Accidental Astronaut 3, page 1
Copyrighted Material
Accidental Astronaut 3 Copyright © 2026 by Variant Publications
Book design and layout copyright © 2025 by JN Chaney
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing.
1st Edition
CONTENTS
Don’t Miss Out
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Epilogue
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1
Of all the ways Jack Schafer had imagined he’d go out, being devoured by dinosaurs on an alien planet had to be near the bottom of the list.
Or just not on the list at all because I couldn’t do those sorts of drugs and keep my pilot’s license.
Not back in Alaska, anyway. He hadn’t been there in weeks and hadn’t thought it very likely he’d ever return, not since he’d crash-landed a spaceship on the rogue world of Dravos. It had been more likely back then, of course. He just had to steal another spaceship and head home…after he’d saved the Earth. Unfortunately, saving Earth had involved opening up a gigantic wormhole that had taken the entire planet light-years across the galaxy and left it in orbit around an alien star.
That had been bad enough, but at least he’d still had Lisa. The strangest thing about this entire adventure hadn’t been that a former military helicopter pilot had wound up being kidnapped to save the planet, it had been the even more unlikely event that he’d find Lisa, the first woman since his ex-wife that he thought he might want to spend the rest of his life with. He hadn’t cared if he was on Earth or Dravos or the planet Vulcan so long as he was with her.
And now he wasn’t. Another of the damned wormholes, this one just large enough to let a few people through at a time, and Jack had been so caught up in trying to stop the Archon Draven from getting through, from getting help from the relatives he’d exiled through the wormhole and using their resources to retake his kingdom on Dravos, that he’d done perhaps the stupidest thing in his whole life. Other than marrying his first wife. He’d jumped through the wormhole right after Draven and his people, only a half-second before the bomb the Archon’s engineers had set blew up the machinery to control the wormhole and stranded him here.
Wherever here was. Away from Lisa, away from his friends. And away from Draven. The few seconds that had separated their passage through the wormhole had deposited Jack headfirst in a river, somewhere in a canyon that reminded him of southern Utah. That had been bad, and he’d lost his rifle, which had been worse.
But he’d dragged himself out and dried himself off and set to walking until he’d emerged from the canyon into a river valley, and from there, he’d spotted a huge lake in the distance, maybe twenty miles away, and a city built on its banks. That had given him a destination at least, and he’d set off along the river, walking on the sandstone beside the river, keeping water in sight because he had nothing to carry it in, nothing besides a useless communicator, a knife, and a pistol.
It still hadn’t seemed hopeless. Draven had come here and burned his bridge behind him, which had to mean the Archon thought there was a good possibility that he could rebuild the gateway from this side. There might be a way back to Lisa. He had the city that undoubtedly was Draven’s destination, and it wasn’t impossibly far away.
Then he’d noted the movement out of the corner of his eyes, heard the clicking on the rocks. He’d expected animals. Worst-case scenario, he’d expected enemy. He was right on both counts.
At first glance, they looked like something dredged up from a museum diorama. Raptors, like the kind every kid who’d grown up in the 90s knew from Jurassic Park. But these weren’t Hollywood animatronics. These were lean, muscular things with sickle-shaped claws flexing on each foot and tails held stiff as balancing rods. Their skin wasn’t reptile-green but patterned in mottled stripes of ocher and black, blending perfectly with the sandstone. They tilted their narrow heads, one letting out a low, rasping clatter that reminded Jack of pebbles shaken in a tin can.
Deinonychus. The word sprang into his head unbidden, a species name he’d read as a kid in a library book, not too long after his first time watching Jurassic Park. These were the size of the raptors from that movie, but they looked more like the terror birds of prehistoric South America. Feathers. He’d read somewhere that real theropods had feathers but could never bring himself to picture them that way, not after the movies. It would look silly, he thought, to make the deadly predators seem more like giant turkeys.
These things were not silly, and they didn’t resemble turkeys at all. The two dinosaurs looked very much like they were flanking him from either side and were about to kill him and eat him. Or maybe eat him and, in the process, kill him, which was much worse. And all he had was the pistol. It was powerful enough to kill one of the things, he was pretty sure, but only if he hit them in the right place. And the things were fast.
The nearer one gave a sharp bark—half hiss, half caw—and his instincts screamed that it was about to lunge. He drew, smooth and fast, the blaster’s grip familiar in his hand. He didn’t aim yet. Aim too soon, and they’d know the game had started.
Jack shifted his footing on the sandstone, calculating distance, terrain, angles. Fifty feet. No cover except a few boulders farther downslope. He could make a run for the forest, maybe, but that would mean turning his back, and he wasn’t suicidal enough for that.
The raptors fanned wider, trying to hem him in. The one circling right let out that same clattering chatter, echoed by its partner. Jack sighted down the pistol and whispered, half to himself.
“Come on, then. Let’s get this done.”
A third moved out of the forest, loping toward the others with nefarious intent…and then a fourth.
“Oh, you gotta be kidding me,” he moaned.
It didn’t change what he had to do, just changed what he’d do afterward. Jack touched the trigger. He didn’t know what exactly the blaster fired. Lisa had told him it wasn’t a laser; she was sure of that because it had a slight recoil. Neither, she’d asserted, was it a particle beam because that would have caused deadly radiation that would have required some kind of electromagnetic field projected from the end of the gun to keep the shooter from keeling over after every shot. She was not, however, that certain about what it did fire, and Jack didn’t care that much. He just knew it was about as easy to handle as a 9 mm pistol, and he was…okay with one of those.
The burst caught the raptor just above the snout, exactly where Jack had been aiming. Sort of. It did the job, burning a hole through the creature’s skull. It had time to thrash and scream for about two seconds before it collapsed, though, which had a lot in common with the old saying by General Robert Neyland of the University of Tennessee. When you throw the ball, three things can happen, and two of them are bad. Three things happened because Jack hadn’t quite hit the right spot, and only one of them was good: the creature’s thrashing got in the way of the other raptors coming up behind it.
The other two things were nowhere near as fortunate. The thrashing distracted Jack for just a second and brought out the hunter’s instinct that he’d developed in Alaska, the need to put a suffering animal out of its misery. And that let the other therapod who’d been flanking him get too close far too quickly.
Jack squeezed off a shot without taking the time to aim because there was none. He didn’t hit the beast, but the flash and wash of heat did throw the raptor off just a step, and Jack made a split-second decision to run. The river. Maybe they couldn’t cross the river.
Dumbass, he yelled at himself, though it didn’t stop him from taking off in a dead sprint. They’re not vampires or the damned Ringwraiths; they can cross running water as well as you can.
But could they swim? He was going to find out. Jack had stayed close to the river and had a good idea how deep it was, so he didn’t bother wading in, just dove like an Olympic hopeful off the high board. The water wasn’t freezing cold, but it felt like it by comparison with the summer warmth radiating off the rocks and the cold squeezed the breath out of his lungs before he could make it back to the surface.
I just freaking dried off, he screamed at whatever mischievous deity might be listening as he stroked powerfully back toward air. And smacked his right wrist hard into a very unexpected rock. His hand went numb, the pistol tumbling away into the froth of the current, and he cursed reflexively, swallowing a mouthful of water in the process. That set off a wave of coughing, and Jack grabbed at the offending rock, then pulled himself up and spit out water as he tried to get his bearings. The rock stuck about a foot from the splashing river, broad and flat on top, and Jack briefly considered climbing atop it and staying there until the raptors got tired of waiting him out. He had water and even some wet beef jerky in his jacket.
Jack used the edge of the rock like a pull-up bar, levering himself far enough out of the water to look back at the bank where he’d come from. The three surviving dinosaurs paced the bank, their big claws clicking on the wet stone as they stared at him from a good thirty yards away.
“Yeah, you goofy, overgrown turkeys,” he jeered at them. “Can’t get me here, can you?”
If one of them had responded, Jack would have only been mildly surprised. So many creatures he’d encountered were intelligent and sentient since he’d arrived on Dravos, he had to even look at the horses and birds sidelong. But they said nothing unless the clicking and chattering counted as a language, and according to the cipher worm that translated every language into something Jack could understand, it didn’t. There was definitely a message in the eyes of the lead raptor, though, a determination. It pawed at the ground, and Jack thought for a horrible moment that the things could swim and that it was about to dive in after him.
He needn’t have worried. The beast had no intention of swimming. Instead, it jumped. Jack was certain it couldn’t leap the whole thirty yards, there was no way… He was sure of that right up until the thing landed on the rock.
“Oh, shit!” Jack blurted, then sucked in a breath and dove back into the water.
If the thing could swim even a little, all it would take was one bite, but nothing bit into the back of his neck as he desperately stroked toward the far shore. More rocks jutted upward, creating small rapids in the water, tossing him sideways, but Jack ignored it and kicked even harder. His boots were full of water and so was his jacket, dragging him backward, as if they were determined to save him the indignity of being eaten by drowning him first.
I am not going to die here. I’m not going to leave Lisa wondering what happened to me, wondering if I’m still alive somewhere. She’ll never give up, and neither will I.
One last burst of energy and his boot scraped rock. Jack clambered against the rock, feet slipping and sliding, fingers grasping blindly for any purchase on the slick surface until he found a crack, dug his fingers in and yanked himself upward. His knees scraped the stone and he flailed forward, digging into soil and firm, dry land.
He was up again. Jack fell flat on his back, gasping for air, knuckles bloody, clothes soaked through and freezing against his skin. It took him a good ten seconds before he could muster the energy to open his eyes and turn over on his side. The sun still stared down at him, frowning in disapproval of his laziness and inaction and he scowled back at it before he looked back to the rock. The raptor still stood on the slippery stone, claws clicking to gain purchase, and there was nothing disdainful about its stare. Just pure hunger.
It was also thirty-five or forty yards away and there was no way it could make that jump. Not without any run-up, not with a slippery surface like that. The creature leered at him, baring a mouth full of dagger-sharp teeth and then crossed that distance…and fell into the river.
The splash drowned out the roar of the rapids, and if Jack had more energy, he would have cheered. The damned thing would drown now, or get washed downstream, which was just as good for his purposes. But it didn’t go under. How something that looked like that had any buoyancy at all was a mystery, but it doggy-paddled with its wing-like arms, the feathers splashing like a three-year-old at his first swim lesson, and the tail that balanced the thing whipped sinuously behind it. Propelling it toward shore.
Downstream, but only fifty yards and when it reached that slippery rock, its sharp claws dug in a lot more easily than Jack’s fingernails, and it pulled itself up with no trouble. Jack didn’t bother complaining how unfair this whole thing was, how there should be some rule that a creature this deadly should have some weakness. Gathering all the strength he had left after a very long day, Jack pushed himself to his feet and started to run back the way he’d come.
It wasn’t much of a plan, but the only thing he could think of was the trees. A hundred yards away, the lowest branch just reachable, maybe, and if he could get high enough up, there was just no way this thing could climb up there.
Could it?
Because everything else he’d told himself the beast couldn’t do, it sure as hell could. Once upon a time, he’d thought Steven Spielberg had oversold how smart and dangerous the raptors were, but right now, he was ready to award the man extra points for realism. But the tree was his only chance. The raptor had shaken off the water and was already catching up to him, and even if he could have outrun the raptor on a normal day—which he could not have—today was far from a normal day. He’d forgotten how many firefights he’d been in but just the almost drowning twice part had exhausted him.
The tree still seemed far away, the dinosaur growing closer, and he tried to distract himself by trying to figure out what kind of tree it was. He sucked at that, at identifying anything except the obvious, like oaks or redwoods or cottonwoods or aspens. This was none of those, but he just hoped the limbs were strong enough not to break under his weight because he could hear the clacking footsteps of the therapod behind him way too close.
A lunge, bracing his foot on a knot in the trunk and then he had the branch in his hands. Pull-ups had never been a problem for him, but the weight of the extra water made the climb harder than it needed to be, and a claw tugged at the bottom of his boot just as he swung upward. He didn’t pause, already tired of assuming limitations the raptor didn’t have, and kept scrambling up until the branches became too thin to support him.
Only then did he look down. The raptor snapped its jaws and chattered at him, leaping upward, scratching at the bark with its claws…and falling backward. It came within a yard of Jack’s perch, and the hackles rose on the back of his neck, but the tree wouldn’t support the predator’s weight. It stood at the bottom of the tree, hissing at him in frustration, and Jack finally allowed himself to breathe, leaning against the trunk without an ounce of energy left.
He pulled a strip of beef jerky out of his jacket pocket and worked at it with his teeth. It was soggy and cold, but calories were calories.
“I’m stuck here in this tree,” he murmured aloud, “and the only water I have is in my damned boots. What happens when it gets dark?”
As if answering him, the raptor tried one more futile jump…and its head disappeared in a blinding flash of energy, the decapitated carcass flopping to the ground with concussive finality. Jack blinked away flashes in his vision, knowing exactly what had happened but not believing it.
Not until a woman stalked up to the dead raptor and kicked it as if she thought it still might be dangerous without a head. She was about his age, he estimated, her brown hair cut short, rough and ready, her shoulders not broad like a female bodybuilder but solid enough to proclaim she’d lifted her fair share of the load. Her gray utility fatigues and the blaster rifle she carried at high ready marked her as a soldier. So did the hard, steady glare in her dark eyes. She aimed the rifle up at Jack, and he raised his hands as much as he could without falling out of the tree.
“Don’t shoot,” he rasped, unable to work up any more volume. “I’m not armed. I’m not your enemy.” I hope.
More troops had moved up behind the woman, male and female and all sharing the same alert intensity…and the same sort of blaster rifles.
