I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man Read online

  Galactic Blues

  Episode 6:

  I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man

  A Newton’s Gate serial

  by

  C.J. Clemens

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  What Is the NGU?

  Galactic Blues Serial

  Release Schedule

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Follow Us

  NGU Releases

  Acknowledgments

  Character Art

  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.

  Release Schedule

  Galactic Blues releases:

  11/05/18 Episode 1 – Born Under a Bad Sign

  11/12/18 Episode 2 – Call It Stormy Monday

  11/19/18 Episode 3 – Mean Old World

  11/26/18 Episode 4 – That’s All Right

  12/03/18 Episode 5 – Got My Mojo Working

  12/10/18 Episode 6 – I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man

  12/17/18 Episode 7 – Knock on Wood

  12/24/18 Episode 8 – Ain’t Nobody’s Business

  12/31/18 Episode 9 – The Sky Is Crying

  Chapter 1

  LILLY

  “Bechet’s gone.” Deputy Davis stood at the entrance of the R.L. Johnson’s bridge, holding an armload of weapons. “But he dropped these in the airlock.”

  Sheriff Lilly Greyson nodded as fresh questions mushroomed in her mind. Side effects from the poisonous gas that had knocked out her and her compatriots still lingered, making her reactions sluggish at the worst possible time. Bechet and his crew had a lot to answer for, but right now, she had even bigger problems.

  She turned to survey her band of bedraggled cohorts, who were in various stages of recovery from the gas. Other than watery eyes and coughing fits, they seemed intact.

  “Alright, everyone,” she said. “I think it’s obvious that those are Darkbur’s men out there. And that they’re not here for a social gathering.”

  Mayor Cansen awkwardly gripped his small pistol in his smooth, pink hands. Clearly, the guy had never shot anyone in his life.

  “What the hell does he think he’s doing?” he asked, inadvertently pointing the gun at Lilly.

  With a long, pale finger, Jacer gently pivoted Cansen’s gun away from her. “I think, Mayor, it’s obvious he’s making his move.”

  “Move… to do what?” Cansen asked.

  “To take control of the planet,” Nate said, stepping out from a darkened corner of the bridge. He was armed to the hilt, and his scruffy jaw clenched with a determination she’d rarely seen in her brother.

  “Yeah, how about we couch the what and focus on the how.” Lilly powered up a rifle and holstered her other guns back in their usual places around her body. She felt a whole lot better fully dressed. “Cuz right now, we’re essentially trapped.”

  All faces turned to her in concern.

  She groaned inwardly at their sheepish expressions and their default expectation that she could provide all the answers. Since taking the job of sheriff, she had dealt with just about every type of situation, from domestic abuse issues to standard robberies and murders. She had maintained a firm foot on the neck of Naillik’s black market, never putting her full weight on it but making sure it didn’t turn the town into another Bane. One lawless city on the planet was more than enough. All of these duties had been a natural part of the job, but this? Being targeted? The planet threatened by a hostile takeover? Was this really what she’d signed up for?

  Bechet was right about one thing: this was a backwards-assed planet.

  “Sheriff?” Davis prodded.

  “Yeah, yeah, OK. Davis, you and Pierce, come with me,” she said. “The rest of you, stay here.”

  Before they could bombard her with questions, she headed off the bridge, Davis in tow. It wasn’t much of a plan, but she had to try something. Halfway down the corridor, though, she heard only one set of feet tramping on the metal decking behind her. Pierce wasn’t following.

  She turned back to the doorway, where the older deputy stood in an apparent daze. “Pierce, now!”

  “Uh, yeah.” He bolted forward and caught up with them.

  By the time they reached the airlock ramp leading off this strange ship, half a dozen people were storming their way. Darkly-dressed, heavily-armed assassins… Gono’s assassins. They were still fifty yards from the Johnson, so Lilly opened up with her rifle, sending several blasts towards them.

  Five members of the hit squad kept coming, zig-zagging in their approach, while one hung back. It looked like that woman Gono had brought into the station. Lilly shifted her focus back to the five assassins headed her way
, all of whom had started returning fire.

  Neither Davis nor Pierce was shooting. Her deputies crouched to one side of the doorway, using the outer wall for cover, while she shot from the other side.

  Lilly pointed at their guns. “Aren’t those working, or what?”

  Davis began shooting. A moment later, Pierce unleashed his own rifle.

  If she ever quit being Naillik’s sheriff, perhaps even got off this infernal planet and returned home, then one of these two might end up as her replacement. What a sobering thought. Davis wasn’t a bad deputy, but he didn’t have what it took to be in charge, to make the hard decisions. Well, at least not to make the wise decisions, since he seemed to think with his dick more often than was probably healthy for a sheriff. Pierce, well, he’d have a nervous breakdown in the first week on the job. Hell, at the moment, he looked on the verge.

  Could she just leave? Abandon Naillik? Did she really care?

  She managed to hit one of the approaching men, but the shot only struck him on his shoulder and deflected off into Skully’s holding yard. The man shrugged and stomped onward.

  “Dammit, they’re wearing body armor,” she called out. “Aim for their heads.”

  She twisted her own head to ensure that Pierce was still coping. He had his rifle sight up to one eye, tracking an attacker, fully engaged, but he was leaning too far beyond the cover of the hull. She opened her mouth to warn him, but her words were ripped from her throat when a shot from one of the assailants whined though the air and hit Pierce in the eye. The plasma blast exploded out the back of his head, and his body slumped across the doorway.

  Lilly stared at the unnatural, black hole in the back of her deputy’s head, fringed with blood-matted, silver hair. Pierce had always taken such pride in his full, shiny mane.

  Something that had been holding her up inside cracked. Another light of reason and goodness extinguished. Darkness and chaos were going to win.

  “Get this damn door closed!” she screamed at Davis.

  Davis patted around frantically on the wall. He opened a panel and reached inside. “There’s a manual crank,” he grunted, “but Pierce is in the way.”

  She tried to reach outward and get ahold of the dead man’s body, but several shots struck his lifeless torso. One almost caught her hand as it penetrated Pierce’s shoulder just two inches away. She whipped her hands from his corpse.

  OK, different plan.

  Davis was still attempting to crank up the door, but part of Pierce’s corpse dangled outside the ship, wedging the ramp open. She fiddled with her rifle, locked the safety into place, and then banged it against the edge of the doorway.

  Davis paused in his futile cranking. “What are you doing?”

  Ignoring him, she pulled out some of the wires from the gun’s broken power source.

  “Hell,” Davis said, “let’s forget the outer one and just close the inner door.” He retreated from the panel and wiped his brow on his forearm.

  “Negative. They’ll blow through that door with one shot. We need to get this door up; it’s heavy enough that their blasters won’t penetrate the hull.”

  She finished rewiring the gun and pulled the trigger to test it.

  Davis paused again and looked down at the weapon.

  “I’m overloading it,” Lilly explained. “Take cover, Davis. We need to finish closing the door.”

  Once her deputy had complied, crouching behind the outer wall, she tossed the rifle thirty feet into the scrapyard. It wouldn’t be a massive explosion, but that wasn’t why she’d done it.

  As expected, the gun overloaded and burst apart. Chunks of dirt and bits of sand sailed into the open airlock. Lilly waited a few seconds, then stepped out into the doorway.

  “No, Sheriff!” Davis yelled.

  But as soon as the large cloud of smoke billowed up in front of them, Davis must have grasped her plan. He stepped out to join her, and the two of them dragged poor Pierce’s body inside by his blast-riddled legs. She then moved to the panel, wiped the sticky, warm blood off her hands, and started cranking the door handle as if her life depended on it.

  Well, hell, it does.

  The ramp lifted slowly but easily. Davis sent a couple of shots out as the smoke started to clear. Finally, the crank came to a stop, the door sealing with a satisfying sucking sound. They’d managed to close the entrance.

  They were safe, for now. But it wouldn’t take long for Darkbur’s crew to figure out how to get inside. Hopefully, none of them would try manipulating the hydraulics, as Skully had initially done.

  Thank Zog they’re assassins, not mechanics.

  In the meantime, Lilly needed to conjure up a plan… some way to get her people off this weird ghost ship and back to safety.

  What would Tim do? Hell, at this point, what would Bechet do?

  Chapter 2

  SHAW

  Darius had just disengaged from shooting at Bechet’s armored ship. For Commander Tara Shaw, this was a clear signal that the mission had turned pointless.

  “Your men just screwed the whole thing up,” she snapped over the comms to Darkbur. She had to yell over the noise of the blasts from his other assassins, and that felt good.

  “What’s going on?” Darkbur demanded.

  Darius whipped the comms unit from her, shooting her a somewhat betrayed look. “They split into two groups. One took off in the med ship. I think it was the guy they’d locked up. He was with a kid and an old man.”

  “I don’t care about them. What’s the status of the others? The sheriff? The mayor?”

  Shaw raised an eyebrow at Darius.

  Got yourself into a bit of a jam there, big boy.

  Darius scowled. “The others… have locked themselves inside that unclassified ship. Heavily armored. We can’t get in with our blasters or grenades.”

  “I gave you one damn job,” came the harsh voice over the comms.

  Darius clenched his fists and gazed up into the sky.

  Shaw smirked. Was it possible that Gono Darkbur didn’t have the total loyalty of his men? Like Larker Max, he controlled through fear and intimidation, so if someone didn’t fear him enough to do his bidding, he likely didn’t consider that person effective in his eyes. Even someone as reliable as Darius.

  Not the most enlightened way to run a team.

  Darius now stared off into the distance. Shaw followed his gaze toward a giant monstrosity of a machine—part crane, part excavator, part bulldozer—which was presently dismantling the wall of a derelict building with its powerful jaws.

  “Darius?” the comms crackled again.

  He held the device close to his mouth. “I’m on it.”

  Shaw flashed him a knowing smile. “You think you can rip the airlock door off, don’t you?” She liked innovative schemes, but this one seemed foolhardy.

  Darius stiffened his posture and brought his dark, impenetrable eyes to rest on her. She assumed he didn’t appreciate her insolence and skepticism. He had a sort of should-I-kill-you-or-should-I-let-you-live? look on his face. It made Shaw smile.

  “Don’t know,” he said gruffly. “But I’m sure as hell gonna try.”

  He handed her the comms unit and headed toward the jawed beast. She clutched the communicator, which seemed like a token of their new camaraderie, and monitored his progress, stupidly rooting for him and his crazy plan.

  Several of the workers from the salvage yard approached him. They clearly had no idea what was happening, only that there had been gunshots. They all backed off after Darius pointed his rifle at them.

  This guy definitely has some style.

  The comms unit beeped again.

  Oh, hell no.

  “Darius?” Darkbur ground out.

  “He’s kind of busy right now,” Shaw said sweetly.

  “Shaw? What the hell’s going on? Where’s Darius?”

  No point in denying it at this stage. Darkbur would find out anyway. “Well, it looks like he’s going to rip the airlock door off wi
th one of the mutant machines in the yard.”

  “What?!”

  She winced and reduced the volume of the comms speaker, although now only stunned silence came from Darkbur. Her gaze returned to the scene: Darius skillfully climbed to the machine’s control booth, pulled out the operator, and threw him to the ground—about fifteen feet down. Whatever Darius managed to do with the Johnson, he sure as hell wasn’t making many new friends.

  “Gotta go,” she said.

  Darkbur started to protest, but she cut the conversation off by switching the device to silent mode.

  Darius motioned his men away from the airlock door, where they’d been futilely attempting to pry it open. Working the controls in the booth, he managed to swing the giant mechanical beast from the rubble it had been chewing through, aim it at Bechet’s ship, and begin a lumbering crawl toward its next victim. The humongous, modified whatever-the-hell-it-was didn’t move fast, but since no one was shooting at them anymore, time was on their side.

  Shaw watched the crazy scene unfold. Darius was the only competent member she’d met so far of Darkbur’s group. She didn’t blame him for not completing this particular job as his boss had ordered. Bechet had proved tricky as ever. That whacko pirate had extricated himself from scrapes much bigger than this, with dozens of her fellow UNSF troops following him, so Darius needn’t beat himself up over that.

  But what was really going on in that handsome skull of his? Was Darius comfortable with the idea of Gono Darkbur taking over the entire planet via his control of one much-needed drug? Was he hoping to be the ultimate ruler’s sidekick after Darkbur had turned Vox into a corrupt autocracy?

  Shaw had already seen what the disease did and how many people in Bane desperately required treatment, and she assumed there were similar numbers in the other cities. If you craved power, then this was a surefire way of getting it. A tyrant like Gono Darkbur could easily assimilate this struggling backwater into whatever system of domination he already lorded over.