Salvage Conquest Read online

  Salvage Conquest

  Tales from the Salvage Title Universe

  Edited by

  Chris Kennedy and Kevin Steverson

  Salvage Conquest

  Edited by Chris Kennedy and Kevin Steverson

  Published by Theogony Books

  Virginia Beach, VA, USA

  www.chriskennedypublishing.com

  This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States’ copyright law.

  The stories in this collection are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used in a fictitious manner. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental.

  Editor: Chris Kennedy; Co-Editor: Kevin Steverson

  Cover Design: DW Creations

  Copyright © 2019 by Chris Kennedy & Kevin Steverson

  All rights reserved.

  The stories and articles contained herein have never been previously published. They are individually copyrighted as follows:

  THE LONG CRAWL OF JONAS KANADEE by Van Allen Plexico © 2019 by Van Allen Plexico

  THE REPAIR JOB by Kevin Steverson © 2019 by Kevin Steverson

  WHEN NO ONE ELSE WILL by Chris Kennedy © 2019 by Chris Kennedy

  TRAITOR’S MOON by Christopher Woods © 2019 by Christopher Woods

  NO ROOM FOR ERROR by Kevin Ikenberry © 2019 by Kevin Ikenberry

  THE SUIT by Robert E. Hampson © 2019 by Robert E. Hampson

  DESPERATION by Mark Wandrey © 2019 by Mark Wandrey

  AKALLA NIGHTS by Ian J. Malone © 2019 by Ian J. Malone

  VENATRIX by Marisa Wolf © 2019 by Marisa Wolf

  HAVE SPACECAT WILL TRAVEL by John G. Hartness © 2019 by John G. Hartness

  WHAT’S OUR SHIP’S NAME? by KC Johnston © 2019 by KC Johnston

  DEATH OF A TRAITOR by Alex Rath © 2019 by Alex Rath

  SYMEON by David Alan Jones © 2019 by David Alan Jones

  SALVAGE: THE JUDAS GAMBIT by Brad R. Torgersen © 2019 by Brad R. Torgersen

  VORWHOL DISHONOR by Quincy J. Allen © 2019 by Quincy J. Allen

  * * * * *

  Get the free Four Horsemen prelude story “Shattered Crucible”

  and discover other Theogony Books titles at:

  http://chriskennedypublishing.com/

  * * * * *

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to…you. Yes, you.

  As a reader, you helped it come to fruition. When I started out writing about Harmon Tomeral, his Associates, and a ship called Salvage Title, I hoped readers would enjoy it. Really, when you think about it, that’s what all writers wish for. I wanted to tell a story to as many people as I could and maybe, just maybe, it would brighten their day…or night.

  As a lifelong reader, I know the power of a good story. How one pulls you in and lets you become part of it, an observer unseen by the characters you are among. “Salvage Title” was the first story I ever wrote. I am so grateful it was accepted and published by the first publisher I approached. Perhaps my hope became a reality, and I did that. So many of you have read it and the rest of the trilogy; it leaves me in awe and humbled beyond explanation. The fact that other authors enjoyed it enough to want to write a story in my universe magnified the feeling.

  Thank you.

  Kevin Steverson

  Commerce, GA

  * * * * *

  Introduction by Kevin Steverson

  It is approximately eight thousand years in the future and many centuries since the Bith delivered the gate to Sol System—a gate known throughout our galaxy as a Bith Gate, though they did not create them and only maintain them. Mankind has spread throughout the galaxy for so far and for so long, there is no true human coalition. Sol is often thought of as just another system.

  There are thousands of known races among the star systems. Many working together with pacts and treaties, others in various states of war. Still others just wish to be left alone. Great technological advances have been made by humans and others. Some are shared throughout the galaxy, others are not.

  Like humanity as we know it, there is trust, distrust, love, fear, jealousy, and hatred among the races in the galaxy. There are those striving for more. More for themselves, or more for others. There is war and threats of war. There is peace, and the desire for peace. Some want simply to be free—free to decide their own destiny. There are those, having known freedom, who will take other’s plight unto themselves and fight to help free them.

  The Salvage Title galaxy is full of stories. Here are some of them. Written by an incredible list of authors, Salvage Conquest will pull you in, once again. It pulled me in…I was there.

  Kevin Steverson

  Commerce, GA

  * * * * *

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction by Kevin Steverson

  The Long Crawl of Jonas Kanadee by Van Allen Plexico

  The Repair Job by Kevin Steverson

  When No One Else Will by Chris Kennedy

  Traitor’s Moon by Christopher Woods

  No Room for Error by Kevin Ikenberry

  The Suit by Robert E. Hampson

  Desperation by Mark Wandrey

  Akalla Nights by Ian J. Malone

  Venatrix by Marisa Wolf

  Have Spacecat Will Travel by John G. Hartness

  What’s Our Ship’s Name? by KC Johnston

  Death of a Traitor by Alex Rath

  Symeon by David Alan Jones

  Salvage: The Judas Gambit by Brad R. Torgersen

  Vorwhol Dishonor by Quincy J. Allen

  About Chris Kennedy

  About Kevin Steverson

  Excerpt from Book One of the Salvage Title Trilogy

  Excerpt from Book One of the Earth Song Cycle

  * * * * *

  The Long Crawl of Jonas Kanadee by Van Allen Plexico

  All but unconscious, I dangled limply over the opening to the pit of Hell.

  The sound—the awful roaring, shrieking sound, echoing up from the depths below—didn’t register with me at first. Neither did the glaring, blinding orange light that flared up along with it. No, I remained pretty much comatose despite all of that.

  As I look back now, I think it was the sound of the short hairs on the back of my neck sizzling from the heat that brought me back to my senses. The sound—and the smell, too. And the near-certain knowledge that, in a few seconds, the rest of me would be burning.

  Awake then—awake, and scared as all get-out—I kicked my feet and thrashed about, and as I did so, my vision focused on what was directly in front of me: the eyes of my would-be killer.

  Black fire danced in those eyes. Black fire and madness. Madness, to do all the things I’d witnessed him doing. Madness, that he’d seemed to enjoy every bit of it. Enjoyed killing them—hurling every one of them to their doom.

  I had no doubt whatsoever that I was about to follow the others, right down into that blazing pit. Right into that burning, stinking maw, served up as a meal for whatever lurked at the bottom.

  Was it really Hell? I have no idea. I’m not a shepherd to strive to make sense of such things. Not a scientist, either, to be able to tell you what it really was. No, I’m not a specialist in either physics or metaphysics, so you’ll have to ask someone else—somebody with high-falutin’ degrees, maybe—what exactly that godawful big stinking pit was. The one whose opening I was hanging right above. I can only tell you one thing about it for certain: Death waited at the bott
om. Death, or something even worse. And I was two seconds, at most, from finding out first-hand.

  * * *

  But I’m getting a mite ahead of myself. Knowing my situation there at the midway point of the story, more or less, doesn’t exactly explain who was trying to murder me, or how I came to be able to tell you the tale later.

  So let me back up just a tad and fill you in on how I, Jonas Kanadee, chief of a planetary salvage crew, came to find myself on Eightball—a world so remote, so lost, so far out on the other end of the other arm of this big spiral we call the Milky Way, that nobody I know had even heard of it. Nobody but Randall Chark, that is. Randall Chark, who showed up at the cantina on Nearside where my little band of scavengers and mercenaries liked to lay low between jobs. Randall Chark, who threw around easy money and easy promises and lured my whole band in, hooking them with a story of untold treasure just waiting to be claimed on a previously unexplored world out along the rim. Randall Chark, who convinced us to accompany him on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity; an opportunity to get rich beyond our wildest dreams. And all we had to do was help him go and get it—just scoop up a mass of treasure that happened to be waiting on the other side of the galaxy.

  In hindsight, this was all far too good to be true. But times were tough and money was tight, and my team likely would’ve believed the promises from any smooth-talking con man who came along. Chark was not lacking in that skill set. He had a bill of goods to offer, and we bought in. We wanted to believe in somebody, selling something. In response to his request, we laid out for him the various talents we each possessed, and he responded that we were, in fact, precisely what he needed. And so we agreed to accompany him on his job.

  We were fools, obviously.

  We geared up and rendezvoused with him at the spaceport a couple hours later. It turned out he owned a beat-up old shuttle—a 704, rust-streaked and corroded, striped in red, with mismatched parts here and there. On the positive side, though, a 704 is bigger than the usual shuttle. Chark assured us it would accommodate him, my team, plus the treasure we inevitably would be returning with. I looked it over and reluctantly nodded my head in agreement. “Yeah,” I said, “as long as she’ll hold together the whole trip and back, I think there’s ample room for the six of us.”

  At least, ample room I thought. Ample room for a jump of a few minutes, or a few hours. Yeah, that old shuttle looked to my jaundiced eye as the lap of luxury. But that was before I knew how long we’d be on that ship, and just how far off the beaten path he was taking us. And, yeah, what awaited us on the other side.

  * * *

  Thirteen fragging days in transit between gates. You heard me right. Thirteen days locked up inside a glorified tin can, just crawling our way through jumpspace.

  We spent the first four latched onto the hull of a Union deep-range Explorer, like a remora attached to a shark. That meant four days of only paying a share of the transit fees—which was bad enough, but a damn sight better than paying all the fees. But four days out was as far as the Explorer was going. We dropped out of the gate right plumb into the middle of a star system that looked to have been ravaged by an apocalyptic war a long time earlier. Burned-out cities on two planets and radiation still spiking through the black haze that passed for their atmospheres. The Explorer captain didn’t seem to like the neighborhood and, anyhow, she was in a hurry to beat feet for a colony world a couple more days’ travel toward the rim. So we disconnected our 704 and bid adieu to those people in their big rig, and we carried on alone. The way that played out should’ve served as warning enough right then: When an Explorer-class ship wants to turn back—and we’re talking here about a ship whose job is to stick its nose into the dark corners nobody else goes—well, you don’t have to be a genius to get the message.

  But we were just getting started. It took hours to locate and travel to the next gate we needed; a special one, ancient and forgotten, orbiting a nearby dead moon in the middle of that dead system. Chark claimed only he knew about it, and that we’d be going a long way through it, but that the costs for using it would be different, and he could pay. We wondered what he meant but, hell—it wasn’t coming out of our pockets, so we didn’t press him on it. And sure enough, whatever he was using for payment, it must have been acceptable and he must’ve had enough of it, because as soon as we approached that gate, it opened right up, and we plunged in.

  What followed? Nine more days in the long dark. The six of us, all alone in the big nothing. What they call, “alter reality.” For nine long days.

  Good gods it was boring. A lot of poker got played, for sure. I think we each lost and gained the entire stake of what we hoped to find, and more than once.

  Nine more days. And it was a strange trip. The hull groaned, like the ship was being slowly twisted and kneaded in the hands of a giant. The visuals outside the viewports you usually see in transit were replaced now by strange strobing effects, with the occasional lightning forking around us. I’ll be honest here and tell you, it scared the hell out of me. Out of all of us. At least, all but Chark. He didn’t seem particularly bothered, or particularly surprised.

  On and on it went, and the weird view outside slowly seemed to translate into a weird feeling inside. More than once, I caught myself clawing absently at my arms; it felt like ants were crawling all over me, or were under my skin. A mild itch at first, in time it grew maddening. And there were voices, too, though I didn’t want to believe it at first. But if you lay still and quiet in the dark, you could hear something like whispers coming from the hull. Maybe from outside the hull—which of course made no sense at all. I’m sure it was just in our heads. But that was no consolation, because your head is the worst place for something to get into.

  Eight days into this leg of the trip, Inga Lans, the team’s tech specialist, confronted Chark, and there was blood in her eye. Blood on her arms and legs, too, where she’d been scratching. At least I wasn’t the only one.

  “Where the hell are we going?” she demanded. “And how much longer till we get there?”

  “Not much longer,” Chark replied, that weird light glinting in his eye. “Almost there.”

  “You never told us it would be this long, this far,” Inga shot back at him, scarcely mollified.

  “You wouldn’t have come,” Chark said, and none of us could disagree.

  Inga stared at the floor for a few seconds, then looked up and met Chark’s weird eyes again. “One more day,” she stated, holding him to that promise, that prophecy.

  “That’s it,” Chark replied. And he was right.

  * * *

  One day later, and finally out the other side. And each of us still in one piece.

  Rumors had suggested otherwise. Stories went something like, “You come out the other side of a gate more than a couple of days away, and you find you’ve turned inside out.” Least ways, that’s what my pa always said, back when he used to ride the deep range. “You jump too far—farther than maybe even the Bith know—and you come out all scrambled up, with your organs on the outside.”

  The trip we’d just taken definitely qualified as “more than a couple of days.” I couldn’t begin to imagine how much distance we’d covered in a couple of gate trips totaling nearly two weeks.

  But it felt like all our inside parts were still on the inside, where they were supposed to be, and not on the outside. So I dismissed old superstitions and, like the others, started suiting back up.

  We’d emerged from the gate into a system the computer told us was made up of one below-average-sized yellow primary and one terrestrial body. Neither the star nor the planet had an official name in the database—that’s how far out we were—but the planet was dark and shadowy and looked creepy as all hell, even from high orbit. Chark referred to it as Eightball, and that seemed appropriate, so we went with it. Appearances to the contrary, the readings we got from it indicated it was relatively hospitable, as far as planets go: carbon and nitrogen and oxygen and the like.

&nb
sp; No sooner had we closed in on Eightball than a harsh tone started blaring out of the ship’s speakers, followed quickly by a string of sounds too fast and too alien for any of us to decipher.

  “What is that?” Ragesh demanded, gritting his teeth and putting his hands over his ears. Ragesh Dasta was our team’s resident linguist, and I’m sure the thought of a language he didn’t at least recognize, if not understand outright, annoyed him even more than the shrill tone hurt our ears.

  “Relax,” Chark replied, moving less-than-quickly to adjust the volume and drop the sound below a painful level. “It’s the beacon.”

  “Beacon?” I asked.

  Chark nodded. “That’s where we’re headed. That’s where the treasure is supposed to be hidden.”

  We all glanced at one another, puzzled.

  “But,” Ragesh said, “if there’s a beacon, how is it hidden?”

  For a moment, Chark didn’t respond, instead keeping his back to us where he sat at the controls in the cockpit. Then he looked back at us where we sat arrayed on either side of the central cabin and offered us a smile he must have intended to be reassuring. “It marks the general location,” he said with a shrug. “We’ll still have to search for the actual hiding place.”

  I don’t think any of us was entirely satisfied by that response, but there was nothing else to say, at least for the moment. And we’d traveled nearly two weeks, crammed uncomfortably into this tiny ship, just to get there. So we offered one another ambivalent looks and sat back and said nothing more. And down we went, down to the surface of Eightball, as quickly as the 704 would carry us.