Star Navigator Read online

  Star Navigator

  Stranded in the Stars: Book Three

  ***

  By Naomi Lucas

  Copyright © 2016 by Naomi Lucas

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission in writing from the author.

  Any references to names, places, locales, and events are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  ***

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Star Navigator (Stranded in the Stars, #3)

  Chapter One:

  Chapter Two:

  Chapter Three:

  Chapter Four:

  Chapter Five:

  Chapter Six:

  Chapter Seven:

  Chapter Eight:

  Chapter Nine:

  Chapter Ten:

  Chapter Eleven:

  Chapter Twelve:

  Chapter Thirteen:

  Chapter Fourteen:

  Chapter Fifteen:

  Chapter Sixteen:

  Chapter Seventeen:

  Chapter Eighteen:

  Chapter Nineteen:

  Chapter Twenty:

  Chapter Twenty-One:

  Chapter Twenty-Two:

  Chapter Twenty-Three:

  Chapter Twenty-Four:

  Chapter Twenty-Five:

  Epilogue:

  Author’s note:

  Stranded in the Stars:

  Last Call

  Collector of Souls

  Star Navigator

  (Coming Soon)

  Cyborg Shifters:

  Wild Blood

  Storm Surge

  Shark Bite

  Dedication:

  To my loving husband.

  Copyright © 2016 by Naomi Lucas

  Stranded in the Stars

  Chapter One:

  Chapter Two:

  Chapter Three:

  Chapter Four:

  Chapter Five:

  Chapter Six:

  Chapter Seven:

  Chapter Eight:

  Chapter Nine:

  Chapter Ten:

  Chapter Eleven:

  Chapter Twelve:

  Chapter Thirteen:

  Chapter Fourteen:

  Chapter Fifteen:

  Chapter Sixteen:

  Chapter Seventeen:

  Chapter Eighteen:

  Chapter Nineteen:

  Chapter Twenty:

  Chapter Twenty-One:

  Chapter Twenty-Two:

  Chapter Twenty-Three:

  Chapter Twenty-Four:

  Chapter Twenty-Five:

  Chapter Twenty-Six:

  Epilogue:

  Author’s note:

  Chapter One:

  They didn’t have to die, those men before me. I didn’t have to die either, and so far I’ve beaten the odds.

  Reina looked down at the skin of her arm. She twisted the lithe appendage, flipping it over, surveying the reddened joints. There was a long incision that began at her palm and ran all the way to her shoulder. The cut stopped at her armpit but then started back up along the front of her neck.

  It itched. Sometimes it swelled.

  At first, it had made it hard to breathe, hard to move, and then the headaches began, followed by weeks of fever and sweat. Reina remembered the sweat. She nearly drowned from it, and from the sharp pain as the salty dew of it leaked into her wounds.

  Now her skin was pulled taut as it tried to heal. Her body fought to adjust to the invasive and very alien feel of what the Earthian Council had done to her.

  They had purged her of her bones, her muscles, her nerves, and replaced them all with metal.

  “Try not to move it, Reina. It’ll just make the recovery process longer.” The cybernetic surgeon who attended her sighed and eyed her arm with a strange, covetous focus. The surgeon gently took hold of her twitching hand and extended her arm outward between them.

  Reina tried to remain calm, but couldn’t stop her nausea from resurfacing; she winced as the woman probed her sensitive skin. “Why is it taking so long to heal?” She gritted her teeth. The doctor spread fresh salve over the long cut, pressing it into the wound. She is not being gentle.

  “Your genetic code is still mutating alongside the nanocells. Once the process is over...” The doctor paused and turned Reina’s wrist slightly. “The swelling is going down. It’s a good sign.”

  “I know,” she conceded and took a deep breath. “I know,” Reina said again just to hear it as the doctor began to re-bandage her.

  “The pain and discomfort are a small price to pay. Millions would be envious of this implant–”

  “–I know.” Please stop lecturing me. I don’t want to hear that. It had been the only comfort the doctors gave her as she lay in their lab in agony.

  The woman shot her a look. Reina could feel the judgement through her skin, straight into the center of her robotic arm.

  The arm felt too heavy and had a fluid yet stiff movement structure that was entirely foreign to her anatomy. The cybernetic metal ran from the tips of her fingers to a cyberorganic chip in her brain. Wires were threaded throughout her shoulder and neck. They ended in a wormy mass in her head. She clenched her teeth as she willed the image away.

  The doctor held her tongue while Reina pulled the sleeve down of her gown, concealing her arm from view. The joints of her unaltered fingers twitched.

  My arm is worth more than an Earthian battleship. More than the claim of transportation spaceways. Warp drives. Research labs. Her heart raced as the surgeon turned away from her.

  She rolled her shoulder.

  “You will need to apply the salve twice a day, every day.” Why do doctors always assume you can’t read labels? “Try.” The demand was evident. “Please, try not to move it more than necessary. Your genome and the cybercells will pair soon enough. The discomfort will end.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “We’ll remove the technology and replace it with synthetic biomaterial,” the woman huffed, “you know this.”

  Reina pulled her arm against her and cradled it over her chest. I know that isn’t the truth.

  They stared at each other in silence until their battle of wills ended with a chime. The appointment was over. She looked down at her new appendage, still held heavily over her torso, as the woman turned away and grabbed a bottle and an applicator. She handed them to her in silence.

  With the medication in her reliable, human hand, Reina left the lab without a backward glance.

  SEVERAL DAYS HAD PASSED as her body continued to mutate with the aggressive nanocells. Everything still felt unfamiliar to her but the swelling had all but vanished. The incision that graced her body, the seam that weaved her skin back together, now only itched and flaked. The new manmade cells took over her body with increasing ease.

  Reina closed her eyes. I’m going to live.

  Now that she had been cleared for her mission, her health regulated, the next phase began. She sat erect in her uniform in a room surrounded by large bay windows, waiting for her commanding officers to arrive. Her eyes drifted to the view outside.

  A storm raged, and the skies whirled with a thick grey haze. Reina was sitting in a glass room, on Earth, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. She imagined that she could hear the whistle of wind, but the conference room was soundproof and impenetrable.

  She couldn’t stop the strange circumstances that fate had dealt her these past several weeks. She had been approached by the Earthian Council for this mission directly, and even now she wasn’t quite sure why, although she had her suspicions: they wanted to remove her from her pos
t because she had become a diplomatic liability.

  Regardless, something in her heart told her to take it. Reina wasn’t sure if it was the intrigue of the request, an abiding loyalty to her people, the bone-deep boredom that had settled into her being and stuck to her soul like glue, or maybe it was the fact that she felt alien amongst her crew, being the only woman on the bridge of her previous assignment.

  They had been her family but she was never able to emotionally connect with anyone aside from her commander, and that had been a recipe for disaster. Fraternization with the boss was severely looked down upon, and after her commander pulled every string to save her from the treatise with the Trentian aliens, it would look even worse.

  The implications were there.

  Besides the occasional tryst, the only bed she wanted to warm was her boss’s. She had worked up the courage to confess to him when she received this mission. He was her mentor, and the taunting smiles he gave his team still gave her goosebumps.

  He would only ever see me as a friend, or at most a little sister.

  But it wasn’t only that. Women had once been a norm in the Space Fleet, but were now just a memory. It had become too dangerous, even amongst the men to whom she could entrust her life, to remain with the Peace Keepers. The Trentians they often worked with now knew of her status as a single woman.

  The Trentians. The humanoid alien species that inhabited the other side of this galaxy, who the Earthian people had run into during the first galactic exploration missions. It had led to the worst war in history, and the first galactic war. Reina hoped that another galactic war would never happen.

  We would lose.

  It raged for over a century but had ended in desperation several generations ago. The barbaric, mystical ghost people were compatible with humans, and with the breeder’s disease disaster and the billions of lives lost on both sides, an uneasy truce was struck. A truce that not everyone honored.

  The waves and wind mixed outside until she could barely tell them apart. Kind of like my emotions. She frowned. Kind of like my thoughts.

  The door to the room slid open and Reina stood to attention.

  Two men in uniform entered: one she knew was the lead scientist at the cybernetics lab here on Earth, Dr. Estond, and the other was Space Fleet’s own Lieutenant General Wasson.

  “At ease, Captain Reynolds.” Will I ever get used to being called captain? The lieutenant general and the scientist took their seats at the ovaline table and she followed suit. Dr. Estond placed a round techno-projector between them. A blue light blipped on and blinked intermittently. Reina had seen them used before to create holograms of space sectors; they were often used in navigation.

  The lieutenant general placed a clear tablet before her on the table. Reina looked at him for allowance before she initiated the flow. “Call me Captain Reina, please. Thank you, sir.” The mission dossier came to light.

  “Captain Reina it is then. How’s the arm feeling?” Wasson asked.

  She looked away from the file. “It’s healing, sir.”

  “Can we see it?” The scientist inquired. She looked at Wasson expectantly, and with a nod, Reina shrugged out of her jacket and extended her arm across the table between her and the scientist. Dr. Estond folded up the cloth of her uniform and rolled the appendage from side to side. His fingers were cold and curious.

  The general eyed the exchange, seemingly waiting for the man’s opinion. Reina flinched as Estond pressed his thumbs hard against the sides of her wrist. “That hurt?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. The tissue is still new and the small amount of swelling left makes it ache.”

  “You’re healing slower than you should be.”

  “But I am healing, sir.”

  Wasson looked at his comrade. “Captain Reina was cleared by your team, Estond.”

  The scientist released her and Reina gladly unfolded her sleeve, hiding her raw skin from their view. “They were correct in doing so. We just like to monitor every variable, and Captain Reina’s recovery is important to us.”

  It’s important to me too. She pulled on her jacket.

  “Maybe my cells are stronger than your manmade ones.” She bit her tongue, quickly adding, “Sir.”

  The lieutenant general sat back with a slight smirk while Estond adjusted his glasses. His face was pensive.

  “Maybe they are,” he stated after a thoughtful moment.

  “Well, this is a briefing, and now that we have the okay to continue, let’s proceed.” Wasson waved his hand at the tablet.

  “Let’s.” Estond kept his eyes trained on her.

  Reina reigned in her emotions and looked at the file before her just as a large wave rolled up and hit the bottom of the clear bay windows. The utter silence only heightened the violence of the torrential storm outside.

  The downpour fell from her thoughts as it fell from the sky.

  Wasson cleared his voice. “You have already been made aware of the mission and its more pertinent confidential details.” He sat forward. “You took on this assignment the moment you went under for cybernetic surgery.”

  “Yes, sir.” Reina knew a warning when she heard one.

  “If you change your mind–if you falter–if you so much as deviate from the mission in any way that directly impedes the goal–you will be labeled a traitor to the Earthian Council.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “If that isn’t warning enough, know that you will be brought in by the Council, dead or alive. If you should live, it will be an arduous life on a prison planet.” The lieutenant general rubbed his mouth and admitted, “To be blunt, your arm has an embedded tracker in it.”

  You’re very transparent, sir.

  Reina willed her face to stay straight and her heart to stop racing. “I am aware, sir.” I know what I signed up for. Was it worth it? She and the lieutenant general stared at each other.

  “Since you are aware. We will move on.”

  She shifted her eyes away from the men.

  “Ships have been vanishing outside of the network’s reach. When communication drops away, it never comes back online.” Reina skimmed the file as he spoke. “The first ships disappeared right after the war. We didn’t think anything of it at the time. War casualties? The first ones were two transporter ships that were lost, looking for habitable outposts farther away.

  “As you know, we suffered extreme loss of life during the galactic war. The Trentians lost even more. Our species remains devastated, and that devastation is exacerbated by continual expansion and exploration. There is a lack of control: we can’t keep our people confined to a single planetary system anymore. There is so much out there that we are not aware of. We are stretched thin.” Wasson took a deep breath. “Of course some loss is expected. Space is a dangerous place after all but over the years, more ships have vanished, more than we would anticipate–”

  “–You don’t believe it’s the Trentians, sir?”

  “Not anymore. We have been in communication with their government and the Intergalactic Council, and it turns out that their ships have disappeared as well.” Wasson leveled a look at the projector between them. Reina followed his gaze. “We have monitored the deep space sectors where the ships are vanishing, and have even deployed satellites in those areas. They come back with nothing, not even a black hole, until they disappear as well.”

  I signed up to die. She kept her face straight.

  “Which leads me to your mission.” Wasson paused. “And to be frank, you are not the first person we have sent out to investigate. Over the last twelve years, we have sent out militarized forces, expecting alien involvement. We have sent out top scientists, equipped with state of the art technology. And the aforementioned satellites.”

  “Why am I different, sir?” Dr. Estond and Lieutenant General Wasson both looked at her arm. Well, there's my answer. Reina tensed the new muscle tissue but stopped as the foreign sensation of it wrapped around metal made her nauseous again.

 
“To continue, we have lost a significant amount of resources, and an even more significant amount of personnel trying to solve this mystery and bring our people and technology home. You and your team will be the final attempt. If you don’t make it back or are unable to relay any information to us, we will start the process of setting up perimeter radar blockades in those sectors to stop others from traveling through. The Trentians are agreeable to this course of action. Whatever is beyond our reach, killing our people and destroying our ships, we don’t want coming any closer to us.”

  Dr. Estond interjected, “To answer your question, Captain Reina, you are different because you are the key to the ship we are sending.” He nodded at her arm. “Your arm has override access and control of this ship’s systems, beyond manual control. The ship will not fly without you. It will do nothing without you. The ship is yours as long as you have that arm, and you are ours for the same duration.”

  Reina thought her heart might stop. As the fear settled in, it left her just as quickly and an overwhelming excitement shot through her. She could feel it from the tips of her bionic fingers to the goosebumps over her scalp.

  So many thoughts raced through her head. But one stood out more than the rest: They own me. Beyond her service contract, beyond her free-will.

  “If I am successful...” She had to know. “What will happen to me, sir?”

  “If the mission is a success, you will be promoted. You and your ship will become part of the Earthian Space Fleet Exploration Division, and you will command your own crew until your contract ends.”

  “And my arm?”

  Wasson and Estond shared a look. “Will remain with the ship,” Wasson answered soon after. “We hope you will remain with both.”

  “Is there no other way?” Reina glanced down at the cyber-appendage, hidden amongst a very human layer of skin.

  “We can integrate you into the Neoborg program.”

  Reina looked beyond the two men in front of her and to the raging storm outside. The waves climbed higher up the crystalline windows.

  “WOULD YOU LIKE TO MEET your team, Captain Reina?” Wasson asked.