Demons and Dragons Book One: Ranin Seven

 

As a d’skeku trooper, Zaynah belongs to the emperor. Duty is everything. She’s sworn to take her own life if she fails to achieve her mission. When demon brothers rescue her from the wreckage of her spacecraft, she faces a heartbreaking test.

The rebel demons live to exact vengeance from the Emperor Prado. The hated royal ordered the murder of their brothers, sparing them only so they would take the blame for the heinous crime. The demons escaped by stowing away on a miner headed for Ranin Seven. The remote moon, rich in the duranium essential to so much of modern life, provides the brothers with a powerbase to topple Prado’s empire.

Excerpt:
Zaynah entered hostile territory. The very elements themselves assaulted her ship. Dust swirled, overwhelming the purifiers and oxygen generation systems. Strange energy fields hammered the hull. Worst of all, fiery meteors battered the small fighter’s shields.

Wielding a handheld fire suppressor, she tried to contain the dozens of smoldering fires without wiping out anymore of the ship’s systems. Fire suppression was off line, a demon-level inconvenience. Then a flashing blue light indicated shields were gone. Another blinking display informed her that life support registered seventy percent. Five percent less than the last time she checked. Not good.

Stinking demons! The lovely dragonfly fighter was hopelessly damaged. Suddenly, sadness threatened to overwhelm her. She wanted to weep for the ruined ship. The wreckage seemed doubly unfair on the craft’s maiden voyage and her first trek outside Dragon’s Fire–her home solar system. After nineteen years of dismal performance, she’d improved–growing stronger and faster. Now none of that mattered. She’d failed within sight of her goal.

The dark side of Ranin Seven loomed on the ship’s viewer. The moon’s surface was a study in black. The only signs of life surly red landing lights. So different from the welcoming glow of the yellow safety beacons of Basilisk Prime’s tarmacs.

She pushed away the despair, before dark thoughts overwhelmed her, and coated another set of hissing and sparking connectors with the thick foam. The low-tech canister sputtered. Its steady stream of foam narrowed, and then quit with a sullen hiss. Smoke thickened around her much too quickly. The stench of burning syns stung her eyes and rasped her throat. Her ears rang from the spacecraft’s alarms. All of them worked too well. The high-pitched sirens blared constant warnings of yet another critical system failure.

Thanks to the Goddess, the main engines were still on line. Although without oxygen, warp power didn’t help all that much. Zaynah dropped the useless suppressor, tapping the thruster control to avoid another spray of small meteors. Without shields, even fist-sized rocks could puncture the craft’s hull. Then the whole ship lurched and shuddered.

Another meteor hit?

Not a meteor, unless they’d developed artificial intelligence capabilities. Her vessel had changed course. It was going down.

Thrusters weren’t responding. If it were simply a matter of losing engine power, then the ship would’ve been in freefall. This was a fast, but controlled, descent. Better than crashing. Maybe.

Something, or more likely someone, had a lock on her ship.

The moon loomed into view–black, rocky, and barren. There should be some evidence of the massive duranium mining operation, a biosphere, and life signs. None of those things was visible. Nothing registered on the ship’s sensors. Zaynah wasn’t a superstitious woman. But she’d been briefed on the losses in this sector. The area surrounding Ranin Seven had become the galaxy’s own black hole.

While in route to the moon, she’d received an update–yet another of Prado’s mining ships had dropped out of the info-web. Simply vanished. The most recent missing transport had been escorted by squadron of imperial fighters.

Way too many vessels vanished while on course for Ranin Seven for the losses to be attributed to the meteor storms. Stranger yet, no wreckage, not even the nearly indestructible automatic distress signal device every imperial craft carried had been recovered.

As her small fighter spiraled toward the moon, the sinking feeling in her stomach plummeted almost as fast as the ship. She was about to learn the fate of all those missing ships, but she wasn’t likely to survive long enough to share the answer.

Everyone knew that syn-people didn’t have souls. But just in case, she made the sign of the goddess as she strapped herself into the pilot’s seat. She reminded herself a d’skeku trooper’s wishes counted for nothing in imperial schemes. She and the dragonfly were an initial ploy. Her mission was to find and exploit an opening for the more powerful fighters coming.

Her imminent death signified nothing. If she failed to accomplish her mission–duty required her to take her own life as soon as possible.

Acceptance of fate’s decrees had never been her nature. The stubborn streak that kept her training for hundreds of hours without any improvement in her fitness scores kicked in now, filling her with fresh determination. By the emperor’s teeth, she would not dishonor her training. She would find that opening.

Or make one.

Buy link