Pyro Canyon Read online

  Pyro Canyon

  By Robert Appleton

  It’s a galaxy-wide red alert…again.

  And it’s Corporal Gus Trillion’s job at the Propaganda Office to drum up recruits. But the colonists have heard one too many calls to arm to care. Disabled in battle and on the verge of burnout, Gus feels pretty apathetic himself—until his reporter friend Lyssa Baltacha stumbles upon top secret satellite footage indicating that the treacherous Sheikers are planning to invade human-occupied space. Now Gus and Lyssa must find a way to galvanize humanity to rise up against the enemy—before it’s too late…

  37,000 words

  Dear Reader,

  June is a good month for us here at Carina Press. Why? Because it’s the month we first started publishing books! This June marks our two-year anniversary of publishing books, and to celebrate, we’re featuring only return Carina Press authors throughout the month. Each author with a June release is one who has published with us previously, and who we’re thrilled to have return with another book!

  In addition to featuring only return authors, we’re offering two volumes of Editor’s Choice collections. Volume I contains novellas from three of our rising stars in their respective romance subgenres: Shannon Stacey with contemporary romance novella Slow Summer Kisses, Cindy Spencer Pape with steampunk romance Kilts & Kraken, and Adrienne Giordano with romantic suspense novella Negotiating Point.

  From the non-romance genres comes Editor’s Choice Volume II, and four fantastic novellas: paranormal mystery Dance of Flames by Janni Nell, science-fiction Pyro Canyon by Robert Appleton, humorous action-adventure No Money Down by Julie Moffett, and Dead Calm, a mystery novella from Shirley Wells.

  Later in June, those collections are joined by a selection of genres designed to highlight the diversity of Carina Press books. Janis Susan May returns with another horror suspense novel, Timeless Innocents, following up her fantastic horror debut, Lure of the Mummy. Mystery author Jean Harrington offers up The Monet Murders, the next installment in her Murders By Design series. And the wait is over for fans of Shawn Kupfer’s debut science-fiction thriller, 47 Echo, with the release of the sequel, Supercritical. Rounding out the offerings for mystery fans, W. Soliman offers up Risky Business, the next novel in The Hunter Files.

  Romance fans need not dismay, we have plenty more to offer you as well, starting with The Pirate’s Lady, a captivating fantasy romance from author Julia Knight. Coleen Kwan pens a captivating steampunk romance in Asher’s Invention, and fans of m/m will be invested in Alex Beecroft’s emotional historical novella His Heart’s Obsession.

  If it’s a little naughty time you’re longing for, be sure to check out Lilly Cain’s Undercover Alliance, a sizzling science-fiction erotic romance.

  We’re proud to showcase these returning authors, and the amazing books they’ve written. We hope you’ll join us as we move into our third year of publishing, and continue to bring you stories, characters and authors you can love!

  We love to hear from readers, and you can email us your thoughts, comments and questions to [email protected]. You can also interact with Carina Press staff and authors on our blog, Twitter stream and Facebook fan page.

  Happy reading!

  ~Angela James

  Executive Editor, Carina Press

  www.carinapress.com

  www.twitter.com/carinapress

  www.facebook.com/carinapress

  Dedication

  Many thanks to Deb, my editor, for knowing exactly what makes stories tick.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  “You have survived. You have adapted. You are the patient sun behind the eclipse. You are your father’s son.”

  The urgent pull behind the words stretched Gus’s ruffled mind taut. Groggy as hell, he was emerging from some kind of anesthetic, but the mantra repeated over and over, so reassuring, so confident, giving spine to his sense of self.

  Where am I?

  “You have survived.” Glimmers of liquid flame and twisted bulkheads all around him felt out of reach. Rationed. Secondhand memories.

  He arched his neck a fraction, digging the back of his head deeper into a foam pillow. All down his right side from shoulder to toes, a prickly buzz. One or two gentle muscle spasms. A faint, dull ache about to go ape if he wasn’t careful. No feeling on his left side whatsoever.

  Dark green tumbled through the blackness as he tried to open his eyes. Heavy lids. One blinked open of its own accord, flooding him with a soothing Lincoln light. It stayed open, despite his efforts to shut it, and blinked on its own once more after several seconds. Muscles on a timer, not his own.

  He swallowed with a dry, flaky gulp, retched. His throat tasted musty and ancient. How long had he been unconscious? What had happened on the ambassador’s ship?

  “You have adapted.” Despite the reassuring mantra, his chest suddenly throbbed with a severe thump. Intuition told him something had gone drastically wrong during the explosion—something he should not have survived. A violent endgame, all debts collected. The word adapted now cast a sickening echo through him. He shuddered. Still his left side did not react. For chrissakes, how much of his own body was left intact? What in God’s name had they “adapted” him into? An image of a brain squirming inside a metal skull—from a holo-horror movie he’d sneaked in to see as a boy—made him jump up.

  His right side overreacted, flipping him onto his front, leaving him teetering on the edge of the foam bed. In the polished floor, a very familiar face peered back at him. He heaved a sigh and thanked his lucky stars it had all been in his mind.

  “You are the patient sun behind the eclipse. You are your father’s son.”

  Father’s son? “Eh?” I must be more out of it than I thought. He stared hard. The more he tried to focus, the more his brain smogged. The reflection staring back at him was familiar all right, but it wasn’t him, Gus Trillion, corporal second rate, sequestered to diplomatic protection duty for the ISPA-Sheiker summit. A career-making opportunity. Personal bodyguard for Ambassador Shin Gunto himself, one of the Interstellar Planetary Administration’s chief negotiators.

  He’d had an aquiline nose, eyes bluer, colder, closer together, a more pronounced chin, a prematurely receding hairline that showed the scars from his low-g cycling accident in all their glory. This face was warmer, not as sharp-looking, more handsome. A face he’d looked up to for years, it was now looking up at him with equal wonder.

  It can’t be. Dad?

  “You are your father’s son.”

  The mantra continued quietly in one ear. He’d yanked the other earplug out when he’d flipped. Jesus, what have they done? He broke out in a cold sweat, tried shutting his eyes to jettison the bad dream but his clockwork eye remained open to its own blinking rhythm. Beyond his control.

  “Careful there, Corporal Trillion. You’re weeks away from escaping that bed on your own.” Strong hands gripped his right side, turned him over, settled him back into his body-shaped depression in the foam. Reconnected both ear plugs. “There you go—Dr. Lendl chose those phrases especially for
you, to help you stay positive and proactive, to help condition you for— Yes, good, strong words.” It was a black man, extremely tall and thin, with elaborate ridges in his cropped copper hair. His big, sunken eyes held an intelligent gaze, while his nametag read Dr. P. Umbize.

  “I—I caa—” Gus’s tongue tingled numbly, wouldn’t wrap around any syllable.

  “You’re awake earlier than I expected. Sorry about that, son.” Son? The doctor plucked a pair of omni-glasses from his coat pocket and put them on. “We really should have been here to ease you into your…new self.” Umbize spoke softly as he checked every inch of Gus’s body, dictating medical jargon for the omni-glasses to record—a visual and verbal record, as the spectacles also had a microphone to go with their full-spectrum lenses of variable penetration and magnification. The examination took just a few minutes, at the end of which he pressed Gus’s temples so hard it felt as though he were trying to squeeze his brains out.

  “A…ho…!”

  “Now, now, Mr. Trillion. After what you’ve been through, and what you’ll be going through with your physiotherapy, try not to take these first few days to heart. The psychological adjustment will take time—time and healthy forward thinking. We look after our own in ISPA, as you know, and this pioneering surgery you’ve had has impressed some pretty high-ups in the service. They’ve been coming here for weeks to see what we’ve accomplished. Frankly, I’m amazed at how well the procedure worked.”

  “You have survived. You have adapted.”

  “Wha…happe…?”

  “What happened?” Umbize palm-slapped his forehead, then sat on the edge of the bed, pocketed his glasses. “I’m sorry, son. I plumb forgot, what with all the visitors and the conferences and the reports and what have you—this is the first you’ve heard about any of this, isn’t it.”

  “Uh-huh.” Not even his desperate sarcasm came through as Gus clenched himself for the worst news of his life, whatever it might be. Because with this much ballyhoo about the surgery, it had to be both absolutely ingenious and revolting. Doctors were seldom impressed anymore. A brain squirmed inside a metal skull.

  “You are your father’s son.”

  “I’m not supposed to be the one to tell you, lad, but our resident counselor’s busy today and I don’t think it’s fair to keep you in suspense like this, now that you’re lucid.” Umbize spoke a command and the metal blinds around the room opened, flooding in a greenish-yellow glow or, whenever a cloud obscured the binary suns, a wavering blue light from the lake outside, which was lit from beneath by some kind of bioluminescence. Gus recognized it immediately as Med Lake, the 65z R&R moon orbiting one of the Triton planets, where all wounded ISPA veterans were sent to recover.

  What happened to me?

  “The first thing to tell you is you’re not in any further danger. When the Sheikers assaulted Ambassador Shin Gunto’s ship, he was killed, along with most of his staff. But you managed to save four whole sections of the ship, lad, including the bridge, by manually sealing an emergency airlock door. Unfortunately, the only way you could do that was by holding on to the remote lever on the other side of the door until the seal was complete. The door severed your right arm and leg and crushed most of your right side. Also, the liquid fire that flared up in your section burned you badly as it was sucked out through the breach.”

  Glimmers of liquid flame and twisted bulkheads…not secondhand at all but real, suppressed. His own memories. The ISPA neural doctors had saved him the majority of that nightmare, at least. They’d almost completely blanked that portion of his recall. God forbid he should ever remember the full ordeal Umbize was describing.

  “So we had to reconstruct your entire right side using a new cybernetic procedure called FIBER—Fully Integrated Biological and Endoskeletal Reconstruction. Your existing bones, nervous system, skin tissue and even the blood flow itself—all are now fully synergized with your reconstruction. You might have to take anti-inflammatories for a while, perhaps indefinitely, but we’re confident you’ll have complete freedom of movement in a matter of months.”

  “You have adapted.”

  Gus looked at the doctor’s hands—dark, with pale palms and long, skillful fingers. Fingers that had worked on him, inside him.

  “But my fa…” Lifting his cybernetic hand for the first time took no effort at all and all the effort in the world. It was not his hand, it was theirs. A product. A thing not of his mother. He used it to caress his cheek. The tingle spread from the fingertips to his skin, where it seemed to blossom in a rush of hot blood, as though his face and brain were rebooting the sensation hitherto known as embarrassment. What could he call it now? Cybarassment? The tin tint? Hell, was he even classed as human?

  “Your face is the real reason for all the attention you’ve been getting.” In response to a twin-beep alert, Umbize uttered something into his wrist band, then continued to Gus, “With the damage to your facial nerves, time was against us, so we had to make a decision. Instead of saddling you with a rushed and frankly inadequate approximation of your own features, we chose to give you a new face. Over a decade ago, select members of the various ISPA branches volunteered for a cybernetics program. We took exact castes of their bodies, skin maps including the tiniest blemishes, and kept those files for use in making the most realistic cyborgs ever created, for infiltration, propaganda, top-secret stuff even I’ll never know about. But the project was scrapped. Yet even so, the files remained. And when you came to us, the computer clocked your name immediately.

  “Max Trillion, your father, was one of the original volunteers. Even though he died at Perihelion a few years later, his entire facial reconstruction data was right there for you, waiting to go. We made the decision to give you his face in perfection, rather than something that would look alien and artificial. You’ve seen some of the less successful skin jobs?”

  Gus blinked his one real eye in tandem with his timed one.

  “Exactly. And that’s pretty much where we’re at, Corporal. You made an exceptional sacrifice at 100z, saved the ship, and you’ll no doubt have your pick of Kappa-grade jobs when you recover. In ISPA, we take care of our own. And I’d just like to say, it’s been a privilege helping to bring you back to life.” He lifted and shook Gus’s organic hand, which still had no feeling. “Not every day we get to rebuild one of our boys so successfully.” Just when Gus thought nothing in the universe could ever surprise him again, Umbize’s sniffling and rapid wet blinks did just that.

  Clearly entire lives, careers and sciences had changed while Humpty Dumpty Trillion had been put back together again, while all Gus could picture was the face staring back at him in the polished floor.

  Dad?

  One face, two victims of Sheiker attacks. Both resurrected?

  “You are the patient sun behind the eclipse. You are your father’s son. You have survived. You have adapted.”

  Just words, yes. But words he would have to live up to.

  Chapter Two

  Four years later

  Interstellar Public Relations Headquarters

  65z (Sixty-five light-years from Earth)

  “As soon as you’re done polishing top brass heinies, meet me in the Starwarp Café. I’ve something very important to show you.” L.B.’s cute, unsmiling profile avatar rotated in the top corner of Gus’s omnipod visor.

  With a well-aimed wink, Gus tagged the incoming message and saw it into the trash bin. He sat up on his custom workstation armchair, then sank back into it again. For Christ’s sake, she might be his only real friend within fifty light-years, but if he had a clip for every time L.B.—and ISPA for that matter—had hit him with an ooh-ah-urgent message, he’d be richer than a shack-sheik by now. First an amber-red alert from the deep-space border hub, now this—the universe was clearly trying, and failing, to rouse him from his pill chills this morning.

  Fat chan
ce.

  The cybernetic reconstruction of his right side—hip, pelvis, rib cage, femur, wrist, hand and partial shoulder—had never quite meshed with his existing bone structure and nerve endings, so even now, four years after the accident, Magmalava ritolin was his only ticket to a sound night’s sleep and a relatively lucid, pain-free day. The only casualty was his mornings, as the drowsy side effect of ritolin didn’t fully wear off until around lunchtime, which rankled his superior, Captain Lineker, no end.

  Gus mimed a whistle, pleased with himself as he ignored the amber-red light flashing on his console and the message summoning him to Lineker’s office. The fourth summons in just a few minutes. But seriously, what could they do to him if he took his good time getting there? Interstellar Planetary Administration policies on equal opportunities and nondiscrimination were like avenging angels perched on his cybernetic shoulder wherever he went in his uniform. He’d own the department if they so much as hinted at canning him.

  Besides, he’d thrown away his chance at living a normal life for these assholes—they’d have to cut him some slack. Okay, a lot of slack. Grid-licking bastards.

  Ten-thirty-eight. Still time for another vote. He zeroed the crosshairs on the next virtual civilian congressional candidate, a white-haired beauty from Moon 1, and waited until his cybernetic left eye blinked. The slightly nervous, younger-than-she-pretended woman, a pale, long-legged goddess with athletic shoulders that filled her shiny blouse, marched up and down an aisle in the Hall of Congress, filibustering to an attentive quorum. He didn’t have the sound on but she appeared passionate and engaging enough in a nice-teacher-lost-her-rag-with-the-class sort of way. She reminded him strongly of Danica, his girlfriend at the time of the accident. Not in looks or even physique—no, this girl was statuesque and had sharp, striking features, while Danica had been short, full-figured, slightly chubby-faced—but the pale skin and…something in the eyes, an awkwardness in the limelight perhaps…made him want to wrap a warm coat around her and take her out for a quiet drink. She was perhaps too glamorous, trying too hard to be James Stewart for big-time politics, and his heart was racing too fast not to vote for her in this preliminary round of Kappa elections.