High Places -e

Minders Series, Vol. 1

by Nina M. Osier

It’s been 20 years since Maisie Thurlow last saw her big sister. First a team of government "minders" tore their family from the pastoral religious colony that was the only home small Maisie had known. Then a mutiny aboard the star liner carrying the displaced colonists separated the sisters, with Eve boarding a lifeboat aimed toward a vacant but inhabitable planet. Now Maisie is Captain Thurlow of Star Guard, and she can’t resist trying to find her sister when her patrol ship’s course takes it temptingly near that remote world.

That’s when Murphy’s Law kicks in with a vengeance, bringing Maisie’s ship down in flames on the mountain where Eve’s lifeboat landed. Throwing Maisie and her surviving crew members into a survival scenario none of their training anticipated, because this planet’s atmosphere does strange things to Humans...and they’re just as trapped on it, now, as Eve is.

ISBN 1-59431-635-X Sci-Fi / Romance

Cover Art by Shelley Rodgerson.

Also available in RTF and HTML formats.



Chapter 1

“Jack, I’m sorry.” Star Guard Captain Maisie Thurlow whispered the words into a commlink that she thought had gone silent. So First Officer Jacques Qiero’s answer, reaching her helmet speakers in an equally hushed tone despite the racket all around them, made her start against her command chair’s restraint harness.

“For what, Maisie? You didn’t know this was gonna happen.” The familiar voice did what it always did. It centered her, and gave her back her focus.

No, she hadn’t known. Couldn’t have. Yet the captain must be held responsible, nevertheless, for all that happened aboard her ship. Authority she could delegate, but accountability clung to her no matter what.

So be it. Thurlow squared her shoulders and braced her feet against the ship’s bucking. Closed her ears to the screaming alarms, and spoke into the commlink on purpose this time. “All hands, this is the captain. Check in with your mates as soon as you can after we’re down. I’m assuming we won’t have a working intercom, but we will have a breathable outside atmosphere and gravity pretty close to T-normal. So get yourself out of the ship, and then get your helmet off so you can hear. If you need to shuck your suit so you can run better, do it! Stay alive, people. That’s your only priority right now. I’ll see you dirtside. Thurlow out.”

Dirtside on a dirt ball that didn’t even have a name on the star charts. Coming down through its atmosphere trailing fire, and hoping the shields would hold and their power source wouldn’t fail until the ship’s outer skin was no longer endangered by heat-generated friction. Trusting to restraint harnesses and envirosuits to protect their fragile Human bodies from the forces of such a ride, and then from whatever fires and fumes a crash landing would set loose inside the breached hull.

At least they had military-issue gear to guard them against all that, and at least they had years of training in how to get through this. Did she dare to hope that a band of untrained civilians, the oldest among them not long out of childhood, had survived a similar landing some 20 years earlier? Not all of them could have, common sense told her. But maybe some had. Survived not only landing, but everything that must have come afterward…Thurlow stopped listening to her ship, now that nothing she did in response to it could make a difference, and fixed a face from the past firmly in her mind.

I’m coming, Big Sister. Not quite like I promised I would, because I sure didn’t plan on crashing my ship beside yours! But I’m coming after you anyway, at last. And no matter what things look like right now, I’m making you another promise. I’ll get us both off this dirt ball somehow. Sometime. One way or another, I’ll get you home.

With those words and Eve Thurlow’s image filling her thoughts, she bid instinct be damned and forced her muscles to relax. Shut everything outside her body away from consciousness, and waited for the next few minutes to be over.