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    Junkers Moon: Plague Planet
    Junkers Moon: Plague Planet
    Junkers Moon: Plague Planet
    Ebook129 pages1 hour

    Junkers Moon: Plague Planet

    By Peter Salisbury

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    About this ebook

    The Junkers Moon Scrap, Salvage and Servicing Company have side-stepped interference from the interstellar Bureau, but the team needs to take greater risks to find out more about the alien ship excavated on Cymbeline. The search for translations begins at an abandoned colony and leads from one obscure planet to the next. Will they find what they are looking for, or something completely unexpected?
    Sequel to Junkers Moon: Lucy And The Quantum Gnarls

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPeter Salisbury
    Release dateFeb 23, 2018
    ISBN9781370484959
    Junkers Moon: Plague Planet
    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

      Junkers Moon - Peter Salisbury

      Junker's Moon:

      Plague Planet

      Copyright © Peter Salisbury February 2018

      Smashwords Edition

      No copying of this material is permitted by any means be it on a physical medium, electronically or in the form of transmitted data without the prior written consent of the author.

      These stories are works of fiction. Any resemblance to any real person or place is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

      Junker's Moon: Plague Planet

      Introduction

      The Junkers Moon Scrap, Salvage and Servicing Company have side-stepped interference from the interstellar Bureau, but the team needs to take greater risks to find out more about the alien ship excavated on Cymbeline. The search for translations begins at an abandoned colony and leads from one obscure planet to the next. Will they find what they are looking for, or something completely unexpected?

      Learning to tame the ancient alien spaceship excavated on Cymbeline is impossible without a translation, but the archaeologists think they can find one. An earlier dig on a different planet uncovered metal tablets with inscriptions on them, but the Commander in charge of security ordered a cover-up, and quarantined the planet for plague. That is only one of the problems of getting there undetected.

      A sequel to Junkers Moon #11 Lucy And The Quantum Gnarls

      Junker's Moon: Plague Planet

      Table Of Contents

      Chapter 1: Recall

      Chapter 2: The Candrille System

      Chapter 3: Unwelcome Attention

      Chapter 4: Gerrard Five

      Chapter 5: Parasite

      Chapter 6:The Vortex

      Chapter 7: Entombed

      Chapter 8: Thirty-Two Minutes

      Epilogue

      The Junkers Moon Series

      Personnel

      Chapter 1: Recall

      Laurent and Anaïs were arguing their case for another hazardous endeavour. The two spacefaring archaeologists sat opposite Marshall, Debbi and Melanie aboard the alien ship that had been discovered on their last covert mission. Vanessa Robin, an Inspector in the Federal Bureau of Interstellar Security, and a notorious ex-pirate, had flown the alien ship this time, rather than its regular pilot, Melanie. The group had assembled in one of the sparsely furnished travel lounges. The seats were comfortable enough, but the incredible speed at which the ship travelled meant that the aliens who built it had no need of any facilities during transit, so there was nothing even as basic as a sandwich bar. The ship was parked close to Lucy and Theo's hotel on the planet Cymbeline, which was where the Junkers Moon servicing, repair and salvage depot had long been established. The problem was the potential danger of excavating artefacts at a quarantined planet in the Candrille system.

      'And I'm telling you that it is not a plague planet,' Laurent insisted.

      'He's right. 'Anaïs said. It's Febis again, protecting one of their top secret alien dig sites. Laurent and I were both there working on it. A small colony had been established twenty years before, and it was doing fine, getting by and starting to build up a small profit. The colonists were happy to sell all the supplies we needed, but when we'd finished, Febis slapped the plague order on it, and uprooted the whole colony. The colonists were relocated to a planet in a far distant system. And it was one on which, it has to be said, they fared rather badly.'

      'The official line was that there had been unexpected deaths and when Febis sent in specialists to investigate, they found a mysterious virus. That was all a cover story. When we had finished the excavation everything at the dig site was mounded over, as usual, and the planet evacuated for everyone's safety.'

      'Did the locals know what was going on at the time?'

      'They were told nothing other than that it was official Febis business. Just before the colonists were shipped out, they were told the tale about a deadly virus.'

      'Not a word of it was true. It was an alien dig, and that's the end of it.'

      Marshall cleared his throat. 'How was it established that there was in fact an alien settlement on the planet, not an old human one?'

      'We always verify the date from the finds, as usual. Any organic matter incorporated in them gives a date. The settlement that we excavated pre-dated human space travel between stars, and the development of the hyperspace pipes by a thousand years.'

      'And how was the site discovered?'

      'Routine scans by colonists looking for minerals, aquifers, that sort of thing. Word got out that there were underground structures, like a colony had been set up before. Febis swooped on it, slapped a 'Desist' notice on the media, barred the colonists from the site, and moved us in.'

      'If Febis always cover everything up after it's been excavated, why do they even bother with uncovering it all in the first place?' Debbi asked.

      'All questions are met with folded arms and blank stares. Anyone who persists is shipped out, so you soon learn not to ask.'

      'My best guess,' Anaïs said, 'is that the boffins at Febis Head Office hope something hugely advanced is unearthed. They can then study it and get complete control of a new technology.'

      'You think they're hoping for weapons?'

      'There will always be those looking for weapons but, honestly, Febis never give anything away. All we can assume is that, whatever they want, they haven't found it yet.'

      'That's the way I see it, too,' Laurent added.

      Vanessa chuckled. 'And yet we got our hands on the first active artefact ever discovered, and kept Head Office out of it.'

      'We didn't have a choice about saving our skins, but you're talking now about going out looking for trouble,' Marshall said.

      'Do you really want to go back to the planet in question, despite the fact that Febis took nothing away, and whatever was found there was covered up. Are you saying that you still believe there is something special about it?' Debbi said.

      'Yes, what did you see that makes you so certain that you need to go back?' Marshall asked.

      'As soon as I get back from these digs,' Laurent said, 'I make notes of everything I can remember, and I make sure that I remember plenty. Every archaeologist is searched daily, along with all of our kit, to prevent us from recording anything at the time. Febis scanned each of us on arrival and on departure as well, to make sure we weren't carrying anything which we could make notes with or that made images.'

      'Febis haven't got as far as inventing a mind wipe,' Anaïs said, 'so our memories of what we'd experienced were still very much intact. However, what they do is monitor all our comms and everything we put online and offline. If it's digital, they will find it. That makes it very difficult to write anything up, and impossible to publish. After a while they know that the memories will fade.'

      'They also divide the dig up, so that any one of us only sees a small part of it.'

      'OK, Anaïs,'Marshall said, 'there has to be something that you have remembered?'

      'I didn't see what happened,' Anaïs said, 'but Laurent witnessed an incident.'

      'I count myself lucky that I wasn't directly involved. I was working on my own about fifty feet away, neck deep in a trench. I looked up because I heard an argument going on beside the next trench across, where the dig leader was working with two assistants. She was the senior archaeologist…'

      'You have to know that, after what Laurent is telling you about, she was given a sinecure in a prestigious university,' Anaïs interrupted. 'To keep her quiet.'

      Laurent continued, 'The prof was holding up and pointing at what looked like part of a metal sheet of something or other that was about a foot square. It was too far away for me to see properly, but I'm pretty sure that it was a section of an inscription of some sort. There were a couple of Febis officers with her, one of which was the Commander in charge of the expedition. He glanced in my direction, but there was a bucket on the edge of my trench and I dodged behind it just in time, so he didn't see me.'

      'You said there were a couple of assistants with the prof, as well, Laurent?'

      'That's right. I heard a fragment of what the prof was shouting, something about it being the most significant thing ever discovered. When I peered around the bucket, I saw the Commander jabbing his finger towards the ground and yelling about putting it back. A second later, the other Febis officer shot one of the assistants with his stun stick. The prof staggered back into her trench, but the second assistant threw himself at the Febis guys. He got shot with the stun stick as well, and a couple of agents were called over to cart the two unconscious archaeologists away to one of the ships. Later that day it took off with the two guys on board.'

      'I can see now why you didn't say much about your previous digs the last time you were with us,' Marshall said.

      'It wasn't

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