A Promise Made

By Janet Miller

Shipped off to war as soon as she'd finished medical school, Dr. Karen Masters is more curious than frightened when her ship is captured by the enemy, and she's sent to collect needed medical supplies from the enemy ship, the Promise.

Her first close encounter with a Gaian, Dr. Jeffery, is nothing like she expected.

Note: This is a re-edited version of the original novella.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Janet Miller
• Release date: Aug 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9780985999438

Janet Miller

Janet Miller, often known as Cricket Starr, is the author of over twenty-seven titles at Ellora's Cave, Samhain, Red Sage, and New Concepts Publishing. These titles include the 2004 PRISM award winning Violet Among The Roses, 2011 PRISM award winning Bad Dog and the Babe, and 2006 EPPIE award winning All Night Inn. She has two Romantic Times Top Picks and nominees for the RT Reviewers' Choice Award for Beloved Enemy under her Janet Miller name, and Fangs For The Memories by Cricket Starr. Janet specializes in futuristic romance under her own name and futuristic, fantasy, and paranormal romance under the pen name Cricket Starr. Not all of her books are erotic, but she knows a good love scene when she reads or writes it.

Book preview

A Promise Made

  By Janet Miller

www.cricketstarr.com

  Copyright 2012 Janet Miller

Cover Art Darleen Dixon

Smashwords Edition

Version 2

ISBN 978-0-9859994-3-8

Version 1 electronic book publication November 2006

Version 2 electronic book publication August 2012

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the authors’ imagination and used fictitiously.

This book was originally published in 2006 under the same title. It has been extensively rewritten and edited for this edition.

  More Science Fiction Romance by Janet Miller

Gaian Stories

Promises To Keep

Beloved Enemy

Beloved Traveler

Beloved Stranger

The Girl In The Box

Other worlds

Imperfect Judgment

Table Of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

About The Author

Excerpt from Beloved Enemy

Chapter One

After one year, six months, and thirteen days, I'd had just about enough of life in Earthforce. Mind you, I knew it was my obligation to join up and serve my world. In the 2480s, it took a lot of money to study medicine, and for as long as I could remember, all I'd ever wanted to be was a doctor. My parents weren't wealthy, and I'd needed the financial support from my government to get through medical school.

So I made the bargain- medical school in exchange for Earth's government owning me for seven years after I was through. I figured I'd serve my time in one of the many run-down government hospitals on Earth, the same as my best friend, Sarah Johnson, who'd graduated the year before me. How bad could that be? The seven years would pass, and I would still be a doctor when they did.

Well I became a doctor, but I wasn't on Earth. As soon as I'd finished school, Earth's military, Earthforce, had snapped me up, giving me no choice of where I was to serve my promised time. I'd barely had time to say goodbye to Sarah before I was shipped off planet.

After a brief stint at space school where I was trained for life on a star cruiser, I was stationed on the Hope, a hospital ship assigned to the first really big anti-Gaian campaign. There had been a few small skirmishes in the war before this, but this was the big one, the battle where we would teach the rebellious Gaians just who had the superior military force.

Gaia was Earth's oldest colony, settled over two hundred years ago. From what I'd heard, it was a pastoral paradise of a planet, rich in life-forms of its own and welcoming to ones imported from Earth. Some odd hormonal changes in the humans living there had been mentioned in the early medical reports coming from the planet, enough to raise my curiosity given my special interest in endocrinology. But the specifics had been vague, and after a couple of generations, the Gaians had shut their doors to new immigration. Information about the colony had become sketchy after that.

Not that Earth cared that Gaia's borders were closed, so long as it got its regular supplies of rare-on-Earth materials from its colony. But then Gaia had decided to declare itself a sovereign planet, without allegiance to Earth, owing its mother planet nothing, including the shipments of natural resources Earth had come to rely on.

The Gaian's defiance might not have been enough to cause Earth to react, but some of the newer colonies had also noticed the Gaians' move and discussed similar actions, and our government had decided to crack down on Gaia and make an example of it.

I'd heard Gaian cities had been attacked in the first encounters of the war, and some of the early reports had even said innocent lives were taken, but those rumors had been hushed quickly. Once the war was in full swing, the government pretty much controlled all information we received.

I was in the military, yet knew little more than I had on Earth, except that there had been no repeat of the earlier assaults on Gaia itself. Since the first attacks, the battle had stayed in space. I'd been told the Gaians had managed to assemble something resembling a military since the first shot in the war, and we could no longer get past that to hit the planet. The only fight Earthforce had clearly won had been the first, when our ships had attacked Gaia before it could get its defenses up.

Recently, our side hadn't done very well at all. As soon as ships got into Gaian space, they stopped reporting back. No one knew what had happened when an Earthforce ship engaged the Gaian military—it was as if they'd simply disappeared.

Of course, no one on the Hope was worried about that. The battles we'd lost had been small ones, and it wasn't too surprising they'd won as we'd sent small task forces at them. With this armada, there was no way the Gaians would win.

Or so we were told. But it didn't matter what I thought. My job wasn't to fight this war but to take care of the casualties.

And the medical supplies.

On the Hope, I was not just Dr. Karen Masters, but Lieutenant Karen Masters, M.D., and since I was the most junior officer on the ship, I became by default the Chief Medical Supply Officer. This was a fancy way to say I was in charge of making sure we had enough of what we needed, when we needed it, and where we needed it to help our patients.

Which was why I was now inventorying the supply of bandage rolls we'd brought on board for the fourth time since I'd arrived on the ship.

For some reason, Captain Javinson insisted there was a problem in the bandage roll count. An easy to use basic field item consisting of self-adhering bandages, antiseptic, burn, and pain-relief ointments, plus a built-in, self-monitoring pressure applicator, a bandage roll allowed even the most inexperienced space cadet to treat common wounds in the field. They were part of every pilot and soldier's kit, but somehow our supply wasn't what it was supposed to be. We were fifty-five rolls short of what should have been a hundred full cartons of a thousand each.

Javinson, of course, blamed me. At one point, he'd all but implied that being a woman, I had been unable to manage the inventory. Something about being non-math-oriented. I'd swallowed my anger at his slur, and pointed out that my count had been the same every time. If it differed from the official count, then the official count must have been wrong.

It had occurred to