Galactic Blues - A Newton's Gate Serial: Born Under a Bad Sign Read online

  Galactic Blues

  Episode 1:

  Born Under a Bad Sign

  A Newton’s Gate serial

  by

  C.J. Clemens

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  What Is the NGU?

  Galactic Blues Serial

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Follow Us

  NGU Releases

  Acknowledgments

  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.

  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.

  Chapter 1

  REMY

  The bridge of the R.L. Johnson shook. Captain Remy Bechet bolted awake in his chair. This wasn’t the ship’s resigned kind of shudder, reminding him of her general age and dislike of gravity fields. Nope, this was a we’ve-got-company kind of shake.

  Blades.

  His eyes darted around the room, automatically seeking Dreyla. There she was, unharmed, poring over the nav console, seeming as cool as ever. A customary mass of black curls concealed her face as her slim, athletic frame leaned over her station, a tight grip on it the only sign of tension. She could’ve woken him sooner, dammit. Before getting attacked by what appeared to be three blades.

  Make that four.

  Crap. Five.

  The silver ships swooped into the vision of the R.L. Johnson’s front windows, in a mocking V-formation. He’d expected this, of course. You didn’t steal a large shipment of TZ107 chips and expect there to be no heat. Valuable as the power source for many things in the solar system, the Teez also served as hard currency out here in the Belt, an impoverished market where money was hard to come by, legally or otherwise. The shipment of Teez they’d stolen was worth half a billion credits, a huge score, and not one to go unnoticed. Or unpunished.

  Only one thing for it. They’d have to take the ship deeper into the Belt.

  Remy’s gaze locked with his adopted daughter’s. Dreyla was doing a good job of not looking petrified.

  “Port side got a hit, Captain,” she said. “Second-degree damage to the airlocks, and one of the boosters is out.”

  He nodded, relaxing his grip on the old-fashioned steering wheel he’d reclaimed from a 1968 Corvette, and shifted his primary focus from the main viewscreen to the adjacent gun turret display. He’d designed this setup himself so he could operate the steering wheel with his left hand and the joystick controlling the forward guns with his right.

  It was one of the many modifications he’d made to the ship when he initially bought her. Though he’d enabled each station, from navigation to diagnostics, to control almost all the ship’s systems, steering was the only action with a single point of access, naturally from his station.

  As with the rest of his well-worn ship, the bridge had seen better days. True, it was spacious, with a main steering console that curved along the front bulkheads and two smaller consoles behind him, one on each side of the bridge. All the buttons and displays functioned effectively, at least most of the time, but a noticeable patina of rust had spread across every surface, from the walls to the consoles themselves.

  The R.L. Johnson was old but true, and with any luck, she’d save their asses again, as she had so many times before.

  Remy scanned the central viewscreen, noting the five blades currently cramping his style. Though he’d always enjoyed piloting his own ship, he knew it was time to engage the A.I. system. For the moment, he needed to focus on blasting those blades to hell while the ship’s computer took over steering.

  The R.L. Johnson (or Jay, for short) had sustained many hits over the years, and she was still flying, but he didn’t want to test the limits of abuse she could tolerate. He slammed one of the guns into operation and rubbed some dirt off the targeting visor with his thumb. One fine day, he’d clean this baby up.

  “Find me a route through the Holcom Range,” he growled at Dreyla. “And where the hell is Sache?” His second gunner should be here.

  Dreyla frowned, her bottom lip protruding, a groove deepening between her dark eyes. “The Jay’s twice as big as those blades. They’ll have an easier time flying through there than we will.”

  He grinned. “Honey, nobody has an easy time flying through there… but nobody flies the Belt like I do.”

  Chapter 2

  LILLY

  Sheriff Lilly Greyson swatted a stubborn sandfly from her vision. As if the burning sun weren’t enough, she had to deal with these annoying insects, too. Intent on eating out her eyeballs, they were driving her slowly insane and generally maki
ng her day worse. What quirk of terraforming had permitted them to flourish?

  Well, she wouldn’t let anything, terraformed or organic, stop her from busting those assholes today.

  Behind her, Deputies Davis and Brand were swatting their own paths clear, waiting for her call to action. She eavesdropped on their hushed conversation. Davis, a tall, fit young man, swarthy and handsome, had been trying to flirt with newbie Brand, a trim, blonde, twentysomething beauty, all week. Guess now he had his chance.

  “Know what the Rot is, right?”

  “Respiratory disease caused from breathing in Vox7,” Brand responded. A textbook answer.

  Clearly, no one close to her had been affected. Not surprising, given her status as a recent immigrant to the planet.

  “Shortness of breath at first,” Davis clarified, “then the painful breathing, and eventually… bleeding lungs. It’s called the Rot because it feels like you’re rotting from the inside.”

  Lilly swatted another fly away from her nose and shook her dark ponytail to discourage any of its pals. If this was Davis’s best attempt at flirting with Brand, then there’d be no action between her two deputies any time soon. And that was fine with her.

  “But it’s treatable?” Brand asked in a too-girlish voice.

  “Well, only one way to live any kind of normal life after you get it… you gotta shoot up with nano-biotics every ninety days,” came her colleague’s robust answer.

  Lilly turned, gesturing to the abandoned warehouse they were approaching, the kind of place where black-market deals notoriously went down. “And these bastards are selling off fake nano-biotics, Deputy Brand, selling them to greenhorn miners fresh off the ship, letting them believe they’ll be safe. We should force them to work in one of the community mines, catch the Rot, and deal with it without the meds.” She grinned. “My jail is way too good for them.”

  Brand’s pretty eyes widened. Davis opened his mouth, as if to say something, but Lilly held up her hand for silence. They now stood within hearing distance of the warehouse. The time for chatter was over.

  The domed, cream-colored building had been one of the first structures hastily erected after the discovery of Vox7. Nearly sixty years old now—and looked every day of it. Lilly strode ahead, up the five steps to the front entrance. Pursing her chapped lips together, she pushed her shoulder against the door. To her surprise, it swung open easily under the pressure. Good sign or bad? She couldn’t tell, but to be safe, she indicated her deputies should keep close behind her.

  The gloomy interior offered a respite from the sun and the flies, but the stale odors of dust, urine, desiccated rodents, and varied debris urged Lilly to take shallow breaths. When a moment passed, and no welcoming party had appeared, she relaxed a little, but kept her hand pressed against her holster, ready to draw her pistol if necessary. While they might have tracked down a bunch of scumbags here, she knew that other people, from trouble-seeking teenagers to some of Naillik’s homeless population, often used the building. She didn’t want to shoot anyone that didn’t deserve it.

  Lilly and her two deputies moved down the main corridor, their standard-issue boots making little noise. Though the warehouse might have been state-of-the-art when first assembled, its features and furnishings were long out of date. Wall-mounted monitors were cracked and broken. Layers of dust coated the walls and other surfaces, just like everywhere else in Naillik. Some of the inner walls had even crumbled, as they weren’t meant to last more than a couple of years. Typical terraforming mentality, resulting in a typical ghost building.

  But farther along the lengthy corridor, obvious signs of life emerged: certain hallways were well worn and free of dust. Somebody or something was regularly clearing the floor.

  A small thud compelled Lilly to draw her pistol and swing it up toward an open room to her right. A scruffy man and an even more unkempt woman froze in fear as they eyed the weapon pointing at them. Lilly glanced down at the bed beside them. Actually, it resembled more of a nest, as if they’d piled up various pieces of foam insulation, probably from the compromised inner walls, into a makeshift sleeping space.

  Lilly couldn’t tell if these were some homeless, down-on-their-luck miners or if one of them were about to turn a trick. Frankly, she didn’t care. Slowly, she lowered her gun and holstered it, then put a finger to her lips to indicate the couple should keep quiet. Neither the man nor the woman nodded in compliance, but when they didn’t make a sound either, Lilly and her deputies left them to their business and resumed their search for the vermin uppermost on their minds.

  Chapter 3

  DREYLA

  Dreyla rolled her eyes at her captain’s boast. Her swaggering surrogate father might be one of the most skilled men she knew, but it would be refreshing if he didn’t always think he was. Then again, she often found comfort in his total faith that he could haul everyone’s asses out of whatever mess they’d gotten into. Because there was no shortage of messes in a pirate’s way of life.

  Lately, they’d endured so many close calls she’d taken to using adrenaline blockers just to fall asleep. She hadn’t told Remy about those yet. For all his scruffy bravado and grease-splotched clothes, he was a clean-veined guy who held an antiquated notion that music alone (and maybe a good shot of bourbon) could calm the nerves, and he expected the same standards of her. Speaking of which…

  The twangy strains of old blues artist, Robert Leroy Johnson, blasted onto the bridge, almost drowning out the whines of torpedoes ripping the Jay’s force field to shreds. Dreyla didn’t care what Remy had said about the so-called American legend. Every creaking strum of his acoustic slide guitar and every soulful note of his pleading voice jangled her nerves.

  She wished the captain wouldn’t play anything at all. When enemy guns were tearing your ship to pieces, communication was challenging enough without having to deal with the noise Remy considered classic. He could at least blare something better than the old-man tunes he preferred. She’d once tried convincing him to play one of her favorite modern groups instead, but that went about as well as expected. He kept it on for roughly five seconds before declaring it junk and going back to the blues.

  Predictably, the tune now resounding from the ship’s speakers was “Cross Roads Blues,” one of Remy’s favorite in-a-tight-space, under-serious-attack songs. Naturally, he had a different track for every occasion.

  “What did I say about playing that music?” she asked.

  “That it was badass and inspiring?”

  “Yeah. The precise term was don’t.” She rubbed her temples, shifted her attention to her console, and frowned at the screens displaying the hell outside.

  The five United Nations Space Force ships were smaller than the Jay, but not ineffectual. Called blades because of their sleek, deadly look, the UNSF ships resembled massive sushi knives hurtling through space with the intent of hacking up the enemy at will.

  Dreyla’s official job as navigator—official now that she’d turned sixteen, despite the fact she’d been doing it for four years—was to determine safe routes through asteroid belts and any other hazardous places, while Remy flew the ship (that is, when he wasn’t distracted by warfare). So, as much as she longed to help him fight off the enemy, she needed to focus on her own job and trust he could handle his alone.

  Just then, the door whooshed open, and Newman Sache entered the bridge at a trot. “Sorry,” the second gunner said, wincing. “Taking a leak.”

  “Yeah. Glad you could join us.” Remy cocked his head at the starboard window. “Take those. I’m on these.”

  The sounds of an explosion cut through Dreyla’s concentration. Where once a blade had been slicing a path way too close to the Jay’s port side (the captain’s current focus), there now appeared a billowing cloud of metallic debris, dispersing in the blackness of space.

  “Pretty,” she remarked, rewarding Remy with a small smile.

  “See, you just need the right music for the job. Save your fusion hip-hop for when
we’re cleaning the cargo hold.”

  “We never clean the—”

  Another massive explosion drowned out her words. She yelped as the aftershock rattled through her, crunching her bones together inside her stiffened limbs. This time, the Jay had taken a direct hit, and she couldn’t tell from which side.

  “Holy shit,” Remy yelled.

  A bead of sweat trickled from his dark hairline, down his clenched jaw, and into the collar of his shirt as he pumped the blaster for all it was worth, all the while yelling commands in staccato at poor Newman. Judging by the ferocity of the swearing, her captain wasn’t as on top of the situation as he’d initially claimed.

  She tapped the edges of her console, wishing she could help the two men shove some of those blades into the next dimension. Or at least tackle something more energetic than just waiting here. But she had her task. The computer had almost figured out the route. The tracing algorithm, if left on its own, would do a brute-force search through all the possibilities, taking hours they didn’t have. By chopping it up, though, with some quick and dirty optimization heuristics she had a particular knack for, she could speed up the operation.

  It was enough. It had to be. While waiting for the computer to finish, she found herself drumming her fingers in time to the music, which annoyed her. She stopped before Remy noticed.

  “Hah!” Newman shook out his blond curls. He’d hit a UNSF ship, too, sending its disabled hulk careening off course. He winked at her. “Captain’s not the only one with good aim around here.”

  Dreyla gave him a curt nod. “Yeah, just three more to go, Flash.”