Table of Contents
Tile Page
Copyright
What Is the NGU?
Galactic Blues Serial
Episode 4
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Episode 5
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Episode 6
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Follow Us
NGU Releases
Acknowledgments
Character Art
Galactic Blues
Box Set
Episodes 4 - 6
A Newton’s Gate serial
by
C.J. Clemens
Copyright © 2019
C.J. Clemens
All rights reserved.
No part of these books may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the authors.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the authors’ imaginations and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, businesses, and individuals, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For more information, visit the authors’ website: NewtonsGate.com
What Is the NGU?
First, you might ask... who is C.J. Clemens?
C.J. Clemens is the pen name shared by over thirty authors who have written and continue to write an assortment of stories based within the Newton’s Gate Universe.
And what is the Newton’s Gate Universe?
On New Year’s Eve of 2050, humanity launches Newton’s Gate, a gateway meant to enable interstellar exploration. But when the gateway explodes, our greatest achievement morphs into our greatest disaster. Portals begin to appear around the world. Some open and close briefly, others swallow entire cities, while some remain permanently active, linking Earth to a wide array of planets, galaxies, universes, dimensions, and alternate times. Earth has become Grand Central Station for all of existence, bringing humanity into contact with alien humanoids, fantastical creatures, and everything in between.
One consequence is certain: chaos reigns everywhere.
The NGU features a variety of series, ranging from space opera to urban fantasy—epic fantasy to steampunk—thrillers to military sci-fi. Virtually something for everyone!
Galactic Blues Serial
Why a serial?
The authors of Galactic Blues envisioned the series as a limited-run television show, with weekly episodes being released on nine consecutive Mondays, starting on November 5, 2018.
Will we release box sets?
Although we will eventually release each season (nine episodes) in a combined format, we originally conceived Galactic Blues as a weekly form of entertainment that would enable readers to escape into our world for a short time.
Will there be additional seasons?
Yes. We are currently planning a three-season run. Of course, if you can’t get enough of our characters and stories, we will happily keep the “show” flying for a while longer.
How is Galactic Blues connected to the NGU?
The renegade space pirates at the heart of the series—Remy, Dreyla, and Tosh—begin their misadventures within the portal-filled solar system that has birthed Newton’s Gate. But as they soon discover, some portals have a mind of their own.
Galactic Blues
Episode 4:
That’s All Right
A Newton’s Gate serial
by
C.J. Clemens
Copyright © 2018
C.J. Clemens
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the authors.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the authors’ imaginations and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, businesses, and individuals, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For more information, visit the authors’ website: NewtonsGate.com
For Andy and Chris...
two brothers who have given us unwavering support.
Chapter 1
LILLY
“Sheriff,” Skully announced from the cockpit, “touchdown in less than ten minutes.”
The drop ship shuddered as it hit a cloud of sand. Purple forks of lightning surged through the cloud and sizzled the front windshield. Sheriff Lilly Greyson jerked back in her seat. The ship had been designed to fly through most environments, but a dose of a billion volts at close range never calmed the nerves.
“Everyone, get ready,” Lilly said.
She scanned her deputies, half of whom returned her gaze with determined smiles and shining eyes. The other half looked terrified, their eyes avoiding hers and instead darting to the fireworks outside the windows.
Like mankind in general, her crew divided into the risk-takers and the risk-averse, and it had nothing to do with skill or experience. She was always careful to cater to both personality types.
“We have no idea what we’re about to find, but we need to be ready for a fight,” she said in firm but gentle tones.
Skully, who wasn’t actually an employee of the sheriff’s department but still serviced all of their vehicles, skillfully took the ship down to two thousand feet. He might not be official, but he treated everyone in the department as if they were one of his children, so he’d often volunteer for tricky jobs like the one he was about to perform.
Flying anything around Vox’s skies could be difficult. If Lilly and her deputies needed to land quickly, to maintain an element of surprise, they required the drop ship—a vehicle meant for delivering troops by plunging anywhere from as high as twenty thousand feet. But that was a height Lilly hoped she’d never experience dropping from.
The last couple thousand feet were always the toughest. All could go smoothly, of course: the pilot could just sync the thrusters to the internal pressurizers, which would keep the passengers from squishing into the ship’s metal decking. But if one of Vox’s sand squalls happened to blow through, the ship could find itself off course and smash into the planet’s surface. It wouldn’t be the first time in history. Skill alone wasn’t enough; you needed luck on your side, too.
The crap-storm outside didn’t bode well for their chances. Then again, very little on Vox ever did.
Was that true? Or was Lilly just stuck in a self-sabotaging get-off-this-planet mode? If she were honest with herself, she’d been stuck in it ever since her husb
and, Tim, was killed.
“Sheriff?” Deputy Joyce’s voice crackled over the comms.
He was one of the few members of her staff she’d left back at the station. Like Brand, he was a newbie to the job, but unlike her, he didn’t know his elbow from his asshole. He was likeable enough, but having him on this drop would have endangered his life and everyone else’s. Not that he had begged to join the mission or anything.
Joyce had been one of the mayor’s hires intended to bolster the department’s numbers. A distant relative. Maybe someday he’d be a decent officer. Today was not that day.
“Yeah, what is it, Joyce?” Lilly snapped.
“The prisoners are asking to be fed.”
The ship shook violently, slamming everyone against one another, and Lilly against the side panel.
“Sorry, everyone!” Skully called out cheerfully.
Lilly rubbed the point on her shoulder that had whacked against a protruding ridge on the panel. There would be a nice bruise there later to add to her collection.
“We need to land now,” Skully called over his shoulder in a more serious tone. “I see two high-altitude squalls near the med ship. Better to land here where we’ve got some visibility and then hike the quarter-mile in.”
“Agreed,” she said. “Do it.”
An instant later, he started the drop.
“Sheriff, what should I do?” Joyce’s voice whined.
The ship shuddered as it plunged into near free fall. Lilly grasped a side handle for support and felt her stomach bouncing upward. Nothing could ever prepare a body for such abuse. It was horrendous every time.
“Dammit, Joyce… use your imagination.”
She cut off the comms. She honestly didn’t care if Joyce chose to starve Yercer and his cohorts, as long as he didn’t let them escape. Hopefully, using his imagination wouldn’t result in a such a scenario.
Focus. She needed to concentrate on the immediate mission, not on what was happening back at the station.
“I think I’m gonna be sick,” Davis moaned beside her.
She threw him a sideways look of warning.
“I had h-half a bowl of Downder’s stew before we left,” Davis acknowledged. “I dunno… sometimes, you just want… you know, a simple bowl of food, where every spoonful’s the same… that you can eat when you’re focusing on something else and—”
“Shut up, Davis,” she commanded.
Brand, on his other side, flashed him a sympathetic look.
The ship quaked even more violently.
Harvey Downder’s stew was suspect even if you weren’t dropping out of the sky. The staff of his little cafe around the corner from the sheriff’s station had a habit of cooking whatever Downder killed or found dead around town. Protein was protein, but still, nobody ever knew how old the meat was, and the man simply covered up the gamey taste with what Lilly had to admit was an incredible blend of spices. Anytime she’d eaten it, she’d made damn sure to inspect every spoonful before it went anywhere near her mouth.
The ship shook again and Davis turned a more persuasive shade of green. A moment later, he blew chunks all over Brand’s boots and her big-ass weapon. That was definitely not the smoothest way to woo his new conquest.
Brand glared at the hapless Davis, her thick eyelashes descending as she narrowed her pretty eyes.
“Well… lucky it was only half a bowl,” Lilly mused.
The ship slammed down to the ground. Even with the pressurizers on full, Lilly’s bones rattled and the wind was punched out of her lungs. She felt the intense discomfort of being a delicate sack of bones, completely at the mercy of incredible forces. Laughable to think she had any control over her destiny.
All her deputies were silent now, their faces creased with anxiety and, in some cases, the euphoria of survival. Davis wasn’t the only one who’d vomited. Already, the smell of puke had overwhelmed that of fuel and burnt rubber.
“Good job, Skully,” she croaked. She swallowed, her throat scratchy and parched, and fumbled with the safety belt buckle. No matter how weak she felt, she had to step up, to rouse her deputies into action and catch the bad guys. Her feelings weren’t important. Her sense of being abandoned by Tim wasn’t important. Her growing hatred for the planet wasn’t important.
Retrieving the medication for those citizens suffering from the Rot was the only thing that mattered.
Chapter 2
REMY
Captain Remy Bechet waited for Dreyla and Tosh to reach his location. As a safety precaution, he crouched behind a small sand dune, where he could observe the strange ship without being detected.
He wished the pair of them had just stayed where they were until he could be sure the coast was clear.
“Captain, what do you think’s going on?” Tosh asked, unceremoniously collapsing on the sand beside him.
Dreyla took the more graceful approach, hunkering down on one knee and peering over the crest of the dune at the mysterious craft, gun poised.
Remy rose wordlessly and pushed ahead over the dune, pistol raised.
“Remy?” Dreyla called after him.
The side ramp leading into the ship was down. The men had left hastily. The only sound was the wind, whipping strong, pelting Remy, his crewmates, and the ship with sand.
“Here’s what’s gonna happen.” He moved slowly toward the ramp, sheltering his eyes from the sand. “I’m going in, and you two are staying out here.”
Like any good crew, they ignored him and followed him into the ship.
The sudden cold darkness came as a relief to Remy. But a wave of revulsion quickly followed.
Dreyla’s eyes widened. “Holy crap!”
Three bodies, all appearing to be human males, lay sprawled out on the floor of the small cargo hold. They had been riddled with enormous blast holes, which had caused several large pools of blood to ooze onto the floor.
“Whatever these guys were hauling, someone reckoned it was valuable enough to kill them for.” Remy used his foot to nudge the outstretched arm of one of the victims back toward his torso.
These killers were merciless bastards. Some things never changed, no matter how far you ventured into the universe.
Over half of the crews Larker Max had working for him were willing to snuff out anyone who got between them and their score. Of course, according to Captain Pike, Larker was afraid more pirates would prefer Remy’s philosophy: kill only if you had to.
Whoever murdered these men were still out there… somewhere.
None of the three victims seemed to be armed—although, in theory, the weapons could’ve been removed. The only accessory they appeared to have was a data display still gripped in one of the dead men’s hands.
Remy left Dreyla and Tosh preoccupied with the three bodies and moved through the cargo hold, up to the small bridge. Inside, he discovered two more bodies. One of these guys had managed to draw his pistol, which looked remarkably similar to the plasma guns Remy was used to seeing. OK, not so unarmed after all.
He hauled one body and then the other down into the cargo hold as Dreyla and Tosh watched in eerie silence.
“Uh, what are you doing?” Dreyla asked.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he panted.
Damn, these bodies are like sacks of rocks.
He let the second corpse fall. It slumped awkwardly across the first, as if they had perished during a bout of wrestling. He turned to Dreyla. She was clutching her stomach. Tosh’s chin quivered.
“We have to jack this ship and get the hell outta here,” he said, eyeing them both sternly. He couldn’t afford either of them going into full-on panic mode.
They continued to stare at him.
“Listen, I know you’re both freaked the hell out… but we’re on a strange planet with humanoids… and we’re in a ship where five people were gunned down. The gunmen are nowhere to be found.”
Their expressions didn’t change.
“If someone else comes nosing around for what the s
hip was hauling…” Remy waited to see if they would catch on.
“Oh, man, they’re gonna think we did this.” Tosh kneaded his forehead, glancing around at the carnage.
Remy nodded grimly, then turned to Dreyla. “So, I need you to find the ship’s power generators. Because if I can’t get the engines started from the bridge, you may have to fire them up.”
“Captain?” Dreyla came to life again, shaking her head rapidly. “I have no idea what kind of ship this is.”
“Improvise. It can’t be that different.”
“Who says it can’t?” She peered up at him through a scowl. It was the fear talking. She was rarely argumentative like this.
“Look.” Remy pointed at the data display in the dead man’s hand.
“Well, what do you know,” Tosh mused.
“Huh?” Dreyla asked.
“Whoa! It’s in English.” Tosh knelt beside the body to look closer at the screen. “Granted, there are some words I don’t recognize, but still…”
“How can that be?” Dreyla asked in a small voice.
“Flee now, philosophize later,” Remy said. He gave her a bracing smile.
She finally nodded and stepped gingerly around the bodies toward the rear of the ship.
“Tosh, why don’t you go with her,” Remy asked, although it wasn’t a request.
Tosh nodded, stood up, and then did a slow-motion pirouette before his feet slipped out from under him and he landed splat in the middle of the largest pool of blood. Slick drops of the dark red stuff rained down everywhere, splashing across Remy’s hands.
“That’s disgusting,” Dreyla rasped out from the doorway.
Galactic Blues - Box Set Episodes 4-6: A Newton's Gate Space Opera Adventure (Galactic Blues Box Set Book 2) Page 1