The Days of the Golden Moons (The Two Moons of Rehnor, Book 5)

by J. Naomi Ay

  The Two Moons of Rehnor

  Book 5

  The Days of the Golden Moons

  By

  J. Naomi Ay

  Published by Ayzenberg, Inc.

  Copyright 2012-2016 Ayzenberg, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  011116

  Cover Art by Robert W. Cabell

  Also by J. Naomi Ay

  The Two Moons of Rehnor series

  The Boy who Lit up the Sky (Book 1)

  My Enemy's Son (Book 2)

  Of Blood and Angels (Book 3)

  Firestone Rings (Book 4)

  The Days of the Golden Moons (Book 5)

  Golden's Quest (Book 6)

  Metamorphosis (Book 7)

  The Choice (Book 8)

  Treasure Hunt (Book 9)

  Space Chase (Book 10)

  Imperial Masquerade (Book 11)

  Rivalry (Book 12)

  Thirteen (Book 13)

  Betrayal (Book 14)

  Fairy Tales (Book 15)

  Gone for a Spin (Book 16)

  The Firesetter Series

  A Thread of Time

  Amyr’s Command

  Three Kings

  Exceeding Expectations

  Table of

  Contents

  Chapter 1 – Jerry

  Chapter 2 –Katie

  Chapter 3 – Caroline

  Chapter 4 – Jerry

  Chapter 5 – Taner

  Chapter 6 – Jerry

  Chapter 7 – Shika

  Chapter 8 – Jerry

  Chapter 9 – Shelly

  Chapter 10 – Jerry

  Chapter 11-Katie

  Chapter 12-Tuman

  Chapter 13-Caroline

  Chapter 14-Shika

  Chapter 15 – Jerry

  Chapter 16 – Katie

  Chapter 17 – Tuman

  Chapter 18 – Sorkan

  Chapter 19 – Katie

  Chapter 20 – Tuman

  Chapter 21 – Taner

  Chapter 22 – Katie

  Chapter 23 – Sorkan

  Chapter 24 – Katie

  Chapter 25 – Garinka

  Chapter 26 – Katie

  Chapter 27 – Sorkan

  Chapter 28 – Katie

  Chapter 29 – Moira

  Chapter 30 – Shelly

  Chapter 31 – Katie

  Chapter 32 - Shelly

  For Mick, Ben & Rachel

  Never stop reaching for the stars.

  Chapter 1

  Jerry

  I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t marry Janet. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her because I did, or at least I thought I did.

  She was like my family. She reminded me of my grandmother and all my aunts and uncles who I hadn’t seen since I went to space twenty-five years ago.

  When I was a kid, we would sit down at the dinner table and everyone would stab at the food with their forks, grabbing whatever they could as fast as they could. You would have thought that someone was going to take it all away before they had a chance to shove it in their mouths. Janet would talk with her mouth full of food too, just like them. Every conversation was a shouting match and every meal was a free for all. She felt like home. I just didn’t want to go home.

  “I’m going with Thad,” I said. “I’m going to Derius II to find Katie.”

  “The hell you are,” Janet replied and threw her napkin at me. I was lucky it wasn’t her fist.

  Thad said I didn’t need to go and he wouldn’t take me so I went by myself.

  First, I returned the tuxedo. I didn’t want it anyway. I certainly didn’t need a tuxedo where I was going. I didn’t ask for the ring back. I supposed it was Janet’s right to flush it down the toilet or throw it in the ocean. If she pawned it and made some money off of it, I figured it was the least I could do. She returned that pink tulle dress because I saw the credit come through on my visa card. I never liked it anyway. It made her butt look big.

  I had plenty of money for just me. I had a pension from Spaceforce and savings from working at SdK Rozari for the last seven years while living in an inexpensive flat and eating mostly takeout. I took a leave of absence from the hospital and bought a spaceplane ticket to Derius, intending to go find the Spaceforce mental hospital on the north continent before Thad did.

  I found it alright, but I was a week too late. The director, a guy named Weimar had swallowed a handful of pills and killed himself after a bunch of patients escaped. Asking around the local town, I found a guy who had been an orderly there and lost his hand to a laser burst when the patients broke out. He was shot by a small blonde woman who went by the name of Anna and whose weapon of choice was a Glock although she was obviously proficient with a laser.

  “Nobody knew that zombie could shoot,” he told me, tears falling from his eyes as he studied the gauze wrapped stump of his arm.

  “I knew,” I mumbled and gave him some money for his time. He asked me for more, claiming he needed a lot of rehabilitation, so I gave him another hundred and told him to go sue the Emperor.

  After that, I lost Katie’s trail. I didn’t know if she was still on this planet or ran off to another. I figured she never returned to Rehnor because it would have been all over the Galaxy News Service. I wasn’t much of a detective except when it came to medical diagnosis, so I didn’t know where to head or what to do next. I had no desire to go back to Rozari though. Janet had probably booby-trapped my apartment and frankly, I really hated the weather there. It was hot and dry and rained only occasionally. On top of that, I was paranoid about the radioactive residue in the dirt and the dust. Sure, the government claimed it was well under exposure limits, but after all those years in Spaceforce, I had learned never to trust anything any government said.

  On the other hand, if I had a house like Katie’s, I would have been willing to risk it. Janet and I had once taken a drive out to the big villa on the coast. We couldn’t land because the place was protected by a security bubble but even from the air you could see it was like a tropical oasis in the middle of a barren desert.

  “I could live there,” Janet had said. “Build me something like that, Jerry.” I remember making some lame joke about getting Ron to sell it to us.

  “Nah,” she replied. “He’s keeping it so after he invades Rozari, he can come back and live there again. Furthermore, I don’t like Captain Perfect’s decorating style. I want to pick out my own drapes.”

  The house was way too big for us anyway. It had all these other buildings where all his staff and retainers lived and frankly, it looked like a small palace which was probably what it was supposed to be all along. Janet and I just needed a little place with some space for a garden. I reminded myself now we didn’t need anything. It wasn’t Janet and me anymore. It was back to just me.

  I decided to stay on Derius II and sent in my resignation to Thad. It wasn’t a bad planet. The natives were basically humanoid, and there were a lot of Earth ex-pats around too, so I felt almost at home. The Empire was taking over the planet which didn’t bother me. I stayed out of politics for the most part. I paid my taxes and saved my money and as long as the government let me live my life without conscripting me into the service or confiscating every dime, I had no problem with them regardless of who they were.

  I booked myself into a hotel with a weekly rate and got myself a speeder. I spent the next month flying around the continent trying to figure out where I wanted to live and what I wanted to do. Nothing really rang my bell and so I checked out of the hotel and went on to the southern continent. I found a little place on the western shore that had crystal cl
ear blue water and sugar sand beaches. The temperatures hovered in the mid 80’s every day, and if it got too hot, the trade winds would kick up and cool us off all afternoon.

  It seemed just about perfect, so I rented myself a flat in the middle of a small town with a nice view of the ocean and a deck to sit on and watch the sunsets. In the back of my mind, I was still searching for Katie, but in the front of my mind, I figured I was retired and if I had to spend the rest of my life alone, here was a good place to do it.

  Chapter 2

  Katie

  It was pretty stupid of me and maybe I was a little crazy besides. I had some pretty heavy duty psychotic drugs in my system for the last eight years, so I probably wasn’t thinking straight. Here I was, lost in some damn forest on the southern continent of whatever planet this was, and all I had was a couple of guns. No money, no food, no change of clothes and certainly no cell, not that I'd want to call anybody anyway. Actually, if I had a cell, they'd be tracking my signal and then what would be the point of this?

  I had been out in the forest for two nights after escaping the hospital and leaving Caroline and the others to wait for Thad. The first night I didn't sleep at all. I heard something that sounded like a bear snuffling around me. I could have blasted it with the laser but then what? I wasn't about to gut it and eat it, and it wasn't like I had a knife to do that with anyway, so all I would have ended up with was a partially fried bear that would attract all sorts of other carrion. Instead, I climbed the only tree that had branches low enough for me to reach and spent the night sitting there in the dark watching whatever it was move around beneath me.

  I ended up sleeping half the next day at the base of another tree because I was simply exhausted. All I had eaten in three days was wild berries and a few unripe apples. I was tempted to start carving up a white birch if I could find one. The inner bark tasted like chicken. Actually, it didn't. It tasted like bitter cardboard, but I figured since I was hungry enough, I could pretend it was anything. I’d been licking off water from large maple leaves until I came to a creek that ran fast enough, I figured my chance of catching worms was fairly small. I was tired, and my legs ached, but I kept walking because I wasn’t sure what else to do.

  Easily, I could have turned myself in at the first town I came to and found myself whisked back to Mishnah. I wasn’t ready to do that though. I didn’t know if I would ever be ready to do that.

  Here, as difficult as it was I was free to go this way or that and decide for myself what my next step would be. I felt horrible about neglecting Shika, but I couldn’t imagine he needed me anymore now anyway. He was fifteen and had spent more than half his life raised in the Palace as a prince. I imagined he'd look down his nose at me, this wretched wreck of an insane asylum escapee who was his mother.

  And Senya? I despised him. I know I didn't listen to him when he told me not to leave but still he didn't stop me. He had to have known where and how I would end up because he always knew everything. He didn't send the Imperial Guard or the Imperial Intelligence Services to rescue me. Instead, he had virtually taken over half the galaxy in my absence. I considered that this was probably his plan all along.

  While sitting in a tree surveying this foreign landscape, I decided it was better to stay here and start over. I would close my eyes and would not look at how the Alliance I supported for twenty years had crumbled and been replaced by the Empire. It was really best for me not to be involved in intergalactic politics at all. Instead, I would find a shack near a beach and grow tomatoes to sell in the farmer's market. I would wear jeans, t-shirts and a baseball cap. I had more than enough of dressing in silk gowns with cloth of gold embroidery. I would do crossword puzzles and read books at night. I wouldn’t even own a vid or a tablet. I would get a puppy, no a vicious dog with big teeth, and I would train him to growl at everyone who came near. I would cook whatever I grew and could buy in the market. I would be lonely for sure because I would never find anyone who could compare to Sehron de Kudisha, but I wouldn’t even try. Right now, I would live just for myself.

  I walked for four days until I got to a town and there I pawned the Glock. I got enough money for a decent meal and a bus ticket across the continent. When I arrived on the western shore, I pawned the laser and bought some clothes, some food and two month's rent in a decrepit cottage on the beach.

  The first night I spent in the cottage, I couldn’t sleep at all. The moon was high in the sky, and it was a beautiful night reminiscent of thousands of beautiful nights I had spent on the beach in Takira-hahr and later in Mishnah. After hours of tossing and turning on a mattress that smelled musty and was slightly damp, I got up and walked on the beach. I was tired and angry, and I cursed him to the sea. I damned him for all eternity for leaving me here alone and for letting me fly away when he knew I wouldn’t come back.

  A ship or a satellite lit up the sky overhead and the warm ocean rushed upon my feet. For a brief moment, I had a vision, a memory, and I saw what had happened. I remembered the ship falling apart and plummeting through the atmosphere, the heat in the cabin reaching enough to boil our blood were we there for more than a few seconds. Then we dropped like a stone into the vast sea of this planet and at the same moment, the cabin cooled, and we were flooded with water.

  The water surrounded us. Somehow I released my safety belt and pushed myself away from the cabin towards the light above me. Zem didn’t move though. I couldn’t leave Zem. I crawled back and released his belt. He fell forward, but I grabbed his hair. I couldn’t swim. My legs wouldn't respond, so with only one free arm, I pulled myself and Zem from the cabin through what used to be the cockpit window. My lungs were bursting, and my strength was gone. We were both going to die down here on the sea floor. Then a miracle happened and the ocean rose up in a great wave, tossing us on to a beach and into the sand. I gasped and took in as much air as I possibly could while the warm sun of this planet shone upon my face. Zem lay next to me, his skin dark green, his lips turning blue.

  "Zem!" I screamed and tried to twist around to help him, but I couldn't move. I could only lie there uselessly. A sparkling silver light shone upon us then, and a man appeared. He knelt on the sand and pressed his hands upon Zem’s chest. Zem gasped, spouted water and started to cough.

  The feeling in my legs and back returned, and the pain was incredible. The man in the silver light put his hand on my forehead.

  "Sleep, Sister," he said and after that I can remember nothing more until I saw Caroline's face peering into mine, and eight years of my life were gone, and I was living in a nineteenth century hell hole.

  I looked for a job. It was a little difficult. I didn’t speak the language. Not too many here spoke English. Nobody spoke Rozarian, and while they were starting to use Mishnese, which I could speak passably well, I discovered that I knew only the Noble Mishnese dialect. I couldn’t exactly work in a drive-thru and take orders speaking Noble Mishnese.

  I worked one day in a flower shop, and when the owner didn't like the way I arranged the daisies next to the dahlias, I was out the door.

  “Screw him,” I thought. It was tough to be a former starship Captain and a former Empress and be told that I was inadequate at putting flowers in a vase.

  As I was rapidly running out of money and supplies, I needed to get a job and some income soon. I could go on welfare for a bit which would be my option of last resort. The Empire's welfare plan allowed for up to two months of assistance but required that we take any job they found suitable for us. I might end up doing laundry again or digging ditches.

  I applied for lunch duty at a local school. I figured dropping slop on kids’ trays wouldn't require a vast knowledge of the local language and the kids learning Mishnese wouldn't notice if I used the royal We when referring to myself. That worked for a little while.

  During that period, I had my share of tater tots thrown at me, trays returned to me covered in vomit, kids picking noses and putting the discards in their food. In addition, I was yelled at continuousl
y by the enormous woman who ran this place for just about anything and everything I did. Fortunately, I didn't understand most of what she said otherwise, I surely would have gone out and bought a new pistol.

  After I had been there for about three weeks, the Derian planets officially joined the Empire. A holiday was declared, parades and celebrations happened in every town, and so I hid in my shack until things calmed down and the kids went back to school.

  My first morning back, I discovered that a large portrait of the Great Emperor and me was now hanging in the front lobby on the school. Overnight, this same portrait had become a mainstay in all public buildings. I guess I hadn’t been divorced after all. I walked in to the school at 7:30AM that morning to discover me in my imperial best smiling with giddiness. I remembered when this pic was taken because it was the only time I had opened the Imperial Council and I was extremely nervous. The dress was heavy and hot, and I needed to go to the bathroom, but it would have taken easily thirty minutes just to get out of this gown. Senya had leaned down and whispered in my ear that we were going to play chess as soon as this event was over.

  “Why would we do that?” I had snapped back. I was anxious and mad at him because I hadn't seen him in more than a month.

  “Don't be nervous,” he replied calmly putting his hands on my shoulders. “Think on this. I am the black king, and you are the white queen, and when we are finished here we will skip to the end of the game and go straight to the mating part, yes?” He pulled me against him and kissed me and I forgot all my other problems even though all his fancy gold buttons, braid, and medallions were poking holes in my chest.

  “I think you told me that once before and I slapped you or something,” I said.

  “I think you did,” he agreed and would have kissed me again except we had to go into the council chamber.