by Jean Johnson
PRAISE FOR THE THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY NOVELS
“Both highly entertaining and extremely involving in equal measure.”
—The Founding Fields
“Fast-paced with terrific battle scenes and deep characterizations.”
—Genre Go Round Reviews
“An engrossing military SF series.”
—SF Signal
“Reminiscent of both Starship Troopers and Dune.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Full of suspense, danger, and intrigue . . . Fans of military science fiction will definitely want to check out this surprising and exciting novel.”
—SciFiChick.com
MORE PRAISE FOR JEAN JOHNSON
“Jean Johnson’s writing is fabulously fresh, thoroughly romantic, and wildly entertaining. Terrific—fast, sexy, charming, and utterly engaging. I loved it!”
—Jayne Ann Krentz, New York Times bestselling author
“Johnson spins an intriguing tale of destiny and magic.”
—Robin D. Owens, RITA Award–winning author
“A must-read for those who enjoy fantasy and romance.”
—The Best Reviews
“[It] has everything—love, humor, danger, excitement, trickery, hope, and even sizzling-hot . . . sex.”
—Errant Dreams Reviews
“Delightful entertainment.”
—Romance Junkies
Titles by Jean Johnson
First Salik War
THE TERRANS
THE V’DAN
Theirs Not to Reason Why
A SOLDIER’S DUTY
AN OFFICER’S DUTY
HELLFIRE
HARDSHIP
DAMNATION
The Sons of Destiny
THE SWORD
THE WOLF
THE MASTER
THE SONG
THE CAT
THE STORM
THE FLAME
THE MAGE
The Guardians of Destiny
THE TOWER
THE GROVE
THE GUILD
SHIFTING PLAINS
BEDTIME STORIES
FINDING DESTINY
THE SHIFTER
Specials
BIRTHRIGHT
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
THE V’DAN
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
Copyright © 2015 by G. Jean Johnson.
Excerpt from The Blockade by Jean Johnson copyright © 2015 by G. Jean Johnson.
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eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-17579-2
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Ace mass-market edition / January 2016
Cover illustration by Gene Mollica.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
Welcome to the second novel of the First Salik War, a trilogy set in the same universe as my military-science-fiction series, Theirs Not to Reason Why. Like the previous book, this one is all about First Contact . . . only this time, as events unfold, we see more of the other side of the equation coming into view.
In other words, this is Act II. This story should be enjoyable enough on its own, but to help readers new and old catch up on what happened before, I’ll be giving you a little recap of what happened in the first book.
If you’d rather not risk any spoilers about what happened in the previous book, now is the time to turn to Chapter One and begin reading. If you’re curious about what happened before, or just need a refresher after having been away for a while, read on.
—
Jacaranda MacKenzie, ex–Special Forces psychic and polyglot translator, had been requested by former Premiere Rosa McCrary to resign from being the Councilor for Oceania Province, representing hundreds of islands and their multitudes of cultures on Earth. Once she did, however, she found her military commission being reactivated and herself given orders to report to the Tower on Kaho’olawe Island, at the heart of the Space Force.
There, Jackie learns that because of a spate of precognitive visions both benign and potentially violent, she and a select handful of others will be involved in making First Contact with hopefully friendly aliens. This is good news, as the only true extraterrestrial sentients the Terrans have faced so far are the Greys, vastly superior in technology, vastly inscrutable in motives, and only thwarted by those with strong psychic abilities. But it is not the Greys that Humans will be facing; instead, there seem to be many new races out there.
With her knowledge of the military and her familiarity with politics from her years as a Councilor, as well as her outstanding skills as a telepathic translator, Jackie has been selected to join one of the Aloha exploratory missions into deep space, traveling on ships that use OTL, other-than-light methods to traverse the vast interstellar distances in mere seconds. She is promoted to the rank of Major and given the authority to become an ambassador should First Contact actually happen. However, she immediately gets off on the wrong foot with the copilot for the mission, Lieutenant Brad Colvers, who, as it turns out, has a personal reason for distrusting psis.
Within a month, contact is made, but not with a friendly species as hoped. The Aloha 9 is grappled and dragged into a huge starship manned by strange beings who look like a cross between a frog and an octopus, with vaguely ostrich-like legs. These, they learn, are the Salik, and they prefer to take live prisoners. Jackie, attempting to make contact, discovers there are five other Humans on board the bigger ship. Among them is a fellow psi, albeit a very poorly trained one, a psi who does not speak any language she knows.
Managing to communicate in rough picture-thoughts, she grasps that these alien captors will treat her own people like prey-prisoners, too. Determined to rescue the five who are on the alien ship, Jackie emerges, fights her way to the brig with a combination of telekinesis, holokinesis, and telepathy, and brings all of them back. Pushing her abilities, she gets the command codes from the Salik’s minds, shuts down their ship’s weapons, power, and the force field holding the Aloha 9 in its hangar bay, and they take off for hyperspace.
Emerging on the far side, with no signs of pursuit, Jackie and her crewmates are free to begin communicating with their unexpected passengers. The newcomers seem human, but they have a distinct visual difference: Each one is spotted, striped, or spiraled in strange blotches of color, affecting everything from skin and hair to the iris of an eye.
Jackie attempts to communicate with the psi, to exchange languages psychically so they can begin communicating in earnest, but his poor training requires her to change plans. Forced to take control long enough to show him how to discipline his thoughts, she teaches him what
the Psi League taught her. Once he is reasonably disciplined, she manages to make the language transfer, learning quite a lot about him, while he in turn learns quite a lot about her, exchanging his language, V’Dan, for hers, Terranglo.
Leaving the burgundy-striped blond man—who has identified himself as Captain Li’eth Ma’an-uq’en—to sleep off the psychic transfer, she begins to converse with the other four oddly marked humans. Their next-in-command, a green-spotted blonde named Leftenant Superior Shi’ol Nanu’oc, a countess in civilian life, takes offense at being rescued on a ship crewed by “juveniles.” Jackie manages to smooth over the moment, calming things down, and gradually, in stages, the ship of Terran and V’Dan Humans makes its way back to its home base, MacArthur Station. There, they go into quarantine since it has become obvious that both groups are genetically Humans, albeit separated by nearly ten thousand years of disparate evolution.
While the crew’s medical doctor and station medical staff work on producing antigens and vaccines for all the various microflora each side carries, Jackie continues to transfer languages and attempt to learn who these people are, where they come from, and what their war with the Salik is all about. Astronomers work with the V’Dan in an attempt to identify their homeworld, and members of the United Planets Council prepare their questions for their unusual guests. But the problem of being viewed as juveniles—simply because the Terran Humans lack the same skin-coloring jungen marks the V’Dan bear—continues to mount.
In an effort to prevent Countess Shi’ol from attempting to take over the role of highest authority among the V’Dan, Li’eth reveals himself to the Terran Council as Imperial Prince Kah’raman Li’eth V’Daania, thirdborn offspring of the Empress of V’Dan. From the shock of his own crew, they hadn’t known this fact either; Li’eth reveals that he had been maintaining a physical disguise as well as a name-based one while serving in the Imperial Army simply so that the Salik and any other enemies would not know they had been facing such a high-value prize.
Though the Terrans accept Prince Li’eth’s rank and ability to make preliminary promises for his people, there are still misunderstandings afoot over the Terran lack of jungen, which all V’Dan Humans acquire in puberty, marking the transition from childhood to adulthood. After a confrontation between Li’eth, Shi’ol, and Jackie in his quarters in quarantine provokes the prince into using his fledgling, untrained pyrokinetic powers, Jackie orders Shi’ol to her quarters and tries to figure out a way to avoid the prince being charged with the very serious crime of assault with psychic weaponry.
Eventually, she and he agree that his powers simply are not trained, and that Jackie herself doesn’t have the right combination to help him gain control. Since there is a provision in psi-based law to let such charges slide for those who are as yet untrained but remorseful and willing to learn, Jackie arranges for a psychic instructor to be brought into quarantine, along with two doctors who specialize in virulent pathology to hurry along the efforts to isolate and create immunization programs for all the various pathogens being exchanged, V’Dan and Terran alike.
Under the guidance of Master Sonam Sherap, Li’eth slowly gains control over his powers. Using the Buddhist monk’s sharp inner eyes, Sonam discerns there is more between Jackie and Li’eth than just frequent telepathic explanations of unusual or strange cultural concepts. He is convinced the pair have begun forming a Gestalt bond, a very rare but not unknown situation where the minds of two psis become quantum entangled to the point where they can boost and share their various abilities . . . at the cost of becoming emotionally bound.
Realizing this puts both of them into a very awkward political situation, Jackie heads to Earth to speak with the Terran Premiere while the V’Dan are escorted on a tour around the Sol System. After experiments to confirm that the bond is genuine, the Premiere asserts that he cannot decide whether or not to allow Jackie to continue being the first ambassador the United Planets has had in many decades. He turns the decision over to the Council itself to decide, leaving Jackie’s fate in their hands.
Meanwhile, first audio, then visual contact is made with the V’Dan home system; the Terrans get to see the Empress of V’Dan, War Queen Hana’ka V’Daania for the very first time . . . and gain an inkling of V’Dan culture when she speaks very formally, almost distantly to her own son, a son presumed captured for dinner by her people’s current enemy. Still, diplomacy wins the day, as arrangements to start learning each other’s units of measurement and exchanging basic (nonproprietary) technological information begin, and arrangements are made for the Terrans to set up an embassy on the V’Dan homeworld once they have put together an expedition to make the hundreds-of-light-years voyage between the two systems.
A special Council session is convened to discuss whether or not Jacaranda MacKenzie should remain Ambassador of the Terran United Planets to the V’Dan people. Li’eth is questioned by the Council. When it looks like they aren’t even going to ask the most important person in the debate any questions, he challenges the Council on trying to make decisions about Jacaranda MacKenzie’s life without even consulting her—a treatment he likens to slavery.
After a bit of debate, the Council interrogates Jackie, and their decision is rendered. Despite not knowing how the V’Dan will feel about—or even if they will believe in—the Gestalt bond between the pair, the Council members vote, voicing their confidence in Jackie’s ability to be an honorable, ethical, moral ambassador despite the potential difficulties her Gestalt might have on the situation.
Li’eth knows that his return to his people means that their difficulties have only begun, not ended. His culture is very different from hers, and the world of V’Dan politics even more so. Rosa McCrary later approaches him, informing him that she has been included on the ambassador’s expedition to V’Dan as Jackie’s apprentice. The prince knows this is very different from the V’Dan way of things, where those in high positions of power almost never get demoted to a subordinate position without some source of disgrace being involved.
Once everything has been gathered, a fleet of ships carrying guards, embassy personnel, and supplies—including inoculation supplies for the V’Dan to culture and distribute to their own people—are launched from Earth. The book closes as Jackie and company leave the Sol System, bound for a new adventure among a new people who may be Human but are definitely not Terran:
The V’Dan.
—
One more thing: For those of you familiar with my previous series Theirs Not to Reason Why, you may already know this, but for those who do not, I would like to explain something that has been overlooked by certain readers, which in turn has caused some of them unintended discomfort.
The soldiers in this book, members of the Terran United Planets Space Force, are all exactly that. Soldiers. Regardless of which Branch they serve, Navy, Marines, Army, or Special Forces, they are all considered to be soldiers serving in the Terran Space Force. While there are several similarities to the various militaries of the real world, many members of which I have had the honor of interviewing over the decades . . . my fictional soldiers are not meant to be viewed as actual members of the U.S. Marines, or of the British Navy, the Canadian Air Force, et cetera, ad nauseam.
They are their own thing, and the whole system has been made up out of a combination of knowledge gained from all of those interviews, and the author’s imagination. I have a great amount of respect for the very real men and women who serve in their national militaries, regardless of which nation that might be, because they are willing to lay their lives on the line for their fellow citizens, and chose not to copy any single real system.
I have not served in any military personally, but I have invested multiple decades in my research of militaries both modern and ancient. So, at times things may feel “very real” to many of you who have actually served . . . and then at other times you might think, “Wait—that’s not right!” Some of these differences com
e from military sources found in other nations, and some of it is just fabricated out of whole cloth. Or at least some nice ribbon trim to weave it all together. I am, after all, an author of fiction, not nonfiction, and thus I ask that you keep in mind that this is my own creation, even as it is my own way of honoring those who have served in the real world by trying to get at least some of it right.
With all that said, welcome to Act II of the First Salik War, where newly made friends might be the most foreign of strangers out there, when unseen cultural differences can twist everything out of proportion . . . and where the only way to survive in high-stakes politics is either to cave in to gain what is needed immediately—thus losing everything—or to stand out, maybe even be shut out, and hope that someone will be smart enough to open the door once again.
And sometimes, it’s all too easy to forget that there is still an enemy out there, an enemy bent on galactic conquest and lunch, when there are other, friendlier foes far closer to home, hiding themselves behind pleasant smiles and polite bows.
Enjoy,
Jean
CONTENTS
Praise for Jean Johnson
Titles by Jean Johnson
Title Page
Copyright
Author’s Note
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
Special Excerpt from The Blockade
CHAPTER 1
APRIL 24, 2287 TERRAN COMMON ERA (C.E.)