Running With Bulls E-Book

Tami Veldura

• Herausgeber: Tami Veldura
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

 Dany is a Taurus soldier stationed above Titian, Saturn’s largest moon. Normally a hub of trade and tourism, the space station has shut down for the upcoming meteor shower, but Dany and her crew are on call for the next twelve hours, ready and able to respond to any station emergency. 

Rhino Four is an ice-mining platform established at the edge of Saturn’s outer rings and thanks to the meteor shower, it’s about to crash. Emergency alerts throw the Taurus into action. Their mission: get aboard the out of control platform, rescue fifteen doomed souls, and get out again before the meteor shower destroys them all. 

But a meteor shower couldn’t have knocked the platform out of orbit. And something much larger is responsible for this gaping hole in the side of the complex. Whatever happened here, Dany and her team don’t have much time to save the civilians and get out.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

About The Author

Copyright

Running With Bulls

By Tami Veldura

Chapter One

Dany had just inhaled a complementary processed breakfast and was brushing her teeth when the station’s AI chimed gently over the intercom. She paused to listen.

Attention, Ark Station citizens, station shutdown in advance of the Grigg meteor shower will now begin. For your safety, please make your way to the inner ring.

Dany brushed faster. While the rest of the station got a day off, she and her fellow Taurus bulls were on call. There was always some idiot who wanted to see the meteor shower from outsidethe station, and it was up to Dany and her crew to ride in for the rescue. And they would, because a bull always did what was necessary.

Nevermind there was nothing to see out here in space. The shower was probably something spectacular down on Titan, but up here there was no atmosphere for the ice and dust to burn up in, which made it just a rain of ice and dust.

Under Dany’s feet, the station floor began to vibrate as the outer ring—where her tiny room was located—closed all of its viewing windows. Her basketball-sized porthole was full of Titan’s roiling clouds one second, then a metal iris on the outside snapped shut the next.

She rinsed, spat, and snatched her helmet off the hook on her way out. Her door hissed shut, then blinked green as she locked it with her thumbprint.

This section of the station was already deserted. Anyone with money enough for a room with a view in the outer ring had left the Ark in the last week, shuttling down to Kronos on Titan for the duration of the shower. That also meant the spine elevators were busy at the inner ring, servicing the Ark’s three million people who all suddenly realized they needed to stock up on milk and bread.

So Dany jogged spinward on the outer ring through the weirdly empty thoroughfare. Shops and tours normally lit for visitors were all gated and dark. The dock entrance was closed and a single Taurus soldier stood on guard at the gate. Dany lifted her helmet in greeting as she ran by and the soldier nodded back. She wasn’t sure who was on deck this turn and the Taurus uniforms were all identical on purpose. They took individuality away so the team could work as a single unit. It worked, for the most part, though Silvian was so tall it was always easy to pick her out of the crowd.

The shower was only supposed to last a few hours and the Ark AI had predicted no more than seven minor impacts. No threat of major impacts. If Dany was lucky, she’d be spending her shift playing cards with Basile and stripping the man of his cash.

Dany side-hopped through an empty security checkpoint and found Anne-Claire just locking her door. Dany faltered for a second, eyeing Anne-Claire, then the fifteen or so yards left to their squad door down the hall.

“Running late, too?” Anne-Claire asked.

Her voice sounded casual but Dany wasn’t fooled. She grinned. “Not as late as you!”

Dany took off down the hall at a full sprint with Anne-Claire right on her heels. Dany had the benefit of a warmup, and she pulled ahead in the first few yards, but Anne-Claire had always been faster between them and they hit the door together. Dany shoved Anne-Claire to the side and yanked the door open, but Anne-Claire hauled her back and they scrambled to be first. They both wedged one shoulder in, interrupting the very quiet briefing with the crack of their uniform’s hard breastplates against one another. Eight other Taurus lounged in the room, all heads turned to look, and at the front stood Zion, Ark Station’s resident Leo who outranked them all.

Zion crossed his arms and the flat look in his eyes said he wasn’t amused. Anne-Claire cleared her throat. Dany jerked herself through the doorway ahead and together they made their way to a pair of back seats under the scrutiny of the class.

The room was loosely organized in rows with two chairs parked behind each slim folding table. An aisle up the middle led straight to a podium dwarfed by Zion’s broad shoulders.

Only when Zion picked up where he’d left off on his briefing, did Dany lean over to Anne-Claire and hiss, “First.”

“We tied and you know it,” she whispered back, not at all fazed by Dany’s immature tongue.

Dany grinned and let it go. There was always tomorrow to set the record straight.

At the front of the room, Zion clicked through a slide show of the Grigg shower: it’s makeup of ice and dust, the angle of intercept Titan and Ark Station would experience, even the adjustment Jupiter’s massive gravity had on the comet year after year.

And it wasn’t just Ark Station in the path of the debris, every mining base, each Titan cruiseliner, all the thousands of satellites in place would be exposed to bits of ice traveling far too fast to see. The vast majority would experience nothing more than a rain of dust. But some, like Ark Station and the larger cruise ships, would catch bits the size of corn kernels, what Ark’s AI called a minor impact. Even something as small as a ping pong ball, when traveling at interplanetary speeds, was enough to punch a ten foot hole in a critical place. Like a space station.

Dany and her team were here in case the AI missed one of those ping pong balls.

Zion checked his watch as he finished his briefing. Unlike the rest of the Taurus squad in their space-worthy uniforms, Zion wore the dun pixel camo of his Leo station, featuring ribbons on the left breast from recognized operations. He looked good in the uniform, his bald head—probably shaved, since Zion couldn’t have been over forty—gave him a more serious air that helped keep the rowdy Taurus in line.

And the Taurus deserved their rowdy reputation. Dany and Anne-Claire’s friendly rivalry was tame compared to some of the other ongoing competitions. Dany had never met a Taurus she couldn’t goad into a bet or a challenge, their branch of the Forces seemed to attract that kind of soldier—people who never settled for the lowest goal, people who couldn’t just claim they were the best, they had to prove it. Right now. Hold my helmet.

Attention Ark Station security, the AI chimed gently over the intercom in the squad room, the Grigg shower will intersect with Titan in ten seconds. Impact events with Arc Station remain in the low single percentages. Shower duration expected to conclude in nine hours. Thank you.

Zion nodded. “In that case I leave you all to it. I have some paperwork to take care of, so please don’t blow up the squad room, Porthos.”

“What?” Porthos spread his hands and lost the fight not to grin. He slouched in his chair, his helmet off to one side on the table, and today his hair was lime green. “It was a small fire.”

“It took four months to referb the room before we could use it again,” Marion griped and jabbed Porthos in the side with her knuckles. She and Porthos frequently got into scuffles, mostly friendly ones, and were constantly testing each other’s limits. While the rest of the bulls had at least short fuzes, Marion had none at all. She tended to explode easily.