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    Finder's Gate Episode Two
    Finder's Gate Episode Two
    Finder's Gate Episode Two
    Ebook134 pages1 hour

    Finder's Gate Episode Two

    By Odette C. Bell

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Helen and Zel are safe. Technically.
    They’ve been pulled into another dimension, and it’s not a friendly place. With Helen unconscious from her ordeal and Zel running on empty, he must scrounge to survive.
    But his survival is one thing, and it won’t last. With an Aquin Princess in hand, he’ll have to struggle with everything he has to keep her safe. Lose her, and he won’t just lose his greatest find – he’ll lose his future, too.
    ....
    Finder’s Gate follows a bounty hunter and a hidden princess fighting through the multiverse to save her and everyone. If you love your space operas with action, heart, and a splash of romance, grab Finder’s Gate Episode Two today and soar free with an Odette C. Bell series.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOdette C. Bell
    Release dateAug 6, 2018
    ISBN9780463616086
    Finder's Gate Episode Two

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      Book preview

      Finder's Gate Episode Two - Odette C. Bell

      Chapter 1

      Zel

      When you traveled through a gate, you were meant to return to the Hall of Doors.

      It didn’t always work out that way, though.

      If something interrupted your jump – say a sudden, unintended burst of energy – the wormhole could be affected, spitting you out somewhere different.

      There was another reason you might not return to the Hall of Doors. If they decided to ban you.

      But to do that – to be banned by the guards – you’d have to break one of their holy precepts. And you’d have to break it hard.

      Yes, technically you weren’t meant to interfere too much in the lives of the people in whatever dimension you landed in. But the rules were pretty liberal. They had to be. The 10 Families had been abusing them for millennia.

      So only one thing made sense.

      Because I had a problem, see.

      I expected to be spat out of one of those roughly hewn stone doorways in the Hall of Doors. I expected to see those two enormous Anubis headed guards staring down at me.

      I saw neither.

      Because I didn’t return home.

      As soon as the heady, impossible-to-explain effects of being spat through a wormhole to another dimension started to fade, feeling like fireflies darting through my mouth, my vision focused.

      Around me was a set of four silver white-cream walls.

      They weren’t made of stone. They were made of some strange amalgam of metal my scanners would detect as soon as they kicked back into gear.

      It was a miracle I was still awake.

      That fight had taken almost everything from me and more.

      The first thing I needed to ascertain was what dimension I was in. Then? I would need to wait for a gate to open up. You know before how I’d said that before you went to a new dimension, you learned the gate schedule? Yeah, it was pretty important. Because though on places like Earth a gate opened up every day and a bit, in some places, it could take years.

      My skin crawled. I didn’t throw myself up and find a way out of this room – because that was just the thing. There were the four walls, ceiling, and floor, but no doors. Not even any windows. There was no obvious exit at all.

      At least there was breathable atmosphere, though, and though it wasn’t quite the same as Earth, I could adapt to anything.

      I, however, was not currently my primary concern.

      Goddammit, I spat as I leaned over Helen.

      She’d finally lost consciousness as we’d jumped – after she’d blasted some unknown energy into me and enabled us to get away from that Level VIII Finder.

      She was out cold, her cheeks so pale, they almost matched the white walls around us.

      Come on, come back to me, I said, both to Helen and my implants as I pumped my hands in and out, ineffectually attempting to reset them.

      It would take 10 minutes or so until I would get rudimentary scanning power again. In a half hour, my implants would reset fully. In two days, they would be up to full operating capacity and my shoulder would’ve healed, the skin re-knitting.

      It was already doing its best, and if I glanced down, I could see there were no longer any jagged edges, just a faint green glow indicating my onboard nanobots were doing their best.

      My fingers creaked, the endoskeleton within them grinding as I kept pumping my hands in and out.

      It wasn’t helping my implants reset. But at least it was distracting me as my gaze darted over Helen’s crippled form.

      The one thing I could be thankful for was that neural blast had mostly cauterized her wrist. There were lacerations from where her arm had been cut against the exploding glass when we burst through that window, but they were superficial.

      She wouldn’t die of blood loss. She could very well die of shock, though.

      While the neural blaster hadn’t been programmed to shut her down specifically, who knew what it could have done to her central nervous system? Especially at a fragile time like this – when her underlying biology would be attempting to reassert itself.

      Dammit, I spat bitterly, gazing around the room for the second time as if I honestly thought anything would’ve changed.

      Nothing.

      Just white walls and that goddamn plain floor and ceiling.

      I tried to calculate what I could do for her. Without technology—

      I suddenly shoved a hand into my pocket. It was still there. The matter re-calibrator. Short of printing cash, it could also manufacture me other rudimentary materials. Metal, bandages – you name it.

      It was fully stocked with a buffer of elements. It didn’t mean I’d be able to create any meaningful weapon, but antiseptic bandages that would prevent her injury from becoming infected would be easy.

      I shoved a hand in my pocket, pulled out the matter calibrator – which was no larger than a palm-sized pebble – and began to log-on to it.

      That’s when I realized my implants were too weak even for that.

      Dammit, I spat again, my voice bellowing out.

      So far this room – whatever it was – hadn’t reacted to us.

      Until now.

      As my voice pinged off the walls, something shuddered beneath me.

      My eyes blasted wide, I shoved my matter calibrator back into my pocket, and I hunched over Helen.

      She’d fallen on my lap, her hair a mess over her face as it was twisted to the side.

      As the floor shuddered, it scattered into a clump at the base of her neck.

      I held onto her for dear life, using the strength in my skeleton and nothing more.

      There was a thump from the wall to my left. I swung my gaze to it wildly, cheeks stiffening as my free hand pumped into a fist.

      Even without significant input from my implants, I still had a skeletal system that was stronger than most soft-fleshed races throughout the multiverse.

      There was another bang. It sounded like someone was hammering on the wall with some kind of metal device.

      I clenched my teeth.

      Eight minutes. It would take eight minutes until I had rudimentary scanners back.

      Why was my life consisting of desperate chunks of time at the moment? Back on Earth, I’d had to take every minute as it was before the gate opened. Now, time seemed to elongate once more, every second my enemy as I waited for another attack.

      There was one more almighty thump, then a section of the wall gave way. It didn’t seamlessly move into the floor, and it wasn’t absorbed by the ceiling.

      No, a meter-tall and half-meter-wide section just caved in as if someone had cut it with a laser.

      Because someone had.

      As I brought my arm up protectively in front of Helen’s face and twisted my own face to the side, my eyes locked on the faint red glow indicating a laser cutter visible through the clouds of dust.

      As the dust dissipated, I heard footsteps.

      Someone walked in.

      My sharp eyes managed to pick up their form through the swirling smoke.

      What the hell do we have here? a female voice barked out. Stowaways? How the heck did you even get in here? This is an engine compartment. Are you mad?

      The woman’s words came out as clicks and hisses, and my mind instantly translated the language she was speaking as I seamlessly understood every word – another benefit of being a mutant who’d been specifically genetically crafted in my universe. The 10 Families had been traveling the multiverse for years. And in those years, they’d built language models for almost every single race. It behooved them to understand the people they were stealing from, after all.

      It took a moment for my neural processes to shift, allowing me access to this woman’s language, even picking up her accent and ensuring I spoke a variant of it. At least those processes worked without my implants and scanners.

      I cleared my throat. Where are we?

      The woman took a step in, and I finally saw her in full.

      She was in a flight uniform – or what I could assume was a flight uniform.

      She wore leather-like pants that were 10-centimeters thick. They bunched around her slim legs, stuffing into two massive, robotic reinforced boots.

      She was in a skintight black tunic top, and she wore a black jacket over it made of the same thick material as her pants.

      Her hair was looped up into a bun, tied roughly with strips of brightly colored fabric.

      Secured around her hips was a rudimentary magnetic holster lock. Various tools of which I didn’t instantly recognize but could easily guess the uses of were locked on the belt, jangling as she took another step forward.

      There was some kind of laser cutter tool in her hand. My gaze instantly darted over it, assessing its probable energy output and concluding that while it wouldn’t be particularly pleasant to be attacked by it, it was unlikely to cut my endoskeleton.

      She took another step forward, planted a hand on her hip, and tightened her grip on the laser cutter.

      She looked almost human. A lot of races throughout the multiverse did. If you traveled the multiverse, you would find that the races of my own galaxy were almost identical to those of everyone else. That was no accident. According to the annals of the 10 Families, it was highly likely that the original race who created the Hall of Doors seeded the multiverse.

      I shuddered to think how long ago that would have had to be. For civilizations to rise and fall, that original race would’ve had to

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