Tag Archives: A KDG Scifi Romance serial

Piloting Fury Part 24: KDG Scifi Romance

Good morning, my lovelies. Welcome to another  Monday morning read. Here’s this week’s episode of  Piloting Fury.  

Last  week things didn’t quite go to plan on the deal, but this week, we see the game isn’t over yet.

If you have just arrived and would like to start at the beginning of Piloting Fury, follow the link, and enjoy!

 

Piloting Fury

“Win the bet and Fury’s yours. Lose the bet and your ass is mine.” It seemed like a no-brainer — Rick Manning’s slightly inebriated offer. If he’d been sober, he’d have remembered indentured pilot, Diana “Mac” McAllister never lost a bet. All her life she’s dreamed of buying back her freedom and owning her own starship, and when Fury’s ne’er-do-well, irritating as hell captain all but hands Fury to her on a silver platter she figures she can’t lose. She figured wrong. That’s how the best pilot in the galaxy finds herself the indentured 1st mate of a crew that, thanks to her, has doubled in size. Too late, she finds out Fury is way more than a cargo ship. Fury is a ship with a history – a dangerous history, and one that Mac’s been a part of for a lot longer than she thinks. And Rick Manning is not above cheating at poker to get her right at the center of it all, exactly where he needs her to be.

 

Piloting Fury Part 24: Winning: A Crash Course

“Damn, Fury, have you been looking at Manning’s porn stash?” I asked as I turned in front of the holo-mirror to get the over-all effect of the clinging off the shoulder dress. The fabric had a prism effect as I moved in the light. It showed off my legs and hugged my curves as only bespoke clothing could.

“Richard Manning does not have a porn stash,” came a reply I could have sworn was just a wee bit huffy. “I have only complied with your request that the costume be appealing to Banshee Blake and show off your anatomy in a way that would attract one of the opposite sex.”

A deep, drawn out wolf-whistle came from the open door of my cabin, and I turned to find Manning leaning up against the wall looking me up and down. “If I were Blake, I’d sure as hell want to play with you.”

“Playing with you is what got me into trouble in the first place,” I said to his reflection in the mirror. “And I don’t believe for one minute that you don’t have a porn stash. Shameful really, getting Fury to lie for you.”

“In the first place, Fury doesn’t lie, and in the second,” he said coming into the room and walking around me for the full 360 inspection, “how can you possibly call all the fun and adventure we’ve had so far trouble? I’m wounded to the core.”

I flipped him the finger. Sometimes the ancient gestures were still the best. He only chuckled. “And another thing, Manning, knocking is the polite thing to do before entering someone else’s quarters.”

“The door was open,” he said.

He was right. It was. I’d returned to my room only planning to insert the subdural tracking device into my neck like Manning had instructed. I hadn’t expected Fury to have the dress ready so quickly. I’d slipped into it in the bathroom and came out to see the full effect in front of the holo-mirror.

“And the implant?” Manning asked, all humor gone from his voice

I looked down at the device I still held. “Haven’t quite gotten there yet.”

He stepped up close and personal and took it from me. His warm knuckles brushed my earlobe as he raked my hair aside. “I’ve discovered that if you’re right-handed, the images you project will be clearer and more stable if the implant is on the left, just next to your carotid. There’s a sweet spot,” he ran his fingertips lightly down the side of my throat, and my pulse jumped, a response to which he flashed a knowing smile. “Right there,” he pressed gently. “Less interference from the pulse, which can make the image jumpy under stress.” In a move that I could have damn near mistaken for foreplay, Manning eased the device into position and, with a slight sharp sting, inserted it. My breath caught, and so did his. The smirk that turned into a wicked smile said he knew exactly what I was feeling. The smug bastard. “There,” he purred. “Exactly there.”

For a moment, we stood eye to eye, and everything in me went warm and soft, like the afterglow I felt when I’d pilot a good ship through a rough patch, only more so. But warm and soft was not what I needed right now. I was just about to step back when Manning said, “you’ll have to wear this up so my view won’t be obscured.” He reached around me and stroked the length of my hair. I’d defiantly grown it out after I joined the Dubrovnik crew. Fallon kept me closely shorn because when I was young and underfed, as he preferred me, there were times when he used me as a boy. Though my near bald head might have aided his sick fantasies, it also meant one less thing for him to grab onto and one less way for him to hurt me.

 

 

But Manning, Jesus, Manning’s hands tangled in my hair made me want to move closer and snuggle down against his chest while he caressed and touched, while he curled tresses around his fingers and lifted them away from my neck. Fuck, I actually embarrassed myself by moaning, as he scooped the weight of it off my nape and the heat of his breath bathed my bare throat and shoulder.

“Fury,” his voice was barely more than a whisper, “can you replicate a couple of Terran combs to hold Mac’s hair up?”

“I don’t know how to put …” I lost my train of thought as he walked me backward, his body all but flush with mine. He reached around me to where two beautifully formed mother of pearl combs appeared almost instantaneously on the shelf near the mirror.

“Don’t worry, Mac. I got this.”

I found the breath to speak as he caressed and arranged my locks. “You’ve done this before?”

“No, but I’ve taken them out,” he said with a filthy grin.

“Of course, you have. I should have known.”

He must have felt the stiffening of my spine at his words. His smile softened and his gaze held. “I’m kidding, Mac. I’m as clueless as you are, but I’m sure between the three of us, we can figure it out.”

And then we were all talking at once as Manning pulled and tugged and arranged while Furry advised, and I joked about having never had anyone do my hair before. It wasn’t one of the perks of being an indentured.

“Perhaps I shall become a chef on the Riviera and Richard Manning shall open an exclusive hair salon there,” Fury said.

“And Mac here will play poker with our customers and win all their money,” Manning added.

When we were finished, both humanoid and ship made satisfied oohs and awes at the end result, just like I could easily imagine an exclusive hairdresser doing. “Now then, let’s check the connection.” Manning pulled a small black case from his pocket. Inside was the single contact lens that was his visual connection to my implant. There was also a micro device beneath the skin just below his right ear so he could hear. He blinked a couple of times as he settled the lens into place and then gave a slight nod of his head. “Say something Mac.”

I offered him my best smile and spoke in the voice I usually used with my marks. “I still say you have a porn stash.”

His lips quirked in a smile that had mischief written all over it. “Care to bet on that?”

“Not really. You’d just cheat anyway, and with you and Fury tag-teaming, what chance does a poor girl have.”

 

Piloting Fury Part 23: KDG Scifi Romance

Good morning, my lovelies. Welcome to another  Monday morning read. Here’s this week’s episode of  Piloting Fury.  

Last  week Mac got a crash course in smuggling. This week the deal doesn’t quite go to plan

If you have just arrived and would like to start at the beginning of Piloting Fury, follow the link, and enjoy!

 

Piloting Fury

“Win the bet and Fury’s yours. Lose the bet and your ass is mine.” It seemed like a no-brainer — Rick Manning’s slightly inebriated offer. If he’d been sober, he’d have remembered indentured pilot, Diana “Mac” McAllister never lost a bet. All her life she’s dreamed of buying back her freedom and owning her own starship, and when Fury’s ne’er-do-well, irritating as hell captain all but hands Fury to her on a silver platter she figures she can’t lose. She figured wrong. That’s how the best pilot in the galaxy finds herself the indentured 1st mate of a crew that, thanks to her, has doubled in size. Too late, she finds out Fury is way more than a cargo ship. Fury is a ship with a history – a dangerous history, and one that Mac’s been a part of for a lot longer than she thinks. And Rick Manning is not above cheating at poker to get her right at the center of it all, exactly where he needs her to be.

 

Piloting Fury Part 23: The Set-up

My gut twisted into a double knot. “Mol-tran him back, now.” Manning was already dematerializing from Blake’s ship before the words were out of my mouth while Blake bellowed a string of curses in several different languages.

“Blake is powering to jump,” Fury said as calmly as though he were telling me the weather.

“Fuck! He’s hanging us out to dry.”

I heard the bastard say something about sending us coordinates to finish the transaction. Manning’s lock I got, but somehow Blake had managed to shield the whiskey. Manning ended up sprawled ass over teacup on the deck cursing profusely, and Blake jumped. We, on the other hand, were well and truly trapped.

“I can’t jump from here, and they’ll have a visual in ten seconds,” I shouted as Manning strapped himself in, but he wasn’t listening to me.

“Fury, cloak,” was all he said just as the three Authority hunters came into view and then cruised right on by us at troll speed. I held my breath, hands pressed flat and sweating on the console, ready to ease out and make the jump, if we all survived that long. I would be plague bate if we were caught, but I’d made the decision ages ago when I first joined the crew of the Dubrovnik, I’d throw myself out the airlock before I’d let Fallon take me again. Nobody had cloak technology, not since the SNTs. It was highly illegal. It would be a plague planet punishment for Manning too if we were caught, or at the very least a shackle and a one-way trip to the triaxium mines. I said nothing. I barely breathed. I’d been so damn careful all these years, so afraid of what my punishment might be, so afraid that Fallon would toy with my shackle just a little too long, and I would end up dying by inches on some plague worlds. No one would ever know what had actually happened on board the Merlin. And my father would never be avenged. For one horrible second, I thought I would vomit on the console, and then I felt Fury rise up around me like a bird of prey on the glove aching to mount the sky and fly. For a moment I felt the embrace, and I looked up to find Manning’s stormy eyes locked on mine. In an instant everything that went before was over and my life was ahead of me. And from a split second I went from being sure I would vomit, feeling horrible gut-wrenching fear of the shackle to feeling free, an experience I’d never expected to have again.

“Can you jump while cloaked?” I asked Fury.

“I can, Diana Mac. Shall I?”

 

 

Manning was already entering the coordinates. He nodded he was ready and just as the backend of the last hunter past us, I made the jump with a bellow that would have put Banshee Blake to shame. But we’d barley made it before Manning was entering coordinates again and my stomach slammed against my backbone as we came out. “What the fuck?”

“We’re on the dark side of Outer Kingston,” he said without looking up at me. “If I know Blake, the bastard’ll be patting himself on the back for getting us in trouble with the authorities and getting off with one hundred thousand credits worth of New Hibernian. And doing his best to drink the profits.” He waved a hand in my direction. “Oh he has no intention of sending us rendezvous coordinates. He reckons we’ll be in enough trouble he’ll be safe for at least a year or so, and if he sees me again, all he’ll have to do is claim he had to dump the cargo and share in the bad luck.”

“So you know where he’s going then?”

“I know where the whiskey’s going because I tagged it. I always tag my cargo, and then when the deal goes down according to planned, the tag disintegrates. If the deal gets fucked for whatever reason, I at least have some recourse. There.” He pointed to a red blip on the grid of the space dock of Outer Kingston Prime. “Gotcha, you fucker,” He jabbed a finger at the monitor.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Well,” Manning drug his teeth over his lower lip and rubbed his chin. “We won’t be able to beam out the whiskey. It’ll be well shielded. In fact, it’ll be all but invisible, and if we turn the authorities on him, we’ll never see any of those hundred thousand credits.”

I undid my harness and stood on legs still none too steady from that last quick and dirty jump, then I began to pace. “I don’t suppose you’d know what watering hole he hangs out in?”

“It wouldn’t be that hard to find.” Manning watched me pace. “What do you have in mind?”

“Fury, you’re a fabulous ship, and you make a mean breakfast, but how are you as a seamstress?”

“Is your apparel not satisfactory, Diana Mac?” the ship asked.

Manning broke into a wicked chuckle. “Not for what she has in mind, Fury.”

“I need a sexy dress that might make a lonely smuggler like Banshee Blake want to buy me a drink and maybe pass a little time with a friendly game of poker while he admires my well-displayed cleavage.”

“I see,” Fury said. “How soon do you need it?”

“Just let me make a few inquiries,” Manning said. “I have a lot of friends in Outer Kingston, and since you’ve never been, and that fat bastard doesn’t know you’re working for me, he won’t even know what hit him.”

Piloting Fury Part 22: A KDG Scifi Romance

Good morning, my lovelies. Welcome to another sneaky Monday morning read. Here’s this week’s episode of  Piloting Fury.  

Last  week Manning made a few things clear to Mac, but only a few. This week, Mac gets a crash course in smuggling.

If you have just arrived and would like to start at the beginning of Piloting Fury, follow the link, and enjoy!

 

Piloting Fury

“Win the bet and Fury’s yours. Lose the bet and your ass is mine.” It seemed like a no-brainer — Rick Manning’s slightly inebriated offer. If he’d been sober, he’d have remembered indentured pilot, Diana “Mac” McAllister never lost a bet. All her life she’s dreamed of buying back her freedom and owning her own starship, and when Fury’s ne’er-do-well, irritating as hell captain all but hands Fury to her on a silver platter she figures she can’t lose. She figured wrong. That’s how the best pilot in the galaxy finds herself the indentured 1st mate of a crew that, thanks to her, has doubled in size. Too late, she finds out Fury is way more than a cargo ship. Fury is a ship with a history – a dangerous history, and one that Mac’s been a part of for a lot longer than she thinks. And Rick Manning is not above cheating at poker to get her right at the center of it all, exactly where he needs her to be.

 

Piloting Fury Part 22: Smuggling – A Crash Course

We skipped the scenic route to Outer Kingston in favor of the most direct, the one that involved three rough jumps and a slingshot move around a gas giant. It was a route that no one had tried before and frankly I was surprised when Manning gave me the go ahead. He said he’d rather be there a little early, never being sure of what Banshee Blake would do. “I trust the bastard about as far as I can drop-kick his fat ass through the nearest airlock,” Manning had said. He added that Blake had to have a special captain’s chair in his ship that would accommodate his size.

We came out of hyper and all but coasted to the rendezvous point with time to spare thanks to some seriously fancy flying, if I do say so myself. I could tell by the smile on Manning’s chops that he thought so too. He chuckled and ran a hand over his stubbled chin. “I think we just took the record for fastest trip from the Remote Inner Edge to New Kingston,” he said with a chuckle. “The McAllister Sling Shot, that’s what I figure they’ll be calling it one day.”

Sadly we both knew it couldn’t be made public, since we’d just paid an illegal visit to a plague planet carrying major contraband, and all that done with a Shanghaied indentured pilot. But I still had every plan to bask in the afterglow until Blake showed up.

“Nothing to do now but sit tight and wait.” Manning disappeared and returned shortly with a bottle of New Hibernian and two glasses. “Under the circumstances, I think a toast might be in order.” He handed me a glass and lifted his. “To the McAllister Sling Shot.”

I returned the toast.

He downed his in a single go. New Hibernian was more of a gulping whiskey, even the good stuff. It would get you there fast, and almost but not quite burn your taste buds off in the process. I followed suit.

He pushed the glass aside and stretched out his hand. “Let me see your device,” he said.

I gave it over and raised a curious brow as he typed something in it.

“There!” He handed it back to me. “As far as our little run to Pandora Base, well, nothing from nothing is nothing, but you’re welcome to half of that.” Before I could say anything, he nodded down to the pad.

“That’s the code to your Atlas account. It’s empty now, but while you’ve been doing the flying, I’ve arranged everything so that, as we said, twenty percent of all profits will automatically go into your account. Numbered only, for your protection, of course. Plus the folks at Atlas don’t give a shit that you’re indentured. Once we conclude the deal with Blake, the credits will be deposited. If you continue to prove yourself, I’ll up your percentage to twenty-five and from there,” he quirked his head and winked, “well from there we’ll see.”

I stared at the open account page until it became nothing more than an abstract jumble. “Does that mean you’re giving me the opportunity to buy back my indenture?” I managed around the excited hammering of my own heart.

“That means I’m giving you the opportunity to do whatever you want, whatever you’re capable of.” He held my gaze. “Naturally I’d prefer that whatever you do, you do it here with me and Fury.” Then he offered a blinding smile. “With a pilot like you who can gamble like you do, who can think on her feet like you do, I figure you’re my ace in the hole.”

Before I could offer more than a shocked thank you, Fury said. “There is an urgent incoming transmission from Banshee Blake.”

 

 

Fury patched it through. “Authority’s on my ass,” Blake’s voice was a nasal sharply accented tenor that boomed through the com like an out of tune French horn, like we were all deaf, or soon would be if we had to listen to him long. I guessed that’s how he got the name Banshee.

“Rendezvous point’s been compromised. Sending new coordinates.”

“Fury send a text only confirmation,” Manning said without switching on his com link. “I don’t know this place,” he added studying the coordinates Blake had sent. We both watched as a 3D image came up, closed in on our destination and then magnified it.

“It is a high orbit space station, abandoned five standard years ago as unsafe and too expensive to repair,” Fury’s computer said, as we studied the details.

“This is not like Blake,” Manning said. “He prefers open space for a quick getaway. That makes it easier for him to grab the cargo and run if he gets an opportunity.”

“I don’t like it,” I said.

“I don’t either. But then I never like doing business with Blake.”

“Then why do you?” I asked.

“Well, the deals are usually sweet and the profits high if you can manage them without him scalping you alive.”

“Fingers crossed then.” I entered the coordinates and stroked Fury’s console for luck. “I could use the credits. I’m broke.”

The space station was huge, and I wondered how the hell the giant hunk of junk had remained in orbit once it was left derelict. I also wondered why it hadn’t been dismantled. It had been used for the docking port for all ships coming and going to Outer Kingston until the new, larger, more streamline one had been built on the other side of the planet. Outer Kingston was the last and most remote port of call before the long trek to the Outer Rim. It was not really a part of anything, only a single rocky planet orbiting a small yellow sun, a planet that was almost entirely water other than the few small islands that served as hideouts for smugglers and ports of call for ships in and out of the Outer Rim. There had been a few efforts to make some of the more picturesque islands into holiday destinations, but the planet was just too far from the so-called civilized center of the Consortium of Planets. That meant most of those islands had devolved into illegal casinos and brothels, surviving and thriving just beyond the edge of Authority scrutiny. Though technically it belonged to the Consortium, it was too far out for any real Authority control, and that made the place a mecca of smuggling and illegal activity. We made our way in and out of the docking bays of the derelict space station until we found the rendezvous point. It was way too claustrophobic for my liking. I couldn’t keep from wondering just what else went on in a place that had trouble written all over it.

“It’s a good place for a sting,” I said.

“Too good,” Manning grunted, just as Blake’s ship appeared from a blind spot around the curve of the station.

“Wait a minute,” I said, “the man just came out of nowhere. That’s not possible. Something’s going on. We should have been aware of his approach.”

“Manning, let’s make this quick. I’m feeling a little twitchy after the week I’ve had.”

Manning kept the mic off. He laid a hand on my shoulder. “I need you to stay on deck and stay ready, Mac. We’ll Molt-tran the whiskey and me over at the same time, but separately. You know how to do that?” He waved a hand. “Fury does. Keep a lock on me and on the whiskey, but if worse comes to worse, we cut our losses and live to fight another day. I’ll need you to get us out of here fast. You got it.” I nodded.

He opened the mic. “On my way. Meet me in the belly with your manifest.”

“Shields dropped,” came Blake’s nasal flugelhorn response.

“I don’t like this,” I said to Fury, as I keyed in the mol-tran and watched first the whiskey and then Manning dematerialize before my eyes. “I don’t like this at all.”

“I am not terribly pleased at the situation myself,” Fury commented. “Banshee Blake is to be trusted less than most of our disreputable colleagues.”

Our colleagues?” I commented as Manning’s visual implant came online and I felt a whole lot better clapping eyeballs on him. “How much is he paying you?”

“Not nearly enough.” Fury replied, and in spite of the tense situation, I laughed. But the laugh died in my throat when Fury quickly added. “We have company, Diana Mac, three Authority jaegers converging fast off starboard.