Star Angel: A Lesbian Science Fiction Romance Read online

  Star Angel

  By Mia Archer

  Copyright 2015 Mia Archer

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Individuals pictured on the cover are models and used for illustrative purposes only.

  First digital edition electronically published by Mia Archer, May 2015

  All participants are 18 years or older.

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  Table of Contents

  1: Scout Mission

  2: Captured

  3: Experimental Subject

  4: Experimenting

  5: Space Angel

  6: Escape

  7: Revenge

  More from Mia Archer

  1: Scout Mission

  “Scout Captain Tyla Venture's log, supplemental.”

  I leaned back from the control console and tried to gather my thoughts. This was another bust. It was my third scout of the Vega sector and there were absolutely no hostiles.

  “The picket sensors around the edge of the system picked up something entering the system at sublight speeds, but I’ve found nothing so far. No fleet craft are scheduled to be out here and standard communication didn’t raise any civilians. It’s a promising lead but no luck yet. Will update when there’s more to report.”

  Of course there was as good a chance that the picket sensors picked up a piece of ice falling in towards Vega and not a massive Klik battle cruiser. They’d made sillier mistakes. I tried to keep the frustration out of my voice, but it was difficult. Where the hell were they? Five years since the incident with the Leyte Gulf. Five years of searching. Five years of nothing.

  “Charging up faster than light drive and making the jump to the next planet,” I said. “So far Vega sector seems clear.”

  I was disappointed. I’d hoped to find something this close to Earth, but no dice. That seemed to be where they showed up, which is what made it so infuriating when we couldn’t find them in our own back yard. The Kliks seemed to come out of nowhere, fading out of the very darkness of the stars themselves, hitting random merchant ships, and then disappearing into the void. And no one could find them. No one could even figure out where their home world was.

  Nowhere within a good hundred light year radius of the Sol system, that was for sure, which made it all the more frustrating that they kept melting in and out of our territory hitting us with such little effort and such great success. Sure they were only annoying raids, pinpricks in the grand scheme of things, but it had become personal for me when the Leyte Gulf went down.

  It still shamed me that I didn’t go down with her.

  The faster than light drive spooled up and there was a brief flash, a brief passing wave of nausea, as I was pulled slightly out of normal space and then reinserted in front of the next planet in the Vega sector. I glanced at my readouts once the ship flashed back into normal space. Everything looked good on the FTL, but it’d be a short while before it was charged enough for the next jump.

  Not that the recharge time was an issue in this instance. I planned on taking a leisurely look around anyways.

  I looked outs the windows which was silly but it was habit. My instruments would catch anything far before I saw anything with my mark one eyeball. And yet I couldn’t help but look out at the planet. It was the habit of an old space explorer, even though I was only about a decade out of the academy and still fairly young for a captain in the fleet.

  I was already ridiculously young when I took command of the Gulf, but thinking of that brought up too many bad memories. A Klik ship appearing from behind a moon. Power draining from the ship. The order to fire kinetic weapons. The Gulf breaking up around me as I was shoved, very much against my will, into an escape pod.

  The only miracle of that day was that the people who went into the escape pods made it back to human space. The Klik ship disappeared which was very odd. Usually it was any human involved in a Klik attack who disappeared.

  I definitely shouldn’t have been in a backwater this close to Earth driving a scout ship. I should’ve been on to my next command despite what happened on the Gulf. But I had a different mission now. A mission I’d sworn the day my ship went down around me.

  And so I scanned the skies. I looked down at the planet below. A gas giant that roiled with flashes of lightning. This planet had a couple of moons, though none of them could support life. Whenever people got around to actually populating this system it would be nice and easy to strip mine them for resources. No blue humanoids to fight off.

  I rolled my eyes and let out a disgusted sound. Movies from the days of ancient spaceflight could be so ridiculous. As though people would actually fight on the surface of a moon instead of just bombarding a place from orbit and picking up the pieces afterwards. The fleet’s motto had always been if you have to use a breathing apparatus anyways to fight against a native force that didn’t have air tanks then removing the atmosphere made pacifying the natives a hell of a lot easier.

  These moons held no interest for me though. Sure they’d be of interest once humans actually decided to start terraforming this system. Not that terraforming was something that would happen anytime soon. Plenty of matter in this system to work with, no convenient earthlike planets though. That meant it would be awhile before they got some of the heavy duty matter transmogrifiers in here to start turning the system into something a little more palatable to life as we knew it.

  Whatever. That was a concern of the eggheads. There wasn’t even a scrap of life in the system to make things interesting. No, I was purely looking for non-native life forms. The kind that I could blow up with some of the weapons on my scout ship that was armed to the teeth. Armed far more than your usual scout ship.

  One of the benefits of having friends in high places in the Admiralty who felt sorry for you and were willing to give you a little leeway because of a little incident with hostile alien life forms.

  “Anything in this area?” I asked.

  “Nothing on the sensors ma’am,” the computer read back to me.

  I rolled my eyes and let out another disgusted sound. That was exactly what I’d heard from the computer on that fateful day when the Kliks got the drop on us. It turned out the computer’s definition of “nothing showing up on the sensors” included nothing showing up because it was hiding behind, say, the mass of a moon. The mass of a moon that allow them to get the drop on me.

  I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

  “Let’s launch a probe here and leave it. Maybe it will tell us something before we leave the system,” I said.

  The ship bucked under me as a probe launched. Immediately the comforting steady ping from its signal filled the cabin. I turned it down so that it was just barely on the level of conscious thought. The pinging wasn’t absolutely necessary, especially in this day and age, but I already had so many things to keep track of in the cockpit and at this point all the various beeps and whistles were like a symphony to me. I could make out any discordant note in an instant, and it would alert me far faster than a blinking light.

  Where the hell were they?

  The Kliks were so odd. So erratic. They tended to hit human outpost in spots we barely thought were important. At least they were spots that were barely important in this day
and age. The sort of outposts that would have been long forgotten by any species that had discovered faster than light travel.

  Faster than light travel.

  “Computer, how fast was the object that tripped the sensors traveling?”

  “It appeared to be traveling at 0.5c and slowing.”

  Interesting. That definitely wasn’t a chunk of ice falling into the star system. That also got me to thinking about something I hadn’t really considered before. They hit old bases that would only be of strategic importance to a slower than light species. What if they didn’t have FTL? It was something nobody had considered before as far as I knew, though I don’t know why it was never considered since our first contact with the Kliks came before humanity developed faster than light technology.

  Still, the notion was crazy, especially considering how much trouble they’d caused for us with their raids. It boggled the mind to think all that trouble could be caused by aliens moving around slower than c, but it was also something worth following up on. Particularly if they were scouting a system so close to Earth. And if my hunch was correct then they were out there. I just had to find them.

  “Are there any likely sources of water in the system?” I asked.

  “One moment,” the computer said. “Searching through spectral analysis from previous surveys of this system over the past century.”

  I rolled my eyes. That could take the computer awhile. I also had another reason for rolling my eyes. It had to search over the last century because their probably wasn’t any recent data. Mankind had grown afraid of exploring, grown afraid of sending out scientific expeditions for fear that a Klik raid would pick them up and they’d never be heard from again. It happened far more often than people in the fleet liked to admit. It was one of the many reasons why I was on my all-encompassing mission right now. Sure I was out here for a bit of vengeance, but I was also out here to help humanity reclaim the stars.

  And I was going to be really annoyed if it turned out that the great and powerful enemy that had humanity afraid to explore was barely able to travel as fast as the light twinkling from those stars.

  I tapped an irritated finger against one of my consoles as I waited for the computer to finish its calculations. Once that was finished I could go for a leisurely jaunt around the planets and planetoids in the system to see what there was to see. Space was big, but faster than light travel made it a hell of a lot smaller. All that surface area out there got a hell of a lot closer and all the space in between a hell of a lot more trivial when you could pop between it instantaneously.

  So why was it so damn hard to find them?

  It was so damn hard because we were afraid to put out new probes. We were afraid to send out new missions because everybody was terrified. Everybody was afraid they’d be the next ship to disappear under mysterious circumstances. Nothing made people more reluctant to do some exploring like disappearing under mysterious circumstances.

  I smiled. I hoped they tried to turn me into a mysterious disappearance. It would be the perfect opportunity for me to get some target practice in with my heavy weapons.

  Idly I reached out and tapped a button to spool up the faster than light drive. When the computer was finished with its calculations I wanted to be ready to go instantaneously. At least the drive took a hell of a lot shorter to spool up on this scout ship than it used to on the Gulf. The bigger the ass on a ship the longer it took for the drive to do calculations and throw a ship across a star system or in between the massive void in between those star systems.

  “Calculation complete,” the computer said.

  “Finally!” I said. “What do you have?”

  “At least five hundred probable locations for water in this system,” the computer said.

  That didn’t help at all. There was no way I was going to be able to search all of those locations in a timely manner. If there was still anything in this system they’d be long gone by the time I got around to wherever they were. I’d get the notification from the faster than light pickets that whatever was out there was on its way out when I was halfway through that search.

  “New parameter computer,” I said. “I want you to give me probable locations based on a ship stopping to gather water.”

  “With faster than light technology any of those locations would be as likely as the next,” the computer said.

  They said these computers weren’t exactly thinking machines. They were impressive, but they didn’t have anything pesky like sentience or consciousness. There were computers out there that did that, but it was pesky dealing with sentience in the thing running a ship’s systems. It was bad enough that the human element was already part of a warship. Only there were times that I suspected the computer was getting just a little snippy, just a little sarcastic with me. I figured that was just my time in deep space and my mind grasping for some sort of emotional interaction, but still.

  “I want you to pretend we’re talking about a capital ship,” I said. I held up a hand as the computer started to talk again. “A capital ship from before the days of faster than light travel.”

  Heck, there were still more than a few of those of human origin screaming around the stars. One of the pesky things about making war in the days before faster than light travel was discovered was you had to send your fleets screaming across the endless void at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light with no way of actually getting in touch with them once they’d been sent out across that void.

  That led to some awkward situations once somebody actually decided to do some experiments with faster than light travel outside of our gravity well. War fleets still showed up at the edge of star systems poised to go in and rip any civilizations living inside to pieces only to discover a fleet envoy already there waiting for them to let them know the war was long over and they could all go home, and oh, by the way, they’d be going home immediately rather than turning around and spending another couple of years, relatively speaking, traveling between the stars.

  I’d had to do at least one of those envoys. It was always loads of fun talking to a captain who’d been sent out nearly a century ago, though to them only a few months or a few years had passed, and was preparing for one hell of a fight, but it was part of doing business in the fleet. It was also something that they more or less kept quiet. Most of the people who were old enough to remember the men who’d shipped out on those fleets were long dead by now, or they were so old it didn’t matter.

  A beep from the computer brought me out of my reverie.

  “New calculations completed,” the computer said. “Showing three likely locations for a refueling spot for water, assuming a pre-faster than light travel capital ship.”

  “Good. Take us to the one closest to the sensor that tripped the alarm.”

  There was a small problem with going on a long search like this. A problem with going on a search where I don’t find what I was looking for time and time again. I was starting to get sloppy, and I didn’t even realize it until the ship popped out of faster than light and I saw a giant capital ship looming in front of me.

  I grinned. “That’s a bingo!”

  Only that massive capital ship was turning towards me. I could see on my readout that various weapons were powering up. Particularly interesting was a new reading I’d only seen once before on the Gulf right before we lost power. That reading surged and a beam shot out and hit my ship. Immediately everything went dark around me. Emergency power came up, but it wasn’t nearly enough to launch anything from the vast array of energy weapons at my disposal.

  If I’d told the computer to come out of FTL farther from the point of interest I might’ve been able to get the drop on them. If I’d been faster on the draw I might’ve gotten a shot off. If I’d realized that energy surge was related to that damn beam that took out power and made energy weapons ineffective, a weapon you couldn’t fire was worthless after all, then I might’ve gotten away a second time.

  Only I didn’t do any of that
and basically I was a sitting duck. Shit.

  2: Captured

  I watched, helpless, as a tractor beam hit my ship and started pulling me towards the big capital ship. My lights flickered and across my viewport I could see the telltale static flickering where the field made contact with my hull. I wanted to beat my fists against that viewport.

  Damn it. Damn it. Damn it!

  I’d finally found them. I’d finally figured out how to track them down. I’d figured out why we were having such a hard time tracking down the Kliks. We were thinking all wrong, only now that I’d started thinking right, started thinking like the enemy, I’d also managed to stumble right into them and get captured.

  Beeping sounded off to my left. That meant somebody was trying to hail me. And it probably wasn’t somebody from the fleet calling to tell me they had a couple of massive capital ships ready to come to my aid. There were only two ships out here in this system right now, and I had a pretty good idea who was calling.

  I ignored the signal. Instead I desperately tried powering up several weapons. I winced as several lights indicated the ship was trying its best, but none of the indicators had a healthy green glow. They were all red. Not even an angry red. More like a dim impotent red because there was barely enough power to keep them going. Damn it.

  Apparently keeping me powerless wasn’t enough though. A quick blast shot out from the ship, a warning shot since it didn’t blow me to smithereens, but the message was obvious enough. Whatever alien intelligence was on that massive ship, and I was a damn sure that was a Klik ship even though we didn’t have any good images on file and I’d been a little busy to take a look while the Gulf was under attack, obviously didn’t want me pressing any of the buttons on my ship that powered up my weapons even if there was no way to actually power them up.

  I briefly considered starting up the self-destruct sequence and going out in a blaze of glory, to quote that ancient ballad of my people, but instead I pulled my hand off of the self-destruct controls. I had important information. Information the fleet needed if I was right. If my hunch was correct. And what better way to prove that hunch than by getting onto the Klik ship and finding out firsthand and for sure whether or not I was right?