Phantom Planet (Galaxy Mavericks Book 2)

by Michael La Ronn

  Phantom Planet

  Galaxy Mavericks

  Book 2 (Keltie Sheffield)

  Michael La Ronn

  Copyright 2017 © Michael La Ronn. All rights reserved. Published by Ursabrand Media.

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters, dialogue, and incidents described in this publication are fictional or entirely coincidental.

  No part of this novel may be reproduced or reprinted without permission of the publisher. Please address inquiries to info@michaellaronn.com.

  Cover designed by Yocla Designs (www.yocladesigns.com)

  Editing by Calee Allen

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  SCIENTIFIC DISCLAIMER:

  I cannot guarantee that any of the following in this series are accurate:

  Physics

  Astronomy

  Chemistry

  Algebra

  Geology

  Quantum Mechanics…

  OK, pretty much every area of science probably got bastardized in some way while I wrote this book. Any and all errors were made lovingly for your reading enjoyment.

  Chapter 1

  One by one, the lights in the hallway flickered on as the luxury cruiser’s generators hummed to life. Keltie Sheffield paused and relaxed a little, hooking her handcoil onto her skirt. Microgravity returned, and she dropped from weightlessness, touching down onto the metal floors with a grace that surprised her, since she was wearing wedges.

  Footsteps clanged on the deck above, where she was heading. She didn’t know whether the people on Deck Two were going to celebrate or kill her. Power outages on spaceships were rare and deadly, especially when you were in deep space, light-years from the nearest colony station.

  Alistair, her loan officer, bumped into her. She felt his hot breath on her neck. He patted her apologetically. “What do you think happened?” he asked.

  “I have no idea.” Keltie’s eyes wandered upward to the ceiling. The vents kicked on, funneling a rush of oxygen through the hallway. She smelled traces of lime and coriander in the air, designed to make the guests feel more comfortable. It must have worked, because the scent calmed her heart, which had been racing for the two minutes during the outage.

  She stopped at a glass panel in the wall and pressed a red button. “Emina, are we up and running at a hundred percent?”

  “Everything’s online,” a voice said after a longer than usual pause. “It’ll just take a few minutes to get the ship back to normal. I don’t think we’ll see any residual effects from the outage.”

  “You’re in the bridge,” Keltie said, “What did you see?”

  “Nothing. Space is clear. But you’d better get upstairs to Deck Two. Mr. Charsworth looks pretty upset.”

  Keltie sighed and let go of the button. Across the hallway, a row of portholes that glimpsed into starry space glowed, and the celestial view transformed into a beach shore with emerald waves and palm trees swaying in a light breeze—a simulation to distract the guests from the ship’s spinning, centrifugal force.

  “Want me to do the talking?” Alistair asked. Keltie was glad he decided to follow along. Maybe it would have been advantageous for him to do the talking—Charsworth tended to be the chauvinistic type—but no, this, unfortunately, was up to her.

  “I can handle it,” she said. “Maybe.”

  “You sure?” Alistair asked as they made their way up an L-shaped staircase. “You know what they say. People always expect bad news from the financial guy. I was going to slap a seventeen percent interest rate on their loan. I don’t know what’s worse news—that, or this.”

  They passed a row of handcoils hanging from the wall. Keltie unloaded hers, spilling several silver, needle-like bullets onto her hand. She pulled open a small compartment in the wall and dropped the bullets inside, then hung the coil on the wall.

  “I’m not going to need this after all,” she said. “I thought for sure it was pirates.”

  “I don’t know if I’d put your coil away just yet,” Alistair said. “Angry clients are sometimes worse than pirates.”

  “I’m a real estate agent,” Keltie said. “If I can’t defuse an angry client, then he might as well kill me.”

  The journey was almost over, and if she came back empty-handed, the company would surely jettison her. They had given her two weeks with the company cruiser to entertain and woo the clients, a temporary staff of twenty hired to meet their every need, and an on-site loan officer and attorney to close the deal right there on the cruiser. Trillions of dollars were tied into this one voyage, and her boss trusted her. For the last two years, she had been the company’s top real estate broker, but this year, she hadn’t sold a single planet.

  This prospect was so close she could feel it. She’d built rapport with the guests. The wives liked her. The children revered her like a schoolteacher. And the men, when they weren’t ogling her, respected her straight-shooting personality. They trusted her. They needed her, and they needed a new place to live. All she had to do was show them the damn planet, and a close would have been all but inevitable. Now the deal was in danger of falling through, as well as her dream of one day owning a planet, too.

  Wishing she had a mirror, she smoothed over her blazer.

  “How do I look?” she asked.

  “Good,” Alistair said, adjusting the sleeves of his sport coat, revealing cufflinks shaped like Earth.

  “If this deal goes through, I want a shot at your next one,” he said. “If I don’t produce, my boss is going to go supernova.”

  “That makes two of us,” Keltie said. She adjusted a gold, leaf-shaped pledge pin on his lapel, twisting it upright.

  “I always forget to check that,” Alistair said.

  The staircase brought them to the outer edge of Deck Two. The deck was designed to mimic a premiere beach resort. The long pool was empty, and the reclaimed wood floors were covered in a thin layer of water. The cabanas and beach chairs lay all over, broken, torn and wet. The giant, bowl-shaped light in the ceiling burned like an artificial sun, and a palm tree hung from a grille around it, smoking gently. The short absence of gravity had wrecked the place.

  A cluster of people circled around a concession stand with a banana leaf roof, whispering to each other. From what Keltie could tell, their body language didn’t look good. Upon seeing her, they began to yell.

  A bearded man wearing a towel around his waist pushed his way through the cluster as Keltie and Alistair approached. He smelled of soap and watery cologne. Keltie really, really hoped he was wearing something under the towel.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Charsworth asked.

  Keltie held up her hands and smiled. “Now, I know that must have been scary, but I can assure you—”

  “Scary?” Charsworth asked. “I’m taking a swim in this magnificent pool of yours, and the next thing I know, I’m on the ceiling. Everybody’s freaking out and I’m floating like a limp noodle. You told us this voyage would be safe.”

  “And it is,” Keltie said. “The captain is looking into what happened.”

  “Is it pirates? If it is—”

  “If it was a pirate ship, they would be on board, and we would all be dead right now, Mr. Charsworth.”

  Charsworth’s eyes widened, and then he calmed down somewhat.

 
“I just came from the generator room,” Keltie said. “I verified myself that the generators are running. The captain assured me that the main systems will be online in a couple of minutes. Everything is fine, and there is nothing to worry about.”

  “What caused the outage?” Charsworth asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t…” The man threw his hands up and said something under his breath. “I knew we shouldn’t have trusted a w—”

  What a pig. But she wasn’t going to let this deal fall through and reinforce this guy’s belief system. That would be a failure to women everywhere in the universe.

  Keltie extended her hand. “I promised you that I was going to find a planet for you and your followers at the best price. You promised you would hear me out. Do we still have a deal?”

  Charsworth stared at her hand, water dripping from his face.

  “We’re almost to the planet,” Keltie said. “It would be a shame to come all this way to turn around, wouldn’t it?” She glanced at a group of children who were hiding behind their parents. “After a few beers last night, your wife told me it was pretty clear that you couldn’t exactly go back to Terrus.”

  These one hundred people were registered dissenters. They didn’t agree with the trade policies of Terrus—or that of any of the planets in the neighboring Zachary Galaxy. So they went out in search of a planet of their own that they could call home. Otherwise, they might have all ended up living a life of constant disagreement and persecution.

  Keltie didn’t much care for intergalactic politics. Any time you got involved, it was a mistake. Honestly, she probably didn’t agree with any of these peoples’ worldviews. But that was the beauty of space—no one cared who you were or what you believed as long as you did what you said you could do. It was the only way she’d become successful at real estate despite being in a man’s world.

  Keltie wagged her hand to get the man’s attention again. “We’re still good, right?”

  Charsworth took her hand reluctantly. “You have to understand,” he said softly. “I have one hundred people here depending on me. And even more back home. If something were to happen to us—”

  “This must have been a frightening experience for you.”

  “You have no idea.”

  Keltie bent down and picked up a teddy bear. It had a sword and shield, and it was soaked. She wrung it out and handed it to a nearby child, who took it, unsure, then hugged it. Keltie smiled at him, and then she picked up a beach chair and set it upright.

  “It was frightening for me, too, Mr. Charsworth,” she said, “but once you’ve seen our destination, I think you’ll say it was worth every moment.”

  She walked over to the concession stand, which surprisingly was still intact. She reached into a drawer and pulled out a pitcher full of fresh pineapple juice, a jar of coconut cream, and a sleek, silver bottle of Nova Rum. “Surely we’ve got enough glasses here to make some piña coladas, right? Any takers?”

  Charsworth was the first in line. Alistair strolled over to a speaker panel and turned on some reggae as Keltie began serving. Small slots in the wall opened and circular drone bots whistled around the room, cleaning and drying and picking up all the debris.

  Keltie took a swig of rum herself and slid a shot glass over to Alistair, who gave her a sly thumbs up.

  A subtle beep came from the speakers in the ceiling. Emina’s voice sounded on the intercom.

  “This is the captain. We’re approaching orbit now. I recommend that everyone change into some comfortable clothes and meet on the Sun Deck in twenty minutes.”

  Chapter 2

  “That was flawless,” Alistair said as he and Keltie rode an elevator to the bridge. The cylindrical elevator car glowed blue as it ascended, illuminating them.

  “It’s not over yet,” Keltie said.

  She was glad for the lucky break. Now it was time for business.

  “I know you’re not one to give yourself much credit,” Alistair said, “but that whole exchange made me a student of conflict resolution.”

  Keltie laughed. “When we make the deal, feel free to ask me all the questions you want. Didn’t they teach conflict resolution in your space training?”

  “Yeah, but not like that.”

  Alistair unbuttoned his cuffs and breathed out deeply. “I’m pretty sure they gave me a digital manual that’s gathering digital dust on a digital shelf in my digital ‘training’ library that I’ve never used. I mean, come on, when you’re out here hustling, who has time for manuals?”

  Keltie had read all of her training manuals. Twice. But she nodded and said, “I know what you mean.”

  A screen next to the door showed security camera footage of the guests. They lined up on Deck Two, waiting for an elevator to the Sun Deck. Many of them looked excited and were smiling. Below the screen, several progress bars lit up and flashed green, showing that the ship’s systems were back online. They beeped, a welcome sound to Keltie’s ears after all the commotion.

  “The mood really lifted when Emina made her announcement,” Keltie said. “Talk about perfect timing.”

  “I’m feeling good about this,” Alistair said. “Can you imagine the commission?”

  “Don’t talk like that,” Keltie said. “Not yet, okay?”

  She hated when he talked about deals as if they were already done. It was bad luck.

  Keltie knew better than to engage in that kind of thinking. Even though she and Alistair had partnered together many times, and she appreciated his easygoing optimism, she disliked his obsession over money. Typical loan guy. Planetary real estate was about the money, but there was much more to it than that. Some of it, you couldn’t teach. Sure, this deal would make her competitive in the company, and it would pay her a handsome commission—a year’s salary after expenses and overhead—but she found that it was just better to focus on selling in the moment.

  God knows she needed the money. Already she was close to being underwater this year. She’d done a few luxury tours that didn’t amount to any sales. When that happened, the company put it against your future commissions. This was her last chance to stay profitable.

  She dreamed of owning a planet one day. A place where she and her family could go without having to worry about anything. She wouldn’t even have to do real estate anymore. She could be the free spirit she’d always wanted to be, and her family would finally understand her.

  But she hated thinking like that, especially when the money wasn’t in her account yet.

  The elevator door chimed and opened into the bridge, a cone-shaped room on the top of the cruiser. Screens lined the walls, showing everything from the vitality of the ship via progress bars to radiation levels. Keltie rejoiced in seeing everything operating at normal levels. There was always something majestic about walking onto a ship’s bridge.

  The gigantic gray ship, shaped like a pistol and smooth as an egg, loomed below, sailing through dark space.

  Captain Emina Markovic sat in a swivel chair in front of a large control panel. She was the shortest space captain Keltie had ever seen, but her piloting skills made up for her lack of height—as did her sometimes fiery personality. Seeing Keltie, she stood.

  “Miss Sheffield, how did it go?”

  “Good enough,” Keltie said. She walked to the front windows, which revealed a dark blue planet wreathed in pale brown clouds. It gave the surrounding space a blue glow that reminded her of Earth, but not quite.

  “The planet Kepler,” she said under her breath.

  She started to think about all the possibilities, all the things someone could do with a planet like this. Excitement raced through her, and she wanted to hop on a corsair and start showing it off.

  This was going to be her best showing yet.

  “The weather is frigid,” Emina said, “but fortunately, one side of the planet permanently faces the star, so if we show them that side, it should be more manageable. If I were you, I would start on the bright side and
then end in twilight.”

  “To emulate a sunset,” Keltie said, grinning. She high-fived Emina. “Perfect!”

  At that moment, the elevator door opened and several more men and women in suits entered.

  Her team.

  Keltie walked to the center of the bridge and everyone gathered around her.

  “This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for,” she said, putting on her most optimistic tone. “Everything depends on this tour, guys.”

  Everyone nodded seriously.

  “Captain, any more information on the outage?” Keltie asked.

  Emina slid into her chair and brought up a 3D hologram of the ship in front of her face. “I’ve never seen an outage like this. As far as I could tell, we were in empty space. No radiation, no spaceships, and no debris that could have caused it.”

  “I wonder if it was a pulse blast,” Alistair said. “Wasn’t there a space battle around Provenance? Bunch of Arguses or something like that? A rogue pulse blast could—”

  “The ship’s scanners would have picked it up,” Emina said. “We might have even been able to see a proton blast. But the ship is undamaged.”

  “An outage just doesn’t come out nowhere,” Alistair said.

  “This one did,” Emina said, frowning.

  A fight was coming. Alistair and Emina always argued when it came to technical matters. Alistair didn’t have an aviation degree, but he always tried to argue based on logic. If Keltie had learned anything about space, it was not to look for logic. Sometimes things made no sense.

  “Let’s not argue,” Keltie said. “Captain, I trust that you sent a notice to the Galactic Guard?”

  “Yes,” Emina said. “I imagine they’ll send someone to investigate, just to be sure.”

  “Then it’s settled,” Keltie said.

  She snapped her fingers, and the hologram of the ship hovered across the bridge and stopped in front of her. She pinched the ship and zoomed in on a deck at the top of the cruiser where several orange dots twinkled like stars.