Junkyard Dog Collection Books 1-3: Junkyard Dog Series, #0

By Charley Marsh

Get the first three novellas of the Junkyard Dog series in one collection.

 

JUNKYARD DOG

Bounced through an asteroid field like a pinball, galaxy cop Rita King crashes her damaged star cruiser on a lifeless planet known only as B4629. Her troubles are just beginning . . .

 

Holding the spot of top pilot in the elite Red Barons leaves little time for anything else in Rita's life. Maybe that's why she missed the signs that all was not well in her world. Stuck on a rocky planet Rita faces a hard truth. Someone tampered with her ship. Someone who should have had her back. Someone she trusted. Until she discovers who wants her dead and why, Rita will never be safe.

 

Junkyard Dog introduces Major Rita King in a new science fiction series filled with quirky characters, strange new worlds, and a smart and edgy tale of betrayal in space.

 

KRAKEN BLUES

Monsters in the deep?

 

Rita King heads to the planet Harmos–her favorite destination for R & R– to recover from her recent ordeal. Harmos is all about Old Earth blues and jazz clubs, fresh seafood, and best of all, her friend Rose's bath house. When someone attacks Rose during Rita's visit, Rose refuses to talk about it. Her only comment? "They're back."

 

The next day, Rose disappears.

 

Saving Rose means Rita must dig into her friend's life. Worse, it means Rita must face a deep seated fear, one that has haunted her for most of her life. One that might uncover the secret of the mysterious Kraken and their tie to Harmos.

 

DEADLY CARGO

Rita King cannot let a mystery go unsolved.

 

Forced to hide from the law agency she dedicated her life to, she heads to the colorful planet Weegan for ship repairs.The master mechanic Weegans love nothing more than tearing into the guts of a ship. But her friend warns Rita off. Refuses to let her land near his village. Rita's unerring nose for trouble won't let her move on until she discovers the reason behind this unusual behavior. 

 

A gripping tale of high stakes on a distant planet in the galaxy, Deadly Cargo delivers another action adventure with space pilot Margarita King.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Timberdoodle Press
• Release date: Sep 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781945856464

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

Junkyard Dog Collection

Copyright © 2018 by CHARLEY MARSH

JUNKYARD DOG COLLECTION/BOOKS 1-3 is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and places are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations

embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For more information contact: [e-mail]

All rights reserved.

Published 2018 in the United States of America by

Timberdoodle Press.

Cover art courtesy depositphoto.com

Publisher Logo by Peter Corbin

Ebook ISBN #978-1-945856-46-4

Print ISBN #978-1-945856-47-1

Contents

Junkyard Dog

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Kraken Blues

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

Deadly Cargo

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Ruby City

Chapter 1

Also by Charley Marsh

About the Author

Junkyard Dog

Copyright © 2018 by CHARLEY MARSH

JUNKYARD DOG is a work of fiction. The characters,

incidents, and places are the product of the author’s

imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance

to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is

entirely coincidental. No part of this book may be used

or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written

permission except in the case of brief quotations

embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For more information contact: timberdoodlepress.com

All rights reserved.

Published 2017, 2018 in the United States of America by

Timberdoodle Press.

---

Cover art courtesy Pixabay

Publisher Logo by Peter Corbin

---

Ebook ISBN #978-1-945856-17-4

Print ISBN #978-1-945856-16-7

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 and stood while piloting her ship. In her mind, the regulators were planet-bound busy bodies who had no clue what a long-distance pilot endured or needed, and therefor they had no business making the rules for those who did the actual flying.

She didn’t make a big deal of it, she simply flew her ship the way she thought was best.

Margarita knew that she should contact the Mars base and report her location and status, but the thought of calling her senior officer before she had identified the problem and solution didn’t sit well with her.

She made the decision to wait on the contact until she had more information.

Competition among the team of Specialized Pilots was fierce and frequently bitter, and the older, more experienced pilots were often sidelined because they didn’t keep up with the latest flight technology.

At thirty-one, Margarita held the distinction of being the youngest pilot to earn the rank of Major while being the oldest pilot currently flying a Viking-class ship. She kept her edge by keeping in top physical form, spending long hours in the newest training modules, and hitting the books to keep up with each graduating class of recruits eager to bump her name off the roster.

It made for a grueling schedule, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. Because of her experience and knowledge, she was often tapped to lead the more interesting and exciting missions.

That made for a lot of jealous co-workers.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world. A brief grin lit Margarita’s face. She often amused and entertained herself with bad jokes while on solo missions. Apparently the Dog Star had tickled her funny bone.

Very few people ever saw her softer, silly side; she kept it well hidden behind a stony mask to ensure that others took her seriously. Through the years commanding officers and instructors had labeled her as stoic, stiff, and aloof. A few called her bitch.

She didn’t care what others called her as long as she got to fly.

Next to her, the navigation screen sprang to life with a soft beep. Running a long, tapered finger over it, Margarita located the ship and her destination. The screen calculated the travel distance remaining: two point five light years.

So why had her ship come out of warp drive? The Viking ships were meticulously maintained, with every system tested and retested before a trip and then again upon their return before they were released for use again.

Margarita pulled up the main command screen and instructed the ship to run a complete diagnostics test. Something had triggered the ship to fall out of warp speed, and until she pinpointed the problem she couldn’t risk re-engaging the warp drive engine. Which meant there was no way she’d be able to get back to Mars base until she found—and fixed—the problem.

Looking back toward the window she realized she could no longer see Sirius.

A moment later she felt a thud against the port side of her ship.

The first thud was quickly followed by a stuttering series of thuds and thunks above and below her.

The ship must have entered an asteroid field, or a debris field of some sort. Great, just what she needed. Margarita belted herself into the pilot’s chair as a hard hit made the ship shudder and yaw.

The thunks grew more rapid and serious, battering her ship from all sides. The noise swelled and grew beyond the level of human comfort.

Margarita grabbed the noise canceling earcups, slid them on, and flipped on communications.

"Mayday. Mayday. This is Major Margarita King of the Mars-based, Viking-class ship Pacifica. Possible malfunction in the warp drive engine. Ship caught in an asteroid field. Mayday. Mayday." She calmly repeated the call twice more and activated the locator beacon.

Normally able to pilot itself through a heavy obstacle field with reflexes that far exceeded a human’s capacity, her ship seemed to be deliberately trying to crash it’s way through the field of asteroids, much like an Old Earth pinball would bounce between flippers, bumpers, and gobble holes.

Margarita watched with growing horror as a large chunk of ice and rock headed toward the nosecone of her ship. She deactivated the auto pilot, grabbed the manual steering stick, and jerked hard to the left.

If she was going to die she wanted the controls to be in her own hands.

The asteroid slid past the window. A moment later she felt it impact the tail of the ship, sending it into a slow spin.

She gripped the joystick with both hands and forced herself to steer into the spin, an action that went contrary to her every instinct, until she slowly regained control of the spiraling ship.

As her vessel came out of the spin, a large, unavoidable object filled the window. She pulled back hard on the joystick and increased power to the engine.

Crash landing on an asteroid was not an option in her personal set of flight rules.

The ship shuddered and gained speed. The nose lifted, lifted some more, but not quite enough to completely avoid the asteroid. The belly of the ship bounced and scraped along its rough, pocked surface, and then she was free.

Margarita took advantage of the brief respite and switched the nav screen to outside view. Her heart skipped a couple beats when she saw the number of asteroids filling the space around the ship.

She sent a quick burst to the reverse thrusters to slow the ship, then steered between two long, black rocks before returning her attention to the screen. She desperately needed to find a place to set the ship down so she could diagnose and fix the warp drive.

She swept a finger up the screen to see what was behind her ship. A pocked surface filled the screen.

Assuming it was the large asteroid she had avoided moments before, Margarita minimized the image. She was about to change screens when an image caught her attention.

The object was too regularly shaped, too round, to be an asteroid. A small spark of hope glimmered inside her chest. She swung the ship around to face the object.

Definitely a planet. A planet surrounded by a field of debris. It would be a risky place to land, but what choice did she have? Without the warp drive she didn’t have the power to go any distance.

Margarita clenched her teeth and increased engine speed again. Using both hands on the joystick, she began to wend her way through the asteroid field toward the planet.

She couldn’t avoid them all. She cringed inwardly as her ship took a beating, knowing that the dents and dings affected the bullet-shaped ship’s ability to move smoothly through an atmosphere, she prayed that nothing critical was being crushed.

After several hours that felt like decades, Margarita guided her ship past the last asteroid and aimed for the planet. Her hands had long since cramped on the joystick but she didn’t dare release it, afraid that she wouldn’t be able to force her muscles to grab it again.

Twenty minutes later she spied a flat valley set between two mountain ridges. She flew over the area looking for signs of life but saw nothing to alarm her so began her descent.

If her ship was a pinball, she had just hit the drain.

Margarita slammed her open palm down on the engine power button as the planet’s surface rose and filled the window. The Pacifica shuddered once and died.

Game over.

2

The snap and pop of cooling metal filled the ship’s interior as it settled onto the valley floor. Eventually only the sound of her harsh, raspy breath competed with the heavy silence.

Margarita stared blankly at the dark landscape outside the window and forced slower breaths through her long, narrow nose.

Long, deep inhale.

Long, slow exhale.

She repeated the breaths until the edge of panic receded and her brain kicked into gear again. The rapid beat of her heart, amplified by the ship’s utter stillness, filled her ears and pounded out a single message: Alive. Alive. Alive.

She was still alive.

Sudden tears welled in her eyes and she dashed them away with quick, angry movements. The tears were a byproduct of the adrenalin that had coursed through her body, same as the bitter bile in the back of her throat. Not a sign of weakness.

Margarita King didn’t cry—didn’t allow herself to cry—over anything. She sat, unmoving, until she felt her confidence begin to seep back, and with it a cold anger.

The Pacifica, the best, most carefully maintained ship in the fleet—because she oversaw the maintenance—had malfunctioned and forced her to execute an emergency landing on an unexplored planet.

She requested her location from the ship’s computer and was told that she had landed on a piece of rock named only by a letter and a number: Planet B4629.

This mission has gone to the dogs. Her husky voice sounded rough and alien in the silent cabin, but the Old Earth phrase seemed right on the money. This was her first mission to the M41 star system, and so far it was a dismal failure.

Margarita turned her thoughts away from the unscheduled landing and took stock of her situation.

If she conserved, the small ship could support her for up to two years, so other than getting smashed by an incoming asteroid, her survival was not an immediate concern.

And while she tolerated other humans, she had learned to prefer her own company over that of her fellow man. The threat of loneliness-induced insanity would not be an issue.

She had met a few pilots who had found themselves marooned for long periods—one as long as fifteen years—good pilots who had not been able to hack the solitude. When found, they had clung to their rescuers and refused to be left alone, or even to sleep in a single person cabin.

Margarita pressed her full lips into a thin line. She was used to spending most of her time alone. Her unusual size and scary-smart intellect frightened off potential friends or suitors. Even in a crowd there was an invisible bubble that insulated and separated her from others. Loneliness had been her lifelong companion.

There had been a time, when she was first recruited for the pilot program, that she thought she might make a friend or two, but the back-biting, competitive environment of the program soon disabused her of that hope.

She still believed that those in command had missed an opportunity in the way they handled the pilots. Instead of nurturing friendship and mutual support among the elite fliers—a sense that your teammates had your back—Central Command encouraged competition and sabotage.

Instead of a crew that worked together, and was stronger for it, the Specialized Pilots team was a group of individuals who worked only for themselves.

Margarita released the seat harness and lowered the navigation screen. She flexed and stretched her cramped fingers, rolled her head on her shoulders, and stood.

She folded in half so her short, spiky hair swept the cabin floor, grabbed her left foot in her left hand, and swept up, lifting her foot past her ear until it nearly touched the cabin ceiling. Touching her forehead to knee, she held the pose for several breaths, then repeated the pose for the right side.

Stretches done, she tapped the cabin light control until the red changed to a low-level, warm white. The dim lights threw her long, lean shadow across the galley walls as she began to pace the central aisle in the slow, measured steps that helped her think.

With her head bent and hands clasped behind her back, she mentally reviewed the catastrophe that had forced her onto this planet.

Something had gone terribly wrong with her ship’s navigation system. And it shouldn’t have. The Second-in-Command had signed off on the ship’s pre-flight check himself.

Only now did Margarita think to question the way the other pilots had looked at her as she stepped forward and volunteered for this mission—sly, sideways glances with knowing eyes that should have alerted her that all was not quite what it seemed.

What she had considered usual behavior in her jealous fellow fliers had meant something different this time. She should have realized, when she was the only volunteer, that something wasn’t right.

I’ll be damned. Those bastards threw me to the dogs.

Margarita stopped pacing and stared blindly out the window. Anger rose in her chest until it burned her throat.

What if she couldn’t fix her ship? What if the bastards had sabotaged it so there was no way she could ever return to the Mars base?

She beat down the rising panic with a firm hand. Nobody knew the workings of her ship better than she did. She would go through it inch by inch until she found the problem, and then she would fix it.

Simple.

Movement out of the corner of her eye snapped her attention to the unknown planet. While no one had reported signs of life yet in the M41 star system, most of it had yet to be explored.

And there were those strange radio signals, the reason she was here in the first place. Unless the report of signals was a sham, a reason to get her out here.

A good pilot remained on edge at all times—constantly prepared to deal with anything that cropped up. It was a brutal, fatiguing way to live, but those who didn’t practice that philosophy usually paid with short lives.

Margarita stood without moving and scanned the area with her eyes only, like a hunter waiting for his prey to approach. Nothing moved.

An hour passed before she decided that she had either seen nothing, or whatever it was had gone. She walked to the Redi-Meal and programmed a cup of hot herbal tea.

She plopped down on the edge of her recessed bunk and inhaled the soft, flowery scent of her favorite jasmine-based tea. Sipping the hot liquid slowly, she allowed the fragrance and warmth to sooth and relax her.

As her body relaxed she realized just how exhausted she was. First she needed sleep, then she would address the ship’s diagnostics.

She finished the tea, and because she hated clutter, cleaned and stowed the cup, then crawled into the narrow bunk. It formed a warm cocoon around her body, and she drifted into