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- Herausgeber: LVE Press
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Serie: Warded Gunslinger
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
A pirate corvette. A spaceship graveyard. And the Warded Gunslinger, out for blood!
I put down the drill, running my fingertip over the ward engraved in the thick slab of spaceship armor plate, feeling for any uneven parts.
I take my work seriously. It’s what keeps me alive.
Jake – the Warded Gunslinger – has a broken ship, an extremely valuable pet void dragon hatchling sleeping in his cabin, and the hope of running away to live quietly with them both.
But with an unidentified, heavily armed corvette on his trail, a new one heading to cut him off, and an engine that explodes mid-flight, it looks like “live quietly” means “go hide.”
Problem is, there’s not much to hide behind in space…
A Graveyard in the Sky is a short novel of guns and magic in a distant future, where dragons are real, warp-stone ships roam the galaxy, and sometimes, the only thing to hide behind is the corpse of your enemy. It’s got cowboys and privateers, found family, true companions, and magitech in a sprawling space opera.
A Graveyard in the Sky is the second standalone novel in the Warded Gunslinger series. Get it now!
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A Graveyard in the Sky
A Warded Gunslinger Short Novel
Filip Wiltgren
A Graveyard in the Sky by Filip Wiltgren
Published by LVE Press www.lvepress.com
Copyright © 2024 Filip Wiltgren www.wiltgren.com
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Iput down the drill, the tiny, high-speed engraving head gouging a slim white line in my workbench. I didn’t mind. The black polymer top was already scarred with dozens of such lines. I ran my fingertip over the curve engraved in the thick slab of steel spaceship armor plate, feeling for any rough edges.
I take my work seriously. It’s what keeps me alive.
The ward engraved in the armor plate felt solid, the edges sharp, the middle smooth. I relaxed my mind, sensing the flow of magic around me, then conjured a thread of force from the void through which the Bucket was traveling.
It came – a tingly, cold, brittle, scraping along my mind – and I fed it into the plate. The ward shimmered a faint blueish green, then faded into the gray of simple nano-layered steel as the thread dissipated.
The ward didn’t imbue. Didn’t shatter, either.
Good enough. I’d imbue it tomorrow, when I wasn’t so tired and my mind wasn’t so foggy.
I forced myself away from the table. I had a lot of work to do if I wanted to keep living and breathing. Having half the sector’s bounty hunters and Syndicate crime bosses after you, and the Federals as well, is quite the motivation.
Not that I didn’t deserve it. In my previous life, if I’d heard that some Jake Nobody was flying around in a half-derelict spaceship with a live void wyrm hatchling sleeping in a dog basket in the cabin, I’d have chased me, too.
The hatchling snuffled, as if he’d heard my thoughts. Which wasn’t impossible. Then again, nothing is impossible when you don’t know the rules. And as far as I could tell, aided by the admittedly poor encyclopedia in the Bucket’s memory banks, I was the first human to be the guardian of a wyrm hatchling.
What I’d figured out was that he slept for weeks on end, ate ridiculous amounts of protein, and liked to stick close to me. Which I liked, too. Warding was less lonely with the hatchling around. Even magic felt different, the threads of force I conjured from the void warmer. Or maybe that was the wishful thinking of an addled mind. Either way, he was fairly small, for a void wyrm – the size of a very large dog, a scaly, black lump curled up in the corner of my cabin.
The cabin also contained my bunk, my leisure station, my sonic shower, and my workbench. Which said pretty much everything one needed to know about the Bucket, the wisdom of my career choices, and what I thought of safety inspections.
Well, maybe not the last part. I’m big on gun safety. Especially when I’m on the receiving end.
The hatchling snuffled again – a deep, wet sound. This time, I sniffed, too. There was something strange in the air.
The Bucket usually smells like the freight hauler she is: polished steel, conducting polymers, ozone, and that weird, vibrating, slightly hot-and-greasy vibe the warpstone engines give off.
This was different. This smelled burnt.
Smoke.
I jumped from the bench, grabbing the fire extinguisher and slapping the door opener at the same time. There was a slight haze in the main corridor, muting the light from the dual strips in the ceiling. The air was all cloying and sticky, like pulverized sweets.
I jogged toward the mess, which was a room half the size of my captain’s cabin. It was painted a soothing pastel green. Or rather, it had been painted a soothing pastel green, at the start of this voyage.
I keyed the door open and lifted the fire extinguisher, letting loose a short fwoosh of foam through the widening gap.
“Crudmunching voidsucker!” Hao yelled from inside.
She was two heads taller than me, and broader in the shoulders to boot, having been born and raised on a high-gravity world. My mechanic, co-pilot, and crew, but definitely not cook. The soot streaks staining the no-longer-pale-green walls were ample evidence of that.
“Didn’t I tell you to leave the stove alone?” I said.
Hao grunted, wiping foam from her bushy eyebrows.
“Got tired of eating reheated cans of Jackson preserves,” she said.
“So you decided to burn down my ship.”
That got me a glare.
“Well, captain,” she said, with a navy emphasis on the cap in captain, “I can’t learn to cook unless I try. And you can’t blame a girl for trying.”
“No, but I can blame you,” I said. “You are to leave the kitchen to someone who doesn’t burn it down. You should have called me.”
Glare. Shrug. Annoyed quirking of one bushy eyebrow.
“Didn’t you have important work to do?” she said. “Like trying to make sure our rear won’t be shot off the moment we turn down the engines?”
I had to give her that. Warding those armor plates would keep us from getting killed. Letting Hao cook would only poison us, and possibly burn us. Priorities.
“That big bastard still on our tail?” I asked.
“A good half-parsec away,” Hao said. “We wouldn’t even see him if your sensors weren’t so crudmunching good.”
I noticed that she still said your about anything having to do with the Bucket. I had hoped she’d settle in, and start seeing herself as crew, and seeing the Bucket the way I did. Like home.
“Any idea what kind of ship that is?” I asked.
“None.”
I sighed.
“Heat me up a can of Jackson’s finest vat beans,” I said. “I’m going to the cockpit.”
It was going to be another long day.
The captain’s couch was deceptively comfortable, its cool embrace trying to lure me into sleep. I rejected it by force of will, tempered by a tad of pure panic. The seat countered by molding itself to me. It hadn’t done that before. Hao had been in here with her toolbox.
Out of habit, I cast a quick glance through the Bucket’s high-tempered quartz viewports. Space was still space, a big empty blackness with a few million tiny pinpricks of light, some of them moving slowly as we sped past at just shy of 300c.
The status lights shone green, with a few yellows, which for the Bucket was pure luxury. Even the ventilation system whooshing quietly, bathing me with dry, cold, joyously dust-free air. Having a mechanic on board had its advantages.
The pilot’s readout showed the local star cluster, which meant lots and lots of nothing, interspersed with the occasional star and its numerical designation. Plenty of planets, according to the ‘pedia, no habitation. Most stars were uninhabited. And in the middle of the readout, behind us, right at the edge of sensor range, was a big, green, blinking dot that was our tail.
We’d picked it up some days and light years from Jackson, when it’d turned in behind us on a shadowing course. That maneuver alone was enough to make my skin itch. You don’t follow random ships. Whoever it was, they knew who we were, and what we were carrying.
The sensor suite really shouldn’t have picked them up. But I’d warded it myself, spending weeks on balancing the wards, and spreading them out over the entire hull. Lots of extra-vehicular activity, until my sprayed-on shielding layer had burnt out and my radiation meter had told me in no uncertain beeps that I would end up with cancer if I didn’t get inside immediately.
I shouldn’t have listened. Maybe another twenty ward chains would have given me enough resolution to tell what that ship was.
Right now, all I knew was that it was big. If it was transmitting a transponder code, that would be lost in the light-wake. Being in front, you couldn’t receive radio signals, and the Bucket was too small to carry its own warded transmission tower.
We were broadcasting a standard freight code. The Bucket of Dice, a low-mass hauler registered at Numenor Prime. The code was legal, and had all the proper crypto-keys. Wouldn’t do me a crud of good if we let anyone get too close in the darkness of the interstellar void, though. Even honest captains could be tempted by no law and an easy catch. What skippers living on the fringes of impolite society would do, I didn’t want to imagine. Breathing cold void was never high on my to-do list.
“Anything?” Hao asked, climbing into the co-pilot’s couch. She folded her legs beneath the dashboard, carefully cramming her head into the space between the couch and the ceiling. There was already a spot of dried blood there. She hadn’t been so careful the first time.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s big and it’s fast. As long as they stay back, we can keep going as we do now. If they increase speed, we push the engines and run. With luck, we outrun them.”
“Can’t you magic the ward or something?” Hao asked. Most of her knowledge of magical theory came from adventure and fantasy vids. It was about as true as the ‘pedia’s knowledge of the hatchling.
“I could,” I said. “If we had six months of uninterrupted time on a pleasant planet, a large supply of spare sensor plates, and maybe ten kilograms of platinum.”
“We could get that,” Hao said.
“And the six months?”
“You’re the captain, sir,” she said with a smirk. “Logistics is your responsibility.”
“Remind me to dock your pay,” I said.
“Remind me to remind you to pay me,” she countered.
The sensor ward beeped. I froze.
“Is it supposed to do that?” Hao said. “I thought you had everything on silent.”
“I do,” I said, pulling up the controls. “Something touched the wards at extreme range.”
“What?”
“We’ll see,” I said. “Maybe it was a glitch.”
Turned out, it wasn’t.
Another ship headed toward us, from high front-portside. Slower than the big blip chasing us, and smaller, but coming in at an oblique angle.
Too perfect to be a coincidence, coming in almost head-on. Unless we changed our heading, it would reach us in about a day.
One ship in front, one ship in back, nothing else anywhere near. Things like this didn’t happen. That big ship following us had to have a transmission tower, had to be in contact with someone that could send a ship on an intercept course.
They weren’t taking any risks. They wanted to box us in. But they were still far off. We could study them, and figure out their capabilities, then turn to an angle calculated to minimize their engine and position advantage, and run.
“Why aren’t we turning?” Hao said. There was a bead of sweat on her temple. My own hair was spiked with wetness. The ventilation system in the cockpit had given out again. The readouts were steaming up.
So much for having a mechanic on board.
“Because they don’t know we can see them,” I said. “A regular scan wouldn’t discover them for hours. That means we’ll be able to study them a lot closer than they’d expect. Might give us an advantage later.”
“Later, as in when they start shooting at us?” Hao said, a barb of stress in her voice. I’d never asked her why she’d been discharged from the Federal Navy. Being gun-shy would do it.
