Forbidden World Read online

  Forbidden World

  Star Ascension – Book Three

  Jeremy Michelson

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  What Happens Next?

  One

  Chris

  The inside of the former Don ship still carried the nose-wrinkling essence of its previous owners. That meaty essence, when it was in full force, was something like an opened can of cat food left out in the sun on a hot day. Then run through the sewer next to a football stadium during a championship game.

  The cabins, corridors and bridge of the space ship had been scrubbed. Then hosed with bleach. Then sandblasted. And finally, in desperation, covered with a supposed odor blocking type of paint.

  Six or seven layers of it, I can’t remember which.

  And the smell still came through.

  The constant presence of it was making the three of us a little cranky.

  Most smells a person could get used to. I had an aunt and uncle who lived next to a big feedlot. Whenever my parents dragged me there for a visit I’d gag at the eye-watering stench produced by cramming thousands of cows in one place.

  My aunt and uncle claimed they couldn’t smell it.

  I suspected they were lying. Now I desperately wanted to believe them. And that somehow they could transfer their superpower to me.

  Of course, it wasn’t just the smell making Liz and me cranky.

  It was…him.

  I was sitting in the command chair on the bridge, my fingers pressed against the bare metal on the control console. Communing with the ship’s sensors.

  Since my adventures back on Earth, and getting an ancient alien A.I. nanobot thing merged with my body, I had gained several interesting abilities. One of which was to the ability to control a ship’s systems simply by touching bare skin to anything grounded to the ship’s frame. It was almost like sending my consciousness racing through the ship’s nerves and brain.

  I had other abilities, too, but none of them were helping me deal with annoyances like persistent bad smells. Or a third wheel crew member who was becoming less likable by the day.

  What am I saying?

  Liz and I hated that jerk from the first moment we saw him.

  Well, I did.

  The ship we were in was captured from the Don. Actually, it was captured from a Don. One by the name of Bey Jodo who really, really, really wanted the alien artifact that decided to make its home in me.

  He wanted it so bad that he was willing to kill everyone on Earth to get it.

  We stopped him.

  Mostly Liz stopped him. But all in all, it was a team effort. Liz, me. Azor the Stickman.

  My life just hadn’t been the same since I stopped for that cheeseburger outside of Albuquerque.

  Aliens and Earth military trying–and succeeding in killing me.

  Liz and I finding each other. After she stopped trying to kill me.

  Everyone sure had a thing for hurting and/or killing me.

  Which I suspected our unwelcome crewmate was trying to figure out a way to make me die permanently.

  The alien device inside me–which permeated every cell of my body–was able to regenerate every part of me. No matter how bad I got hurt. Or killed.

  But I suspected it had limits.

  So did a lot of people who felt I would be more productive to them if I were dead.

  I wasn't sure if this mission General Mattany sent us on was an excuse to get me off the planet. Or to get me to someplace where Mattany's minion could figure out how to separate my flesh from the Dendon artifact.

  After defeating Bey Jodo and bringing his ship back the secret spaceport back in New Mexico, the General came to me with a proposal: They'd fix up the ship with the faster than light drive Professor Kincaid had been working on. If I took the ship to the dead world of Dendon and looked for some nice, juicy weapons to bring back to Earth. Weapons we could use to defend ourselves from the other aliens of SixUnion.

  Back when I stopped for the cheeseburger at Guydoro's roadside burger shack (eons ago, it feels like now) I knew of only two alien species.

  The Blinkies had originally made first contact with Earth. They had a real name, but some wit had called them Blinkies because of their three eyes, and the name had stuck.

  Blinkies were shaped sort of like humans. Like humans who were big and fleshy. Their skin was gray, their heads seemed to sprout from between their thick-armed shoulders without a neck. Their faces were wide and coarse-featured. Thick lips. Flat, almost non-existent noses. Tiny ears.

  But they had two big, human-like eyes in the proper places. Then, right smack in
the middle of their thick foreheads was a single eye with a piss-yellow iris.

  Even with the third eye, the Blinkies looked enough like people that no one really freaked out when they arrived.

  It wasn’t until later when the Blinkies introduced the Stickmen that people freaked.

  Stickmen–who preferred to be called the Perseus Clan–weren’t like humans. There were like something dredged up from a human nightmare.

  The Stickmen’s bodies were made up of thousands and thousands of long, flexible fibers. Most stickmen were dark brown in color and they looked like a bundle of writhing sticks. Hence: Stickmen.

  It was when they moved that the heebie-jeebies factor went through the roof.

  All those fibers and sticks moved independently of each other. They slid over each other with a sound like a flock of wounded violins–squeaking, moaning, chirping.

  For the sake of putting people at ease, Stickmen often tried to arrange their fibers and sticks into a human-shaped form. One that had no defined features and had no eyes or mouth.

  Yeah, sure. That totally put people at ease.

  Despite their scary appearance, the Stickmen were the good guys. They acted as galactic police, trying in vain to enforce the rules the other races of SixUnion came up with.

  And not having an easy time of it since the rest of the races were a bunch of conniving jerks.

  Which, made them a lot less alien to people on Earth.

  Of the aliens I hadn’t known about, the Don were the most trouble.

  The Don were the bad boys of the galaxy. They were ruthless. They might be evil. Some of them were definitely evil.

  A few thousand years ago, they decided to wipe out an entire race.

  The Dendon.

  Once upon a time, the Dendon were the elite of the galactic races. Wise and just and technologically advanced, they did their best to guide the other races to peaceful solutions of their problems.

  Which, of course, only pissed everyone off.

  Especially the Don.

  So the Don dropped a bomb full of flesh-eating makers into the Dendon homeworld atmosphere. Which was, of course, totally against the rules of SixUnion. But the other races decided to politely ignore this bit of poor sportsmanship.

  Besides, all the Dendon were dead, so who was left to complain?

  Well, the ruler of Dendon and his bodyguard were still alive, having been away on diplomatic business. When they returned to Dendon, the makers (more nanobots) had reached the end of their programming and ceased to function. The Dendon king and his female bodyguard had a dead world all to themselves.

  But, rather than get down to the fun business of repopulating a world, the king decided to go the capital world of SixUnion and lodge a protest. But before he left, he took something with him.

  A super advanced A.I. maker factory that contained the whole of Dendon knowledge. Including the new faster than light drive that Dendon scientists had just perfected.

  He absorbed the A.I. into himself.

  Yup. The same one that’s in me now.

  The king got ambushed by Dons as he and his bodyguard arrived at the capital world. The ship was damaged beyond saving, but somehow he managed to send it into L-space before the Don could capture them.

  Guess where the ship ended up?

  Plastered all over a mountain in New Mexico.

  Thousands of years ago.

  Eventually, the artifact found its way into the hands of the United States military. Which had no idea what it was. Through a series of unlikely events, the artifact ended up in my hands.

  Literally.

  Where it quickly absorbed itself into my skin.

  Lucky me.

  Which eventually led me to be in a patchwork alien spaceship that smelled like rancid cat food, orbiting a dead planet. In the company of two people. One was Liz, the golden amazon goddess love of my life and forever soulmate.

  The other was Titus Tavin.

  Or Tee and Tee, as he liked to call himself. Because he was dynamite.

  Now it was a matter of figuring out who was going to kill who first.

  Two

  Kawl Tejoh

  Captain Kawl Tejoh was enjoying a fine Tebenian blood wine in his cabin when Commander Zek interrupted him. Rather than kill him, Tejoh settled back to listen. Maybe it was the wine making him mellow. Or maybe it was the extreme boredom that came from the long patrol at the far edges of the Don empire.

  Zek might have something interesting to talk about, after all.

  This patrol had been excruciatingly boring. Two years now in one of the empire's less than well-maintained battlecruisers. This posting was a punishment, no doubt. But, he certainly didn't regret those hours with General Hav's third-best mating stock.

  Though a nicer ship would have been good. Tejoh had done his best with it. At least his personal quarters. He’d kicked Zek out of the adjacent cabin, then had the wall between them knocked out so he could have a properly sized space. With a proper bedroom and an entertainment and relaxation area. And a bathing pit. What kind of animal would he be without a proper stone-lined bathing pit?

  He’d be like Zek, berthing with the common crew and using sonic showers to hold down their stench.

  A thought that nearly made him shudder.

  Tejoh put the heavy crystal glass of blood wine down on the Pej wood stand next to his comfortably overstuffed relaxation chair. Soft music played in the background through the high-end entertainment screen that took up most of one wall. Zek stood on the thick Vermoz skin carpet, looking uncomfortable as usual.

  Zek seemed to think a battle cruiser wasn't the proper place for such opulent things as Vermoz skin. Even though Tejoh had patiently explained that he had killed all the soft-furred creatures himself.

  Did Zek have any idea how many of those things he had to kill to carpet an entire room?

  It had taken him most of an afternoon.

  Though his slaves had taken care of that whole skinning and cleaning and hide-tanning business. That sort of thing was beneath him.

  Zek stood with his back ramrod straight, his yellow-orange eyes staring at the porthole over Tejoh's shoulder. Nothing to see there. Just black space, sprinkled with a spattering of stars. They were between systems, out in the empty dark. No civilized planets within lightyears. The closest thing was the dead Dendon homeworld.

  And no one bothered to go there anymore.

  “Well, what is it?” Tejoh said.

  Zek brought his pointed chin up a bit. The tentacles sprouting from his head quivered slightly. Wearing his emotions on his sleeve, like always. These long patrols never attracted quality crew.

  “Sir,” Zek said, “We have received a transmission from the Dendon buoy.”

  Tejoh sat up so fast he nearly knocked the glass of blood wine off the table.

  “What!”

  Was that a slight smile on Zek’s face? Enjoying giving it to his Captain?

  There was a slim dart gun slipped into the folds of upholstery in the relaxation chair. He would have rather had a plasma blaster, but burning a hole in the ship's skin wasn't the best idea. The dart gun was nice, though. It could spray a room with projectiles tipped with a poison so powerful it could take down an eight-legged Martasak.

  More than enough to wipe a smirk off a crewman’s face.

  “The buoy detected a vessel appearing in orbit over the planet,” Zek said, “The vessel isn’t broadcasting its registry, but at least parts of it appear to be a class seven light cruiser.”

  Killing the smirk off Zek’s face would have to wait.

  “What do you mean, appeared?” Tejoh said, “Is the buoy malfunctioning? It should have tracked any ship coming into the Dendon system.”

  The smirk on Zek’s face deepened. And his tentacles quivered even more. The fool was excited about this. Tejoh’s hand slipped down to the folds of upholstery.

  “I had engineering run diagnostics on the buoy,” Zek said, “The buoy is in perfect working order. The
vessel it alerted on appeared out of nowhere. One moment there was empty space. The next, there was a ship. One that seemed to be a highly modified class seven light cruiser.”

  Tejoh snorted and ran a long-fingered hand over his tentacles.

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said, “Ships don’t just appear.”

  Zek’s smirk turned to a look of smugness. Was the fool wanting to get killed? He wasn’t irreplaceable. There were plenty of crew who’d be more than happy to take his place.

  “The Dendon had at least one ship that did,” Zek said, “And there might be others. Have you read the bulletins about the Earth situation?”

  “Earth? What in Poq’s name is that?”

  Zek gave him a pitying look. Like he was a mentally deficient child.

  That was it. Tejoh wrapped his fingers around the dart gun’s handle. The fool was going to die now.

  “Earth is a quarantined world,” Zek said, “There is an intelligent species on it. One in the early stages of space flight.”