Last Stand at Rimont: A Space Magic Western Short Novel

By Filip Wiltgren

Sometimes, your safe haven turns into your worst nightmare…

You can’t spend eternity among the stars. Sometimes, you need to dock to trade, refuel, refit. Sometimes, all you want is a bowl of good chili, a cold brew, and something to stare at except your ship’s steel bulkheads.

Sometimes, that’s what you get. And sometimes, what you get is war.

Jake – the Warded Gunslinger – needs a rest, and his ship needs repairs, discretely. What better place to head for than a trade hub where no one’s heard of him?

But when the trade station erupts into civil war turning into genocide, the Warded Gunslinger can’t stand idly by…

Last Stand at Rimont is a short novel of guns and magic in a distant future, where dragons are real, warp-stone ships roam the galaxy, and spaceports are full of scum, villainy, and people you really have no business saving. It’s got cowboys and crooked politicians, found family, true companions, and magitech in a sprawling space opera.

Last Stand at Rimont is the third standalone novel in the Warded Gunslinger series. Get it now!

• Language: English
• Publisher: LVE Press
• Release date: Feb 27, 2024
• ISBN: 9789189545083

Book preview

Chapter 1

I don’t like it, Hao said, fidgeting in her spot in the co-pilot’s couch, making it twist from side to side. The couch’s bearings squeaked annoyingly.

What’s not to like? I said. We’re two hundred light-years from Jackson, nobody knows us, and nobody has heard of the Bucket of Dice. Besides, we can’t stay alone forever. Don’t you want to see other people?

The collision alert kept winking orange on my pilot’s readout, which was the ship’s way of saying that we were going to pass through a star system. Other than that, the entire board was green. Engines green, sensors green, power green. Even the auxiliary connectors were signaling green, something I didn’t think was possible on the Bucket. Before Hao signed on, I hadn’t even known we had auxiliary connectors or a secondary power system. The Bucket had been a junkyard salvage when I got my hands on her. Hao had done wonders for it in the past four months of travel.

Or, said Hao, they’ve heard of the Bucket of Diamonds, an unarmed Mino StarWorks Javelin, carrying a live void wyrm free for the taking. And I like people, but this is a boiling pot.

A hatchling, I corrected. And he’s not free for the taking. A boiling pot would be nice. Something with spices.

Hao gave me one of her trademark icy cold looks from her too-blue eyes. Tall, skilled, and opinionated, that was my mechanic-slash-co-pilot.

Please remind me to remind you of those words after we get killed and your hatchling gets stolen, she said. Revise that to very opinionated.

Noted. I rolled my shoulders, creaked my neck. I’d spent way too long in the pilot’s seat. No one’s going to get killed. News don’t travel two hundred light-years in four months. Nobody travels two hundred light-years in four months.

We did, Hao corrected.

We are desperate. Which had been true. We’d been chased, shot at, blow up, and generally maltreated. Then we’d had four months of travel to repair, ward, and eat every scrap of fresh and frozen produce we’d had. Now we were only low on supplies.

We had a cargo bay full of vanilla and warded armor plates. The armor plates were three, five, and ten centimeter thick slabs of nanoformed steel warded against various things, mostly impact. Good work, which I should know, having done the wards myself. Not fancy, but something a small, independent trader might have for sale.

The vanilla was organic, planet-grown, and wonderfully aromatic. I was crudmunchingly tired of it.

But the Bucket had undergone a transformation. The command couches were light cream, not their old color of weak coffee. The system’s status readout shone green. The engines were calibrated. The ventilation was up to spec and its soft hum filled the cockpit with cool, dry air that, for some strange reason, occasionally smelled faintly of cinnamon. We even had a strong sensor net and good armor bolted on, much stronger than the wards I was willing to sell. All in all, it was a major improvement on how things stood four months ago.

Except for the final leg of our journey.

Rimont is a great place, I said. A quarter of a million citizens, major mining hub, no less than four gas giants extracting helium-3, and most importantly, no Goldilocks zone planet within fifty light-years. Meaning that our vanilla, which I assume you’re as tired of as I am, will be worth a kiloton of helion.

Which was an exaggeration, helium-3 not being all that much cheaper even in a production system, and us having only four crates of vanilla, but I wanted Hao to see my point.

I still don’t like it, she said, her bushy eyebrows drawing together. We could find a small trading post-

Where we would be remembered, I interrupted. And when the stories about us reach that place, people would put two and two together and add up to Syndicate involvement. Or the Feds. We’d get as hunted as before. There are advantages to pots.

Hao twisted in her couch, the bearings squeaking again. She’d fixed our warpstone engines. She’d re-cut the couch’s supports, lowering it and allowing her to sit without cramming her head into the ceiling, and suddenly she couldn’t fix a squeaky bearing?

Will you stop that? It’s annoying.

Sorry, captain, Hao said, putting the stress on the cap in captain the way the navy did it. In the past four months, I’d discovered that she could have a passive aggressive streak a kilometer wide when it suited her. Fortunately, it wasn’t permanent but rather a negotiation tactic. She twisted her co-pilot’s couch. The bearing squeaked.

I sighed theatrically.

Fine, I said. Be a voidmunching crudsucker. But please give me a reason why we shouldn’t go to Rimont.

She fell silent, staring out through the Bucket’s high-tempered quartz viewports. The viewports were ten centimeters thick, and warded around the edges. Outside, the stars crawled by, tiny specs of light in a sea of darkness, shifting ever-so-slowly to our rear.

Well? I said.

Hao shrugged. I just don’t like it.

I’ll keep that in mind, I said. Dock, sell, buy, refit, eat, leave. Nothing more.

Oath?

Oath, I replied. Unless they have a swimming pool, in which case all oaths are off.

That got me another raised eyebrow. And to think it had just resumed its normal position.

What? I said. Wouldn’t you want to spend some time in a civilized place, eating well-cooked meals, sleeping in a decently-sized bed, and swimming whenever you wanted?

The second bushy eyebrow joined the first. You’d jump in a hole filled with water? One deep enough to require a breathing apparatus to survive?

And I’d enjoy every second of it.

You’re a very strange person, captain, Hao said, but she said it with a smile.

Chapter 2

Rimont station was built in a traditional style, with a large central wheel extruding perpendicular spikes. Most of those held gigantic gas shuttles, low orbit craft the size of small moons that dipped into the outer parts of the metallic hydrogen layer of nearby gas giants, most notably Rimont II, the big, puke-green ball Rimont station orbited.

I tried to get a sense of scale on the station, looking at the numbers on my captain’s readout and failed. Dropping out of void space a hundred and twenty thousand kilometers away, it had been a tiny black speck against the gas giant’s swirling clouds. At twenty thousand kilometers, it was the size of my fist. Up close, it was immense, a mountain of liquid gas tanks, helion extractors and refinery gadgetry that dwarfed the Bucket.

We were assigned a shuttle berth, a dock reserved for small personnel craft. I was about to object, when I saw the size of one of the gas transports approaching the station and realized that the Bucket could have fit inside the bulge of its cockpit. Size means something different when you’re mining gas giants.

I shut up, accepting the berth Rimont control had given us.

We stopped by my gun locker on the way out. This time, both Hao and I were wearing mageshields. Not our combat sets, which I hadn’t finished warding, but moderately warded, soft leather jackets with a few armor plates covering our vitals. Something a successful small trader with contacts on a habitable planet might wear.

I considered taking my stockman, the hat’s worn leather smooth and comfortable in my hand. It was warded, and would add to my defenses, but it would stand out. Rimont Station wasn’t a place people wore wide-brimmed hats.

I didn’t want to stand out. Which was the reason I left both my foil and my magerifle, taking only pistols. I selected an M3 for me, figuring that while the heavy-caliber combat gun might cause me some trouble with the port authority, it would still be plausible for a small trader who wanted to appear big. Hao got my Chimer, a short-barreled gun better suited for a game table than a battle. Still, she didn’t like it.

Give me the fire knife instead, she said, pointing to my flameblade. Or let me carry a club.