The Legend of the Crystal Dragon

By Bill Parker

With the advent of the timequake ships, mankind spread so rapidly out into the galaxy that chaos and corruption soon became the order of the day. So Union Fleet was formed to defend and protect mankind from his worst enemy — himself. To keep the peace, Union Fleet enforced the laws on all of the planets of the Union. For the most part, the people of Union Fleet were good and decent folks. For the most part, this all worked just fine on all of the civilized planets, but in the outworlds ... well, that was another story. In the outworlds, where civilization was thin, evil thrived. Pirates plied their ancient trade in the outworld spaceways.
Even so, the pirates were not the worst that mankind had to face. The Jatarian Alien Group was mankind's worst nightmare. But there was one ship that fought them off and saved the people of Benara-3 -- the Crystal Dragon. It defeated the whole Jatarian battle group and sent what was left of them back to their own with a message -- don't come back!
Created with alien technology, this ship single-handedly did what a whole fleet of Union starships could not. But that was a long time ago. The people of Benara-3 forgot and went on with their lives. Corrupt Union Admirals tried to confiscate the Crystal Dragon to steal its secrets. When it slipped their grasp, in spite, they declared it an outlaw ship. As time went on, everybody forgot the Crystal Dragon and got on with their lives.
But the Jatarians did not forget ...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bill Parker
• Release date: Jan 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310631795

Bill Parker

Native Western New York author, and world traveler, Bill Parker, spent most of his career engineering high-tech manufacturing systems for companies around the world. An accomplished deep space astrophotographer, he was a contributing editor for Modern Astronomy magazine when it was based in Attica, New York, working mainly on astrophotography articles and projects.Bill Parker has been a Black Belt in Isshin Ryu Karate and a martial artist for more than forty years. The times when all that stood between him and certain death was his martial arts gave Bill the indomitable spirit that pervades his thinking and writing to this day.Bill calls Earth his homeworld but he is an outworlder to the very core of him.Bill is the author of the highly acclaimed Five Moons Series of science fiction novels and, if you are up for a real walk on the mystical side of science fiction, then you just have to read his Tales of the Green Jinn.

Book preview

The Legend of the Crystal Dragon

A Short Story

By Bill Parker

Creator of Five Moons

fivemoons.org

Copyright © 2015.

All rights reserved

Chapter 1

Jessica sat in the now quiet office of StarQuake Engineers, Inc. The sign on the building said, Union Certified Starship Engineers. Redesigns, Upgrades, Repairs: No Job too big. No job too small. Mornings here were chaos. Jack and his Uncle Henry, who everyone called Hank, organized work crews for the various projects on starships in orbit. Well, they called it organizing. Jessica only saw the chaos, but what did she know? This was her first job since returning home to Benara-3 from college on Etron. She busied herself with the next pile of estimates that Hank left for her to do. Jessica much preferred it when young Jack was around. While she took a break to get some java she ‘wandered’ through Jack’s office. His degrees were on the walls in nice black frames. That is where his sense of organization seemed to crash and burn. His desk was awash in papers and drawings. A picture of Jack’s parents barely peered over the stack of papers in front of them. They had been killed in the