by M. D. Cooper
“Well, it’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you… Strax,” he snickered. “You see, since day one, I’ve been holding onto this nugget. Waiting until this very moment to tell you.”
“Tell me, Steve, tell me!”
“Well, on my planet?” he grinned, “Strax is pronounced shithead as well.”
THE END
— — —
Want to read more by S.E. Anderson?
Starstruck
She could barely look after herself. Now, she’s looking after the entire planet.
After an incident with a hot-air balloon causes college-dropout Sally Webber to lose her job, she sets off to find direction in her life. Crashing into a teleporting alien, however, is not on her to-do list.
Now she’s on the run from TV-drama-loving aliens, and things are just getting started. Zander won’t stop reeling her into life-or-death situations to save her planet, as he waits for his laser-wielding sister to search the universe for him. Though Sally isn’t quite sure if he wants to save Earth from annihilation, or just quell his curiosity of all things human.
On top of this, she’s got to find lost alien emissaries, as well as a job, and stop the planet from getting incinerated in the process. But with Zander as her roommate, what could possibly go wrong?
Released May 4th 2017 from Bolide Publishing Limited
Alienation October 24th
Reach for the Stars:
Free five chapter sample: www.instafreebie.com/free/M1Vdc
Available in Ebook, Paperback and Hardcover: http://bit.ly/KSTAR
About the Author
S.E. Anderson can’t ever tell you where she’s from. Not because she doesn’t want to, but because it inevitably leads to a confusing conversation where she goes over where she was born (England) where she grew up (France) and where her family is from (USA) and it tends to make things very complicated.
She’s lived pretty much her entire life in the South of France, except for a brief stint where she moved to Washington DC, or the eighty years she spent as a queen of Narnia before coming back home five minutes after she had left. Currently, she goes to university in Marseille, where she’s studying Physics and aiming for a career in Astrophysics.
When she’s not writing, or trying to science, she’s either reading, designing, crafting, or attempting to speak with various woodland creatures in an attempt to get them to do household chores for her. She could also be gaming, or pretending she’s not watching anything on Netflix.
Connect with S.E. Anderson:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/seandersonauthor
Twitter: twitter.com/sea_author
Website: seandersonauthor.com
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The Lone Ranger Returns
By Michael Anderle
Slogan
Her Grandfather is gone, his legacy remains. It takes a while for this granddaughter to realize you can’t outrun the Grimes legacy.
Chapter One
Far Outer Torcellan Quadrant, Space Station Yu’mfred 60699
There had been seven of us at the beginning of this game, but now we were four. Hopefully there would only be three after this poker hand.
And I would be one of the three. At least, I sure hoped so.
It wasn’t really poker, but it’s the closest way I can explain the game, and it is how I think of it.
I desperately wanted to get off this infested fucking space station and back out where I could do something decent with my damned life.
“You…” the rat-faced cyborg across the table from me laid down her cards—three aces high, and a pair of black fours, “can all suck my ass.”
The Torcellan next to her made a face and folded his cards, pushing his metal cash into the pile. “I’m out, and it’s ‘kiss my ass,’ you cybernetic cretin. Get a damned dictionary.”
“Fucking hell.” James closed his cards and tossed them onto the pile.
I looked at Rat-face McAssSuck and grinned. “Bite my shiny metal…”
PEW PEW!
“The fuck?” John yelled as the large mirror behind the bar exploded into shards, two pieces implanting themselves into Bob the bar guy. “Take it like a man!” someone told poor Bob as blood erupted from his mouth.
I didn’t think he was going to shake that one off.
PEW!
I hit the fucking deck and everyone else scrambled when the laser blasts started flying. Thinking clearly for the first time since last...uh… Shit.
Day before last month?
Whatever. I reached up over the table to grab my money and pulled it back down to me, stuffing it into my jacket on my second try. These fucking tits of mine are too damned big.
Teach my sexy-ass to get a body-mod when I was floating high as a wind skiff.
I looked around to see what was going on, and that was when I saw that James wouldn’t be doing anymore kissing—or sucking— ass, mine or others. Not with that hole through his skull.
That kind of bit the long cylindrical vegetable. He was good in bed on Tuesdays—or was that Thursdays? Well, dammit.
Had James been any good at all?
I had to stop thinking about these existential questions when I was in a bar that was being shot up to hell and gone.
Rat-face McAssSuck was grinning at me from the floor on the other side of the table, daring me with her eyes as her arm reached over the table to grab more of the pot. I had to give it to her—she had balls.
No, really! I could tell now that I was on the floor that Rat-face McAssSuck was actually a male. “Shiny balls you got there!” I yelled over the screaming and explosions rocking the place. I looked over my shoulder at the three Indie mercenaries who had pulled up a table and were using it to try and hold off four of the local merc military police by the front door.
Shit.
Rat-face McAssSuck screamed, and I turned back—his arm was on fire. He was flinging it about, then spotted the toilet rooms and started running in that direction. One stray beam went toward him before he made it inside, and I grimaced.
I could only imagine the decision he had to make, having his arm burning and looking at that toilet, thinking he had to shove it into that disgusting filth.
I turned back to the Skaine merc-military police, knowing that if I had to choose between my arm burning or sticking it in one of those toilets? Fucking hell, I wasn’t going to stick my arm in that stank sludge. I’d rather eat plasmium bolts and be done with it.
One of the errant blasts came streaking in, and my leg jerked. I scrambled to the side and looked down to see the damage to my feet.
“YOU FUCKING SONSABITCHES!” I screamed. The shot had taken off the bottom two inches of my favorite three-inch heels.
“I got these in Larkatia!” I reached down and unbuckled the screwed-up pump and rolled over to throw it toward the front door. “I hope one of you chokes on it,” I groused to myself as I unbuckled the second shoe. “Anybody have a damned clue how hard it is to get a passport to shop in Larkatia?” I bitched as I flung it after the first one.
The next bolt hit another mirror on the wall a few feet away, showering me with glass.
This bar fight was burning off all the drugs I had spent a shit-ton of money to purchase and drink, eat, and shoot up, trying my best to forget the last job I had been on.
These military motherfuckers had just wasted my high. Worse than that, they had caused me to remember.
My love was dead.
Chapter Two
Welcome to the life and times of Meredith Nicole Grimes. You could call me ‘Merry’ if you had known me back in the Etheric Federation, ‘Nickie’ if you were my friend, or ‘Scary-ass Bitch’ if you pissed me off and my neck was stinging from the mirror shards raining down on me.
I had officially been pissed off.
Now, I like a good fight as much as anyone else. Hell, I was raised on fighting—or ‘practicing,’ if you wanted to call it that. I called it ‘slave labor’
and my Grandfather John just smiled at me like he knew what kind of person I was going to turn out to be.
Well, joke’s on him. He’s in some other god-forsaken galaxy helping aliens or kissing their stank-butt or whatever, and I’m right here getting shot at because I wanted to go out, see the worlds.
And get my ass handed to me.
Fuck my Grandfather and his incessant need to be right all the time. If I’d had a way back home I might have taken it, but his friend the Etheric Empress had given me seven years-to-life to go figure out what kind of future I wanted.
I’m in Year Six, and if I don’t pull my head out my ass soon I might as well French-kiss it goodbye, since my head is already so close.
I hated it when Bethany Anne was right.
I reached under my jacket and engaged all the advanced tech that ran through my body. This was some shit I hadn’t done in all six years of my so-called—or more accurately, forced—vacation from the Etheric Federation.
Systems came online that I had hated to use in my youth. I could have used them earlier, but if I had, those that wondered where I might be would absolutely know.
Sometimes you don’t want family to pull your ass out of the fire.
The nanites kicked into gear and what little buzz I had left vanished faster than Kurtherians around Bethany Anne. My hand ignored the normal pistol everyone saw and wrapped itself around the special one. The one my grandmother had made for me.
The pistol whose onboard computer checked me out as the sweet feeling of a lover’s curve graced my palm and I yanked it out of my backup holster.
Time slowed down as the enhancements kicked in. I looked around one last time and noticed another patron hiding under his poker table and staring at the pistol in my hand.
These fuckers are rare.
You don’t want to be around one in use, and for God’s sake you don’t want to try to use one that isn’t safety-locked to you personally. Just use your own pistol—eat the barrel and pull the trigger. It would be less painful.
That patron’s eyes locked on me and then he started crab-crawling toward the bathroom. There are rumors about people like me. People who have a Jean Dukes special.
I wondered if he would find a dead McAssSuck or a smelly one?
Giving up that line of questioning, I rolled over and started having fun.
My name is Grim’zee P. Bonesticker (‘Grim’ or ‘Z’ to my friends). I grimaced when the table I was hiding behind received a fresh laser hole just three inches from where my Yollin mother’s favorite son was hiding his head.
I shuffled my two-legged exoskeleton=covered ass down a little lower. “You got any extra packs?” I called to the next table to my left. Two of my shipmates were stuck behind that table now; they’d had to ditch the last one when the merc-cops busted into the place.
“Skaine-loving pissants,” was all the poor Torcellan Kremlich got out before those same Skaine-loving pissants drilled him through the chest, making the question of needing any of his packs a moot point. Fortunately, his partner Shara, a human, bit down her scream of surprise and kicked his gun over to me.
I grabbed the gun, checked the safety and the charges remaining, and looked to my right.
And that was when she stood up, eyes blazing red, and I knew the Skaine Merc-Police behind me were dead.
I just didn’t know if my mother’s favorite son was about to die as well.
“I’m telling you,” the main merc-cop ground out as he shot for the fifth time into the table; the hole he had drilled finally exploded and he was satisfied to hear the grunt of someone dying on the other side as blood splattered the wall beyond, “that the Skaine captain wants the human for a slave, so don’t waste her!”
“What about the Yollin?” Quarter-three asked.
“Cred a dozen,” Prime Quarter answered, and started shooting into the table the Yollin was hiding behind. “I don’t have a Yollin skull yet, so try not to mess it up too much.”
There is ‘enhanced,’ there is ‘merc-enhanced,’ and then there are the scary sonsabitches from the Etheric Empire. That group had been from Earth, once upon a time.
(Yes, there are a shit-ton of history books on that story. I don’t have time to tell you about Auntie Bethany Anne and Grandfather John Grimes (may someone kick his ass sometime soon), my grandmother Jean Dukes (who I love to death), and the rest. If you are interested, go look it up–I’m sure it is just riveting reading.)
Anyway, I’m here to tell you about those scary sonsabitches and me. I’m one of the offspring. I’ve got shit inside me that still hasn’t been turned on, and I know my ass will explode if someone tries to get to it.
Which explains the asteroid-sized chip on my shoulder.
There was talk about how those at the sharp end of the stick in the Etheric Empire were protected to the best of their abilities, and their kids…
And for a select few, their kids’ kids.
I had just wanted to be a wild child, and so I was.
But these Skaine motherfuckers had pissed off a Grimes.
The first merc barely registered that I had stood up (It was part of my upgrades, the ability to move much faster than a normal human.) Two of their party were already dead, their bodies and blood blown back through the open doors while the HUD I could see in my eyes tracked to the next two targets.
I heard this asshole’s last comment. “I don’t have a Yollin skull, so try not to mess it up too much.” I shot him through the ear, blowing the right side of his skull completely out.
“Fucking racists!” I yelled. Wait, were they racist or alienist or what? I never get that right.
I hate those who hate other aliens, and Skaines. Especially Skaines, so I hated that one twice as much as the next one I shot.
Then it was my turn to twist to my left and dodge as rounds whizzed past where I had just been. On my third twist I nailed the sonofabitch.
I stopped turning and looked around, making sure no one was about to shoot me in the back. I stepped carefully across the floor, fucking glad I hadn’t gotten any glass in my feet while I had dodged the fire.
A Yollin and a human woman stuck their heads up over the table. In the background I heard a lamp crash to the floor and a grunt, and I turned to see a patron laid out with the lamp covering his head.
Fucker never saw that coming.
I looked around the place. “Ah! Just what I need.” I found a woman, her shoulder and abdomen punctured and blood around her on the floor. I bent down, unbuckled her boots, and pulled them off. “Sorry, but you won’t need these anymore and they are Robotens, so they shouldn’t go to waste.”
It took me a half-minute to pull out a few pieces of glass I hadn’t noticed in my feet and put them on. By that time the human and the Yollin were standing up. “You guys got names, or shall I call you ‘Slave Bait’ and ‘Cad?’”
“‘Cad?’” the Yollin asked.
I pointed to one of the Skaines. “Cred a dozen,” I told him. “He didn’t think you were worth saving, and they wanted you,” I pointed to the woman, “for a slave.”
The female, I’ll give her credit. She walked around the table and spit on the dead Skaine. “Putoh!”
“Well, I’m getting out of here,” I told the two, and walked to the door, stepping over two of the dead Skaines, then bending down to rifle their pockets. “Ah, good.” I slipped their money and whatever else I figured was valuable into my pockets.”
“You’re robbing them?” she asked me.
“They are paying me back for my shoes,” I told her, going through the Prime Quarter’s pockets. “They haven’t nearly paid me enough for my fucked-up outfit or the new monkey on my back.” I grabbed another couple items I would need soon.
“You know,” the Yollin commented, “the Skaines are going to come after you.”
I pulled a pistol and turned it sideways to check its charge, then flipped the safety on and stuck it behind my back. “I doubt it.”
“Why not?” th
e female asked.
I stood up and looked at her. “Because they will be dead. I’m not done with those assholes.”
“Who the hell are you?” the Yollin asked, his voice somber.
“I’m mad as hell, in need of a ship, and someone who recognizes that leaving pissed-off Skaines behind me with a ship that I need would be a bad idea.”
“Right.” He moved over to me and tried again, sticking out his hand in human fashion. “Grim’zee P. Bonesticker. ‘Grim’ or ‘Z’ to my friends.”
I shook it. “Meredith Nicole Grimes, ‘Merry’ or ‘Nickie’ to my friends.”
“Don’t rate that yet, but I’ll work on it,” he replied.
I liked him. “You do that.”
“Want backup going after the ship?” he asked me.
I looked at him, and held my hand back out. “Call me Nickie.”
Two sets of boots clomped down the hallway as the human and the Yollin took a right.
They both heard the clomp clomp clomp of booted feet coming in their direction from the space docks. When the Skaine contingent came around the corner, we both took a step to the side to allow them to clomp clomp clomp right between us.
The eight of them ignored us, since we seemed to be appropriately cowed.
I stepped back out from my little nook in the wall and turned toward their retreating backs, pulling my pistol. I had shot four of them down when I heard Grim’zee’s pistol firing next to me.
I nailed the leader next, then worked my way back as Grimmie took another one out.
The eight Skaine bodies littered the hallway.
“Cleanup, hallway…” Grimmie looked around, “P3K-3R.”
I smirked. “Grimmie, you are such a dick.”
“Thank you,” he told me as we resumed our walk toward the docks. “I don’t remember offering that as one of my names.”