Explode: Team Supernova (The Great Space Race) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Epilogue

  Their chemistry’s explosive. Too bad someone wants to blow them up.

  Cat-girl space racer Sarr’ma Settazz’s plan: Enter the reality show The Great Space Race. Hide she’s also an engineer. Steal super-secret technology. Win. Easy-peasy bloxfruit squeezy!

  Falling for her grumpy, overprotective, smoking-hot human race teammate? Not in the plan.

  Miner Tripp Gallifer’s plan: Enter The Great Space Race. Protect his playful cat-girl teammate while she handles the actual flying. Win. Pray the psycho who kidnapped his sister will honor their bargain: Tripp keeps silent about the crime and hands over the prize money, and his sister goes free.

  Falling for the brilliant female he glimpses behind Sarr’ma’s bouncy façade? Not in the plan.

  Then the kidnapper ups the game to attempted murder and all secrets must be revealed—including their feelings. Sarr’ma and Tripp concoct a scheme worthy of the wildest reality show to save Tripp’s sister and themselves. But they’ll need to trust each other to pull it off. Will their love be enough to let them win the biggest prize of all?

  Welcome to The Great Space Race!

  Grab some cricket chips, (right, that would be potato chips in this galaxy), find a comfy chair, and enjoy this wild ride of an outer space reality show! This series is the brainchild of a group of science fiction romance authors who started chatting on Facebook and decided it would be fun to create a series together. Many thanks to CJ Cade (also known as Cathryn Cade) for herding all the cats, and to the many minds who contributed fun details and helped create planets and systems for us to play in. I owe a special shout-out to Jess Anastasi, who created my hero’s home sector, and to Sabine Priestley, who let me borrow her main characters for the gala scene.

  For more information on the series and a complete list of authors and titles, check out GreatSpaceRace.info.

  As you read other Great Space Race books, bear in mind that race producer Octiron Media is willing to do almost anything to make the show more exciting and improve ratings. That includes giving teams slightly different parameters for winning and changing the rules as they go along!

  Chapter One

  SARR’MA SETTAZZ SMILED into the holo-cam, cocking her catlike ears at what she knew was their most adorable angle, the one that showed off their pink interior as well as their glossy black fur, and taking care to show only a flash of her sharp predator’s teeth. “I’m still pinching myself that I’m in Paragon Galaxy, not back home in the Milky Way, and that I’ve been selected for The Great Space Race. The way Octiron Media transported me to Primaera instantly makes it even harder to believe. I look out a window expecting to see Mrrwr and the sky’s a completely different color. We don’t have that technology at home, and once I stopped thinking I was going to hack up a hairball, I decided it was the very best, most incredible thing ever! Improvements in faster-than-light drives are cosmic, but who wants to sit on a ship for months or even years when you can leave home after work and be where you’re going on time for happy hour?” Was that too enthusiastic, too bouncy? It sounded fine in her head, but her native language, Mrrwr’wrn, had superlatives of superlatives. Bestest wasn’t a word in Standard, but she always wanted to use it.

  No, she decided, it was the perfect amount of enthusiasm. The reality-show version of reality was over the top; that was why people enjoyed it.

  And the technology was incredible.

  Otherwise she wouldn’t be here to take home its secrets.

  Zissel, Sarr’ma’s assigned handler on the reality racing show, had slightly scaly blue-green skin, three yellow-gold eyes, and the same unnaturally perky smile sported by every mid-level holo personality in the known universe (and only one name, though Sarr’ma wasn’t sure if that was an affectation or a cultural quirk). Despite not having much in the way of a neck, Zissel nodded her head. “It’s stellar, isn’t it? We’ve been able to do short-range transport, like from low orbit to a planet’s surface, for about ten years now, but the long-distance transport is bleeding-edge. I love it, but I can’t make heads or tails of it.” She glanced at Sarr’ma’s tail, which was demurely curled around her ankles. “No offense. Is it all right to make comments about tails to a Mrr…Mrrw… Eggs and stars, I’m going to sound like an idiot if I try to pronounce this. May I call you a felinoid? My com says it’s the Standard translation but I don’t want to make assumptions.”

  Some things never changed, no matter where in the universe she traveled. Tailless people were fascinated by her tail, and no one could pronounce the proper name of her species. “It’s pronounced Mrrwr’wrn, but no one who’s not from Mrrwr seems to be able to say it. Felinoid’s fine. So is cat-girl, or cat-boy for our guys; that’s Milky Way Standard slang. And I’m certainly not offended by random comments about tails.” She looked at the camera again. “Pro tip, though: jokes about getting tail are only funny from my friends, and we cats can scratch.”

  Not that she was going to show her claws right now. They tended to scare people.

  Even back in her own galaxy, people who didn’t know much about Mrrwr’wrn thought of them as cute, compact, and harmless. Two of three were correct, but Mrrwr’wrn were predators by nature, evolved for hunting game larger than they were, and blessed with some of the best natural weaponry of any sentient species. Extremely good-looking predators who happened to be smaller than the average, say, human, but still endowed with fangs and claws.

  She’d share the fangs and claws later, if she was in danger. Or if she met someone who liked a little biting and scratching as part of sexytimes—you never knew when a girl might get lucky.

  Or if it seemed amusing to freak someone out, like she’d freaked out the fellow competitor who’d been staring at her in the waiting area as if she were some kind of lab experiment; the long, cool drink of male had looked almost human, but was bone-white and, she’d bet, wouldn’t smell human if she took a sniff. Which she’d opted against doing. The teeth seemed to intrigue him, but he’d looked too tense to cope with a good flehmen.

  Meanwhile, she’d behave and give the impression she was adorable and maybe ditzy. In a competition, it could pay to be underestimated. Both the predator and the student of applied astrophysical engineering could take a back seat to big green eyes, long black hair, adorable ears, and an overall look that nine out of ten humanoid species found sexy or at least pleasant to look at. (Some marketing agency had done a study; people of almost any species were more likely to buy any stupid thing if there was a felinoid of any gender in the ad.)

  She figured the cuteness had helped her get accepted as much as her racing record did. The Great Space Race was at least as much about entertainment as it was about a rally-style interplanetary race that combined a timed course with a number of crazy, potentially risky challenges.

  Which would give the entertaining person with real racing skills fro
m a culture fond of crazy risks an advantage, right?

  “So, Sarr’ma,” Zissel inquired, “you’re one of our few contestants this year with a background in long-distance racing. Tell us a little about it.”

  “I did the Seit Quadrant Race on a lark, came in second, and had loved it so much I took a leave of absence from the university to concentrate on space racing for a while.” All true, and all on her application to The Great Space Race.

  “How does your family feel about this? Don’t they worry? Racing is risky, and it can attract some rough characters. And to be in this particular race, you’ve had to travel a long way.”

  Sarr’ma started to snort, then turned it to a gentle laugh. “Mrrwr’wrn culture values adventure. My parents follow me on the race circuit” (as long as I’m starting and ending on planets where neither of them will get arrested on sight; my mom did push the envelope a bit on Dendros) “and my older brother fronted me money for a better racer, one customized with ergonomic mods since I’m so short.” And engine modifications I’d suggested to increase speed without sacrificing fuel economy. “As for danger, the sport’s risky, but the risk is part of the fun, and the other racers have always been completely respectful.” Because every badass in the galaxy is terrified of my stars-blasted brother and his mates. Even the ones who like Rahal fear him.

  After she won this race, other racers would respect and fear her in her own right, not because of her connection to martial artist/galactic playboy Rahal Settazz, who’d reappeared on the scene after a mysterious absence with rumors flying that he’d been a warlord on a lawless frontier planet under a different name (which was true); Cal Janssen, the famous lawman; and Xia Suarez, who disemboweled slavers as a hobby. She’d won often enough that racers now knew her name—but she knew marling well conversations about her often included the words, “Isn’t she Rahal’s kid sister?”

  That would change after she won this race.

  And came home with the secret to long-distance…oh, why not say “teleportation”? Sounded so much more thrilling than “matter transport.”

  “And you were studying…interior design?” Zissel didn’t have eyebrows, but if she had, she would have raised them. “I think you may be the first interior designer we’ve ever had in the race, as well as the first member of your species.”

  This time, Sarr’ma snorted as a cover for some quick thinking. So that was how applied astrophysical engineering came out after being run through two iterations of translation software! How perfect was that? She wouldn’t even need to make up a ridiculous story about dropping out because school was a snoozefest. “Low-G design, specifically,” she corrected. “A different concentration within the same major, but the low-G makes it more interesting. Sometimes you get to go out in a spacesuit and bob around to get an idea of the setting. How cosmic is that?”

  Octiron Media had wanted her university transcripts, which had irked her. They had her racing statistics, which was what should matter for a show called The Great Space Race. So she sent the transcripts in her native language. Her planet clung with pride to its own sixty-two-character alphabet. The Mrrwr’wrn language was highly tonal and full of glottal stops and sounds many species couldn’t reproduce accurately, and bore no resemblance to the Standard she’d grown up with, let alone the subtly different version that had evolved in the Paragon Galaxy.

  She hadn’t hoped for the translation error to be quite this fabulous, though. Interior design! You couldn’t sound much more harmless than that, or less likely to understand complex technology. She could fake interior design; her favorite aunt was head designer for a chain of sex and bondage resorts. If Zissel asked too many questions about her future career plans, Sarr’ma would wax lyrical about the challenges of creating a dungeon play space in low-G. That would either shut Zissel up or increase the ratings madly for what otherwise might be a boring interview episode.

  “One last question to help our intergalactic viewing audience get to know you—and to help our team finalize your match with your perfect racemate: what was your ultimate motivation for joining The Great Space Race?”

  The easy answer, the one she’d planned to give, was, “Because a chance to race in another galaxy, one we couldn’t even communicate with easily until recently, is a once-in-a-lifetime adventure.” But she ended up giving an equally true answer she thought the audience and race staff might find more intriguing. “I have an older brother who’s done practically every amazing thing imaginable except be part of this race. He’s left big pawprints for me to fill, and it’s not like I’m going to be a Galactic Olympiad mixed martial arts champion like he was.” She paused and let the camera drink in her slender self, hoping the audience focused on her pretty-pretty face and gigantic hair bow, not her muscles. Sarr’ma wasn’t championship material, but she’d trained with Rahal’s coach and had surprised the stars out of larger people in post-race bar fights by applying the principle of leverage at the right time. “But he’s never done long-distance space racing. That’s what drew me to the sport in the first place. And he’s never been in your galaxy. In fact, I think I may be the first person from Mrrwr to get here instead of watching Octiron Media shows and thinking it would be great to do some intergalactic travel if there are ever commercial flights. So I’m here to win this race and prove to everyone that my brother isn’t the only Settazz to watch.”

  She’d carefully avoided using her brother’s name—either the one on his birth certificate or Rahal Mizyar, the one he’d achieved fame/infamy with as the ruling warlord on Cibari. The former warlord of Cibari was supposed to be dead and his legend drew him as a mysterious Mrrwr’wrn criminal who’d come out of the fighting pits of Argo—not a guy with a loving family and a mostly respectable (by Mrrwr’wrn standards) background. But their friends and family back home would understand.

  The interviewer looked puzzled. Sarr’ma had noticed that while some of the male racers had sounded proud, boastful even, in their interviews, many of the females were more self-effacing. “I like your confidence, Sarr’ma,” she finally said, twitching her head a bit and blinking the eye in the middle of her forehead rapidly. “I hope it serves you well in The Great Space Race. Let’s have a round of applause for our first-ever felinoid contestant! Next up is someone from much closer to home, human Tripp Gallifer, a miner from Nieves in the Meridian Corporation Sector!”

  Sarr’ma bounded out of the studio, purring softly. That had gone well.

  The next interviewee…Tripp, right?…seemed to take up an unreasonable amount of the hallway, even for a large human male.

  He loomed. Not over her in particular, she thought, but life in general. She noticed gray clothes that didn’t fit especially well, messy, bark-brown hair—not an artful smoothstyle version of messy, but a haircut that was growing out badly—pretty dark eyes, and light golden-tan skin that she’d normally find potentially lickable.

  He didn’t look like he’d enjoy it, though. Everything about him, including his hair, looked pissed off, and something about his posture let her know it was a semi-permanent condition. This man needed cheering up desperately.

  She bounced closer to the wall with a jaunty flick of her tail to keep out of the way of the big man’s purposeful strides while making sure Tripp Gallifer got a good look at her. Not to be arrogant, but unless a guy was queerbent, seeing a happy cat-girl swishing her tail tended to improve his mood. Stars, it usually worked for queerbent males, malebent females, and asexual plantlike people from Garthak Nineteen. A felinoid’s purr and bounce were infectious.

  Didn’t work with this guy, though. He hardly seemed to notice her, he was so focused. Under the circumstances, you’d think it would be on the interview to come. All her instincts, though, told her that ninety percent of his focus wasn’t here and now; he’d be easy to take down if that had been her intention. Something was preying on his mind, something even bigger than the biggest long-distance race in two galaxies.

  Poor human. Life was supposed to be fun. If peop
le didn’t waste so much time in misery, they’d probably be able to teleport themselves.

  She blew a kiss to the broad back as he headed into the studio and skipped her way down the hall.

  Hope she didn’t get him as a racemate. He was good-looking in a rough, thick-muscled, very human way, but she didn’t want to spend the next several months dealing with that level of gruff and grumpy. Even if part of her wanted to fix his unhappiness the way she’d want to fix a piece of machinery that wasn’t working up to spec.

  Unfortunately, she had a feeling that whatever was going on with Mr. Grumpypants, it would take more than teasing and flirting to snap him out of it.

  And when he did, snap might be the operative word. The man was much too tightly wound.

  It might make for good holo-vision, but she didn’t want to be around when it happened. She enjoyed a good bar fight now and then. Fighting a much larger opponent who was battling something inside his own head was another story. She might win, but both of them could wind up hurting in non-fun, non-consensual ways.

  Chapter Two

  GREAT STARS, DON’T let me be paired with that child. I’m in enough trouble without trying to protect her from my mess.

  The young female—a felinoid, right?—who’d just done her interview was literally bouncing like a six-year-old who’d eaten too many sweets, and she didn’t seem to notice that the angle of her black tail lifted her skirt to reveal her panties. Or maybe she didn’t care. Tripp wasn’t familiar with her species, but he knew the small, four-legged cats that sometimes lived as pampered pets and sometimes hunted in alleyways. Sarr’ma was very catlike, from the tail to the ears and the almost whiteless green eyes with pupils that were slits in the bright studio lights. Cats stuck their legs in the air and licked their own bums and privates. He wouldn’t suppose a sentient humanoid cat would be much more modest.