Backyard Starship Read online

  Copyrighted Material

  Backyard Starship Copyright © 2021 by Variant Publications

  Book design and layout copyright © 2021 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

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  Book Description

  When Van Tudor returns to his childhood home, he inherits more than the family farm.

  His grandfather used to tell him fantastic stories of spacemen and monsters, princesses and galactic knights. Little did Van realize, the old man's tales were more than fiction. They were real.

  Hidden beneath the old barn, Van’s legacy is waiting: a starship, not of this world.

  With his combat AI, an android bird named Perry, Van takes his first steps into the wider galaxy. He soon finds that space is far busier and more dangerous than he could have ever conceived.

  Destiny is calling. His grandfather's legacy awaits.

  Embark on the adventure of a lifetime with USA Today Bestselling Author J.N. Chaney and Terry Maggert in this brand new science fiction series. If you're a fan of found spaceships and galactic quests for glory, this might just be the story you've been waiting for.

  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

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Join the Conversation

  Connect with J.N. Chaney

  Connect with Terry Maggert

  About the Authors

  1

  The rain slammed down in hard, unrelenting sheets, rattling on the rental car like bullets and almost drowning out the rhythmic thump of the wipers. In one hand, I held my phone, a custom-built unit that did everything I wanted and nothing I didn’t. Its screen, and the glow from the dashboard, offered the only steady light. Beyond the windows sprawled nothing but rainy gloom, split by sporadic flashbulb bursts of lightning.

  My phone wasn’t why I was here, though. At least, not directly. I really was just using it for light. It was the thing in my other hand that had brought me to this place, at this time, sitting in an idling car on a gravel driveway with water sluicing from puddle to puddle.

  Another flare of lightning blew apart the night. Its brief crystalline glare etched the shape of a farmhouse and a fence, beyond them a barn, and beyond that the rolling fields that had been my family’s land for—hell, I wasn’t sure how many generations. At least four. Maybe five.

  Until recently, it had all been my grandfather’s. God’s green acre, he called it, a rambling farm granted to my family by the railroad at the end of the Civil War. The tracks still ran along the west edge of the property, in fact—

  Another flash of lightning. This time, my gaze stayed inside the car, on the documents unfolded in my lap. They looked important, all purposeful text and signatures and seals embossed right into the paper. They even felt important, much heavier than the paper alone. They bore down with the weight of meaning.

  Of course, any document starting …being of sound mind, do hereby bequeath… was weighty and important. These papers were a bridge, vaulting from one generation to the next. Or, in this instance, the generation after that. In any case, they were an end, closing another chapter of my family’s lineage, bringing it right up to date. But they were a beginning, too.

  …being of sound mind, do hereby bequeath all property and goods and chattels above and below the surface of Blackthorn Farm, address County Road 1100, Pony Hollow, Iowa, United States of America. (Earth), to my grandson, Clive VanAbel Tudor III.

  I had to smile at that last bit about Earth. “Just in case it got mistaken for Iowa, Mars,” I said to the page. “You always were thorough, Gramps.”

  I killed the engine, freezing the wipers in mid-stroke. Rainwater celebrated this little victory by cascading down the windshield. I folded up the will, tucked it and the car key in my jacket pocket, and prepared to step out into the storm.

  As soon as I gripped the door handle, the front door to the house opened, an island of warmly inviting golden light amid the rainy gloom. It framed a woman—small, older, tidy. Miryam Nunzio, our family’s attorney, and my grandfather’s friend. She was here to deal with the last wishes of a man who lived as he died—with secrets.

  I popped open the car door and ran. It didn’t matter, of course. Some things are simply too fast or relentless to avoid. Like the rain.

  Or the future.

  I pounded up the front steps to the house, muttering curses as water squelched between my toes. It seemed like I’d managed to slam my feet down into every puddle between the car and the porch. Miryam let me in the house, shaking her head in disapproval as I stalked past her while dripping on the ancient hardwood floor and then toed off my sodden shoes.

  “You were never a clean boy. Smart as the proverbial whip, but never clean,” she said, taking my jacket.

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s raining,” I snapped back, but that drained all the snap out of me. I sagged a bit and smiled. “I’ll take it as a compliment, though. The smart part, anyway.”

  A quiet pall hung over the house. I heard only the tick of the grandfather clock in the living room and the soft, irregular patter of water dripping from both me and my coat on the floor. Miryam and I found ourselves just standing, staring at each other, kneading the silence with our grief.

  Although, grief is a funny thing. I missed my grandfather, but more in the way something that had just always been a part of my life suddenly wasn’t. Miryam, I suspected, missed him much more. I was pretty sure this wasn’t her first time in the old house on a cold, rainy autumn night.

  Another second or two and the silent moment would topple into awkward. On impulse, I stepped forward and hugged Miryam. She hugged me right back. She had known me since birth, and I’d grown up with her as much a fixture in my life as my grandfather had been. She was a confidant, a friend, and sometimes even the mother I didn’t have.

  She finally pulled away. “You’re soaking wet. And now, so am I.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Well, there’s coffee on, and your room is ready. He never changed anything up there. Not since you left, anyway.”

  “You know, at the risk of dripping on the hardwood some more, I think I’ll grab that coffee first. I took the red-eye out of Atlanta and got to spend four amazing hours enjoying a layover in Chicago.”

  She smiled and made a follow me gesture. A few minutes later, we sat across from each other at the kitchen table, steaming mugs in hand. Again, the silence fell like a shroud. But I could see Miryam struggling to formulate something, words that would break it, but in the right way.

  I made it easy. I just asked.

  “How?”

  She nodded. “A stroke, I think, but we’re not really sure. He was a big man, but at the end, he was… depleted. Small.” Miryam shook her head, her brown eyes hard with sudden anger—the worst sort. Anger at circumstances, at the universe. “It’s no way to go. Not for him, not for anyone.” She sighed and seemed to exhale the anger with it. Tears suddenly glistened in her eyes. “Especially not him.”

  “So you don’t think—”

  “He was killed because of what he did? No, I don’t. And believe me, I looked. I checked his room over—discreetly, of course. Had a hea
rt-to-heart with the coroner—I know him pretty well—and he found nothing unusual either. Whatever happened to him was—it was natural. If you can call it that. All I know for sure is that no one from that life cared when he—when he went to lick his wounds and die.”

  Bitterness shot through Miryam’s words like the lightning still occasionally pulsing through the windows. I nodded, thinking about those wars he fought in. El Salvador. Honduras. Bosnia. Others, places he refused to name. Dangerous places, mostly on the periphery of the headlines but sometimes not in the headlines at all.

  Black ops, they were called. A sinister term, even though my grandfather insisted that they were considered black mostly because the details were kept off the government’s accounting books, all of them rendered into a single, bland line item in a budget—Non-specified operational costs, one gazillion dollars. He’d always said it like a joke, but I never missed how his smile or laugh never seemed to quite touch his eyes. His mouth might have said one thing, but he gazed at something very different, something painful.

  My father had followed in his footsteps but in a more conventional way. Instead of the shadowy, silent world of special ops, he’d chosen the exact opposite, big and showy. He’d gone Navy, fighting Iranian gunboats in the Persian Gulf and pirates off the Horn of Africa and amid the island sprawl of Malaysia, and staring down Chinese warships in the waters around Taiwan. He met an untimely end almost four years ago when a Super Hornet fighter crashed while landing on the carrier USS Harry S. Truman in the Indian Ocean. You didn’t get much bigger and showier than that.

  And then there was me.

  I joined the Army, of course, with vague plans to go Airborne, or Rangers, or some such hard-assed outfit, because what twenty year-old didn’t imagine they could fight bad guys with a knife clenched in their teeth. I was ninety-nine percent committed to it. The trouble was that one percent, which turned out to be my right knee. Flexion deformity, it was called. My knee worked just fine through a normal range of movement, but I couldn’t bend it through the last ten degrees or so most people could. It was enough to wash me out of all except the most basic of military trades. But trading Ranger for cook or vehicle mechanic wasn’t going to cut it, so I left after only four years.

  And I took my bitter frustration—well, here, actually. I came to live with my grandfather, and he taught me the finer points of hunting and fishing and shooting. And all the while, he went out of his way to express how proud he was of me. My father, too. I knew both men were still a little disappointed. I could see it in their eyes. But, strangely, both seemed even more relieved that I wouldn’t be following them into the service. I never asked either of them about it, and now I couldn’t.

  But they weren’t nearly as disappointed as I was in myself. I was determined to be a warrior, and if I couldn’t wage it on a real battlefield, I’d wage it in the virtual one. I jammed myself back into school and immersed myself in a sort of warfare that didn’t care about trick knees—the electronic kind. Maybe, I thought, I could fight our nation’s foes with weapons made of data, IP packets and route sniffers and encryption-crackers. If I couldn’t stick the knife in my teeth, maybe I could support those who did from behind a monitor. Maybe I could even find solutions to burgeoning conflicts before men like my father and grandfather had to get involved at all.

  So I went to war after all, but a quiet one, fought through back doors and hacked firewalls, wielding secrets and disinformation so grand that the truth was often reduced to a myth. I got very good at it and started picking up contracts—mostly the white-hat sort, but a few were grey, and one or two were as black as anything my grandfather had ever done. I rarely left my apartment, which overlooked a park in the suburbs of Atlanta. The people living around me—Janet, the guitar-playing loans manager next door, or Missus Evans with her multitude of cats across the hall—none of them knew how their lives were open books: for sale or for the taking. Either was possible for the right price.

  “Hello?”

  I looked up. “Sorry?”

  “You were somewhere far away, Van,” Miryam said.

  “I was just… remembering.”

  She nodded. “Oh, I’ve spent a lot of time in this house doing that these past couple of days. Anyway, I should be going. I just wanted to make sure you got in okay and got the keys to the—to your house. They’re over there on the counter.”

  “Thanks, Miryam. I really appreciate it.”

  I followed her back to the front door. “I’ll be back in the morning. I think you pretty much know what decisions you have to make.” She pulled on her jacket, then leaned up to kiss my cheek. I leaned down, in turn, to let it happen, but I was a little numb to it.

  My house. Not my grandfather’s house. Not anymore.

  Mine.

  I watched Miryam’s headlights flash as she turned her car around, then dim as she pulled away into the night. The rain seemed to have slackened, so I stuck my sodden shoes back on, jogged out to my own car, retrieved the single backpack I carried as luggage, and hurried back into the house. The oil furnace kicked on as I shut out the night behind me. I once again pulled off my shoes, considered more coffee, and decided against it. It was late, and I was tired. Instead, I squelched wetly up the stairs.

  The last time I’d climbed them was-- some time ago, and I felt a pang of guilt at that passage of time. I’d gone from childhood, to an awkward teenager, and beyond in that house. For years, I’d been a kid who stayed hidden away from the world in this remote piece of the Midwest, lost in my books and the electronics workbench I kept out in the barn. That boy was long gone now. But so was my father, at least in the sense of feeling any real sort of closeness. And, of course, my grandfather, who was just gone.

  My feet instinctively turned left at the top and took me to an open door. The first thing to catch my attention was a poster on the wall, pronouncing a 2011 concert date in Chicago for Coldplay. The music world might be like the shady world of internet security—what thrived today was obsolete and forgotten tomorrow—but I still liked that band. The hours on the bus to attend that concert had been one of the few major excursions I made off the farm until I finally left it for good eight years ago.

  I sniffed and shook my head. Left it for good. Yeah, okay, except here I was.

  “Kinda like being seventeen again, except for the acne,” I said to my old room, stepping in and dumping my backpack on the bed.

  It was, as Miryam said, ready. Actually, more than just ready. More like utterly unchanged. I could have just clomped up the stairs, fresh off the bus from a day of high school. A time capsule.

  I undressed and draped my damp clothes over a chair I maneuvered over the warm air register. Then, with movements made of memory and the creak of old floorboards, I brushed my teeth and readied myself for bed. Sliding under the blanket and comforter, into the coolness of the sheets, I finally let out a long, slow breath.

  I’d expected grief, and there was some, sure. I missed my grandfather. He’d been more of a father figure than my father had. But if my sadness had any focus, it was less on that he died, but rather how he died. Larger-than-life men like my grandfather were supposed to have larger-than-life deaths. They were meant to end in desperate struggles against impossible odds, not the mundanity of a stroke or heart attack.