Jennifer Wells - Beyond the Stars - At Galaxy's Edge

When I’m not trying to save our current world from itself, I like to make up worlds to save. I’ve written a sci-fi/fantasy series called The Dream Guild Chronicles about a series of first contact experiences from the perspective of the aliens as well as number of sci-fi short stories. See http://davidbruns.com/books-stories/ for a complete list.

What are you working on now?

At the moment, I’m taking a break from thrillers to write a military sci-fi novel set in Nick Webb’s Legacy Fleet world. The new book is called Invincible , and is scheduled for release in Kindle Worlds on September 15, 2016. Here’s the tagline:

The Swarm took away her ship. Commander Addison Halsey plans to take it back.

If this sounds like your kind of book, get on my mailing list for an advance review copy.

THERE I WAS, surrounded by five of the deadliest scumbags in the galaxy. Five guys who had murdered some of the baddest of the bad. They were taking aim at me, and all I could think about was making sure she was safe.

But I wouldn’t exactly call it a love story.

A lust story, maybe. Is that a thing? All I know is, I would have done anything for her. Anything at all. And she wasn’t even human.

Don’t go getting any crazy ideas. It’s not like she was a lizard or a Tovarian Devil Slug or anything like that. She was humanoid. Ish.

She had mostly the right parts, except for the third mammary appendage and an extra orifice that I won’t discuss in polite company. But other than that, she could have walked around any city on Earth without getting too many second glances. Well, not for the fact that she wasn’t human, anyway. She certainly got a lot of looks on account of how beautiful she was.

A few too many, if you’re the jealous type. Not that I’d know anything about that...

Maybe I should start from the start now that I’ve laid down all that interesting foundational info.

You know how you’ve seen a million holo-vids where some rich yahoo hires a scumbag to track down his girl because she got tired of him, or left with a bunch of his credits, or fell in love with another yahoo, or some combo of the above? Well, there’s a reason there’s a million of them. It’s because it’s something that happens when a woman thinks all she needs is a rich guy to take care of her and she’ll be happy, and then it turns out that being rich isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, especially when you’re not attracted to a guy who feels like he has a right to slobber all over you any time he gets the urge.

Buuuuuut it also turns out it’s hard to give up the credits once you’ve been mainlining them for a stretch. So, you try to get the best of both worlds. The easiest way is the divorce route, but most of these yahoos are smart enough to get a prenup, so that’s usually out. The nastiest way is to make sure he has a big insurance policy, or added you to his will, and then off him the first chance you get and hope you don’t get caught. And then there’s the dangerous way, which is finding some scumbag to help you get a hold of a good portion of his credits, and then escape into a life where you can spend the credits without the hassle of all that slobbering.

I’m sure you noticed I mentioned both sides making use of a scumbag. And that’s because, in this particular case, I happened to be said scumbag for both sides.

You see, Xiomara‌—‌that was her name, or rather the Earth standard approximation of it‌—‌had decided to try to extricate some credits for herself without any assistance, knowing full well that anyone she chose to assist her would probably insist on some slobbering of his own. And, because she’s good at pretty much everything she does, she darn near got away with it. In fact, if her husband hadn’t hired the best of the best to track her down, she would have.

Now, I don’t usually toot my own horn unless there’s a serious need to toot it, but I should probably clarify here that I happen to be the aforementioned best of the best. It’s a formerly disputed fact that is no longer in dispute. Because if those who disputed it had been correct, then they would currently be considered the best rather than what they are considered.

Which is deceased.

So this guy‌—‌let’s call him Big Hank (since that was, after all, his name)‌—‌hired me to track down his wife and his credits, and return the one he still actually cared about (hint: it didn’t have three breasts) and get rid of the other.

Now, I’m not going to pretend that she fell for me as soon as we laid eyes upon one another, or even that I fell for her . Especially the former, since I’m not much to look at myself. But she knew she was dead if she didn’t get me over to her side somehow, and she happened to have certain attributes that I found very appealing. So we quickly came to an... understanding.

Interlude: There’s an ancient Earth song that still streams the metanet occasionally with the metaphor of driving in the passing lane of a land highway, by a band named after an extinct bird of great import to the old Earth United States of America. You may know it‌—‌I’m not going to quote it because I don’t want to owe half a year’s pay just to mention it, but you can still find it without too much effort. In the song, there’s a couple of ne’er-do-wells who run around drinking and snorting intoxicants and generally having one big party all the time.

Well, our life became a lot like that song, except instead of driving around what’s now become the great salt flats on Earth in a vehicle running on combustible fossil fuels, we were blasting around the galaxy in my ship, the Red Raptor, spending Big Hank’s credits like they were about to expire. We also may or may not have stopped by some of the galaxy’s most affluent neighborhoods and financial institutions on occasion to refill our coffers. I’m not one to incriminate myself, so I’ll leave all that to your imagination.

In addition, we often made an appearance at the best pasta joints we could find. Xiomara loved her some pasta, and couldn’t get enough of it. We’d always get extra to have later on board ship. I even got pretty good at whipping some up in my small galley when she got desperate. Turned out she enjoyed my pasta as much as the stuff at the fanciest places. At least, that’s what she told me.

Hank...

Well, Hank was not happy.

There were a lot of reasons why Hank felt that way. Not the least of which was that he’d hired me, and there’s obviously no way the second-best scumbag would be able to take me down, even in the awful state I was in a good deal of the time. Or even the second and third best scumbags together, for that matter. But the second through sixth best? That would be a problem. And, thanks to Hank, it did become my problem.

I took to calling them the Cinque, just because I thought it sounded cooler if I was being chased by a posse by that name instead of just five regular scumbags. I’d been working with and against these guys for years, depending on the circumstances, with the exception of the guy who was Number Five with a bullet. Never met him because he was new to the business of doing what we do, but he was what you might call a “rising star.”

Plus, I didn’t actually know any of their names. I hadn’t bothered to learn them before, even when I was working with them, and I wasn’t about to start then. So I just referred to them as “Two” through “Six.”

Before I get into too much detail about these new scumbags, let me first tell you a little bit more about myself. I could tell you I had a horrible childhood, but that would be putting much too rosy of a spin on things. I was orphaned on a barren rock of a planetoid called Finnegan’s Centaur, way out in the middle of the Reach, which had been abandoned by the mining company because it hadn’t been turning much of a profit.