Winter's Galaxy Read online

  Winter’s Galaxy

  Idolum Empire Series

  Book One

  By

  F.E. Arliss

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 Winter is Born

  Chapter 2 Hitting and Hiding

  Chapter 3 Alliance Introduction

  Chapter 4 Revelations

  Chapter 5 Renegar Revealed

  Chapter 6 Jumping Off Point

  Chapter 7 Helmeted and Mited

  Chapter 8 Treasure Hunt

  Chapter 9 Viceroy’s Guard

  Chapter 10 Mission to the Magna Belt

  Chapter 11 Baby Factory

  Chapter 12 Arachnian Encounter

  Chapter 13 A Haven at Last

  Chapter 14 Dark Energy

  Chapter 15 Desperate Design

  Chapter 16 What the Hell?

  Chapter 17 The Calling

  Chapter 18 Power

  Chapter 19 There’s Always One

  Chapter 20 Assassin Again

  Chapter One

  Winter Is Born

  The clients of the illegal brothel on the dark side of UZ627 ran in terror as flames licked like hungry dragon tongues through the interior of the corrugated metal warehouse. The fire brought the inhabitants of the building roiling out through its shabby painted-peeling doors. Some were the women and youths enslaved there. The rest were customers comprised of the lowest dregs of species inhabiting the galaxy.

  An anonymous tip placed by Mae Burridge had brought the Intergalactic Guard racing to the scene. She’d made sure the fleeing client-scum were running into the arms of people who would transport the dirtballs to prison on Asteroid 5. Emergency medical units and Galactic Social Aid had been on her call list too, as enslaved prostitutes of both sexes, some as young as eight, were rushed out by firefighters.

  UZ627 was a ‘new Earth’ supposedly. Well, Mae thought to herself, that was no shit! Here were the same hellholes and scumbags as back on Earth. Still enslaving people to act out some rich asshole’s fantasy. Same old crap; different world. So aliens were involved. Big deal!

  The clients came for every form of sex and gaming that any species had the twisted mind to think up. Mae Burridge hadn’t even known much about sex when she’d been grabbed off the street at the age of fifteen and put to work in a filthy, broken-down, concrete-block dump much like the one she’d just torched.

  Actually, she hadn’t really torched anything. She’d just blown out the pilot light on the rickety coke-gas furnace and placed a couple of candles from one of the hooker’s rooms on the floor beside it. Then she’d just shambled out the back door dressed as a teenage boy still fastening his pants.

  It hadn’t taken long for the gas to accumulate enough to set off the explosion. She’d made sure it would begin in the empty area where they kept the hover-cars used to transport trafficked girls out of hidden cargo spaces on incoming space cruisers. It would give the girls time to get away before it roared into the main building.

  Also, she might have dropped a hint to one of the older prostitutes in the hall as she shambled out. The woman had stared at her blearily for a moment then broken out in a cackling laugh and trotted off down the hall to warn the girls. When it blew, they would all be ready.

  Mae had been taken in south Texas, back on Earth. Even now the thought of it raised the hair on the backs of her arms. It had been a rare day out with friends for a little shopping on the boardwalk in Austin. The chaperone for the three girls had popped into a little booth to use a cash machine when a beat-up white van rolled up. Three guys in black balaclavas had jumped out, swept them into the van and bombed off, van backfiring as it roared away.

  The girls had been bruised and terrified, huddling together against the back wall of the filthy van. Mae was a smart girl. She could tell the smell that emanated off the floor of the van was urine, feces, sweat and blood. Her Mom didn’t take her to work at the hospital as often as she did for Mae not to know those special scents. No matter how hard they cleaned the corridors of the huge medical facility, you could still identify those odors.

  Mae tried three times to escape in the first few hours. Her Dad, an FBI agent, had once told her that the first few hours were crucial. If you didn’t get away on your own, no one was coming for you. Resources just didn’t stretch that far anymore. Girls went missing by the thousands and nothing much ever happened to get them back.

  Once, she’d tried jumping out the back of the van when they were slowed down in traffic. They’d simply caught her, beaten her and thrown her back in the van. No one in the cars so much as twitched a muscle to aid her. The next time she tried to beat on the windows to gain the attention of a border guard; he’d turned his back on her. Probably corrupt, Mae thought, gently touching her bruised lips. Finally, she’d taken off her belt and tried to open the latch on one of the blacked-out side windows.

  The driver had seen her in the side-view mirror, stopped the van, beaten her some more, then tied her hands and feet together with zip ties so tightly that when they arrived at the stinking warehouse in Saltillo, Mexico a few hours later, she couldn’t walk. Mae was dragged brutally by the hair into the building and dumped against a wall. It took hours for the feeling to come back into her extremities and it hurt like hell. Her friends had simply huddled crying in the corner. In one short hour her opinion of her friends changed irrevocably. They were too afraid to try to escape and not smart enough to come up with a plan even if they’d had the will.

  Slowly, over the next couple of weeks, Mae went from an innocent fifteen-year-old to a savvy, cynical prostitute. It hadn’t taken long. Her two crying friends were gone within twenty-four hours. She’d been sold a few days later as a speciality item. Her long blonde hair, blue eyes and virginity put a special premium on her. Mae’s first owner was a filthy-rich, drug lord named Claudio who specialized in premium hookers on the side. Doing a deal with drug distributors was always easier with a little sex on the side. He’d auctioned off her virginity for a fortune, then raped her repeatedly after the ‘client’ left. Indifferent to her tears and bleeding, he’d then turned her over to ‘the line’ to be trained.

  Claudio’s only mistake had been the old whore he’d assigned to train her. Jeanie was 60 if she was a day. Wizened and cynical, she was also smart and far cagier than her pimp believed. Jeanie took Mae in hand and taught her everything she needed to know to survive. Most of it was god-awful, but truly life-saving. By the time three months had passed, Mae was a seasoned trooper on the front lines of the brothel.

  Like Jeanie said, honey caught the flies. You could think anything you wanted about the assholes, but as long as you didn’t let on, you were safe. A girl had to be smart enough to control her thoughts and impulses. It was far better instead to think and plan and implement, without the numbnuts ever knowing.

  Jeanie had an escape route and a bank stash. What she hadn’t figured out yet was how to kill Claudio without anyone knowing it was her.

  Unfortunately for Mae, she hadn’t figured it out before Claudio sold Mae to Carl King. Mae had been a favorite of Carl’s for two years and she’d been in Claudio’s hell house for four years when she was sold. She hoped Jeanie had finally killed Claudio and that it had hurt. Her old self would have been appalled at that sentiment, but her old self had died a brutal death long ago.

  What Carl King, her regular from Houston, hadn’t realized, was that living in a human trafficking den also taught a girl all sorts of things that normal nineteen-year-olds shouldn’t have known. Like how to fight for example. Johns were often violent and other girls were jealous or just plain mean. She’d had to learn to fight. It hadn’t been a choice.

  One of the guards had been an ex-military commando. In exchange for free sex, he’d taught her all manner of fight
ing skills. By the time she was seventeen she could fight like a navy SEAL and kill with ease. Mae Burridge practiced diligently. She’d learned quickly that to get soft or lose awareness was to die or be permanently maimed. Mae still had ridged, red scars on her back where she’d been whipped with a riding crop. That was before she’d wised up and realized that Jeanie’s old saying was right, you really did ‘catch more flies with honey than vinegar’.

  She knew she’d been one of hundreds, maybe thousands, of girls who were taken from the U.S. and shipped to illegal porn studios or brothels. Seriously, people were so naive in the States. They thought only Mexican girls got taken. What idiots! Mae thought with a snort of derision. Girls were snatched everywhere...Europe, South America, all over Asia. It was an epidemic that no one cared much about.

  Earth was slowly dying due to pollution and overcrowding. Lucky for Mae, Carl King got them both off Earth and on their way to the ‘new Earth’ or UZ627, though most people just called it Uzi.

  It had taken them six months to get to Uzi onboard one of the high-priced cruisers that the wealthy were paying exorbitant amounts to berth on. The rats were fleeing Earth like vermin from a sinking ship. Mae was there because Carl had wanted a plaything for the journey. He was an arms dealer and had a large cache of weapons in the cargo hold awaiting some clients on Uzi. In order to safeguard his wealth and connections, Carl had an intricate system of data-streamed safeguards and firewalls on his accounts.

  Thinking she was just a beautiful, but stupid, nineteen-year-old had been his greatest mistake. Her petite size and innocent blue eyes made her look even younger. Six months was plenty of time to learn his passwords and to ferret out the details of his empire and associates.

  She knew it all, from the top where the most powerful people in the known universe awaited his crates of death, to the lowest scum on the ladder. They were the ones that would move his product and provide ‘muscle’. Carl loved telling her all about it. Mae made sure he knew how smart she thought he was. It was harder not to ask intelligent questions while still finding out every detail. That had actually taken the most intelligence and the most patience. She’d given him his monies worth and acted as though he was a walking god.

  The four years in Claudio’s ‘hell house’-- that’s what she called the club he’d owned-- had taught her far more than she’d needed to escape Carl King. Once on Uzi, she’d killed the bastard in a crowded market cafe and left him propped up like a drunk at the corner booth he’d been mauling her in.

  Straddling his lap and kissing him passionately, she had unzipped his pants, stuck her tongue in his ear the way he loved, then shoved a long, thin, lever-release stiletto blade through his ribs and into his heart. Her dad had shown her a picture of the blade once from a case he was working. When she’d ordered it from the security guard at the club, she’d known to ask for a Chicago Toothpick. Carl, the turd, never knew what hit him. He simply slumped dead onto her chest. She should have been freaked out. Too many years of hardening herself for survival made sure she wasn’t.

  Mae had taken the fake ID, the wrist computer with his empire’s layout, and the loaded Universal Data System Credit Chip out of his pocket, then slipped his head gently onto the table.

  Wrapping his hand around the high-priced bottle of wine he’d bought to celebrate his upcoming deal, she sauntered back to the ladies room with her enormous designer handbag and checked her appearance for blood. Stiletto blades really were very tidy, she thought with delight.

  Carl had bragged to her about the fact that he’d registered false iris scans, fingerprints and DNA samples for them when he’d purchased the berth and loaded his cargo. Throwing the tiny mini-dress, dangling shiny earrings, and high-heels into the trash chute that Mae had checked to be sure it went straight to an incinerator, Mae donned a pair of moto-leggings and light-as-air combat boots. Then binding her small breasts into flat pancakes, she slipped on a form-fitting nano-armored sleeveless tee, and topped it all with a standard-issue bullet-proof anorak in the color she liked to call ‘military brainwash’.

  Mae pulled a cordless shaver out of her giant bag and shaved off every strand of long, blonde hair. Then she wiped the caked-on makeup off her face, applied a temporary tattoo of a snake to the back of her now bald head, pulled on a pair of diatitanium shooting glasses and walked out of the cafe as a sullen teenage boy.

  As she caught her reflection in the mirror of the cafe, her image startled her so badly she stopped walking for a moment. Holy crap! She didn’t look like herself at all! As Jeanie liked to say, most men and all teenage boys were really just a sub-human species. Her camouflage image should work well here. She’d stopped being Mae Burridge four years ago.

  She didn’t feel like a Mae, she felt cold and dead. More like Winter. So from now on, she’d be Winter. Just Winter. That was a name that fit. She’d died back then and now she was going to be an icy, biting slash in the ass of every scumbag she ran across.

  Urging herself on, she stepped out into the sunshine of UZ627, and realized that she was probably the wealthiest nineteen-year-old ever. Well at least she was the wealthiest nineteen-year-old arms mogul. Now what to do about all of that?

  Winter sure as hell wasn’t giving those guns to their proposed buyers. The Intergalactic Guard probably wouldn’t be able to identify Carl King once they found his body. Either way, his clients were going to be out some serious armaments. She’d just have to figure out what the hell she was going to do with them instead.

  First, she had cargo to hide and she had just the person to help her figure out what to do after that. Keying in the coordinates for Carl’s ‘fixer’ back on Earth, Winter proceeded to put out a contract on live delivery of Jeanie, her old trainer back in Claudio’s brothel. The contract had one stipulation. It required both Jeanie AND Claudio. When they were both removed from the hooker-hell he ran, Jeanie was allowed to kill him, should she still wish to do so. Then she was to be put on the fastest ship to Uzi. In the meantime, Winter had some cargo to move and some shit-dive brothels to burn down. Yippee!

  Chapter Two

  Hitting and Hiding

  Winter spent the first two months staying in a low-rent hotel room that crawled with cockroaches. Not that roaches were anything new. She’d prefer not to have roaches everywhere, but seriously, there were far worse things than roaches and mice. Though she did have to admit that the roaches and mice-like vermin on Uzi were a tad bit different than back on Earth.

  So far, she’d sort of trained the roaches and the grey bits of fur that passed as mice to stay off her bed. They seemed one hell of a lot smarter than their Earthly counterparts. She was kind of getting to like the mice. Winter had asked one of the loitering hover-cab drivers whether the little furballs were called ‘mice’ or not. “Yep!” he’d said, “We just call anything near to what it was on Earth the same thing.” Humans, too damn lazy to come up with anything different.”

  Having spent most of those first two months just hanging around the spaceport and observing the ins and outs of the people and businesses that operated near the cargo depot where her crates were ‘on hold’, Winter had come up with a fairly clear picture about who could be trusted and who couldn’t. Well, frankly, most couldn’t be trusted. In that way Uzi was like Earth as well. 95% pure crap, 5% pure gold. It appeared to be a universal trait. Or maybe it was just the population she’d been near for the last few years and she forgotten that decent people existed.

  She’d seen a few aliens as well. There were some that seemed if not exactly, ‘nice’, at least polite and somewhat honorable. Weirdly, the ones that came and went in the night were some of the worst and the best. The creepy-looking beings that walked like upright spiders, were called Arachnians. They were always awful. Cannibals and unscrupulous ones at that, was how the hover-cabbie, ‘Fats Domino’, had described them.

  He’d also told her to stay well clear of the scaly-bronze, humanoid-looking aliens called Dreasing. They were nothing but paid death, vicious and bred
to kill. Winter thought that anyone who wasn’t made uneasy by the weird, pointed plates that topped their skulls was probably schizo. Both those species were supposedly ‘banned’ on Uzi, but came and went quietly in the night.

  There was also a very tall, pale-skinned species that sported long-white hair and sharp, shark-like teeth. They had glowing orange eyes and were called Idolum. They were definitely a warrior race and were always armored and loaded with weapons. Mostly, they were polite and kept to themselves. Winter had barely glimpsed them as they seemed to ghost from one place to the next in a split second. They were fast!

  Fats Domino, cabbie extraordinaire, was a short, knobby, dark-skinned ‘little person’. He was from New Orleans and could have been in his twenties, or as old as his forties. Winter couldn’t tell. Either way, he had nice manners, kept his cab scrupulously clean, gave her back the proper credits when dropping her off, and stood up for himself among his peers.

  People often mistook his small, gnarled-self as being a pushover because of his size and slightly misshapen limbs. She could see he was well respected among the people of the spaceport. Once Winter had seen Fats get angry. Now that had not been a pretty picture. He had some action and some mouth, when he was worked up.