Malagor and I crouched in the high grass watching the mile long Zoasian battleship hum along in the sky. The great dreadnought cruised to a point about four miles away from us, and came slowly to a halt. I asked my friend if the Zoasians might have spotted us, as there seemed to be no other reason for the ship to have stopped, but he did not seem to think it likely. I asked him if the ship was equipped with radar or sonar, but he had no knowledge of those devices. I tried to explain them to him, but since I am neither a scientist nor engineer, I didn’t do a very good job. Malagor seemed to get the gist of it, though he said that such technology was unknown in Ecos, or at least the part of it known to him. He assured me that the only detection apparatus aboard the great vessel were powerful telescopes manned by Zoasian observers.

We continued to watch the ship from our location for a very long time. It might have been an hour, or it might have been a week— there was just no way for me to judge. As we waited, I strained my eyes to make out every detail possible on the fantastic vessel. The weapons were massive and futuristic in design, though possessing none of the simple beauty of the light rifles we carried. There were numerous structures and housings along the top and sides of the ship, but it was impossible to determine what the purpose of any individual compartment might be. In the foreword of the vessel was what I assumed to be an airstrip, lined with bizarre looking aircraft. This was somewhat of an assumption on my part, since they did not look at all like earthly planes, but I was later to be proven to be correct. I could see tiny figures moving around on deck but the distance was too great for me to make out what they were like.

I was drawn away from my careful observation when Malagor tapped me on the shoulder. He directed my attention by pointing off into the distance. At first I could see nothing except the green band where the Ecosian landscape reached up to become the Ecosian sky. After a moment though, I saw a dot in the distance, which steadily grew in size. It didn’t take long for me to determine what the object was. It was a ship similar in size and method of locomotion to the great Zoasian battleship, and it was zooming toward the black ship at over one hundred miles per hour. Of course the eternal sun of Ecos makes the measure of miles per hour almost meaningless in terms of long distances covered, but it seems the best way for me to describe the velocities involved.

I glanced at the first ship and saw that it was turning its weaponry toward the interloper. The airstrip on the upper deck began spitting aircraft into the sky. It turned slowly like some great black beast crouching for a spring. It presented all its teeth to the enemy.

The second ship was close enough to observe clearly now. It was roughly the same shape as the Zoasian vessel, and seemed to have a similar array of armament. Instead of being the hollow black of the battleship though, it was painted navy blue with bright silver trim and highlights. From all over the craft were hung colorful banners and bright waving flags. Along the bow was a great golden insignia— two crossed swords above a flaming sun. This ship too began disgorging squadrons of aircraft.

“Amatharians,” said Malagor. “The banners on the ship are the colors of her knights. The insignia means that there is someone important on board.”

“Why would they fly into battle if they were carrying someone important?” I asked.

“If an Amatharian sees a Zoasian, he will attack. If a Zoasian sees an Amatharian, he will attack. These two things are as sure as the sun in the sky.”

The two ships began to fire their weaponry almost simultaneously, as the squadrons of fighter aircraft began to engage in a huge and deadly dogfight. The Zoasian armament consisted of a broad range of weapon types, from missiles to powerful cannon to a particularly ugly black ray. The Amatharian weaponry appeared to be all of one type, based on the same principles as the light rifles, with their churning bubbling liquid sunlight, although the shipboard guns fired light streams anywhere from one inch to one foot in diameter.

The battle went on and on. It seemed incredible that ships of even that size could withstand the punishment that those two did. Each took hit after hit from the enemy ship and its aircraft. Fighters were shot out of the sky right and left, and they dropped to the ground bursting into fireballs. Several of them crashed into the enemy ship, or into their own. Explosions rocked the battle cruisers, and we could see tiny figures on the deck fighting fires and in many cases, losing those fights. After a while it seemed that most of the fighters were gone, victims of the ongoing conflict, but the two great dreadnoughts refused to give up. They kept pouring volley after volley into each other. As they did so, the battle began to slowly drift our way.

“I think that we had better find another vantage point.” I said, as I started to gather our things together.

“Wait, look,” said Malagor, pointing at the conflict.

* * * * * * * * *

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Princess of Amathar

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The Drache Girl
The Young Sorceress
The Two Dragons
The Sorceress and her Lovers
The Price of Magic
A Plague of Wizards

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A newly updated and revised edition of Princess of Amathar is now available.  If you already own this as an ebook, you should be able to download the latest version for free.  If you don’t, you can get it now for just $2.99 wherever fine ebooks are sold.

Mysteriously transported to the artificial hollow world of Ecos, Earth man Alexander Ashton finds himself in the middle of a millennium-long war between the reptilian Zoasians and the humanoid Amatharians. Adopted by the Amatharians, Ashton must conform to a society based on honor and altruism, ruled by Knights whose power comes from the curious energy forms known as “souls” which inhabit their supernaturally powerful swords, and rife with its own peculiarities and prejudices. When the Princess of Amathar, whom Ashton has longed for since first seeing her, is captured by the Zoasians, he must cross an alien world, battle monstrous creatures, and face unknown dangers to save her. Princess of Amathar is a sword-swinging novel of high adventure in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs. It is the story a strange world filled with alien races, aerial battleships, swords and energy weapons, amazing adventures and horrible dangers, and the man who must face them all for the love of a woman he has never met.

After getting a good long sleep, Malagor and I began to pack our meager belongings for an extended journey.  Our belongings truly were meager.  My dog-like friend had only a few furs and some weapons and tools to his name, and I had almost nothing to mine.  I was interested to observe Malagor’s weapons.  With the exception of his knife, which was obviously well manufactured, they all seemed to be hand-made, and consisted of a spear, a bow, and a quiver of arrows.  As soon as we had grouped the possessions into two bundles, we each took one and started on our way.  There seemed to be no north, south, east, or west in Ecos, so we went in the direction that Malagor said he had previously been traveling.  After we had walked across the plain quite a long way, I looked back at the cabin.  It was inching its way up toward the sky.  It seemed a lonely place now.  As we got farther and farther away, it would move up the endless horizon, though of course it would disappear from view before it got very high.  I wondered though if, when we reached wherever it was we were going, it would be looking down at us from some point high up in the heavens.

While we walked along, I asked Malagor many questions about the world of Ecos, the fauna and flora, and the intelligent inhabitants.

“How big is Ecos?”  I asked. I had thought that had Ecos been just a hollow planet, I would have been able to see far more of the horizon as it stretched up into the sky and that much more clearly than I could.  It seemed to me that it was far larger.

“Two hundred twenty-six thousand hokents,” he replied.

This of course, led to my lesson in the measurement of distances in Ecos, which was common to the Malagor and the Amatharians, and a few other intelligent races. The kentan was the basic unit of measurement and had apparently been derived from the size of an insect lair, as strange as this may have seemed at the time.  Then again, I recalled that honey bees made cells in their hive that were completely uniform in size, no matter where you happened to find the hive, or what the bees were using as a source of pollen.  I marveled that the kentan had come from a zoological observation such as this.  As nearly as I could calculate, the kentan was about five and one-quarter inches.  A kentar was ten kentans, or about fifty-two and a half inches.  A kent was ten kentars, one hundred kentans, or about forty-three feet nine inches.  A kentad was one hundred kents, or some eight tenths of a mile.  And a hokent was one thousand kentads, one hundred thousand kents, or eight hundred twenty-eight miles.

So, when Malagor said that Ecos was two hundred twenty-six thousand hokents in diameter, he was telling me that it was about one hundred eighty-seven million miles in diameter.  With a little mental calculation on my part, I realized that with a sun just under one million miles in diameter, this would put the surface of Ecos about ninety-three million miles from the surface of the sun— about the same distance that Earth is from the surface of its sun.  If my calculations held correct, Ecos would have a surface area of over three billion planet Earths.  It was quite an astounding concept.

For a while I thought about the fact that the great plain we walked across, might well be larger than the surface area of my home planet, and yet be only a tiny fraction of Ecos.  But after a while these types of musings can only give one a headache, so I turned my head to other thoughts.  Looking around across the plain, I observed a marvelous collection of plains animals. I could identify the ecological niches of most of the beasts, by observing their similarities to Earth animals, and yet some of these denizens of the great prairie were completely unearthly. There was a herd of beautiful antelope-like creatures, with long spiral horns and stripes across their backs and six legs.  There were beautiful flying things that looked like butterflies two yards wide. Whether they were birds or insects or something entirely different than either, I could not say.  There was a large caterpillar creature thirty feet long, with a huge maw in front, that ate everything it came across, plant or animal, and there was a beast that preyed upon it that stood twenty feet tall and looked like a cross between an ostrich and a praying mantis.  Some of these animals we hunted for food, some of them we gave a wide berth, and some of them we stopped and stared at in amazement, because not even Malagor had seen the likes of them.

We walked, and we hunted as we walked, and at last I was sure we must have been traveling for a week.  It is very eerie to do anything for a long period of time, and then to look up and see the sun in the exact position that it was in when you started whatever it was that you were doing.  That’s how it was for me.  At last however, Malagor decided it was time to stop and sleep, so we cleared the grass from an area and made a fire.  Malagor and I then took turns watching for beasts and sleeping.  We each slept once, ate, then slept again, and then we started on our way once more.  We followed this procedure many, many times over.  We continued to hunt for food animals along our way, and at every small stream, we stopped to fill our water skins.  I must confess that I never did know how long a journey our trip was, but it seems to me that it must have been close to a year.  At one time I asked my friend how long he though that we had been walking.  His only reply was, “What does it matter.”

At long last we reached the edge of the great plain.  Before us stood a line of small hills that looked to be easily passable.  On the lower slope of the hills grew many small bushes, profusely covered with tiny blue berries.  Malagor picked one, smelled it, tasted it, and pronounced it good.

“We will stay a while here,” he announced.  “Berries do not grow enough places to warrant passing them by.”

I examined the bushes closest to us.

“Some of these berries are new growth, and some of them are rotting on the plant,” I said.  “How long will the season last?”

“I do not know season,” he said.  “What is season?”

I don’t expect you to believe this story, but it is the truth.  My name is Alexander Ashton.  I was born in the heart of the American west.  I have often been known to say that I was born either a hundred years too late, or perhaps a hundred years too early.  It always seemed to me that I had the misfortune to live in the single most unexciting period of time the panorama of history had to offer.  I don’t say that I longed to be transported to another time or to another world, for never in my wildest dreams did I believe this to be possible.  I was destined to be surprised.

I was born in a small city.  I played as a child in a park that was once a dusty street where outlaws of the old west fought famous gunfights.  When I was seven, my parents were killed in a motor vehicle accident.  I really remember little of them.  I was put in a state-run children’s home where I lived until I was eighteen, passed by time after time by prospective adoptive parents, primarily because I was too old.  I hold no ill feelings about it now.  If there is one thing I learned while I was a ward of the state, it is that no matter how bad off one may be, there is always someone worse off than you are.

After graduating high school and being set on my own by the state, I entered college at the local university.  I became a voracious reader and excelled in athletics but did poorly in my required studies.  After two semesters of academic probation I was asked to leave.  I walked down the street to the Army Recruiter’s office and enlisted.  There wasn’t much to the army, since there was no war on at the time.  While I was there, I did learn to shoot, and fight with a saber, and to keep in good physical condition, but otherwise I left the service just as I had gone in.

After finding a new apartment in my old hometown, I happened to run into a fellow whom I knew from college.  He was running a small grocery store, and doing quite well, since no large grocery chain was interested in such a small market area.  He offered me a job, I took it, and we became pretty close friends.

My friend, the grocery store owner, was engaged to a nice girl, and they decided in time to get married.  I was chosen to be the best man.  The wedding was nice, and the reception was even better.  I have never been much of a drinking man, but that night I made a name for myself in that capacity.  I don’t know why I drank so much.  Maybe I was feeling sorry for myself and my lot in life, I don’t know.  I do know that in short order, I had worked myself into a staggering, slobbering, half-conscious stupor.  How, when, and where I became unconscious, I cannot say, but at some point, I did.  And this is where my story truly begins.

I awoke with a chill in my bones.  I was lying down in a small streambed with icy water running over my feet.  I tried to rise but couldn’t.  My body was stiff and weak, and its only response was to shiver uncontrollably.  Around me was a thick forest, and I could see dark shapes moving around in the trees. I sensed then, on some deeper level that I was in a place I had never been before.  Then I heard a deep growling as I passed once again into unconsciousness.

When next I awoke, I looked around to find myself in a small shack.  I was lying on a cot made of animal furs, and I was bathed in a cold sweat.  The walls of the small shelter were made from cut logs and a roughly fashioned wooden chair was the room’s only furnishing.  When the door of the shack opened, I truly believed for the first time in my life that there were lifeforms other than those I was familiar with on Earth.

The creature that stepped inside the door, and closed it after him, was most ugly.  That he was intelligent was demonstrated not only by the fact that he had opened and then closed the door, but also by the fact that he wore clothing— ugly clothing yes, but clothing, nonetheless.  He was about five feet tall and stood in a kind of perpetual crouch.  His body was covered with coarse brown hair, two to three inches long, from his head to his feet, which reminded me of the feet of a dog or a wolf, although larger.  He was somewhat wolf-like in every aspect, such as his protruding snout, but he also seemed somewhat baboon-like in his expressive eyes.  I am comparing him to earthly animals, but this is really inadequate, as the similarities were actually quite superficial, and he was totally unearthly in appearance.  I remember most looking at his hands.  He had four fingers not too different from my own, but his abbreviated thumb possessed a great, long, curving claw.

The creature, stepping slowly over to me, reached out a hand and gave me a piece of dried fruit.  I was quite hungry, and the fruit was quite good.  As I began to eat, the creature began to bark and growl at me.  At first, I thought he was angry, but then I realized that he was trying to communicate in his language.   I was too tired to respond and fruit still in hand, passed back into sleep.

The next time I woke, the creature was sitting in the chair looking at me with his head cocked to one side.  I pushed myself up on one elbow and he spoke to me again, this time in a more human sort of language.  It seemed almost like French but having learned a few phrases of that language in the army, I knew it was not.  This language was so much less nasal.  He pointed to his chest and said “Malagor” then he pointed to me.  I said “Alexander”.  He smiled wide exposing a magnificent row of long, sharp teeth.  My language lessons had begun.

It took a long time for me to recover from my illness.  It seemed to me that I was nursed by the creature for at least a month. I slept many times, but each time I awoke I found light streaming in the window.  Not once did I wake to find darkness, or even the pale light of the moon, outside the window.  During this long period of time, my host provided me with food and water, took care of my sanitary needs, and of course, taught me to speak his language.  One of the first things that I learned was that “Malagor” was not the name of my companion but was instead his race or species.  He told me his real name, which seemed to be a growl with a cough thrown in for good measure.  I decided that I would call him “Malagor”, and he didn’t seem to mind.

Starr felt like he was tied up again.  He didn’t know what was holding him, but it was squeezing him to death.  He jerked awake and looked up to see Huppy’s bloated head leaning down over him.

“I brought you breakfast in bed, Starr.”

He thrust a bowl right under Starr’s nose.

“I got you cereal from the cafeteria and Viv said that it would be nice to give you breakfast in bed. Do you like it?”

Starr grabbed the bowl and struggled into a sitting position, his back against the bulkhead.

“It looks good. Thanks, Huppy.”

“You’re my best friend, Starr.  You and Viv.”

“I know.”

After he had finished his breakfast, Starr took his bowl into the galley, where he found Viv sitting at the table, one hand holding a cup of coffee and the other petting the Castorian who was curled up in her lap.

“Watch out,” he said, gruffly.  “You know Castorians are all perverts.”

“Who’s the racist now? I’m just giving her a scratch.”

“Her?”

“That’s right,” said Prinda, looking up.  “I’m a girl. And you have a lot of nerve, calling me a pervert after what I watched you do to that poor girl at The Pink Ubaxa.”

Viv opened her eyes wide and made an o with her mouth in a look of mock surprise.

“You watched huh? See?  Perverts.”

They left the planet with no problem and made the jump to hyperspace early, because of the relative emptiness of the system.  After that, it was four days of boredom.  The first day, Starr and Huppy swept the cargo bays while Viv repaired a leaking pipe in the head, but then they mostly just sat around.  On the second day out, Huppy taught Prinda checkers, which they then spent all afternoon playing.  Starr puttered around, trying to find things he could fix, and did manage to replace a few jumpers on some panels.  The third day, all of his attempts to keep busy failed, though Viv kept herself occupied reading.

“So, we arrive at Thim tomorrow?” asked Prinda, strolling into the galley on their fourth day out.

“That is the plan,” said Starr, without looking up from his coffee.

“Or we might have a misjump and pop out of hyperspace in the middle of a black hole,” said Viv, leaning back and allowing the Castorian to climb into her lap.  “I’ll bet it happens all the time.  Nobody ever hears about it because, you know… black hole.”

“Well, since we might be dead tomorrow, I want to treat your whole crew to a movie.”

“What’s a movie?” asked Viv, scratching her around the ears.

“It’s a video show that is projected on the wall, so that everyone can watch it.”

“How do you know everyone’s going to like it?” asked Starr.

“Oh, everyone will like it,” Prinda assured them.  “We’ll all sit at watch it and eat popcorn.”

“Popcorn?” wondered Viv.

“Yeah, I’ve had it before,” said Starr.  “It’s made of these fluffy little things.  The Rialtans love it.  I hope this little fur ball brought it with her.”

It turned out that Prinda had brought a metallic container of unpopped popcorn and a pocket-sized projector.  Starr and Huppy set up chairs, while Viv and the Castorian placed a blanket on the floor to lie upon while they watched the movie on the wall of cargo bay six.  Even Reed was there, sitting atop the basketball hoop high up on the wall.

The movie turned out to be a Karendian period piece, set three hundred years before, during the Sixth Interstellar War.  The main character was the wife of a soldier in the Karendian Navy.  She was busily engaged in an affair while he was away fighting the Providers.  Then, when he returned wounded, she selflessly devoted herself to his care. Starr didn’t much care for it.

“I think that was wonderful,” said Viv, climbing up from her spot on the blanket.

“I liked when the ships exploded,” said Huppy.

“Everyone does, except for the people in them at the time,” said Starr.

The city was called Promise, and it did look promising.  It was laid out in a spoke pattern, with public buildings in the center and residential and commercial districts spiraling out.  A system of simple but efficient hover busses ran from the terminal at the starport to the alien quarter.  Starr stepped off the bus into the bright sunshine, beneath a brilliant azure sky, and took a deep breath.  The air was clean here, though dry.  He spotted a local tavern on the corner and walked in.

Whatever he was expecting, this wasn’t a dark, dingy little dive.  Large windows and skylights made it almost as bright inside as out, even without artificial lighting.  There was no bar, but Starr sat down at a table and a robot waiter rolled up to take his order.

“Cannis Ale?” the freighter captain asked.

The robot nodded and rolled away.

Starr looked around. There were about a half a dozen humans that might have been locals and an equal number who obviously weren’t.  A couple of them wore the pale green uniform of the Proxian Scout Service.  There were also a couple of Zibu and a single D’dtitu, which made sense, because both races were enough like humans that they could imbibe human drinks—even wear human clothes if they weren’t too picky about the fit.  He took a deep breath.  It was just nice to sit somewhere in the open air, without being enclosed in a tin can.

The robot returned with a tall glass of cold ale.  Starr handed him his PH card, which he was sure had a couple of hundred credits on it. The robot held it in front of its face to scan it, and then handed it back to the man.  Starr took a sip from his glass.  It was good.  It was real Cannis Ale, something he had hoped for but not really expected.

“You’re not from around here, are you?”

The merchant captain looked around, expecting to see a local—a local human.  It wasn’t.  He had to look down to see a furry creature about three feet tall—a Castorian.  It sported a snout full of needle-sharp teeth in front and a broad, flat tail behind.  It was impossible to tell if it was male or female.  Their voices all sounded somewhat like human females when they spoke Intercosmo, and Starr didn’t know enough about Castorians to tell gender by sight.

“No, I’m not.  Are you?”

“No, not really.  Do you mind if I sit down?”

Starr waved toward the seat across from him, which the diminutive being took.

“Are you a crewman on a starship?” it asked.

“I’m the captain of the Nova Dancer, a free trader out of Zarius.”

“I thought you were Zarian, but I wasn’t sure.  You humans come in so many different flavors.”

Starr took a slow drink of his ale.  “So, what can I do for you…”

“My name is Prinda and I’m looking for passage to Gateway.”

“There must be a dozen liners at the starport.  I’m sure half of them are on the way to Gateway.”

“I’m afraid I can’t just walk into the starport.  I’m on the no-fly list.”

“If the authorities on Arminger are after you, why don’t they just arrest you?”

“They aren’t really after me, and in any case, I’ve done nothing wrong.  There are people here who don’t want to see me go to Gateway though, because of my patron.  His name is Pluul.”

“Pluul the Castorian?” mused Starr.  “Yeah, I’ve heard of him.”

“I can pay you five thousand PH credits when I reach your ship and another twenty-five thousand when you deliver me to Pluul.”

“That’s a lot of money for a single passenger.  All right, but I have to make a stop at Thim.  That means we won’t get to Gateway for at least ten or twelve standard days.”

“That’s perfect. Nobody will be looking me going to Thim. Well, nobody would be looking for anyone going to Thim, I think.  I’ve got a room at a place on the edge of town called The Pink Ubaxa.  Come and get me there tomorrow evening at 10AR local time. Come alone.”

With that, the furry little creature stood up and scurried away.

Starr sat for a while sipping his ale, and then left the little pub and took a walk around.  It was a beautiful city.  He looked in a few store windows.  He walked through a little park.  Mostly he just enjoyed being outside.  Finally, he climbed back on a bus and returned to the starport. When he reached the berth, he found Viv and Huppy sitting on folding chairs on the tarmac beneath the Dancer.

“Hey, Boss!” called Viv, when she saw him.  “I’ve got some cargo lined up for Thim, and there’s a lot more to contract, if you would be so good as to tell me where we’re headed after that.”

“Gateway.”

“Sweet.  I can probably get us a full load.  You want me to get on that now?”

“No.  It’ll be there tomorrow.  Why don’t you take a trip into town—get some fresh air.”

“What?  Out in the open?  No, thank you.  Anyway, the air here is just fine.”

“Can I go talk to the people on that ship?” asked Huppy.

Starr looked at where he was pointing.  A freighter just a bit bigger than the Dancer was sitting as its crew loaded cargo. They were flat-faced little creatures with enormous eyes, covered with bluish grey fur, maybe a head taller than Prinda the Castorian.

“Hell, Huppy, I don’t even know what they are. Just because they’re cute and furry doesn’t mean they’re friendly.”

Starr strode down the ramp that led from cargo bay three.  Seven pallets of freight, each a collection of blue plastic containers wrapped in clear plastic sheeting still sat on the gravel-covered ground.  Viv stood beside one of them, clipboard in hand.

“What do we have?” asked Starr.

“Seven pallets of ceramics, as if you could find anything else on this planet.”

The planet, Tan Seven, was completely uninhabited, except for a large and mostly automated facility, owned by an Argaelian corporation, which manufactured high quality ceramic parts for electronic systems.  There was a small domed village, where the few employees of the plant lived, and a starport.  The starport was little more than a flat place covered in gravel, and a prefab freight building where outbound ceramics waited merchant ships bored enough or lost enough to have stopped here.

“Are they going to Armiger?”

“No, they are going to Thim.”  She rubbed her cheek and inadvertently smeared grease across it.  “I got seven hundred a piece PH.”

Starr smiled.  Viv was almost as good at negotiating transport prices as he was himself.  That was the reason that he allowed her to check outbounds.

Viv had been a member of his crew for almost two standard years now.  She was a Zarian, like he was, and to Starr’s mind, way too pretty to be a crewman on a freighter.  She was however, perfectly suited to the job, reveling in the hard work and enjoying the strange sights that went along with it.

“At least we’ll be able to buy food,” said Starr.  “Let’s get them onboard.”

“Aye aye, Captain. Huppy’s bringing the grav-loader around.”

“Good.” Starr turned around and tramped back up the ramp to the ship.

As he made his way through the cargo hold and up the main corridor toward the forward section of the ship, Starr kept his eyes open as he always did for anything amiss.  The Nova Dancer was an old girl, having hauled mail and supplies to a mining colony somewhere and ore back to Zarius for more than twenty years before being sold off at auction.  Starr had purchased her for a bargain price with the money he had stashed away during his own twenty-year duty in the Zarian Interstellar Scout Service. He smiled.  He had been hauling around space just about as long as the Dancer had.

The control section was in the forward third of the ship and consisted of five compartments.  The flight deck was in the front center, while on either side and slightly behind was the automed and crew common area on the left, and the bunkroom and the head on the right.  Then suspended out on either side were the massive stardrive engines, each with a small engineering space reached through a narrow corridor.

Stepping through the door into the flight deck, Starr sat down in the pilot’s seat, the centermost of three spots.  He busied himself plotting a flight plan out of the system.  It was pretty complicated work and took him a while even with the computer.  He was so immersed in his work that when Viv sat down in the seat beside his right shoulder, it startled him.

“Ready,” she said simply.

“Already?”

She nodded.

“Start her up then,” he said as he climbed out of his seat.

“I already made sure everything was ready to go,” said Viv.

“I’m sure you did.” Starr was sure too, but he had never let his ship take off without personally checking for himself.  The engines started to come to life as he examined the systems monitor just behind the flight deck.  By the time he had made a visual check of all the hatches and the cargo bays and made sure that both Huppy and Reed were onboard, the entire ship was humming.  The old girl wanted to get back into the empty.

Starr stepped back into the flight deck and squeezed back into the pilot’s seat.  Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Viv’s cleavage, but he quickly pulled his eyes back to the front.  He hit the large red button with his clenched fist, releasing the grav-lock.  Then taking hold of the controls, he guided the ship as the engines lifted it from the ground.  Pulling the nose up toward the wispy clouds, he threw the throttle forward with his left hand and felt his body pressed back into his chair.

“I love this part,” said Viv.

“I know.”

There was an advantage to landing on an almost uninhabited planet.  You didn’t need to go through lengthy clearance procedures before landing or taking off.  You just threw it open and flew.  The clouds grew lighter and lighter and then just disappeared, as the sky grew darker and darker and then just became the black of space.  Starr punched in the flight plan and leaned back.

“Have you figured out where we are going after Thim?”  Viv asked.

As Starr swiveled his chair to look at her, their knees touched.  She had managed to increase the size of the grease smear on her cheek to reach her ear and her eyebrow, and now there was a large smear across the top of her right breast.  Starr stared at that perfectly formed though messy breast and its unsoiled twin for just a moment too long and when he looked up into her eyes, he saw a question there.  It was a question he didn’t want to have to answer.

“You have grease on you,” he said, pointing.  “Just there.”

“Damn,” she said, looking down.  “How do I do it?  If there is a spot of grease anywhere on the planet, it’s going to end up on me.”

“You’ve got some on your face too.”

“Well, that figures.”

“Did you have someplace in mind?” Starr asked, now that his indiscretion had been covered up.  “To go after Thim, I mean.”

Viv shrugged.  “Makes no diff to me.”

“We can talk it over at supper.”

“Do you need me now?” she asked.  When he shook his head, she continued.  “I’m going to take a shower.”

Feeling her stomach growl, the girl inventor looked up to see that it was almost 1:00 PM. She decided that rather than visit the cafeteria there in the R&D building, she would go on home. Chef Pierce could fix her something light that wouldn’t spoil her dinner that evening with Toby.

The weather was warm for late March, though it was a bit windier than one might have wished, flying fifty feet above the ground. Zipping down low, just over the tops of the saguaro cactuses and zooming back up and over the high red rocks, made Astrid smile. When a few strands of hair slipped from beneath her helmet and down onto her forehead, she broke into a laugh. She finally had hair long enough to get in the way!

Suddenly the gentle humming, which was a constant companion to anyone flying a hoverbike, went silent. The flying scooter dropped toward the ground like a brick, and Astrid went with it. She tried to steer toward a spot of soft sand, but the vehicle was completely unresponsive. There was no time to do anything else. Pushing herself away from the no longer flying scooter, she landed in the soft desert sand, just as the hoverbike crashed on a slightly firmer patch of gravel.

It was a minute before Astrid could suck any air back into her lungs. Though her entire left side hurt, there were no pains that stood out from the others. Carefully checking her legs and arms, and then feeling over the rest of her, Astrid decided that she hadn’t broken anything, at least not too badly. She sat slowly up and looked at her hoverbike. It was sitting about ten feet away. Though its frame was intact, the hoverdisks on the bottom were smashed to pieces.

Astrid tapped her Maxxim Carpé watch computer with her finger. Then she looked down at the device. The screen was shattered and there was a dent. Retrieving her phone from her pocket, she pressed the speed dial to her father.

“Hi, Astrid.”

“Hi, Dad. I’ve had a bit of a hoverbike crash. I’m alright, but I’m stuck out in the desert.”

Getting to her feet, the girl inventor looked at the landmarks all around her. Ahead of her, she could see the low rise of hills between her and Maxxim City. To both the north and south were large sandstone hills. She was north of the Saguaro Cactus Park and miles northeast of Pearl Lake. If she walked downhill, she would run into one of the many dry riverbeds in the area. They all flowed toward Pearl Lake, and between it and her was the monorail line.

“I think I can walk to the monorail from here,” she said. “It may take me an hour or so.”

“Astrid, stay where you are. How’s you’re phone battery?”

“It’s fine… um, seventy-four percent.”

“Good,” he said. “As long as it’s on, we can track you by GPS. Wait where you are.”

Astrid brought the Maxxim Starcraft 170 down on the runway at LAX. The 170 was a sharp, if unusual looking aircraft. Designed by Astrid’s father, the 47-foot plane featured a long pointy fuselage with a small canard wing just behind the nose. The main wing was at the back of the aircraft, and carried twin turboprop engines, with the propellers facing rearward. These were known as push-props. The cabin, which could accommodate up to nine passengers, now seated only Penelope and Sabrina Scacchi and their carryon luggage. Astrid was, of course, up front, along co-pilot Don Herron.

Herron stayed with the plane, while the three young women disembarked and made their way into the LAX Private Terminal. Astrid was surprised to see her friend from France waiting just inside. Océane Feuillée was about an inch taller than Astrid and quite thin. Her pleasant face was framed in short black hair, cut in a cute little wedge. She reached out and embraced Astrid in a tight hug.

“Hello, Océane,” said Astrid. “I thought we would have to search for you.”

“You’re Miss Scacchi told me where to come.”

“And here she is. Océane, Sabrina Scacchi. Sabrina, Océane. And you remember my Aunt Penelope.”

“Oui.” The three women shook hands.

“So what is the big secret?” asked Astrid.

“Let’s find a quiet place, and I will tell you all about it.”

“I’ve reserved one of the private rooms here,” said Miss Scacchi. “It’s just down the hall.”

The small private room, enclosed in glass, was quiet and featured comfortable chairs. Astrid sat down next to Océane, and the other two sat across from them.

“So what’s going on?”

“I’ve been working with my friend Adeline Petit. She is a graduate student with my father, and she has been working on a special project for the past three years. So I decided to help. She is studying dolphins and their communication. It would be wonderful if you could create a device to translate their language to ours.”

“Of course that would be great,” said Penelope. “It’s not possible though.”

“Maybe it is,” said Astrid. “I’ve read about some work along that line that an engineer from Google was doing. It’s simply a matter of finding out what sounds are associated with what actions and objects.”

“You make that sound easy,” continued Penelope. “There could be millions of nouns and verbs to sort through.”

“Adeline has thousands of sounds recorded and identified,” said Océane. “She just needs the program and the computer. And it would have to be portable… and waterproof.”

“Is that all?” said Penelope.

“I think it can be done,” said Astrid. “What’s more, I want to do it. Where is she working? Hawaii?”

“No. She’s at a very small, uncharted island, in French Polynesia. It’s fifty miles east of Tahiti. She calls it Mokupuni Nai’a.”

“Dolphin Island,” translated Penelope.

“I didn’t know you spoke Tahitian,” Astrid remarked.

“I do, but that’s actually Hawaiian.”

“All right,” said Astrid. “I want to help, but why the hush hush? Why couldn’t you tell me all of this over the phone?”

“There’s more to it,” replied Océane. “Something is hurting the dolphins. There have been mass strandings every year for at least the last three years.”

“That’s horrible,” said Miss Scacchi.

“It is,” agreed Astrid. “But it happens all around the world. Why the secrecy?”

“We think it may be caused by the United States navy and their sonar. Adeline is afraid they will try to stop us from reporting it.”

“Well, I don’t think we really need to worry about nefarious Navy agents stalking us, but let’s agree to keep this all between us until we can figure out what’s really going on.”

“My flight leaves for Papeete Fa’a’ā in two hours,” said Océane.

“I need a while to get the necessary computer equipment together,” said Astrid. “Then I can fly the Starcraft out and meet you.”

“You can’t Astrid,” said Miss Scacchi. “Your mother said you must have an adult with you and I have to be back in Maxxim City by Monday.”

“I’ll go with Astrid,” said Penelope. “We’ll get you a first class ticket back home.”

“You don’t mind?” Astrid asked her aunt. “This may take weeks.”

“What? You need weeks to create a device to talk to another species? You must be slipping.”

Astrid laughed. “All right then. Let’s get Océane to her flight, get a ticket for Miss Scacchi…”

“Call me Sabrina please, Astrid.”

“Okay, but if my mother get’s mad, it’s your fault. A ticket for Sabrina. Then you and I, Aunt Penny, need to go to the computer store.”

Astrid Maxxim, brilliant teenage inventor returns. Astrid is looking forward to racing against a professional driving team to prove her electric racecar can take on the gas-guzzlers. Then without warning, she wakes up in the hospital with partial amnesia. What could have happened to her? Now everyone treats her like she’s brain-damaged! What if her IQ really did drop to 184? What a nightmare!

You can get Astrid Maxxim and the Electric Racecar Challenge for nook for just 99 cents.