Survivor Skills Read online

  Survivor Skills

  Project Gliese 581g Book 3

  S.E. Smith

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Synopsis

  Character Reference:

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Read on for samples!

  Sample of The Sea Witch’s Redemption

  Sample of Dust: Before and After

  Additional Books and Information

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank my husband Steve for believing in me and being proud enough of me to give me the courage to follow my dream. I would also like to give a special thank you to my sister and best friend, Linda, who not only encouraged me to write, but who also read the manuscript. Also to my other friends who believe in me: Julie, Jackie, Christel, Sally, Jolanda, Lisa, Laurelle, Debbie, and Narelle. The girls that keep me going!

  And a special thanks to Paul Heitsch, David Brenin, Samantha Cook, Suzanne Elise Freeman, and PJ Ochlan—the awesome voices behind my audiobooks!

  —S.E. Smith

  Science Fiction Romance

  Survivor Skills: Project Gliese Book 3

  Copyright © 2018 by S.E. Smith

  First E-Bookprint Published May 2018

  Cover Design by Melody Simmons

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission from the author.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious or have been used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, actual events, or organizations are strictly coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Summary: A member of the Project Gliese 581g wakes on an alien world and joins forces with a rebel fighter to locate other missing crew members.

  ISBN (paperback) 978-1944125189

  ISBN (eBook) 978-1-942562-76-4

  Published in the United States by Montana Publishing.

  {1. Science Fiction Romance – Fiction. 2. Space Opera – Fiction. 3. Action/Adventure – Fiction. 4. Suspense – Fiction. 5. Romance – Fiction.}

  www.montanapublishinghouse.com

  Synopsis

  Two warriors—one mission: Survival….

  Sergi Lazaroff is a weapons expert and a member of the Russian FSB, also known as the Federal Security Service Bureau—a nice term for his true profession as a spy. Assigned to the Project Gliese 581g exploration team, his job was supposed to be simple—find out what was in space, retrieve the technology, and return home with it, if possible. When he wakes up on an alien planet, Sergi knows the last part of his mission will be impossible. Instead, he must use his military training and skills to survive in a world where he doesn’t know the rules.

  La’Rue Gant’s search for the mysterious occupant of the pod that landed on the assassins’ planet of Turbinta quickly turns into a game of predator versus prey. She found what she was looking for—and discovers that the ancient legends may be true when the tables are unexpectedly turned, and she becomes the hunted. What she doesn’t expect is the powerful reaction she has to this man from another world.

  When word reaches them that another member of the Gliese’s crew was found, Sergi and La’Rue embark on a mission to save that crew member at any cost. Caught in the middle of an alien civil war, two fighters from vastly different backgrounds must come together to fight for the survival of the Knights of the Gallant Order, even as the Legion forces close in around them. Can they slip through the traps set up to snare them, or will the Legion Director finally capture not one, but two of the prophesied ancient Knights of the Gallant Order?

  Character Reference:

  Members of the Gliese 581g Exploration Team:

  Commander Joshua Manson

  American Mission Leader

  Background: Navy

  Commander Ashton Haze

  American Pilot

  Background: Army

  Sergi Lazaroff

  Russian Mission Specialist

  Spy for the FSB

  Background: Mechanical engineering, Payload, and Weapons

  Julia Marksdale

  American Navigator and Contact Support

  Daughter of the professor who discovered the object

  Mission Specialist

  Background: Astronomy and Physics

  Mei Li Hú

  Chinese Mission Specialist

  Spy for the Ministry of State Security

  Background: Computer science, Biology, Environmental Systems

  Landing Sites

  Josh: Tesla Terra

  Partnered with Cassa de Rola

  Ash: Torrian

  Partnered with Kella Ta’Qui

  Sergi: Turbinta

  Partnered with La’Rue Gant

  Mei: Cryon II 5469220

  Julia: Plateau

  Other Characters

  La’Rue Gant:

  Freighter Captain

  Daughter of a Knight of the Gallant

  Home world: Tesla Terra

  HL-9:

  Spider-like service robot belonging to La’Rue

  Nickname: H

  General Hutu Gomerant:

  Legendary Knight of the Gallant Order

  Son of Kubo

  Torrian

  Home world: Torrian

  General Kubo Gomerant:

  Crafty Knight of the Gallant Order

  Keeper of The Ancient City of Torrian

  Father of Hutu

  Home World: Torrian

  Bantu aka Squeals:

  Member of the Legion for 10 years

  Agent for the Gallant Order

  Home World: Tesla Terra

  Slate:

  La’Rue’s ex-lover and ex-crew member on the Star Runner

  Home World: Jeslean

  Tallei:

  One-eyed Master Turbintan Assassin

  Kella’s master

  Home World: Flora Terra

  Zoak:

  Pupil of Tallei

  Gailock species;

  Raised as a Turbintan

  Home world: Gaul

  Andri Andronikos:

  Director of the Legion

  Half-brother to Coleridge

  Uncle to Roan

  Home world: Jeslean

  Coleridge Landais aka Count Landais:

  General of the Legion

  Andri’s half brother

  Father of Roan

  Home world: Jeslean

  Nia:

  Deceased wife of General Coleridge Landais

  Mother of Roan Landais

  Home world: Plateau

  Roan Landais:

  General of the Legion

  Son of Coleridge Landais

  Nephew of Andri Andronikos

  Home world: Plateau – raised on Jeslean

  Roanna:

  Roan’s grandmother on his mother’s side

  Home world: Plateau

  Calstar:

  Roan’s grandfather on his mother
’s side

  Home world: Plateau

  Dorane LeGaugh:

  Wealthy businessman

  Home world: Cryon

  Crock:

  Freight Captain

  Owns fleet of freighters

  Home world: Torrian

  Prologue

  Gliese 581

  Eighteen months, twenty-three days, four hours:

  928,081,020 km/6.2 Astronomical Units (AU) from Earth.

  “Two minutes,” Sergi Lazaroff confirmed into the microphone in his helmet, responding to the warning he had been given.

  He reached out and gripped the side of a long panel. While his spacesuit was bulky, he moved with ease in the zero gravity within the complex alien machine. He had attached a string of magnetic lights at regular intervals, and there were additional lights mounted to his helmet – but outside of their limited range, the interior was pitch black. Josh waited in the large gap created by whatever had struck the gateway, ready in case Sergi needed help.

  A feeling of awe still struck him when he allowed himself to think about the fact that he was inside an alien machine that had been abandoned who knew how long ago. The results of the carbon dating they’d done on the metal were inconsistent, much to the disgust of Mei and Julia.

  A smile curved his lips as he thought about Dr. Mei Li Hú’s frustrated determination to extrapolate a plausible history of the object. Of course she would be better off waiting to theorize until they’d gotten more information, but some people were just too impatient.

  Mei was one of the five crew members on this mission to investigate the unusual object discovered more than ten years ago by Dr. Harry Marksdale, a University of Arizona professor and amateur astronomer. Mei had ostensibly come to the mission at the behest of the Chinese space agency, and Sergi suspected the others were unaware of her secret objectives.

  Her private mission was similar enough to his own that it had been relatively easy to recognize. She was a spy for the Ministry of State Security, the Chinese equivalent of Russia’s Federal Security Service Bureau. Mei’s father, owner of one of China’s largest technology manufacturing and research companies, had been a major contributor to Project Gliese 581g, which had made it easy for Mei to become a crew member of the mission.

  Mei was one of two Mission Specialists aboard the spaceship. Her background in computer science, biology, and environmental systems was an invaluable asset to the expedition. The other three members of the crew were Americans.

  Lieutenant Commander Joshua Manson was a career Navy man. He commanded the Gliese 581g mission with military precision and attention to detail. Along with Lieutenant Commander Ashton ‘Ash’ Haze, the pilot for this operation, he had been brought on after a helicopter accident killed the first crew chosen for this highly classified international suicide mission.

  The last member of the team was the only member without any military training. Dr. Julia Marksdale, Harry Marksdale’s daughter, was there purely for her scientific expertise. Julia was in charge of navigation, medical, and contact support.

  This project had been the brainchild of Harry and Julia. Sadly, Harry, along with the initial and backup teams, had been killed while returning to Houston. Sergi suspected the fatal mechanical failures of the helicopters had been contrived to ensure that he and Mei were added to the new list of recruits. Unfortunately, there had not been enough time to find out whether it had been his government’s doing or that of Mei’s.

  His specialty was in mechanical engineering, payload, and weaponry. Sergi’s mission was straightforward: find out what was out in space, retrieve as much data as he could, and return home alive to share it with his handlers. Unfortunately, there was no way to transmit the data without everyone involved with the Gliese 581g mission realizing that he was a spy. The only way to pass on the information covertly was to make it back home in one piece and do so personally.

  Of course, this mission came with greater risks than any other he had been assigned before. After all, if things went south, there was no one to extricate him – not that anyone would have come for him on any of his other missions either.

  “Sergi, you need to monitor your oxygen level. You are down to eighty percent while Josh is still at eighty-nine,” Mei quietly said.

  “Are you worrying about me, Mei?” he quipped.

  The sound of an inelegant snort whooshed in his ear. “Dead people tend to soil themselves. I don’t want you to ruin a perfectly good spacesuit because you hooked up the hoses incorrectly,” she retorted.

  “That is downright disgusting, Mei,” Ash dryly added his opinion.

  “But true,” Julia responded. “The gas produced within a body after death combined with the incapacitation of the region of the brain that would normally control the muscles holding the sphincter closed would result in soiling. There are a lot of processes that begin after death that manifest in unfortunate ways because not all parts of a body die at the same time. Death creates more of a domino effect. As different types of muscles die, they can loosen, or they can contract, causing twitches and spasms after death. Plus, the blood still contains the nutrients it had before the heart stopped beating, and a person’s death causes the membranes of blood cells to become more permeable to calcium as they, too, begin to die, so for certain muscle cells, like those in a penis, that are activated by calcium ions—”

  “I don’t think I like where this is going,” Ash piped in.

  Sergi shook his head inside the helmet. He didn’t know if it was the growing familiarity with the two women during the voyage or if he was getting soft, but both of them amused the hell out of him. If he stopped to think about it, the lighthearted affection and protective instincts he had toward the two women were actually brand-new experiences in his life. While his relationship, if he could even call it that, with Mei had always been like two tigers circling each other looking for a weak point, what he had with Julia was different. She was a quiet, intelligent, yet strangely innocent and naïve, scientist, and he sometimes silently compared her to a delicate flower so rare that he’d thought it extinct – because she was genuine, and she was compassionate, and she was single-handedly giving him hope that there might be more like her somewhere in the world.

  Josh and Ash were good men to have with you in a storm. He admired Josh’s attention to detail and his ability to process information quickly and piece it together to form a larger picture. Ash, on the other hand, had a quick wit, easy smile, and impressive piloting skills.

  As he listened to his team’s chatter, Sergi turned the cameras embedded in his helmet and suit toward the circuit in front of him, making sure they would record his every movement. The ‘unusual object’ appeared to be an alien gateway of some sort, and inside the mechanism was a treasure trove of technology unlike anything he had ever seen before. He wanted as much documentation of it as he could get. After over eighteen months in space on an experimental spaceship, he was still trying to wrap his head around the fact that they had proof that humans were not alone in the universe – or at least that they hadn’t been at one time.

  He refitted the fourth of five panels he had repaired, and pushed off, floating nearly a half meter before he twisted and grabbed a bar to stop his upward momentum. He joked with Mei as he turned the cameras toward the damaged circuit in front of him. From the pouch attached to his utility belt, he pulled out the last circuit board he had reverse-engineered from the damaged alien boards. He hoped the components were a close enough match to work. When he had applied minimal power to it, the board had lit up the entire workroom.

  Mei murmured that he was now down to sixty-nine percent, so he had better stop giving all the oxygen to his… head. Sergei smirked, imagining the pointed look she would be giving him if they were in the same room. He chuckled when he heard Julia’s voice falter in confusion. Julia was extremely smart, but sometimes suggestive jokes went right over her head.