Yin society like? The planet Yin was colonized by human beings from Earth's North America continent, mostly the United States. This is reflected in their government and politics. The dominate religion is Wicca. There are others, such as Buddhism, Druidism, agnosticism, atheism, and few smaller beliefs. Among Yin conservatives it is believed to proper for a T-female to marry an O-female. Conservatives don't approve of T-females having sex with or marrying T-females, nor O-females having sex with or marrying O-females. Conservatives also are uncomfortable with most types of contraceptives and abortion. Liberals and some moderates have a different opinion on this, thus there are conflicts of such issues in Yin society and politics.
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It is well known that a ship of the sea has only one captain. At least that's the case with most European nations in the past and present. So when writers tell science fiction stories set in the future with starships zipping through the galaxy they usually stick with this tradition whether it’s a military starship or a civilian starship. The starship only has one captain. In some cases of military starships there will be a marine captain onboard. This person is usually given the rank of acting major just so that there's only one captain onboard. There's an old European military tradition for this action of promoting the marine captain.
So what if I created a future where starships don't have only one captain. Instead they have three captains. How would this be done? How could this work? This is what I have done with my Star Traders series. I also plan to write other books in the same universe in the future.
Three captains. What if you say that here on Earth there are twenty-four hours in a day. Chop those hours up into three parts. Now you've divided up the day into three sections of eight hours. Thus in a starship the crew will work in three shifts. Shift one, shift two, and shift three. Each shift will have a captain and an executive officer or XO. The captain, who commands shift one will be called Senior Captain, while the captains of shifts two and three will be called Junior Captain. As you would imagine the senior captain is ranked over the two junior captains. The three shifts would all have to have their own department heads too.
There will probably be some conflict between the captains, but doesn't that always happen with people in any situation. Some may believe that it would never work. But I say this is a work of fiction and I want to try something new. Isn't that where great new ideas come from? Crazed leaps of imagination going where you've always been told was not right.
Feather’s Blades #1
Feather’s Blades #2
Feather’s Blades #3
Feather’s Blades #4
Feather’s Blades #5
Feather’s Blades #6
Feather’s Blades #7
The Mighty Airships of Earth trilogy
(1)The Mighty Airship Kaede
(2)Fall of the Airship Falcon (Comes out in March 2017)
The Star Traders novella series (6 parter.)
(1)Starship Guinevere
(2)Space Assassins
(3)Mutiny on the Guinevere
(1-3)The Star Traders novella series Volume one (Comes out in March 2017
(4)Search for the Daughter (Comes out in April 2017)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title
Dedication
Copyright
CHAPTER ONE Waiting at the Bar.
CHAPTER TWO Going Home.
CHAPTER THREE Blast Off!
CHAPTER FOUR Working for the Family.
CHAPTER FIVE Security Job Day One
CHAPTER SIX Guinevere.
CHAPTER SEVEN Settling In.
CHAPTER EIGHT Meetings and Conferences.
CHAPTER NINE Fight! Fight!
CHAPTER TEN The Loss and the Search Begins.
CHAPTER ELEVEN Where Am I?
CHAPTER TWELVE Sold.
CH
APTER THIRTEEN The Clitoris.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Launch!
CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Alien Captain.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Escape!
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Prepare for a Journey.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The Other City.
CHAPTER NINETEEN Monsters!
CHAPTER TWENTY Hide!
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Alien Prison.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Weird Questions.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Confessions.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Fight!
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Getting Ready.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Battle with Blasters and Mini-nukes!
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Paperwork.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Amusement Park.
CHAPTER THIRTY Conference.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Talking to her daughter
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO Dirt Problems.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Sleepless.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Welcome to Weir.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE Checking Gifts.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX Going ahead.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN Unknown vessel
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT Fight or flee?
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE Being chased.
CHAPTER FORTY Erica's idea.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE Convincing mother.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO Convincing wife.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE Erica's operation.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR Welcome to Chumley.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE Still there.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX Disappointed Janet.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN Another operation.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT Complications.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE Waiting.
CHAPTER FIFTY Post operation.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE Looking at space.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO Barhoping.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE Oceans of problems.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR Captured.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE The mothers that worry.