Tyche's Hope: Tyche Origins, #3

By Richard Parry

The ad said Job of a Lifetime!

Triton Station is Hope's new home. At twenty-two years old and already Guild Engineer First Class, she is asked to breathe life into the broken spans of Triton's shipyards.

The fall of the Empire brought opportunity for the underground. Triton is home to thousands, organized crime eating the space city like a cancer. They've snared Hope's wife in their net. Hope must get Reiko free. But the cost of Reiko's freedom might be everything Hope has worked so hard for.

As the hungry and the powerful close in for the kill, Hope must find a way out. If she doesn't, she'll lose Reiko for good.

Tyche's Hope is the third story in Richard Parry's gripping Tyche Origins hexalogy. If you like page-turning space opera with great dialogue and heart-pumping action, grab your copy. Also in the Tyche Origins collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mondegreen
• Release date: Dec 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9780995109025

Book preview

Tyche’s Hope

Tyche’s Hope

A Space Opera Adventure Story

Richard Parry

Mondegreen

Contents

Get On The List

The Job of a Lifetime

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

About the Author

Also by Richard Parry

Glossary

Acknowledgments

EXCERPT: TYCHE’S FURY

A Saki Deal

TYCHE’S HOPE copyright © 2018 Richard Parry.

Cover design copyright © 2018 Mondegreen.

---

All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-0-9951090-2-5

---

First edition.

Future Forfeit Reading Order

No parts of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any form without permission. Piracy, much as it sounds like a cool thing done at sea with a lot of, Me hearties! commentary, is a dick move. It gives nothing back to the people who made this book, so don’t do it. Support original works: purchase only authorized editions.

---

While we’re here, what you’re holding is a work of fiction created by a professional liar. It is not done in an edgy documentary style with recovered footage. Pretty much everything in here was made up by the author so you could enjoy a story about the world being saved through action scenes and clever dialog. No people were used as templates, serial numbers filed off for anonymity: let’s be honest, October Kohl couldn’t be based on anyone real. Any resemblance to humans you know (alive) or have known (dead) is coincidental.

Published by Mondegreen, New Zealand.

Get On The List

Want updates from Richard Parry? Sign-up and get a welcome bundle at https://www.mondegreen.co/get-on-the-list/.

Welcome Bundle Titles Banner

Find out more about Richard Parry at mondegreen.co

For Mike, and your others-first view of the world.

The Job of a Lifetime

Triton Station. The ad said Job of a Lifetime! without the usual specifics an Engineer might care for. That usually meant the job was better than you could imagine. This one might be, one day. But Hope would have to get the Number Four booster fixed first, or they’d tumble down Triton’s gravity well.

Gravity was one thing you couldn’t bargain with. Shake your fist, like Hope’s Engineers were doing, and gravity would shrug — meh, planets, what can you do? — and just do what gravity did.

Hope’s Engineers were fighting about who would fix the booster, and who would make up for the lost time. Hope suspected they also argued about who would break the bad news to the boss.

Which was her. Hope Baedeker, Engineer First Class. Boss of Project Redemption. Chief Engineer of Triton Station. Who’d have thought? She was surprised to land that Job of a Lifetime!, but Reiko had pressed soft lips to Hope’s forehead and said, Baby, of course they chose you.

Um, said Hope.

Bobbi Harford, short and stocky to Hope’s waifish frame, ignored her. Bobbi was mid-tirade, her voice rising several octaves — difficult when your voice was like a gruff version of the Ghost of Christmas Past to start with — as she shouted at Cory Batham. Batham, you suck. How the hell did you get your Shingle? Was it one of those special deals where you sent in four Core Lager proofs of purchase and got it on the next merchant bridgeliner to drop in-system? The arms of the rig Bobbi wore gesticulated and clacked as she shouted.

Hope winced. Cory Batham was a renowned alcoholic, and Core Lager — apparently from the core worlds, a fact Hope had never tracked down on account of the beer tasting like a degreaser she’d got in her mouth that one time — was his favorite abusive pastime. To be fair to Bobbi — and Hope wanted to be fair, this being her first boss job and all — Cory smelled more of Core Lager than grease and ozone and the other usual smells Engineers wore like a cologne. He didn’t have a rig on, just a rumpled shirt over his pot belly. Not even a ship suit. Um, she said again. If I could—

Goddamn your attitude! said Cory, a fist up in Bobbi’s face like he wanted to start something, before running out of steam like he couldn’t remember how things were started. Hope had noticed the man didn’t run like all his drives were hot when he’d had a few. She had talked to him before about it — Cory, you know you might get everyone killed, right? — and he’d agreed to do better. In this instance, he might have been trying: he wasn’t supposed to be on-shift. Which meant he was supposed to have fixed Number Four before grabbing another Core Lager to chase down his dreams of death by cirrhosis. Hope thought this might have been a good time to step into the conversation again, but Cory rallied. If you’d only done what you were supposed to—

"This isn’t about me, Batham, and you know it. It’s about you, and that Number Four booster. Now my crew’s gotta fix it, or this whole station will crash and burn on Triton’s surface. We’ll be behind production, and it’ll be your fault. But you’ve logged the booster as fixed, so you’re sitting pretty, ain’t that right?" Bobbi paused, wiping spittle from her chin.

Hope frowned. Logged the booster as fixed. She’d known Cory for about as long as any of them. He was as average as an Engineer with a Shingle could get, but still better than anyone outside the Guild. He hit Core Lager pretty hard, but she’d never found him to be a liar and a cheat. If he said he’d fixed the booster, the booster was fixed. She stepped off to the side, brushing a strand of pink hair out of her face. They would shout at each other for a while, which would give Hope some time to check the booster out.

She approached the controls and ducting station of Number Four. The big ornery booster was a couple klicks below Hope, hanging out in space under Triton Station along with all its friends. The ducting station supplied reactants, coolants, and any other ants useful to the operation of a fusion booster. In turn, diagnostics were ferried up to this console. Number Four had been shipped here from Titan. Titan was the Republic’s shiny new shipyard, all gleaming spans of metal, ready to deliver a new Navy for a war already over. Rumor had it they would be cranking out bridgeliners like candy on Halloween. But before they got on to minting new ships that never broke, and were thus a boring place for an Engineer, they’d rushed out this new booster for Triton Station.

It broke often, mostly on days ending in Y.

Red lights littered the diagnostic console. Pretty much everything reported as a fractured mess. Hope sighed. It was super unlikely that many things would go wrong on a booster at the same time. Just look at it. Power couplings, blown. The phase inverters were shot. The main feed from the reactor was — and this was ridiculous — plain ol’ missing. Hope pulled her visor down, her rig’s diagnostics clicking on. Wireframes of conduit overlaid the ducting on her HUD. She frowned for a few seconds, then walked to a panel. Her rig’s arms reached out, opened the panel, and then pulled out the breaker for the diagnostics hub. ‘Breaker’ was a generous term for it. This one was mostly slag, and what wasn’t slag was pure corrosion. Hope sighed, dropping the breaker, and grabbing a new one from a nearby rack. She slotted it, the console’s lights flicking for a second before shining a promising green across the board.

Hope turned back to Bobbi and Cory, who still yelled at each other, but now at the same time. Hope cleared her throat, and when that didn’t have an effect, she