If Wishes Were Spaceships

By Ainy Rainwater

When Jazlyn is forced to make an emergency landing on a quarantine planet, the worst she expects to find are a bunch of irate scientists complaining because she messed up the pristine conditions of some experiment. But the buildings look like works of art and the inhabitants are a wealthy scion of a galactic dynasty and an anxious techie. While the compound has all the comforts of home, it has none of the basic hospitality she expects. Cut off from all communication, surrounded by a thicket of dangerous carnivorous plants, Jazlyn must find a way to repair her ship — if possible — or hope that her friends find her distress beacon before Sterneworth, the planet’s resident tyrant, does something drastic. Can she trust Blaine, the techie who is completely under Sterneworth’s thumb, and who desperately wants off the planet by any means? Jazlyn has never been one to knuckle under or buckle under pressure. Nor is finesse is one of her skills. She will tackle the problems — the ship repair, the bizarre plants, and the duplicitous inhabitants of the planet — head on. Has the sassy spacer who’s used to getting her way met her match in the power and might of the Sterneworth dynasty? Everyone on the planet has a secret agenda. She has a ship to repair...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ainy Rainwater
• Release date: Mar 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9780982959749

Ainy Rainwater

Ainy Rainwater has been writing and publishing short stories, essays, and novels in various genres for about 30 years. She lives in the greater Houston area with her husband and rescue dogs. She enjoys reading, writing, playing guitar and percussion, gardening, knitting, tea, baking and other kitchen improvisations, daydreaming, and wasting time online.Her novels are available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, and other bookstores. She is presently working on a chick lit fantasy series as well as a number of side projects, including a sequel to If Wishes Were Spaceships, a science fiction novel published in March 2016.She is also known for the digital pop which she makes under the name Gymshoes. "Everest Sunrise" was featured in the documentary What It Takes. After hurricanes Katrina and Rita she released an EP of songs, A Tropical Depression, the profits of which go to benefit the American Red Cross. Gymshoes albums are available from iTunes, Amazon, and other online stores. For more about Gymshoes music, please see Gymshoesmusic.com, which has liner notes, links to social media, streaming music, and much more.You can find the author on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. She occasionally contributes to the group food blog, The Usual Suspects: http://usualsuspects.wordpress.com and posts short miscellaneous things on The Mighty Microblog: http://ainyrainwater.wordpress.com. A Truant Disposition, http://truantdisposition.com is Ainy Rainwater's official author site.

Book preview

If Wishes Were Spaceships

by

Ainy Rainwater

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Copyright © 2016 by Ainy Rainwater

Idiolith Omnimedia

Smashwords Edition

ISBN-10: 0-9829597-4-5

ISBN-13: 978-0-9829597-4-9

Cover art by Donna Harriman Murillo

Rocket icon glyph Freepik from www.flaticon.com

This work is protected by copyright. Just as you are paid for the hours that you work, the author needs to be paid for the hours spent working on this book. Please respect the author and artist by purchasing this ebook if you are given a free copy by a friend.

Disclaimer

This is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and events are fictional and any resemblance to persons living or dead, real places, or events is coincidental. Names of people, places and things are fictional and wholly imaginary, and should not be construed as having any relationship to people, places or things with similar names that may exist. As this is a work of science fiction, some facts presented are entirely fictional, eg: things exist in this imaginary future that do not exist in real life. The views expressed in this work of fiction serve the purpose of character and story and are not necessarily those of the publisher or the author.

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Dedication

This book is for friends and fans. Thank you.

Acknowledgments: I’d like to thank Robert Strahan and Karen McNally for being beta readers (one of Karen's comments stuck in my head so soundly that I now have to write a sequel), and Donna Murillo for bringing Jazlyn to life on the cover, and for those amazing dark green eyes -- and freckles (which I hadn’t thought of).

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Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Author’s Note

Except from In The Hands Of Time

About the Author

Other books by Ainy Rainwater

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Prologue

Well, at least the engine had the decency to die quietly without the big fuss of an explosion. But it would've been nice if it had given me some warning, she thought. A hiccup well ahead of failure, or flashing an alert to the problem. She could've evaluated trajectories and course change options, and made a series of plans for the moment when it failed. As it was, her options were more constrained than she liked.

She could do a limited amount of maneuvers with the emergency thrusters which were a purely mechanical system, but she’d have to balance their use for course changes against their use for landing wherever that course change took her. Damn! Why do these things always seem to happen when you're out of range of anybody? Of course, the answer to that was that space is relatively empty. Even in the Jacobson sector, the most populous sector of the galaxy, there were small pockets of space where the hum of civilization thinned out. Eventually Dovey or Rho will come looking for me. But she needed to stay alive long enough for that to happen.

An automated distress beacon should've been triggered when everything went dead, but how dead is dead, she wondered. Everything went down for a few seconds before aux cut in and she didn't want to trust that the automated system had worked. She triggered it manually. And would again. Breadcrumbs. Something that could be received at a distance and traced to the source. She tried the comm without any real hope; unless someone answered there was no way of knowing if anyone heard her. Comm was tied into aux power, but was notoriously weak unless powered by the mains. So she sat in silence, listening to her own steady breathing as she ran through her options.

Momentum is an awesome thing. It would keep her going on this trajectory until she hit something, which would probably not be her destination, unless she was unbelievably lucky. Everyone, whether they acknowledged it or not, believed in luck. If they were smart, like Jazlyn, they didn’t trust it.

There’s no telling what I might smack into eventually, she grimaced. A nice place, with repair facilities? It could happen --- stranger things had --- but she wanted to look at closer options before she ran the calculations on her limited resources versus some distant hope on her flight path. Save the bad news for last.

Technically the ship was drifting but she was coasting at quite a fast clip. Going nowhere fast. Bat outta hell, she muttered. That reminded her of her old Bat 1100, which, despite the name, wasn’t as fast or powerful as her Ace. She had shot out of home base at full burn on manual and put the drive through its paces with no apparent problems. She was a busy girl. Places to go, things to do. She enjoyed flying. It was the best part of the job. Let nav plot the route; she’d fly it, hitting the edge transition on manual at the right moment with a precision that would make other pilots weep. Most pilots relied on automation. Sometimes they had no idea where they were or whether they had successfully shot over the edge. Bad stories always began with a failure. She hoped she wasn’t about to live one of those bad stories. Normally she liked zooming around utterly empty space in her little Ace 370, but this moment wasn’t one of those cases when she was happy to be just sitting on her butt while the universe went by.

Jazlyn had no particular love of planets, but as she surveyed her options, a planet --- any planet --- looked like the best bet. She considered: if she opted for an emergency planetfall, she could deploy the HabiHut, and get its gear working on extracting oxygen and water out of whatever she found there, assuming that the atmosphere and temps fell within the range in its specifications. Or....maybe not. She sighed. Nothing like that was turning up on the nav screen as she widened the search parameters in a huge bubble radiating out in all directions from the drifting ship.

If I could just make it to the surface of something --- planet, asteroid --- some place where I could park this thing I might even be able to fix it. She was trying to think of the problem as a glitch. Anything worse was unthinkable. She cranked up the contrast and detail on the nav screen thinking, that's what’s going get me home, or as close to it as I can manage.

She depended on this ship for long hops so she kept it in prime condition. In her opinion anyone out here who didn’t see to the maintenance of their equipment was someone with a death wish. She had a contempt for those people who never left their cozy terraformed planets. From what she had seen they could let repairs on anything they owned hang fire until it fell apart and the worst that would probably happen was what? They'd be momentarily inconvenienced at some point. Spacers got around the galaxy; they took care of things. Her feeling was that you could measure how dependable someone was by the hours they spent between planets or stations, not on them.

She knew that abrupt engine cutoff usually just meant that a fail-safe had kicked in. Though the number of lights that came on when the drive and main engine kicked out unsettled her no little bit. There was a factory code to override the fail-safes on a ship but she had never bothered to learn it. This popped into her head as she watched the screen for a system with planets to come into range. The one person she knew who had done an override on the fail-safe lived just barely long enough to regret it. Her take on the fail-safe shutdowns was that if there was a problem and it was safe for a system to keep going, you'd get a warning: if it wasn’t safe to keep the system on, the fail-safe will shut down whatever it had to in order to prevent a catastrophic failure. Though, she reflected, when the fail-safe shut everything down in the middle of nowhere, that, in itself, was shaping up to be something of a catastrophe.

Just follow procedures and eventually I'll be home and happy, she told herself. She wasn’t sure if she was glad that she didn’t know the override code or not. That was just the way it was.

She blinked at the dimly lit screen, then huffed out a sigh of relief. Bingo! There's my planetfall. A slight letdown in the next second. A quarantine planet. Just great. My best option is a quarantine planet. Atmosphere and temps were near perfect --- probably terraformed, she figured --- so the HabiHut could keep her in style almost indefinitely. Also, probably swarming with pissed off scientists who will descend on my ship screaming obscenities about contamination and how I've just ruined generations of utterly pointless scientific research about the evolution of dung beetles in the absence dung. Or something like that. Although where coveys --- or should that be covens? --- of scientists are gathered there is usually a copious amount of bullshit, beetles or not.

I'm doing whatever it takes to stay alive, everyone else be damned.

Landing was a cinch. The breeze was slow and steady. Lots of solid flat ground to choose from, mostly covered with vegetation, soft enough to squish, none high enough and thick enough in the area around the buildings to snag on. Ah, well, no points for hazards, she hummed to herself. Beginners learned this kind of manual landing playing against the comp, but comps have no imagination. They were not devious or malicious. Pilots got good at landing in varying conditions when they switched the comp to manual and played against each other. Common wisdom was that you could get pretty good playing against your friends, but if you wanted to really excel, you had to play against your enemies.

She grinned, remembering sims, as she made the easy maneuvers. A malicious rival could find ways to wreck a ship that a comp could never dream of. Mostly because comps don't dream. No, I don't believe in AIs. Or fairies, gods, elves, or the bogeyman.

She had spotted the buildings in her first pass around, and considered herself lucky to do so. There was nothing for miles. No sign of civilization, save for the small cluster of buildings on a low hill in the lowlands, and another in nearby mountains which had offered no good options for landing a ship this size. The Ace wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t small to perch on that pad on the side of the mountain. As it was she had to dropped in two kilometers away from the lowland buildings she had targeted. Vegetation looked pretty thick in some places but flat ground was all she cared about. The terrain was rockier and more uneven closer to the buildings. It looked like they'd sheared off the top of a hill and dropped a couple of buildings on it, leaving a bit of a rocky debris field around the base of the hillock. An adjacent building appeared to emerge from the side of the hill, blending in so well that on the first pass over she didn’t even see it. It wasn’t until she maneuvered for landing that she was close enough to see the third structure.

She’d expected bland boxy architecture like every research station planetside she had ever seen, but this was all shiny curving surfaces and inexplicable shapes. She hoped it was a research station and not some larger than life piece of artwork. On the other hand, she reasoned, no one quarantined art. Science, hell yes. Technology, sometimes, depending on what sector you were in. But something with only subjective value like art? Never.

Well, speculating won't get my ship fixed, she thought as she brought the ship down into the vegetation. She sent out her third distress beacon, then checked the air quality again --- you can never be too careful. The particulate numbers had looked a bit dodgy, so she slapped on a breather before cracking the hatch. Despite the filter, which was supposed to scrub out toxins as well as particulate, the air had a peculiar unpleasant odor, musty and stale like some room where the ventilation had either been off for a long time or compromised, she thought, but with sharp acrid top notes, like some perfume designed by monsters. She didn’t believe in monsters, either. She caught herself wrinkling her nose involuntarily, her upper lip curling as if she had just inhaled something nasty.

A flare of adrenaline. I hope I haven't inhaled something nasty. The breather filtered and scrubbed, but it didn't change the composition of the air. Which was a shame because this air almost smelled like decomposition. A smell human beings have had an aversion to for eons. Suddenly she was a bit uneasy about why this planet was a no-go area. The quarantine log had it tagged as nonhazardous, which was a lot more reassuring before she got a whiff of the place.

The unconventional look of the building gave her some hope they wouldn't be too mad about her crashing their quarantine. She was relieved not to be using the word crash literally.

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Chapter 1

She stared in dismay at the way the steps disappeared into the jumbled mass of green, and the wilted and scorched debris at the base of the Ace. Three steps were more or less hidden from view, assuming that she remembered how many steps it was down. She blinked. Reassessed. No, it was only two steps. The vegetation was only knee high at most. She was tall and lanky. She lowered herself slowly down the retractable steps into the vegetation. Her knees were above the top of the plant debris as her feet squished down to the unseen ground. She felt around with her feet, pressing here and there, evaluating the solidity of ground. It appeared to be muddy and wet, but not actually a marsh. She looked under the ship and assessed the landing gear, making a mental note of the positioning. Any repairs would be moot if her ship sank into a swamp. She stood there a few moments, entering the bearing of the buildings into the nav on her wrist unit, gratified to note as she did that her heart rate wasn’t even elevated. The ship didn’t move, so she decided against the precaution of manually triggering the flotation mechanism. Once deployed it would keep the ship from sinking, but would be impossible to work around. And the ship definitely needed work. The sooner, the better.

Time to meet the new neighbors and see if they can give me a hand with repairs. Or at least pitch in and help clean up the area. There were dead animals all around her she now saw. Decomposing birds. Dead insects. Her chest tightened. She took small slow breaths. Bet my heart rate is up now, she thought. The plants, or the remains of them, were sticky. They stuck to her flight suit, along with a residue of unidentifiable parts that she really didn’t want to think about. Looking at it closely made her unease grow.

What kind of place is this? It didn’t look like any terraformed planet she’d ever seen. Interrupted terraforming after Phase 1, she speculated. No, she thought, nothing would be here. Phase 2 or 3? She didn’t know. Terraforming was highly technical. It was something she just took for granted. If the planet was habitable, she presumed it was terraformed. She had been to dozens of terraformed planets and until now they had all looked more or less alike. Boring, bland, vaguely nice looking, nothing distinctive, unless it was the architecture, and even that usually showed little imagination. She had never given much thought to how planets were terraformed. She knew there were a series of phases, but what comprised each phase she had no idea. She knew from what other people said that in the early days of terraforming things sometimes didn’t turn out as expected. Planets were too wet, or a desert, or some key species which was supposed to thrive there failed and the ecosystem collapsed into chaos. She knew that sometimes a species introduced into an ecosystem liked it far too well and ran amok. Her mother had been consulted a few times on things like that. But this. This. She had never seen or heard of anything like this. Is this deliberate or did something go wrong in the terraforming? This was not a cozy little terraformed planet; the grotesque plant life and stench made it more like a nightmare version of one.

It was unnerving to be dropped into the middle of something that looked so alien. That brought her up short. Could this be a Soman planet? Not Soma itself, but an outpost of theirs? The Soman home planet was closed to all but diplomats, linguists, ethnographers, etc. But she had heard they had smaller colonies dotted around the galaxy, as well as some seemingly abandoned outposts. No one knew what they were for, only that Somans claimed them and didn’t object to visitors. She felt chilled. How could I communicate with them? How alien were the Somans? Another thing she had given no thought to. She had never had reason to give the galaxy’s reclusive other species any thought.

She shook her head, determined to clear it of wild thoughts. The buildings she had seen as she came down did not look Soman. It looked unusual, but Soman architecture was built for their standards of beauty --- and from images she’d seen some years ago, it was distinctly ugly by human standards, or at least her standards. Their ships were gorgeous, but their buildings are seven shades of ugly, in her opinion. Whoever lived here had a human aesthetic. More or less. She looked at the snarl of bizarre plants surrounding the ship. Maybe botanists. That would be ideal. They might have heard of her mother. The galaxy is big, but the world of plant people is small, her mother always said. Plant people. Jazlyn sighed. She could almost taste the plants...or something...when she breathed in, even through the breather. She had closed her eyes and tried to convince herself that it was her imagination. It was not a successful experiment. I hope the breather isn’t failing like everything else. Dovey was supposed to track emergency supplies and make sure everything was refurbished or replaced at recommended intervals. She couldn’t imagine Dovey not doing this. Just like she couldn’t imagine that she didn’t smell something with the breather on.

It was going to be a long slog to the buildings. She considered whether to troubleshoot the problem before going any further, but decided that getting a place to stay out of the muck and whatever else was out here should be a priority. Chances were that she wouldn’t be able to get the ship up and running before nightfall. She synched her chron with planetary time. She’d have time to make it to the buildings before sunset, if she could find a way through all the gushy green stuff. Everything seemed to be wet, or wet and sticky. She didn’t envy the scientists here and hoped the unpleasantness of the planet would make her all the more welcome.

What is this stuff? She thrust herself into the foliage, pushing aside large, upright, tubular plant structures that sloshed out water or some other liquid. She tried not to let it splash on her, but after she had gone a ways, she realized it was almost impossible not to get wet -- or get stuck to something. When one type of plant wasn’t trying to topple over and drench her, some other plant was tugging at her flight suit with sticky fingers, or leaving greasy smears. Her mother was a botanist and specialized in the divergent evolution of plant life on terraformed planets, but Jazlyn didn’t know much about it herself. She found herself mentally digging through everything she could remember about terraformed plant life. Surely this couldn’t be a result of divergent evolution. But if not, where did it come from? She racked her brains to pull up everything she knew about terraforming and plant life on terraformed planets. It wasn’t much, but it kept her mind from dwelling too much on the clinging plants, the stickiness of everything, the horrible squishiness of the ground, and stench of decaying animals. Something that might have been a bee flew past her face; it barely missed smacking into the nose of her breather. She was, at that point, just happy to see something living that wasn’t green. But scarcely had the thought flickered in her mind than she wondered what other animal life was on the planet. Insects to pollinate the plants. That was reasonable. Obviously birds. She scrunched her nose involuntarily at the remains of dead birds she saw inside one of the shorter liquid-filled tubular receptacles. But what of other, larger, animal life? Terraforming didn’t routinely stock planets with animals dangerous to humans, but nothing about this planet looked routine. Terraformed planets didn’t routinely have monstrosities like these plants, either. It seemed to her that planets mostly had plants that were either edible or attractive. Nothing on this planet seemed to qualify in either category. Was there some