Joah Maroon 1 Read online

  Joah

  Maroon 1

  The New Ride

  Rodzil LaBraun

  © 2021 Rodzil LaBraun

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, names and locations are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real people is purely coincidental. Any references to real people or locations are used fictitiously.

  Find more novels by Rodzil LaBraun:

  Author website: https://rodzillabraun.com/index.html

  Amazon Author site: https://www.amazon.com/~/e/B013YWMRA6

  Goodreads page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14212575.Rodzil_LaBraun

  The Joah Maroon series is based on the main character from the Island Girls Trilogy. Though reading that three book series is not required to enjoy this story, it is advisable to fully understand references and the established characters. Joah, Lin and Nancy have all come an extremely long way since their first appearance on the page. I believe that following their strange and wild adventure through the Island Girls series will assist you in enjoying this tale to the fullest.

  Island Girls book one available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08262Q9S1

  Entire trilogy available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089ZFYN87

  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

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter One

  My stomach felt abnormally queasy after reentering our known universe. I'd gone through the rip-jump process a hundred times, only getting an upset stomach on the first few. I wasn't sure the reason for the relapse. It could be my nerves or the fact that it was the first time that this ship had performed the highly technical transition over into the alternate fabric of space and back.

  It was probably both, since this was my inaugural mission as captain of the Terran Capsule as well.

  Lin reached for her injection tube and promptly pressed it against her shoulder. A moment later Nancy did the same. At least I wasn't the only one. However, the two of them had intermittent trouble with the interstellar travel technique. Since they were each serving their first duty in their new capacity, it might just be the jitters for them too.

  Spaceport Andromedas contacted us moments later. Our ship's computer exchanged data with the trading station without a need for us to get involved. At least at that point. Voice communication would possibly be required once we got closer. I had personally only visited this station once before, and that was over a year ago. I wasn’t even in the command room during that approach.

  The small commercial spacecraft did not belong to me. It was owned by Oxeonn. The company had five such vessels in operation. I had the pleasure of being trained on the fleet's flagship by the owner, Plith Sunderin. That vessel was nearly three times the size of this one and carried a crew of twenty-two people. It came as a bit of a shock when he offered me the position of captain on his newest ship. I had only been with him for two years.

  Not so surprising was his offer for me to take both Lin and Nancy with me. The three of us had been inseparable ever since we escaped the clutches of the Thesphilians. They had luckily found jobs aboard that merchant ship the same time as me.

  The only additional crewmate on the Terran Capsule, which I personally named, was an android. Plith had been insistent that the thing be included. The company had never commissioned an artificial intelligence robotic entity before. AIRE for short. My ship was to be the guinea pig, but of course no one in the new galactic era understood that reference. If testing went well, he planned to place one on every ship in his small commercial fleet.

  I was absolutely certain that the AIRE unit had been assigned to us first due to our small crew and lack of experience. Class E merchanters typically carried a crew of five minimum. No other employees applied to join us, which seemed a bit strange. That was until we learned of our assigned route.

  Four separate star systems provided a circle of supply and demand that would yield Plith and his company huge profits. They would also provide us with a great variety since only two of the four were controlled and inhabited by humans. Just as frightening for modern day space travelers was the fact that half of our destinations were on planets instead of the habitation rings of space stations.

  Planet deliveries didn't bother me in the least. Nor did it worry my crew. The three of us were all from Earth originally. We had been sent into cryogenic preservation at different times but were released nearly two hundred years in the future only days apart. By perverted, deadly game designing aliens.

  Our story about surviving the death-defying entertainment show of the Thesphilians had spread across the human media network surprisingly fast. For several months we were celebrities. As our fame began to fade, we sought employment in a galaxy with which we were not all that familiar. Public relation gigs got us by for a little while. When free food and housing was no longer available, we eventually had to find real work.

  There were five of us then. Shira and Nevenah snagged some office jobs on the prime residential station at Tau Ceti. With my security background and muscular build, I was able to find work easy enough. However, when Plith Sunderin offered me an entry level position on the Chargreuse, the Oxeonn ship that he himself captained, I eagerly took it. My only request was that he also hire Lin and Nancy.

  Both girls studied hard and earned positions quickly as others retired or transferred to new ships. Though my job was security for the company merchant ship, I eventually became a jack of all trades just by paying attention. After seventeen months the owner named me first officer when the woman that previously held the position called it quits. It ruffled a few feathers among the more experienced members of the crew at the time.

  The Chargreuse visited more than a dozen trading posts regularly. Mister Sunderin made his decisions based on current supply and demand situations. But he didn't like to take chances with his four other ships. Steady routes of three to six stops were designed for each crew. Numbers were crunched every few months to see if adjustments could be made to be more profitable.

  So, I didn't get a choice of where to take this brand-new Class-E cargo ship. Plith mapped it out for me. In a way that was good. I didn't have to worry about making those decisions anytime soon. My new role as captain had plenty of responsibility already. I planned to take mastering it very seriously.

  "Approach instructions just came in," Lin told me from her Navigations station to my left. I was seated in the pilot's seat instead of the raised captain's chair in the center of the control room. Directly behind me was Nancy and the communications post. Though each seat and set of touch displays had assigned functions, most tasks could be handled from any of the stations. With that in mind we tended to sit in the same chairs regardless of what we had going on at the time.

  "Estimated twelve hours until docking at Andromedas Glow," Lin informed me. "That's a weird name for a space station, isn't it?"

  "Probably a poo
r translation from the alien language," I replied.

  My sexy Asian wife was well trained in interstellar navigation, system communications and even piloting. With her medical training back on Earth, she decided to pick up enough courses to pass for the ship's doctor as well. Her expansive skill set was the biggest reason why we could get by without the need of additional crew mates.

  Nancy's primary field was systems. Extracting and analyzing data from the ship's computer. She was also fully trained in communications, which didn't seem like a difficult job to me. And she picked up enough basic navigation knowledge to get by should something happen to Lin.

  As captain, I was supposed to know how to do everything. At least that was how it should be according to my military training. Instead, I completely ignored the skills that my two wives already possessed in spades. I focused more on piloting and mechanics, as well as decision making as the leader of the crew. That came the most natural to me, though. I had developed my leadership qualities while escaping the islands of the Thesphilians.

  We had all the bases covered with just the three of us, but our experience was extremely limited. Oxeonn management insisted that we have a fourth. That was where the android came in.

  Portia was the AIRE unit’s name. A fitting one, I thought. Mister Sunderin, knowing my tastes very well, selected a curvaceous female version of the commercial work unit. Modern technology actually made it difficult to tell her apart from a real woman to the naked eye. To combat that, my wives decided to dress her in bland clothing that covered her entire synthetic body and had bold metallic ornaments. Just so I wouldn't forget that she wasn't a real woman.

  Portia followed instructions incredibly well but tended to ask for permission to speak quite regularly. She was designed to have a hefty role among the crew of any ship that brought her aboard. Her programming had her capable of handling any position. Her robotic body made her even stronger than me, which I tried not to think about.

  "May I assist in analysis of the approach path?" Portia asked in a voice much too sweet for her kind. Only her tone remained unemotional like standard androids. Her voice synthesizer was one of the features that I was permitted to select. It had a soft elegance to it that helped balance out her otherwise stoic nature.

  "No, you may not," Nancy answered firmly. She had discovered early on that there was no need to raise her voice toward the android since she would accept what she was told every single time. But my first wife was often bold in her manner, especially in dealing with the robot.

  Our fourth crew member was seated directly behind Lin at what was typically considered the systems station. The last two remaining chairs in the control room, one on each side, were vacant. I had stopped calling this room the bridge a long time ago due to the reluctance of the Chargreuse's crew to adapt the term. Now on my own boat, I was thinking of going back to it. Both Lin and Nancy understood the reference.

  The cramped chamber for controlling the ship looked nothing like a Federation starship from the old sci-fi shows. It didn't resemble the space shuttle either. The closest thing that I could relate it to would be a crowded rented office of a startup company. There were no windows or main screen on the front wall. Just our monitors which could display pretty much anything we wanted.

  "Something is wrong," Lin alerted me in a voice that didn't sound too panicked. She was confused more than concerned.

  "May I assist you in researching the problem?" Portia’s voice chimed in. It was a regular occurrence since we first accepted her onboard.

  "No thanks," Lin answered without offense. When I asked what the problem was, she explained. "Navigation won't let go of the Nav-hole that we just came through to enter the Andromedas system. It keeps giving me course corrections to go back to our entry point before continuing toward the station."

  "Are we still headed the right way?" I wanted to know. It sounded more serious to me than she was letting on. That might be due to my lack of knowledge regarding the navigation job.

  "Yeah," Lin answered. "The computer is not taking control. It's like our old GPS systems on Earth. The stupid thing keeps telling us to go the wrong way."

  "The computer cannot be stupid," Portia corrected her. Since she was essentially a computer as well, I imagined an attitude in her tone that simply wasn’t there. The unit had failed to take offense no matter how poorly she was treated.

  "Well, it is acting stupid," Lin informed her.

  "I think I found the problem," Nancy said. "The rip-jump engine hasn't shut down yet. We have system thruster control, so it isn't interfering with that."

  "Will I have to fly this bird manually all the way to the station?" I asked. I was almost excited at that prospect. Space flight could be quite boring at times.

  "You will not be permitted to dock the ship on manual control," Portia informed me. "The issue must be resolved before we reach final approach. I recommend solving the problem at this time. May I assist?"

  "Oh no!" Nancy said as I felt a slight rumble in the floor beneath my feet. I recognized that feeling as the rip-jump engine beginning to do its thing. The device with world changing power was quieter on our ship than the Chargreuse. I assumed that was because it was new. When the vibration increased, I wasn't sure what was happening.

  "We are ripping!" Lin screamed in panic. Her calm concern tossed aside finally.

  "Where?" I asked. "Back into the hole we just came from?"

  "No, captain," Portia announced, completely maintaining her professionalism. "Our ship will rip a new hole in the fabric of space in six seconds to send us into the alternate universe..."

  The nausea returned as the lights dimmed. My screen went blank. I knew that it would remain that way until we ripped back into our own galaxy. Pilot control would be locked out. I could switch to monitoring systems, but I’d rather get control back instead.

  "Where are we going?" I demanded to know. "What is our target destination?"

  "I don't know!" Lin yelled even more panicked than before. "The ship just ripped a new tear in space without our permission! We don't have a destination locked in!"

  "May I assist with the analysis?" Portia asked calmly. I knew that she was already monitoring more of the ship’s systems than the three of us could possibly do at once. She just wouldn’t share a solution until invited to do so.

  This was actually some pretty scary shit. There were horror stories of ships that disappeared into the other realm never to return. Is this how it happened? Were we going to die? On the very first trip of our new spacecraft?

  "Yes," I relinquished my fear of the android getting involved. It couldn't possibly get any worse than it currently was, unless maybe we exploded without knowing what the hell was going on?

  I was never fond of the alternate plane of existence. I didn't like the lack of control. The immense amount of trust that I had to place in the ship's computer. The beyond, as it sometimes was called, was basically a two-dimensional blanket with buttons that attached to our universe at points we referred to as nav-holes. Those were doors for safely transitioning from one realm to the other and back. When an existing hole did not exist, like in the early days of rip-jump technology, a new hole would have to be ripped. That could be dangerous.

  The parallel universe allowed us to move quickly along that blanket without fear of colliding with another ship. However, that was only when our target destination was locked in before we ripped over. There was no steering, accelerating or braking in the beyond.

  "There is a faulty coupling in the navigation portion of the shift inverter," Portia announced after just five seconds. "A section of code to override the issue has been corrupted. The repair must be made manually."

  "Where are we headed?" I asked the robot. "Once we get the coupling repaired, where will we be? Do we need to rip another hole to get back? How can we do that without navigation?"

  "The reentry point is always programmed before entering this side," Nancy announced what we already knew. She appeared to be as scared a
s I was, only not hiding it near as well.

  "Nowhere," Portia answered in her now annoying monotone, yet soft female voice. "Same place. Yes. I can handle it."

  "What?" both girls replied as they failed to interpret our android's short answers to the four separate queries that I posed.

  "We are sitting still on the other side?" I asked. "I didn't know that was possible."

  "It isn't," Nancy said stubbornly, rejecting our fourth crew member's first situation report of her young career. “You are reading it wrong!”

  "This chance occurrence has never before been documented," Portia rebutted. "The navigation tear is being held open by our engine. Technically, we are neither here nor there. The Terran Capsule's computer claims that replacing the coupling gives us a ninety-seven percent chance of returning to the exact same location in the Andromedas system."

  "Claims?"

  "My calculations place our chance at nearly a hundred percent," the stress-free reply came back. "The repair will take me less than six minutes to make. Shall I proceed?"

  "Yes," I told her in a kinder tone than I had previously used toward her. I suddenly realized that this was karma on a galactic scale. We shunned the most knowledgeable and capable member of our crew because she wasn't human. Then we immediately were thrust into a situation where we were heavily dependent on her. I didn’t like being taught a lesson any more than other people, but I wouldn’t let my pride stand in the way of learning from it. Especially if it could save our lives.