Jax’s Mission: Scifi Alien Adventure Romance (Science Fiction Alien Romance) (Galactic Survival Book 1) Read online

  Jax’s Mission

  By Hana Starr

  Copyright © 2016 by Hana Starr – All rights reserved.

  The author holds exclusive rights to this work. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form including photocopying, recording or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  WARNING: This book contains sexually explicit scenes and adult language. It may be considered offensive to some readers. This book is intended for adults 18+ ONLY. Please ensure this book is stored somewhere that cannot be accessed by underage readers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are used in a fictitious manner and not to be construed as real. Similarities to real people, places or events are entirely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  About the Author

  Introduction

  In a far future year, Beatrice Noble works for a small time inter-space transport specialist. Basically, she’s a glorified mailman. A few years at her job and she’s just good and average, living her life by the same old routine. And then the Peace Federation reaches out to her. The Federation is fighting a war and a space base out near the front lines was pretty heavily hit by an ambush. The soldiers there need medical supplies badly and Beatrice is the only shipper available for the job. However, she can’t go it alone.

  Jax is an alien warrior with command over lightning, as gruff and unfriendly as they come. In order to break into the Federation’s secret assassination unit, he has to successfully guard a shipment from start to finish as the last step in his training. Beatrice is nothing at all like he was expecting though.

  However, despite their differences, can attraction blossom in two people from entirely different species? In a voyage fraught with danger, anything goes.

  Chapter One

  Today was a day just like any other, and for a good reason. It was nearly impossible for any day in the life of a courier to be anything else. Part of the reason for that was because there was no “day”, as it was. Galactic travel was so widespread by now that Beatrice often found herself in places where the sun never touched. And so, everything happened upon an eternally-ticking clock in her cockpit.

  That clock never stopped. She knew her schedule down to the exact tick. Twelve hours of travel, twelve hours of layover. If there was nowhere to layover, a drifting autopilot was activated to keep the ship from straying into any potential dangers while she slept. No matter where she was or what she carried, be it freeze-dried ice cream or crates full of military-grade blaster rays, her life went by the same as it had for the past several years.

  It was often a lonely job, because she was still so new. Sure, if she was better at it she might move up through the ranks faster and be able to join a new, larger company that would offer more than single-person vessels, but she was just average. Maybe a little bit above average on occasion, but otherwise she was the model of the competent, common employee.

  Not that there was anything wrong with that, Bea tried to reassure herself as she adjusted her monitor to account for any statistical anomalies for the fourth time this hour. Not everyone could be incredibly talented or hot. Someone was always going to have to serve food, or take orders from someone else, or spend years doing nothing but putting along approved channels through vast voids of space. Her cargo was rarely precious, and she just didn’t seem to have any of the humorous stories of all her travels like her peers. But again, that was just fine, wasn’t it?

  Her luck just never ran in that direction.

  So what if Daddy was an engineer and helped design these ships in the first place? And so what if Mom died giving her life in service to the Peace Federation, defending a young planet from unlawful pirate attacks? Not everyone could be whiplash smart or noble.

  Even though her last name was Noble, she just wasn’t. She was just Bea, just herself.

  Fifteen more minutes before her next monitor adjustment, and she was already looking forward to doing it just so she would have something to do. Her current job was to take this load of basic toiletries to the Federation base nearest to Earth. However, it just so happened that Earth and its surrounding region were lightyears away from the front lines of battle, which meant literally nothing happened. If a breach ever reached this far, she would probably already be too dead to know about it. It hadn’t been easy to convince all those other races to ally with them, and even harder to get them to agree to having Earth as the epicenter of the Federation, but she supposed in the end that it had been done. Why, she had no idea. She’d seen a great deal of people in her past few years and nearly every single race was more interesting than humans; all the planets she passed at the edge of vision were better as well, simply because you could see them.

  Pollution on Earth was a huge problem, which sucked because she still lived there.

  However, that wasn’t any of her concern. Her only concern was making sure that she arrived on time, stopped over for the proper amount of hours, and then headed back to company headquarters in America. This trip was going to be mundane, and very easy.

  And that was exactly what it was until she reached the base just after passing by Jupiter. It resembled the empty husk of what was once a grand space station in Earth’s orbit, but it had a flat base and was kept drifting in approximately the same place by simulating its own miniature orbit –around itself. She had no idea how it worked. From the base could be found a number of runways and entrance ports that led inside individual airlocks. Someone watching on camera 24 hours a day would see her come in for a landing and be ready to open and close her airlock, and then allow her entrance into the garage beyond. She would be checked out, her cargo inspected, and then she would be checked into the visitor’s roster, shown around even though everyone here knew her by name now, and then she would sleep for a solid eight hours.

  It was that simple. That’s how it was every time.

  There was a difference today, however. Not in the actual building, which resembled a New York high-rise sandwiched between squat insurance firms, and not even in the surroundings. It was with the entrance ports. They were all currently occupied, which was something she’d never seen before.

  I didn’t think this base even had that many ships on it, she thought wonderingly, and then swiveled in her
chair to grab for her radio. It was a hand-held, an ancient but still serviceable relic upon which no expenses could be wasted in such perilous times.

  Turning it on, she quickly picked up the watchman’s signal for the garage and ports. He picked up on her call, and answered swiftly. His voice crackled with static. “I see you, Shipway United. Your number?”

  “729,” she replied.

  The crackled faded after a few moments. “Beatrice Noble, right? You’re cleared.”

  “Am I?” she asked pointedly, holding the mouthpiece closer to her lips as she jabbed her finger at the occupied ports even though he couldn’t see her. Though outwardly there were no signs of congestion, a glowing light above the wide doors said otherwise; the light meant something was pressing on the pressure plates just inside. If she tried to enter in herself, she’d crash into an unmoving object.

  “Oh, that?” the watchman chuckled. “That’s…well, I can’t say over this channel. It’s classified, okay? I promise that they’re all empty. Just pick whichever you like, Noble. We don’t have all day, and I know how strict you people are.”

  He clicked off, signaling an end to their conversation.

  Now, that was an odd thing, wasn’t it? If the ports were empty, why were the lights being kept on?

  Then, she sighed and turned back to her control panel. A few manual adjustments to the engine output, and then she grabbed the joystick and brought her little ship into a creaking descent. Just another thing that was none of her business, after all.

  The descent went easy, and she had plenty of time to deploy her landing gear: wheels. Wheels were an incredibly awkward design because of the lower friction in atmosphere-less space, but her ship was still an older model. The military always had top-grade versions, while she was stuck with this dumpy little thing.

  There was an answer for the problem however. She simply coasted along the runway and timed a perfect pass into one of the ports, where the last of her momentum was halted by specialized magnets. The designers had even managed to make the stop somewhat smoother since the last time she’d been here, which wasn’t saying much when she was clambering down from her ship with a crick in her neck.

  The airlock was being flooded full of fresh air, and she took a deep, grateful breath. Even the smallest station such as this came equipped with its own greenhouse. Oxygen was produced naturally, rather than canned and packed in like her supply was on her ship.

  All around her were steel walls, a special alloy meant to withstand the constant barrage of space debris. Bea sighed and kept rubbing her neck as she waited for the watchman to get out of his office. Stationed above and between the airlocks and the garage inside, his office connected to a series of walkways that allowed him to descend into any airlock he chose. What was a leisurely walk for him was sometimes an insufferable waiting game for her, especially since he seemed to be taking his time today.

  That was odd, considering that he normally jumped at any chance to be doing something. Then again, everything was turning out to be very odd on this otherwise-average day.

  Finally she heard the clunking of his metallized boots as he descended steep magnetic steps from the upper walkway. “Hey, Noble,” he called out.

  She recognized him now, and realized that he wasn’t the one that she’d been talking to over the radio. This was the new guy who’d been in training the last time she was here. What was his name?

  From the very recesses of her memory, she pulled it up. “Hiya, Murphy,” she greeted him. “Where’s Dan?”

  Murphy hopped down the last couple of steps and strode over to her. “Man, he’s stuck in the office all day. Get this: ton of weird shit been going on since a couple hours ago. That’s why all the ports are being shown as full. Don’t want any unauthorized landing attempts, you know?”

  As Murphy pulled out a small device from his back pocket and flipped it open to bring up a checklist, Bea frowned and tried to decipher the flood of information. “Slow down. Are you still in training?”

  “Yup,” he answered, scribbling in lines of information and then handing the device and stylus over to her to sign her name.

  After giving consent to the search and inspection, Bea pressed, “I thought trainees weren’t allowed to be alone in the airlocks.”

  “You see, that’s part of the weird shit. Murphy ain’t allowed to leave the cameras. But, I ain’t allowed to be anywhere alone. They figured I’d do less of a mess holding down the airlocks rather than fuckin’ around with the computers.”

  Murphy went around the back of her round little ship. “Mind opening this up?”

  Bea reached down to her belt and let her fingers run along the leather to find her own device: it was a slender keypad with a few choice buttons. She pressed one, and the rear cargo hold door began to roll up in on itself. “So, why is Murphy stuck up there? Surveillance? Why?”

  Murphy clambered up into the back of the ship and began to count boxes, cross-referencing them with the list on his screen. “Look, I’m not supposed to tell you this…”

  She waited.

  “…but some delegates from the Peace Federation are here right now.”

  She blinked, taken aback. “What? Actual delegates, not just messengers?”

  “Yeah!” he crowed, excited. He nearly leapt down from the cargo hold and then worked his way back around to the front to begin searching through her cockpit and the miniscule living quarters behind. As before, Bea followed. “They’re being real secretive about what they want but they’ve really ramped up security. Ain’t real happy about how short-handed we are but ain’t much we can do about that when we’re at the max limit for our size. Problem’s on them for showing up!”

  Bea gave a startled little laugh, and they both headed out of the ship again. “That’s crazy!”

  “Yup,” he agreed again. “Looks like you’re all in order here, Noble. Just like every single other time, from what I see here.”

  I’m reliable, she thought, and then replaced it with, I’m just regular.

  “You know the drill,” he continued, “but I bet you that Dan’s got me on camera and is listening to everything I say, so I gotta go through the usual spiel. I’ll open the garage up for you and you can take it on in over to the loading area. Hand off your paperwork to the first asshole you see, then go get signed in at the front desk. I know you completely don’t do this for a living every day.”

  She smiled, more genuinely this time. “You got it. I don’t even work for United. I just stole this ship because my private rocket broke down.”

  Murphy winked, and then ran back over to the stairs. As he was clumping up, Bea leapt back into her ship and began to warm it back up again. The engine whirred in rusty complaint, and she lightly stroked the screen with one olive hand. “I know,” she muttered sympathetically. “I’m tired, too.”

  This time, she didn’t have long to wait. The garage doors opened, and she urged her ship forward into the cavernous space. Right away, she saw the fleet of eight scarlet Peace Bearers, the newest model line of inter-space travel rockets, equipped with all the standards in weaponry for getting around in such harsh times.

  Her expert eye saw no scuffs on the shiny rocket surfaces though, so she just shrugged a little and puttered along in the opposite direction to the rectangular area marked in yellow. A small team of six burly men were milling around aimlessly, looking bored and restless. They immediately perked up at the sight of her as she came to a gentle halt perfectly within the lines.

  “Damn fine parking,” one of them commented, reaching her first. “What we got?”

  Beatrice was ready, and handed him her own paper list of the crate contents and their numbered designations. “Boring stuff this time, I’m afraid. Toiletries. Soap, towels, toothbrushes. The basics.”

  All six men sighed, but nodded. “Well, hand us over your control and we’ll take it from here. It’ll be waiting up at the area where you check in, when you check out after your sleep, Beatrice.”

&nbs
p; “Right,” she said, and handed them her slender control. Bigger stations had skeleton-key type controls that could access any type of modern ship within a few seconds but hers was hardly “modern” and the station wasn’t big enough anyway.

  With that done, she headed for the nearby service door. The scenery beyond changed drastically, going from shining slate and shades of grey to a homely cream. Everything was still metal and the floor was rough, having not a trace of its mellow golden pattern anywhere but around the walls, but other than that, it was a feast for her dark-strained eyes.

  She headed down the hall and found the registration desk. The woman behind the counter knew her on sight and didn’t need to see any of her papers or documentation. “Okay,” she said cheerfully, “you’re in room 66 a few flights up. You know what to do, Miss Noble.”

  “Been here enough times,” Beatrice said drily.

  The woman leaned forward, and put up a hand in front of her mouth. “You’ve never been here when everything is all crazy like this, though! If you’re lucky, you’ll see them.”