by Audrey Faye
Star Rebels
Stories of Space Exploration, Alien Races, and Adventure
Audrey Faye
C. Gockel
Christine Pope
Anthea Sharp
D. L. Dunbar
L. J. Cohen
Pippa DaCosta
Lindsay Buroker
Patty Jansen
James R. Wells
Kendra C. Highley
C. Gockel
Contents
Copyright
Welcome!
About the Stories
Audrey Faye
A Tale of Two Ships
C. Gockel
Carl Sagan’s Hunt for Intelligent Life in the Universe
Christine Pope
Blood Ties
Anthea Sharp
Passage Out
D.L. Dunbar
Arcturus 5
LJ Cohen
Treason’s Course
Pippa DaCosta
Falling
Lindsay Buroker
Starfall Station
Patty Jansen
Luminescence
James R. Wells
Glome
Kendra C. Highley
Unfinished
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Copyright
Copyright © 2016 for each individual story by Audrey Faye, C. Gockel, Christine Pope, Anthea Sharp, D.L. Dunbar, L.J. Cohen, Pippa DaCosta, Lindsay Buroker, Patty Jansen, James R. Wells, Kendra C. Highley.
Welcome!
We love anthologies like this—putting them together as much as reading them. There is such talent in the writer world right now, and so many people telling stories that are a little (or a lot!) outside the norm.
This collection is mostly prequel short stories to science fiction series. You likely picked up this anthology because there’s a story in here by an author you love. Absolutely go read it—but also graze a little. Try a story from someone new to you. In the end, if this anthology doesn’t help you discover new worlds, then we haven’t done our job. However, given the number of new books on our Kindles, we’re pretty sure that’s not going to be a problem!
Thanks for reading,
~ The Authors of Star Rebels
About the Stories
A Tale of Two Ships by Audrey Faye
A KarmaCorp Story
Two ships crash into an unimportant digger rock. The first carries a newborn baby. The second will rewrite her destiny.
Carl Sagan’s Hunt for Intelligent Life in the Universe by C. Gockel
An Archangel Project Story
Sometimes intelligent life is right in front of your whiskers.
Blood Ties by Christine Pope
A Gaian Consortium Story
On the outlaw world of Iradia, Miala Fels and her computer hacker father discover that taking the wrong commission can have unexpected consequences.
Passage Out by Anthea Sharp
A Victoria Eternal Story
Street rat Diana Smythe has long since given up her hopes of escaping Earth, but that doesn’t mean she can’t watch the ships fly in and out of the spaceport and dream…
Arcturus 5 by D.L. Dunbar
A Twenty Sectors Story
Xella went to Arcturus 5 to mediate a simple trade dispute between the Mol and the Dark, but now she’s not sure she’ll get out alive.
Treason’s Course by L.J. Cohen
A Halcyone Space Story
In the midst of Earth's first off-planet war, a soldier is given a covert assignment and must decide if treason lies in carrying out her orders or disobeying them.
Falling by Pippa DaCosta
A Girl From Above Story
Trapped in a scrappers rig with a woman he’s been hired to kill, Caleb Shepperd is beginning to wonder if this job could be his last.
Starfall Station by Lindsay Buroker
A Fallen Empire Story
After the empire falls, cyborg soldier Leonidas Adler must avoid the Alliance operatives who want him for secrets only he knows, but that’s easier said than done. Worse, his past threatens those he’s traveling with, including Alisa, the freighter captain he has come to care about.
Luminescence by Patty Jansen
An ISF-Allion World Story
Hadie learns the price of being an artificial human when her partner has an accident and becomes unresponsive.
Glome by James Wells
A Great Symmetry Story
Humanity’s first interstellar colony ship has arrived at its destination, only to find an inhospitable death trap of a planet. Crew member Amanda Bowen wishes that was the biggest problem she faced.
Unfinished by Kendra C. Highley
An Unstrung Story
In a world where genetically-engineered humans serve as slave labor to “real humans,” two prototype children, designed to be the most superior models ever created, look to each other to find a way to escape their fate. They may discover that being “artificial” doesn't mean they can't love.
A Tale of Two Ships
A KarmaCorp Story
Audrey Faye
Two ships crash into an unimportant digger rock. The first carries a newborn baby. The second will rewrite her destiny.
A Tale of Two Ships
She was dead.
Sigrid Albrecht snatched her face off the console that had apparently turned into a pillow for her latest desperate catnap. Every damn alarm on the Skrapp was sounding, even a couple she knew hadn’t worked for at least a decade.
All letting her know the obvious. Her old, leaky nav charts had been wrong. There weren’t clear skies out this side of the Veridian ice fields—there was a fucking huge rock. And she had solar sails in full deployment.
Turning while deployed was suicide—it would rip the ship in half.
152 seconds until impact.
Her brain, suffering from traumatic lack of sleep, still had no problem doing that math. 2.5 minutes left to live.
Sigrid stabbed at buttons, ignoring the wailing behind her. Freja would just have to wait.
Freja.
Sigrid’s heart clutched. Her precious baby girl. Everything else in her life had been mercilessly snatched away, and now it seemed the universe was coming for her tiny daughter too.
It hadn’t even waited a week.
She banged her right hand on two different consoles, trying to quiet the damn alarms. Her left hand abused the sonar, radar, nav charts. Trying to find a way to take a crippled junker around a freaking huge asteroid.
One that wasn’t supposed to be there.
131 seconds.
She should have bought better charts, but charts cost money, and there had been precious little of that lately. She’d needed the cash off this trip. Pickings had been good—not a lot of junkers collected in this sector. She had a cargo hold full of high-quality space trash.
It would form her burial mound.
117 seconds.
Freja’s wailing pierced through the alarms. Sigrid glanced over at the tiny, mad arms flailing at the monstrous sounds that had invaded newborn sleep and felt her heart split in two. She’d never know now if her girl was going to have her momma’s straight blonde hair or the curls of the man who had accidentally helped to make her.
Apparently black market fertility control wasn’t any better than black market nav charts.
Sigrid looked back at her consoles. It was bleak. She could slow the Skrapp down a little. Enough to maybe
leave their dead bodies intact instead of pulverized into ooze.
Long enough for the sky gods to find her tiny girl’s soul.
101 seconds.
She’d always had a weakness for the gods. It wasn’t reciprocal. They’d never noticed she existed.
Freja. Named for the Norse goddess of love and beauty—and of death. It had been the name that had come to Sigrid as she lay curled up on a pallet, exhausted and alone, after giving birth in the Skrapp’s cargo hold. The med bot had died right about the time her water had broken. Which was fine, because Sigrid had been about to strangle it anyhow. No damn bot got to tell her how to breathe.
82 seconds.
Breathing. Oxygen. The cargo hold had an evac pod. A junked one she’d scooped up in an asteroid field three days before Freja’s birth—and hooked up to her systems long enough to verify its life support still worked.
Worth more that way.
Sigrid bolted for the port to her cargo hold. The evac pod wouldn’t fly, and she didn’t have a door to push it out of, but it was a tough, padded cylinder. One with oxygen.
The closest she could come to a womb on short notice.
No time.
She reversed herself back through the port hole and grabbed Freja, wrapped in a batik scarf and remnants of an old skinsuit. Poor kid. She’d had a weird life in her six days in the galaxy.
Fortunately, the med bot’s single auto-diaper had still been functional.
61 seconds.
Sigrid kissed the top of her daughter’s head and propelled them both into the cargo hold. She tucked Freja into the evac pod, batik scarf and all. And then, heart rending, touched one finger to her sweet girl’s red, yowling cheek and slammed the door of the small capsule shut.
Two steps and she had both hands on the cargo hold console. It worked better than most on the ship, and it would let her spend the last 61 seconds of her life close enough to see her baby girl through the evac pod’s tiny window.
Frantically she re-programmed the code, running shunts around the systems that were already broken and the ones unlikely to survive impact.
Impact. She couldn’t think about that now.
46 seconds.
Sigrid’s fingers flew, echoes of when she’d been one of the best programmers in the Federation’s fleet. Before Antonio. Before the handsome man who had pulled her over to the dark side.
Before she’d sold her soul to try and save him.
Her luck with men had never changed—Brag had only been the latest. Named after the Viking god of music and poetry, and he’d been a master of both. His voice had seduced her in one long, slow evening over mugs of spiced mead in between sets at the bar on Heimili Station.
A bard with a golden voice. Maybe his daughter had inherited some of his fortune.
She would need it.
22 seconds.
Sigrid cursed and locked in the last two lines of code. All oxygen would route to the evac pod on impact.
Which would likely only mean that her beautiful, innocent, defenseless baby girl would die slowly and alone on the side of an unforgiving astral rock.
Sigrid’s eyes filled with hot tears. She slashed them away with the back of her hand, knowing she had to be able to see. Had to time the execution of the code just right, or Skrapp’s sense of self-preservation would override the suicide script.
8 seconds.
She watched the view screen and the oncoming, rushing horror of the rock. Watched the evil numbers counting down, her finger hovering over the execute command. Looked one last time at the red, screaming face of her tiny girl, about to be birthed yet again into an unfriendly world.
And pushed the button.
Eight Years Later…
“Hey, kiddo. Keep it under three gees, okay?”
Lakisha Drinkwater, eight and already one of the best pilots on Halkyn VII, rolled her eyes. “I can fly faster than that and you know it.”
Her father ruffled her blonde, wavy hair. “I know. But the pressure hull can’t handle it.”
She sighed. “Is the patch failing again?” That meant they’d be grounded until they could borrow Tivi Malcolm’s blow torch. Which, given how mad he was at the Drinkwaters right now, might be a while.
Everyone was kind of mad at the Drinkwaters. Her oldest brother Jingo was the newest full-fledged digger on the rock, and he’d been assigned the pile-of-crap shaft to mine. Or at least, that’s what everyone had called it until he’d found the vein of iridium in the back right corner.
Iridium was the most valuable thing they mined in this sector, and a new vein would earn a hefty finder’s bonus. Maybe Jingo could buy them a blow torch.
Whatever. Kish’s mind swerved away from the boring issues of iridium and money and petty digger-rock politics and surveyed the horizon. It was a big treat to be out here, and she wasn’t going to let anything distract her for a second. Even if she had to fly at the speed of a slow turtle.
She glanced over at the man in the co-pilot seat. Pops looked happy. There was no one better in the driver’s seat of a flitter, but that wasn’t the reason she’d been willing to get up before skybreak to come flying with him. Out here, he treated her like an equal—or at least like someone who might be worth his while one day. At home, she was just the smallest and scrappiest of eight kids, and if she got noticed, it was usually because she was in trouble. Again.
There were a lot of ways to get in trouble on a digger rock when your heart yearned to be somewhere else and there was nowhere else to go.
Kish looked out at the stars and wished, like she always did, that the clunky old tin can under her hands could carry her there.
“Don’t be wishing for what you can’t have.” Her dad’s voice was gruff, and a little impatient—they’d had this conversation before.
She could feel her lower lip popping out. “It doesn’t hurt anything to look.” But it did. She could see the small caldera coming over the horizon—the one that marked the spot where they’d found her DNA mother’s ship.
The man who had rescued a squalling baby out of an evac pod and taken her home laid his hand on her shoulder. “Head right, kiddo. No time for sightseeing today. We need to run the lines. If we’re not back by dinner, your mom will make us eat cold potato flakes.”
That wasn’t much worse than having to eat them warm. Payday for Pops was still four days away, and there would be a lot of potato flakes between now and then. And soy paste.
Kish scowled. She hated soy paste. She banked carefully to starboard—it wasn’t a hard maneuver, but the left thruster had been acting up lately, and if she broke that, they’d definitely be grounded. She hummed a little to the flitter under her breath.
“Stop with yer singing already. It’s a machine, not a baby.”
Pops sounded annoyed. She glanced over at him, hoping he was just teasing.
He winked at her. “Think you can hold that patch on with a little ditty, do you?”
Not likely—but sometimes she thought her singing made Pops happier. Even when he scowled. Kish kept humming and swept her eyes over the instrument panel with a practiced gaze. Everything was good except for the auto-stabilizer, and that had been broken since she was three.
Fortunately, Kish had an iron stomach—so long as she didn’t feed it soy paste.
She jumped as the radio squawked and dumped out a bunch of gibberish.
“Damn.” Pops leaned forward, tension in his voice. “I thought Jingo fixed this thing.”
Kish gripped the yoke under her hands until her knuckles turned white. They always left the flitter radio on the emergency frequency. Chatter on that channel meant something had exploded or someone was dead.
Or both.
Pops jimmied with the radio controls, trying to get a better signal. The squawking got louder—and then suddenly cleared. “… the Federated Commonwealth of Planets trader ship Ios. We have crashed and need immediate assistance. Repeat—we have crashed and need immediate assistance.”
Kish and
her dad gaped at the radio.
“We caught their signal. We must be close.” Pops yanked an ancient pair of binoculars out of the net above his head and jammed them against his eyes. “Take her up. Now. Fast and hard.”
He wasn’t Pops now. Those were the terse orders of one of Halkyn VII’s finest first responders.
Kish’s chest nearly blew up with pride. He was letting her fly. In an emergency. Only the best pilots got to do that. She pointed the flitter’s nose almost straight up. Height first—Pops needed visibility. The old machine stuttered, but it went up. Kish pushed a little more, and started to sing.
The stutters evened out a little. She watched the rising coolant temperature—much higher, and they’d have impeller issues.
Pops still had his binoculars glued to the window. “Nothing. Swing right. Head past that caldera first—I want to see the far side.”
Kish gulped and headed straight for the place where her DNA mother had died. No one ever went there. Ghosts. Bad juju. Darkside cold.
A flash out the left window caught her attention. “Pops. Over here.”
He swung himself to the other side of the flitter in one quick motion. “Where? I don’t see it.”
She didn’t either—not anymore. But something inside her knew where it had come from. “I know where to go.” Kish wrenched at the controls, suddenly frantic. In an emergency, speed mattered. Seconds mattered. People died in seconds.
Pops said nothing. He just stared out the window.
Kish couldn’t look—she had her hands full holding the flitter steady. But she could feel the right way to go. There was a rope now, reeling her in.
