Getting to Galen

By Lotta Bangs

Taj, an escaped bio-engineered super-soldier, taught her whole company to love. Separated from her friends she finds help and support, then spends many years searching for her mates in the world she finds outside Typhon and avoiding the weirdo religious sect Galen. Finally, by dropping bricks on his head, she finds Evan and falls in love. It is far from a romantic reunion and the thickhead seems blind to her tentative seductive overtures.
Taj becomes a very successful veterinarian and eventually goes to Galen where she discovers her true self. She finally has her way with Evan and captures his love, knowing it will be hers for only one day until he again sees his soul mate Rowena, the powerful, mysterious founder of Galen. Taj finds her special guys, her true vocation and much more, just as Galen is attacked simultaneously at many locations all over the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lotta Bangs
• Release date: Oct 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301641475

Lotta Bangs

I’m Aussie, way over 35, thankfully and very happily divorced, and have a wonderful daughter who very occasionally beta-reads for me. A few years ago we had 13 cats; we just lost another, so now only one of those remains. We have added 6 more over the years, including the sweet feral ragdoll which is my Facebook avatar. I generally prefer female cats, but have also had some magnificent males. I couldn’t live without cats, just wish their lives were longer. I’m having a lot of problems adjusting to social media which doesn’t leave me enough time for writing and editing, so I won’t be expanding my web presence any time soon. If you want to know about NEW RELEASES and SPECIALS you will need to FRIEND ME ON FACEBOOK. I have announced coupons to get a new release free here, but apparently nobody reads author biographies. Of course my books are what you are really interested in. Originally, I wrote a long continuous story, starting at Reacquaintance, told from Ro’s POV. Then when Ro disappeared for a year or so, I had to use Taj to fill in the gaps, and she proved so feisty and interesting, that I added in her back story, starting with Getting to Galen and continuing in The Deep End. After Thxx’s Story, the various POVs continue in the same stream. I had to break up my huge tomes into installments that could be published separately as I finished editing them. I’m afraid my writing was quite stuffy at first, with convoluted 12- to 15-line sentences, turgid half-page paragraphs, and a lot of pompous pontification and personal political opinion which the story didn’t need. I had to rip out a lot before I could publish. I think the books are greatly improved now. I was giving away my books for free for most of a year, hoping to develop a fan base quickly, but learned that people don’t value what is free. Though over 20K copies have been downloaded, very few seem to have been read, and even fewer have been reviewed. I was unlucky to attract an ill-wisher who thought it amusing to devalue every one of my few 5-star reviews. Perhaps that put off others from reviewing. Certainly, without good reviews, few readers cared to buy my books, so if you have enjoyed them, I really would appreciate a short review. With the next book, The Power of Art, I will be doubling all my prices, so they’ll never be cheaper than they are now. I believe that I am the only person writing Utopian books today, though mine are nothing like the political satires of yesteryear. My books are based on the power of love to bring out the best in everybody, to develop their souls and help them to evolve into higher beings. Ro started Galen, and she, Taj and their men lead their people to make Galen a true Utopia which reaches out to the stars. Cat lovers will adore Brinna, my sentient sabretooth, though we have intelligent dogs and dinosaurs too. Though you couldn’t call my series a space opera, I do have a space battle planned, probably the cutest ever written, but that is still a way off. I really will have to buckle down and get more books edited and published so I can write some more.

Book preview

Fragments Part 1

Getting to Galen

Lotta Bangs

Smashwords Edition

ISBN: 9781301641475

PUBLISHED BY:

Lotta Bangs on Smashwords

Getting to Galen 43,260 words

Copyright 19 October 2012 by Lotta Bangs

Cover by coverageart

Cover title fonts: Bangkok, Baskerville Semibold Italic

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author / publisher except for the use of brief quotations in critical articles or reviews.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. Please do not re-sell or give away this eBook to other people. If you would like to share this eBook with another person, please purchase/obtain an additional copy for each reader or send them to Smashwords to obtain their own copy.

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/obtain your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work and many years this author has spent at her crash-prone computer to produce this series.

This is a work of fiction and does not in any way advocate irresponsible personal or sexual behavior. Names, places, businesses, characters, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, actual events or locales is purely coincidental.

Dedicated in homage to James Cameron, whose creation

Dark Angel, inspired me to start writing. Thank you.

However, my characters wouldn’t obey and play nice.

They each went their own twisted way.

Perhaps that was for the best.

Acknowledgements:

My thanks

to Alex Papadimitriou for information about Tryptophan,

to Ashleigh Willis for veterinary advice,

and to my beta-reader Amanda for the welcome criticism and

suggestions which have greatly improved my work.

Getting to Galen

Fragments Part 1

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Taj’s Early Life

Chapter 2 Breakout

Chapter 3 Reaching Fermina

Chapter 4 Trying to be Normal

Chapter 5 Alone

Chapter 6 First Encounter with Langdon

Chapter 7 Evan Turns Up

Chapter 8 Evan’s Transformation

Chapter 9 Evan’s Betrayal

Chapter 10 Evan Returns

Chapter 11 Working as a Vet

Chapter 12 Dropping Langdon

Chapter 13 Galen University

Chapter 14 Sucked Back In

Chapter 15 Handling the Estrus

Chapter 16 Reincarnation?

Chapter 17 Magdalena Arrives

Chapter 18 Head of Galen Security

Chapter 19 Finally

Chapter 20 Gathering the TYs

Chapter 21 Again and Again

Chapter 22 and Again and Again and Again

Chapter 23 Emergency

Author’s Note

Book 1 Taj

Chapter 1

Taj’s Early Life

I am Taj. My mother gave me that name. She said it meant ‘the finest, the very best’ which she believed I was. I have tried to live up to her expectations, but it has not been easy.

She began speaking to me in utero, probably accentuating the spoken words with telepathy, so that I understood her clearly from the first. Mother always passed on her love and hopes for me. She told me about the world outside the wire—how beautiful and free it was, though dangerous too. And she told me always to be very careful.

My mother gave me practical advice as well. She told me to be very aware of my surroundings and always to look out for spies and listening devices. She explained how to network with the other children, to form cells with different tasks. How to keep a lookout and how to spy on the adults who would be around us, to learn their plans. She told me never to trust any of them because they didn’t really care for me or the other children I would grow up with.

I have many memories of my mother’s speaking to me, filling me with her love as she fed me her milk. She apologized for birthing me in such a terrible place where she would soon have to leave me. She told me she loved me and would never stop trying to get me back, and that some day we would be together again.

My mother also told me to hide my abilities as much as possible. Not to show off what I could do until the other children could do the same things. But also to be careful not to be slower than the others, so I wouldn’t be left behind. And always to think carefully before speaking to the adults. To reveal as little as possible about my friends or myself.

My mother said my life here would be harsh and difficult. When things became too unbearable, I should remember her loving me. And try hard to love all my friends who would also be suffering. To teach them to love and be kind and supportive to each other.

They too, had been taken from their mothers. So they also needed to be loved and comforted. She said that all children needed love to help them grow straight and true.

She said the grown-ups here weren’t loving people. We couldn’t expect anything but harshness from them. We should never trust any of them.

We had to provide the love we needed for each other.

She also said that I should remember that she would always love me. And that she would be outside in the world waiting for me.

And then she was gone.

* * *

So I already understood language when I was born. But I didn’t speak until the other children in the nursery did. And I used only the sounds and words they spoke.

For years afterwards I woke in the night, feeling her presence envelop me in her love. I heard her voice inside my head telling me once more that she loved me and that we would find each other again. I wanted to speak to her too, but I didn’t know how to reach her. There were so many questions I needed answers for, but I couldn’t ask them.

I often dreamed of her too. Her message was always the same: to remember that she loved me, to be wary of the adults, and to love all my friends and comfort them. So I did love the other children in the dormitory and tried to touch each of them at least once every day, and to comfort them whenever the adults hurt us.

There were over a hundred of us TY7s, some a little older, some younger, and our company was divided into platoons of 20 to 24 children. None of the others had been given names, only me, and I was one of the oldest. Eventually the others too all chose names which we used among ourselves. The adults called us by the numbers we had tattooed high on our right upper arms.

There was one girl who was a natural leader. She was very intelligent, big and strong with a dominant personality and a certain way about her. The other kids in our platoon looked up to her. Ava became our platoon leader and eventually the Company Commander and Evan was her second.

I managed to tell Ava most of what my mother had told me. She put the ideas into effect, organizing our company into 5 platoons and then into small squads of 4 to 8 persons specializing in certain functions. The cell idea caught on and the older companies reorganized themselves on the same principle.

There were 4 boys and one other girl in my squadron and our task was spying. There were also other squads of specialized spies with different tasks and talents in other platoons. Evan, who was big and stocky, was our squad leader and platoon strategist and he reported back to Ava. The three other boys, Vene and I were small and skinny.

Lim excelled at being unobtrusive, somehow managing to disappear into the background. Even when I knew he was there I often forgot about him, so he was a natural for this work.

Zane had a talent for finding the listening devices and soon learned to temporarily disable them.

Cute looking Tam and Vene were our charmers. They managed to get around some of the more amenable adults and even get special favors from some of them, such as comics and books and videos that weren’t part of our curriculum.

Despite our days being crammed with planned activities, we managed to organize an extensive internal spy network, not just in our company, but including the older companies too. We bugged some of the adults’ areas to discover what they might be planning for us, cobbling together the bugs from parts of their devices, which we sabotaged so they didn’t work properly and by stealing others from stores.

We small ones who could easily wriggle into tiny spaces, took shifts just hiding in closets adjoining the adults’ dining and rec. rooms. We listened in with the aid of paper cup megaphones and our heightened hearing.

Vene and I did that a lot as we both had enhancements that let us function without much sleep. She and I were usually paired with one of the boys, all of whom were very light sleepers and could be awoken in an instant to listen in on anything either of us thought important.

Two sets of ears were always better than one.

Because we worked together and had to trust and depend on each other so much, I became great friends with each of the boys. Several times, they helped me evade discovery or provided me with an excuse to be caught out of bed. And many times, Evan would appear and move us out of where we could have been trapped just before some patrol would do a spot check of that area.

Lim was especially good at sneaking around. He found a way of getting into the kitchens and stealing food which had been placed on carts to go to the grown-ups. He would fill his pockets with this, and give me some, so when one of us did get sprung, they could say that they’d woken hungry and gone looking for something to eat.

My most special friend was Vene. We were very close, and understood each other very well. Sometimes, but not all the time, we could even read each other’s minds, like some identical twins are supposed to be able to do. We could send each other private messages, which at times was very handy to pass on warnings. Yet we had been born to different mothers.

Vene was about five months younger, and had no memories of her mother at all. At times I wondered whether we may have been started from eggs produced by the same mother and gestated separately.

We were fairly similar physically. We were both small and dark-haired with dark brown eyes. But Vene’s hair was thicker, much more luxuriant and grew faster than mine, even with the short buzz cuts we all wore most of the year.

We were careful never to show the officials just how little sleep we needed. And we always slept in whenever we had the chance because we enjoyed the luxury of being cozy and dreaming.

Because we were almost always together, I loved everyone in our platoon and especially our little squad, easily. But whenever I had the chance, I also loved any of the children in the other platoons that I could reach, making eye contact, smiling at them and touching them when I could.

Luckily, a friendly smile, a touch in passing and a hard hug couldn’t be overheard and was rarely observed. So, many of the other children adopted my methods to connect with each other. Soon this spread throughout Typhon, even to the older companies.

We all knew that there were listening devices planted everywhere in the buildings and grounds. Whoever found one, showed it to everyone else. Zane inspected each one and decided whether to just leave it alone, disable it permanently or use it occasionally. He even found some in tree cavities in the forest outside the wire where we learnt orienteering, tracking and to live off the land.

We all knew better than to attempt to run away during these times outside.

So we had to learn to become wary and self-contained, not to talk idly about anything important. And we passed messages soundlessly in a simple sign language we developed, or spoke only after Zane had just checked and disabled the bugs or where some loud noise covered our voices.

Sometimes we all were hurt by the surgery and the chemicals they fed us. I found that in trying to comfort my platoon mates and those in the other platoons whom we saw occasionally in the corridors, at meals and during