C.M. Simpson's Blog, page 87

Carlie's Chapter 14 - Dear Tiger: Don't Look Back

LAST WEEK, Tiger revealed that FedExplore had caught up with him. This week, Simone reveals a rescue team has been sent.



Chapter 14 – Help is On the Way







Tiger!










I’ve sent help, but I don’t know if you’ll get this
before the help gets to you.



You’re on a ship—at least, that’s what the worm is
telling us. That’s the good news.



The bad news is that the last report said

Wednesday's Verse - Life Within the Planet's Depths

This week’s verse moves from a horror fantasy poem about defeating subtle evils to a science fiction verse about a race that lives within the planet's depths. It is taken from 366 Days of Poetry, a
collection of mixed-genre poetry released in 2016.










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Life Within the Planet's Depths

Tuesday's Short - Miss Delight's Mistake

This week’s short story takes us from the science fiction tale of one rogue's attempt to save his world against long odds to another science fiction story of adventure involving Odyssey's agents, some artifacts and a very close call. Welcome to Miss Delight's Mistake.





People are disappearing on the close archaeological
world of Jehornak, including an Odyssey operative’s sister, but that’s

Carlie's Chapter 13 - Dear Tiger: Don't Look Back

LAST WEEK, Simone revealed that Odyssey was hiding something from her. This week, Tiger says FedExplore caught up with him.



Chapter 13 – In a Bind










Hi Simone,





I’m sorry things are going dark on you. I’d send you
back your luck if I could, and I’d add a good measure of mine, too, but I
can’t. I think I’ve used up all the luck you sent, and any luck I might have
had left after

Wednesday's Verse - Demons in the Dark

This week’s verse moves from a fantasy poem about the end of a war to a horror fantasy poem about defeating a subtle evil. It is taken from 266 Days of Poetry, a
collection of mixed-genre poetry released in 2016.










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Demons in the Dark














A hand at my hip,


a demon at my side,


a

Tuesday's Short - Miguel Unmade

This week’s short story takes us from the science fiction tale of a colony investigator discovering that not all legends are made equal to a rogue going the extra mile to save his world against great odds. Welcome to Miguel Unmade.





Captured by the space wolves and held aboard
their battle cruiser, Miguel doesn’t think things could get worse—and then he
discovers he’s sharing his cell with

Carlie's Chapter 12 - Dear Tiger: Don't Look Back

LAST WEEK, Tiger said he was going to try to sneak aboard an Odyssey cruiseliner. This week, Simone reveals she's been moved into more 'secure' quarters by Odyssey, and that they're hiding something from her.Chapter 12 –Lotsa Luck
Good Luck, Tiger!
Break a leg, and all that kind of stuff.And take care.I’m glad to hear you’re all right, and I hope you made it off the ship you were hiding on, and onto a cruise liner, although no-one’s told me you’ve made it, yet, so I can’t wait for news.Seems to be the story of my life, waiting.I’m still waiting to hear from my parents. I thought they were with Odyssey, but Odyssey has gone really quiet about them, so I’m hoping for them, too—hoping that nothing has gone wrong between Odyssey getting them off-planet, and getting them here.Odyssey have moved me, too. They took me out of the room I was in, and put me in one that reminds me a lot of the one I was in when I was in the FedExplore complex—and they won’t tell me why. If I think about it too much, it scares me.But they’re still talking about me meeting up with my mum and dad. While they’re doing that, I figure nothing too bad is going on, and that helps keep me hopeful that everything is okay with my parents, even if Odyssey won’t tell me where they’ve taken them.It makes me nervous, Tiges, because Odyssey haven’t kept anything secret from me before, and now the only people I’m getting to see are the ones who can keep me out of their head. It’s a bit frightening to think they feel they have to do that.It makes me wonder what’s going wrong.Maybe you should wish me luck, Tiger.And tell me if the luck I sent you is doing any good, because, with what’s going on around here, I’m not sure if it’s working.  Hugs and hopes for the best  Simone-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The complete series is available as short, individual ebooks, and will become available as an omnibus, later this year. In the meantime, you can find them on this blog, until one week after the last chapter in the last book of the series has been posted, at which point this series will be taken down, and a new series serialised on site.
books2read.com/u/4Awrze
books2read.com/u/mgrxdR




















books2read.com/u/4DoG8D books2read.com/u/b5Mng1
books2read.com/u/3GYBla books2read.com/u/4782k8

NEW RELEASE: Trading by Shroomlight

This is just a quick note to say IT'S HEEEERE!

Trading by Shroomlight , the fifth book in the Magic Below Paris series is now live on Amazon.



Three caverns are secure, but a fourth stands in peril. Can Marsh and the shadow mages make the difference needed to save it?

An assassin.
Two rebellious children and a kat with attitude.
And a cavern on the brink of falling to invaders.
Ambushed on arrival, Marsh and the Protectors discover a cavern on the brink of destruction. With its inhabitants driven from their homes, and raiders on the move, Ariella’s Grotto is close to falling. Can Marsh and the Protectors tip the balance?
Or is the Grotto destined to fall.
And, if it does, can they hope save those taken?

Wednesday's Verse - King Ruford's Peace

This week’s verse moves from an eerie speculative piece about a dangerous journey home to a fantasy poem about ending a war. It is taken from 366 Days of Poetry , a collection of mixed-genre poetry released in 2016.
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King Ruford's Peace

Alternatives were few and far between,
But we tried,
Course we tried.
Decided there was nothing in between,
Ending or capitulating to our foes unseen,
Finally deciding what our fate would be,
Going forward with the plan.
How could we explain that we,
Instead would fight to our last man?
Just when all seemed bleak and lost,
King Ruford came through skies storm-tossed
Landing lightly a-dragon-back,
Meeting our leaders to suggest a different tack.
No-one had fought as long as he, so
Of course, he was the one to make us see that there were other
Possibilities.
Quite few, but there.
Rarely still King Ruford came,
Seeking to find the final game,
To end this war once and for all,
Until we all knew peace once more.
Very determined did he seem,
While planning the execution of our dreams,
Xenophobes had no place, he said.
You’ll need tolerance, or the war will continue, instead.
Zealots from both sides lost he, until he brought us victory.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------You can find the first two poetry collections at the links below - although there are plans to reissue them with more genre-appropriate covers in the future. The third collection will be released later in the year. books2read.com/u/mVLQZb books2read.com/u/bxgyLd

Tuesday's Short - Men of Sand & Light

This week’s short story takes us from the urban fantasy dreamscape of a vampire hunter and her nemesis to the science fiction world of a colonial investigator who finds that not all heroes live up to their legends. Welcome to Men of Sand & Light.  
It was meant to be a surprise for Allan’s farewell, but the only person who got surprised was me. And the only farewell I was lookin’ at was my own, which just shows it’s never a good idea to look too closely at your heroes—even when you’re asked to, because now I’m gonna need a little help.Men of Sand & Light


Allan Overdale was my hero—right up until I found what he’d really done when he’d walked into the Light of Alma Sands. And he wasn’t too happy to see me sitting perched on the bench in his workshop, leather-bound diary in one hand, scanner wand in the other.

“What do you think you are doing?” he demanded, and I looked up, hitting record on the palm dot that activated the remote camera I’d installed while I’d been waiting.
“Making sure the Chronicles have all the information,” I said.
“What have you got there?” he’d asked, and then he recognised the cover and his eyes went wide. “Give that to me!”
I turned the page and ran the wand over it, not panicking, not hurrying, but making sure each stroke was as smooth as I could make it. It was the best way to upload the data.
“You should have trusted us with the truth,” I said, and turned another page.
I could see he wanted to walk right on over and snatch the diary out of my hands, but I had a reputation, and he was rethinking the wisdom of the direct approach. Good. I looked him directly in the eye.
“Why did you do it?” I asked.
“I take it you read it before you started scanning?”
I nodded.
“So your implant has a copy.”
Again, I nodded. I could see where he was going with this, and I didn’t like how his mind was working. I was also very glad I’d thought of it, and put contingencies in place, because the look that flicked across Allan’s face wasn’t very heroic. Nor did it fit the ‘nice old man’ image most of the colony had of him. He wasour hero after all—the man who had stopped the Alma Sands Invasion. It was just a pity the truth said otherwise.
“Why’d you write it down?” I asked. “You had to know there’d be a risk.”
He propped himself on the desk by the door of his one-room cabin—another reason the people adored him: hero or not, was that his needs were modest and he refused to live beyond them… except that I had discovered this, too, was a lie.
“Why did you write it down?” I demanded, and flipped another page, it was either keep scanning, or start ranting, waving the book around, and demanding why he just couldn’t have been real, or told us the truth all along. “Why didn’t you just tell us?”
“What? And been known as the Alma Sands Butcher for the rest of my days. This way was better.”
“But you had choices!”
“All bad.”
“Yeah, but.”
“Look, kid. That book. That documents the truth. Your implant documents the truth. The mainframe documents the truth. I did what had to be done at the time, and I’ve had to live with it ever since.”
I forced myself to turn another page. I’d done scanning the Alma Sands incident. The pages telling about what he’d done when he’d stepped into the gleaming light that took him below the dunes might as well have been written in blood. And I disagreed with every word on every page, every decision he claimed to have made, every action he’d taken. Biting back the sheer outrage, I felt, I scanned another page, and another, and all the while, Allan watched me.
His honey-dark eyes had faded to pale yellow tones, and his tan-bark hair had become peppered with grey, but his body hadn’t let him down. It had grown more wrinkled and gnarled, for sure, but it was still stronger than most. I sat on the workbench, and knew I had no way of getting out of there quickly enough. I kept scanning, watching him for the slightest sign he would attack, half-hoping he’d try. I needed something to hit.
“How do you even know that what you’re scanning is the truth?” he asked, voicing the thought that had crossed my mind more than once that morning. “How can you be sure?”
“I can’t,” I admitted. “I keep hoping it’s not, that you lied in here, even if you lied out there.”
He shifted on the bench, and gave a grunt of approval.
“Well, at least not all my lessons were wasted,” he said.
“You said, you wanted humans to find a better way,” I reminded him, and raised the book and wand. “And then you write this?”
He shrugged.
“Well, I had to write something. It was part of the deal.”
“What deal?”
Allan didn’t answer, just gave me a steady stare. Well, two could play that game. I went back to watching him from over the top of the book, while I scanned its pages as quickly and carefully as I could. All the while, I knew the camera in the top corner was recording every movement and sound. I thought about what he’d said as I worked.
“There’s no mention of a deal in here,” I said, turning another page, “and you never talked about a deal.”
He arched an eyebrow.
I scanned another half-dozen pages, processing the possibilities while I watched him, watching me, thinking.
“Who?” I finally asked.
“What do you mean ‘who’?
“Who did you make the deal with?” I asked, and he stared. I scanned another page, and then expanded, “I mean, if you bargained the cure of their heir in your official report, and then you slaughtered them in this version, who was there to deal with?”
Allan smiled. Damn him! And all I could do was glare and go back to scanning. He let me get through the worst of what I had read before, obviously reading where I was at by the level of anger on my face.
“They are not the only people in the Sands,” he said.
“I know!” which, given the section I had just scanned, was true.
Two races lived in the sands, two species who warred for the water resources, and each of whom wanted, had wanted, to claim the mineral wealth, there, as their own. Now, there was only one race, and we weren’t supposed to know about it, weren’t supposed to know that the colonists who disappeared in the night were sold so Allan could retire in comfort—something elsehe hadn’t told the rest of the colony about.
He was about to announce that retirement, had confided it in me, which was why I’d come to the cabin in the first place, not to spy on him, but to find something more to celebrate about him, to discover something unknown that would only justify our love for him, even more. Well, that had been my initial intention. I hadn’t expected Ryvell to hand me a sealed communications packet from Odyssey, had not expected the orders within.
It seemed, in spite of all Allan’s clever manipulations of the Chronicles, that news of the disappearances had made it off-world, and Odyssey was curious. I wondered why my old employers were even interested. It wasn’t as though the colony had anything of value to offer. Perhaps, our hero, Allan, was about to get the recognition he deserved?
And then I read the orders.
Allan Overdale, hero of Alma Sands, saviour of our world. Allan Overdale—traitor!
I looked around. On the other side of the room, he was fidgeting with the drawer in the bench, popping it open with the ease of familiarity. I tried, but couldn’t’ see what he was doing, as his body blocked most of the view. I scanned another page, turned to the next—and he moved.
He moved like lightning, grasping my wrist and stretching my arm straight out from my side, tightening the skin as he slammed the hypoderm home. Depressing the plunger, he wrapped an arm around my torso, pulling me tight against his chest.
“The next shipment’s due,” he said, whispering the words in my ear, “and I know you’re curious.”
To my surprise, I didn’t lose consciousness. I lost the ability to control my limbs, and to speak, but not to breathe, or blink, or to feel a terrible heart-thudding fear. Allan picked me up in his arms, and carried me to the back of the hut.
“I know you’re recording this,” he said, “and that’s fine, because the records will be safe with me, and don’t fret for the colony. There will always be a colony, but I will control it. You want to know what happens to the vanished? Let me show you.”
And he let go of my legs, holding me upright against him, in the curve of one arm, while he flicked open a control panel and punched in the entrance code. I made sure to watch each finger curve and stroke. That code was vital to what had to happen next.
When the hidden door slid open, Allan dragged me through, and closed it behind me. I heard it lock, and knew the cabin would look as empty as it had when I’d arrived. I also knew the journal had been left open on the desk, and my scanner, with my prints and DNA lay beside it. It was small comfort, since I’d just entered into the part of the mission Katriana had said was the most dangerous.
Allan carried me down the corridor, and through another code-locked door. He noticed my stare, and laughed.
“Go ahead,” he said. “I change them often enough, and it’s not like those recordings are going to go anywhere useful, when this is all over.”
I didn’t want to think about what he might mean by that, so I kept silent. I also didn’t tell him he was wrong. My implant wasn’t colony-standard; it was an Odyssey implant. They’d let me keep it when I left, claimed to have deactivated the bits they didn’t want me using. Now, I wondered, because the orders had been immediate, and there’d been no mention of reactivation of the standard suite.
I should have felt angry about that, but I couldn’t. I’d been with Odyssey long enough to know how they operated. It was stupid to expect they’d behave otherwise just because they’d “allowed” me to retire. And because of all that, I knew I was transmitting, real-time, over what Odyssey called their insta-web. That, and I could feel it, always had—it was like a tide going in and out of my head, only, in this case, it was more out than in, as the input was being snatched instantly away.
Allan’s real quarters, the ones he’d built in secret, from the profits he’d made of selling colony members to the… I wished I could ask who he dealt with. Were they sand men, like the ones who had tried to kick us off their world, the ones who’d tried to negotiate with an Allan Overdale who’d already been bought by their enemies? Or what? And what did they have to do with the smugglers?
I thought of this because I was looking around Allan’s quarters and none of it had come through colony channels. Luxury items? He’d have never gotten it on a supply ship. Contraband? I ran an eye over his liquor cabinet, over the girl kneeling in the centre of his floor as though waiting for his return. She did not stir as he carried me by. Slavery, too? To what other levels of depravity had Allan sunk? All we’d wanted was a hero.
“Tour’s over,” he murmured, after we’d walked past several other well-appointed rooms.
That bathroom! I know it would have made him the most popular man on the world, if he’d have thought to share it. Hero or not, that bathroom would have had people forgive him a myriad of sins. In a way, I was glad the other colonists hadn’t seen it; what I was about to do would earn me enmity for life, but Allan sharing that bathroom would have gotten me dead and buried and lost forever.
And, as for that hydroponics section… my mouth watered just looking at it, and I was glad that whatever drug Allan had filled me with, allowed me to swallow the saliva. He glanced down and noticed the movement of my throat, laughing.
“You have no idea,” he said, “and I have no time to show you. I have to get back and clean up the cabin.”
This was true, so I did not argue, could not argue, but he read my face, anyway.
“What? You thought maybe someone would come in after you? Well, you do have a point, except I locked the place down so that couldn’t happen. Wouldn’t want the mayor or some other well-meaning soul to get in and discover the truth, now, would we?”
I wished he’d thought to do that with me, than remembered the codes Odyssey had slipped into the message. Dammit. I’d just had to go and look. What had I been trying to prove? Oh, yeah. I’d been trying to prove them wrong. There were days when I hated Miss Katriana Emilia Emily Delight. Days and days and days. She had been a large part of why I’d retired
Little Miss Perfect. What a bloody, ruthless-minded nuisance!
“Right. Through we go,” Allan said, and carried me into an airlock.
An airlock, hey? Maybe he wasn’t as happy with his allies as he claimed to be.
I was doubly surprised when the airlock opened and we stepped into a second one.
Two? Now, I was curious, and just a little alarmed. If a treacherous ass like Allan felt he needed this much protection, what sorts of precaution did the colony need to take? Not that it was going to be my problem—Odyssey would take me off-world as soon as I’d gotten the data they needed. The colony wouldn’t let me stay… well, not stay and live. Treachery, even if it was on their own behalf was not tolerated, and treachery that brought down a village hero… well, that didn’t mean I’d take Allan’s place.
Before he opened the outer door of the second air lock, Allan looked down into my face, then he set me on my feet, and dragged one arm over his shoulder. I guessed that would make me easier to hand over.
“You’re still armed, right?” he asked, and I realised that, yes, I was. “And that thing in your head is transmitting live, right?”
He laughed at the look on my face, not that it had changed. Maybe he’d seen the surprise in my eyes.
“Yeah, I know all about Odyssey’s little message. We took the courier the day after he’d already passed the message. Or rather,” he said, tapping in the code to release the lock, “my masters did. There are no secrets they cannot find.”
I let that process, aware of the sudden tingle that ran over my skin, signalling that whatever he’d given me was wearing off—too slow  to stop him from doing what he had planned next, of course. Far too slow.
“I don’t care if Odyssey sends someone after me,” he said. “I’ll be long gone—and they don’t share their secrets, so the colony will never know. They’ll still have their hero.”
I was outraged. All that talk about no one coming after me, about no one ever knowing—and he hadn’t been referring to the colony. He’d known about Odyssey, all along. Well, weren’t they going to be impressed with that! I wondered what had happened to Ryvell, but the airlock opened.
It opened to reveal a cavern carved from the sandstone ridge that edged the desert and stopped it from over-running the colony proper. It also protected the only viable farmland we could find near the mines. It had protected us from the inhabitants of Alma Sands, too, at least for a while.
Allan dragged me through, and closed the door behind us. He supported me over to the open floor in the centre of the cavern, and set me down, lowering me until I was sitting. The tingle was becoming an itch, and I found I could keep myself upright, even if I couldn’t move my arms or legs. Allan noticed, too.
“Good,” he said, and went to a sliding door set into the far wall of the cavern. “Say hi to your new friends."
And he left me, just like that. I almost panicked, reaching for the Odyssey link, I was hoping was still live. It was, but it wasn’t hooked up. I couldn’t call for help. I could transmit real-time, but I couldn’t call for…. oh.
I tried to use my voice, but could do little more than make a hum. A hum… Okay, then. I tried to twitch the fingers of my hand. Allan had been careful to place my hands in my lap. I wasn’t sure why. He’d been pretty quick to abandon me. I wondered if the sliding door led to another entrance to his cabin, and then figured it probably took him to the back of the closest dunes, so he could come into the village like he usually did… or took him to a waiting escape pod.
“You are the Odyssey agent.” The voice sounded metallic, rocky, almost robotic. “Where is your keeper?”
I tried to open my mouth and answer them, almost succeeded. I was going to kill Allan when I was done with this. I was going to use every resource Odyssey had, and I was going to hunt him down and kill him… and then I was going to shoot him out an airlock, and hunt him down and kill him, all over again.
“Will you stand?”
I tried. I think my foot twitched, and maybe I managed a frown. I wanted to look around, but my neck muscles still wouldn’t respond. Damnit!
“Will you stand? Or must we come and collect you?”
“I’ll…” I paused, surprised to hear myself speak, and realising I had only one chance, hoping Odyssey and Allan’s ‘masters’ would understand through the slurring. “I’ll stand. Allan has abandoned me. I don’t know where to go.”
“Allan has delivered you, and removed himself from the loading area as instructed.”
“Loading area?” I tried, again, to turn my head, and discovered a fraction of movement.
My movements were observed.
“You have been drugged?”
“Yes.”
“Scanning.”
“Scanning?”
“We will come and collect you.”
Well, at least I wasn’t blind. There really wasn’t anyone in the chamber. I wondered what Odyssey was making of this. Before I could take that idea too much further, light flared on either side of me, fading to reveal what looked like a crystalline leg—an articulated crystalline leg. I couldn’t resist, I reached out to touch it—and found the best I could do was get my fingers twitching.
Allan must really be having a real laugh over this. No doubt he was watching me on some hidden monitor and laughing his backside off. At least, I hoped that’s what he was doing, because then Odyssey could find him in his hidden bunker, or on his escape pod, and arrest him. Stars! I hoped they arrested him.
“Up,” and sharp-edged digits curved under my arms, lifting me to my feet. I “upped”…. excellent. My hands dropped uselessly to my sides.
“Where?” I managed.
“Colony,” they responded, and I thought they meant my colony, the colony of humans I’d once belonged to. Silly me.
The light enveloped us, and then fizzled away. I had that moment of sickening giddiness as I was lifted out of one point in reality, and reassembled in another. It was a relief to see I hadn’t acquired any crystalline structures on the way through. My head fizzed and popped as the implant came back on-line, and I wondered if even Odyssey’s equipment could track me through that kind of transition.
The settlement I came into was not my own. Instead of standing at the foot of sandstone cliffs, this one was set amongst the sand-dunes, force domes over crystalline huts. Not my own colony at all, but a colony nonetheless.
“You’re not native to this world?” I asked, and the grips on my arms tightened.
“We were here before you.”
“And the sand men?”
“They were in our way.” Even out here, in the open, the creature’s voice had a metallic twang.
“So you destroyed them?”
“It was easy. The illness was not deadly. Your people would have recovered once they left the world.”
That news struck me a solid blow.
“You mean…”
“We only needed one man. Only one person had to die.”
“But you killed his wife!”
“She was collateral damage. It was the child we were after.”
My head spun, and I was glad of the hands on my arm.
“But why?”
“You had a chance to negotiate. We had not been able to access their chiefs.”
And Allan had been the colony’s head xenobiologist and chief trade negotiator. He’d been other things, too, as the slaughter at the sand man camp had shown, but I hadn’t known, and it didn’t fit.
“Did you train him?” I asked.
“To do what?”
“To kill?” As far as I had been aware, Allan had been a peaceful soul.
“We gave him the weapons.”
“But, how…”
“How did we meet, or how did we get him to agree?”
I could see where they were taking me, now. A three-story building, its entrance flanked by columns, its roof concealed in sand, its sheer walls a mix of sand and crystal.
“We offered him revenge. When he survived, we offered him wealth in return for specimens. He was very angry, still.”
Yes, I remembered that, nights when I’d listened to Allan rant over how the colony leaders were to blame. Threats of a vengeance I’d been sure he’d never carry out. How little I had known.
“Specimens?” I asked, feeling weak at the knees.
“There is very little arable land on this world.”
“But you could trade for crops.”
“You don’t grow what we need. At least, not in the way you mean.”
Now, real fear curled through me.
“What do you mean?”
“We can take much of our nutrition from the sands.” The creature gestured towards the dunes with its free hand, “but we also need small amounts of protein and some minerals.”
“This world is low on iron and calcium,” the other creature added, and I turned my head to look at it, relieved to find I could.
They were amazing creatures, all sharp angles and crystalline facets made to flesh. Every movement was accompanied by a soft ringing sound, as though the crystals rang. Both creatures were drawn in shades of pink, one slightly darker than the other, with amethyst highlights.
“We were relieved to discover a ready source close by.”
“So, you didn’tget here first!”
The lighter creature smiled down at me, and tightened its grip. The shade of its skin reminded me of pink quartz. It was beautiful, but it frightened me in a way quartz never had.
“We had marked the world for further exploration, and returned to find a human colony in place. That does not make it any less our possession.”
“But there was sentient life here.”
“Which you did not know about—and which your Allan murdered.”
“You gave him incentive.”
“No, they were the ones who poisoned your water supplies with their disease.”
“But you made it deadly.”
“It served our purpose.”
We had reached the doors, now, and I baulked at the steps leading down into the building proper. Both grips tightened, and I became aware of blood running down my arms.
“How many of you are there?” I asked, for I had not seen a single one of them emerge from the huts we’d passed.
“Enough that Ryvell will not be sufficient for us all.”
I shifted my arms, glad to discover that the walk across their village had been enough time for movement to be restored to my limbs, suddenly realising that my legs had been walking of their own accord for the last hundred metres or so.
I wondered how many times I could hunt Allan down, shoot him to bits, and then stick him in a regrowth tank so I could hunt him down, and shoot him up, again… and then I wondered if Odyssey would let me. I knew Katriana would, but she had always possessed a warped sense of justice. I’d even use the pistol he’d left strapped to my hip.
The… oh… on my hip… and just within reach of my fingers, too. I curled my hand over the top of the holster just as we started down the stairs, hoping neither of my crystalline captors noticed what I was doing, as I unclipped the cover.
The stairs took us down into a huge meeting hall. I looked at it and thought that, if the central pillar, with its steps and circular balcony was removed, there’d be enough space to park ten orbital shuttles side by side. Ryvell was lying on a slab of pure white crystal, looking terrified.
Crystal shackles enclosed his wrists and ankles, and I glimpsed a collar of crystal over his throat. What concerned me more, was the identical crystal slab standing equidistant on the opposite side of the pillar. I baulked, again, and my escort stopped.
“Well, Odyssey,” I murmured. “If you’re gonna do something, now’s the time.”
Without giving myself any more time to think, I jerked the pistol out of the holster and angled it away from my body, shooting the creature on that side of me in the leg. As I’d hoped, the crystal shattered, and the creature screamed in a jangle of sharding notes. It also let go of my arm, as it fell.
I did not try to pull free of the other creature, but spun in close so I was facing its chest as I fired up under what served it for a chin. This time, there was no scream as the creature dropped away, its head exploding in a crash of shards.
Keeping an eye on the other creatures around me, I moved quickly over to where Ryvell was held. Resisting the urge to blast my way through his bonds, I used my free hand and slid my fingers beneath the shackle. It did not lift away, but there was an irregular angle in there that I was able to slide to one side.
The shackle popped open, and I moved to the next one, a hand, this time, rather than a foot. The sooner Ryvell could free himself, the better. When his hand was free, I turned away, but a gasp of panic stopped me, and I remembered the collar across his neck. Well, that was gonna cramp my style.
I reached over, trying to keep an eye on the gathered crystal creatures who were starting to advance towards me. If these things had any kind of ranged weapon, I was done. I never did get to find out just how far I would have gotten with my rescue. The crystalline creatures were not the only things with a teleport, and Odyssey did not like losing its people.
Having heard that the crystal creatures intended to eat us, the company followed its edict of eliminating all threats to its colonies before opening negotiations. I often wondered why it did this, what alliances we missed with the whole ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ policy, and then I decided it didn’t matter. The reputation the company had as a result, won it more battles than one for mercy.
Katriana made an ideal company poster-girl…and speaking of Katriana.
She materialised in front of me in a flare of light and started shooting—and when I say in front of me, I mean facing me and shooting over my head and Ryvell’s stone. Pritchard, the guy who’d saved, and then been recruited by her, was at her back, the only person she ever had at her back, except for the cook—and he went a whole lot of places I doubted Pritchard was even allowed to see.
Huh! She raised her eyebrows at me, and took out three of the creatures who stood inside the ring of Odyssey operatives, and then she turned away from me and filled the space beside Pritchard. I was just about to feel honoured, when I heard her say, “Get them out of here,” and the light of teleportation flared around me and Ryvell and ripped us off-world.
We ended up on the Sugarsides, a luxury cruise-liner, somewhere deep in the hull near the drives. The passengers were probably watching the light refracting off the galaxy’s largest desert, given it had been coming up on dusk when I’d been taken through the crystal colony, but I found myself disarmed and stuffed into a debriefing cell until well after we’d left orbit.
“Did you find Allan?” I asked, when Katriana finally decided to see me.
“Well, we found what was left of him,” she said. “He got picked up by the Shards.”
“The Shards?”
“Those crystal people you got yourself captured by,” she explained, her tone suggesting my capture was all my own fault.
“How?”
“Well, he thought they’d give him a lift to the next system over. They ate him instead. I think we found traces of Allan in at least a dozen individuals from the ship.”
Traces… I let that sink in, but Katriana just went on with business. She put a tablet computer down on the table, turned it around and pushed it across to me, and then she passed me the stylus.
“Odyssey is pleased to welcome you back from furlough,” she said. “We’ve updated your contract to include the new terms of service. If you would just sign here, here, and here, we’ll get you kitted out and assign you new quarters.”I looked at her, and made a show of considering the contract. In the end, of course, I signed. I mean, who was I kidding? Odyssey had already helped me retire once, they’d surely do it again, right? 

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Men of Sand & Light is available as a stand-alone short story at the following links: books2read.com/u/bP180r.
You can also find Kristine Kathryn Rusch's latest free short story over on her blog: kriswrites.com. Why don't you go and check it out?