Last Call (Stranded in the Stars Book 1) (2 page)

If someone I was hunting would have run into the middle of a forest I may have had difficulty locating them but one would have to find a forest to run into first.

He was aware of his set-backs. Luckily, few others were.

His reputation was renowned over several Earthian controlled galaxies and even more Trentian controlled ones. He was a lone-wolf hunter for hire by anyone who had the money and the guts to contact him.

Humans were afraid of him and his fellow Cyborgs. At one point, the council tried to wipe out all of the war-created Cyborgs
due to their violent tendencies and uncontrollable natures; they changed their minds fast after he personally hacked their technology, turning it against them, and a fellow
Cyborg, Breco, blew up a planet destroyer. Now, there was a stiff yet reasonable working relationship with each side that only
occasionally
resulted in death.

Pirate Captain Larik, on the other hand, was not a Cyborg but a half-breed that happened to align with the Trentians.

He was wanted by the Earthian council to answer for crimes that included but were not limited to, abducting Earthian females and trafficking them to Trent colonies for breeding, smuggling blacklisted items, for being an active member of the
Impure Gang
, for excessive use of hostile weaponry against the council, and leading an intergalactic syndicate. Larik had been a busy man.

When he smuggled the daughter of a high chancellor along with a handful of other high ranking women, a crime that was considered so severe by Earthian purists, to Xnteaus Trent; was when the council sought Jack out specifically to apprehend Larik. They prefered him captured alive but would accept his corpse if it came to that.

He was gaining on the pirate and in just a few more clicks he'd have Larik's system under his control. The pirate was uncannily intelligent, though, and Jack knew he had a trick up his sleeve. His prediction came to fruition soon after when he dipped closer toward Argo's innermost atmosphere.

Larik was leading him straight into a meteor storm.

The half-breed would rather face death than be captured by me.
Going into the meteor storm would damage both ships and Larik was either going to get very lucky or very dead.

Jack hailed Larik’s ship and after a moment a connection was made. He wondered if Larik knew that receiving his request through the network intercommunication channels would make it easier for him to overpower his ship’s system.

I wonder if he even cares.

“You’re going to get us killed.” Jack hailed through as a faint static noise filled his usually quiet cockpit.

“It took you long enough to catch up to me, Cyborg, I expected more from the council’s...
best
.” A bored voice eventually answered back. “Turn back if you’re afraid of the falling rocks. No one's stopping you.”

“Hmm, you’d like that wouldn’t you? To extend this damned cat and mouse chase a little longer?”

They weaved in synchronicity through the meteors that began to resemble raining gunfire. Jack was impressed with how the pirate evaded collision as if the man had a sixth sense.

“How much are the bureaucrats paying you for my capture?”

“Enough.”

Fearlessly, Jack flew right into the storm, wanting this shit show to end. He personally didn't give a damn about the pirate nor that he delivered breeders to the Trentians. The Trentian men wanted to procreate and they needed viable Earthian females to do that.

During a gruesome period of the war biochemical weapons were released that made many of the future generations of Trentian females impotent. It had been a sick thing for the Earthians to do but he understood the tactical logistics and advantages of that move.

Besides, most Earthian females couldn't get to Trentian colonies fast enough; if they were virile, they were treated like queens. The halfbreed children were beautiful.

“Oh come on, tell me, it’s a matter of pride.” Larik quipped through the intercom.

“A single ton of Pyrizian Ore.”

The pirate didn’t immediately respond and Jack thought it may be because of what the price of his head was worth.

“Damn.” Jack laughed at the expected response. Pyrizian Ore was a very rare, very strong star ore that was often used to create powerful and advanced weaponry. It could only be found in fading white dwarfs, dead stars on their last stretch of life.

The meteor shower increased in intensity the closer they got to the planet’s surface.

The effort Jack took to dodge the meteors was causing him to lose any gain he had made on the pirate and Larik, the lucky bastard, was getting away. Right when he was about to make a final push to capture the flyer, a loud noise permeated the air and at the same time as all his systems went red.

Cursing, he quickly diagnosed that a football sized meteor had crashed into his right drive. The colloid silver nanoparticles that his ship was using to manage any variations in temperature couldn't keep up with the shifts.

He wasn't going to lose his ship and a repair could easily be made but he was going to drastically lose speed, a lot of speed.

Jack repositioned himself to use his body as an energy source and forced his ship into overdrive, making one last push to get close enough to Larik. He wouldn't last long as a battery but he may still get the job done today.

It was then, during several critical seconds and closing in on success that his ship got hit again.
What the hell was that?
He found no readings on the second impact and had no choice but to give up the chase, to land, and repair his ship.

He watched as the pirate ascended into the sky and flew away, the communication link disconnecting after a faint taunting laughter snaked through the intercom.

Grudgingly, he changed course to land on the rock called Argo.

***

Jack maneuvered his vessel as carefully as possible, unconsciously scanning all meteor activity happening around him. Slowing down and then abruptly picking up speed while zigzagging left and right, he felt like he was still dancing through a rain of bullets like he had done often during his war days.

He was almost in the clear, dipping into Argo's atmosphere where the meteors reacted and turned back into meaningless specks of dirt. The chemical reactions that were happening outside his ship were briefly intriguing but he soon lost interest as he descended to the ground.

This planet will do just fine.

He scanned everything for miles in every direction from his location. There was less life here blipping on his radar than a graveyard on Earth. He could immediately sense the giant behemoth wurms deep under the outer crust of the planet.

Those fuckers are big.
His scans indicated that the monsters were sensitive to light and that he would have to remember to take extra precautions at night. Strangely enough, he could sense one moving lifeform, an anomaly, that was traveling towards his ship above surface. It didn't appear to be a threat but he decided to examine the life-form further.

... a lone female. He took his attention away from the giant bugs under the planet’s surface and solely focused on the girl moving his way.
This is an interesting development... how does a female end up on a rock like this?

He could tell from analyzing her movements, heat signature, and heart rate that she was young and that she had to be Earthian. Unlike any other female he encountered in the past, this one was alone and unprotected.

The closer she got to his ship, the more he could sense her presence, her erratic heartbeat, and her uniquely scented pheromones.

It must be something on this planet.

The surface climate was hot and dry, a blistering, undisturbed heat that sat stagnant over the landscape.
The female would have to be Earthian to withstand this amount of heat and lack of water.
Jack could sense an underground network of springs below the planet surface but no bodies of water above ground or clouds in the sky to indicate a change in weather.

He decided to keep half of his processors, which he knew was overkill, to track her every movement while he went about preparing his ship for maintenance. He reconnected himself to his flyer and ran several diagnostic reports on all his ship’s vital parts.

Filing away the pieces that needed to be repaired, he realized he would have to salvage metal from other parts of his flyer to properly repair the damage to his impulse drives. It frustrated him to think he would have to harvest from his own ship.

The girl must have come from somewhere. Maybe he could take what he needed from her vessel so he wouldn't have to take apart his. His ship was his home, an extension of himself and taking apart hers would teach her the age old lesson ‘
Survival of the fittest.
’

Scanning the rest of the planet's surface nearby, he found no other heat sources, no other recently active ships.

The female may just be as stranded as I am right now, or maybe her ship has heat signature cloaking.
Shit, for all he knew there could be a hidden colony of humans thriving here and she was sent forth as a trap.

The girl was close enough now to his location that she would be able to see his ship and its minor details. Her heat signature had stopped moving and he could tell she was now crouched down between the rocks and dunes outside.

Jack decided it was a great time to leave his ship and get a visual on his drives. He headed to the hatch and opened the capsule door to step out.
      

A blast of dry heat assailed him.
It’s a fucking wasteland.

Straight ahead of him was a desert that gradually turned into a forest of rocks that morphed into giant dull brown mountains in the distance. There was no color on this planet unless you counted every shade and hue of brown. The only thing that could make this rock a paradise for him was a splattering of blood red and an active battlefield. His favorite color and pastime.

Above him the meteor shower was ending and the vibrant colors it had caused were fading away. Jack pretended he didn't know she was there as he casually looked around at the terrain, covertly keeping an eye in the direction of the female and wondering what move she would make.

After several minutes of waiting for her reaction, he gave up and half turned toward his ship to assess the damage.

Chapter Three:

---

I
t had taken her hours but she had finally managed to get within viewing distance of the ship. Excitedly, Allie realized that this had been the most interesting day that she has had since leaving the crash site to make her way out into the planet; and each day that preceded that terrifying day had been a stale state of existence, a blur of days, weeks, months, years of just surviving, of having no hope of rescue.

The day hadn’t been a complete loss though.

She had been fortunate to find sustenance several times over the course of the afternoon and today she had located over half a dozen dead baby wurms along the ground. The wurms were a source of food on this planet even though the thought of eating them still disgusted her.

They resembled grubs but had a milky white sheen to them and in the sunlight they had a purple glisten. It was that sparkle that made it so easy to spot them and after a sandstorm, the little dead bugs were everywhere, being picked up by the wind and dying during the turbulence of the storm.

They were the spawn of the giant monsters just below the surface. There was some macabre satisfaction that the giant beasts below her, were also her main source of food.

She shivered to herself.

She didn't eat the worms often, she couldn't, she never found enough to fully sustain her. But she found herself actively looking for the carcasses every time she went out to forage and luckily, her main source of food came from other tiny critters and dried out, chunky roots she often found under rocks near the mountain range.

It was a day trip to get to the mountain range and back so she only went as often as she needed to as the trek led her closer to the ghostly tomb.

Satisfied with her find today she settled in to survey the ship in the distance.

The ship hadn't crashed like her transporter vessel but had haltingly landed instead, disturbing nothing but the sand it packed into the ground. She had expected it to resemble the crumbled metal of the crash site of her flyer but it was unlike it in every way. She concluded that any supposed victims were most likely alive and well.

I haven't encountered another human in so long.

Allie now felt deeply insecure in her decision of investigating the ship.
What if the beings on board were loyal to the Warlord?
Or what if they were men just like him and his generals. The Warlord had never pursued the transporter vessel she had been on nor did he come after the maidens while they were still planetside. Why would he be here now?

Feeling her stomach sink, she quietly reached in her pouch and pulled out another root to munch on. The ship was unlike any she had seen before and she eyed it appreciatively, she could salvage a lot from its hull. If the beings onboard didn’t kill her first.

It was sleek, beautiful, and had a chrome gleam to it with streaks of red lights along the sides and above the lights, large, tinted viewing glass ran along its entire frame. There was a dome at the top that was all glass, or some other substance that could withstand space travel.

She could just imagine the supplies such an expensive ship would have inside, cloth, tools, food, soap... Groaning to herself.
What I would do for a bar of soap.

Her thoughts were abruptly cut off when the back capsule of the ship smoothly opened up.

She held her breath, waiting for something to happen, nervously running her fingertips through her mess of windblown hair. It was a couple of heart-pounding seconds before a figure slowly emerged. A man, a very large, very lethal looking man. Allie felt her stomach dip further.

She zeroed in on his movements as he surveyed the terrain, his head cocked up, legs slightly apart, exuding an aura that screamed he owned everything he saw before him.