Maker - Michael Jan Friedman [0]
Sitting up in Bed and Running
His Fingers Through His Hair.
“Sorry to bother you, sir, but we’re being hailed by an unidentified cargo vessel. Whoever’s in command wants to speak with you—and you alone.”
“Very well,” said the captain. “I will take it here in my quarters.”
“Aye, sir.”
Instantly, the Federation insignia on the screen—a disk displaying a field of gleaming stars resting in the embrace of twin laurel wreaths—gave way to a different image entirely.
It was that of a woman, and a very beautiful woman at that. She had long black hair gathered into a ponytail and eyes the color of rich, dark chocolate. And it wasn’t the first time the captain had seen her…
Though the last time had been in another galaxy.
Other Stargazer Novels
The Valiant
Gauntlet
Progenitor
Three
Oblivion
Enigma
Requiem
Reunion
The First Virtue
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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For Debbie and Stu, who understand
Chapter One
ANDREAS NIKOLAS HAD RUN into his share of alien species. He had attended the Academy with them, worked alongside them on starships, eaten with them, slept with them, laughed with them, and risked his life with them.
But he had never encountered anyone like the personage who towered before him in an otherwise empty corridor of the Yridian cargo hauler Iktoj’ni.
This alien was taller than Nikolas by half a meter and remarkably thick-chested beneath his coarse, dark tunic, giving the impression of enormous strength—though he was quite clearly padded elsewhere with a surfeit of flaccid flesh. His oblong head was bald except for a long, lank circlet of dark hair, and his mouth was little more than a gash in his face.
But his most distinctive feature by far was his eyes. They glowed a dazzling silver beneath the overhanging ledge of his brow, fixing Nikolas where he stood.
“I am glad you are awake,” said the behemoth, his voice a hair-raising jangle of stones.
It echoed off the cone-shaped mineral deposits that hung from the ceiling and rose from the floor—because it wasn’t quite true that Nikolas and the alien were alone in the duranium-sheathed passageway. There weren’t any other sentients there, but there was an abundant collection of orange- and blue-veined stalagmites and stalactites—the kind that seemed to belong in an underground cavern, not in the corridor of an Yridian cargo hauler.
And if that weren’t disconcerting enough, the projections were growing before Nikolas’s eyes, lengthening and adding girth with the help of the mineral-bearing water streaming down their sides.
Where was the water coming from? He didn’t know. The Iktoj’ni wasn’t supposed to have any water supply. Its crew washed with the help of sonic emitters and got their drinking water from replicators, the same as their food.
So why were there crystalline threads descending the smooth, shiny surface of the stalactites? And how could mineral deposits have gotten so robust in the short time Nikolas had been stretched out on a lower deck?
Awake, the alien had said. But was he awake?
He had lost