The Gaslight Bandits: St. Antoni - The Forbidden Colony, #3

By Gail Daley

A fast-paced Sci-Fi novel of adventure, mystery and romance on the forbidden colony of St. Antoni.

 

A little Old West, some Science Fiction, A bit of Victorian Steampunk, a touch of Mystery and Romance, and a whole lot of Fun!

 

When the law comes knocking at her door, sixteen-year-old Francis Dominique answers with a strength and resilience born of tragedy. After her father killed her mother, Francis is left with the responsibility of caring for her two younger sisters in the wild and untamed colony of St. Antoni. To make ends meet, Francis takes a job as the receptionist to the Enforcers, St. Antoni's elite law enforcement bureau, and finds herself unexpectedly drafted into an investigation of the outlaws robbing the trains connecting St. Antoni's City States. But when her father escapes from the Asylum for the Criminally Insane, and a lawyer with a custody writ arrives with intentions to take her sisters away, Francis must prove her strength and courage in order to protect her family and catch the outlaws.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gail Daleys Fine Art
• Release date: Jan 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393012320

Gail Daley

Gail Daley is a self-taught artist and writer with a background in business. An omnivorous reader, she was inspired by her son, also a writer, to finish some of the incomplete novels she had begun over the years. She is heavily involved in local art groups and fills her time reading, writing, painting in acrylics, and spending time with her husband of 40 plus years. Currently her family is owned by two cats, a mischievous young cat called Mab (after the fairy queen of air and darkness) and a mellow Gray Princess named Moonstone. In the past, the family shared their home with many dogs, cats and a Guinea Pig, all of whom have passed over the rainbow bridge. A recent major surgery on her stomach and a bout with breast cancer has slowed her down a little, but she continues to write and paint.

Book preview

The Gaslight Bandits

St. Antoni – The Forbidden Colony - Book 3

A black and white photo of a building Description automatically generated with low confidence

Gail Daley

COPYRIGHT © 2020 BY Gail Daley dba Gail Daley's Fine Art

The Gaslight Bandits | St. Antoni—The Forbidden Colony- book 3 Gail Daley—1st ed. Copyright © Cover Art Copyright © 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

E-book ISBN: 9781393012320

Print ISBN- 9781393649809

ASIN  B08RWFVFVB

Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is unintentional and accidental. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

Gail Daley

5688 E Sussex Way

Fresno, CA 93727

www.gaildaley.com

Ordering Information: Quantity sales (sales of 100 or more books). Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the Bulk Sales Department at the address above.

GAIL'S OTHER BOOKS

SPACE COLONY JOURNALS

Options of Survival

Destiny Rising

Tomorrows Legacy

The Interstellar Jewel Heist

The Designer People

Alien Trails

Quantum Light

Soturi—A Novella*

GAIL’S WORLDS

Federation Colonies & Civilizations

Rulari – Land of Myth & Magic

Forbidden & Outlawed

ST. ANTONI – THE FORBIDDEN COLONY

Warriors of St. Antoni

The Enforcers

The Gaslight Bandits

The Portal Lawman

Cradle of Fire

The Clone Initiative

THE OUTLAWED COLONIES

Game Theory

Heirs of Avalon

Apex Predator

Babylon Shattered

The Arcadian Web

Cloned Ambition*

Daughter of Shadows*

City of Deception*

Riddle of the Halivaara Wheel*

Day of the Clone*

MAGI OF RULARI TRILOGY

Spell of The Magi

Magi Storm

Paladin

NON-FICTION

The Complete Modern Artist’s Handbook

PAMPHLETS

Introduction to The Internet #1

The Hard Stuff – Handbook #2

Art Show Basics – Handbook #3

Framing on a Budget – Handbook #4

Are You Making Money? – Handbook #5

For Writers Only – Handbook #6*

*Working Title. Release dates TBA

About This Book

Afast-paced Sci-Fi novel of adventure, mystery and romance on the forbidden colony of St. Antoni.

A little Old West, a little Science Fiction, A little Victorian Steampunk, a touch of Mystery and Romance, and a whole lot of Fun!

When the law comes knocking at her door, sixteen-year-old Francis Dominique answers with a strength and resilience born of tragedy. After her father killed her mother, Francis is left with the responsibility of caring for her two younger sisters in the wild and untamed colony of St. Antoni. To make ends meet, Francis takes a job as the receptionist to the Enforcers, St. Antoni's elite law enforcement bureau, and finds herself unexpectedly drafted into an investigation of the outlaws robbing the trains connecting St. Antoni's City States. But when her father escapes from the Asylum for the Criminally Insane, and a lawyer with a custody writ arrives with intentions to take her sisters away, Francis must prove her strength and courage in order to protect her family and catch the outlaws.

If you enjoyed the combination of western, science fiction, steampunk, mystery, and romance elements in books like The Wild West Adventures of Annie Oakley by Steven A. Stanko, you'll love the thrilling adventure and emotional depth The Gaslight Bandits.

Table of Contents

GAIL'S OTHER BOOKS

About This Book

Born Upon The Tide

A Gypsy's Ribbon

The Indigo Moor

Under The Jeweled Sky

The Moonlight Ribbon

With Stealthy Tread

Born To Talk Back

Daddy Was a Mean Man

Flesh, Blood and Bone

Whiffling Through The Wood

Still, Still The Shadows Stay

Take My Hand

The Road Less Traveled

A Bright Red Rose

By Hook or by Crook

A Disreputable Pair

All The Ways of Dusty Death

The Stars At Night

Hide & Seek

A Father's Love

Thus, It Is Proven

Carousel of Life

About The Author

A Note From Gail

Bonus Excerpt: Magi Storm

About Magi Storm

From Jacite With Love

A Stubborn Woman

Man With A Mission

Born Upon The Tide

FRANCIS DOMINIQUE looked up from her typewriter and glanced out the large windows in front of the reception room and sighed. The view was uninviting; winter's steel grey skies were still dripping rain. It was the first of December and the Christmas season looked like it was coming in wet. This would be her and her sisters first Christmas without their mother, who had been murdered earlier in the year. This news had come with the devastating news their father, instead of being the mild-mannered bookkeeper they had thought him, had in realty been a killer for hire who murdered prostitutes for fun on the side. He was currently residing in an asylum for the criminally insane on the outskirts of Junction City.

Francis was now the sole support of her two younger sisters, thirteen-year old Hetty and ten-year old Sydney. They had an older sister Lila, but instead of assuming her place as the new head of the family when tragedy struck, she spent her time in her room moping over her lost marriage chances.

Francis survived her summer baptism of fire and emerged from her trials with a steel spine. With her parents gone and her older sister a useless burden, she had shouldered the responsibility of ensuring Hetty and Sydney had food, clothing, a place to live and were able to attend school.

Her friend Chloe, an Enforcer who was engaged to the chief Enforcer here in Junction City had suggested Francis go to work in the Enforcer's office. Francis had applied and Caleb Jones had hired her as a secretary and part-time investigator for the Junction City Bureau of Law Enforcement.

Unlike her older sister Lila, Francis was no raving beauty; she was a tall, slender woman in her late teens, with her dark hair drawn up in a neat braid coiled on the top of her head. Her cool blue eyes looked out at the world from an oval, high-cheek boned face with a firm lipped mouth and obstinate jaw.

She was alone in the reception area this morning. The building had once housed a general mercantile store with living quarters in the upper story and stables out back. When Caleb Jones opened the new Enforcement office, he had retained the upstairs as living quarters, now occupied by himself and his cousin Hercule Jones, another Enforcer.

The downstairs store had been divided into a reception area, offices, a storage room and a kitchen with an attached mudroom. As he was every morning, Caleb was out back checking on his tricorns and dogs.

The tricorns everyone used for riding, pulling carriages, and plowing were native to St. Antoni. When the first colonists snuck through the illegal portal to the planet, they immediately realized some form of transportation was needed. Tricorns, like the horses of earth they resembled, were herd animals and readily adapted to being domesticated. Two sharp horns jutted out on their foreheads above their eyes, with a shorter, blunt horn on the nose just above their nostrils. St. Antonians used them for the same things earthly horses had been used for until they were replaced by vehicles with motorized engines.

When Caleb opened the office, he had expanded the original four stall stable to make room for the three riding animals owned by the Enforcers office and the privately-owned beasts ridden by Francis, Chloe, Caleb and his cousin Hercule. Included in the expansion had been a four-cubicle kennel run for the large dogs Caleb had brought with him from Copper City.

Caleb's cousin Hercule, who occupied the spare upstairs bedroom, was in the kitchen eating breakfast. There was a marked family resemblance between the Jones cousins; both men were about medium height and had dark, near black hair and grey eyes. Most people meeting Caleb were intimidated. He had earned his reputation as a tough Enforcer who would bring outlaws in alive if they didn't fight him, or dead if they did. He didn't particularly care which, and it showed.

While her boss didn't intimidate her, Francis couldn't imagine falling in love with him the way her friend Chloe had. Hercule was another matter. It would be all too easy to allow herself to dream about his easy-going smile being turned on her as something other than a friend and colleague. Hercule was tall and slender, with the olive skin, wedge-shaped face and sharply cut features of the Jones men. On his cousin, the Jones features looked harsh and forbidding, probably due to the scar on one side of his face, but on Hercule, they gave character to an otherwise too handsome visage. Despite his resemblance to Caleb, she found it impossible to be intimidated by a man who had dimples when he smiled. He's older than you and probably considers you a little girl, she reminded herself sternly.

Francis had ridden over  to work this morning with Chloe. When Francis had come inside, Chloe had stayed in the stable and kennel area to check on Athena, the bitch Caleb had assigned to her in the spring. Athena usually accompanied Francis and Chloe back and forth from the house where they lived, but she was on hiatus from duty as she was expected to whelp soon.

The Jones Bred dogs were highly prized on St. Antoni. They were Hybrids of several earth breeds smuggled through the Gateway by Portal Runners. The dogs were superb trackers and guard dogs. Rottweiler ancestry not only gave them guarding instincts, but their massive size, heavy bone structure and powerful jaws. A little Bloodhound had provided the super sensitive noses that gave them their wonderful tracking ability. From their Border Collie genes came intelligence and a thick coat of multi-colored fur.

Dogs weren't the only items smuggled through the Gateway. Despite the threat of jail time and heavy fines for violating the Portal Settlement Acts, Portal Runners brought in a steady trickle of items (mostly medicines, diagrams for machines, books, plant cuttings or seeds, and a few specialty items hard to make on St. Antoni). These things were highly valued on a planet without its own technological resources. Usually a runner also brought in a couple of new colonists desperate to escape Earth for a variety of reasons.

Having been born on St. Antoni, Francis didn't find the mixture of technologies strange. The first settlers on St. Antoni had the good fortune to land on a planet closely resembling earth in the Pleistocene Epoch and set out to create their own society, unfettered by restraints imposed by governments of earth. The constellations overhead might be new and strange to Terran eyes, but St. Antoni's buttery yellow sun looked down on blue seas, lush, grass covered prairies, dense forests, high snowy mountains, and hot dry deserts. Large rivers and small streams threaded the continents. Three closely connected moons orbited the planet and regulated its tides. Plants, animals and the fish in the oceans were genetically close enough to those of earth to support human life. With icy polar regions and enough of a tilt to provide seasonal changes, St. Antoni's temperature range made humans feel quite at home.

Of course there were drawbacks to being completely free from Earth's influence: when the first colonists arrived, they were dropped barehanded into a primaeval world. There were no factories and no power to run them, no huge farms to grow and distribute food or machines to assist in building homes and towns.

It took several hundred years for St. Antoni's new settlers to develop into seven City States with loosely connected governments. They now had paddle boats and trains that ran on steam. The more affluent had home generators providing stoves, refrigerators and lights, all powered by steam.

Francis looked out at the steady drizzle of rain coming down and made a face. She was tired of winter. Junction City was low enough in elevation for it not to snow often, but during the winter months when the mountains and foothills were covered in snow, the Delta was a sodden mess. She had been hoping to take Hetty and Sydney up into the mountains to enjoy the snow this weekend, but the rain would make travel impossible.

Thanks to the seemingly never-ending weeks of winter rain, the street in front of the office was a quagmire. The planet of St. Antoni didn't yet have the technology to create asphalt to pave its roadways, so the winter rains made mud out of the normally hardpacked earth covering the street. The Enforcer office had been built high enough off the ground not to be submerged by ankle deep water, but the stable area behind it wasn't. Last month Francis had helped to sandbag the stables and kennel areas to protect them from being flooded.

Above the stable was a large loft for storing hay and a two-bedroom apartment where Bill Jenkins the stableman and George Carmody the cook shared bachelor quarters.

A wooden boardwalk stretched along the front of each storefront lining the street. Each building was separated by an alley wide enough to drive a wagon through it. Across the street it was the same. Most of the buildings were half timbered, with river stones making up the lower portion of the ground floor.

As Francis watched through the glass windows covering the walls of the reception area, a closed carriage with an umbrella hood over the driver came to a sliding halt in front of the hitching rail. The driver of the carriage jumped down from the box, splashing dirty water up to the tops of his leather boots. He opened the carriage door and let down the steps to allow a large woman to descend. She was dressed in an oiled leather overcoat coming to her knees and a wide brimmed hat to keep the rain off her greying hair. She wore dark grey trousers tucked into knee high boots.

The driver took her arm so she wouldn't slip in the slick mud, and assisted her to the boardwalk. Once she was safely out of the mud, he returned to the carriage.

Thank you, Michel, she told him. I see a livery stable down the street. You can take the carriage there and wait for me out of this rain.

He tipped his hat and drove off.

Francis realized the woman intended to enter the office, and quickly got up to open the door for her.

Good morning, I'm Francis, she told her visitor. Why don't you let me hang up your coat and hat so they can dry off? There's coffee over there, please help yourself to it, she gestured to a side table against the wall holding cups, saucers and light brown cubes of sweetener made from a root closely related to earthly sugar beets. The pot itself was sitting on top of the Bluestone stove used to heat the room.

Shed of her enveloping coat and hat, the woman facing Francis was still large. Francis herself was tall, but this woman made her feel like a dwarf.

Francis hung the woman's dripping hat and coat on the coatrack and turned back to her.

How can I help you, Ma'am? she waited for the woman to introduce herself.

My name is Jones, the woman said. Hortense Jones. Where are my nephews?

Won't you sit down, Mrs. Jones? Francis asked. Caleb is out in the stables checking on one of the dogs. I believe Hercule is still eating breakfast in the kitchen. I'll let them know you are here.

No need for that, I'm here. How are you Aunt Hortense? Hercule set his coffee cup down on Francis' desk so he could give Hortense a welcoming hug.

Better for seeing you, boy, his aunt said, returning the hug with enthusiasm. There are so few of us left, it's hard not being together as a family, especially at Christmas.

A shadow crossed Hercule's face. I know, he said soberly. But you know why the decision to spread the family out was made. Are you and Cousin Lucille still safe where you are?

That's something I came to talk to you and Caleb about, she said. and to meet my soon to be niece.

Athena and the puppies will need to be indoors in this weather, Chloe argued, as she and Caleb came back from the stables through the kitchen.

It's a law enforcement office, Chloe, Caleb protested. We can't interrogate prisoners with puppies running around underfoot.

We won't be interrogating them here; we haven't got an interrogation room, Chloe retorted. We will be using the Sheriff's office and jail across the street.

Caleb!