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    Junker's Moon: A Grave Concern
    Junker's Moon: A Grave Concern
    Junker's Moon: A Grave Concern
    Ebook130 pages2 hours

    Junker's Moon: A Grave Concern

    By Peter Salisbury

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    About this ebook

    Inspector Vanessa Robin was tormented by one thing more than anything else from her past: that her ruthless pirate husband was held in a top security jail for his crimes. Until she stood face to face with the man who had led her through years of murder and mayhem, she would never feel truly free. Vanessa's attempt to gain access to the prison's remote location would have deadly repercussions reaching all the way to Junker's Moon.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPeter Salisbury
    Release dateFeb 13, 2015
    ISBN9781310572012
    Junker's Moon: A Grave Concern
    Author

    Peter Salisbury

    I am a life-long fan of science fiction, and so when I had an idea for my first story, I wasn't surprised that it was in that genre. The first book took me ten years to complete, but I've got a little quicker since. I am pleased to say that I now have over thirty books published in my name. What next? So far I haven't run short of ideas for new stories, so there are several projects in various stages of completion, and I hope to be publishing the next story before too long, so please subscribe to my alerts. My profile picture is a portrait of the author as a young man, painted by my daughter Charlotte Salisbury who has also contributed to several of my book covers. Professional background In the 1970s I studied Chemistry at university and then spent over thirty years in classrooms across England teaching almost anything but Chemistry, including Photography, Communications Skills, General Science, Computing, and Information and Communications Technology. In the 1990s I spent ten years writing abstracts of chemical patents. This was a most exacting process but very rewarding to be reading about the very latest inventions in the field, and the abstracts were distributed world-wide to research scientists by subscription. Articles of mine have been published in magazines and I have written assignments used for assessing Communications Skills for a major international Examination Board. After retiring early this century I began writing in earnest.

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      Book preview

      Junker's Moon - Peter Salisbury

      Junker's Moon: A Grave Concern

      Copyright Peter Salisbury February 2015

      Junker's Moon: A Grave Concern

      Peter Salisbury

      Smashwords Edition 2015 Feb 12

      This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person or place is entirely coincidental. No part of this work may be distributed, printed, reprinted or copied by any means without the permission of the author.

      Introduction

      Inspector Vanessa Robin was tormented by one thing more than anything else from her past: that her ruthless pirate husband suffered for his crimes in a top security jail. Until she faced the man who led her through years of murder and mayhem, she would never be free. Her attempt to gain access to the prison's remote location would have deadly repercussions reaching all the way to Junker's Moon.

      Table of Contents

      Chapter 1: The Plateau

      Chapter 2: Memories

      Chapter 3: Melanie Scopes The Prison

      Chapter 4: Ravenheart

      Chapter 5: Landings

      Chapter 6: Governor Hamball

      Chapter 7: Dirk Knight

      Chapter 8: Extraction

      Chapter 9: Hamball Explains

      Chapter 10: Legacy

      Chapter 11: Plot

      Chapter 12: Stealth Moon

      Chapter 13: Alarming News

      Chapter 14: On The Move

      Chapter 15: Rogue Ships

      Chapter 16: Drinks All Round

      Personnel

      Introduction to the Junker's Moon series

      Previously on Junker's Moon

      More books by Peter Salisbury

      Chapter 1: The Plateau

      Dirk Knight, murderous space pirate, a man sentenced for crimes along the length of the spacelanes, awoke with a blinding headache of bone-breaking proportions. The last thing he remembered was being dragged to a cell behind the courtroom where four heavy-weight enforcers held him down while a medic shot him in the neck with an infuser. A lengthy catalogue of his adventures and misdeeds had been broadcast from the court across every news channel, but he had held his head high. Instead of shame, his lip curled in a sneer as the judge pronounced him to be without pity, mercy or remorse in any degree. He had delighted in the quivering fear he had induced in the witnesses simply by the mention of his name, but now he was condemned to life imprisonment for the innumerable counts of theft and murder on a scale which had fallen short only of destroying an entire planet. To add to his ire, his pirate crew had been disbanded and were held in chains for their own arraignment. Dirk's ship, prized by him and dreaded by his victims for its destructive power, had been given over as bounty for his capture, claimed by the most insignificant of foes. Dirk's only consolation was that his fanatical pirate wife, Vanessa Longtail, was certain to seek deadly revenge on his behalf.

      Dirk took a fleeting glance at his surroundings before screwing up his eyes against the pain doing its best to burst from his temples. He reached for the water bottle he had glimpsed on the wooden crate in front of him. There was hard stone at his back and beneath his legs, giving an unmistakable sense of imprisonment. His fingers connected with the metal bottle and he groped for the stopper. After twisting it off, he drank a deep draft of the cold liquid within. As the drink cooled and soothed him, he spat and swore violently.

      It tasted like water. He had assumed it was water. But what if it was not? Too late, he had swallowed half the bottle.

      No, there was no reason to go to the expense of transporting him and then poisoning him, Dirk reasoned. He was more use to FBIS alive than dead, a lure to aid capture of more of his many associates, or even his wife, Vanessa Longtail. After Dirk, FBIS's greatest prize would be Vanessa's capture. She was almost as notorious as he was and they would be sure to use him as bait. No doubt word would reach her eventually of whatever out of the way jail they had stuck him in. His wish for her to find where he had been incarcerated was not for her to be captured but because he was confident that after wreaking deadly vengeance on Marshall Brion at Junker's Moon, she would free him.

      'She be too clever to be caught when she be a'springin' me from this forsaken hole,' he shouted to the four walls of his cell.

      The effort of demonstrating his defiance left him clutching his head and cursing under his breath at the pounding inside his skull. Dirk had no option but to sit still and wait for the headache to subside. He emptied his mind and relaxed. Over the next hour the headache passed and he slowly opened his eyes to accustom them to the light. The place he found himself in was an eight foot square stone box open to the sky. There was little doubt he had been kept sedated during his shipment to whatever place he was now incarcerated. The planet on which the prison had been built would have been purposely deleted from the regular Stellar Almanac, so Vanessa would have to dig deeper to find him.

      Dirk grinned to himself, to be free of his cell all he had to do was to climb out, although its walls were completely smooth. Whatever other barriers his prison may place before him, this was surely the easiest to surmount. The only features of the cell were that it contained a wooden shed with a wooden bench to sleep on. Besides the rough wooden crate, there was a container each of food and water enough to last a single day, an empty bucket, and a hammer and chisel. Fixed to one rock wall facing the shed was a clock enclosed in a metal cage to protect it from vandalism. As Dirk stared at it, he saw the final digit increase by one. It had a digital readout which incremented by one on its way to ten. At ten the next figure incremented. He sensed that each of the smallest increments was about a minute, and as time passed there were a hundred minutes in an hour. The time it showed then was two tenths past the tenth hour. With the sun overhead, Dirk worked out that ten signified midday. Dirk sneered in scorn, the fools had left him the means to escape. As soon as his headache subsided to a bearable level, with the hammer and chisel he would cut hand and footholds into the featureless walls of his cell, climb out and be gone.

      Dirk's prison was based on the remote planet of Peach Wood. The private prison facility was so named to make it sound attractive to enforcement agencies and to enable the owners to charge large sums for keeping the inmates secure. The bare cells provided them with an incentive for activity. An ancient lava field covered three quarters of the planet's single continent in hundreds of thousands of square miles of featureless plateau. Widely spaced across its surface, compartments had been excavated to contain the most undesirable and dangerous of criminals. The cells were initially no larger than the legal minimum specified by the courts. Containers of food and water were delivered at night by drones and the containers were filled by robotic systems on a different part of the planet, where bio-engineered food was grown in digester tanks from fungus and yeasts.

      The enclosures were eight feet deep and the only way for the inmates to enlarge their living space was to use hammer and chisel to break up the stone. The drones which delivered food took away the stone chippings and replaced the tools when they became too worn down to use.

      While the prison executives lived a life of bountiful luxury far away on resort planets, the prison manager enjoyed an only slightly less opulent existence in his own high tech suite hundreds of miles from where the inmates survived in their walled enclosures. On the remaining corner of the continent not covered by the lava field, trees and shrubs grew in in lush abundance.

      Legally, when kept in solitary confinement a prisoner had to be given something with which to occupy himself. The prison executives had decided to provide the hand tools, giving the false impression that escape was possible. Climbing out of a cell was usually accomplished within half a day, allowing the prisoner to stand on the apparently unrelieved plateau stretching from one horizon to the next. Prison statistics showed that there was a fifty-fifty chance that a new inmate would try to walk away from his cell. If he was foolish enough to try to do so, the prisoner was not intercepted, but left until he collapsed from exhaustion and lack of water. The unconscious inmate was then carried by drones to the same cell he had started out from. Most gave up after the first attempt and none tried again after the third.

      Some of the older inmates had spent years widening their cells by cutting steps and features, a few had cut whole new rooms for themselves, others made sculptures.

      Over the years that Peach Wood had been used by FBIS, the Federal Bureau of Interstellar Space, the prisoners had tried every trick in the book, including hurling stones at the drones which brought their daily rations. If a drone was knocked down, the prisoner might do a variety of things, like trying to send a signal by using the on-board radio equipment, or fashion a blade from a rotor. Some prisoners attempted to repair the drone and fly out but

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