The Skull Game

By Katina French

She’s brave, crazy, dangerous… and your best shot at crossing the galaxy alive.

An encounter with an android and an orphan has left Shaen unsettled. She’s the best coyote pilot in the galaxy, but the future for all coyote pilots is madness and death, or worse, a permanent return to the hellish Asylum Ships. Unwilling to let the Belle Starr become space debris if she’s incapacitated, Shaen agrees to something she’s never attempted: taking on an apprentice.

But old rivals Vahnu and Vishku have a different plan to make their fortune and avoid their fate. A plan that includes stealing the very thing she's struggling to save: Shaen's fractured mind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Per Bastet Publications LLC
• Release date: Sep 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781942166054

Book preview

french

The Skull Game

The Belle Starr Chronicles

Episode 2

Katina French

The Skull Game

The Belle Starr Chronicles, Episode 2

Electronic Edition

Copyright © 2014 Katina French

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author and artist.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 978-1-942166-05-4

Electronic Edition 2014

intersections

Of all the bars in all the planets in the galaxy, she had to walk into this one.

Drevin eyed the scruffy pilot anxiously. There was no mistaking the short-cropped platinum hair topped by grungy brass mechanic goggles, the petite curvy frame stuffed into a dingy tank top under a battered grey coat, and cargo pants stuffed into work boots. It was definitely Shaen Morris, pilot of the Belle Starr.

The only question was whether or not she'd recognize him, and whether she'd shoot him where he stood if that happened.

When he'd gotten mixed up in that mess back on Mebarik, she'd been his first choice for a coyote pilot to get him off world. She'd turned him down flat; fearing the stolen credits he'd use to pay her would come back to bite her.

His second choice, a pilot called Vahnu Vero, had tried to slip him off-world in a jump window Shaen had already claimed. Then Vero's even crazier brother Vishku had tried to shoot her out of the sky. Their plan had backfired. It ended up with Vahnu's craft, the Johnny Ringo backing off, and Vishku's Cole Younger taking damage. He'd only barely made it off-world ahead of the local authorities.

Now they were somehow on the same world again. He couldn't help but notice the pistol sticking out from under her long grey coat as she sat down at the bar.

Drevin signaled the barmaid quietly, paid his tab, and weaseled his way out the door. Dealing with coyote pilots, who were all crazy anyway, was a dangerous business. He'd take safer pursuits like armed robbery any day.

~*~

She never thought she'd envy an orphan.

Captain Shaen Morris sat in the Drunken Monkey, a broken down cantina on outskirts of Ghadrak, the capitol city of Magha III. Not that being the capitol city made it any less of a grime-coated wasteland than the rest of the planet. Magha was an industrial Class I world. Factories piled on top mines, burning the local equivalent of coal to produce metal and ceramics used on other worlds. The planet's atmosphere had been only marginally breathable when the Universal Human Council, or UHC, had found it. At the rate the factories were going, it was going to be a gas-mask-only planet in a couple generations.

As she eyed her drink through the haze, she kept imagining the tropical planet of N'Bari IV, and the