Escape Velocity

by Jess Anastasi

Overview

Ilari, Brannon System, 2436

At first, Dr. Sacha Dalton is simply curious about the prisoner of war admitted to her med-lab...until she sees who it is. For Commander Kai Yang—the commander of the battleship Valiant Knox—has long been thought dead. Killed in action. But after almost a year and half, he's returned home. Returned to her.

Kai is recovering from his ordeal and under the watchful care of Sacha, his childhood friend and the widow of his best friend. Only now, their friendship has grown and deepened into something far deeper, and far more complicated. Yet as Kai's body recovers, his psyche remains broken. How could he ever be the man he was, and the man Sacha deserves? But an intergalactic war has a way of forcing a man to be the hero he was always meant to be...

Each book in the Valiant Knox series is a standalone and can be enjoyed out of order.
Book #1 Escape Velocity
Book #2 Damage Control
Book #3 Cover Fire
Book #4 War Games

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781633751453
Publisher:	Entangled Publishing, LLC
Publication date:	02/02/2015
Series:	Valiant Knox , #1
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	950,852
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Jess has been making up stories ever since she can remember. Though her messy handwriting made it hard for anyone else to read them, she wasn't deterred and now she gets to make up stories for a living. She loves loud music, a good book on a rainy day, and probably spends too much time watching too many TV shows. Jess lives in regional Victoria, Australia, with her very supportive husband, three daughters, one ball-obsessed border collie, and one cat who thinks he's one of the kids. Learn more about Jess at www.jessanastasi.com

Read an Excerpt

Escape Velocity

A Valiant Knox Novel

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By Jess Anastasi, Robin Haseltine

Entangled Publishing, LLC

Copyright © 2015 Jess Anastasi
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63375-145-3

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CHAPTER 1

May, 2436 Ilari, Brannon System

The precise scratches on the wall across from him tapered off into a dim blur toward the far corner of the cell where the light didn't quite reach. There were far more marks than Kai wanted to count. Time had distorted into an immeasurable haze ever since the heavy, steel-reinforced door had clanged shut and locked behind him. Having a record of how long he'd been in here made his skin crawl, but damned Amos had carefully scored a new mark every time the sun came up and sent a teasing shaft of golden light through the paneless barred slit of a window.

Kai shivered under his ragged coat and breathed in the hint of fresh coldness over the revolting dank and rotting dungeon-esque smells. The brief slant of sunlight made an appearance and he lifted his head to look over at Amos, huddled on his side against the opposite wall. Any second now, his friend would sit up and drag himself over to add another score to the tally.

Muffled banging echoed from outside the cell. Slop time, right when the sun came up, just like every other goddamn morning he'd awakened here.

"Amos, get your lazy ass up. No sleeping in on my time, Sergeant."

The door to their cell made a series of clicking noises and then swung outward, but Amos didn't move.

Two black-robed figures appeared in the doorway. One stood back while the other walked in and dropped two bowls of gray swill in the middle of the rough concrete floor.

"Enjoy your breakfast, Commander." The one in the doorway sneered. "And don't forget to pray before you start. The Lord God is watching."

Kai clenched his jaw over the words "screw you and your psychotic religion" but that'd only get him another beat-down, just like it had the other twenty or so times he'd lost his temper and opened his mouth.

The two men left and slammed the door behind them. He let his head fall back against the cold cement wall and fortified his mental defenses to endure another meal of goo that tasted like manure. Eating the stuff had become a lottery for the damned. Some days it made them so sick they'd barely get it down before it came back up again. Sometimes the slop was drugged and it'd knock them out cold for a few hours. Mostly it just tasted bad and left him feeling queasy. But refusing to eat it was not an option, not if he wanted to survive.

With a determined exhale, he sat forward and braced for the pain of moving his damaged leg. A couple of a-holes had broken it early on in his confinement, and without any type of medical attention, the bones hadn't healed right. He could still get around on it, but if any of the Christ's Sunday Soldier jerks wanted to torture him, all they needed to do was get him to walk laps of his cell. The ache would be all right for a while, but eventually he'd start sweating and getting light-headed from the pain. Of course, being half-starved and dehydrated didn't help any.

With a sideways dragging kind of movement, he shuffled over to the two bowls, which also put him in poking range of Amos. Lazy sonuvabitch. He'd missed the whole three minutes worth of sun they got to see every day.

"Come on, grub's up. It's a four-star serving of crud. With any luck it won't be poisoned today."

Amos still didn't respond and with a muttered curse at having to move farther, Kai lugged himself over to his sergeant and grabbed the man's shoulder.

"Wake up." He shook him, gentle at first, and then harder when the guy didn't rouse. A spike of gut-clenching apprehension took hold deep within him as he rolled Amos over.

The sergeant's lips were blue, his skin waxy and gray.

No.

He slapped a trembling hand to Amos's neck, searching for a pulse, for a sign of breathing, any little spark of hope. But he felt nothing except the rubbery post-rigor-mortis flesh of a dead man.

"No!" The hoarse yell ripped deep from within his chest as he pounded a fist down on the sergeant's shoulder. The impact jarred his hand as he struck bone. He focused on the pain, drawing in short ragged breaths as his lungs seized.

Since the religious zealots had grabbed him and Amos, each day had been a living hell. But the two of them had strengthened each other, had made a pact to survive and get home. Except Amos was dead, and inside, Kai could feel himself crumbling.

He sucked in another strangled breath and turned away from the body, only to come face to face with all those goddamn marks on the wall. Fury blazed, burning through him like a sun going supernova.

Reaching down, he found Amos's limp, cold hand. "I can't believe you up and goddamn died on me, Sergeant. Cutting out wasn't an option. I'm sure as hell not spending another night here, not alone. When those CSS dicks come back for the bowls, I'm taking them down and whatever happens after that ..."

His mind went blank and he tightened his hold on the sergeant's icy hand. It didn't take a genius to work out what would happen if he went on the attack. Beneath his fingers, the bones of Amos's hand dug into his palm. No, not bone. Alloy. A few years back, his friend's hand and most of his arm up past the elbow had been crushed. Nearly all of the bones had been replaced with a lightweight alloy.

He glanced down at the hand and then over to the vacant face, a horrible idea coalescing in his mind. You should feel guilty. He searched for the emotion, for even an ember of remorse. Instead, survival instincts were pushing him, telling him Amos would understand. Hell, he would probably get a kick out of it. The bastard had always had a twisted sense of humor.

He pushed the sleeve of Amos's tattered uniform up to examine the forearm. With a careful movement, he set the limb down and then leaned over sideways, stretching to reach the thin plastic bowl the glop had been served in.

He tipped the foul-smelling slime onto the floor and then smashed the bowl down with shaking arms. The plastic cracked, but didn't shatter. It took a few snaps to break up the dinnerware and get himself a useable piece.

Stomach clenching, he straightened and turned back to the body, forcing himself not to look up at the face. He wrapped one hand around the upper forearm, just under the elbow, and started hacking.

With single-minded focus, he set about retrieving the length of alloy in the forearm. After a few minutes, he started sweating cold. Shivers spasmed through him every now and then, but he didn't pause in his task. The CSS guards could come back any second.

Time did that distorting thing again. When he at last sat back with the length of metal in his hand, minutes could have gone by, or it might have been hours. With a surge of icy satisfaction, he shuffled over to the wall and braced himself against the cement to climb to his feet. Breathing harsh over the pain, he maneuvered himself next to the door and let the frame prop him up. The room spun, so he closed his eyes and focused on the sure feel of the alloy rod in his hand.

The familiar clicking noise sounded in the door's lock. Kai snapped his eyes open and forced his head up, tightening his grip on the measly weapon. The door swung outward and a figure loomed.

Kai swung his body weight around, putting every single pound he had in the momentum behind his hand. He stabbed the rod into flesh and then slammed into the robed soldier. They both went down, Kai ramming the bar home as he came out on top.

A different hand grabbed his shoulder as a shout reverberated in the enclosed space. With a sharp wrench, Kai pulled the alloy free and launched up from his knees. Pain screamed through his bad leg, right up into his back with a near-paralyzing intensity. But it didn't stop him from shoving the bar into the neck of the other soldier.

He collapsed in a tangle with the second robed man. Drained, Kai rolled into the corner where the floor met the wall, waiting for one of the CSS guards to get up and end his wretched existence. His leg and lower back throbbed, while his brain sloshed around his skull with a sickening force.

Silence fell and nothing moved. He lifted his head and looked at the two unmoving CSS guards. Blood seeped from underneath both men and crept across the concrete floor toward him. With teeth clenched, Kai forced himself up and closer to the fallen pair. Had he killed them? He didn't care and couldn't muster the energy to check. Instead he yanked the alloy bar, slick with blood, from the second soldier's neck.

Now what? His thoughts were thick and sluggish. He hadn't considered he might bring down the guards so easily. The door creaked in the icy dungeon draft and he dragged his gaze up to the opening.

Clarity exploded into his mind hard enough to give him an aneurism.

Escape.

Kai wasn't going to sit there and wait for more guards to turn up. He'd probably still end up dead, but at least this way he'd go out with a fight, instead of dying in the tiny, bare cell that had been his only reality for too many months.

He dropped the bloody alloy rod and it clanged loudly on the concrete floor. Lowering himself beside the nearest soldier was almost as hard as getting upright. Trying to maneuver himself down while keeping his bad leg straight was awkward; one shift in the wrong direction and he'd end up flat on his back, immobile with pain.

Once he'd gotten down, he yanked at the soldier's robes. He didn't expect to find anything useful like an electromagnetic pulse gun or a three-phase stunner pistol; the CSS didn't believe in technology. However, he did find an old-fashioned semi-automatic pistol. It took him a second to find the mag release on the outdated weapon, and a check revealed there were seven bullets in reserve, plus one in the chamber. He secured the cartridge and then shuffled over to the other soldier. A quick search revealed a dull knife and nothing else. Obviously the prison guards didn't expect much resistance. Then again, the CSS weren't exactly the most reliably fitted-out army. The only reason they'd held out in the two-decade-long war had been through superior numbers and sheer tenacity.

He shoved the knife into his belt and tightened his grip around the semi. With a short puffed breath, he pushed himself up again, using the wall to steady himself.

The walk past the two dead soldiers and through the doorway seemed to take forever as he strained to hear over his panting breaths, to listen out for any more guards coming his way. There wouldn't be any monitors to avoid, considering the CSS shunned as much technology as they could, apart from the things they deemed necessary to fight their war, but in place of the cameras, there'd be more guards patrolling at frequent intervals.

He and Amos had amused themselves for a few weeks trying to work out the guards' pattern. Initially it had seemed somewhat random, but then Amos had realized it was periodically and purposely haphazard. There was a pattern in the apparent disorganization of the patrols. It had taken another few weeks after that, but they'd memorized the pattern and found the holes. He'd never dared hope the information would come in handy.

Just outside the doorway in the empty corridor, he paused, trying to remember when and which way the last patrol had gone. The hallway was almost darker than the cell had been. One torch sputtered in the cold draft farther down the passageway, sending weak snatches of light flickering along the rough concrete walls.

The prison had been built to double as a bunker. If the CSS needed to go to ground in this area, they simply killed the least valuable prisoners to make room for their soldiers. One such culling had happened a few months after he and Amos had been captured. He still couldn't decide if he'd been lucky the CSS had deemed him valuable enough to live, or if the ones who'd been mass-executed were the fortunate ones.

Voices echoed from somewhere to his right; impossible to tell if it was other prisoners or the patrolling guards he needed to avoid. He pushed off from the wall and limped along the corridor to the left, walking deeper into the shadows. Doors marched along either side of him, identical to the one he'd walked out of a few moments ago. Occasionally he'd hear snatches of whispered voices, and the commander within him stirred, reminding him that it was his people behind those doors, possibly even people from his ship, the Valiant Knox, people he should be helping set free. But he hadn't even considered grabbing the keys from the dead soldiers and, despite the guilt that heaped on top of the burn of leaving Amos behind, he wasn't going to turn around for the keys. Goddamn it, he could hardly hold on to his own survival, let alone take the responsibility for anyone else's.

Instead, he pushed himself onward, reaching out to touch his fingers to the damp wall as the darkness expanded. Was he heading deeper into the prison? He'd been half out of it from a brutal interrogation when they'd first brought him down here, and he had no idea which direction they'd come through the maze of corridors.

The wall he'd been tracing dropped from beneath his fingers. He groped for the adjacent side of the corner and carefully stepped around it. Something skittered across his feet—a rat or one of those fist-sized cockroaches that dwelled down here. He'd become acquainted with both over the months, and the sight of them didn't bother him anymore. He and Amos had tried to catch rats for extra food every now and then, but apparently even the rodents had been too smart to touch the slop served at each meal in the prison, and they hadn't found anything else to tempt the creatures with. As for the cockroaches, no matter how hungry he'd gotten, he couldn't stomach the thought of eating one of the giant bugs.

An eerie moaning sounded from somewhere ahead of him, making the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. Glancing up, he saw a square of light at the far end of the corridor.

Quickening his steps, he headed toward it, his breath catching in his chest at the largest slant of sunshine he'd seen in a long time. Halfway there, another corridor intersected into his, the echo of boot steps and low conversation heralding the end of his luck.

He paused at the corner and peeked around. A torch was set in the wall, blocking his vision, so he bent down a little. Four guards farther along the hallway— two carrying torches and two carrying semi-autos like him, which probably meant they had sixteen bullets to his eight. The only advantage he had was surprise. He could shoot the two with the guns first, taking out the immediate threat before moving on to the pair with the torches, but the sound of gunfire would bring every other guard within the prison walls. And the six bullets he might have left wouldn't go very far against a garrison worth of men.

He leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes as dizziness threatened his balance. His nutrient-starved body wasn't used to this much activity. Pain throbbed like a constant smolder in his bad leg, sporadically forking up into his back. Icy sweat trickled down his spine and dripped down his face, stinging his eyes, while his exhausted muscles clenched, not quite trembling, but on the verge of breaking into a weakened quaking.

His short-lived freedom was about to end.

Dull anger pushed at his exhaustion. At least he'd taken a couple of the bastards with him. He shifted, trying to lessen the pressure on his injured leg, and his foot knocked into something. He squinted down in the shadows to see some kind of bucket-sized tin can. Closer inspection revealed it had oil or fuel in it, probably whatever they used to keep the torches burning. Possibly not the best idea to leave it sitting so close to the torch just around the corner. One stray spark and—

He glanced back down and told himself he'd lost his mind. Solving his little patrolling-guards problem with an explosion was ridiculous. If a few gunshots would bring the rest of the prison guards down on him, then what would a detonation do? Plus, he didn't know how volatile the stuff was. He'd be just as likely to blow up himself or the entire goddamn prison complex. Except the fatalistic side of him didn't care. The pessimistic part of him that had already decided he was going to die here told him to light up and blow as many of the CSS bastards to hell as he possibly could.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Escape Velocity by Jess Anastasi, Robin Haseltine. Copyright © 2015 Jess Anastasi. Excerpted by permission of Entangled Publishing, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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