Chapter 1

A man from the stars finds himself stranded on a savage world of sword and shield. Bound by his oath and covenant, he becomes embroiled in a conflict larger than the war that rages across the galaxy.

Gideon is screwed, in more than one sense of the word. The interceptors behind him are gaining ground and his own bird is slowing down, not to mention the fact that his insides have been rearranged. For a moment he tries to recall why he’s decelerating. Brief clarity reminds him that the entire craft is on fire. He slaps himself across the face with his left hand while keeping his other on the controls of the stolen interceptor. That’s the thing about being shot, it hurts at first, but after a while you just get very, very sleepy. Gid doesn’t want to sleep right now, though. He’s seen the sleep claim countless souls. So, he’ll stick a finger in his wound if it’ll keep him from passing out. He grips the controls tighter.

“All I need to do is get clear of the station so I can initiate a Translation,” He says to himself as if he were walking a toddler through riding a bicycle.

In his mind, he is reviewing half-read flight manuals that he never had time for, but to no avail. Why didn’t he have time for them? Why can’t he find the friggin’ button?

“When will a Rec-Marine need to fly a spaceship?” He remembers asking his pilot friend.

He hears the answer again, spoke through lips present only in memory. “You never know Gid, you never know.”

Gideon begins to panic, his mind racing. “Some of these Talagrassi birds don’t have Translation engines. I remember Tyson saying that. What if this is one of those models?” He is past the point of knowing if he is saying these words or just thinking them. Realization dawns on him that he could be looking at the button and not know it because this isn’t an American bird or even a human bird. Everything is written in what looks like chicken scratch.

Sweat, nervousness and blood loss are quickly clouding his vision. Instead of fading to black, it bleeds light. Within the radiant center he beholds things that could not possibly be. Gideon shakes his head and says the words his father and grandfather have etched into his soul as if they were God’s commandments to Moses. “Gird up thy loins, for the hour is near. The harvest is great and the laborers are few. Take to thy tools and commence the work.”

 Another moment and he’ll be dead seven ways till Sunday. There are a hundred things he needs to do. He needs to stop the bleeding and take some combat stims to keep from passing out, put out the fire that is threatening to burn all the oxygen from the cabin, outmaneuver two trained dogfighters without any training of his own and find the blasted Translation button! Easy, right?

He deals with the gunshot first, reaching into a pouch attached to his combat armor that makes him resemble a medieval knight and extracts a vial and an injector for said vial. Quickly, he puts the injector in his mouth and loads the vial into it with his right hand, while keeping his left hand on the controls. Alarms blare and he instinctively makes a hard left. Through the glass of the cockpit he can make out two missiles scream by on the right. It’s now or never. He jams the injector into the hole where part of his side used to be and squeezes the trigger. White hot pain blowtorches his wound, lancing through his nervous system and into his brain. After a half second of hell, the pain settles down to a dull throb.

The missiles decide to come back around, leading to more alerts flashing in an unknowable language. He turns to the right this time. If he’s not attentive they’ll hit him for sure. The interceptors are also closer now. If he doesn’t escape soon they be able to rake him with their machine guns.

“Time for the stims,” He says to himself with a shiver. “I hate needles.”

With that, he jams the needle into his neck. The effects are immediate as the serum courses through the highways of his cardiovascular system. The emerald green of his eyes thin as his pupils double in size. His head instantly clears and everything around him seems to move slower while he moves faster.

“Fire, fire, fire. Need to put out the fire.” He mumbles under his ragged breath as he looks around the small cockpit for an extinguisher. Gideon finds what he assumes is the extinguisher and tries to open it, but to no avail. Two warnings pop up on his screen seemingly at once. He can tell that the first is about the cabin’s oxygen levels because it shows a graphic indicating that there must be a hull breach. The second is the missiles again.

“Oh for Pete’s sake!”

He throws the extinguisher into the back of the interceptor and takes the wheel again. He swings a hard right and then a hard left, then checks the display again. The missiles are now in line with him and parallel to each other. An idea crosses his drug addled, blood deprived mind. Hopefully it’s a good one. He starts making another turn, but it is gradual this time. When he straightens out he checks the position of the missiles again. They are still behind him, but are a lot closer to each other. Both missiles have leveled out and are heading on optimal trajectories. He makes another gradual turn. The missiles doggedly follow their programing, unaware of one another. The head of one clips the tail of the other and they explode in a rather anticlimactic fashion.

Gideon breathes a sigh of relief, but when he inhales his empty lungs find little air. Without delay he crams his helmet on and pressurizes his suit. A precious supply of emergency oxygen alleviates the burn in his lungs. This will only last about fifteen minutes or so and he knows that. Oxygen is no longer his concern, though. If he can’t extinguish the fire the fuel in the engine may very well ignite and vaporize him. That explosion might be a bit more…exciting.

 He turns back to the extinguisher, which is engulfed in flame, reaching a hand back to grab it with a steel, flame resistant gauntlets an...

BANG!

White fire retardant erupts from the canister like a volcano, covering his face and the fire, obstructing his vison. The oxygen alert abruptly shuts off, and the engines start giving a bit more power.

“Ok then,” Gideon notes to himself as he wipes off the pleasant surprise. “Must have been heating up the fuel lines and causing misfires. Any longer and it would have blown the fuel tank for sure.”

He turns his attention back to finding the Translation button. With no way of knowing what is what, he just mashes buttons and switches like a toddler on a keyboard. Three things happen simultaneously. First, weird music that can only be described as techno-bongos begins playing from an alien pilot’s music selection. Second, mines, flares, and all manner of ordinance are birthed from various ports and guns attached to the ship, turning the craft into what Rec-Marines would call a Death Blossom. Third, the interceptors close in enough to engage with their primary guns.

One of the interceptors disappears in a cloud of debris as it enters the Death Blossom. The other interceptor is not so easily shaken. It deftly steers clear of the radius of death that enveloped its companion and lines up a shot on the stolen craft. Shots puncture the hull of Gideon’s interceptor, crippling it, if not outright clipping its wings. The surviving interceptor swings around to the side of Gideon’s vessel.

“You’re one ugly dude,” Gideon says to the alien, who has hard scaly protrusions coming out of it forehead and face, as he peers through, into its cockpit. It pops the canopy of its craft and raises what must be an EMP device towards Gideon.

“I guess they want me alive. That’s not going to happen.” Gideon pushes the last button left in the cockpit and waves to the alien. “Bye!”

Between the time it takes the electrical signal to travel from the button to the fighter’s flight computer, the RecMarine prays that he’s not going to look really stupid if he doesn’t actually vanish before the eyes of his would-be capturer.

For a slight instant, everything implodes to nothingness as his craft becomes super dense and plunges through the fabric of space, into a space beyond our physical plane. Then in the next instant everything explodes outward to inhabit its previous space.

Gideon looks outside the cockpit and gets a good view of what is in front of him. The hostile interceptor is no longer in sight. What has replaced it takes his breath away. A radiant gem shining in the void. A vibrant planet with blues and greens and all the indications of life. He takes it in for a moment, savoring the beauty and hope that the sight brings to him.

The serenity does not last. Alerts pop up on the interceptor’s display. Gideon doesn’t need them to see and realize the problem, though. The planet has him it its gravitational field. He tries to gun the engines, but they refuse to even make a death rattle. They have given up the ghost and there is nothing he can do about it.

Gideon finally takes his hand off the wheel and throws them up in the air. “This day just keeps giving. Oh Lord in heaven, please preserve me.”

Author's Note

This is the first chapter in a completed novel. Bear in mind that I haven't done as much editing in the early chapters as I have in the later ones. Any constructive criticism is encouraged as are suggestions.