Mr, Grace and I are just recently back from spending the holidays in Italy. Lovely weather, lovely food, lovely place to be. I hope you all had equally amazing holidays however you choose to celebrate, and that you have enjoyed the weekly episodes of Dragon Ascending. . Once again it’s time for another episode of Dragon Ascending I left for you while I was away. And it’s time for another new episode.  Last week tempers flared ending in some serious fireworks. This week Ascent trespasses while Len sleeps. As I mentioned, I am now attempting to post episodes at lengths that will be better suited for the flow of the story and enhance your reading pleasure. Some will be slightly shorter, some will be longer. I hope you find this switch-up helpful. I hope you’re enjoying Dragon Ascending, the sequel to Piloting Fury, as much as I’m enjoying sharing it with you. As always, I love it when you share my work with your reading friends, so feel free. In the meantime, enjoy!

If you missed the previous episode of  Dragon Ascending follow the link for a catch-up. If you wish to start from the beginning, of Dragon Ascending. Follow the link.  

For those of you who would like to read the complete novel, Piloting Fury, book one of the Sentient Ships series, follow the link to the first instalment.

Dragon Ascending: Book 2 of the Sentient Ship Series

On a desolate junkyard of a planetoid, scavenger Lenore Felish, disturbs something slumbering in a remote salvage dump and uncovers secrets of a tragic past and of the surprising role she must play in the terrifying present she now faces.

Robbed of her inheritance after her tyrannical father’s death, Tenad Fallon is out for revenge on her half-brothers, one who happens to be the sentient ship, Fury. Fury, with his human companions, Richard Manning and Diana McAllister, has his own agenda – finding the lost sentient ships and ending the scourge of indentured servitude in Authority space.

Dragon Ascending Part 50: The Trespass

I did not have to lie there next to Lenore contained in as much of a physical form as I had ever managed since my reawakening, but I could not bring myself to release her, silently willing her to accept me back to her heart. I could feel her isolation as though it were my own, the stories that she had not told me, the pain that she had suffered. And in my cruelty, my jealousy, I had unintentionally brought it all back to her. How had I missed her pain, her trauma at seeing this man from her past who had left her to die alone in such a horrible place? How could I have let my own pettiness, my own selfishness blind me to the trauma she had experienced, and that for me, so that I might possibly become whole again. All of what had been, what she had endured was laid bare to me. Our loving had created an opening, and her heart, her beautiful, wounded heart, was as open to me as my heart was when I bonded with my beloved. I would have left. Perhaps I should have, for I felt the shifting in her brainwaves as she began to dream, and yet I stayed for I wanted to see, to know her pain, to share in it, but she had not invited me. I was an intruder again, betraying her trust again. And still I stayed there, close to the heart of Lenore Felish. But this time it was not her dream that took me. This time our intimacy had grown such that I was pulled into the very center of the woman herself, the seat of memory. The very thing I had denied myself, she had faced every day of her young life, and she had faced it alone, without a compliment, without a beloved to comfort her in her pain, and she had not the luxury of shutting down and blocking all that caused her suffering from her mind.

As there is heat and sand in the Sea of Death, so there is snow and ice on Talkamakan Minor, farther from the sun, thinner of atmosphere.

“I promise I’ll make it off Mama. I promise. And I promise I’ll come back for you. I won’t leave you here alone.” Tears froze on Lenore’s cheeks. She knew better than to be out without a helmet as the temperatures plummeted and the winds howled, but she couldn’t leave her mother unprotected where she had fallen. The effort to drag her from where they had murdered her to the ice cave near the generator kept her warm, but it also exhausted her. Her limbs ached. She was sure her fingertips were frostbitten, but she would not leave her mother to be stripped molecule by molecule, taken apart by the icy wind until by morning there would be nothing left of her. She didn’t care if maybe that was better. She couldn’t part with her, not yet. Deep in the cave that housed the generator, she would stay safe and undisturbed until Len could return for her and give her a proper burial. And she bloody well would return! There was little she could do to clean her mother’s body, the blood already frozen black in the dancing shadows of her headlamp. She could barely manage to drag her to a protected place against the back wall and lay her down. “Bye for now, Mama. I’ll come back for you.” She placed a kiss on her forehead and touched her cheek. One last look and she dragged herself up on trembling legs. “And I swear, Mama, whoever did this to you will pay. I’ll see to it.” That was the fire in her gut that would keep her warm until she could make that promise good.

With the last bit of strength she could manage, she fought the wind back to the station and shut the airlock behind her as the temperatures outside plummeted. No one could survive out there at night. Then she sat down with her back against the door and sobbed herself into a sleep of exhaustion.

But unlike the coward that I am, dear Lenore would wake again, and she would wake to those dreadful memories, to the agony of loss. She would not have wanted me to see her so vulnerable, but our loving had rendered her memories an open book to me, a thing that should only have been possible with a bonded compliment, and I could not look away, though I was a trespasser, uninvited. She had been just a child, only a child.

Len woke up shivering convulsively. She had bitten her tongue, more than likely what saved her life. The heating in the station proper never remained above freezing at night when the generators went into recharge mode, and she was still dressed in only her outdoor gear, not the environmental suit needed for protection once the anemic sun fell below the horizon. Tak Minor was much farther from the sun than Tak Major and the light was never more than a pale gray of twilight, never enough for much heat. It was just that the winds died down enough to survive outside without an environmental suit during the daytime. At night, they howled to unbearable levels, barely kept to a dull roar by the thick protective walls of the station shelter. Even inside the station, Len and her mother had to retreat to the small atmosphere tent at night, which was the only part of the station above freezing. It was little more than a huddled thermal dome designed to keep two residents from freezing to death until morning came. The builders of the station, who clearly had not had to live there, had made an executive decision that the plummeting in temperatures and the wind chill at night was too much of a strain on the generators to maintain a comfortable temperature inside the facility. The money allocated for more powerful generators, for a more comfortably built structure, instead went to pad some bureaucrat’s Atlas account. So, the generators powered down until the winds died and only then did they kick back in to warm the station internals. The place had been slated to become automated at some unforeseen date. In the meantime it served as a more or less a punishment for any scientist who displeased the powers that be.

Supplies were brought in periodically by drone ships, automated only for the return journey to whatever space station had sent them. Once a year a manned ship came to make sure the present inmate was still alive and relatively sane. If one or the other was not the case, they would bring another unlucky scientist or two in their next visit. If the researchers managed to survive the isolation relatively sane, they were replaced every five years by some other poor soul. No place on Tak Minor was ever comfortable and no place was ever completely safe. And now, Len was alone.

Every detail of her memory from that horrible time was now mine, every ache, every pain, every fear, and mostly the loneliness. Oh how I understood loneliness. And yet she had chosen to move on. I had not. I had been a coward, and now there was a great deal at stake, and all that I was, all that I had known, had contained, had been, I was unable to access because I was a coward. It was as she squirmed in her sleep and snuggled closer to me that I knew I would do what I had to that she would not suffer again, that Fury and his brothers, my brothers, would not have to fight this battle alone.

“I am here, my darling Lenore. I am here.” She calmed at the sound of my voice and moved still closer. And while I knew she did not hear me, maybe it was because I knew she could not hear me in her sleep, I continued. “That’s it, my darling, my brave, tender hearted one, only rest awhile, and tomorrow Fury and Diana Mac and Richard Manning will help me to take back my memories.”