Broken: Stranded on the Prison Planet: Book 2, page 1
Broken
Stranded on the Prison Planet Book 2
Katie Neptune
Contents
Title Page
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
Epilogue
SANCTUARY: CHAPTER 1
About The Author
Books In This Series
As this story has been translated from the original [redacted] dialect, the author has taken liberties with the non-Terran voices. As a result, they may use certain Terran colloquialisms common to the early 21st century. This is to make the text more intelligible to Terrans. If you’re a non-Terran and you’re reading this, the author apologizes for any unintended offense.
What’s happened so far?
In Crashed: Book 1, Pacey, Olivia, and Kylie, peacefully boating on the quarry lake, are suddenly beamed aboard a flying saucer! The spaceship crashes and the girls become separated. Pacey wakes up on the prison planet, Geshan X, and has a lot of frantic adventures involving traps, creepy scaled aliens, and wild animals. She meets Ademho, a beautiful golden-skinned alien with wings who was falsely imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. Despite some obstacles, they fall in love, and they’re determined to stay together, no matter what happens.
Pacey is desperate to find Olivia and Kylie so they can all escape, with Ademho, of course.
Broken: Book 2 picks up the story from Kylie’s point of view.
Chapter 1
Kylie
We’re going to die, and it’s all my fault. Or not my fault precisely. My deadbeat father’s fault.
We’re crashing, spinning out of control. My blood is ice in my veins. My brain is reeling with shock and panic.
My thoughts flash back to earlier in the day. Was it today? Who knows.
I’d been feeling down because Pacey’s moving out of our group home. She, Olivia, and I grew up together at Mama Sterling’s house, our foster home. Wards of the state, baby. We’re sisters of the heart, my girls and I. Forever. When we hit eighteen, the town moved us to a group home for young women transitioning into the real world. A pit stop only—expiration date, your twenty-first birthday. And today is Pacey’s birthday. We were all feeling the doom and gloom of it.
Pacey’s special. She’s not supposed to be on her own. Without Olivia and I at her side, I’m really worried she’s going to spiral.
Olivia had the great idea to borrow her boyfriend’s boat and we planned a quarry lake picnic to cheer ourselves up. Only, once we were out on the lake and the moon rose, and I forged us into a real sisterhood with a blood pact and everything, a spaceship rose out of the lake and gobbled us up.
Now sirens are blaring, Pacey and Olivia are passed out on either side of me, strapped into these weird metal pod things. And my restraints are loose, and the ship is talking to me.
It has a nice voice, like Alexa.
As I snap back to the present, Alexa is saying, “Kylie Summers. Wake up.”
“I’m awake,” I slur. Am I awake? My brain is foggy, like I’ve taken something to give me a little blurriness. But that doesn’t make any sense because I never take anything around Pacey. She’s strictly hands off drugs and alcohol. She has to be, given her family history.
Me, I like to buzz at parties. I’m very aware life is short, and I want to get my kicks while I can. But this isn’t a party. This is girls’ night on the lake. Or it was. Olivia brought sparkling cider for Pete’s sake.
“Kylie Summers, please report to the bridge.”
“What the blazing Star Trek fuck is happening?” I groan, clutching at my head. There’s a bandage on my hand from where I scraped it with my pocketknife, and I’m wearing a lime green romper and black Keds. My hair is a mass of springy curls on top of my head, per usual. And my mouth is dry.
The ship sucked us out of the boat, told us to strap in or risk catastrophic injury, and then a giant needle poked me, and I passed out. Now I’m awake, but I’m the only one.
Staggering, I step out of my open pod and rap my knuckles on Pacey’s. She doesn’t move. Her eyes are shut, her face slack. Metal arms bracket her arms and legs, holding her in place. I spin to check on Olivia. She’s the same.
“Oh God,” I mutter. “Is this like, an organ harvesting thing?”
I yank at the brackets, but they don’t move. “Olivia!” I shout. She’s the brilliant one. She’ll know what to do. “Olivia, wake up! I need you.” She doesn’t move. She’s so pale and still. Tears jump to my eyes. “Olivia!” I scream.
“Kylie Summers, report to the bridge immediately.”
“Alexa, turn off!” I shout. My voice is too loud for my ears, and they start to ring. Not that I can hear much over the still-blaring alarm. It’s incessant.
I turn away from the pods I can’t budge. The room around us is bright white and round, except for one wall opening to a narrow corridor. Red lights blink, outlining the door. My legs feel like jelly, but I walk toward the opening. The floor vibrates a little and then tilts. I gasp and brace a hand against the side. The ship alarm increases in volume.
My fingers trailing along the smooth wall, I hurry down the corridor. It opens into a wide oval room. It’s empty, but three chairs sit in front of three different screens. One screen shows a series of geometric lines, crisscrossing back and forth between labeled pinpoints. I squint, but I don’t recognize the language on the labels. Another screen is blank, a green light flashing in the bottom right corner. The third screen makes my breath catch. It shows a swirling mass of dark gray clouds, roiling and boiling as spikes of lightning pierce through it. One bolt lights the entire screen and the floor under me jerks.
I have a sinking feeling the third screen is actually a window of some kind, and we’re in the middle of that storm.
The middle screen turns green.
Alexa says, “Destination achieved. Atmospheric conditions not conducive to autopilot. Request navigator.”
I blink and stare at the screen. It’s now blipping and flashing. A line travels in a circle through the blips, highlighting them. It’s a . . . radar screen? I think.
“Kylie Summers, please assume the navigator position.”
Nope, no way. I lift my hands in the air and shake my head. “I’m not a navigator!” I used my phone’s GPS to find my classes for my whole first month of college. And I’ve never seen anything like what’s on that screen outside of movies or shows. I assume we’re in the middle, but so what? What are the blips?
“Olivia’s the STEM girl. Let’s go wake her up,” I suggest.
The computer ignores me. Instead, its voice loud and echoing through the ship, Alexa announces, “Destination achieved. Atmospheric conditions not conducive to autopilot. Request navigator assistance to bridge.”
I look around expectantly. Am I about to see a little green man? There have been no other signs of life since the ship beamed us on board, but surely someone is in charge?
But no one comes to the bridge. The alarm continues to blare. And lightning continues to strike us, shaking the walls of the room and causing the screens to blink in and out.
My hands twist in front of me as I tug on my fingers one by one. My ribs feel too tight, like something is banded around me and squeezing. “Hello?” I manage to call, my voice thin. “Any navigators on board?”
The room jerks into a violent spin. I drop and hug the floor, letting out a short scream before the spin abruptly stops. Glancing up again, I see the blips on the flashing green screen are getting bigger. They’re definitely blobs now.
“Kylie Summers, do you wish to begin the evacuation protocol for all passengers?”
“What does that mean?” I cry from the floor. “What passengers? Pacey and Olivia? Are we crashing?”
“If our current course is not corrected, I estimate we will impact the planet's surface in thirty seconds.”
My life flashes before my eyes. Faint memories of my mom before she died when I was six. The brief foster stay with the Rachels, those bastards, before I moved to Mama Sterling’s house. And my girls, Pacey and Olivia, laughing with me, plotting shenanigans with me, cheering me on at my track races . . .
“Evacuate the passengers,” I croak.
Alexa’s calm voice echoes through the ship again. “Emergency evacuation protocol beginning in three, two—”
I hear two large bangs and the ship shudders briefly. Only two bangs. Two pods. No one else on board.
Realization hits belatedly. I sit up straight and search the room with widening eyes. “Alexa, how do I get off the ship?”
“You do not have time to return to your pod. The bridge exterior contains the strongest shielding on the ship. Please sit in the navigator position.”
I scramble up from the floor and climb into the middle chair. It’s large around me, obviously designed for a much bigger body. Which is odd because I’m pretty tall. Straps erupt from the seat and the arms, binding me into place. Another locks around my forehead, pul
I squeak and start to struggle, but there’s no give in the straps.
The right screen flickers, the storm clouds thinning, and a vast blueness appears. As we drop toward it, I realize it’s a lake. It’s wide and long, the edges of it vanishing from the screen, and it’s full of white-capped waves. I catch a glimpse of a large gray structure before the blue fills the screen completely.
My jaw aches from clenching it so hard. From one lake to another. Maybe it’s the same lake? There was no sign of storms in the forecast I checked when Olivia told me about the boat idea.
“Where are we?” I wonder out loud.
Alexa answers as the waves become more distinct. They’re really rolling, and we’re dropping fast. A peal of thunder echoes through the bridge. Queasiness bites at me.
“The prison planet Geshan X. Your father’s site of incarceration.”
My . . . father? My father who abandoned me as a baby after he stole my mother’s life savings? I’m speechless until I’m not. “What?” I shriek. The rest of the words penetrate. “Prison planet?” I shriek again.
We hit the water. The impact jerks me in my chair as my brain rattles in my skull. There’s a massive groaning sound, a sense of weightlessness, and then my body catches up to my situation and I faint like a goddamn southern belle.
Chapter 2
Lir
The storm masks my arrival like I’d planned it that way. It boils across the surface of Geshan X, a maelstrom of churning clouds and bright lightning strikes. The rest of the planet is blue, spinning tranquilly in the vastness of space. There’s one land mass in the center of the planet, large and mostly rocky except for some vast central forests. That’s where I’m headed. That’s where the prison is, the Citadel. And that’s where the storm is circulating. It should hide my low stratosphere jump from the Federal ships guarding the airspace.
Jacek eyes me from across the ship’s control panel. I paid him a lot for this ride, but he’s also a friend, sort of, and he doesn’t like what I’m about to do.
I double check the straps of my thermosuit. It should keep me warm enough to survive the subzero temperature of the stratosphere while also protecting my skin from the heat of the jetpack on my back.
When I’m done, I pat the top of the helmet I’m holding in my lap. It makes a thick, rapping noise.
“It’s my fault he’s there. I blew the job. And I’m going to get him out.”
“Or die trying,” Jacek mutters.
I nod. “Or that.”
His gray skin pales further. “Your brother would not want you to do this.”
“Orix isn’t here. He’s there.” I jerk my thumb at the planet filling the view screen. “When I get him out, he can yell at me if he wants.”
Jacek shakes his head, his lips thin, but he doesn’t push anymore. We’ve been over this argument a hundred times already.
“You have two weeks,” he says instead. “If I circle back around in two weeks and I don’t get your signal, I’m not waiting. You’re stuck there. A prison planet. If anyone catches you, you’ll be branded a smuggler and you’ll be in your own prison. With no Orix to rescue you.”
I wave my hand in the air. I know all of this. “Did you drop the packet?” I ask. I loaded a small crate with some essential supplies I can’t carry with me on my jump.
“I did the math for the landing right. I don’t have confirmation yet though. The battery packs are too small to jet it fast. But it should be waiting for you in the woods east of the citadel. It’s linked to your comm.”
“Thanks.”
“Where are you meeting the informant?”
I frown. This is the weakest part of my plan. Other than my older brother, I don’t know anyone on Geshan X. I don’t know which gangs on the surface will stay loyal once bought, or which guards have access to both inside and outside of the Citadel. Jacek’s cousin has another cousin who worked there as a guard for three years before he got fired for smuggling whores to and from the illegal brothels on the surface. He gave us a couple of names.
I comm’d one of them and arranged for a meeting on the south side of the big lake. I’m going to give him Federal silvers for info, and he’s probably going to lie to me and try to rob me.
I give Jacek the coordinates, but it’s not like he can monitor anything. As soon as I launch, he’s leaving this airspace before one of the patrol ships penetrates his cloak. I won’t be able to comm him again until his ship is back in range.
“We’re wasting time,” I remind him when he opens his mouth to ask another stalling question.
“All right. Get in the chute. I’ll count you down. See you in two weeks, Lir.”
I drop from the cockpit into the narrow hold in the belly of Jacek’s ship. It smells like metal and stale air. In the far corner, the trash chute beckons.
I grin to myself as I pull on my helmet and lock it in place. Very appropriate.
I step in the small room and toss a wave at the screen above me.
Jacek’s voice, metallic over the speakers, alerts me, and then I’m catapulting into free space.
I tumble head over heels for several agonizing seconds before the sensors in my suit calibrate and point me head-down to the surface. Air roars past my helmet as I fall, and I count down the altitude in my head, only occasionally verifying the count against the numbers flashing on the inside of my visor.
My arms point out straight behind me, my body a long, lean line.
My ears pop over and over again, and my stomach is in my throat. At the same time, I’m breathless and panting inside of my helmet. My mouth is open in a silent shout. The planet curves below me, filling my visor screen as I rocket toward it. This is the biggest rush of my life. I swallow back a laugh as my blood fizzes through my veins at hyperspeed. I’m a living, breathing fireball, the tracks of my passage burning blue in the thin air.
As I fall, the storm grows larger and larger in front of me, spinning slowly like water circling the drain. I need to drop below it before I can switch on my jetpack, otherwise the Federal ships, or the Citadel itself, will sense the heat signature and blast me out of the sky.
When I hit the upper level of clouds, fear begins to trump the excitement coursing through my body. If I get in the way of one of those lightning bolts, I’m done. For the first time since I conceived of my plan, a doubt flashes through me. Orix is not expecting me to rescue him. He fully intends to serve his sentence and die here. In return, our former gang back in Erixt will support our mom and younger sister for the rest of their lives. That’s how it’s done. If you go down for the crime and you don’t squeal, your family is covered.
Only I don’t think that’s good enough anymore. I don’t think it’s worth it, the risk we took to rob and steal for Grozi’s gain. I should have stayed in school, learned a trade instead of wasting all my time on useless drawings, earning silvers with petty theft instead of hard work. If I’d found steady employment, maybe Orix could have gone with that paladin recruiter instead of guarding Grozi on jobs that brought him home covered in blood and grim-faced. He could have been someone great instead of just another Kral gangster.
But in Erixt, Grozi’s influence is difficult to escape. And honestly, neither Orix nor I tried that hard.
So I quash my doubt with an iron grip. This is my chance to get us out from under Grozi’s thumb. I’m going to find Orix, extract him, and we’re both going to disappear. Grozi will take care of our family, oblivious, and Orix and I are going to start over somewhere new. Jacek is holding our new Federal identifications in his ship’s lockbox. For once in our lives, I’m going to be the responsible one.
And now I’m falling too fast to think any more. Thunder rumbles, echoing in my ears and sending vibrations through my body. The clouds are streaming past my visor too fast to register. Everything is a pale gray blur. The roaring in my ears grows louder and louder as the air thickens when I hit the troposphere.
My comm alerts me I’m at altitude, and I press the button on my palm that fires up the jetpack.
I blast through the lower levels of the storm like a fvisn escaping a keistra, and then I’m above the lake. It’s choppy and blue gray. My jets direct me south as the far shore grows larger in my visor. It’s rocky, and the purple forest looms above it with deep shadows.
