Exclusive Extract: Altered Tides (The Galactic Captains #5)

Galactic Captains fans! Here's a (spoiler free) sneak peek of book 5: Altered Tides which will be releasing later this year.

This is an unedited extract from Altered Tides, my forthcoming fifth installment of the queer sci fi series The Galactic Captains. In this extract, we pick up the story of Captain Ales after the events of book 3, Horizon Points.

This is as spoiler free an extract as possible. Read at your own risk of course, but there shouldn't be anything here that will have a bearing on your enjoyment of books 1-4.

This reading was given last month at the Rainbow Space Magic convention. There is a brief introduction and the reading, which is around ten minutes, begins at 1:28.

https://youtu.be/R-BSyiWKL5A

Each of the four books in The Galactic Captains series are 40% off when purchased directly through the Nine Star Press website

***

“Translation complete.” The metallic twang of the wrist-tech woke me. I don’t know how long I’d been out for, but long enough for it to listen to whatever conversations had been going on around and build up a rudimentary vocabulary. I shifted uneasily from the dream world I’d been swimming inside for what could have been a lifetime. I’d imagined Franx and I in the cockpit of a ship, diving from world to world, crossing frontiers of empires and bouncing between galaxies while holding crystal cocktail glasses in our hands. I drank deeply from my frosted glass. ‘It’s made of liquid galinium and lemonique juice,’ Franx said. We both burst out laughing. I laughed all the way into consciousness.

Up here, for it felt like I was high, a breeze blew in from a wide-open window I couldn’t see. The slight wind washed away the otherwise hot and heavy air which edged on uncomfortable whenever the breeze quietened down.

I shuffled off the bed, keen to get a lay of the land I was an involuntary guest of. I wrapped the sheet around my shoulders and folded it across my body to keep out the breeze which was now edging into the cold side. Beyond the netting, I was in a large stone room. The walls rounded and curving up to a dome, but here it was made out of smoothed stone or clay, not rough rock like the last place I’d been in.

A range of pottery littered what felt like a palace bedroom. Large pots and shallow bowls scattered along the walls. Then I noticed the source of the breeze coming from behind the bed. I padded with bare feet towards an archway leading out to a broad balcony high in the sky. Without even edging outside, I caught the breathtaking sight of nighttime sky from another galaxy.

Unfamiliar patterns of stars sparkled in a black sky. Beyond the horizon was a hint of light blue. I had no clue of the time, but it felt like this world was approaching dawn. I stepped a bit further out, wrapping the sheet closer around my body to keep the cold air out. An entire city of stubby square stone buildings and clay-colored domes rushed far below, bounding between narrow streets leading to a high wall surrounding the settlement in the distance. Beyond that was wilderness, then craggy mountains painted dark yellow across the emerging light blue of the horizon.

It almost reminded me of my room atop the Capitol Hotel on Jansen, gazing out on the city of ice and stone built inside a crater. But in place of white snow and black rock were dusty streets and terracotta homes.

“You’re awake,” a voice said behind me on the balcony and I jumped in utter terror, practically losing my sheet in the process.

“What the infinity…” I spun around and saw her. She said it again.

“You’re awake.” But the movements of her mouth did not match up to the sound I heard in my ear. The wrist-tech had taken over, using it’s capacity for universal translation to instantly turn whatever words she spoke into Standard Galactic in my ear, and turning my words into a language she could understand when I said anything. I hated this function of the wrist-tech, the disconnect between the words a person spoke and what one heard in their ear, plus one’s lips and tongue moving in a different direction from what the brain expected, always left me with a cracking headache.

But the woman who spoke did not look in a hurry for an answer. She smiled kindly, but exuded pure power. Here she was standing atop what seemed to be the tallest tower in this whole world, all alone with me. She leaned back against the parapet surrounding the balcony which looked to me like sandstone in the starlight. Unlike the only other creatures I’d seen who’d been dressed all in white linen, she wore tight, practical trousers and a simple woven overshirt with a thick leathery belt wrapped around a middle so thin and bony she looked malnourished. The buckle was the color of unpolished gold, much like her hair, which seemed to contain weeks upon weeks of dust and grime. But she flicked her dirty hair to one side and stepped forward, joining my side and gazing out into the sleeping city.

“My priests say you are a God,” she said, again her mouth moving with a disconcerting difference to the words I heard in my own ear. The universal translator built into the wrist-tech had at least done its job. I stood quietly. There wasn’t much else to do but marvel at the absurdity of crash-landing on a world with no way home and being hailed as a deity. I wrapped the sheet tighter around me. “ But I am not so sure,” she said, not thinking I would understand. She turned to lean her elbows against the parapet and gazed out at the dark, sleeping world below while I kept my eyes firmly on the starry sky above, desperately looking for any signs of space-faring life in this new galaxy.

“Are you in charge here?” I asked her as the chilled air made me shiver and my unused muscles began to ache. My tongue twisted in ways I would never suspect as the universal translator chip overrode the brain signals. It was so much easier when everyone knew at least rudimentary Standard Galactic. I’d even take the hissing plurals of my old globby boss Javer over the incongruous clashing of mind versus wrist-tech.

But her face dropped in disbelief as my mouth spoke the words in her own language, the wrist-tech hijacking thoughts from my brain and turning them into some other form of speech. Through the darkness the whites of her eyes flared as if assessing how quick she’d been to assume I was not a god.

“In… charge?” She asked, swallowing tightly.

“Do you,” I pointed at her, “rule here?” I swept my bare arm over the nighttime vista, like a pompous Kyleri noble wrapped in my silk robes. All I needed was some crystal high-heels and I could be the next Emperor of the Million Suns.

“Ahh,” she nodded. “Yes. I am the king.” She pointed at herself. I waited a moment for the translation to correct itself, but it didn’t.

“Queen?” I suggested, listening closely to the actual sound the wrist-tech had caused my mouth to say. It sounded almost the same as the word she’d said which had translated in my ear as ‘king.’ Morck it sounded like, but I couldn’t be too sure. The universal translator broadcast the Standard Galactic in one ear, but left the other open to hear it directly.

“Morck,” she said again, pointing to herself. “Na Morck-ah al ack-ah. Kehma ah-Morck.”

I’d been concentrating on her words so hadn’t heard the translation. I quickly tapped my wrist-tech for a repeat. The sight of the shiny metal wrapped around my lower arm seemed to intrigue her further. I figured this wasn’t the only piece of metal she’d noticed on my body.

“King,” the translation repeated in my ear. “Not queen or wife. More like she-king.”

“Ah-Morck,” I said with a brief bow, enjoying the brief sensation of my mouth aligning with my brain. Then, realizing my mistake, corrected myself. “Morck.”

The she-king seemed to like that. She smiled and turned away from her kingdom and pointed inside.

“You must be cold. Come on me.” That didn’t sound right. After I followed her inside, the wrist-tech gave a corrective twang and repeated itself. “Come with me.” Yes, communicating in Standard Galactic was easier.

Back inside the palatial room, she led me behind the bed to a hollowed out square in the floor covered in cushions surrounding a brick table in the middle of the dip. It looked out on a glassless window, supported by three thin clay columns slightly narrower than the width of a person to keep anyone from falling out into the city below. The view downward was much the same as from the balcony we’d come from. An endless snaking of dusty streets of squat red brick buildings squashed up against each other. An ancient city if I’d ever seen one.

A few I noticed had a flickering flame inside. It reminded me so strongly of the monastic villages back on Teva. Simple brick huts crowded around the foot of the Holy Mountain of Souls. They preferred to live the old ways. Without technology or even running water. When I used to fly my fighter ship over their village, I knew the dawn was coming when inside the huts cooking fires were lit, exposing themselves to the Crejan bombers. I shivered at the memory and blinked away a stinging tear.

“Sit, please,” the she-king said. Keeping my sheet carefully intact, I edged into the pit of pillows and stared beyond the city walls to the craggy mountains and emerging blue light beyond the horizon. Those crags felt familiar. My ship must still be out there in the mountains. Infinity knew what state it was in, but I must find it. At least to know if forever I would be trapped in this galaxy, on this planet and in this cage.

“Drink,” the she-king said, leaning down and handing me a small clay cup. She slid into the pillow pit and took a seat to my right, taking a sip and placing her own cup on the table then leaning against the pillows, looking at me. I was suddenly struck by the feeling this was her own bedroom.

“I hope this won’t put me back to sleep,” I said, taking a sip of the warm, minty tea.

“No no,” she said. “Your body was broken when we found you. Our priests healed you.”

I flexed my arm, painless and as strong as ever I remembered it.

“Thank you.”

The she-king nodded and reached for her clay cup. But with another sip I noticed she’d finished it, while mine was still full. Perhaps this was a ruse to trick me into drinking a poison that required a cup full to work. But I’d survived this long thanks to them. It seemed strange to heal me before only to poison me now.

“You came from the stars,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, I did. But many, many stars away.”

“Why to here?” She asked without the pretense of nicety. If I was an invasion, or the preface to one, a king should know.

“I’m lost.” She seemed to settle at the simple explanation.

“Where is your home?”

I laughed while drinking my tea. That was a loaded question, and it might take me till beyond dawn to answer fully. Surely a king did not have time to sit and listen to my tortured tale of escaping Teva for the Outer Verge, trafficking Kri to Targuline with Franx then branching out to work for Javert’s smuggling operation before getting caught up Ukko, Turo and the Union of the Outer Verge. No, it didn’t sound like a story a king should hear.

“My home was destroyed in a war. I survived, but now I am lost.”

The king’s eyes softened. She swept back her hair and shuffled closer on the pillows, almost close enough to touch me. She seemed genuinely touched by me, a traveler from the stars she did not know, and even sad for my lost home.

“I am sorry. You will always have a home here. You have my word.”

She said it with a rock-hard stare of determination. The she-king was young, but weathered. I could imagine her having won some great battle to sit where she was, atop a tower of clay and commanding white-robed priests to bring star-gods to her chambers. My experience with priests might not serve me well, but I had better luck with strong-willed women. I hoped I could trust this one too.

“By what name are you called, space-traveler?”

“Ales.”

“Ales.” She repeated. “I am Medaliah.” Medaliah touched her temple then her heart, and I followed the gesture as she nodded along.

“Thanks to you and your people for rescuing me, Medaliah. But,” I leaned forward, the linen sheet falling to my waist and exposing my bare chest. I quickly wrapped it around my shoulder again, incredibly aware I was still naked.

“I must tell you what I saw from my ship. This world is in danger.”

“Yes,” she nodded, sitting back on her pillow like the weight of the world rested on her shoulders. I suppose it did. “The rains have not come in two years.”

“Rains? No. A collision. There’s a blue planet, the same size as this edging into your orbit. You must have seen it in the sky.”

“Aquina,” she told me, as the city below began to brighten with an azure dawn. “This world is dry. We have no water. The rains they come once in a generation, when Aquina swallows the sky. For forty days and forty nights it will rain, and we rejoice and open our jars and reservoirs and save every drop to last us for the next forty years. But our bores are empty. We have been waiting for two long years. Only a god can help us now."

“I’m… I’m sorry, I truly am. But I’m not a god. I’m just a man.”

Medaliah sighed, and I felt her frustration, every last drop of it.

“That’s what I feared.”

***