The Ice Prisoner: From Dancing on the Moon, Book 2 of the Brother 5 Series

By Ardyce Years

The Ice Prisoner

From Dancing on the Moon, the second book in the Brother 5 series.

The Captain is transporting a dangerous prisoner to a penitentiary located on a desolate, frozen planet. The ice planet's only residents are the inmates—the evil and most depraved in the universe. A rouge asteroid collides with her ship and the Captain crashes on a mountain summit. In order to survive, she abandons her craft for a nearby cave and brings the unconscious convict with her.

To her astonishment she discovers the captive is not a deranged reptilian criminal she was led to believe.  In order to get paid the Captain must fight the elements and deliver her package to the warden, alive and intact. But one thought keeps nagging her: Why would the prison want this creature?

The Ice Prisoner is a novelette, approximately 8700 words.

Dancing on the Moon will be available summer, 2016.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ardyce Years
• Release date: Apr 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781533726452

Ardyce Years

Ardyce’s love for books was born to replace friends. Growing up in the southwest her parents moved from town to town. The local library supplied her with endless relationships, some she holds near and dear today. The Old Man and the Sea stays by her bedside, although their love affair is relatively new. When an auto accident as a teenager kept her immobile for three months, the doctor’s banishment to the living room couch began her obsession with movies and television. (BTW, next to smart phones, streaming is the best invention of modern times.) The first science fiction movie she can remember viewing is The Day the Earth Stood Still. She found the movie poster in Canne, of all places, in 2006 and insisted on carrying it on the plane on her return flight home. Artie lives in Phoenix with her husband, three kids, and a menagerie of four legged family members. She is known for a wicked, sometimes inappropriate, sense of humor. Her kids do not think she is funny at all. 

Book preview

The Ice Prisoner

By

Ardyce Years

Copyright 2016 by Ardyce Years. All rights reserved. No part of this novel may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission from the author.

Visit my website: www.ardyceyears.com and please ajoin me on Facebook.

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Table of Contents

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Part One

The Arrival

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Part Two

The Departure

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Synopsis of Brother 5

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Synopsis of Dancing on the Moon

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About the Author

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Part One

Well, my friend, this earth will one day be that cold corpse; it will become uninhabitable and uninhabited like the moon, which has long since lost all its vital heat...Jules Vern

The Arrival

The muted blue-whites of the massive moons loomed closer and closer through her optical viewer. The lunar illuminations hovered above a remote planet, permanently shrouded in a silvery mist and deterred all potential visitors except those invited.

She eased her legs off the console and stretched her long appendages, which almost touched the ceiling. They ached from the lack of mobility over the past week.

Finally, I can collect my pay and get my ass to a well-earned vacation. Maybe Brother 2, where I can enjoy the sunshine and warm beaches.

She hated cold and kept the temperature balmy inside her small cabin. Absent were the obligatory illustrations of family and friends. Instead, condensation from the artificial warmth produced a misty frame around the portholes, serving as a memento of those left behind.

Space welcomed her to its playground, unsupporting of all life, therefore neither friend nor foe. She answered to no entity and bounced at will from system to system, transporting legal and not so legal goods to destinations most carriers refused to enter. The reward for her freedom was to experience astonishing splendor offered to the few beings who dared to venture to all junctions of the universe. Her recent travels included the split suns and the matching half planets of the Byzans and the cascading Édessia waterfall of falling stars, beautiful to view but a bitch for interstellar operations. The punishment was to observe horrific behavior from beings she would least expect. She learned early on greed and fanatical devotion to individual causes infected all factions of various life forms. Time after time she witnessed as justifications replaced compassion.

Her chosen career maintained her lifestyle: a custom equipped ship (owned, not leased), an assortment of illegal weapons and a stash of coin for the day she decided to live in one place.

The temporary beauty of the bluish moons masked the disgusting beings incarcerated on the planet below. The bitter cold and the cyrovolcanoes made it a perfect host