Junkyard Dog: Junkyard Dog Series, #1

By Charley Marsh

Bounced through an asteroid field like a pinball, Major Rita King crashes her damaged star cruiser on a lifeless planet. Her troubles are just beginning.

 

Rita loves her ship.

Loves the feel of deep space between the stars.

Loves being a galaxy cop. But holding the spot of top pilot in the elite Red Barons leaves little time for anything else in her life. Maybe that's why she missed the signs that all was not well in her world. Someone she trusted tampered with her ship and sent her out to die.

 

Things go from bad to worse when Rita's repaired ship is captured and she is forced to work in a mine filled with a deadly bacteria. Even if she escapes she'll be a fugitive from the very agency she swore to uphold. Her life in tatters, Rita fights to find answers. Who betrayed her, and why?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charley Marsh
• Release date: Aug 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781945856174

Charley Marsh

In her younger days Charley Marsh’s curiosity drove her to climb mountains, canoe rivers, and explore caves and wilderness areas from Maine to California. She's been shot at, caught in a desert flash flood, and almost drowned off the Maine coast. Once she tobogganed down a 5,000+ foot mountain.  Life is always an adventure if you have the right attitude. Charley never set out to be a storyteller, but looking back on the elaborate lies she made up as a troubled teen she can see that she always had the makings. Now, in the immortal words of Lawrence Block, she happily “makes up lies for fun and profit.” If you would like information regarding Charley’s new releases or simply want to contact Charley visit: https://charleymarshbooks.com/

Book preview

1

The insistent and irritating buzz of an alarm pierced Red Baron Margarita King’s brain. Gad, she hated that sound. She flipped onto her back and slapped a flat button on the bunk’s back wall.

The buzzing alarm stopped. She heaved a sigh at the merciful quiet.

The extra long bunk, specially constructed of a dense foam that molded to her body and prevented bed sores during long flights, shifted its shape to accommodate her new position. She settled into it and took a few deep breaths.

Why was she awake? The sleep medicine she had taken after setting the ship’s course made her brain thick and fuzzy. Time-eze, a sleeping potion developed especially for the ultra long-distance pilots and travelers who passed through the time/space warp-field, could be precisely calibrated so that upon the specified wake time a person would be wide awake, no drowsiness.

Her muddy thoughts told Margarita that she had been awakened before her preset arrival time.

She took several more deep breaths and tried to clear her brain. Margarita hated taking the sleeping drug for exactly this reason—the difficulty in thinking clearly when under the influence; but science had proven that the bodies of pilots who slept during the little understood journey through the warp field went into a kind of stasis that suspended the aging process.

The early pioneers who had braved the effects of bending time and space had suffered greatly for it, often returning as dry, hollow husks. Space exploration had come to a standstill until the development of Time-eze.

Like everything in life, it was a trade-off. Would she prefer to be sharp, or grow old and possibly die while getting from point A to point B?

As she struggled to fully awaken, she gauged her surroundings. The ship’s interior was velvety dark and silent, the kind of silent that possessed weight and pressed in on a listener’s ears with an intensity that rivaled that of a loud explosion.

A quick check of her wrist unit confirmed that the ship had not yet arrived at its destination. So why the alarm?

Margarita reached down and touched another button on the side edge of her bunk, activating the low-level cabin lights. Twin strips of small red lights appeared on the cabin’s deck, running from the cargo bay at the rear to the nose cone nearly two hundred feet away.

The use of red-colored lights was a carryover from the meat hunters of Old Earth. Red light was invisible to many creatures while giving the hunters a way to see what they were doing in the dark.

The curved cabin, modeled after the sailing vessels of Old Earth, sprang out of the darkness. The ship’s interior was sleek and neatly cobbled together on either side of the central aisle. No space, no matter how small or oddly-shaped, had been wasted.

Instrument panels, equipment and personal storage lockers, cooking and bathing closets: all fit together like a 3-D jigsaw puzzle crafted from a non-organic material that mimicked the rich grain of cherrywood, a tree long since disappeared from man’s long-abandoned home planet.

Margarita had always considered her ship not only her home—much more home to her than the base housing back on Mars—but also an important work of art; a reminder of the artisans and their way of life on human’s original planet.

She turned her head and surveyed the long, narrow cabin. As one of the top scholars of Old Earth history, she had participated in the interior design of her ship, right down to the clever drawers and cubbyholes which held a myriad of small items that tended to get lost during long trips through the galaxy.

Her gaze stopped at the ship’s only window, a thick, cone-shaped shield that made up the nose of the vessel. The window showed nothing but blackness outside the ship.

Created from a substance that could be heated to a liquid state, poured into a mold, and then cooled to a clear, rock-like consistency called Kristal, the nose cone was nearly impervious to damage.

The cone looked fine—no cracks, no foreign substance blocking visibility.

So why the alarm?

Blackness. The meaning of the starless vista penetrated Margarita’s sleepy brain. If the ship was still traveling on warp drive she should be seeing the streaked light trails of stars as her ship passed through the Milky Way.

No streaked trails of light meant that her fast and nimble Viking-class ship, a ship no other pilot wanted to operate because it wasn’t all cold sleek steel inside, had taken itself out of warp drive.

She lay there for a moment longer, then judging herself awake enough to move, Margarita stood with a grace that spoke of countless hours studying dance and martial arts. She groaned, stretched out the kinks, and rubbed her hands over her face and the dark cap of short, spiky hair that topped her tall frame.

Reaching into the narrow cabinet at the foot of her bunk, she pulled out one of her two flight suits and pulled it on.

The mud-brown body-hugging suit was knit from gossamer fine spider-silk threads that were stronger than steel and cost more than land on Old Earth. It weighed next to nothing, yet protected her body from the elements and any weapon short of a fusion bomb.

Margarita had set aside every spare penny for five years before she had saved enough to buy the special suit. Now she owned two.

A girl had to know where her priorities lay.

She sat on the edge of the bunk to pull on mid-calf boots made from a sharkskin-kevlar blend and padded forward to stand before the Kristal window.

From this vantage point she could see now stars everywhere she looked. Slightly overhead lay Sirius, called the Dog Star by the ancient peoples of Earth.

The brightest star in Old Earth’s sky, it was also the brightest star that could be seen from Mars. From here it’s vibrant blue-white light clearly dominated the heavens.

Her current destination lay several light years below Sirius, in the star cluster tagged Messier 41, or the M41 star system. She had set out from the Mars base the previous day on a simple fact-finding mission: investigate the source of the odd radio signals that had been picked up during a routine scan emanating from somewhere within M41.

Margarita turned away from the window and walked back to the ship’s central command center. Unlike the ancient sailors who plied Old Earth’s oceans using charts and sextants as their guides, she had the advantage of sophisticated computer-assisted navigation tools.

She folded herself into the gel pilot-chair and pulled up the navigation console. Specially created for long hours at the helm, the pilot’s chair cupped her body like a warm hand. At six foot two, Margarita King found that no furniture made for the average-sized pilot was comfortable for her body during extended periods.

She frequently defied regulations