Legacy of Stars: Book 4 in the Backyard Starship Series Read online

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  BOOK DESCRIPTION

  There are some things you simply can’t escape. For Van, it’s family.

  Out among the stars, his cousin, Carter Yost, drags Van and his team into a criminal ring run by the High Doctor- a dangerous con artist with delusions of grandeur. Working from the abandoned world of Pathway, the High Doctor has created a cult, stealing a fortune from the fearful, sick, and scared.

  If there’s one thing Van hates, it’s a bully, and the High Doctor has his full attention. But in order to crush the criminal cult, Van needs bigger, better armor—and that comes with a price.

  The rarest metals cost money, and that means doing a few dirty jobs in order to pay for the tools of his trade. Van’s got the will. His team has the skill.

  Now, he has to find a way. And the way will surely involve war.

  Copyrighted Material

  Legacy of Stars Copyright © 2022 by Variant Publications

  Book design and layout copyright © 2022 by JN Chaney

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing.

  1st Edition

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  Glossary

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  About the Authors

  1

  I eyed the massive hunk of rock as we swung past it, heading for the Iowa’s new home.

  “So that’s Orcus. It’s dull, but at least it’s featureless. Rock and ice, I assume?”

  “Everything out here is some combination of rock and ice, Van, with maybe the odd bits of metallic iron and nickel thrown in for variety,” Netty replied.

  Netty was right. Out here, in the furthest reaches of the Solar System, countless hunks of rocky, icy debris—leftovers from the formation of the planets—plied their stately way around the distant Sun. There were literally hundreds of millions, and perhaps billions of bits and pieces of detritus.

  Not that you’d ever know it. The bigger objects, the ones you really didn’t want to slam into, averaged about a million klicks apart. So, even though we were in a dense part of the so-called Kuiper Belt, it was only dense in comparison to nothing at all.

  Once again I was reminded of the sheer scale of space.

  “Orcus. That name has a kind of ominous ring to it,” Torina noted as the tiny planetoid fell away behind us, back into the endless night.

  “Orcus was the punisher of those condemned to the underworld in Greek mythology. His boss, Pluto, the Greek god of the underworld, is about four and a half billion klicks that way,” Perry replied, waving a wing vaguely toward the Sun.

  “Charming. A god of the underworld, his chief hatchet man, and didn’t you tell me that Pluto’s moon was named after another jolly figure, someone who ferries the dead around on a boat? Karen, I think?”

  I smirked. “Close. It’s actually Charon, and yeah, he’s another one from that cast of mythological Greek characters. While gloomy, he’s not as frightening as an actual Karen in an HOA.”

  Torina lifted a brow. “What’s an… HOA?”

  “Homeowners Association. A lot like hell, but with cleaner streets.”

  Torina snorted, then her face fell. “Is everything out here named after something gloomy?”

  “Now that you mention it… yes, at least from the perspective of Earth, anyway.” As I said it, I glanced back at the Sun, a fierce point of light glaring against the void. I got Torina’s point and even shivered a bit myself. I’d been much, much farther from the sun than this, but our position now felt heavy with an inarticulate lonesome quality that had a weight all its own. To the Earthbound, these distant reaches of the solar system were a dark, cold, and mysterious place. And as someone who’d recently been Earthbound, I still felt some of that. To see the sun, whose hard glare could make an Iowa summer day feel like an open furnace, reduced to a small, bright dot—it was a perspective that gave me pause.

  I pulled my attention back into the Fafnir’s cockpit. Yes, we were sailing through the lonely fringe regions of the solar system. It was bleak and dark and coldly silent, but it was also the perfect place to park the Iowa. Lonely also meant safe.

  We’d brought the old battlecruiser here from Starsmith, where she’d been cleaned, refurbished, and upgraded, simply because it was out of the way. The solar system didn’t see a lot of interstellar traffic, at least not compared to other systems like Tau Ceti or Epsilon Eridani. And this far from the sun, with her drives shut down and no transponders or comms, the chances of anyone stumbling on her were remote.

  As for her inadvertently being spotted from Earth—Netty summed it up nicely.

  “Build a model of the Iowa the same size as your hand, Van, then put it roughly in the middle of Colorado and try to spot it from the farm in Iowa.”

  Enough said.

  “Icky, how are you doing back there?” I asked over the comm.

  Icrul, our engineer and general troubleshooter, was piloting the Iowa a few thousand klicks back from us as we settled her into what would, for now, be her home orbit. The fact that she was able to single-handedly fly a ship normally crewed by a couple of dozen was a testament to the automation she’d designed and installed. With Netty’s help, she could helm the big ship from the bridge without anyone else aboard. That said, though, keeping the Iowa running required constant attention across dozens of critical systems. One person could move her from point A to point B, but if there was any fancy maneuvering to be done—or battles to be fought—that was a different matter.

  “E
verything’s good here, boss,” Icky replied. “Well, except for that portside plasma constrictor. Had to take it offline again, which leaves us without a redundant system. That’s no problem once we’ve shut the drive down, but—”

  “Add it to the list, Icky,” I said with a resigned sigh, then turned back to the nav display. The Iowa had snuggled into the orbit we’d selected for her, one that would take her around the sun once about every three hundred years. I had Netty slow us, maneuvering so that the Iowa would overtake the Fafnir. Once she had, we nudged her against the battlecruiser’s flank and thumped our docking adapter into place. When it locked and showed green, Torina and I unstrapped from our seats and clambered out of the cockpit to head for the airlock.

  As we did, we passed through the new crew hab module now installed into the Fafnir, offering a lot more room than before. We’d bought the new module for one bond from its previous owner, the former Peacemaker Guild Master and now-mercenary Petyr Groshenko. His ship, the Alexander Nevsky, had been decommissioned upon his resignation, with most of its components being stripped off and taken away by lienholders. But he’d sold us the habitat module for a token sum, which was most welcome. Torina, Icky, and I were all sick of pushing past and stumbling over one another as we tried to maneuver in the tight confines of the Fafnir. It had been like sharing a one-bedroom apartment with two other people—and one of them, Icky, was the size of a gorilla.

  But with two extra arms and occasional lapses in social graces.

  It made the Fafnir just short of being reclassified from “Upgraded Dragonet Class” to actual “Dragon” Class. The main difference now was the drive and powerplant. The Fafnir’s was pretty-much maxed out and couldn’t support any further loads from weapons or new systems. Not surprisingly, this would also be the most expensive upgrade—currently out of my reach unless I wanted to cash in every asset and empty every account I could. The alternative would be finding someone willing to provide us with the upgrade in exchange for holding a lien on it, which I refused to do.

  Besides, I thought as we strode into the vast emptiness of the Iowa, it wasn’t really essential right now. We had a usable amount of space aboard the Fafnir, and more than we could possibly ever use aboard the battlecruiser. Which, in fact, presented us with our next problem—and there was always a new problem in space.

  I stopped in the first corridor junction, now gleaming and sparkly clean—a massive contrast to the first time I’d seen it, when the ship appeared to be mostly made from rust and grime. Spreading my arms, I turned a circle.

  “So much room. What are we going to do with it all?”

  Torina just pushed past me, though. “I know what I’m going to do with some of it. Dibs on the Captain’s cabin!”

  After flashing me a wicked grin, she hurried off.

  “Aren’t you going to go after her?” Perry asked.

  “Why?”

  “Uh, the Captain’s cabin? You know, the big one, right behind the bridge? Don’t you want that for yourself?”

  “Perry, I am not so small-minded and egotistical that I’ll let myself get so worked up over a mere room.”

  “You’ve already had Netty lock it, haven’t you?”

  “One of the first things I did.”

  * * *

  I’d toured the Iowa a couple of times since her refurbishment and refit, but those had both been more orientation sessions, just letting me get a feel for the layout of the ship. Now that we had her parked in a semi-permanent orbit, we had time to dig into some serious planning regarding how we were going to use all the internal space. Even though I’d snagged the Captain’s quarters early, it didn’t really matter, because both Torina and Icky had their choice of cabins. In fact, by taking over two of the larger cabins with an interconnecting door, Torina ended up with more space than I had. Icky, for her part, was happy to take one of the rearward cabins in the forward section of the ship to let her live as close to the engineering section as she could.

  Staring at her new quarters, Icky put a hand up against the bulkhead and made a low noise of approval.

  “What is it, Ick?” I asked, smiling at her obvious joy.

  “I can feel the engines.”

  “They’re not even running. Just subroutines,” I said, but she held up a hand and tilted her head.

  “Still can feel them. This is a good place to call home, Van. Very good indeed.”

  I put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed—it was a lot like touching a large ham—and then laughed, because it was apparent we’d all come a long way.

  Of course, while the Iowa solved several problems—such as having a secure base of operations that we could move around as necessary rather than just work out of static locations—it raised several more.

  Like furniture.

  I stood in the middle of the Captain’s cabin, looking around at the empty floor and blank walls. Linulla, the Starsmith who worked on my Moonsword, had provided the labor to get the Iowa cleaned up, and they’d done a terrific job. They’d even installed hygiene fixtures suited to human anatomy, since the previous owners, aliens, apparently had the same needs. And they’d painted and polished everything to an extent that would have made my father, a career sailor, proud. But they’d also removed all the old junk, essentially anything that wasn’t nailed down, and that included all of the furnishings. Again, not only had they been designed to the ship’s original alien owners, but they were also all in terrible shape. It left us with a clean, shiny, and almost entirely empty ship.

  Torina appeared in the door. “At least you’ve got a bed,” she said, nodding at the cot that had been bolted to the floor.

  “Yeah, and it’d be great if I was, like, ten years old. Then I might fit in this thing.” I sighed down at the tiny bed. “I wonder why the hell Linulla even had this in the first place. I mean, he’s basically a giant crustacean. What would he need with an, um… minibed? Or whatever this thing is?”

  “Well, the good news is that my parents agreed to buy us fixtures and fittings for the Iowa. It looks like the cost for the space hippies to clean up that cursed nanoplague back home is going to come in lower than they’d estimated. They asked what they could do to help out, so I suggested getting us the stuff we needed so we didn’t have to sleep on the floor.”

  “So, what? We’ve got some interior designer coming to measure for carpets and curtains and stuff?”

  “We do.”

  I blinked, taken aback. I’d been joking. “Really?”

  “Well, unless you want us to go and pick out all the pieces ourselves and then haul everything back here and lug it all—”

  “No, no, that’s fine. It’s just that I don’t associate battlecruiser with interior decorator very often.”

  She shrugged. “Living in space doesn’t have to be a chore.”

  “Yeah, I know, anyone can be uncomfortable—”

  “Van, there’s an incoming message from Anvil Dark,” Netty cut in.

  I looked around. There was a comm terminal built into the wall. I had Netty put the message through to it, and the screen lit up with the image of Lunzemor Nyatt, aka Lunzy, one of the Peacemaker Masters’ chief liaison officers and emissaries.

  “Hey, Lunzy. Are you a Master, yet?” I asked. I said it jokingly, but technically at least, her senior position put Lunzy in reach of one of the three vacant Masters positions if she wanted one.

  She blew out a sigh chock full of exasperation. “Don’t get me started. And, take my advice, don’t come anywhere near Anvil Dark if you can avoid it. The politicking over those Master positions is so intense you almost taste it in the air.”

  “I’m curious—what would that taste like?”

  “Equal parts narcissism, naked ambition, and ruthless opportunism, with spicy hints of treachery and sucking up. I hate it.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Indeed. Besides, what makes you think I even want to be a Master? So I can inherit Groshenko’s big office and all the headaches and bullshit still piled
on his desk along with it?”

  Her flat dismissal of the idea made me think of my grandfather. He’d apparently had the opportunity to take on the mantle of Guild Master of the Peacemakers, but had likewise turned it down. As a spec ops soldier back on Earth, he hated the necessity of spending time chained to a desk doing administrative stuff, important or not. He’d apparently felt the same as a Peacemaker.

  “Anyway, I didn’t call you up to discuss my career opportunities. I’ve got a job for you,” Lunzy said.

  I frowned. “Lunzy, I’m supposed to be on leave so I can sort out—”

  “Your new ship, yes, I know. But I wouldn’t be calling you if it wasn’t important. Moreover, when I say I’ve got a job for you, I mean a job for you—as in you specifically.”

  That made me shift a little uncomfortably. “Dare I ask?”

  “It’s about your cousin, Carter Yost.”

  I swore, using a Wu’tzur curse I’d learned from Icky when she smashed her head on one of the drive mounts in the Fafnir’s engineering bay. I wasn’t entirely sure of the meaning, only that it was apparently quite rude. And quite rude fit anything involving Carter Yost.