Trajectory stabilized, she blocked the massive X-ray radiation of the pulsar from the viewport and looked over.
She’d seen many interesting things in her three years of freelance scouting. Beautiful things, terrifying things. She needed a little sleep and a lot of drinks to process what she saw now, but she suspected this topped them all.
“Ken, get up here.”
“But I’m still fainting.”
“Whatever. Get your ass up here.”
The planet-sized body—a quick measurement suggested a 40-50K kilometer diameter—appeared to be composed of a crystalline mineral so clear it was nearly transparent. The sole reason she was unable to see all the way through to the other side was that eventually, thousands of meters below the surface, the inner core darkened into an extremely dense form of carbon. Beyond the brilliance of the outer material, the body retained no more than a trace of natural luminosity. Plainly no longer a white dwarf; not for millennia.
The result of it being stripped of its outer layers then its stellar nature was a surface and outer core which looked a great deal like diamond but was likely something far more precious.
“What…ohhhh.” Kennedy brought a hand to her mouth. “This is the most exquisite thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Pretty much.”
“You upgraded your radiation shield, right? Because I can get you a next-gen kit for cost.”
“Let’s do that. Soon as we get back.”
Many white dwarfs had carbon-oxygen cores, but humanity thus far lacked the technology to harvest stars. Cold planetoids, on the other hand?
A dozen so-called carbon planets had been stripped bare to minimal riches for companies long forgotten, but only one other true ‘diamond planet’ had ever been discovered, orbiting the Fyren pulsar. A hundred twenty years ago the Magellan Aeronautics founder had made a fortune and funded an entire generation of interstellar private spacecraft by being the first to reach it and mine it.
Alex jerked out of the reverie. “Crap, the beacon!”
She’d been mooning over the splendor of the singular object speeding alongside them to the point of forgetting her mission. She hurriedly programmed in the details she hadn’t known until now and launched it directly at the body.
The beacon plummeted to six kilometers above the ground, then decelerated and adopted a low-altitude orbit and began transmitting to everyone in the galaxy who mattered. Alex sank in her chair with an exuberant cackle.
“Bob, you and I are going to be rich—well, I’m going to be rich. You’re going to be slightly more affluent.”
Kennedy’s face lit up in excitement. “If you’re truly earning that much money from this find, I have got so many ideas—”
“Assuming you survive the next few minutes. Kyril just turned tail and made a beeline for the pulsar. Or for you. I’m guessing for you.”
Couldn’t she spend five seconds enjoying her success in peace? Apparently not.
She straightened up in the chair and began to retreat from the planet. Her shield only had eight minutes worth of full functionality remaining before it started failing. She needed to move to a safe distance, and soon.
“Solovy, you bitch! You think you can get away with such a bullshit scam right in front of me?”
“Nice to talk to you, too, Kyril. Oh, wait. No, it’s not. So sorry your plan to ghost then leapfrog me didn’t pan out. Better luck next time. Or preferably, worse luck.”
“Is that a bloody diamond planet? No. No way are you stealing millions from me. Not this time.”
“He wouldn’t dare try to shoot you down, would he?”
“Strap back in.” She killed the heat and lights in the cabin and diverted the extra power to the defensive shield and increased the distance between her and the pulsar. Another couple of megameters and she’d be distant enough to engage the sLume drive and disappear—
—the Siyane shuddered as the laser hit it full-on broadside.
Kennedy’s shocked gasp echoed behind her. “That bastard shot at you!”
“Not so cute now, is he?”
The shield held, but it had depleted to thirty-eight percent from the single hit. Kyril had top of the line everything it seemed, including weaponry.
Alex hit the comm. “Goddammit, Kyril, if you shoot at me again you will regret it.”
“It would be such a shame if you accidentally got too close to the pulsar and met an unfortunate demise. Astral Materials will mourn your death while they pay me for the contract.”
Fuck, no. Not going to happen.
She frantically pulled power from everywhere she could find it to recharge the defensive shield faster, located Kyril on the scanner and locked on.
She returned fire. The laser skimmed off his hull.
Nose down. Fired.
Hard port. Fired again.
She arced above him in a high-g maneuver, firing the whole way.
His shield had to be getting low. Hers had climbed to seventy percent, which was a good thing as he finally managed to track her and return fire. In a flash she was down to nine percent shields….
“Hit him again. I got your back.”
Bob arrived out of nowhere above Kyril’s ship, bless his drunken soul. She fired once more.
So did Bob.
Hers hit first, but it was Bob’s shot that broke through the shield and caught the port rear of the ship. Hard.
The force of the strike sent Kyril’s ship hurtling toward Shanshuo in an uncontrolled spin.
No blip on the scanner appeared to indicate the launch of an escape pod or chute as the ship was swallowed up by the pulsar.
Alex threw her arms on the dash and dropped her head onto them.
“Okay, Bob, twenty percent…and two drinks. You earned it.”
“I didn’t actually mean to kill him.”
He sounded almost remorseful; she got that. “He intended to kill us. If you try to show mercy to someone like him, they will twist it back on you and use it to destroy you.”
“When you put it that way…frankly, in your sultry voice it’s kind of hot. Drinks—when and where?”
She sighed in weary amusement. “I’ll be in touch. Promise.”
When she lifted her head from the dash, Kennedy was standing beside her staring out the viewport. Her hands trembled at her sides. “Is it always like this?”
“Scouting? Nah. Sometimes it’s dangerous.”
See Alex and Kennedy again, five years later, when a grander adventure than they could possibly imagine begins:
STARSHINE
AURORA RISING BOOK ONE
(AURORA RHAPSODY #1)
Available in eBook, paperback and audiobook
Space is vast and untamed, and it holds many secrets. Now two individuals from opposite ends of settled space are on a collision course with the darkest of those secrets, even as the world threatens to explode around them.
The year is 2322. Humanity has expanded into the stars, inhabiting over 100 worlds across a third of the galaxy. Though thriving as never before, they have discovered neither alien life nor the key to utopia. Earth struggles to retain authority over far-flung planets and free-wheeling corporations while an uneasy armistice with a breakaway federation hangs by a thread as the former rebels rise in wealth and power.
Alexis Solovy is Earth Alliance royalty, her father a fallen war hero and her mother an influential military leader. But she seeks only the freedom of space and has made a fortune by reading the patterns in the chaos to discover the hidden wonders of the stars.
Nothing about her latest objective suggests the secret it conceals will turn her life—not to mention the entire galaxy—upside down. But a chance encounter with a mysterious spy leads to a discovery which will thrust Alex into the middle of a galactic power struggle and a sinister conspiracy, whether she likes it or not.
When faced with its greatest challenge, will humanity rise to triumph or fall to ruin?
Aurora Rising is an epic tale of galaxy-spanning
adventure, of the thrill of discovery and the unquenchable desire to reach ever farther into the unknown. It's a tale of humanity at its best and worst, of love and loss, of fear and heroism. It's the story of a woman who sought the stars and found more than anyone imagined possible.
***
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
I published Starshine in March of 2014. In the back of the book I put a short note asking readers to consider leaving a review or talking about the book with their friends. Since that time I’ve had the unmitigated pleasure of watching my readers do exactly that, and there has never been a more wonderful and humbling experience in my life. There’s no way to properly thank you for that support, but know you changed my life and made my dreams a reality.
I’ll make the same request now. If you loved VENATORIS, tell someone. If you bought the story on Amazon, consider leaving a review. If you downloaded the story off a website with Russian text in the margins and pictures of cartoon video game characters in the sidebar, consider recommending it to others.
There is no single thing that will sell a story better than word-of-mouth. My part of this deal is to write a story worth talking about—your part of the deal is to do the talking. If you all keep doing your bit, I get to write a lot more books for you.
I love hearing from my readers. Seriously. Just like I don’t have a publisher or an agent, I don’t have “fans.” I have readers who buy and read my books, and friends who do that then reach out to me through email or social media. If you loved the story—or if you didn’t—let me know. The beauty of independent publishing is its simplicity: there’s the writer and the readers. Without any overhead, I can find out what I’m doing right and wrong directly from you, which is invaluable in making the next book better. And the one after that. And the twenty after that.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
G. S. JENNSEN lives in Colorado with her husband and two dogs. She has become an internationally bestselling author since her first novel, Starshine, was published in March 2014. She has chosen to continue writing under an independent publishing model to ensure the integrity of the Aurora Rhapsody series and her ability to execute on the vision she’s had for it since its genesis.
While she has been a lawyer, a software engineer and an editor, she’s found the life of a full-time author preferable by several orders of magnitude, which means you can expect the next book in the Aurora Rhapsody series in just a few months.
When she isn’t writing, she’s gaming or working out or getting lost in the Colorado mountains that loom large outside the windows in her home. Or she’s dealing with a flooded basement, or standing in a line at Walmart reading the tabloid headlines and wondering who all of those people are. Or sitting on her back porch with a glass of wine, looking up at the stars, trying to figure out what could be up there.
Title Page
Aurora Rhapsody
VENATORIS
Yuzhou Li Orbital Station
Messier 71
______________________
Starshine: Aurora Rising Book One
Author’s Note
About the Author
Venatoris: An Aurora Rhapsody Short Story Page 3