A Most Unusual Kidnapping: Smugglers and Starships, #1

By J. C. Long

Dalen Reed thinks he has it made when he gets an easy job: kidnap some poor rich sod and deliver him to a specific place. Kidnapping isn't something he would normally resort to, but times can be tough, and you've gotta do what you've gotta do. Things get complicated when the target turns out to be on a ship full of armed bodyguards. The twists continue when Dalen learns it wasn't a kidnapping but an aided runaway. Now he's being followed by the Klei pirates, the deadliest, most ruthless privateers in space.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J. C. Long
• Release date: May 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386566243

J. C. Long

J. C. Long has had a long love affair with words, writing stories from a very early age. When not writing J. C.'s time is spent teaching English as a foreign language. J. C.'s second longest love affair has been with theater, a passion that comes through and shows in his first published story, Broadway Babe.  He is also quite passionate about Welsh corgis and is convinced that anyone who does not like them is evil incarnate. J. C. currently lives in Japan, but has also lived in various parts of the United States and also South Korea.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

25 Hours Left

Dalen Reed was about to commit a kidnapping. It wasn’t something he’d planned to do when he started life as a ship for hire but, well, money was tight. Shit was hard. People that wanted to travel usually paid for high-class escort ships. Those that couldn’t afford to pay for a cruiser like that weren’t really up Dalen’s alley as customers, anyway. Most jobs that came Dalen’s way ended up being low-pay salvage jobs or else were on the dangerous side, thus making them less appealing on the whole.

With nothing else to do about it and a crew of people (well, two additional people) to pay, Dalen turned to smuggling. It came with his own share of dangers, but not usually the kind where someone shoots at him, which was always preferable.

One thing led to another and here he was, sitting with his ship, appropriately called Specter, just within sight of a Waypoint, a gate out of hyperspace that ships made use of. Being in hyperspace for too long, it took its toll on a ship and its crew. With good shieldings a vessel could travel in hyperspace for about a day before they needed to drop out. With Specter in ghost-mode, its energy-output was completely undetectable by all but the most advanced military scanners. A travel cruiser didn’t stand a chance. They would easily get the jump on their target.

Their target. Just thinking about it set Dalen’s nerves on edge. He’d never been involved in a kidnapping before. The job promised no fuss, ensuring that the target would be easily taken aboard. If it was going to be that easy, how could he turn it down? Especially since the pay was nearly fifteen million yen—that was more than he and his crew raked in on six months of hard work.

For his companions it had been an easy choice: take the money.

Relax, Dal. I can hear your foot tapping here in the cockpit. The voice in his comm belonged to Trais, his pilot. She was Regarian, which meant she was basically an anthropomorphic bunny, complete with the fur—hers being a cream-and-coffee color. It’s just a kidnapping. Don’t get so tense about it.

Dalen scoffed. Right. Just a kidnapping.

Just think of him as cargo, Trais offered. "Hell, we can even keep him in the cargo hold if that will help. Of course, it’s air-compressed so he’d probably die a horrible death…just to check, did the job state that he had to be delivered to Xhose alive?"

Dalen was sorely tempted to mute his comm, but he needed her to alert him when they were ready to move. Dalen and Griffin, his other crew member, were waiting in semi-okay quality engagement suits for the ship to make forced dock with the transport cruiser so they could commence with their boarding. The engagement suits, high-tech armor that generated shields that should absorb most of whatever fire came their way, were mostly to hide their faces and for intimidation purposes; Dalen wasn’t sure if they would actually function in combat, it had been so long since they were used.

If the suits didn’t work for intimidation then Griffin certainly would. Griffin was tall, closer to seven feet than to six, and equally wide. He was half-Human and half Gaan, which meant he had quite the temper. A closer look at Griffin’s skin would see that it was closer to scales than to human flesh.

At least one of us will be okay if the engagement suits don’t work.

To distract himself from the thought of death by laser blast Dalen signaled his in-suit computer to once more pull up the photo of the target he’d received from their mystery employer. Their target was a handsome man, probably twenty-six or twenty-seven. He had dark black hair and Asian features: small nose, almond-shaped eyes and an almost harsh-looking slash of a mouth. His clothing was quite expensive, marking him as the scion of some Corporation or something similar. There was something in those eyes, though, that spoke of more. He couldn’t put his finger on it.

Damn if he wasn’t just Dalen’s