Atalan Adventure Pack: Books 4-6 Read online

  R.M. HAMRICK

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover Design by R. M. Hamrick

  Editing by Sticks and Stones Editing

  Copyright © 2021 R. M. Hamrick

  All rights reserved.

  Table of Contents

  INVASIVE FESTIVAL INVASION

  LIVING IT UP AT HOTEL BERAMUDA

  GALAXY’S MOST WANTED

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MORE BOOKS BY R.M. HAMRICK

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INVASIVE FESTIVAL INVASION

  R.M. HAMRICK

  ONE

  The large data capsule labeled “WELCOME PACKET” had been queued to download overnight, and finished in the early morning hours—if there were such things as night and morning in the expanse. Sent to all contributors to the crowd-funded campaign to purchase Hephaestus, a small watery planet in the Psi Imagen System, the capsule’s message began to play automatically in the last few unoccupied moments on the Atalanta Empress’s bridge. In the first few occupied moments of the Atalanta Empress’s bridge, a startled sleepy-eyed Nurflan reached for her weapon before realizing two things. The first, that she carried no weapon to the bridge, because the manual doors kept out all ill-intentioned beings, except those employed on the ship. And two, that the tall and very hairless creature was merely a recording playing on the bridge’s windscreen in Xtremely Unnecessary Definition™.

  “Mevix,” Frankie cursed under her breath. Her skin ping-ponged along the visible color spectrum before landing on a sickly lime color. Almost anything was setting her off lately. It was one thing to settle into a color; it was quite another to flash like a strobe light on the way there. At least, she hadn’t been holding a hot cup of Caffex to drop. She’d skipped the morning staple, deciding additional stimulation would only be detrimental to her current condition.

  *Thanks to you, Go away and Leave us Alone was 110% funded* said the prerecorded Matt. His droning, monotone voice hid his quickly waning enthusiasm. He stood along one of the many gentle coastal lines of Hephaestus, of which Frankie was now part owner.

  While Matt’s limbs, of which there were four, were not exceptionally long, his torso and/or thorax was. So much so, Frankie feared that his lackadaisical nature would at some point give up on holding his body upright, and his top half would limp over the bottom like a wet noodle. In fact, if Frankie ever had to pull some While You were Sleeping-shenanigans, she’d probably be forced to write, “wet noodle?” under species on the hospital registration forms. Matt backwards-walked into the waters and began floating on his back to a supposedly artistic fade-out.

  To the point, but whimsical.

  Typical Matt.

  Frankie considered the wet noodle theory from the captain’s chair of the double-mortgaged Xavier-class ship. She always sat there for important, unimportant, and not-so-much captain-ly duties as her name was on both of the unfavorably worded mortgages. The terms of those agreements, her recent purchase of a planet, and their steady lack of employment possibly contributed to Frankie’s current state of disarray. Her skin was on the fritz. Even though it had decided on lime green, it couldn’t maintain dominance over the color wheel, and so flashed and stuttered like the broadcast of a monopoly cable company during a light rain.

  Frankie found her hands disconcertedly idle and cold without the double-insulated mug to warm them. Without the morning ritual and any sort of environmental cues from the deep, dark emptiness, Frankie was beginning to feel as if it wasn’t morning at all—which was true. And with her body running the gamut of emotions, she wondered if she should just return to bed to try again.

  Instead, she perused the remainder of the data packet which was appropriately bureaucratic in nature. As required by law, the planet’s history was disclosed, marking creation, hydration, population, and ecological destruction of at least seven planetary cycles. The law did not stipulate the data be sequential, consecutive, chronological, or recent. As such, most disclosures were a highlight reel of the planet doubling as an entry in planetary sales catalogs, and even verified Instagram feeds had been submitted and approved as legally clearing more than once.

  Also disclosed was the planet’s ranking from the RankMyPlanet website. They were voted “Most likely to collapse before anything like the Romulan democracy could form,” which was eleven steps up from “Complete and utter nutters,” but fourteen steps down from “A place for mother.” Fortunately, the planet’s health was rated high, and its occupants’ health even higher. It seemed all the extra water molecules did a body—any body, celestial, physiological, or wet noodle-ly—good.

  The ship’s stock computer, Compi, screeched an alert, causing Frankie to start in bright white.

  “Compi, turn down the volume.” Frankie began to fade from some of the visible light spectrum.

  *OK!* shouted Compi.

  “Compi, turn down the volume.”—again.

  *Ok,* Compi whispered.

  Frankie could barely hear her now, but she’d also given up. She rolled her eyes, from which action the computer concluded, based on past experiences, that the task had been completed successfully.

  “What’s the alert?” Frankie sat very still and listened carefully.

  *Mandatory meeting on Khufu, regarding the POA status of the planet,* reported Compi.

  Another meeting. In retrospect, becoming partial owner of a planet had not been the way to avoid bureaucracy when attaining a business license, which fact she noted was not in the welcome packet.

  “Good morning,” came Quaja’s honeyed normal-volume voice as the doors to the bridge were manually opened.

  Quaja was routinely the second to wake on the ship, since she prepared the crew’s breakfast. It was one of the many duties she juggled gracefully with her limbs. She swept across the bridge, grazing Frankie with a few inky dark green tentacles. The arms felt cool and allowed the heat to escape from Frankie’s unusually warm body. The Kieron lowered herself with a tentacled flourish onto the blue and white beach chair that had been anchored to the deck where the pilot’s console used to be.

  The pilot’s console had been moved laterally to press against the weapons console, so that the pilot and weapons specialist Lorav and Patav, triplets, could sit close to each other. Unfortunately, the console also sat directly in front of the captain’s chair. When Lorav, who was not a short being, sat there, Frankie had trouble seeing the bottom half of the windscreen.

  However, Frankie now preferred this setup, as Lorav and Patav were both skilled and reckless. Oftentimes it was easier on the captain’s stress levels to not actually see what was going on, and instead, just see later if she survived the incident or not. So far, she had.

  Quaja turned backward in the chair, weaving around the metal support bars, to converse with the captain. Frankie always found the configuration of the bridge troublesome. All chairs looked toward the windscreen, but on a long-distance freighter, there was really—just completely—nothing at all to look at. So, the crew would turn in their un-turny chairs to look toward the center of the bridge, which also happened to be where the captain’s chair was. Thus, not only could she not see from it, it often put her uncomfortably in the center when there was nothing better to see. Frankie felt oddly obligated to entertain them somehow, as she had been the one to recruit them for this unpretentious, crushing boredom that only living in a small metal can in the wide—unfathomably wide—reaches of nothing could provide.

  After an awkward moment that Frankie
often blamed on the bridge’s configuration, Quaja asked, “Do you want to talk about it?” More than one of her tentacles gestured to the Nurflan’s technicolor dream bod.

  “Oh, no, I think I’m just tired,” dismissed Frankie in a purposefully dismissive way. Quaja meant well, but Frankie having her emotions on display and supposedly ‘malfunctioning’ seemed to give everyone permission to comment and give advice.

  “You appear to be lots of things. I’m sure tired is one of them,” answered Quaja in a non-confrontational, but also have-differing-thoughts sort of way.

  Before Frankie could manage to change the topic, her second-in-command partly stumbled onto the bridge. She stared at Frankie’s kaleidoscope of colors, as if she were trying to get it in focus.

  “She’s on the blink, isn’t she?” asked Quaja.

  “Yes,” replied the girls in unison.

  Tarke was surprised about the judge-y look she was receiving from the person most definitely on the blink. “It’s five o’clock somewhere. Or, in this case, quarter-to-six somewhere, since obviously the saying is directed toward when to start drinking, not necessarily when to be drunk.”

  Not knowing when Tarke last went to sleep, woke, or if her most recent meal contained time-typical foods, there was no reason to assume it wasn’t quarter-to-six where Tarke was, and just a few feet over, morning’s first light.

  “Plus, I always celebrate a job well-done,” she added, slinking into her chair to the right of Frankie’s.

  Tarke’s definition of a ‘job well-done’ was a job in which she got paid. Even so, Frankie had to explain that their job was actually not complete, nor paid for.

  “OK, maybe I’m a little early. Or wait! I’m right on time. Here we are.”

  It was often impractical to describe Tarke in any exposition, because her appearance changed so often. However, there were some fundamental characteristics. She had a rough scar on her left hand, tawny golden fur, and a mane that would make even James Earl Jones jealous. This morning, her mane had been French braided into two braids and had been sprayed with Galaxy Glitter, this color combination called Starry Night. She wore a spandex suit—not the kind you’d typically wear in space, but the kind if you were going to travel to the 1980s on Earth to attend a Jazzercise™ or Step class. In fact, the suit had been passed down for generations in Gail’s family before Tarke had allegedly stolen it. As captain, Frankie had served as mediator during the incident. Gail claimed Tarke had taken it without permission. Tarke claimed she had borrowed it, and it could not be claimed stolen until she no longer had intention of returning it. She claimed to have intention of returning it. Gail and Frankie had hoped they’d be able to come to some sort of compromise, but as usual, Tarke wore them down with constant, unadulterated insistence until they folded.

  For this point though, Tarke was right. They were here. The ship had been on autopilot to a small rock circling a bigger rock in the Psi Imagen System, and they’d just arrived to deliver their cargo of a ‘delicate nature’. Code, possibly for something illegal—allegedly.

  Frankie pressed an intercom button, bypassing Compi’s complex inter-ship messaging system.

  “Gail, do you have the cargo ready?”

  With her bodily enhancements, Gail, their elderly human Cargo Supervisor and Mover of Really Heavy Things, couldn’t wear the leotard anyway. And, while Gail claimed it had been an heirloom, several on the ship had suspicions that she’d actually lived through Earth 1980s, which made her… well, they didn’t know how old, but probably really old. Well, parts of her were old, they guessed. Her teeth weren’t but a couple decades old. Her titanium-reinforced spine and bionic arms still had working warranties on them. Plus, black don’t crack.

  *Why would you ask such a thing? I’m not Cargo Supervisor for nothing.*

  “She lost it,” Tarke muttered.

  Frankie cut her eyes at Tarke, but she would not go so far as to defend Gail’s abilities to do her job.

  “You will be if you’ve lost the cargo and we don’t get paid,” said Tarke over the intercom, using her constant, unadulterated insistence unsquashed by Frankie’s cut, which had evolved into more of a disdainful look.

  Gail had replied with something of a ‘No I didn’t,’ but it was drowned out by the rustling of paper. *HERE IT IS!—err, I mean, yes, the cargo is ready.*

  Frankie dialed up the local number she’d been given, and she introduced herself to the shaggy creature that answered by videophone.

  “Hello, I hope I haven’t woken you. We have a delivery for you,” Frankie said and Compi translated.

  *Oh, no, it’s a quarter-to-six in the afternoon here,* said the shaggy creature, nonplussed.

  Tarke pulled a couple of bottles from behind the paneling of her console’s cooling system. She cracked them both open and gave one to Quaja, who had possibly crossed time zones or just didn’t ascribe to such formalities.

  “Can I deliver it?” asked Tarke for the seventy-third time.

  Frankie did not reply, but instead patched it through to the cargo bay.

  Gail stood at attention, opened the envelope, and read it out loudly as directed by their client.

  “Your mother was a puli, and your father smelled of car wax.”

  *Oh dear, what’s a car wax?* asked the shaggy creature, who indeed could possibly have a puli as a mother.

  “It’s a paste that can be put on land vehicles to make them shiny.”

  *Oh, that doesn’t seem so bad. What does it smell like?*

  Gail shrugged. “Elderberries?”

  *Skagforge that skagforger,* abruptly cursed the recipient of what now seemed like an insult. *He paid you to fly all the way over here, to call to my local number, to say that to me.*

  Tarke pressed a button to take over audio for a moment. “Yes, would you like to return a message of equal length for the cost of fuel and reading fee?”

  TWO

  With their new message safely tucked away in a small envelope, Frankie had Compi turn the Atalanta Empress around and return for their mandatory meeting. Immediately after Frankie had become part owner of Hephaestus, they’d rushed off to handle that delicately natured business, and so Frankie had yet to step foot on the planet. She had been on its moon, Khufu, however. Well, as Khufu was so desperately sandy, maybe it had been more on her than she had been on it.

  When Lorav arrived on the bridge, she was displeased to find them going in the opposite direction from when she’d gone to sleep. And, it wasn’t that she wanted to visit the small rock that spun around a larger rock, but that she hadn’t been consulted on the return trip’s navigation.

  “I didn’t want to wake you,” said Frankie, who really hadn’t thought anything about it.

  Lorav was a Rapcorh, which was often thought to be misspelled in its singular due to the fact that it was rarely used in singular form. It was unusual for Lorav to be on the bridge without her triplet sister Patav, but since they had rescued their sister Etav, they seemed to be creating a more—some would say ‘healthy’ relationship. Although according to elder Rapcorhs, their species was going to hell in a handbasket and perhaps the younger generation shouldn’t be so selfish.

  Lorav had thin, silver gray fur and a lone antenna atop the left side of her head, as if the other was missing. Patav had the other, on the opposite side of her head. Rapcorhs were of a solid, equally proportioned nature. Their hips, shoulders, and sometimes even their legs took on similar widths and angles. Their delicate antenna was the only wispy thing about them. Perhaps it signaled to them whether they could fit through particular rectangular doorways. They were quite adamant that it didn’t have anything to do with their psychic abilities. Lorav was like a rectangular sponge, collecting thoughts. They appeared in her brain as her own. It was really quite disconcerting. Patav dealt with emotions, and often would start crying before the other person could process and decide that was what needed to happen. The emotions had no thoughts attached to them, and thus were hard to understand. The thought
s had no emotions attached to them, and thus it was difficult to know whether “I’m going to go ape-spit and kill you all” was a slightly frustrated release of tension, or one of deadly intent and anger.

  Coincidentally, spit and shit had become interchangeable after apes purposely infected water sources to have a go at that Planet of the Apes spit.

  Lorav, knowing thoughts, knew that Frankie did not want to wake her. However, she didn’t know that Frankie hadn’t even considered the idea when she inputted the coordinates into Compi’s navigation system. This fact she only learned after Frankie decided to say out loud, “Besides, I don’t know what you have against the automatic navigation system.”

  Lorav coughed a small cough before verbalizing, “Compi. Please tell us where we are.”

  *Sure, we are in the Gamma Ithacae System.*

  Lorav raised an eyebrow to punctuate her point.

  “Wait, why did we leave the system? We were already in the right system,” Frankie argued with Compi.

  *I didn’t know how to get there from where we were, so we had to go somewhere else to get to where we wanted to go.*

  Lorav then left the bridge without making any corrections to the navigation plan, not even bothering to ask Compi about the remainder of their trip. Frankie did not call her back, instead they wasted two extra days and all the reserved fuel to make a point and also, to be super stubborn and not order their pilot to navigate them to the desired location. For someone who considered the Atalanta Empress family and who loved their family so much they were often physically connected, Lorav was really showing no love. Tarke, a rebel in her own right, was quite proud of her.

  Still having trouble decompressing from all the cumulative stress, Frankie considered affixing a seizure warning label to her forehead. Thankfully, while the meeting was mandatory, it wasn’t mandatory to be on Khufu at the time of the meeting. Instead, she opted to tune in to the meeting with audio only, to avoid fielding any questions concerning ‘moodiness’ or fertility cycles. The meeting was held in the Khufu sandnasium-turned-mathnasium-turned boardroom. With the cameras installed over center court, the room was viewable in 360 degrees with several add-on features. Frankie declined the olfactory channel.