Tigra

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  Zumaya Publications

  www.zumayapublications.com

  Copyright ©2006 by Richard J. Leahy

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  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to all and everyone who have helped and guided me in this. Too many to name here, but you know who you are. My everlasting thanks and love to Racine, who puts up with me, God knows how.

  Prologue

  She might have been pretty at one time; perhaps she still was. It was impossible to tell through the layers of grime that covered her. Not that the guards cared. They weren't bothered by filth, nor the mildly crazed look in her eyes. She was everything they wanted her to be. She was theirs.

  The guard-sergeant led the men into her cell and brusquely ordered her to strip. She didn't fight, she didn't cry out, just silently and mechanically removed her flight suit to stand naked before them. Her breath misted slightly in the cold as she waited, shivering.

  The sergeant grunted orders to his men before collecting money from those who had not yet paid. A battered mattress was pulled to the center of the cell.

  Ignored for the moment, the woman began humming and slowly swaying to a half-remembered tune.

  "My bonny lies over the ocean, my bonny lies over the sea...” She giggled at the silliness of the song but, when she tried to continue, found she had forgotten the rest of the words.

  She shuffled her feet. She felt hungry and reached into her pocket for the bone she had been chewing on earlier in the day, only to find she had lost both the bone and her pockets. Where are my pockets? she wondered.

  She looked down in search of them and saw the worn and tattered flight suit lying at her feet. It was covered in the accumulated filth of sixteen months of continuous wear, but the ID stenciling could still be made out, the white letters just visible against the jet-black of the suit.

  "Cap-tain ... Jeen-a ... Gar-za,” she whispered, carefully enunciating each syllable. She puzzled over the words for a moment then smiled. She remembered the name. It was hers.

  At least, that had been her name, in that rapidly fading memory of a past that was once her life—a life before her crash and capture, before the prison and the torture and the rapes. She'd still been a pilot then, and a soldier, and human. She'd had a name. What was it again? She frowned. Lately, she found thoughts difficult to hold on to.

  The ID came back into focus.

  Jeena. I remember now. My name was Jeena.

  But it was a hard thing to remember. Here in the prison she had no name. Here she was only a number: F548666. The F was for female, she assumed; the other numbers were meaningless. Not even the guards bothered with them anymore; to them she was simply Sixty-six.

  Sixty-six! Sixty-six, come here, you bitch! They screamed it at her day and night—especially at night. It was at night they most wanted her, like they wanted her now.

  They pushed her roughly onto the soiled mattress, and she let them, offering no resistance. Early in her capture she had fought hard against every violation, but the end had always been the same. Then, after they used her they would torture her for her disobedience, and she was now too weak to withstand any more torture.

  She twisted a strand of hair absently between her fingers, still humming softly. Some of the other women had not learned the lesson. They had fought too long or too hard. Bad girls. Bad, bad girls. Eventually, the men tired of them, taking their clothes and food and leaving them to slowly freeze and starve in the bitter-cold cells.

  But Jeena had learned. She would not fight back, for fighting back meant death; and despite the unspeakable horror her life had become, she could not yet bring herself to end it.

  She'd been through this all before—God, how many times? All the other women were gone now. Dead, maybe ... she didn't know. For the last five months only she remained, and they came for her nightly, laughing and drunk, no more than animals in rut.

  Sixty-six!

  Sometimes there would be only one or two, other times many, many more. Always there was the guard-sergeant. He had claimed her early in her capture, and now she was his—his property, his animal. Deep down in a place that was still Jeena Garza she knew her time was running out, and that he would soon grow weary of her, too.

  The first soldier fumbled with his belt, cursing as the others laughed. Jeena stared at the flight suit, and at the name that once again had become meaningless, and felt nothing.

  Chapter 1

  The Coalition: Name adopted by the first four planets to break with the Union of Democratic Planets at the beginning of the Galactic Civil War. Now numbering twenty-two separate worlds, it is more often referred to as the Coalition Empire.

  Encyclopedic History of the Union, 22nd ed.

  Jeena woke with her fist buried in the pillow, sobbing and clutching at her stomach, fighting off the pain and nausea that accompanied her back to the waking world. The nightmare images of the prison faded, but she could still smell the men, still hear the echoes of her own screams.

  With great effort, she opened her swollen and bleary eyes to a room eerily illuminated by flashing red lights, pulsating in rhythm to the modulated shriek of a klaxon. It took a moment for her to register the sound as the ship's main system alarm.

  She was suddenly alert and leapt from the bunk, only to reel and fall to the floor. Something was terribly wrong. The walls of her sleeping quarters were shuddering, and there was an odor of smoke in the air. Grabbing the bulkhead for support, she forced herself up. The metal wall was hot to the touch.

  Staggering, fighting to maintain her balance, she moved toward the cockpit door. She caught sight of her bloody flight suit on the floor just as she reached it. There was no time.

  She hit the door panel, and it opened with a hiss. Naked, she stumbled into the cockpit.

  A deafening roar like the inside of a blast furnace struck her, enveloping her in a ragged blanket of noise that made her cringe and cover her ears. The source of the noise was readily apparent. Through the cockpit window she saw angry, red-hot flames engulfing the hull of the ship. The smell of smoldering insulation was thick in the room, and white-gray smoke rose in twisting columns from the conn.

  With a sudden sick fear Jeena realized her ship was burning up in an uncontrolled re-entry. The question of how that was possible would have to wait—she had to get control of the ship.

  Lunging toward the conn, she swayed, falling again as the ship careened madly. She grabbed the back of the chair, pulling herself up. A reinforcement cable tore loose from its mooring and whipped through the cabin, the jagged tip slashing her left thigh and leaving a six-inch bleeding gash. Screaming, she fell into the conn chair.

  Ignoring the wound, she scanned the instrument panel, quickly assessing the situation. Drive and main engines were offline; hydraulics were bleeding; external hull temperature was twelve hundred degrees and rising, angle of declination ... fifty degrees. Too steep!

  There was a sound like the firing of a gun beneath her, followed by a loud hiss of escaping air. A violent shudder ran through the hull. The ship was coming apart.

  The air brakes had automatically engaged on entering the atmosphere but were doing little to slow the momentum. She needed power to pull out. She slammed her fist on the main engine switch, but the indicator remained dark. She hit it again then tried the auxiliary override. Nothing. The engines were dead.

  The ship groaned, and the fire before h
er was now a searing wall of white heat. She quickly went over her options. If I can't start the engines, at least I have to dump the Drive. The Drive was enormous, and was not built to withstand an atmosphere, intended only for interstellar flight.

  She gripped the double-level crossbar in both hands and pulled it down. The separation alarm sounded as a green warning light swept the cockpit. There was a jarring sensation and a deep grinding from behind her, followed immediately by a second alarm—separation failure. Dammit! The heat of re-entry must have fused the couplings; she would not be able to disengage the Drive. She would have to bring the huge transport down in one piece.

  She gripped the flight stick between her legs she pulled back hard, sweating profusely as the cabin temperature climbed. Her right thumb toggled power to the tram's forward thrusters, and she felt some relief as the indicator light came on; but the stick was still buried forward, and she was unable to pull it back. Grunting with effort, her sight blurred by sweat she strained against it, fighting both the planet's gravitational pull and the inertia of the ship.

  She cursed the lack of response. Rigel's rings, it's like trying to fly a burning brick! This wasn't a sleek frontline fighter; it was a beat-up cargo vessel with its Drive still attached. Theoretically, it might be possible to land the giant ship in one piece, but she'd never done it, or ever heard of it being done.

  The forces against her were enormous. If the thrusters could not decrease the angle of descent, the ship would disintegrate, falling to the planet below in a fiery rain of burning debris.

  The vibrations were so violent she could barely read the instruments. Smoke filled the cabin. Declination still read fifty degrees; hull temperature was now over nineteen hundred. The situation was deteriorating. She was losing the ship.

  No, not now! Goddammit, not now! All those months of torture; all that pain. I won't die now. Not like this. Not after so much.

  In a rage, she threw her body against the stick, the sinews of her arms screaming in protest.

  "Help me!” she cried out to the ship. “Help me, you bitch!"

  As if in answer, the ship shuddered and yawed, nearly wrenching the controls from her hands. Teeth gritted, knuckles white, she held on, fighting for control. She frantically sought out the declination gauge—forty-nine degrees.

  She was gaining. Against the almost unimaginable dual forces of wind shear and gravitational pull, she was gaining. But external temperature was now three thousand degrees. There was a popping sound in front of her, and a small crack appeared in the center of the windshield.

  "C'mon, baby,” she pleaded.

  Amid the noise around her, she could just make out the synthetic voice of the flight computer.

  "Fifty-two seconds of thrust remaining,” it announced calmly.

  "Damn you, Vicki!” she cursed to the empty cabin. She had less then a minute in which to pull the ship out.

  Bracing herself, heaving against the stick, she watched the numbers slowly recede as the seconds ticked agonizingly by. At forty-five degrees she could feel the vibrations lessen, but she was weakening, her muscles beginning to tremble. Her arms felt on fire, burning from the buildup of lactic acid as she pushed them beyond her limits.

  "C'mon, c'mon,” she grunted, but the stick felt as though it was moving through thick cement.

  The air inside the cabin was searing, and she labored to breath. The small crack in the windshield began to enlarge, snaking in a twisted curve through the reinforced glass. Sweat poured from her. Declination was now thirty-five degrees.

  Jeena closed her eyes and focused her energy, willing her tortured arms to maintain contraction. They finally reached their limit and the muscle fibers began to tear, then to shred as her strength finally gave out. Her eyes flew open as she gave another scream.

  The wall of fire before her had thinned, the flames losing energy. Soon they fluttered and went out. With their loss the horrible roaring in her ears died as well. Jeena checked the declination gauge: twenty-eight degrees. She was in a stable glide pattern.

  She released the thruster toggle and painfully pried her fingers away from the stick. Four seconds of thrust remained.

  Slowly, her left arm throbbing, she reached out and canceled the red alert. The cabin was now still, save for the barely audible sound of rushing wind as they soared through the sky. Her body ached terribly, and her left bicep was already turning an angry shade of purple. There was the salty taste of blood in her mouth—she must have bitten through her tongue. She took a brief glance at the gash in her right inner thigh. The wound gaped but was only bleeding slightly.

  Jeena sank back into the seat, trembling from exertion and the adrenaline still coursing through her body. She took a few steadying breaths as she watched the wispy, whirling patterns of clouds dance before her, and allowed one question to occupy her mind.

  Where the hell am I?

  She had been on a pre-plotted course to Earth when she left Mizar 3. She had chosen a flight pattern well away from all known Coalition military outposts and recent battle sites. The flight plan had been calculated and re-checked by the ship's navigation computer. She should still be in hyperspace. So where was she?

  She puzzled over the question as the ship's computer droned on, giving her technical information on her glide path and the ship's status, but she had stopped listening. The sky before her had caught her attention, and she realized she could not recall the last time she had seen blue skies and white clouds. When was that? Earth? Yes, it must have been on Earth.

  The military preferred low-gravity, moonlike worlds for their bases, and Jeena had spent most of her life in the Star Corps. Her last visit to Earth had been ... almost ten years ago.

  Can it have really been so long ago?

  Looking out at the sky, she felt a sudden pang of regret and a deep feeling of loss for what she had missed. It was a life she had chosen, but in reality, there had been little true choice. You play the hand you're dealt the best you can, she had said often. Abandoned as an infant, she had cut her own way in the world. She had done the best she could. Still...

  Jeena stiffened, loathing the feelings of self-pity that had crept up on her. The months in the prison must have softened her. She was a soldier, a decorated officer in an elite SAG unit. She had crawled and fought her way up the chain of command and if not for her capture might have made major by now. What more did she want?

  Before she could explore that question, the clouds thinned then abruptly disappeared, replaced by an impossibly bright, blazing blue sky. Below her, expanding out to the horizon, lay a panoramic view of a new and alien world.

  With land now in view Jeena activated AL—approach and landing. Using a combination of sophisticated radar and laser scanning, it would evaluate the condition of the surface below and recommend a site with the highest probability of her surviving an emergency landing.

  "Okay, AL, what have you got for me?” she whispered.

  Static crackled from the comm and a topographical grid map appeared on the heads-up display, floating like a phantom in the space between her and the windshield. The entire map was lit a dull red—probability of survival less than ten percent.

  "Keep looking,” she said, switching to a wider view. The display expanded its area, but all was still red. Jeena glanced at the altimeter. “C'mon, I've got to put her down soon. Give me something I can live with."

  A moment later, a small patch of yellow appeared in the left lower corner of the grid—chance of survival greater than fifty percent.

  "Nothing in blue or green today, huh?"

  The screen remained unchanged. Glancing again at the altimeter, she set a course for the small area of yellow ahead and strapped herself into her seat, suddenly reminded of her nakedness as the stiff restraints bit into her skin.

  She soared above a wide savanna, descending rapidly. She watched as the ship aligned itself with the area AL had chosen as giving the best chance of surviving an emergency ditch—best being a relative term, she
reminded herself.

  The plain was coming up fast, the ground now racing past her. Airspeed was still over five hundred knots, but four seconds of full forward thrust would slow that down significantly. Jeena quickly went over her mental checklist for emergency landings—everything seemed ready. Breathing deeply, her hands gripping the stick, she put the big ship down.

  The rear Drive section hit the ground first, almost tearing the controls from her grasp. The great ship shook and shuddered as it thundered over the broken terrain. Jeena hit the forward thrusters and was slammed against the restraining straps. Four ... three ... two ... one. That was it. The thrusters were gone. Now it was up to Newton.

  She released the stick and gripped the restraints as the land rushed by. The momentum of the ship was enormous; she was still moving at over two hundred knots. She watched the grid map as the yellow patch disappeared; beyond all was ominously red. Still the ship raced on.

  There was a terrible jolt and the sound of shearing metal as the tram's forward landing gear tore away. With a violent lurch, the nose pitched forward, plowing into the ground. Dirt and vegetation blasted into the air as the belly of the ship gouged a rut in the earth. The windshield shattered, the pieces held in place only by the layer of plastek running through it. Bolts from the rear of the ship tore loose and shot forward, crashing into the control panel. Sparks flew, and the smell of smoldering insulation filled the cabin.

  Then all was silent.

  Jeena slowly lifted her head. The cockpit windshield was dark under a blanket of dirt. Tiny sparks popped and fizzed from the conn. She sat for a moment, listening to the sputtering of the control panel. A drop of blood fell from her nose and splattered on her thigh. The edges of the restraints had cut into her flesh, and there was a sharp pain under her left breast that made breathing difficult.

  But she was alive.

  Wincing, she carefully disengaged from the restraints. Another drop of blood formed on her nose, and she wiped it away absently, leaving a bloody smear across her cheek. She took a trembling breath and sank back into the chair.